Episode 18: Dwight D. Eisenhower

Show Notes

Overview

Today’s episode is all about Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, a two term president with arguably the greatest pre-presidential resume of them all. It’s not everyone who could fill out a job application, and under experience, write: “saved Western civilization.” That might be a stretch, but only a small one. It was Ike, after all, who oversaw the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, and then did as much as anyone to build the structures of long-term American prosperity and power that ultimately proved triumphant in the Cold War that followed.

He was not without fault, however, nor one for whom questions of race intertwined easily with the awesome power of the presidency. Dwight Eisenhower sat in the Oval Office during critical years of the modern Civil Rights movement, sitting too long and refusing to stand up for equal justice under the law a bit too long for many Americans of his own time, and for American’s looking back in hindsight from today.

So let’s start with a refresher. Dwight Eisenhower was raised in a tight-knit religious family, dreamed of gridiron fame, and ultimately won a coveted slot to play football at the US Military Academy at West Point. He went to college to play ball, but then, as so often happened, life took an unexpected turn. He tore up his knee. The kind of injury that today might set a player back four to six months, but in 1913, was a career killer. It was only then, with his dream snatched away, that he turned his full attention to where he was, to his studies, and to fully being a cadet.

This fateful intervention mattered. Having only studied for about half his college career, he graduated middle of his class in 1915. Those at the top got the best slots, and many soon after found themselves in France during the Great War. Ike was sent instead into transport and logistics, a move that changed his life. Why? Because a new age of transportation was about to dawn, coupling truly effective ground and air transport finally capable of rivaling the railways and changing the face of war. Ike was at the forefront of the new doctrine of movement, and indeed a revolution in the way humans shape and traverse the world.

A brilliant staff officer, he served under Generals like Fox Connor, John Pershing, and Douglas MacArthur, and was all set to retire in 1942 when Pearl Harbor happened. And a man named George Marshall remembered something written by Douglas MacArthur, who rarely had good things to say about anyone but himself. Marshall was chief of staff of the US Army. If war ever broke out, MacArthur advised, put Ike in charge. Less than 72 hours after the Pearl Harbor attack he was in Marshall’s office, who ordered him to construct a new war plan for how to win the fight in the Pacific. Then, a plan for Europe. Within six months he commanded the American-led invasion of North Africa. A year later he was named Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, charged in particular with invading France, and bringing Nazi Germany to its knees.

What should you take from this quick retelling of his rapid rise? First, that Ike was smart. Second, that Ike could make decisions, even the toughest ones. And third and perhaps most important, this man was a natural politician and diplomat. He was no mere battlefield commander. His battles were with the likes of Britain’s Winston Churchill, France’s Charles de Gaulle, and even his own Commander in Chief, Franklin Roosevelt.

Democrats and Republicans alike hoped Eisenhower might ultimately grace their presidential ticket. As a career officer, he’d always kept this own politics private. Yet as a natural conservative, the Republican Party was a more natural choice, and with Richard Nixon as his running mate, Ike won the 1952 election in a landslide, then repeated the feat in 1956.

Ike’s years in office were tumultuous, yet also idealized in our past. The fifties. If there was ever a moment we might identify as the time Donald Trump meant when he said “make America great again,” this was it. The American standard of living reached historic proportions. So too home ownership, wages, and almost any other economic measure one can imagine. Yet it was also a time of strife, both internationally in the Cold War, and also at home, when Americans long denied their civil rights marched, sat-down, protested, and demanded their full due as full citizens of the republic.

How did Ike respond? Well, that’s what we are going to discuss today, with two ideal experts for the task. First, we spoke to Professor Will Hitchcock of the University of Virginia, author of The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s. We then looked more directly at the way racial politics at home affected America’s relationship with the world when we spoke to Professor Brenda Gayle Plummer, Professor of History and African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s long studied the intersection of race and foreign policy, and with works Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs.

Together our scholars pointed out two key themes:

First, that in civil rights as in so much else in American society, a president must always balance their own politics and preferences, against the duties of his office.
Second, that what happens in America when it came to race relations, didn’t stay in America for long, and one can’t understand US Cold War policy without including the story of the long struggle for Civil Rights.

Guests:

will hitchcock.jpg — **William I. Hitchcock** is the William W. Corcoran Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His work and teaching focus on the global history of the 20th Century, in particular the era of the two world wars and the cold war.

He received his B.A. degree from Kenyon College in 1986 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1994, working under the supervision of Paul Kennedy. He taught at Yale for six years, and served as the Associate Director of International Security Studies. He published France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe (UNC, 1998) and co-edited a volume with Paul Kennedy titled From War to Peace: Altered Strategic Landscapes in the 20th Century (Yale, 2000). He moved to Wellesley College in 1999, where he taught for five years, and then took a position as a dean and professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia. After publishing The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-present (Doubleday/Anchor, 2002), he went on to write about the experience of liberation at the close of World War II. His book, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Free Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize, and a Financial Times bestseller in the UK. In 2010, he moved to the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), which was a New York Times bestseller. For more information, click here. He is now writing "FDR and the Dictators: Fascism, Democracy and the Awakening of America," which explores reactions in the United States to the rise of fascism in Europe from the 1920s to 1941.

Follow Dr. Hitchcock on Twitter.

Dr. Hitchcock’s podcast, Democracy in Danger.