Investor's Business Daily, June 20th, 2007
When we think of great leaders, what names pop up?
Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Churchill, de Gaulle.
All had to lead their country through a war that was, in fact, a fight for that nation's survival.
Perhaps that explains why Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) was such an underrated president. His greatness was quieter, more subtle. He presided over eight years of peace and prosperity. That was one of his crowning achievements.
"Eisenhower liked to say the fact that there was no war in his eight years was not an accident," said Thomas Alan Schwartz, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.
Certainly, President Eisenhower didn't have to deal with hot wars once the Korean War ended six months into his first term. But he had to cope with a new, ominous form of confrontation.
These were the early years of the Cold War. Harry Truman was in office when the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. Eisenhower was the first president who had to deal with a USSR that could deliver such a blast to U.S. soil.
And this leads to the most puzzling issue about Ike. Was he a pacifist or a warrior? He was both.
Ike's early years held no clue that he would be a successful soldier and president, careers that are all about confrontation and at least the threat of violence.
He was born in Denison, Texas, to a Mennonite family and grew up in Abilene, Kan. His parents did not believe in war or militarism. They even disdained saluting the flag.
To The Point
Many question why Eisenhower, who is not known to have shown any rebellion in those years, chose to apply to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. Schwartz thinks young Ike saw it as his ticket out of Abilene. "Whatever objections his parents may have raised didn't deter him," he told IBD.
Eisenhower's military career was astonishing, especially since he accomplished so much while never seeing combat. He rose from Army staff duty to supreme Allied commander in Europe, calling the shots during the invasion of Normandy in 1944. He took on the rank of five-star general and, after World War II, served as the Army's chief of staff and NATO's commander.
So he had a load of experience with confrontation.
And he saw plenty of both during his presidency from 1953 to 1961.
The biggest confrontation involved the Soviets. Our allies in the war against Germany were now our enemies. The Iron Curtain had fallen across Europe. Most of the world's nations were lining up with us or with the USSR.
Through it all, Ike relied on his values. "What Eisenhower believed prior to becoming president ... and what he felt and thought influenced how he interpreted the world around him and acted to shape it," said Richard Immerman in "Waging Peace," a book he co-wrote with Robert Bowie.
In that book, Immerman describes how Eisenhower formulized some of his core beliefs into the Great Equation. "Spiritual force, multiplied by economic force, multiplied by military force, is roughly equal to security," Ike said to a member of his administration. "If one of these factors falls to zero, or near zero, the resulting product does likewise."
Immerman, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, told IBD how much Eisenhower's reputation has been upgraded in recent years.
"The knocks were, one, he was very likeable but not too bright, and somewhat lazy. That he was ineffectual and a model of what a president should not be. And that because of his congenial personality he could attract effective people around him," Immerman said.
That view of Eisenhower goes back to World War II, when the shining stars were George Patton and Omar Bradley.
This has been discredited. Immerman says the Eisenhower papers, released in the mid- to late 1970s, showed that the 34th president was far stronger and smarter than many thought. The "nice but slow guy" was a persona Eisenhower used. It wasn't who he was.
Those papers proved he was extremely bright and more politically sophisticated than many had given him credit for. The true picture, Immerman said, was "almost a negative of the previous picture." And the notion that John Foster Dulles, secretary of state from 1953 to 1959, dominated Ike's presidency has been laid to rest.
"This was a president who was very involved," said Schwartz. "He was not out playing golf."
Ike indeed was derided as a sort of country club president. Many remember him playing golf -- a lot of golf. "It was such a bad knock that (President) Kennedy insisted that reporters not know when he was out playing golf," Schwartz said.
So why the act? Why would Ike play dumb? The answer is so he could use his hidden hand.
This view was first promoted by historian Fred Greenstein in his book "The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader."
In it, Greenstein says Eisenhower purposely let others in his administration make the noise and do the deeds. Those others got the credit, but Ike was the true force. By using his hidden hand, Eisenhower built and preserved his political capital. This is how, for years, many thought Dulles dominated Eisenhower's administration.
Which issues were targets for Eisenhower's hidden hand?
"Practically all of them," said Immerman.
The big one involved Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his crusade against communism. Eisenhower's reputation had been tarnished in the press, with many saying he simply didn't do anything about McCarthy's unsubstantiated claims against innocent Americans of disloyalty and even espionage.
"In fact, (Eisenhower) was very active behind the scenes against McCarthy, but he didn't want anyone to know that," said Immerman.
As he noted in his Great Equation, Ike believed that a strong economy was crucial to defense -- to pay for it and to add incentive, to have something to protect. He feared that out-of-control defense costs could cripple the economy. If the economy crumbled, so would core values and democratic institutions. The likely result: censorship, price controls, rationing -- all the things that communist Eastern Europe relied on.
With those costs in mind, this former general with pacifist roots steered America away from hot wars -- especially during France's Battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954 and during the Suez Crisis two years later.
Stop It
Eisenhower was about stopping conflicts, and he used a big stick. During the presidential campaign of 1952, he promised to end the Korean War. When it came time to seek a truce, the Soviets and Chinese were slow to come to talks. It was then that President Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear force. Serious talks followed and led to an armistice.
And how did that pacifist-general-president handle the Cold War? Not with short, dramatic strikes. His vision of America and of how to make her safe guided him through what turned out to be the first years of a long, protracted struggle.
"When I think of Eisenhower," said Schwartz. "I think of a man who, because of the experiences he had in his life, both coming from the heartland of America and rising in a peacetime Army and then coming to command the largest coalition Army the world had ever seen, afforded him a global perspective on America's power and problems."
