Eisenhower, Dwight D.
(b. October 14, 1890; d. March 28, 1969) A career army officer who led the Allied Forces during World War II; thirty-fourth president of the United States (1953–1961).
Eisenhower commanded the Allied armies in World War II that landed in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and liberated Nazi-occupied western Europe. After the war, he served as chief of staff of the U.S. Army and then as president of Columbia University. Following the out-break of the Korean War, Eisenhower returned to uniform, becoming the first Supreme Commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in 1951. From his NATO headquarters near Paris, Eisenhower quietly encouraged leading Republicans who mobilized support for his presidential candidacy. He returned to the United States to campaign in June 1952 and won the Republican presidential nomination the next month.
Eisenhower easily defeated Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. He pledged that he would clean up the scandals over corrupt government officials and Communist subversives that had plagued the Truman administration. He also promised to go to Korea to find a way to end the unpopular, stalemated war. The combination of Korea, Communism, and corruption provided the formula for Eisenhower's victory. But also important was the trust he inspired and the popularity he enjoyed as a national hero. As his supporters put it, "I like Ike."
After an armistice halted the fighting in Korea on July 27, 1953, Eisenhower revised America's Cold War strategy. His New Look aimed at providing sufficient strength to meet Communist challenges without over-burdening the economy. A central part of the New Look strategy was overwhelming atomic strength to deter and, if necessary, wage war. Eisenhower invoked that nuclear strength during a prolonged crisis in 1954–1955 when the People's Republic of China bombarded two small islands under control of the government of Taiwan, a U.S. ally. If the United States went to war to protect Taiwan, Eisenhower said at a news conference, then he favored using tactical nuclear weapons against military targets "exactly as you would use a bullet." This Cold War confrontation, though, ended without any U.S. military action, nuclear or conventional.
Eisenhower made controversial decisions at the climax of a war that another U.S. ally, France, fought to retain its colonial control over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the
General Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower as they leave New York City aboard the "Eisenhower Special," September 14, 1952. The following year he began the first of two terms as a popular president of the United States. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOSthree nations that made up Indochina. In the spring of 1954, Eisenhower refused to authorize either a conventional or nuclear air strike to rescue a trapped French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam. After its troops surrendered, the French government agreed at a conference in Geneva to grant independence to the Indochinese nations. The United States, however, did not sign the Geneva accords, and Eisenhower decided to use U.S. aid and influence to prevent Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader of the anti-French forces, from establishing control over a unified Vietnam. Instead, two governments emerged, a Communist North Vietnam and a non-Communist South Vietnam. Eisenhower kept the United States out of war in 1954, but he helped create conditions for a future American conflict.
Only once did Eisenhower order U.S. combat troops into action, during a government crisis in Lebanon in 1958. The marines he sent ashore stayed just three months and suffered only a single death from hostile fire. Eisenhower, though, authorized several covert actions, including interventions that helped local leaders over-throw governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. Although these interventions achieved their immediate goals, they also created long-term problems that led to revolution or civil war. Sometimes they failed to produce even short-term success, as when the Central Intelligence Agency began training Cubans who opposed Fidel Castro for what became the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion shortly after President John F. Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower.
Even as he vigorously prosecuted the Cold War, Eisenhower hoped for improved relations with the Soviet Union. An opportunity for détente seemed to follow the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953. Eisenhower as well as the new Soviet leaders talked about curbing the arms race, and the president proposed that both super-powers contribute nuclear materials to a new international program, "Atoms for Peace." Achievements, though, failed to match rhetoric. Eisenhower proposed another new initiative, "Open Skies"—a way for both sides to use reconnaissance flights to gather information about each other's military capabilities—when he met with Soviet leaders at Geneva in July 1955. But Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, rejected "Open Skies." Still, the first Soviet-American summit in a decade raised hopes that negotiations would eventually ease Cold War tensions.
In his second term, Eisenhower hoped that his legacy would be the first major U.S.-Soviet arms control agreement, a treaty that banned the testing of nuclear weapons in the air and seas. But the Soviet downing of a U.S. reconnaissance flight on May 1, 1960—the disastrous U-2 incident—doomed any chances for a test-ban agreement during the final months of Eisenhower's presidency. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961 as a popular president who had avoided war but who was unable to achieve the détente he so earnestly desired.
Nevertheless, like George Washington, Eisenhower left a significant legacy through a warning issued in his farewell speech. Eisenhower always worried about the negative impact of excessive military spending on the civilian economy. He preferred much cheaper long-range missiles to expensive army divisions because they delivered "more bang for the buck." In his farewell address in January 1961, he warned against the "military-industrial complex." He feared that a too-close relationship among the military, defense contractors, and politicians protecting installations and factories in their home districts might distort the economy and more generally undermine the American way of life.
Civil Defense, 1946–Present; Foreign Aid, 1946–Present; Korea, Impact Of; Mccarthyism; Military-Industrial Complex; Politics and Elections; Truman, Harry S.
Bibliography
Ambrose, Stephen E. Eisenhower, Vol. 2: The President. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
Bowie, Robert R., and Immerman, Richard H. Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Craig, Campbell. Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Dockrill, Saki. Eisenhower's New Look National Security Policy, 1953–61. New York: St. Martin's, 1996.
Pach, Chester J., Jr., and Richardson, Elmo. The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, rev. ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.
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