The Quiet Crusade
Hess, Stephen
The Quiet Crusade Ike and the ‘hidden-hand presidency’ on civil rights. BY STEPHEN HESS This carefully researched and readable book on an important subject—civil rights during the...
...Fifty years ago, Dwight Eisenhower, the Kansas realist, may also have accurately calibrated the national threshold on civil rights...
...Three were white women (the social secretary, the president’s personal secretary, and a deputy press secretary), and one black man, Frederic Morrow, whose job was more important to us than to the nation...
...How does a president, dedicated to a federal system, tell the nation that a governor is lying...
...The groundbreaking parts of Nichols’s research are those that were previously hidden from sight, excavated from the archives, and that show how wrong surface impressions of Eisenhower have been...
...Nichols uncovers a delicious footnote: Eisenhower recommended Brownell to President-elect Nixon in 1968 as his choice for chief justice...
...I’m proud that Nichols opens his penultimate chapter with this summing-up from Eisenhower’s fi nal State of the Union address, delivered on January 12, 1961, and contributed by a young speechwriter: This pioneering work in civil rights must go on...
...As administrative offi cer, he controlled offi ce and parking space...
...As Morrow makes clear in his angry book Black Man in the White House (1963), they were polite and remote...
...Drifting back in time, the Eisenhower staff then was so small that even its lowliest aides got invited to white tie state dinners: September 17, 1960, a dinner for Crown Prince Akihito of Japan, the entertainers will be Todd Duncan, Gershwin’s original Porgy, and Camilla Williams, the fi rst African-American to be a regular at a major American opera company: I am thrilled to fi nd that I am to be Ms...
...And in the book’s most riveting chapters—the Little Rock crisis and subsequent military intervention—we see Eisenhower constantly confronted by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’s duplicity...
...The White House social secretary, a gracious lady, pulls me aside to apologize for having put me in this awkward position . . . During the eight years of the Eisenhower presidency, there were 102 senior assistants, collectively, measured by those who had White House Mess privileges...
...Where I—and Americans to the left of Eisenhower—separated from the president was in his words, not deeds...
...Bruce Bartlett’s new book, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, argues that it was also superior to John Kennedy’s and the Democrats...
...The Civil Rights Act of 1957, for instance, for which credit usually goes to Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, now, under the Nichols revision, must be shared with Eisenhower and Brownell—and with Johnson actually gutting the strongest provision...
...The president and the men around him had little knowledge of black America...
...Rauch sees a lesson for our times...
...He preferred to frame civil rights as legal issues, rather than matters of morality, as in his statement when the Brown decision was handed down: “The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional processes in this country...
...I loved working for President Eisenhower, even as I was slightly embarrassed by where he positioned himself on civil rights...
...This is similar in approach to Fred Greenstein’s seminal Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (1982...
...Williams’s dinner partner...
...Not only because discrimination is morally wrong, but also because its impact is more than national—it is worldwide...
...in the South, Frank Johnson and John Minor Wisdom for the Fifth Circuit, Simon Sobel for the Fourth Circuit...
...and I will obey”—with never a comment from the White House on the merits of the decision...
...There was movement in Ike’s stance toward the close of his presidency...
...Nixon chose Warren Burger...
...Rauch, writing about international relations, not civil rights, sees Ike as a realist who sought to manage evil rather than risk over reaction and destabilization...
...I was wondering about this shortly before I read A Matter of Justice, inspired by a recent article (“Learning from Ike”) by Jonathan Rauch in National Journal...
...Thanks to Nichols, I feel better now...
...but Ike’s record of picking judges who supported civil rights and the Brown decision, as Nichols points out, is impressive: William Brennan and John Marshall Harlan for the Supreme Court...
...Nichols wants to counter the “myth” of the Arthur Schlesingers of the world that Eisenhower’s record on civil rights was evasive and uncaring...
...He was the fi rst black executive on a White House staff—none under FDR or Harry Truman— and much was made of this...
...Nichols’s downplaying of the bad blood between Ike and his chief justice, Earl Warren, doesn’t convince me...
...Nichols rightly credits a con-siderable portion of Ike’s civil rights accomplishments to Attorney General Herbert Brownell, a New Yorker who had managed Tom Dewey’s presidential campaigns...
...His fi rst task is to illustrate Eisenhower’s exemplary work in those areas where his command was constitutionally given: This largely relates to desegregation in the District of Columbia, discrimination in federal employment and contracting, and completing Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces...
...Would we have accomplished more for civil rights if Eisenhower had chosen the banner of moral leadership...
...BY STEPHEN HESS This carefully researched and readable book on an important subject—civil rights during the Eisenhower administration—reconnects me to a time, 50 years ago, when I was a young White House speechwriter troubled by my boss’s words—or, more accurately, by his failure to speak words that I thought the nation should hear...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 12
