"Let no one say that we shun the conference table."
                  "Atoms for Peace" Speech, December 8, 1953

Dwight David Eisenhower’s eight-year presidency (1953-1961) left a legacy as powerful and lasting as his military career. The two Eisenhower administrations remain memorable first because they helped to bring America both peace and prosperity, and second because the process by which the President achieved his goals provides our generation and those in the future with an outstanding example of sound, effective leadership. After World War II General of the Army Eisenhower, the world-renowned conqueror of the Nazi military machine, looked forward to a peaceful retirement. His goal was to finish his working career at a small college in a quiet town, where he could mold young minds and preach the American values that had shaped his country’s history. It was not to be. Friends prevailed upon him to take up the presidency at Columbia University in the great metropolis of New York. This would, they said, provide him with a more visible platform from which to spread his message. Next, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal persuaded him to come back to Washington to advise him on national security matters and to serve as unofficial chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Late in 1950, as the Cold War threatened to explode into a nuclear holocaust, President Harry S. Truman again appealed to his sense of duty and selected him to be the first Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, for the new NATO military organization in Western Europe. Finally, in 1952, he responded to yet another call to duty. Political leaders and public officials called upon Eisenhower to run for the presidency. They admired the modest, selfless, and soft-spoken war hero, and they trusted Ike to lead them safely through dangers at home and abroad. The General complied with their wishes. He had devoted his entire life to public service in fulfillment of obligations to his country and to humanity, and he quickly began to prepare himself for leadership in a new realm. Learning by doing, he overcame some early mistakes and his electoral triumph in November 1952 was decisive.

The gravest and most immediate problems faced by the new President involved America’s great global struggle against communism. The Cold War had flared into a bloody, stalemated conflict on the Korean peninsula, and Eisenhower was determined to bring it to a close. After a factfinding trip to Korea to assess the situation for himself, he concluded that further exertions by the U.S.-led United Nations forces were unwise. He decided to force negotiations toward an honorable peace, one that would leave the southern half of Korea in freedom and would also allow captive North Korean soldiers the right to decide for themselves whether to return to their totalitarian state. Eisenhower’s firmness and his suggestion that nuclear weapons might be used in the conflict were enough to persuade the communists to accept an armistice and bring the war to an end.

Once this great drain on America’s resources had ended, Eisenhower could pursue his goal of trying to rationalize the nation’s defenses. He had always decried the cyclical feast-or-famine approach toward the military, one in which drastic cutbacks (such as those that had occurred after both the world wars) had alternated with reckless spending sprees. The best approach was to structure the defense establishment for the long pull by carefully planning for the force levels that the American economy could sustain for the extended period that the Cold War was likely to last. Working with Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and taking pains to educate the public about the necessity for avoiding unnecessary costs, he was able to restrain the momentum toward redundant armaments. The political pressures to overspend on defense rose dramatically after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik earth satellite in the fall of 1957 — leading to fears that the Soviets were ahead of the United States in their ability to launch long-range atomic strikes. In this difficult situation, the President demonstrated once again the kind of effective leadership that had long distinguished his career. He was able to calm the public and the media and to provide for eventual victory, in both space and armaments, at a reasonable cost. In 1958 he established the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration — NASA — whose accomplishments have continued to testify to his vision. He ended his tenure in office with a warning to future generations to avoid the excesses of the “military-industrial complex.”

Eisenhower’s approach, which emphasized calmness and rationality during times of crisis, also characterized his handling of the greatest problem of foreign policy — dealing with the Soviets and the Communist Chinese. The most serious crises occurred in 1954-55 and in 1958, when the People’s Republic of China adopted a belligerent stance toward two small islands, Quemoy and Matsu, occupied by America’s Chinese Nationalist allies. Many political leaders in the United States called for an all-out pre-emptive strike against the Chinese mainland. Others felt that the islands were not worth the risk of a global thermonuclear war. Eisenhower decided that the islands had real, if symbolic, value, and that their retention helped maintain Nationalist morale and demonstrated American firmness. While avoiding provocative actions, he steadily pursued a course that kept the Communists out of the islands and resulted in the defusing of a tense situation. In similar fashion, Eisenhower resisted the temptation to engage in adventuristic intervention in the Soviet sphere during the 1956 Hungarian crisis, thus avoiding a conflict that might well have resulted in a nuclear conflagration. His patient strategy, based on the conviction that containment of the Soviet empire would ultimately bring about its downfall, ultimately proved wise and successful.

In all of his dealings with the Soviet Union Eisenhower steered a similar course between war and conciliation. He answered every propagandistic charge calmly but firmly, and he continued to press for disarmament and a reduction of tensions without sacrificing American security or America’s friends. He insisted upon demonstrations of his opponents’ good faith before he would sit down with their leaders at summit conferences: in 1955 he met with the Soviets at Geneva only after they pulled their army out of Austria, and in 1959-60 he refused to hold talks with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev until he abandoned his menacing ultimatum against the Western nations in Berlin. When Khrushchev threatened to cancel the Paris Summit talks unless the American President issued a humiliating apology for having sent a U-2 reconnaissance plane into Russian air space (May 1960), Eisenhower refused to knuckle under. Such activities, he explained, were the necessary if distasteful measures that kept the free world safe.

The United States, then as now, was the leader of the free nations, and Eisenhower’s stature was a major factor in maintaining that leadership position. In so doing he had to face a number of problems that could be resolved only with a precise mix of tact and firmness. America’s main allies, Great Britain and France, desired to retain many parts of their vast colonial empires. The indigenous colonial people, however, wanted freedom from foreign rule. Eisenhower sympathized with these legitimate aspirations, and he helped ease the transition to an overwhelmingly noncommunist post-colonial world while maintaining the loyalty and support in international affairs of America’s traditional friends. The most serious crisis occurred late in 1956, when the British, French, and Israelis invaded Egypt in an attempt to reclaim the nationalized Suez Canal from the government of Gamal Abdul Nasser. Eisenhower insisted on a peaceful settlement. Working through the United Nations, he was able to compel the invading forces to withdraw. In 1958, when instability threatened to convulse the Middle East, the President swiftly sent American peacekeeping forces into Lebanon. His decisive actions permitted peaceful resolution of a local problem that might have spilled over into surrounding areas and endangered the delicate balance of forces in that important region.

Eisenhower’s approach to foreign policy entailed support for the United Nations and NATO, reduction of tariffs and promotion of freer trade. He aggressively promoted increased commercial, social and cultural contacts by individual citizens around the world. His leadership revitalized the national two-party system by turning the Republican mainstream away from the isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s. In its place he achieved a national consensus for an internationalist approach to America’s role in the world.

In domestic affairs, Eisenhower pursued what he called the Middle Way. A centrist path, he thought, was the best and safest way toward lasting progress. The wisdom of this approach was apparent in the field of internal security, where Senator Joseph McCarthy had for some time been endangering civil liberties in his quest to root out Communist subversion. Eisenhower refused to engage in character assassinations, book burnings, or witch hunts. Instead, he worked within the law to protect the nation from disloyalty and espionage. One knowledgeable observer characterized his method as “vigilance without fanaticism.”

Some of the thorniest issues facing the United States in the 1950s had to do with civil rights. The Eisenhower Administration completed Harry Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces. Attorney General Herbert Brownell also filed an amicus curae (friend of the court) brief in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, the landmark case that dissolved legally mandated segregation in seventeen southern states, giving impetus to a civil rights revolution whose true leaders were Rosa Parks and a young Montgomery, Alabama minister, Martin Luther King, Jr. When Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus challenged the supremacy of the federal judiciary, Eisenhower responded by sending troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to class at Central High, where the ancient doctrine of “separate, but equal” no longer prevailed.

Through the Civil Rights Act of 1957, President Eisenhower attempted to push for further change by securing the right to vote. He knew this was one of the important steps that needed to be taken to redress racial discrimination. He believed that democracy could be enhanced and secured by such incremental steps through adherence to well-established democratic and legal procedures. Eisenhower was not, however, naïve about the hard leadership choices that were necessary to move the process along. Reluctant to force the South in the sensitive field of school desegregation, he nonetheless took decisive military action to enforce the law when an obstructionist governor and racist mobs defied federal court orders in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.

Eisenhower’s moderate approach was nowhere more apparent than in his efforts to put the nation’s finances, and the national economy, on a sound footing. He put the federal budget into structural balance by reducing expenditures and staving off demands for unwise tax cuts. The economy flourished, and the gross national product jumped from $365 billion to $520 billion. In three fiscal years actual budget surpluses were recorded, and the rate of inflation dropped dramatically. These actions allowed America to experience a sustained period of solid economic growth, which was further spurred by his ambitious program of building interstate highways (now called the

Eisenhower System of Interstate Highways). This massive public-works program was at Eisenhower’s insistence financed on a pay-as-you-go basis through user taxes on gasoline. All these accomplishments were the result of Eisenhower’s leadership skills, which featured, as General Andrew J. Goodpaster has said, “strength and civility.” Striving to achieve cooperation while avoiding unnecessary friction or resentment, he was able to gain the respect of the world’s peoples and leaders. He refused to question the motives of those who opposed him and declined to engage in personality disputes. Indeed, Eisenhower made it a point never to mention a name publicly unless it was in a favorable context. Within his Administration, he guided a strong executive team toward agreed-upon goals. Eisenhower welcomed dissenting opinions, insisting only that once a decision had been made that all subordinates should support it loyally. The best statement of his methods and goals was given at the outset of his presidency in a letter to William Phillips, a former colleague from World War II:

In my view, a fair, decent, and reasonable dealing with men, a reasonable recognition that views may diverge, a constant seeking for a high and strong ground on which to work together, is the best way to lead our country in the difficult times ahead of us. A living democracy needs diversity to keep it strong. For survival, it also needs to have the diversities brought together in a common purpose, so fair, so reasonable, and so appealing that all can rally to it.

At the close of his final term Eisenhower could look back with satisfaction at his years in office and even with characteristic modesty credit himself with having played a large role in America’s achievements. So, now, can we. Eisenhower’s presidency was a triumph of character.