But Dwight D. Eisenhower said no to that. In some of the most important yet little appreciated decisions ever made by any U.S. president, Ike faced down both his own advisers and his base in the early to mid-’50s and embraced the containment policies of the other party. And he did it for a simple reason: he knew they were right. His only litmus test was competence.
It’s important to remember this relatively obscure chapter of American history today, a time when the GOP—the supposed party of adults—is being accused of incompetence on almost every level: from running a war to managing the nation’s budget to overseeing its sexual mores. And it’s useful to remind ourselves that, just as old Harry Truman once said, the buck does indeed stop in the Oval Office. Donald Rumsfeld may be the disastrously clueless and arrogant secretary of Defense portrayed by Bob Woodward’s new book, " State of Denial ." But cabinet secretaries are disposable, as is every presidential appointee who ill serves the nation, and their advice can be ignored. All that is needed is a president with the judgment to dispose of them—as it appears even Laura Bush wanted to do with Rumsfeld, according Bob Woodward—or at least to ignore them.
One of the virtues of the Woodward book is that it helps to move us away from the template we’ve all used to write about the Bush administration, in which Bush is routinely seen as a strong leader, and every mistake is blamed on Rummy, or Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice, among others. It restores a sense of balance about how government is supposed to work and who’s in charge.
On that score, it’s interesting to compare Bush to Eisenhower, who is often caricatured as a president who saw his office as a retirement sinecure and played golf for eight years. Historical records, some of which came to light decades after his death, show that Ike was actually fiercely engaged in the details of analyzing and deciding critical national-security issues. And he dominated thinking about policy in a way that seems unfamiliar to the post-9/11 generation of Americans.
During the 1952 election campaign against Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson, many Republicans endorsed John Foster Dulles’s “policy of boldness” or “rollback” toward Moscow, a repudiation of Truman’s “mere” containment of tyranny. But within six months of taking office, in June 1953, Eisenhower convened a top-secret “Operation Solarium” (named after the White House sun room) to thrash over various approaches to the Soviets over a five-week period. There were three teams. Team A proposed continuing Truman-style containment; Team B pressed for a more aggressive form of it, and Team C argued for martial rollback. Among those present was George Kennan, who had served only in Democratic administrations and who later remarked that Ike took total command of the process, demonstrating “his intellectual ascendancy over every man in the room.” In the end, Eisenhower opted for Team A’s plan, and he forced Dulles, by then his secretary of State, to fall in line.
By contrast, there is no evidence that President Bush ever held a high-level strategy meeting on how to fight the larger war on terror in which all the variables were laid on the table: What was the strategic goal? What were the opportunity costs of invading Iraq? After an initial post-9/11 meeting at Camp David, when Bush settled on a retaliatory response in Afghanistan, the administration abruptly shifted its attention to Iraq with little apparent discussion.
At least two more times in the mid to late ’50s, hard-liners such as Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay urged pre-emptive war on the Soviets. Eisenhower (who was born in Denison, Texas, though he moved to Kansas as a toddler) simply showed them the door, noting at one point in his diary that starting such wars violated American values and tradition. During the Suez crisis of 1956—which occurred 50 years ago this month—when Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser seized the canal, it was Eisenhower who restrained the Europeans, rather than the other way around, saying that he was “determined to exhaust every feasible method of a peaceful settlement.” Finally, the records show that he resisted Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Arthur Radford’s 1954 advice, endorsed by Vice President Richard Nixon, to use U.S. air power to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu. Upon leaving office, Ike left the incoming Kennedy administration a bit of sage advice: don’t put American troops in Vietnam.
At the same time, Eisenhower was not overcautious. As Princeton historian Fred Greenstein notes, “his most famous decision was to go ahead with the D-Day invasion of Europe in the eye of a hurricane.”
Yes, Ike had his own lapses of judgment and courage, notably when he stayed silent for too long while the demagogue Joe McCarthy took over the GOP. But at least he knew where the buck stopped, just as his predecessor Harry Truman did. Recall Eisenhower’s famous contingency message in 1944, the one the supreme Allied commander planned to issue to the public in case the D-Day landing failed. “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone,” he wrote in a note he tucked into his wallet. He didn’t get along with his predecessor, Truman, but the latter also shared this quality of personal integrity. “When things went wrong, he took the blame,” wrote Truman’s secretary of State, Dean Acheson, in his memoirs. “When things went right, he followed his hero, ‘Marse Robert,’ General Robert E. Lee, by giving one of his lieutenants the credit.” Compare that to Bush and Rumsfeld’s habit of laying everything off on their generals, or disgraced Congressman Mark Foley’s absurd effort to blame his sexual depredations on alcoholism and a childhood molestation.
Are there no Ikes or Harrys extant?
