Ike's Second Army
Hess, Stephen
Ike's Second Army Whatever happened to the Eisenhower Republicans? by Stephen Hess Adecent neighborhood in heaven should be reserved for those who write biographies of history’s spear...
...Instead, Ike gave the Republican party a smashing victory in 1952, reaffirmed in 1956...
...Quite the contrary...
...by Stephen Hess Adecent neighborhood in heaven should be reserved for those who write biographies of history’s spear carriers, those men and women who lead useful public lives at the margins of national attention...
...Both William F. Buckley Jr...
...Arthur Larson, the subject of Ohio State historian David L. Stebenne’s meticulous rendering, had one shining moment on the national political scene...
...Many Eisenhower people, I felt, came to Washington with no greater expectation than to contribute to government service as good citizens are expected to contribute to the community chest, and would continue as good citizens when they went home...
...On history’s balance scale, the GOP owes more to Ike than he does to his party...
...Some of the Eisenhower people were retained by Kennedy and subsequent presidents, such as William Macomber at State...
...He had a deep antipathy to partisan politics, which he extended to its practitioners, particularly of the legislative variety...
...In the course of the eight Eisenhower years, there must have been several thousand political appointments: cabinet members, White House staff aides, departmental undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, and those with titles like special assistant to the undersecretary...
...Rockefeller’s political career was built on being a Rockefeller...
...Excluding the military aides, 104 people served on the White House staff and only one subsequently ran for office: Malcolm Moos, an unsuccessful independent Senate candidate from Minnesota...
...Below this level in any presidency are buried the young men and women who return to their states to build political careers...
...Indeed, I thought the most interesting chapter was about his years at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (1932-35...
...Eisenhower then rescued the miscast scholar with an appointment as presidential speechwriter, “a maddening experience” that lasted 10 months...
...This should not imply that Eisenhower’s people made no further contribution to public service...
...The list might start with Arthur Burns, the president’s chief economic adviser, a future Fed chairman...
...Yet in staffing his administration it was almost a litmus test that politicians were tainted...
...Larson took leave of Washington at the end of August 1956 to direct the Rule of Law Center at Duke...
...Nixon made his own political career...
...Stebenne shows, for example, how Larson was asked his political affiliation only as an afterthought when he was invited to become the administration’s number-two official at the Labor Department, and later, being a political outsider, influenced Eisenhower in giving him two essentially political jobs...
...These are the ones I recall from the Eisenhower administration: William Scranton (State), John Lindsay (Justice), Fred Seaton (Interior), George Lodge and Steve Horn (Labor), Elliot Richardson (Health, Education, and Welfare...
...The manuscript was vetted by the White House staff and enthusiastically endorsed by the president during a news conference, whereupon, with the aid of Henry Luce’s publications, it became a surprising bestseller...
...The analysis of what follows Eisenhowerism in the Republican party is most often presented in ideological or sociological terms...
...His military experience gave an internationalist cast to his otherwise conservative beliefs...
...Stassen lost a Republican primary for governor of Pennsylvania in 1958, which ended his political career, although not his running for office...
...The president was hardly naive and was himself a skilled bureaucratic infighter...
...What happened next was that a smitten president decided Larson should be a future Republican leader...
...Still, these are pretty slim pickings from the hundreds who came to Washington to help the president govern...
...There were the experts...
...Of the 20 people who served in the cabinet, only one subsequently ran for office: James Mitchell, secretary of labor, defeated for governor of New Jersey...
...There were three major players of national political ambition in Eisenhower’s government: Harold Stassen, Nelson Rockefeller, and Richard Nixon...
...Stephen Hess, distinguished research professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, is the author, most recently, of Through Their Eyes: Foreign Correspondents in the United States...
...Despite the title, Stebenne has written a birth-to-death biography...
...Several weeks after Larson left the White House, I joined President Eisenhower’s staff, where I remained happily until we were forced to vacate for President-elect Kennedy’s arrival at noon on January 20, 1961...
...Harry Truman would have given him the Democratic party’s presidential nomination in 1948...
...The Eisenhower administration consumed just four-and-a-half years of Larson’s life and takes less than half the book’s chapters...
...and Barry Goldwater had blistering attacks on Larson’s treatise in their books...
...Larson was a law professor and expert in workers’ compensation who, in his spare time, while serving as undersecretary of labor in the Eisenhower administration, wrote a slender book called A Republican Looks at His Party (1956), in which he declared that Dwight Eisenhower had “discovered and established the Authentic American Center in politics...
...Dwight D. Eisenhower was a genial, shrewd, optimistic product of small-town middle America, the most popular general of a just war...
...I was his speechwriter when he ran for governor of California in 1962, the only Eisenhower alumnus on his staff...
...Nor did Rockefeller or Scranton have the political skill to successfully challenge for the 1964 nomination...
...There was a sea change coming...
...But if only as a sidebar, the general left the field of battle without providing enough foot soldiers to contest the outcome...
...Irving Berlin even composed his campaign song...
...But Republican Eisenhower was only casually interested in party-building...
...My back-of-the-envelope calculations surely overlook someone from the Third District of someplace...
...When he became president in 1969, only two Eisenhower people were in his cabinet: William Rogers, whose friendship predated the Eisenhower years, and Maurice Stans, his money man...
...Our experience—Professor Larson’s and mine—raises an odd question: Why did one of the most successful Republican presidents in history—eight years that brought peace and financial solvency—leave no imprint on his party...
...He spent the rest of his life productively in Durham and died in 1993...
...He promptly elevated him to the directorship of the United States Information Agency, but Larson’s ineptness in dealing with a Democratic Congress resulted in the budget being drastically cut...
Vol. 12 • February 2007 • No. 23
