In Good Hands

Not long ago, at an academic institution named for the man who succeeded Dwight D. Eisenhower as president, a student paid me a visit. He wanted to know why it was that, of all the men who served in the nation’s highest office in the past 70 years, Eisenhower received the least mention among students, scholars, and political pundits.

I told him that, because Ike ran the country with a steady hand in an era that John F. Kennedy termed a “hard and bitter peace,” and comported himself in a manner devoid of theatrics, his presidency, unlike his service as Supreme Commander of Operation Overlord during World War II, did not readily lend itself to dramatization. I recalled that when I proposed writing my undergraduate thesis on Eisenhower, I encountered difficulty finding someone willing to supervise it. “Eisenhower was so boring,” one professor said. “Why don’t you write about Truman or Johnson? Then we might have something going.”

I struggled to remind her that she had missed the point. For of all the postwar presidents up to that time (Harry Truman to Richard Nixon), Ike stood out in one crucial respect: He calmed, even soothed, a nation that had had enough excitement inflicted upon it by presumably more “interesting” partisan scrappers (Truman, Douglas MacArthur, and Joseph McCarthy among them). He had also stayed clear of the kind of divisive foreign adventure that, while I was writing, would destroy Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. It would take another decade for historians, able to ramble through Ike’s papers, to be reminded just how hard that was to do and how he managed to do it.

Of all the presidents who served after Franklin Roosevelt and before Ronald Reagan, Truman and Eisenhower may have been the only two who sought the office not as a means of “proving” something. And Truman had the office thrust upon him. Ike, contrary to all those myths about a “draft,” sought the job in order to do something. He wanted nothing less than to put into place the wherewithal that would enable the United States to prevail in what appeared to be a decades-long struggle against a determined, ideologically driven enemy known to exhibit a certain ruthlessness. If any of this sounds remarkably contemporary, keep on reading.

My student departed before I thought to remind him that there is one camp on the political spectrum that has taken Ike in–some might say even hijacked him. That is the Loony Left. Ike’s picture became the logo for Why We Fight, Eugene Jarecki’s filmed political diatribe that passes itself off as a “documentary.” It begins with Eisenhower’s warning, in his farewell address, of the dangers of the “military-industrial” complex, and before long, proclaims most American military engagements in parts of the world as efforts to justify massive expenditures on advanced weaponry. (Oh yes, it also mentions oil.)

That the left would present Ike as an unheeded prophet would startle liberals of his era. In Good Morning, Vietnam, Robin Williams captured the prevailing Hollywood view of America’s first golfer when he mimicked Ike and likened him to Elmer Fudd. “What would happen if Eisenhower died and Nixon became president?” ran one 1950s joke. “What would happen if Dulles died and Eisenhower became president?” went the rejoinder.

Readers of The Truth Is Our Weapon will encounter on its pages neither the “do-nothing” Eisenhower that academics of yesteryear invented nor the gifted statesman/politician contemporary historians now see, nor Jarecki’s scorned prophet, but (hold on to your armchairs) a man who, through his rhetoric, provoked the Soviet Union and American allies, making war more rather than less likely.

Parting company with both the jokesters who saw Ike as putty in the hands of a scheming Dulles, and the revisionists who had Ike manipulating Dulles and others with a “hidden hand,” Chris Tudda sees the president and his secretary of state as equal partners. Though he might protest that he does not fully share the churlish opinion of Harold Macmillan, that Ike was “very naive and inexperienced” and Dulles was “ignorant and stupid,” he sets up his arguments in ways that would have readers not that familiar with this duo draw no other conclusion.

Tudda’s basic thesis is that, through their deliberate use of “inflammatory” rhetoric, in both public and private, Eisenhower and Dulles on more than one occasion undermined their own policies of moderation, containment, and peaceful coexistence by first bewildering and, eventually, emboldening the Soviets and antagonizing allies. He takes as his focus of inquiry three cases, all involving Europe. These were Eisenhower’s advocacy of a “New Look” military posture, with West Germany and its neighbors fully integrated into one military force, the European Defense Community; a “rollback” of Soviet territory (Tudda cannot bring himself to call it an “empire”); and the incorporation of a unified Germany into the Western alliance.

That the first of these goals was implemented by Eisenhower himself, the second by Ronald Reagan, and the third by George H.W. Bush, Tudda ignores. Would Reagan and Bush have been able to succeed had Eisenhower announced, as Tudda might have had him do, that it was American policy to accept the permanent division of Germany and Soviet domination of Eastern Europe? The closest the United States and the Soviet Union came to a nuclear exchange occurred, not during Eisenhower’s tenure in office, but during Kennedy’s. Historians attribute the origins of the Cuban missile crisis to Nikita Khrushchev’s conclusion, after meeting him in Vienna, that Kennedy was “weak.” Whatever his faults, no one ever thought that about Dwight D. Eisenhower, or felt a need to “test” his resolve.

With the luxury of hindsight, Dulles seems to have been anything but “ignorant and stupid” when he recognized the need for the United States to “keep alive the spirit of liberty in these [captive] people.” Tudda finds it odd that the Eisenhower administration never publicly acknowledged that the CIA had determined that “Soviet control over the satellites is virtually complete and unlikely to diminish or be successfully challenged from within.” How fortunate for the people of Eastern Europe that there were some in the West who refused to believe that the conditions they endured would be permanent. One was the “naive and inexperienced” president of the United States.

Tudda, a State Department historian, finds it provocative that Eisenhower would tell the Czechs that “America remains true to its great traditions and firm in its conviction that tyranny cannot long endure in a world where free men are strong, united, and resolute,” and the Poles that “a people . . . who have once known freedom cannot be for always deprived of their national independence, or of their personal liberty.”

None of this is to suggest that, in the three cases Tudda examines, Eisenhower walked away a glowing success. The failures he endured may have resulted from more than his choice of rhetoric. In the case of the “New Look,” Eisenhower’s goal was to defend Europe more through nuclear weapons than the more costly long-term commitment of troops. When the French balked at an integrated military, Ike and Dulles threatened, to no avail, to reduce the level of America’s commitment to Europe’s defense. (With the allies the use of “brinkmanship,” another word missing in Tudda’s text, did not work.) As Tudda suggests, Ike and Dulles may have had no alternatives; the problem may have been the policy, not the rhetoric. With World War II over only nine years, it was not surprising that the French would fear the Germans more than they did the Soviets.

When discussing the uprisings in Eastern Europe, and especially in Hungary, Tudda concedes that neither Eisenhower nor Dulles promised to intervene in order to assure the success of these independence movements. That, all sides knew, would have assured war. Yet Western diplomats and Radio Free Europe made statements that were ambiguous enough to allow listeners to conclude otherwise.

In discussing these two cases, Tudda demonstrates that Eisenhower’s “multiple advisory” executive system, and military “staff-like” operation, which placed a premium on moving orders and information down the line, broke down on more than one occasion. Ike’s secretaries of defense and treasury, Tudda says, were not among the first to know that the president had postponed his much-trumpeted defense cuts. Eisenhower, we learn, was “amazed” to discover that U.N. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was unaware that it was not American policy to incite revolution.

A reading of Tudda’s chapter on German unification suggests that, however clumsy Eisenhower and Dulles may have been as negotiators, the stalemate they achieved was a partial victory, in that they thwarted Soviet aspirations even if they could not advance their own. Germany remained divided, but the United States did not publicly relinquish hope that it would one day become whole again and part of the Western alliance. Eisenhower and Dulles also pushed back against pressures to unify Germany as a neutral state, on the Austrian model. By “holding the line,” Ike made it possible for Reagan and Bush 41 to advance decades later.

Of most interest to policymakers are the early chapters in which Tudda treats the origins of Dulles’s ideology and the instruments Eisenhower used to further it. Although he had supported all the instruments Truman enacted (with Republican help) to contain Soviet aggression–the Marshall Plan, aid to Greece and Turkey, NATO, the reorganization of intelligence-gathering and military operations–Dulles came to believe that, under containment, the Soviets had been able to use “ideas” as “missiles” while the United States adopted a passive pose. He wanted us to engage vigorously in the ongoing war of ideas.

In the aftermath of 9/11, much has been said about the need to “win hearts and minds” in the Muslim world. The 9/11 Commission, the secretary of defense, and others have recognized that, if the West is to prevail against a determined enemy, with firmly held beliefs and the determination to impose them through extraordinary and violent means, the West must find a way to dry up the supply of would-be terrorists. That means telling America’s story as many ways as is humanly and technically possible. And doing that will require rebuilding the house that Ike helped build and that presidents in the aftermath of the Cold War allowed to atrophy.

In the late 1940s, the man who presided over the invasion of Normandy complained to Congress about an “appalling ignorance throughout the world about the United States.” He called for a national program to get the facts to the people of the world by means of massive educational and cultural exchanges and a civic education component in schools that taught the principles of both democracy and communism. A year after the Soviets launched Sputnik (another phenomenon unmentioned in this book), Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which provided a free college education to students entering certain fields, such as the hard sciences. It also provided for the training of translators and linguists in languages not then widely taught in the schools.

Ike called on educational organizations, businesses, and labor unions to join in partnership with the federal government in telling America’s story to the world. After leaving office, he helped found Sister Cities, an organization committed to linking American cities and towns with foreign counterparts so that differing cultures got to know one another through the steady exchange of people from all walks of life. He urged schoolchildren who visited him at Gettysburg to become “pen pals” with children their age in other countries.

With the fifth anniversary of 9/11 fast approaching, how close have we come to equaling the effort Ike made a half-century ago? Whatever mistakes he may have made, and however his critics, past and present, belittle him, it is Ike’s vision that prevailed, not Khrushchev’s. Because he put into practice a series of institutions, organizations, and networks that told America’s story effectively, the United States was able to win the last war of ideas–seven presidents later. If the current White House follows Ike’s lead, George W. Bush may be able to claim a similar legacy.

Alvin S. Felzenberg is the author, most recently, of Governor Tom Kean: From the New Jersey Statehouse to the 9-11 Commission.