The Brilliant Prudence of Dwight Eisenhower

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/the-brilliant-prudence-of-dwight-eisenhower/262556/


Never showy or impulsive, the 34th president always played for the long term. As voters consider what qualities they want in a leader, a new look shows why Americans were right to like Ike.

In his January 18, 1961, farewell speech, Eisenhower coined the term "military-industrial complex." (Associated Press)

Dwight Eisenhower is a president whose reputation has improved over time. When he left office, he was regarded as a genial, grandfatherly figure but also as a caretaker who was a little out of it. At the time, in January 1961, his Farewell Address presciently warning against the "military-industrial complex" was little noticed; far more attention was paid to JFK's soaring (and, in hindsight, overreaching) inaugural speech, promising to "bear any burden."

We know now that Ike was quietly powerful, that he operated with a "hidden hand," as Princeton professor Fred Greenstein once put it. In my new book on how President Eisenhower kept America out of war, I examine his ability to bluff and outmaneuver the Soviets and, when necessary, his own generals. The Eisenhower leadership style sharply contrasts with what we have come to expect in our celebrity culture and tit-for-tat politics. Eisenhower was never showy or impulsive; he disdained partisanship and always played for the long term. He was patient and calm in the face of uncertainty. He needed to be, for he faced an unpredictable and dangerous foe.

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In the summer of 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower flew to Geneva for the first summit meeting of the Cold War. Two and a half years into his presidency, Eisenhower was not sure who was running the Soviet Union. Was it Nikolai Bulganin, the chairman of the Council of Ministers? Tall and smiling, Bulganin seemed relatively benign. (With his goatee and white suit, Bulganin bore a striking resemblance to Colonel Sanders of the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain.) Eisenhower hoped the real power lay with Georgy Zhukov, the Red Army field marshal who had been Ike's comrade in arms in World War II. Having seen so much war, Zhukov hated it as much as Ike did. But when Ike sent his son John, an army major, out to do a little informal spying at "tea" (cocktails), John reported back that Zhukov seemed subdued and shaken. "Things are not as they seem," Zhukov whispered John Eisenhower.

Eisenhower found out who was really in charge four days later when he unveiled his major peace initiative, called "Open Skies," to allow the Soviet and American reconnaissance planes to freely fly over each other's territory. The idea was to reduce the threat of surprise attack, the great fear of the new nuclear age. After the speech, a short, round man came straight for the American president wagging a stubby finger and saying, Nyet, nyet, nyet. "Open Skies," said Nikita Khrushchev, the Communist Party chairman, was just a chance for the Americans to peer into Russian bedrooms.

[hifiguy]

1. While he had his faults, especially on the issue of race,

Ike was a very good president. He was always calm and considered in his judgments, distrusted the Pentagon as only a General of the Army could, and never spoke before thinking.

Today he would be run out of the Republican party on a rail after being tarred and feathered, as would Theodore Roosevelt.

[MicaelS]

2. Eisenhower was a warmonger of the first order...

The fascination of some people on the Left with Eisenhower, simply because of his anti MIC speech as he left office never ceases to amaze me. He presided over the enormous buildup of the US Nuclear Arsenal, and regularly contemplated Thermonuclear War with the USSR. Eisenhower was no Dove.

http://hnn.us/articles/47326.html

Peace activists love to quote Dwight Eisenhower. The iconic Republican war hero who spoke so eloquently about the dangers of war and the need for disarmament makes a terrific poster-boy for peace. The image of Eisenhower as the “man of peace” is so useful that I almost hate to burst the bubble. But if you look at the historical record there is no escaping the other Eisenhower: the Eisenhower who said “he would rather be atomized than communized,” who reminds us how dangerous the cold war era really was and how easily political leaders can mask their intentions with benign images.


Early on, he noted in his diary what he later said in public: nuclear weapons would now be “treated just as another weapon in the arsenal.” “We have got to be in a position to use that weapon,” he insisted to Dulles. That became official policy in NSC 5810/1, which declared the U.S. intention to treat nuclear weapons “as conventional weapons; and to use them whenever required to achieve national objectives.” By early 1957, Eisenhower told the NSC that there could be no conventional battles any more: “The only sensible thing for us to do was to put all our resources into our SAC capability and into hydrogen bombs.” He found it “frustrating not to have plans to use nuclear weapons generally accepted.”

His whole reason for fighting was to prevent the communists from imposing a totalitarian state in America. He had long recognized the irony that nuclear war would lead to the very totalitarianism he abhorred. But he confessed to the Cabinet that he saw no way to avoid it: “He was coming more and more to the conclusion that … we would have to run this country as one big camp—severely regimented.” After reading plans for placing the nation under martial law, giving the president power to “requisition all of the nation’s resources–human and material,” he pronounced them “sound.”

It is hard to give up the “man of peace” that peace activists have come to admire. And perhaps it’s not fair to give him up. After all, we can never know what another person truly believes. But the record of the other Eisenhower is so consistent and so extensive (I’ve offered only a sampling here) that it is hard to ignore. More importantly, it is dangerous to ignore, because the other Eisenhower was the one who made actual policy. It was a policy that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would “push whole stack of chips into the pot” and “hit ‘em … with everything in the bucket”; a man who would “shoot your enemy before he shoots you” and “hit the guy fast with all you’ve got”; a man who believed that the U.S. could “pick itself up from the floor” and win the war, even though “everybody is going crazy,” as long as only 25 or 30 American cities got “shellacked” and nobody got too “hysterical.”