The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower
With Susan Eisenhower and Fred Greenstein, Moderated by Richard
Immerman
John F. Kennedy Library and Foundation
March 9, 2003
TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon, and welcome to the Kennedy Library. On behalf of Deborah
Leff, Director of the John F. Kennedy Library, and John Shattuck, CEO of the John F. Kennedy
Library Foundation, I welcome you to this forum on the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. My
name is Tom Putnam, and as Director of Education, I want to especially thank our cosponsors,
FleetBoston Financial, the Lowell Institute, Boston Capital, The Boston Globe, Boston.com, and
WBUR.
This session is part of a sequential series sponsored by the library, examining the presidencies of
the 20th century with past sessions focusing on Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin
Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. Before introducing today's speakers, and to set the stage for the
discussion, I wanted to share a few brief film and audio clips with you from our own archives. But
first, a disclaimer. A few weeks ago, we had a session with White House photographer Cecil
Stoughton, who took many of the iconic photos of Caroline and John Jr. with their parents.
Despite all of our careful efforts at preparation, somehow the slides had been arranged in the tray
in exactly the opposite order for which they had been intended. And so rather than being
charmed, as we all expected, by children skipping through the Oval Office, the first slide to come
up was perhaps Mr. Stoughton's most recognizable image of a somber Lyndon Johnson taking
the oath on Air Force 1.
So I want to assure you that by opening with this next clip of President Kennedy's inaugural, that
we are not making the same mistake twice, beginning this session on President Eisenhower with
the final moments on his presidency. But in mining through our collection for a clip or two that
related to our subject today, Allan Goodrich, our Chief Archivist, suggested we show this
exchange between Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower, literally seconds after the oath of office.
If you listen closely -- and I'll show it twice, so that it's not hard to hear the first time -- when
President Eisenhower congratulates JFK, he heartily exclaims, "You're it now, my boy." So let's
roll this tape.
[tape played]
Again, I didn't hear it the first time, so we'll play it one more time, and see if you can pick it up. But
again, he says, "You're it now, my boy."
[tape played]
Moving even further afield from today's main focus, I want to play a brief excerpt of a phone
conversation almost two years later, which allows one of those rare moments that presidential
libraries offer, in which you can truly eavesdrop on history. Let's listen now as President Kennedy
calls former President Eisenhower at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is a weekly
edited transcript. And I realize I haven't given it to our guest speakers, so if someone has one in
the front row that they could share. We've cut the first minute or so where President Kennedy is
explaining to President Eisenhower the different telegrams that they've received from Premier
Khrushchev. We cut right to the part where President Kennedy and former President Eisenhower
have a brief exchange on the phone. So let's listen in.
[tape played]
Before we hear from our speakers today, we're pleased to be able to show a brief excerpt from
the "American Experience" documentary on Dwight D. Eisenhower, moderated by David
McCullough and provided to us by the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. The
clip opens at the start of President Eisenhower's term of office and helps set the stage for
Professor Fred Greenstein's opening talk. The clip fast forwards through the section on how
President Eisenhower chose to not confront Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly, but worked
instead behind the scenes to undermine him and ends with a very brief excerpt on foreign policy
that will hopefully provide a launching point for Susan Eisenhower's comments.
I've taken enough time already, and your programs contain extensive biographies of today's
distinguished panel, so allow me the briefest of introductions and the order in which they will
speak. Fred Greenstein is professor emeritus at Princeton University. His book, The Hidden Hand
Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader, which is on sale in our bookstore, revolutionized the way
historians and the general public evaluate the Eisenhower presidency. Richard Immerman, who
will serve as both our moderator and a respondent this afternoon, is chair of the history
department at Temple University and the co-author of Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped
an Enduring Cold War Strategy. And lastly, we're so pleased to have with us today Susan
Eisenhower, currently the director of the Eisenhower Institute, whose efforts help to carry on her
grandfather's legacy of building a safer world and who is best known for her work to improve
relations between the United States and Russia, and other republics in the former Soviet Union.
The following film clip lasts about 10 minutes, at which point our speakers will take the stage. And
then, Fred, to paraphrase a certain former president, you're it then, my friend.
[film clip]
FRED GREENSTEIN: I think I've actually done my work already, very conveniently, in the form of
an interview conducted 10 or 15 years ago in my living room in Princeton, New Jersey. That
phrase that began the video snippet, which is from the Public Broadcasting series called "The
American Experience," which has now produced wonderful videos on a high proportion of the
modern presidencies -- FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan, so
far -- was framed with the title of my book The Hidden Hand Presidency. The subtitle of the book,
which is out in the gift shop, is a phrase that would have been viewed as a contradiction of terms
in the 1950s, and that's why I chose it. The subtitle is worded Eisenhower as Leader.
Now, in the 1950s -- and I see enough white hair here to know that there are people here who
undoubtedly had the opportunity to vote in the two Eisenhower/Stevenson elections in 1952 and
1956. In the 1950s, the notion that you would put Eisenhower and leader in the same sentence
would have been viewed as a kind of contradiction in terms by people who were not, say, avid
Eisenhower enthusiasts, or people in the inner Eisenhower circle. Eisenhower seemed, in many
ways, to be almost more like the Queen of England than the President of the United States. In the
United States, we take the position which is divided in many nations, such as England, or the
other parliamentary democracies, between a ceremonial head of state who is above politics and
symbolizes the nation. It's divided in England between that and a prime minister, who really does
the controversial dirty work of presidential leadership. So we see Tony Blair very much under fire
now on his leadership on Iraq, whereas the Queen is invulnerable.
Well, we put those together in the presidency. And I think one reason why so many American
presidencies go downhill is that the president comes in. People rally around the president as a
symbol of the nation. But as the president does the bare-knuckles work of political leadership,
that seems inconsistent with the larger expectations of the presidency, and gradually you see a
Johnson or a Nixon or a Ford or a Jimmy Carter just going dramatically downhill in terms of public
support. Eisenhower, on the other hand, had stable and very high popularity. He appealed to
people in the core of the Democratic party as well as in the core of the Republican party, and
presided over eight years, really, of peace and prosperity during a very difficult and demanding
period of the Cold War.
Now, he must have been active in leadership, one would say, if the country didn't fall apart during
those eight years. Yet he seemed like a benign, golf-playing, trout-fishing father figure. And my
own experience was to go to a place very much like the one that you're in right now, one of the
presidential archives. This is the Eisenhower Library in central Kansas, in the town of Abilene,
where Eisenhower was born. And in the late 1970s, look at documents, which had just become
available from the Eisenhower presidency. And these documents dramatically transformed the
image of the Eisenhower presidency.
People who study presidents, as opposed to the American people at large, had come to think of
Eisenhower as kind of a minor figure in the presidential pantheon by the time he left office. When
historians ranked the great presidents, they put him down with the forgotten, portly, bearded
figures of the 19th century. He ranked with Chester Arthur in one famous poll. And I'm sure you
all spend a lot of time thinking about the great leadership feats of Chester Arthur, if you've ever
heard the name at all. Well, in the present era, if historians are asked about Eisenhower, no one
thinks he was a lightweight. No one thinks he was above politics. Nobody thinks he had a simple
mind. And that's because we have seen what went on within his presidency.
Now, how and why would somebody not have drawn attention to the muscular part of his
leadership? I think the why is that Eisenhower maintained that great support that came from
being a hero from World War II, from having led the allied forces in Europe. His leadership feats,
his beaming and wonderful public persona, made him a figure who was beloved of the American
people. As long as he had that support, he had running room to do what he needed to do on
foreign policy. I've been asked also to comment on his domestic policies, but the critical thing
about the Eisenhower presidency from Eisenhower's standpoint was foreign policy. Susan
Eisenhower is going to talk about that. Richard Immerman is one of the leading writers and
scholars on the Eisenhower foreign policy.
Eisenhower reluctantly chose to run for president having established his place in history, because
he felt that the United States had to get on a firm strategic footing with the Soviet Union, that it
had to avoid spending itself blind and to dig in. In the long run, it had to find proper leverage.
Eisenhower did not even have a domestic policy that he promulgated to the Congress in his first
year in office. By the end of that year, it was obvious to him that his presidency had to stand for
something. And what he did was develop moderate policies that were forward-looking. They were
policies that were more progressive than his own rather deeply conservative views.
But as a great tactician, he was persuaded that if the Republican party was to thrive, it couldn't
attempt to eliminate the great breakthroughs of the New Deal and the Harry Truman Fair Deal. It
couldn't try to get rid of social security. In fact, it would have to improve those programs. Much of
what he did domestically was to improve and expand and perfect the implementation of the
programs that had been put on the statute books, particularly during Roosevelt's time. And also,
as an old soldier who recognized the importance of the material strength of a nation, he presided
over developments such as the interstate highway system, which is now called the Eisenhower
system, the St. Lawrence Freeway, which opened up navigation to the Great Lakes, other things
like soil conservation programs, and so on.
Now, just to finish up, and to slightly supplement what really, I think, is nicely summarized in that
video, he was able to maintain his support, yet to exercise leadership by doing a number of
things. One that I did indeed come to call hidden hand presidency was not something that I made
up or surmised. The Eisenhower White House had wonderful records. I think that was part of
Eisenhower's military experience that you kept good documentation of what you did. And his
personal secretary had the responsibility of sitting at an extension and taking shorthand notes of
his phone conversations. And in one phone conversation, which I read literally a few minutes after
beginning to work in the Eisenhower archives, which struck me like a lightning bolt because it
seemed so inconsistent with any image of the man who was above politics, he was telling his
Treasury Secretary to tell a particular Texas billionaire and oil magnate that that billionaire should
put the pressure on Senator Lyndon Johnson, who was the leader of the Democrats, to be more
cooperative with the Eisenhower administration. Now, this was, you have to say, a somewhat
devious, but, from Eisenhower's standpoint, a constructively devious approach to leadership. He
didn't sully the image of the presidency. But he didn't let the nation and his program just slip
away. He worked through intermediaries in a sophisticated fashion.
He also used language in ways that advanced his purposes. If you want to understand what he's
doing, you can go to those records, which have now been published, and are not just in
typewritten form, and you can see the analytic and clear ways in which he laid out for his aides, or
clarified for people who corresponded with him, precisely what he thought the nation's goals were
and his goals were. But if there was a danger that he would undermine a policy -- for example,
that he would either say to communist China, "We're not going to defend those islands just off the
mainland, so you might as well take them," or alternately commit himself to defend islands which
were not defensible militarily -- he would do the sort of thing you saw in that press conference.
And, in fact, before that press conference, he said to his press secretary, who said, "The State
Department asks that you not say anything about those islands" -- these are islands that are
about four or five miles from the Chinese mainland, maybe even closer, but which even today, the
communist Chinese forces of the People's Republic of China threaten from time to time to invade.
When the press secretary said, "Don't say anything about that," Eisenhower said to the press
secretary, "Don't worry, if that comes up, I'll just confuse them." And you just heard the confusion.
He also was very agile about putting different aides to work for different purposes, and often,
aides served as lightning rods. When difficult things had to be done, he didn't detract from the
luster of the presidency. He might ask the press secretary to do it, and that press secretary,
whose name was James Hagerty, once said in a conversation on staffing the presidency, "When
President Eisenhower had a highly controversial policy to announce, he would ask me to
announce it. And I would say to him, 'But Mr. President, if I say that, they'll give me hell.'" And he
said, "With that, the President would smile, and he would put his arm around me, and he would
say, 'Jim, better you, my boy, than me.'" So this was this man's style. Now, I think you were going
to ask me some questions or make some comments?
RICHARD IMMERMAN: I guess I'm supposed to do both. I should mention, in the interest of full
disclosure, that Fred Greenstein and I have been carrying on this act now for about 20-some-odd
years. We actually began working together in the late 1970s, when we were two very unusual
people who would journey out to Abilene, Kansas, and spend weeks out there. In fact, once we
said that we were going to write a book about how to survive in Abilene, Kansas for a period of a
month.
I mention that in part to reinforce what Fred said initially, that, what a surprise it was -- and we
both came to the same conclusions independently as we went through these materials -- to find
that the duffer Ike was not so much of a duffer at all. And in terms of some of these aspects, one
of the more fascinating revelations -- and this goes back to what Fred said about Eisenhower's
overall political philosophy, at least in the domestic area -- is to eavesdrop, so to speak, on the
debates that took place among the Eisenhower brothers. The brothers themselves, to some
extent, spanned the political spectrum. Ike was significantly to the left of a number of his brothers,
Arthur particularly, and Edgar, both of whom -- one was an attorney, the other was a banker -could not understand why Eisenhower would not aggressively roll back the New Deal, at least.
It's interesting to speculate, and perhaps Fred might comment -- maybe this is a segue into my
first question -- the extent to which Eisenhower's political agenda, his domestic agenda, was
driven by his own core values, in terms of his political views, his views, and what you might
consider political pragmatism or expediency. He fully believed, as far as I could understand, that
to attempt to roll back the New Deal would be political suicide. The question then is that, if that
were not the case, whether he would have been more aggressive. And my own feeling is that he
would not have been, but I think it's something interesting to think about.
A second question, which gets into the more -- I'm a historian. Fred's a political scientist. He's
more interested in instrumental issues. I like to decide who's right and who's wrong. And a pivotal
component, really a key to Eisenhower's success, Fred argued, for a long time and very
persuasively, is that he emphasized, or he played up, if you will, the ceremonial role of Chief of
Staff, and at the same time downplayed, almost hid, the prime ministerial role. He used his staff,
his advisors -- and I've worked carefully on this -- as lightning rods, wasn't always just confusing
them, but if someone was going to take the heat, as he said, "Better you than me, Jim." Whether
John Foster Dulles, to some extent, Sherman Adams, or others, they took the blame for anything
that went wrong. Anything that went right, Ike was very happy to take the credit for it. And as a
result of this, he husbanded his exceptional popularity. And there wasn't anyone who was more
popular than he was at that time.
The other side of this, as you've also written, is that he was very careful to prevent catastrophes
and often hid his own role in avoiding catastrophes, which in some sense meant sort of avoiding
extreme controversies, things that might be liabilities. So in terms of substance, perhaps you
might comment not simply on the McCarthy question, but how this careful husbanding of his
forces, to some extent going back to what Schlesinger was saying in terms of the moral
responsibility, how would this play in something like civil rights, which has been quite
controversial, whether he should have been more active. Let me just end it at that, and perhaps
we can come back.
FRED GREENSTEIN: It's an interesting array of stimuli there. And you can hear Schlesinger
saying, "This is a man who should have taken strong positions in controversies where he seemed
to lie low." In the McCarthy story, if you're at all interested in it and want to see it spelled out in
very great detail, you can also go to a public library. You don't have to buy The Hidden Hand
Presidency next door. But the next to the last chapter traces that out in very great detail using the
still unpublished diary of that press secretary you were referring to, James Hagerty.
In the case of civil rights and civil liberties, Eisenhower, I think, was fundamentally a conservative.
And I think he was temperamentally conservative, even though he was a lovely, warm human
being. I don't think there was an iota of race prejudice in his makeup. One of his most delightful
relationships was with a gentleman named Mony, who was his personal valet and who he had a
kind of an amiable give-and-take relationship with. His presidency, in fact, very much the hidden
hand mode, was responsible for rather unpublicized developments in the era of civil rights. For
example, in his first year, through a lot of background negotiations, the District of Columbia
becomes desegregated. And that's done without high publicity. There also is a desegregation of
previously racially divided military installations, including shipbuilding installations in the South.
So it's very Eisenhower-esque that rather than bringing that desegregation of the Southern
facilities up to a head, in a way so that there may be a high degree of attention to what was going
on, they did such things as come in over the weekend and paint out signs that stipulated that a
particular drinking fountain was only for white people, or only for, as was then said, colored
people. So the notion was that you take these very hot and demanding issues, and you kind of let
the steam out of them and find practical ways of negotiating your way through them. But I think he
may also have been lacking in the notion that the president is someone who should make a mark.
I think some of this may come from Eisenhower's own incredible sense of self security about
being in the presidency. His first day in office, he penned a little note to himself, which appears in
something called The Eisenhower Diaries, which is a collection of diary-like notes that begin in
the mid 1930s, when he was the deputy to General Douglas MacArthur and they were serving in
the Philippines, which they were training to develop its own democratic political system. The first
day in office, he writes in his diary, "This seems like what I have been doing for the last decade."
Well, in 1942, within six months after Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower's mentor, General George
Marshall, and President Roosevelt recognized that his ability was so great -- he was taken to the
Pentagon as a war planner -- that they wanted him as a leader of the American forces in Europe.
And within that year, he became the leader of all the Allied forces. And you see a very cool
intelligence going into this, but at the same time, a remarkable ability to harmonize people and
bring them together, and a persona, an ability to reach out to people in the mass that really could
be described in some ways as charismatic in terms of his ability to just engage people.
Now, I think it's possible that a somewhat differently put-together Eisenhower would have used
the presidency much more as a teaching and preaching role, precisely as FDR did, as Kennedy
did. You can see this in all the videos that are showing in this building. And I think to some extent,
where he used the hidden hand, he might have better used the bully pulpit. And in thinking about
this, I think, why did he do things that in some ways decreased the reputation of his presidency in
order to be low key?
And I'm reminded of something that Susan's Uncle Milton, who was the youngest brother and the
closest advisor of Eisenhower, told me. Milton had been a college president, first at Penn State
and then at Johns Hopkins. And those two college presidencies sort of split the two Eisenhower
terms. Well, in the next to the last year of Eisenhower's first term, he was Milton's
commencement speaker at Penn State. The commencement was held in an open-air football -you know the story -- stadium. And the decision the president had to make, if it looked as if there
was going to be inclement weather, particularly lightning storms, which would be literally
dangerous, would be whether to move the commencement into the largest indoor facility. And
that would mean that people who had traveled across the state of Pennsylvania to see their
grandchildren graduate might not be able to get into this field house.
So Milton says, "I was distraught. There were these thunderclouds. Should I go ahead? What
should I do? Ike was going to give the talk. I said to my brother, 'What should I do?' My brother
said to me, 'Milton, I haven't worried about the weather since June 1944.'" So he had done it all
by D-day. And I think that may have taken out some of that impulse.
RICHARD IMMERMAN: Just to set the record straight, because Milton would be very upset, he
was also president of Kansas State. You cannot leave Kansas out of the Eisenhower legacy.
Well, as Fred indicated, foreign policy was Eisenhower's passion. It was also really the raison
d'être for his decision to run for presidency, and what he would find is his presidency. So we're
fortunate to have Susan Eisenhower tell us all about it.
SUSAN EISENHOWER: Thank you, Richard. I am not a professional historian myself. I work in
the area of foreign policy. But this has been a subject of great interest to me. Before I say a few
words about his foreign policy, however, I have to just respond to this "old duffer Ike" business. I
have to tell you, I as a kid always wondered where that came from. Because I was fortunate
enough to know him very well, and he didn't seem very sleepy or preoccupied to me.
RICHARD IMMERMAN: Tell them how he taught you to swim.
SUSAN EISENHOWER: Yes. Actually, we all smile in the family about this, but he decided when
we were young that it was probably important that we learn how to swim. So he tied a rope
around our middle and plopped us into the swimming pool. You know, we wouldn't drown. Our
style wasn't very good as a result of that, so we ended up with swimming lessons. But this was a
very strong personality, a very direct personality, as a matter of fact, one of the things that was
really so nice about being around him.
I'd just like to add a few things to what was just said, because I can't resist. You know, I think
Fred really made a point that is extremely valid here, that you can't understand the Eisenhower
presidency without understanding the experience that he underwent during World War II. And I
remember when I was researching a book I wrote called Mrs. Ike, which is really a story of the
Eisenhower marriage, I guess, throughout all these long years. During the war, he wrote in
exasperation to Mamie. He was explaining to her that he was trying to get others at command
headquarters to take the interviews, that he thought it was good for morale if everybody was seen
to be important in this war effort. And then he said, "Anyway, we've got one publicity-seeker in the
army, and that's quite enough." The point being that I think he used even deflecting attention on
himself as a way not only to reap the benefits that you mentioned politically, but also to create a
sense of organizational teamwork in a sense.
It is true that there was a man named John Mony, who was his alter ego in many ways. And I
think that his relationship with Mony was an interesting indication of what he thought about civil
rights. Without getting into this whole domestic agenda, I would say that probably one of the most
profound things Eisenhower did in civil rights was to integrate the blood supply. We don't talk
about it very much, but this was absolutely a very, very important thing and a very difficult issue.
And of course, I would go as far as to say that sending in the 101st Airborne isn't exactly being
indifferent, into Little Rock.
In fact, I think probably the reason the Eisenhower presidency is mostly defined around foreign
policy is because indeed that was probably the reasons that Eisenhower sought election in the
first place. We remember that Eisenhower visited Robert Taft and tried to determine what Taft's
attitude was towards NATO and collective security. And when Robert Taft didn't give Eisenhower
the answer he wanted, I think Eisenhower understood then that he would have to run for
president of the United States.
It was a dangerous world that Dwight Eisenhower inherited. Nuclear weapons had made their
way onto the international scene in a very big way. And there was tremendous division within the
government apparatus about how best to approach the Soviet Union. What's not said in the
"American Experience" clip that we saw, anyway, and I'm sorry that David McCullough didn't
mention it, but deep at the core of Eisenhower's attitude about the Cold War was the firm belief
that the Soviet Union would ultimately self-destruct, because of the internal contradictions of the
Soviet system, because of the inhumane and inflexible position of communism itself. And I think
he also felt that it was absolutely critical that the United States serve as a beacon for the world,
and in serving as a beacon of freedom and democracy to the world, that this idea would ignite
and spark the aspirations of people behind the Iron Curtain.
And I think that's an important thing to note, because it says everything about how Eisenhower
then established a strategy for the Cold War. When Eisenhower came to power, US defense
spending had tripled, and US forces had doubled in an effort to try and meet the nuclear and
conventional threat posed by the Soviet Union. We had atomic weapons. Fusion weapons by this
point were 25 times more powerful than those used in Japan. And also, there was the disturbing
fact that very little at this time had been done to think through how to deter surprise attack -- that
is, creating survivability of nuclear weapons that would be a critical part of the deterrence
concept.
In any case, communism at this point was now global. We were engaged in Korea, and China
had fallen. These deep differences within the government had a huge impact, actually, on
considerations when the Eisenhower administration came to power. There were many respected
people who believed deeply in the notion of a preventive war, even rollback. Now, I think the thing
that strikes me today, here in the year 2003, is how contemporary this discussion really is, the
whole notion of preventive war and rollback. And, in fact, we are in a very interesting sort of 50th
anniversary period right now. Just this last week on March 5 was the 50th anniversary of Stalin's
death. And I think that how Eisenhower handled the immediate period after Stalin's death says a
lot about how he was going to set up his administration for the coming years.
I think government -- that is, both during the Truman administration and obviously in the first
stage of the Eisenhower administration -- saw that Stalin's death would provide an opening, but
no one really knew what that opening was going to look like. In fact, Eisenhower was one of the
few leaders on the international scene that had actually met and spent time with Stalin. This was
as a result of World War II. Eisenhower had been with Stalin in 1945 in Moscow, found him a
completely and utterly humorless man. In fact, there was a wonderful moment where, after
dinner, they went to watch videos in the Kremlin, and there was a picture of a whole newsreel of
General Georgi Jukov capturing Berlin, and Eisenhower thought he'd be lighthearted and leaned
over to Stalin and said, "If Jukov ever needs a job, I'm sure he could find one in Hollywood," to
which Stalin looked back at him and said, "Jukov will never need a job." So I think that
Eisenhower at least had some idea of the customer he was dealing with.
And there was some idea in the beginning that Stalin had sent signals that he might be willing
and interested to meet with Eisenhower after the inauguration. That event never took place,
because in a remarkably short period of time Stalin was dead. Eisenhower said later -- said it at
the time as well -- that the new leadership in Russia, no matter how strong its links to the Stalin
era, was not completely bound to the blind obedience and to the ways of a dead man. The future
was theirs to make.
In fact, again, by today's contemporary standards, it would be hard to imagine a foreign policy
crisis emerging quite so quickly in a presidency. The inauguration was on January 20 and literally
by the dawn of the 1st of March, Stalin was gravely ill, dying on the 5th. As you remember, during
the first Bush administration, administration took six solid months to review US policy towards the
Soviet Union. This was after Gorbachev had already come to power. But no, within literally two
months, one of the key figures on the international stage had died, and he was of course the
leader of a block that was of such serious concern to American policymakers.
One of the first decisions at this time was whether or not a statement should be made, marking,
or saying something appropriate to the Soviet people about the passing of their leader. Believe it
or not, there was a lot of resistance within the administration about making such a statement.
Eisenhower didn't agree, and went ahead and made his statement to the Soviet people. At the
heart of the issue was a number of people didn't see any reason to believe that things would
change. Eisenhower, on the other hand, saw no reason why things wouldn't change. And that
was a very key difference.
During that time, the Psychological Strategy Board that was established by the Truman
administration was asked to the psychological implications for the Soviet people of the passing of
the Soviet leader. And they filed a fascinating report. And, of course, these things are all
declassified, and they make fascinating reading. The Psychological Strategy Board at one point
said, quote, "A despotism can be ruled in the long run only by a despot, and history is strewn with
unsuccessful efforts to replace a tyrant with a committee. There is a real question whether
Malenkov or anyone else will be able to bring or maintain all the power factors under his iron
control, as Stalin did." In any case, there was much about this assessment that Eisenhower didn't
go along with. But they offered a fascinating set of analyses about the opportunity for change in
the Soviet Union.
Finally, I think the most telling of it was that there was deep concern within the administration
broadly, and I'm sure Eisenhower shared it, that the new regime was deeply worried and
distressed about the possibility that the whole Soviet bloc would become unhinged by the passing
of Stalin. And because of this tremendous vulnerability within the Soviet bloc, Eisenhower was
faced with a choice. He could take advantage of the vulnerability of the Soviet Union, and thus
probably garner great support from those who believed in preventive war or rollback, or he could
take a different non-confrontational approach. And Eisenhower chose, as we know from the
speech that was quoted in the video clip, to take a non-confrontational approach. He decided to
lay out his view of the world, to talk about how costly the arms race was, to remind the Soviet
public that they had a new choice they could make, and that the Soviet leadership could find
ways to really seize the opportunity, to seize the chance for peace, because that's what the
United States firmly supported.
Now, it's interesting. On March 17, the discussion about whether or not a speech should take
place was the primary topic in a very important meeting. I don't know why I can't help feeling sort
of strangely odd about March 17, since that will be the 50th anniversary of the day the UN
decides what's going to happen in Iraq. Nevertheless, on March 17, 1953, John Foster Dulles and
CD Jackson, who was heading the Psychological Strategy Board, talked about the idea of giving
the speech. And there's this wonderful moment when Eisenhower says that he wants to talk
about the arms race as being, in essence, a theft from those who are poor and those who are
hungry. And CD Jackson said that this was a ridiculous approach. By the way, Eisenhower really
encouraged his aides to speak very directly and forthrightly to him. CD Jackson said, "Their idiom
is entirely different than Americans'. Beedle Smith, Eisenhower's Chief of Staff during the war,
was against giving such a speech. John Foster Dulles was as well.
The bottom line is that Eisenhower overrode all of his major aides, I would say, and decided that
yes indeed, he was going to give a speech and it would be along the lines that it just outlined. In
fact, at one point, Eisenhower was so frustrated with his aides, and especially the State
Department, and it goes on and on, that he sat down and personally wrote huge sections of the
speech himself. Few people remember that he was a speechwriter for Douglas MacArthur, so he
knew how to do that sort of thing. He could do it without difficulty. But that speech was all
Eisenhower. And I should also say, very quickly, as sort of the beginning of the bookend, the
farewell address at the end of his Presidency reflected many of the same themes.
And so, what turned out to be this "Chance for Peace" speech, given on April 16, is really very
interesting, because it was the first speech of the Eisenhower presidency. Imagine the first
address you give to the American people being one on such an important topic, with, as I say,
really less than just a few months to formulate the policy. And so, in closing, he outlined five
major precepts of American values. And I'd like to read them to you today, because we are still
dealing with these issues. Whether or not the administration has adhered to the same five is
another question. You can judge for yourself. The point is that this presidency, these decisions,
these strategies, are in some ways as relevant today as they were then. Eisenhower was
planning for a long struggle. He was desperately worried that the United States would undergo
enormous economic strain in trying to meet the challenge. He was determined that, in the end,
our way of life, our democracy, our liberty, our economic solvency would be as much an
inspiration to those who countered us as any threat of force.
And so in giving this speech on April 16, he said, "The way chosen by the United States is plainly
marked by a few precepts which govern its conduct in world affairs." This is Eisenhower talking.
"First, no people on earth can be held as a people to be an enemy, for all humanity shares the
common hunger for peace, fellowship, and justice. Second, no nation's security and well-being
can be lastingly achieved in isolation, but only in effective cooperation with fellow nations. Third,
every nation's right to form a government and an economic system of its own choosing is
inalienable. Fourth, any nation's attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is
indefensible. Fifth, a nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race and
armaments, but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations." And
then, as I say, he concluded in his speech that the Soviet Union had a number of steps that it
could take to build the kind of confidence for the long haul.
So, in closing, I would say that Eisenhower confronted and managed many challenges. I
mentioned setting up a strategy for the long haul. Also, assigning what he called the "great
equation," which was balancing military strength with the potential for economic growth. He
believed deeply in the importance of the strong alliance and actually made concessions to keep
our allies with us at the most important and crucial times. He believed in the enormous
importance of winning the hearts and minds of those who opposed us. And in doing so he created
the information agency and fostered programs like People to People. He also believed in
economic aid and development to the noncommunist nations, and he believed, actually, in
loosening some of the restrictions on East-West trade, to provide opportunities for international
interdependence, including some interdependence with the communist world, because he
believed that would be ultimately stabilizing. And finally, in addition to a strong stand against
Colonialism, which he believed was the Achilles heel of the West's appeal to nonaligned nations,
he believed deeply in the importance of having a well organized government -- that is, a
systematic policy development process that made sure that our policy was well thought through
and not a kind of freelance exercise.
And so I do recommend that you go back and read some of this period, because it is hauntingly
relevant today. And I think we certainly, at that time, adopted a way forward that, in the end, bore
fruit some many years later.
RICHARD IMMERMAN: I'll just make, again, some very brief comments. And then, actually, while
Susan was thinking, I thought of a question that in fact in a way will, I think, allow us to synthesize
both of the talks. The first is, you know, just to stress the point that was said at the beginning that
Eisenhower decided to run for president largely after this meeting with Bob Taft. The subject
really was America's commitment to NATO. It was the issue of collective security. Eisenhower ran
for president, by and large, because he believed nothing was more important to America, to
American foreign policy, to American security, and to peace in the world, than the concept of
collective security. Again, in terms of what Susan mentioned about some of the eerie parallels
with the present time, I don't think the issue of collective security has been debated since
Eisenhower became president to the extent that it has over the last year or two. And I hope
perhaps during the brief discussion we can revisit that issue.
There's another parallel that I think in many ways is even more specific, which had to do with
Eisenhower's view of Joseph Stalin -- Stalin, who he did know as very few Americans did know
during that time. And Eisenhower debated those in his administration about Stalin as well,
including CD Jackson. I've often argued, as many know, that CD Jackson actually played a much
less influential role in that administration that many have argued, but he's wonderful for a
historian, because he was sort of the backboard that allowed Eisenhower to articulate his own
views. And again, I think you'll see the parallels.
Eisenhower clearly was no fan of Joseph Stalin. Whether he would use a term like evil to
describe him is less clear, because Eisenhower tended not to use terms like evil. But he was also
very explicit that he did not think Joseph Stalin was a fanatic, was the word that he used. He did
not believe that Joseph Stalin was ready to be a martyr, another term that he used. What he
believed is that Joseph Stalin was perhaps paranoid, was power-hungry. He was certainly an
opportunist. But he was generally rational, and that Eisenhower tried to design his policies, his
strategies, on the basis of that rationality. That allowed for deterrence. It allowed for containment,
but it also allowed him to keep a cap on spending so that you had sufficiency. Again, I think the
parallels today are again the national debate, are really quite striking, because without saying you
can just interchange personalities, certainly the question of whether another person is rational or
not, whether they're prepared to be a martyr, clearly resonates in today's discussion.
Which leads to the question. The "Chance for Peace" speech, one of the most famous speeches,
the ideas for which, by the way, Eisenhower got at least some of them from a writer/political
commentator by the name of Samuel Lubell, who wrote a letter to Bernard Baruk. Bernard Baruk
passed this letter on to Eisenhower. It suggested in a sense what we would now call the peace
dividend, which Eisenhower thought was a very good idea and circulated around the
administration. It was another way that Eisenhower, his leadership style.
But the debate over that speech is, first of all, Eisenhower did lay out his vision of the world, in a
sense. Basically, what he did is challenge the Soviets that in order to have normal relations, this
is what you have to do. It was a question of deeds versus words. One of the controversies -- and I
don't know whether this came up at the recent conference in Washington -- is whether
Eisenhower did this largely for public relations value -- in other words, to score points -- or he
sincerely believed that in fact this was the first step for the chance for peace. And what has made
this more controversial is, the day after Eisenhower gives this speech, John Foster Dulles gives
another, in which in many ways, it was much more aggressive, much more hostile, antagonistic, if
you will, towards the Soviet Union.
So I guess my question is, in a sense, primarily to Susan Eisenhower, which is, whether there
was a missed opportunity in '53, whether or not there could have been stronger follow-through.
But then also in a way it goes to Fred, because of this dog-and-pony show, so to speak, that
Eisenhower and Dulles orchestrated. I've actually worked on this speech for about 15 years,
trying to put the two of them together. I think I've actually figured it out, but I'm not going to tell
you what the answer is. But in this case, whether here the whole idea of lightning rod or whatever
may have turned out to be counterproductive, because at a minimum, it sent mixed signals, or
confusing signals, to Moscow.
SUSAN EISENHOWER: Well, I think, first of all, in terms of what Eisenhower really believed, I
think it came across rather loud and clear during that March 15 meeting. Because when CD
Jackson said something about, "This isn't in the Soviet idiom," Eisenhower snapped back and
said, "Don't tell me what's in the Soviet idiom. I've worked with these people, and I know them
and you don't," type of thing.
In terms of scoring points, I don't think -- I mean, I don't know. Maybe there's a part of
Eisenhower's personality that I am unfamiliar with. But I don't think it would have at all been
inconsistent to let 1,000 flowers bloom, in the sense that there was a very vociferous group of
people who wanted to take preemptive war. And if Foster Dulles got up and said something that
would placate some of those critics, so be it. But ultimately I think Eisenhower had confidence
that the Soviets knew, from their dealings with him during World War II, that he ran the show.
When we started talking about the Soviet Union, I feel like I'm on stronger ground here, because
I've made maybe close to 50-some-odd trips to that part of the world. And I think that it would be
fair to say, at least from everything I've heard over there, that they didn't know what was going to
happen themselves. It would have been quite premature, I believe, to have advanced anything
too ambitious during these beginning years, because as the Psychological Strategy Board
pointed out, running a Soviet Union by committee was not likely to be a very stable affair. And so
whether they could have been reliable negotiating partners at that stage I think is highly
questionable. I believe that was also part of the calculation, as Eisenhower wrote to Churchill
some months later saying, “There's nothing to follow up here. It's still not clear who's running the
show."
FRED GREENSTEIN: I think perhaps that we're dealing now with very specialized aspects of the
Eisenhower presidency. And there's no reason to believe that these are issues that those of you
who went all the way to this part of the city of Boston have on your mind. You've had a lot of
stimuli, and there's only about 15 or 20 minutes left to this forum, so I think we should open it up
to give-and-take. I would recommend a book that Professor Immerman co-authored with
someone who was the director of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' planning staff, Robert BO-W-I-E, pronounced "Boo-ee." Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, which has the subtitle
which I'll roughly render, How Eisenhower Laid Down a Sustaining Cold War Strategy, or
something like that.
RICHARD IMMERMAN: Want some help?
FRED GREENSTEIN: Well, I think it's somewhere in that realm. But if you're really deeply
interested in the foreign national security of the Eisenhower presidency, reading this very nicely
put together book will do you more than listening to the next 15 minutes.
RICHARD IMMERMAN: Why don't we use these last 15 minutes for questions and general
discussion? I'd ask, just for the sake of allowing everyone an opportunity, to try to keep your
questions and comments as succinct as possible, probably more succinct than we could do. Yes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I remember that Eisenhower, I think, took a trip at the end of his
presidency to India, and I believe Latin America. I'm not sure.
RICHARD IMMERMAN: They were different trips. And then to Japan. That one was canceled. He
went to Latin America twice.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you think by that time he saw himself in a more Messianic role? What
was the connection of those trips to his foreign policy in the early part of his administration?
FRED GREENSTEIN: I think it was an attempt to … I don't think he saw himself as a Messiah. I
think he had a modest view of his own place in history, perhaps even more modest than was
warranted. This was a man who at that point was the oldest person ever to have served in the
White House. He put enormous physical energy into traveling around the world. Many of these
trips occurred after a grave disappointment, which was that at a point where he expected to meet
with Khrushchev and perhaps reach some major and fundamental agreement, one of our U2
planes had been shot down. This is the May 1 shooting down in 1960.
Now, some of this, I think, was nevertheless to make a very strong statement about America's
commitment to peace. And those were very well received trips, and I think they did something
which the United States could use a lot of right now, namely presenting a very positive view of the
country's leader and of the country itself.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good afternoon. I'm an international student and happen to be visiting the
city, but I study at SEIS in Washington. And there is a class I'm taking this semester, "US Foreign
Policy since World War II," so as I was visiting, I was very attracted to this important meeting.
This is my question, which is an open question. Would you consider the Eisenhower foreign
policy as a policy oriented more towards the earlier Roosevelt view, a Wilsonian view, or perhaps
maybe something else, something new, moving into the new Truman Doctrine of, of course, the
Second World War ending the Soviet Expansion? And being the Eisenhower policy is something
not exactly as the early isolationism, not exactly as the Wilsonian reach-out, but as something
more in US national security interests, somehow developing further the Truman Doctrine? Thank
you.
RICHARD IMMERMAN: First of all, I think that Truman would certainly not consider his policy in
any way incongruous with Wilsonianism. To try to answer as briefly as possible, I think the first
thing, in terms of understanding Eisenhower's policy, was that it was committed to
internationalism, meaning international activism. The danger, he felt, was the United States would
withdraw behind something that was referred to as "fortress America," that America needed to be
engaged internationally, that its security, its prosperity depended upon that international
engagement.
Secondly, the other big debate is whether or no -- and this goes back to something that Susan
said -- the United States would seek to continue containment, à la Truman, or be more
aggressive, and pursue a policy that is generally referred to as rollback. I think in 1953
Eisenhower made it very clear to his administration that it was not going to pursue rollback,
because of the consequences of rattling the tiger's cage so much, as he put it. So to answer your
question, that it was internationalist in the Wilsonian terms, and it came down very strongly on the
side of containment versus rollback.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Michael Giovanovich and I am a Serbian. I am not on the
welcoming committee, but I take the liberty to welcome the granddaughter of President
Eisenhower and the other two speakers. I am sentimental to Eisenhower, because General
Dwight Eisenhower was president of Columbia University when I was a student there. He was
one of the few speakers that, because of him, I liked the rest of America. He delivered several
speeches at Columbia, but I remember one sentence, which I will remember as long as I live. He
said that American military might is stronger than the rest of the world combined.
You mentioned something about your good -- Thank you for the remark. You mentioned
something about your knowledge about Russia, about NATO. I see some thoughts that are
reflected from NATO and from Russia about the present situation in America, namely, the war
between Russia and America probably prevented, because Russia also obtained atomic
weapons. Nowadays, North Korea has atomic weapons. It was found out from inspectors that
Saddam Hussein does not have it. The question is, if he had not listened to inspectors and United
Nations and made atomic weapons, would it have a danger for him to be attacked by the
strongest power on earth? That is my question.
SUSAN EISENHOWER: I'm not sure I exactly understood the question, but I think what I was
trying to do in my presentation was to lay out the fact that there are some very large, broad
foreign policy concepts that are and should be part of the national debate. Certainly, all of us who
have been working on the nuclear danger fully recognize the tremendous challenge that's posed
by newly nuclear countries like North Korea. And I think I should just leave it at that. But again, of
course, I'm a great student and enthusiast of history, and I always think that there are some very
instructive things that can be learned. Korea again is an issue today, and that's also very much
part of the Eisenhower years.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: On NATO …
RICHARD IMMERMAN: I don't mean to cut you off, but I want to make sure that we give
everyone an opportunity. Thanks. Yes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: If you wouldn't mind a domestic issue question, I wonder if Professor
Greenstein would comment on President Eisenhower's attitude to what became the Civil Rights
Act of 1957 and particularly his relationship with Attorney General Brownell during that period.
FRED GREENSTEIN: Some of that is nicely laid out, actually, in Brownell's memoirs, I Worked
For Ike. I would say that Eisenhower was less drawn to the notion of attempting to rectify racial
evils and inequities by law than Brownell was. On the other hand, he greatly respected Brownell.
In contrast to other people in his administration who Eisenhower kept a tight rein on, particularly
his Defense Secretaries who were essentially administrators, he gave Brownell very great
running room. So on a whole series of civil rights things, the Eisenhower administration was
probably more forward as a result of the way Eisenhower worked with Brownell and his respect
for Brownell, than it would have been otherwise.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a quick question. At the end of that video that you showed,
Eisenhower was very disappointed in his eight years as president. He felt he had failed as a
president, and that's a point that's made beautifully in the film. One of the roles of a president is
political leadership, which Eisenhower may or may not have done well. But if that was important
to him, to his legacy, to see a peaceful world, then my question essentially is this: Why didn't he
try harder to see that his vice president was elected in hopes that his policies and legacy would
be carried through into another administration?
RICHARD IMMERMAN: You must have been sitting at lunch with us.
FRED GREENSTEIN: We were actually discussing that at lunch. After Mr. Nixon's defeat in 1960,
without which there would be no Kennedy Library -- therefore, you wouldn't be here -- Nixon
wrote a very curious and quirky book called Six Crises, many of which related to his rather tense
and insecure relationship during the eight years during which he was Eisenhower’s Vice
President. And he actually said that Susan's grandmother had asked him not to invite Eisenhower
to campaign. Now, these people are dead. I think there are all sorts of different interpretations.
Late in the process, Eisenhower was invited to campaign. He was over 70, had had a heart
attack. He did campaign, and campaigned very vigorously, just as he traveled around the world
very vigorously during that last year in his presidency. Whether that would have turned it around
in that very close election is a good question.
I once looked at a document which Eisenhower had hand edited in order to get rid of some of his
irritation. And he said, "Why didn't that guy ask me to campaign if he wanted me to campaign?"
So it's lost in the murk of history, but it's a very interesting issue. He certainly wanted Nixon to
win. In his early meetings with Kennedy, he also thought that Kennedy was more up to speed
than he had realized in advance, that he was a smart and able person.
SUSAN EISENHOWER: I just wanted to respond to -- Actually, I learned a long time ago not to
watch programs about family members, because usually there's something that is somewhat
annoying, and then I think about it and wonder if I should respond. But I will to this one point. I
don't believe that Eisenhower felt his eight years were a failure. And I think in terms of storyteller,
and I've certainly written my share of books, that it's always very tempting to bring things to a
rather dramatic closure, etc., and somebody is either victorious or feels a sense of loss and
disappointment. I don't think Eisenhower felt that way at all.
First of all, it was very clear that after the U2 incident and the Paris summit that Khrushchev,
quote/unquote, "wrecked"-- those were his own words – that, in fact, the Soviet Union lost as
much from that wrecked summit as the United States did, and that I think Eisenhower left office
with the full confidence that he had not only managed to avoid nuclear war, which was a very real
concern, especially with the opportunity for miscalculation during those dangerous years, and had
managed to actually produce a strategy that made it possible for this country to prosper
economically. This was no small feat. And I think Eisenhower had a big enough picture to be able
to leave office after eight years with a sense of satisfaction.
RICHARD IMMERMAN: I'm going to ask, actually, all three of you to ask a question. You will
watch how rapidly we're able to process these questions. And then we'll respond in whatever
strategy we quickly devise.
FRED GREENSTEIN: We can give you our e-mail.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'd just like to know if you could comment a little bit about President
Eisenhower's relationship with Mr. Nixon, and why he was going to remove him from the ticket in
1956.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was interested, particularly following your point about the concern about
colonialism was a response to the nonaligned movement, particularly with John Foster Dulles,
and I believe also the CIA, clearly being very concerned about this sort of third force emerging, or
seem to be moving definitely to polarize, you're with us or you're against us. That had, obviously,
lots of implications.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I would just like to hear some of your thoughts about President
Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex.
FRED GREENSTEIN: Why don't we each take one of those, very rapidly? I'm [email protected],
if you have anything you want to …
RICHARD IMMERMAN: Why don't you do the first one?
FRED GREENSTEIN: Sure. Eisenhower was open to seeing Nixon removed from the ticket, but
he didn't have a firm commitment to that in '56. I think one of the things that was clear to
Eisenhower and the people around him was that Nixon was not a personally popular figure with
the American people. I think Eisenhower respected Nixon as a political technician, as a smart
person. He was someone who encouraged Nixon to devote much of the vice presidency to world
travels. And this was part of what put Nixon on the map as the sort of preemptive figure for
getting the 1960 nomination, particularly his so-called kitchen debate in Moscow with
Khrushchev.
But Eisenhower was a person of great balance and flexibility, who did not go out of his way to
harbor grudges or to try to push people off the map. He wanted Nixon to win once Nixon had the
nomination in '60. He would have been prepared to see someone else come up. I think he
accurately sensed that Nixon was someone who had a dark and difficult side to his personality,
which made him less than ideal as president. And Nixon's presidency vindicated that by never
finishing up.
RICHARD IMMERMAN: I'll do the question about the nonaligned movement and anti-colonialism.
I guess I should begin by saying that I sincerely believe, really unequivocally believe that
Eisenhower, and Dulles for that matter, did generally support the notion of development, of anticolonialism. I think there's a tremendous amount of evidence to support that.
On the other hand, they were both very concerned that individuals living in less developed areas
were vulnerable to subversion, were vulnerable to what they would consider sort of
misinformation, purposeful misinformation, primarily form the communist bloc. This caused a
tension, I think, throughout the administration. When it was feared -- and I think that basically
thought that it was prudent to fear that an area, particularly one that was vital, was in danger of
falling to communism in one way or another -- if that danger could be mitigated at a low cost,
such as by using the CIA or a covert operation, clearly the administration was willing to do that.
And throughout the 1950s, there are a number of instances in which a covert operation occurred,
some successful, some not so successful. Some we really still don't know much about.
But the other thing I would just say at the end -- and I think this was somewhat typical -- is that
Dulles tended to be more impatient than Eisenhower. Eisenhower was willing, to some extent, to
allow history to take its course, and was confident, I think, that ultimately the values that the
United States stood for would prevail. Dulles tended to be more pessimistic generally. And I think
that is another dynamic that pervades the administration, and again, why Dulles would say
something like "neutrality is immoral," where you would never hear Eisenhower say that.
SUSAN EISENHOWER: On the question of the military-industrial complex, I think this is not a
surprising speech in many ways, because I think there are some hints for it even in "The Chance
for Peace." But he tried, in his eight years, to develop strategy, even a military strategy, that
would be set up so that there would be a regular funding base for the military, that it would be set
up for the long haul, instead of subject to immediate and kind of panic surprises. I think the
speech that also, by the way, mentioned the scientific-technological elite and a number of other
issues in addition to the military-industrial complex, may have been born out of the missile gap
debate that occurred in the 1960 election. And I think he was very disturbed by that part of the
election. Everybody knew, after the election was over, that there was not a missile gap. But this, I
believe, had its roots there.
And I think also many people don't realize it, but back when he was working for Douglas
MacArthur between the two world wars, he actually worked on defense industrialization policy. So
he knew a tremendous amount about how industry and government interact. So the notion that
this might have been invented by his speech writers I can only take to be a compliment, since
some quality things tend to have many fathers. But I believe, to give you a final succinct answer
on this, I think the missile gap played a very big role.
EN D