Five Other Republicans I Admire, Part III

Back in the 1920s, the noted comedian, Will Rogers, said of a recent Republican president, "Calvin Coolidge didn't do much of anything, but...that's what we needed to have done." Many people would think the same thing could be said of Dwight David Eisenhower, our 34^th president, but they would be wrong. The Eisenhower presidency actually marked an era of considerable social progress and a degree of success in foreign affairs.

People who denigrate the complacency and the conformity of the era should not blame Eisenhower, as though he imposed that mind-set on the nation. No, we imposed that on ourselves.

One other unpleasant aspect of the 1950s was the thing we refer to as "McCarthyism," largely because Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy was at the forefront of the movement to discredit as communists, many eminent liberals, free-thinkers and even moderates. That was something that Eisenhower did have some control over, to his considerable discredit.

Just as I indicated President Kennedy suffered from too much hubris as the leader of his party (In my earlier essay about Everett Dirksen), President Eisenhower suffered from too little. Of course McCarthy was the arch-villain of the pageant, with many of his fellow Republicans on the infamous HUAC in supporting roles, but the President's failure to make even a serious attempt to check their excesses must be noted, even in an encomium to his administration. In all fairness, I should point out that this witch-hunting business began, not with the Eisenhower administration, but when the Republicans attained a Congressional majority in 1948. Of course, as a Democrat, Harry Truman and far less power to check the excesses of his Republican opponents. In further fairness, it should be noted that Eisenhower did not approve of or actively endorse McCarthy's tactics.

One admirable aspect to Dwight David Eisenhower was that he was a leader and hero of our second-deadliest conflict, World War II. Of course, while that does indeed make him admirable, it does not necessarily make him a great political leader, by itself. General Grant was one of the heroes of the Civil War (despite a couple of horribly-executed battles), but he turned out to be a lousy president. In fact all the lackluster presidents of the latter 19^th Century were Civil War veterans, most of them generals. The only good president we had in that era was a draft-dodger. (Funny how history would repeat itself in the latter part of the 20^th Century).

If the embittered enemies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt imagined that President Eisenhower was going to roll back the new deal, they were in for a rude surprise. Eisenhower kept the most important programs intact, and actually expanded Social Security. Keep in mind, the first Social Security recipients could look forward to a stipend of under $30 a month.

The new President effected the efficiency of rolling a number of those programs into a new cabinet-level department: Health, Education and Welfare (now known as Health and Human Services). And, though it has had some unfortunate consequences, he instituted the Interstate Highway System in 1956. What is more, he did all of this on a budget of $77 billion and a national debt of $300 million (in 1957).

In terms of foreign policy, he did honor a campaign promise that he would "go to Korea," and, having done so, oversaw the uneasy truce that has held to this very day. Yes, there are a great many things to be dissatisfied about regarding the arrangement, but would several more years of bloody warfare have been a better deal?

Keep in mind, we were not just fighting the North Koreans at that point. The Chinese had become involved in vast numbers. Judging from the horrendously sacrificial human-wave attacks their military leader, Lin Pao, launched, time and time again, they were not going to be easily deterred.

By his adaptation and expansion of the Truman Doctrine to stop the spread of Communism wherever it threatened, Eisenhower was able to keep the tide reasonably at bay. A revoltingly corrupt Cuba did fall to a Communist regime at the end of his term, but, throughout western Europe and what we would call the Third World, the system failed to catch on, thanks largely to the administration's vigilance.

Perhaps the single most important aspect of the Eisenhower presidency was his respect for the law in the controversial area of civil rights. Keep in mind that, when Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren to be chief justice of the Supreme Court, he did not by any means task him with the mission of ending racial segregation. Warren, a former (and very popular) governor of California, had shown his own conservative side by overseeing the infamous Japanese internment camps we established shortly after Pearl Harbor. Hardly the type of fellow you would expect to turn the world of race relations on its ear.

In fact, after Warren had promulgated the decision against "separate but equal"-and in Eisenhower's adopted home state, Kansas, to boot-the President called his appointment of the Chief Justice "the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made." After that, he proceeded to enforce the new law of the land.

Eisenhower was far from being a rabid segregationist, and, at some level, he realized that our unequal racial policies were simply supplying fuel to the Communist fire in the "battle for the hearts and minds" of the uncommitted. On his own, he ordered that the District of Columbia schools be integrated, and, when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus refused to allow the integration of Little Rock Central High School, Eisenhower called out the national guard to escort the black students past the mob of hostile whites.

Just as Harry Truman did when he enforced the Republican-imposed Taft-Hartley Act, concerning labor disputes, Eisenhower enforced a law he did not like, knowing full well that the strength of the Constitution was far more important than what any president thought. Compare the respect for the law these two presidents displayed with the shameful effort to gut all regulation deemed hostile to big business that the previous administration showed, of which the Gulf of Mexico is only one unfortunate manifestation.

And, as many of us know, he warned sagely against the potential excesses of the "military-industrial complex" in his farewell address as president. After he had been out of office for a while, it became fashionable to discredit his presidency, but in virtually all the significant polls of this century, he has been voted among the ten greatest.

Dwight Eisenhower's vow to wipe out corruption, when he first ran for office, was far more rhetoric than fact. But, then, no president of any party has "wiped out" corruption, not even Abraham Lincoln, the greatest president of them all.

Sources

Wikipedia

My Weekly Reader (1957)

wikiquote.org