The President and the apprentice : Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961

937 Pages·2015·7.14 MB·English

by  Eisenhower

THE PRESIDENT AND THE APPRENTICE
THE PRESIDENT AND THE APPRENTICE
Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952–1961
Irwin F. Gellman
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2015 by Irwin F. Gellman. All rights reserved. This book may not
be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond
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Set in Electra type by Westchester Publishing Services. Printed in the United
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015935011
ISBN 978-0-300-18105-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Ruth Ann Segerstrom Moriarty
with
gratitude and love
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Changing the Story
Part One 1952–1957
1 The Nominees
2 The Fund Crisis
3 To Victory
4 The General as a Manager
5 The Worst Kind of Politician
6 The Collision
7 Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Civil Rights
8 Eisenhower and Civil Rights: The First Term
9 Ike, Nixon, and Dulles
10 Nixon in Asia
11 The Battles over Asia
12 Trouble with Good Neighbors
13 The U.S. Response to Neutralism
14 Incumbent Politics
15 The Ill-Will Tour versus the Big Lie
16 The Incapacitated President
17 The Hutschnecker Fiction
18 Ike’s Decision to Run
19 Nixon’s Agony
20 Stassen’s Folly
21 The Land of Smear and Grab
22 The Hungarian Revolution and the Freedom Fighters
Illustrations follow Part One
Part Two 1957–1961
23 Ike and Dick Return
24 Prelude to the Struggle
25 The Civil Rights Act of 1957
26 Little Rock and Its Consequences
27 The Implosion
28 The Steel Solution
29 Nixon in Africa
30 Ike’s Cold War
31 A Near-Death Experience
32 Inside and Outside the Kitchen
33 Ike’s Hopes Collapse
34 Ike, Nixon, Kennedy, and Castro
Conclusion: Ike and Dick
Appendix: Eisenhower’s Notes on the “Checkers Speech”
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
When Herbert Brownell Jr. told Dwight D. Eisenhower that his advisers had
selected Richard M. Nixon as his running mate in 1952, the general readily
concurred. Ike saw in Nixon a young, talented politician who, like himself, was
a strong foe of communism and had distinguished himself as a congressman in
1948 by his pursuit of Alger Hiss, later shown to have spied for the Soviet
Union. Eisenhower would also come to value Nixon’s political insight and his
ability to connect with his Republican constituency. Not yet forty years old at
the time he was nominated, Nixon saw his place on the 1952 ticket as a priceless
opportunity, and he never lost his determination to make the most of it. Yet he
never completely understood Ike’s military character and would be left
dumbfounded by some of Ike’s decisions.
The two men were never partners. Theirs was not a “strange political
marriage,” as Jeffrey Frank claims in Ike and Dick. Eisenhower, the supreme
commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in World War II, the former chief
of staff of the Army, the first supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, did not have partners. He led a team of subordinates, who were
expected to go where Ike sent them, be his eyes and ears, provide intelligent and
informed advice, deliver his messages, execute his decisions, and occasionally
become casualties. Whether the battlefield was military or political, Ike often
had his soldiers take the heat instead of himself.
Having seen how unprepared Harry S Truman was to assume the presidency
on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, Eisenhower kept Vice President Nixon aware
of most of the decisions made in the White House. Nixon attended Ike’s weekly
meetings, presided in Ike’s absence, acted as a liaison with both houses of
Congress, met with dozens of foreign heads of state, and tirelessly represented
the administration on the campaign trail. He had more responsibility and more
authority than any vice president before him. He shared frequent breakfasts and
lunches with the president, and was one of a small circle of advisers who could
walk into the Oval Office without an appointment. When Eisenhower, after a
futile year of trying to get Joseph McCarthy to cooperate with his
administration, decided in 1954 that the senator was doing far more harm than
good, Nixon was part of the small team that ruined him. When Eisenhower
wanted to advance the cause of civil rights, he turned to Nixon, first as the head
of the President’s Committee on Government Contracts, and then as the point
man in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957. (Some historians have given the
credit for this legislation largely to then–Senate majority leader Lyndon
Johnson, but Johnson actually eviscerated two major provisions that were
unacceptable to the southern caucus.)
Nixon evolved into one of Ike’s most valuable subordinates. When
Eisenhower suffered a major heart attack in September 1955, Nixon, Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles, and White House chief of staff Sherman Adams
were largely in charge of the White House for several months. At the time, the
public did not know the severity of Eisenhower’s illness, nor did anyone know
that Nixon, over-stressed and overmedicated, was at the very limits of his ability
to function in the first half of 1956. Nor did John Foster Dulles reveal that his
cancer surgery that year had been unsuccessful; he would die in the spring of
1959.
Both Eisenhower and Dulles relied increasingly on Nixon as a foreign policy
counselor. Nixon’s trips to Asia, Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the
Soviet Union were never ceremonial goodwill journeys; he conducted delicate
business and sometimes tense negotiations with foreign leaders, and he gave
Eisenhower detailed reports on what he saw, heard, and did. In the process, he
became close friends with Dulles. This immersion in foreign affairs as vice
president gave Nixon the background, when he became president, to conduct a
foreign policy that included winding down the war in Vietnam, détente with the
Soviet Union, and a historic opening of relations with China.
Little of this is known, or properly understood.
Instead, many historians, journalists, and others have advanced the
proposition that Ike and Nixon disliked each other and barely spoke throughout
the Eisenhower presidency. In past decades, critics described Ike’s presidential
leadership as inept and Nixon as hyperpartisan. While Ike’s image has improved
to that of a near-great or great president, Nixon remains an inconsequential vice
president. This divergence in their reputations has created a paradox: given that
Eisenhower is now seen as firmly in control of his administration, and that he
was so wildly popular that he certainly did not need Nixon’s help to win the
presidency, why did he allow Nixon to stay on the ticket? Even if we concede
that he might have done so once by mistake, in 1952, why did Ike run with him
again four years later?
At this point, more than a half-century since Eisenhower left office, the fog of
misunderstanding has become bipartisan. The conservative British historian Paul
Johnson’s slim volume Eisenhower: A Life, published in 2014 and based entirely
on secondary sources, includes just a single paragraph on the president’s
relationship with his vice president.
Ike’s attitude toward Nixon remains a mystery to this day. He
behaved toward his vice president throughout the eight years they
served together as if he were a burden or an embarrassment rather
than an asset. Asked if Nixon had ever made a positive contribution
to his administration, Ike avoided an answer and said he’d like to
think about it. Of course Ike had never chosen Nixon to run with
him. And he disliked having around him a man he could not fire. (p.
107)
From the other side of the political spectrum, Elizabeth Drew concurs with
Johnson. A liberal journalist and television personality, Drew has covered the
capital since 1959 for distinguished magazines like The Atlantic Monthly and
The New Yorker. Her book Richard M. Nixon (2007) describes Ike and Dick’s
“relationship” as “distant” (p. 16); she writes that Nixon complained of never
having been invited to Ike’s Gettysburg home (he was) and that “moderates and
other opponents” tried to dump Nixon from the Republican ticket in 1956
(except for one man, Harold Stassen, they did not). Nixon stayed on the ticket
even though the president “had doubts” about his running mate (he did not).
Drew and Johnson, who might agree on little else in politics, both believe that
Eisenhower had little use for Nixon.
Neither author departs from the conventional understanding; their books
depend mainly on others’ impressionistic accounts. Neither spent time in the
archives that house the voluminous records showing how Eisenhower and Nixon
interacted. In this, they are hardly alone.
I have been working on this book for twenty years. I spent seven years
reviewing documents related to Nixon’s vice presidency, located at the National
Archives in Laguna Nigel and in the Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda,
California. Historians have usually consulted the largest part of the Nixon
manuscripts, called the 320 series (approximately 845 boxes), which is
organized alphabetically. Thus the boxes containing As include Sherman
Adams; the B boxes, Herbert Brownell; the E boxes, Eisenhower; the S boxes,
Harold Stassen; and so forth. This organization allows researchers to avoid
reading systematically through the files and instead to cherry-pick the best-
known names. But a thorough examination of every box yielded critical
documents that otherwise would not have turned up. For instance, I found the