Ike from a Distance

...But there was broad agreement that he did perform weli as a mediator between Washington and London, and as the symbol of America's fighting forces...

...Alger Hiss appearing before a grand jury...

...Hard times in his youth, the result of his father's economic failure, led the President to favor budgets balanced by the businessmen in his famous Cabinet of "eight millionaires and a plumber...

...according to the author, cast their ballots against the Democrats, not for Eisenhower...

...Another speechwriter, Arthur Larson, responding directly to the Kissinger challenge, praised the President's role in foreign affairs, especially in contrast to that of his two predecessors and two successors...

...Eisenhower's death in March 1969 was followed by a handsome volume, issued as tribute by the editors of American Heritage and United Press International...

...Parmet's study is billed as "the first major assessment of the United States government during the critical 1950s," and while an author cannot be held responsible for the excesses of his publisher, it must be stated that the book is neither first, nor an assessment, nor even, despite its bulk, major (since only 50 pages are devoted to Eisenhower's controversial second term...

...Goldman wrote that the man fit his times and the people he governed, a viewpoint later echoed by a Harvard professor of political science...

...As Eric Goldman pointed out in The Crucial DecadeAnd After: America, 1945-60 (1960), the majority of them "assigned to his Administration, whatever its demerits, a highly constructive role in bridging deep political divisions within the country and in leading an almost united nation to acceptance of continuing social change at home and coexistence abroad...

...Childs concluded his judgment of Eisenhower with a comparison to James Buchanan: "He simply did nothing...

...But with the healing mission performed, most critics agreed, he became in his second term a symbol of drift...

...and a dedication which occasionally turns into righteousness...

...And Ike's textbook view of the American government as a body divided into three neatly staked-out spheres, a concept he had picked up at the Point, was complemented by his indecision and willingness to let matters drift until the most drastic action often became necessary...

...liberals, especially, were attracted to his internationalist outlook, undaunted by his conservatism on matters at home...

...From 1935 to 1939 he was with Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines...

...His initial close contact with domestic politics, however, when he served as Army chief of staff from November 1946 to February 1948, had made him uncomfortable, and he abandoned the post to accept the Presidency of Columbia, his first appearance in civilian clothes since 1911...

...He depicted the former President as "a man of drive, intelligence, ambition, and ruthlessness," as well as a man with "profound limitations...

...Not every Eisenhower critic was as severe as Childs...

...While he was putting down intellectuals during the '50s, I was attending college and graduate school, and growing fond of my "egghead" professors: What began as a difference of opinion between the President and me ended as a matter of political apostasy...

...It is, rather, a fairly standard political narrative, informed by extensive research that is close to overwhelming, partly because it is not tied to any sustained argument...

...It was Eisenhower himself who protested that "nothing in the international or domestic situation especially qualifies for the most important office in the world a man whose adult years have been spent in the country's military forces...

...Joe McCarthy instinctively understood and exploited this feeling...

...In The Crucial Decade Eric Goldman pointed to the shocks of 1949: an atomic bomb in the hands of the Russians...

...But as in Greek tragedy these same qualities also produce the flaw which could, in time, undermine America's role in world affairs: a good will which does not necessarily produce understanding for the dilemmas of other societies...

...Indeed, there is a temptation to see some relationship between Parmet's approval of Eisenhower's pragmatic, low-profile approach to politics, and his own episode-by-episode presentation...

...In the process, the President's vague generalities, his assumption that good will would solve almost everything . . . could be deemed assets...

...Goldman .concluded that the Russian and Chinese challenges to America's faith in its omnipotence (including the belief that capitalistic democracy could be exported anywhere) could only be comprehended in terms of the third challenge internal subversion...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, California State University, San Francisco Although I was born into a family of Republican true-believers, I lost the faith and strayed into the camp of the old-deluder Democrats...

...Probably nothing in the '50s was so poorly understood as the Eisenhower Presidency," O'Neill argued...

...In Childs' opinion, the new Administration reflected the experiences of its leader...

...His achievements were negative: ending one war, keeping us out of others, holding down military spending...

...China in the clutches of the Communists...

...Emmet Hughes, with some misgivings about his boss' failure to consistently follow his advice, depicted Ike as a "man of strong will who reserved his greatest force for keeping unwanted things undone...

...The Vice-Presidential nomination of Richard M. Nixon was conceded to the conservative wing of the party...

...Eisenhower and the American Crusades proceeds on two assumptions: that Ike was needed, and that he was always in command...

...But this contention, too, the author does not bother to prove...

...Parmet thinks that Ike's invisibility was a virtue, which causes me to wonder whether he (like others) has not recoiled too much at the turmoil of the 1960sAnd in the process neglected its origins...

...Parmet does not deal with this contention, choosing to illustrate the civil rights struggle only by contrasting a restrained Eisenhower with headline-grabbing Adam Clayton Powell, naturally much to the President's benefit...

...Still, it came as a surprise when author-journalist Garry Wilis described Ike as "a political genius" in Nixon Agonistes (1970...

...William O'Neill presented a more temperate reassessment in Coining Apart: An Informal History of the 1960s (1971), but revisionism was clearly in the air...

...Ike, "the compromiser, the reconciler," was unequal to the job of uniting and inspiring the country...

...As we rush headlong into '50s nostalgia we must beware of this penchant for myth-making and treat Ike in terms of the needs of his own times, not ours...

...It was probably in 1954, therefore, when fears of subversion were rampant, that Ike's reassuring presence became a necessity...

...To cite one example, it has been suggested that if Eisenhower had taken a firm position in support of civil rights after the 1954 Supreme Court decision, the nation might have been spared some of the violence that permeated race relations in the 1960s...

...Appropriately titled Eisenhower: American Hero, its tone was set by Bruce Catton, who noted that in "a final look at Dwight Eisenhower, we stand in judgment of ourselves as much as of him...

...Born in the center of the United States, brought up in an uncomplicated community, the future President worked and played in the happy fashion of millions of American boys...

...Yet having been repeatedly sounded out for the Presidency by both parties while insulated from political infighting as a military leader, by 1952 Eisenhower came to believe that if he were elected Chief of State, he could rule "above politics...

...Despite the limited scope and dubious assumptions of Parmet's study, I would not discard but only reinterpret his concept of the necessity of Eisenhower...

...The public shared his view, picturing him not only as an eminent general but also as a man untarnished by partisan bickering...

...Ike turned down all political bids in 1948, and by 1950 was back in Europe as commander of nato...

...On the first of these Parmet writes: "To label him a great or good or even a weak President misses the point...

...Eisenhower's self-confidence, his "temperament of a healthy extrovert," his agreement with a Europe-first strategy, the impression he made on Churchill, and a growing father-and-son relationship with Marshall led to his being chosen over 366 senior officers...

...The reason was Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Luckily, he returned to Washington shortly before the Army's chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, began looking for a commander of the European Theater of Operation who would, according to Childs, "have qualities of leadership, conspicuous, even showy, qualities, to inspire a mass army and the democracy that must furnish and equip that army...

...But by highlighting Ike's accomplishments overseas and playing down his domestic role, O'Neill implicity informed us why appraisals of Eisenhower have changed so drastically...

...Eisenhower," Childs wrote, "was shot out of a cannon from complete obscurity to a position at the very top...

...Nevertheless, politicians of both parties eyed Ike hungrily...

...Constantly in the public eye, he was being mentioned for the White House even before D-Day...

...President Eisenhower closed out one war, the Korean War, and carried his country through eight difficult years without any war, large or small, and without any loss to Communist aggression...

...Now we have Herbert Parmet's Eisenhower and the American Crusades, offering a different sort of sympathy for the man and his Administration...

...As for the second assumption, that the President was firmly in control, Parmet argues that Ike's mode of operation was to stay behind the scenes and thus he sometimes gave the impression that his Administration was rudderless...

...The President never confronted Joe McCarthy, placed naive faith in summitry, took no action on civil rights, andexisting above politics never attempted to lead his party...

...Four years at West Point (where his education in the humanities was restricted to a one-semester course in his senior year) were followed by assignments to obscure Indian posts not far from his childhood home...

...His military career fostered a belief in the delegation of authority...

...and we find that the record is a good deal better than we have sometimes supposed...

...Though he did not participate in World War I, Eisenhower was called to Washington in 1927 to prepare a guidebook to its battlefields (then he visited Europe...

...Marquis Childs' Eisenhower: Captive Hero, published in 1958, lent biographical support to my Democratic biases, particularly Childs' argument that Ike's life fit the Horatio Alger tradition...

...Perhaps, but it is no more clear today that the Eisenhower Presidency was "necessary" than it was to the American voters in 1952 who...

...Meanwhile, former members of the Eisenhower team started to make their opinions known...

...But Parson Weems invented a biography that, with the aid of 19th-century romantic nationalists, created a Washington whom his contemporaries would not have recognized...

...Only a man with supreme self-confidence could have terminated the [Korean] war, as became clear in 1969 when Richard Nixon, confronted with the same opportunity, declined to take it...

...He was merely necessary," a stabilizing force in a conflict-ridden time...

...There was and continues to be conflicting opinion over Ike's actual military accomplishments in World War IIprobably resolved in his favor by the recent publication of Stephen E. Ambrose's The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...After high school graduation, working in a creamery, he learned by chance of the entrance exam for the Service academies...

...As anyone who has looked carefully at those stories knows, it was more luck than pluck that vaulted Alger's protagonists to success...

...In 1965 Henry Kissinger observed: "It is easy to understand the hold President Eisenhower has had on the nation's affections, for he epitomizes much that is best in America...

...Similarly, regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Parmet lists in his bibliography J. W. Anderson's Eisenhower, Brown-ell and the Congress, yet neglects in his text Anderson's argument that Ike was tricked into supporting this legislation by his Attorney General...

...His views on foreign and domestic matters were wholly conventional...

...Not surprisingly, Eisenhower's hero was George Washington, the father of his country, who fulfilled a comparable need after the colonies were deprived of their paternal protector...

...Like Eisenhower, Washington was, in his day, subjected to heavy criticism, primarily during his second term...

...This enabled shrewd liberal Republicans, among them Thomas E. Dewey, Henry Cabot Lodge and Herbert Brownell, to undermine the Presidential bid of conservative Senator Robert A. Taft by finally luring a rather innocent Dwight D. Eisenhower into the campaign...