*Harry Truman may have been a great president, but not many people realised it at the time.  His stand for civil rights had split his own party and his firing of Douglas MacArthur had alienated much of the American public.  As his second term drew to a close, Korea was still at war with itself.  Although he would be vindicated by history, at the moment he was seen as a failure.  It was obvious he would not run for re-election, even though the XXII Amendment did not block him from doing so.

*The Republicans had not won the presidency since Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928.  However, they felt their time was ripe.  General MacArthur actively sought the nomination (in fact, he’d sought it since 1936), but his difficult personality and advanced age worked against him.  The Party establishment seemed likely to pick Robert Taft (of Taft-Hartley Act fame).  However, some Party leaders suggested that, instead, they approach the greatest living military hero who wasn’t MacArthur, General of the Army, Dwight David Eisenhower.

*As a good general, Eisenhower had never even admitted to having a party preference.  He had, however, personally dealt very well with foreign generals and leaders, including Churchill and Stalin, so he had experience and had been trusted by FDR and was popular with Americans.  He claimed he did not want to run for the presidency, but was eventually convinced to allow his name to be written in.  He chose to be a Republican after years of being apolitical, reportedly because he felt that after 20 years with one party, the country needed a change no matter what.

*Eisenhower got a tremendous write-in ballot in the Republican primaries, beating Robert Taft and getting the nomination.  Ike cultivated an image as a non-politician, never even mentioning his opponent by name if he could help it.  He stayed aloof, genial, and unsullied by the partisan fighting of politics.

*That is what the Vice-President was for.

*The GOP nominated as Ike’s VP Richard Nixon, now a Senator from California despite being only 39 years old.  Nixon would do all the dirty work of the campaign, relentlessly attacking the Democratic Party as being soft on communism, incompetent in Korea, and generally corrupt.  In truth, Nixon himself knew a great deal about corruption, having probably made use of illegal slush funds (i.e. funds raised for undefined purposes, often through shady means) while a Senator.  He apologised on national television, claiming the only thing he had accepted illegally was a little dog named Checkers.  The sentimentality of the speech endeared Nixon to many Americans, and the age of manipulating people through television had begun in earnest.

*Even Eisenhower appeared in television ads.  His ads used clever editing to link questions submitted by average people apparently link up with answers given by Eisenhower, although, in truth, he recorded most of his answers in advance, and then questions were found to fit them.  Ike thought it was beneath his dignity, and so did some commentators, but it was too late to stop the trend.

*The Democratic candidate was Adlai Stevenson, Governor of Illinois and grandson of Adlai Stevenson, Vice-President for Grover Cleveland (during his second term).  Supposedly he was a great speaker, but he was, or at least came off as, very intellectual, which also turned off some potential voters—Nixon attacked him as an ‘egghead,’ referring both to his supposed intellectualism and to his baldness (it probably ran in his family; his grandfather was bald, too).

*Despite being widely respected, Stevenson was no war hero, and perhaps people were tired of a Democrat in the white house.  He lost by over 6 million votes—33,936,234 to 27,314,992, or 442 electoral votes to 89.  All Stevenson’s votes came from the South (not even his native Illinois gave him its electoral votes), but Eisenhower got a lot of the South, too—Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, and Tennessee.  The Solid South would never be solid again, or at least not solidly Democratic.

*Ike Would defeat him again, by an even larger margin, in 1956 despite a recent heart attack.

*One of Eisenhower’s campaign promises was to go to Korea and personally end the war, or at least that is what was implied.  Upon his election, even before his inauguration, the President-elect flew to Korea for a three-day tour.  Nothing much changed, however.  The armistice would be signed and the DMZ created only after Ike threatened to use atomic bombs and Stalin died.

*The bad news:  54,246 Americans dead, and millions more killed among the Chinese and Koreans.  The good news:  Communism was contained and the war did not spread beyond Korea—it did not become WWIII.  Perhaps a limited war was possible.

*In any event, Eisenhower helped create the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.  SEATO was an alliance organized on September 8, 1954 by representatives of Australia, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States.  It was much like NATO, although it would be less significant and ultimately fail.

*In most domestic matters, Eisenhower attempted to stay above the fray.  He spent a lot of time golfing, and tried to let things take care of themselves.  He knew he was popular, and he did not want to mess with that by actually doing anything publicly.

*Officially, Ike’s domestic policy was one of ‘dynamic conservatism,’ promising ‘in all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human... [but with] people’s money, or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative.’  This suited a worn-out American public just fine—it was the bland leading the bland.

*Under Eisenhower, America’s nuclear arsenal would grow larger every year as we became dependent on the power of our atomic weapons.  However, military spending on the whole would decrease (although only to 10% of the GNP, still a huge amount), as less money was spent on troops and other equipment.  Navy and army spending went down, nuclear and air force budgets went up.    As long as all you want is a lot of destruction, atomic bombs provide more bang for the buck.  Anyway, the idea was one of Mutual Assured Destruction—no-one would go to war because both sides were guaranteed to be annihilated.

*Ike tried to give off-shore oil drilling rights to the states, wanted to sell off TVA and did encourage other companies to compete with it, and when Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine (one of the first successful vaccines against any virus), Eisenhower’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare complained that giving it out for free was socialism.  To-day, of course, polio is completely wiped out in all of the Americas except Haiti, where it has recently re-surfaced.

*To reduce competition from low-paid illegal immigrants (although not to hurt legal immigrants—in fact, he wanted to help them), Ike authorised Operation Wetback, which rounded up over a million illegal Mexican immigrants in 1954 and deported them to Mexico.

*Eisenhower sought to assimilate American Indians into the rest of America, hoping to re-create the Dawes Act and replace the Indian New Deal.  A few tribes did agree to be ‘terminated’ for a fee, that is, they ceased to exist as separate nations.  Most, however, stood their ground until Kennedy reversed the government policy again in 1961.

*For all his mistrust of the New Deal, Ike accepted many of its programmes, and even beat it in a few areas.  Impressed by the German Autobahn and remembering a time as a young soldier in 1919 when he once took 62 days to drive a military convoy across the United States, Ike would support the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, which began the construction of the Interstate Highway system (which could also double as emergency airstrips in times of war).  Construction of the Interstates helped out the construction business and any town through which an Interstate passed.  On the other hand, those left out suffered as had towns bypassed by rail or canals in the last century.  Air pollution rose, people abandoned city downtowns for suburbs and malls on the edge of town, and railroads, especially passenger trains, lost business.

*In 1959, Eisenhower oversaw the admission of two new states to the Union, Alaska and Hawaii, for a total of 50.

*Eisenhower spent a lot of money, but his critics said it wasn’t enough, and blamed him for several small (and, in 1957-58, large) economic downturns.  Concerns about the economy put a Democratic Congress in power in 1954 and led the AF of L and CIO to merge in 1955.

*The AFL-CIO was plagued by corruption, especially among the Teamsters.  Their leader, Dave Beck, invoked the V Amendment 209 times before a Senate investigation in 1957.  He was replaced by Jimmy Hoffa.  The Teamsters were so corrupt and their leaders stole so much money that the AFL-CIO kicked them out.

*In 1959, the Landrum-Griffith Act would make union leaders liable to certain types of fraud and bullying tactics, such as boycotts and secondary picketing.

*The major blemish on domestic politics during the 1950s was the work of Joe McCarthy.  He began his attacks on communists in government in 1950, during Truman’s administration, and was a useful tool during the 1952 election, although Ike always tried to avoid dealing with him, or even admitting he existed (although he privately hated him).  Coasting on the rising tide of popularity, McCarthy attacked bigger and bigger targets, including George Marshall in 1951 (who, despite being his superior officer for many years, Ike did not try to defend).

*Many modern writers and commentators hate McCarthy because he and especially other red attacked so many prominent members of the left and prominent actors and other celebrities.  If you were, or ever had been, a member of the communist party, it was unlikely you could work again.  Unfortunately, many people had once had some kind of tie to communist groups at some point in the past, due to their popularity in the 1920s and 1930s.  Since so many journalists and other media types were harassed, they created a particularly unflattering portrait of McCarthy, most famously through the allegory of The Crucible by Arthur Miller.  That said, McCarthyism unquestionably went out of control and was evidence of a serious insecurity in American life.

*During Eisenhower’s administration, Tailgunner Joe finally bit off more than he could chew:  the US Army.  Having accused the state department, the Senate, Hollywood, and even the president of the Red Cross of communism, McCarthy went after the Army.  In televised hearings in 1954, McCarthy presented a poor figure to the watching world, and he lost a great deal of his credibility.  He would die of alcohol poisoning in 1957, but suspicion of communism and attacks on supposed communists would continue in more muted form for years to come.

*Like Truman, Eisenhower’s overarching foreign policy as expressed through Secretary of State John Foster Dulles would be one of containment, but also a policy of boldness.

*Eisenhower would threaten to drop a-bombs on Red China in 1955 when they shelled some minor ROC islands off the coast of Taiwan.

*Although they were not communists, Eisenhower would also intervene against Britain and France during the Suez Crisis of 1956.  In that year the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal, and British, French, and Israeli troops invaded to take it back.  Ike cut off all help, including vital petroleum, to the attackers, and threatened to sell off all US reserves of the Pound sterling, thus destroying the value of the British currency undermining and ultimately ruining their effort despite the fact that they had been very successful militarily.  Our former Allies felt betrayed and wounded.  In many ways, this was the symbolic end of the British Empire, the proof that they could no longer go it alone, unless they had the US’s tacit approval.

*The French Empire was also on the decline, but in at least some places, the United States was picking up the slack.  In Indo-China, the French had been waging a long, slow war against Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh.  Ho was a communist backed, US trained guerrilla who had fought against Vichy France and had sought Wilson’s help in making Viet-Nam independent at Versailles.  He thought of George Washington as his hero, the Declaration Independence as his favourite text, and he would kill anyone who got in his way, and their family, too.

*Because Ho was backed by the Soviets, the US helped the French to fight him.  Eisenhower promised that all we would do was send money—to the tune of $1 billion a year, or 80% of the entire French war costs, by 1954—but eventually that wasn’t good enough.

*In 1954, the French were finally trapped at their last major fortress, Dien Bien Phu.  This forced them to the negotiating table, and in the Geneva Accords of 1954, Viet-Nam was divided roughly in half at the 17th parallel, north latitude.  Ho would control the North, a pro-western government under Ngo Dinh Diem would control the South, and the two would be re-united after a popular election could be held two years later to see who should rule both halves.  The national elections were never held, because it was feared the communists would win.  The US would be stuck backing Ngo and his corrupt, nepotism-ridden government until his assassination in 1963, and would remain involved in Viet-Nam for a decade after that.

*When Stalin died in 1953, he was replaced by Nikita Khrushchev, who, it was hoped, would be more friendly towards the west.  Initially, this seemed to be the case, but it did not last long.

*In 1955, Eisenhower proposed ‘open skies,’ allowing planes to fly through any airspace, allowing them to see that countries really were as peaceful as they said they were.  Khrushchev, who never meant to be peaceful, opposed the idea as a cover story for spies.

*In 1955, West Germany was allowed to re-arm and invited into NATO and the Soviets agreed to end their occupation of Austria.

*In 1956, the people of Hungary, always the most resentful nation in the Eastern Bloc, attempted to revolt against their Soviet oppressors.  The Red Army marched on Budapest and butchered the insurgents.  The freedom fighters had counted on US aid, and when it did not appear, they called the US liars, backing out when the going got tough.  In truth, though, Ike had little choice—the US nuclear arsenal was too big to use against the Red Army if Hungary was to remain intact, but the army and air forces were too small to use as they stood at the time.  Mutual Assured Destruction did not look so good close up.

*When the West protested, Khrushchev dismissed them:  ‘whether you like it or not, history is on our side.  We will bury you.’

*In 1957 Dulles issued the Eisenhower Doctrine, pledging armed support to any Middle-Eastern nation that was threatened by Communism.  The US had already installed a pro-US Shah in Iran, and even before the Suez Crisis were worried about President Nasser of Egypt, who seemed more than happy to work with the Soviets in exchange for Soviet money.

*By 1960, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela formed OPEC—the US no longer was the dominant oil producer in the world.

*Only 8 years after the shocks of 1949, America was terrified again by the 1957 launch of Sputnik, a small artificial moon.  Although it weighed only 184 pounds, it was the first time anyone had launched something into space.  Sputnik II, carrying a dog, Laika, went into space next.  Not only was this a blow to national pride, but it meant that an ICBM could get a nuclear warhead almost anywhere.

*Republicans blamed Truman.  Others said that while America had some technological advances in many areas (we had colour television sets!), the Russians had put all their efforts into rocketry.  Regardless, the US needed to overcome the ‘missile gap.’

*Formed in 1957, NASA had a number of failures.  Vanguard blew up a few feet off the ground on national television.  In 1958, the US put Explorer 1 into orbit.  It was the size of a grapefruit and weighted 2 ½ pounds.  In 1958 Congress passed the National Defense and Education Act, giving $887 million in grants to colleges in order to expand and improve science and language programmes.

*In 1958, the Soviets did all the nuclear tests they wanted to do, then stopped, pressuring the US to stop, too.  Both nations agreed to stop atmospheric and underwater testing, but it was difficult to properly inspect this.

*In 1958, the US invaded Lebanon to protect it from the Egyptians and communists, restoring order without losing a man.

*In 1959, Khrushchev came to New York to speak at the UN.  Another meeting was planned for 1960 in Paris.  The meeting broke up after a U-2 spy plane was shot down over the USSR.  The pilot, Gary Powers survived, and spent almost two years in Russian prison camps before being returned to the US.  This diplomatic disaster followed by another in New York.  Here, Khrushchev demanded the US leave Berlin and we refused.  He suggested total disarmament, but only so we could say that was impossible and end up looking bad.  Khrushchev emphasized his closing remarks by pulling off a shoe and banging it on the table.

*In 1959, the Cuban people had had enough of their corrupt dictator, Fulgenico Batista, who was backed by the US government, the US mafia, and US sugar interests.  Led by Fidel Castro, they overthrew Batista and eventually set Cuba up as a Communist country in the Soviet sphere.  American and other foreign properties were seized (as was the property of many wealthy Cubans) and nationalized.  The Cubans also hoped to export this revolution to all of Central America and the Caribbean, and to try to stop this, Ike finally announced $500 million in aid for Latin America, which many saw as too little, too late.  The US never recognised the government of Castro and still maintains an economic and travel embargo against the country.  Worried about such revolutions, the US would continue to prop up friendly dictators around the world.

*In 1960, Eisenhower would neither wish not be allowed to run again.  Vice-President Nixon would run against the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.  Nixon’s running mate would be Henry Cabot Lodge, junior, grandson of TR’s old friend.  JFK’s would be Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, who nearly won the presidential nomination outright, and still wanted the office.

*JFK would be feared because he was a Catholic.  One North Carolina Baptist preacher said ‘I fear Catholicism more than I fear communism.’  Kennedy accused Ike and Nixon of letting the communists get too far ahead, and with Sputnik, Cuba, and ever-escalating nuclear arsenals, it was hard for Nixon to defend his old administration.

*In the first televised presidential debates, JFK looked young, fit, and handsome, while Nixon looked sweaty, shifty, and unappealing.  Most people who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon had come off better—he had the experience and he could be a great speaker—but most people who saw it on television were swept away by the handsome young Kennedy.  He got many votes in the North and in big cities, he still carried much of the Deep South, and workers, Blacks, and Catholics in all parts of the country tended to vote for him.  In Chicago some of them voted several times.  JFK won with 303 electoral votes (Nixon had 219 and Harry F. Byrd, Senator from Virginia, with Strom Thurmond as a running mate, got fifteen).  The torch had been passed to a new generation.

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