American History Hit - President Eisenhower: War on Soviets & Segregation

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Dwight D. Eisenhower is a fixture in the lists of America's favourite Presidents. How did Eisenhower change America? How did the Cold War and Civil Rights become intertwined in this period? What doomsday did Eisenhower foresee for America at the end of his time in office?Don's guest today is Christopher Nichols, professor of history at The Ohio State University. Chris is working on a book about Eisenhower and the 1952 election.Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. January 17th, 1961, the White House. Though it will soon become a tradition among modern presidencies,

in the era of Dwight D. Eisenhower, they are still an exception to the rule. But on this, the eve of the inauguration of his successor, for President Dwight Eisenhower, his feral address to the country has become an imperative. After leading the nation to victory in World War II, then serving a full two terms as its commander-in-chief for the last eight years. One might expect this to be a glowing tribute to his own administration's political success, a victory lap. But instead, this speech will have a darker, more urgent, and prescient tone.

A former five-star general means to warn his country of a clear and present danger to its existence. So what is it? This dire threat. About who or what does Issa? Eisenhower wished to raise an alarm. A communist adversary flexing its military might, the dreaded Democrats returning to executive power, ICBMs on their way from Russia. To the contrary, as he studies his gaze into the blinding lights and hulking TV cameras, Ike prepares to take aim at an unanticipated target, an insidious enemy, to be sure,

but one that's growing within the U.S. government. Greetings, listeners, glad you're with us from either side of the Atlantic or elsewhere. This is American History Hit, and I'm Don Wildman. Dwight David Eisenhower, Ike, to family, friends and colleagues, became the 34th President of the United States in 1953, serving a full true terms until 1961. This was the era when America became first captivated by Elvis Presley's pelvic pulsations and the changing fashions of a beat generation. On screen, Marilyn Monroe dazzled a dazzled a dup.

Audiences in movies like gentlemen prefer blondes, while teens swooned over James Dean's brooding brow in Rebel Without a Cause. During this presidency, the McDonald Brothers met Ray Kroc, the notion of modern suburbia was hatched. A generally conservative social order thrived, inspired the later nostalgia of American graffiti and happy days. But this was also the time of Rosa Parks, famously refusing to give up her seat,

and Martin Luther King Jr. emerging to lead the Montgomery bus boycott. In discussing the Eisenhower presidency, we'll focus today on its crucial role in the Cold War and Civil Rights. Topics very resonant today, as the United States is now shuffling its cards and seeming to deal from a new deck. It's worth considering a president who was known to be very skilled at poker, who upped the ante, playing an important hand in the American century, creating much of the status quo we came to accept. Our guest for this today has been with us before. Check out episode 277 on the Spanish-American War. Glad to have him. Chris Nichols is a professor of history and the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair of the National Security Studies at the Ohio State University. He is currently working on a book about Eisenhower and the 1952 election. Hello, Chris Nichols. Welcome back to the pod. Don, it's great to be back with you. Thanks for having me. Let's first touch on the backdrop I described in the opening there, the 1950s, such a fabled time in American history, at least in the media and the music. Is this Fair, given the contradictions of the Cold War and what was being confronted in civil rights. Why are we so nostalgic for these so-called happy days?

You know, on the one hand, it's absolutely fair. If you think about the economy, standard of living, coming out of a cataclysmic world war, higher education boom, more people being educated, more jobs, job growth, manufacturing in the U.S., the white picket fence, suburbia, you could own your own home, the automobile, you could have your oddly colored high expense every month automobile, new appliances in the home, right? The parts of the Cold War were waged over the so-called kitchen debates, Crucshiv and Nixon. So yes, on the one hand, and in the other hand, I think the early Cold War, the aftermath of the Second World War, cast in sharp relief some of the real flaws in American democracy. And in trying to fight that conflict abroad through

propaganda, highlighting how truly just American society was and how much it was living up to its democratic ideals in that way, then the sort of the Cold War came home. There was a sort of rebound effect that helped to empower African-American civil rights movements, but also all kinds of other power movements that we don't tend to talk about. Later on, the American Indian movement, Green movement, all kinds of other LGBTQ, you know, but the leading tip of the spear there is African-American rights. And you see the NAACP petitioning the UN and all sorts of other things. So it's both fair in terms of thinking about society. And it's also that nostalgia mass some of the under the surface tumult that is really so essential to understanding the exact same period.

My World War II parents, I mentioned them all the time on this podcast, always said, and it always rolled their eyes when Happy Days was on. Like, it wasn't like that at all, they would say to me, at least in our household, I suppose. And so, you know, there's a lot of contradictions, which are the texture we'll be talking about today. It might seem strange as we begin a discussion about President Eisenhower with a question about someone else entirely. But it's a good place to start. Who was Robert Taft? And how does he contribute to Ike becoming president? This is a great question. Thank you for going in this direction. So, you know, the counterfactual that we often have or the way that we tend to think about the Eisenhower presidency is it was a foregone conclusion. If you're going back to that nostalgic moment, of course, Ike. We all like Ike. Ike brings Democrats and Republicans together. He does the highway system. He, you know, he's part of the civil rights movement, whatever you think or understand of that.

that couldn't be farther from the truth in 1948 or 1952. The likely frontrunner for the Republican Party was Mr. Republican, Robert Taft, son of the former president, Ohio Senator. He won a resounding victory in Ohio in 1950 for his Senate campaign, which seemed to suggest he had all the donors and other things lined up to make a really serious run for the presidency. And in fact, Taft is kind of the foil for why Eisenhower gets into it in the first place. Taft and so-called Taft Republicans,

of the farther right of the party are against NATO, against the UN. They don't like the U.S. having permanent bases in Europe. They're for a more hawkish policy in Asia. They're so-called Asia firsters coming out of World War II. And the Ike folks, Eisenhower famously meets with Taft in 1951, and then after he finally gets the nomination in late 52, the Ike folks were focused on a kind of internationalism and international leadership that we tend to associate with the U.S. role in the Cold War.

Right? The U.S. taking a leadership role, being ready to put its blood and treasure on the line. And that was not popular with the base of the Republican Party. Had Ike not won, I think you can say pretty unequivocally, Taft would have won in 1952. Democrats were so unpopular in that moment. The Marshall Plan has everything to do with this. All the, as you say, blood and treasure, the treasure especially, going into creating a whole stability in Europe that many Americans back home, understandably in some cases, you know, having lost, love. ones, et cetera, back in the Pacific and in Europe, don't want to have any part in this. You know, we've had two wars in Europe, enough already. You mentioned the term internationalism. I mean, Eisenhower understandably as international, he spent the entire most of World War II over there figuring out how to win that war. Now he's back home trying to figure out how to preserve that victory. Where does he land with the Marshall Plan as a tool in all of that? So he's an absolute fan of the Marshall Plan. He's a he is for reconstructing. You're

Europe, he has a kind of economic security vision. It sometimes was derided by conservatives as a stomach theory of how the world should rebuild after the Second World War. And the stomach theory basically argued, and we hear this all the way up through his farewell address, which I hope we'll talk about at the end here, that the way to peace and prosperity in the world was to have people's stomachs full, to have them have employment and food and vibrant economies. And so Marshall Plan is a huge part of that, getting the west of Europe. But even all of Europe, he was for extending it to the Soviet Union until they rejected it, although he did not take very strong political stances. So, you know, if I say this sort of thing that sounds declarative, it's because we know it from

his papers, his personal papers, what he says after the fact. Right, the most important thing to know about Ike before 52, before roughly January 52, is he took almost no public political stances in any of his roles. He had this very staunch belief that military officers should be, stay out of politics. And in fact, you have a hard time finding him in the voting roles. You have to really look closely to figure out his party. Many people had no idea what party affiliation he had. So, but just to add a little bit to that. So the Marshall Plan, Reconstruction of Europe, he's for that. He's for committing significant numbers of divisions to Europe. There's some debate going back and forth. George Marshall indicates no more than four. You know, he's willing to have more.

The challenge in the late 40s into the early 50s, once the Korean War starts in late 50, is trying to figure out as well, what if that is a faint by the Russians? And then they're headed towards a poorly equipped, poorly defended Europe. And the U.S. has to backstop that is the thinking of people like Eisenhower. The thing of people like Taft is if they can't defend themselves, you know, the U.S. needs to have its kind of fortress America. It's Gibraltar, rock of Gibraltar, America, as Herbert Hoover put it. And then, so then NATO is another extension of that, right? And that's an important piece. So if you think about the Marshall Plan is the economic commitment to rebuilding. The U.S. divisions there are a theoretically temporary piece of that.

And then the North Atlantic Treaty Organization signed in 1949 is the other piece, right? And it's a binding security commitment that will absolutely guarantee the sovereignty of the member nation states and all other member nation states agree to support anyone who's attacked. Right. So that's critical in collective security. And that, again, is the kind of thing that the farther right conservatives coming out of World War II don't want. They say this is precisely the sort of thing. that would get us into a war against American interests. And the counterpoint from most Democrats and the moderate Republican wing is this is exactly how you prevent the next world war. Exactly.

This is the major theme or one of the major themes of Eisenhower's time in the White House is this internationalism versus isolationism. That which we hear about all day long these days has its roots in Eisenhower 80 years ago or about 75 years ago. But let's, so let's back up now and talk about Eisenhower's origins himself, where he comes from, and we'll get back to the presidency in just a few moments. Raised in Kansas, hometown Abilene, Kansas along the way the family was in Texas and so forth, but they were a deeply religious family, many, many brothers, for one thing, which I wasn't aware of. His mom becomes a Jehovah's Witness. His father, I guess, is an engineer, is that right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

His mother was against him joining the army, but Dwight Eisenhower wanted to go to West Point and did. does very well. Serves in World War I only domestically, to his great chagrin, he does not go abroad, but he develops tank strategy alongside the likes of George Patton. You know, he's very much this modern warfare kind of guy. Then, interestingly, serves between the wars under Douglas MacArthur, and they have a very antagonistic, prickly relationship for the rest of their lives, apparently. He begins World War II as a staff officer, ends it as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. It's an incredible professional leap that this man makes from one thing to the other. It's an astonishing episode unto itself. You know, how did Eisenhower become Eisenhower?

It had everything to do with that moment of taking what he had learned in the trenches of his career and World War I and into this new kind of warfare of World War II. By 1950, he was appointed Supreme Commander of NATO, as we've already mentioned. That sets the table for his run for the presidency in 1952. When he runs for the presidency, 1952, what are politics like in the Republican Party? Harry Truman wanted him to be a Democrat, didn't he? Yeah. So Truman famously, he later says he never said this, but we have good records to indicate that he said that he would help Ike get any office that he held, including the presidency, and that's before the election in 1948. It's pretty clear that both parties had their eyes on Eisenhower to run for the highest office.

There were draft Ike campaigns in 1948 and in 1952. In 48, you had a relatively strong Democratic one as well as a Republican one. In 52, that campaign is run by Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the son of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., who we've talked about in terms of the Spanish-American War and other actions in Massachusetts. Henry Cabot-Lodge Jr. from Massachusetts helps run this draft Ike campaign, and he's the one who famously says and really importantly says that Ike is a Republican and that that. Ike will accept the nomination. This is in January 52 if he gets it. But throughout this process, throughout this period, you can look through the Eisenhower letters. It's really fascinating. He keeps disavowing an interest in politics. He says that he has no interest in holding the highest office. And he actually seems to think that after turning down the possibility of running in 48, he's done. And that he thinks that because of that relative age of the folks who might have won, he thinks that if there had been a Dewey presidency in 48, for instance, Dewey would have run,

and he was a Republican, Tom's Dewey from New York, would have run twice. And after eight years, I couldn't possibly run again and say 56, right? So, but what happens is the unexpected. Truman wins again in 48. And Ike sees the counterpoint of the Taft and more conservative Republicans. and this is where the rubber hits the road. This is the time for the conservative Republicans. Who have now said, you've had your chance moderates.

You've lost again and again. You've lost the FDR. Now you've lost a Truman. You've lost a Truman at a point where he was so unpopular. You know, people joke things like a cow could win against him, right? Farm animals could beat him. But Dewey couldn't, right? And so Taft says, look, I'm the real inheritor of authentic,

sort of Americanist republicanism going back to the, sort of the Taft-McKinley-Rosevelt era, and he's pushing that forward. And he's remarkably similar, in fact, to Eisenhower on his domestic policies. But so how is politics in this moment? Republican Party is riven. The Democratic Party is reeling. The writing on the wall in terms of surveys is that there's just no chance that Democrats are going to win the highest office in 52. And in fact, as you play this out further, it looks very likely that Republicans are going to get both houses of Congress, which they do. How did Eisenhower view the communist threat, which has so much to do with this backdrop.

Yeah, so the point-counterpoint that's interesting in this moment is the Taft and the sort of more thoughtful, are the right Republicans, think that the communist threat is primarily in Asia and that Soviet communism is less likely to expand through Europe than the kind of proponents of big militarist U.S. are articulating. And the primary challenges for the U.S. therefore would be fiscal conservatism and not spending outside of its means. The Eisenhower version is that there is a legitimate communist threat in Eastern Europe. And he looks to the satellites and the places where the government's changed after the Second World War and notes that that's a highly contested area. You're thinking your East Germany's, your Czechoslovakias, your Yugoslavia's, a place where the next

war could be fought. And also looks to Asia in the same way. And one problem for the Truman folks is that the Truman Democrats had a pretty good consensus foreign policy from 46 through 51 on Europe, but not on Asia. And so both Eisenhower and Taft, and many Republicans are saying, look, Truman lost China in 1949 when Mao's forces routed Chiang Kai Shaks and they flee to Taiwan. In 49, that's when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. So this year in 1949 is a really pivotal moment. And you see this divide. And so for Eisenhower, it's a worldwide possible security threat from Russia and communism. For the Taft wing, it's primarily Asia and let the Europeans stand up on their own as best they can. They're not for selling them out per se, but they're not for stationing a lot of troops, spending a lot of money, and definitely not the sort of blood treasure model that I was saying before. So he's beaten Taft in the convention. So that was worked out within the party. Then he wins in a landslide against Adley Stevenson, who's going to look.

who's again and the next one too. But he's really taken power at this point with a big mandate. This is the return of the Republican Party to Washington, D.C., you know, shades of what's happening today in many ways. But I want to mark this moment just to say, before he gets the presidency, interesting, he was the president of Columbia University, which is a kind of awkward phase of his life. But during which time, he actually sort of defines himself, really, by starting this institute, which, was for internationalism. He really wanted to focus on building strong international relations. I just want to mention it because it's important to realize that that's in the face of a lot of people who are saying, ugh, this communism, oh, the World War II, we're turning our backs on this. Eisenhower is the one that says, no, we are part of this world and we're going to keep working

on this in very subtle ways. Don, you're so right. So when he takes the presidency of Columbia, which was unexpected, he says, I have one main goal that I'm going to do. And if you don't let me do it, I'm not going to take the job. I want to start the American Assembly. I want to start a think tank on internationalism that's going to promulgate and sort of advocate for new forms of internationalism, the U.S. world leadership, bring people into government from the think tank, bring in new proposals. You know, he is an unabashed advocate of internationalism. If you listen to some of his speeches, if you, you know, look at some of his wording, he often would be in eloquent, sometimes on purpose, so that people couldn't understand what he was saying. But if you look, as you're, as you're

noting Don, if you look closely, he is for this version of world leadership. And it's the sort of thing that the U.S. is debating today and has, you know, really since the end of the Cold War, you know, how to balance domestic and foreign commitments and what actually advantages the nation in the world. And for him, it's so clear that alliances, partners, U.S. leadership, you know, the expenses will more than generate adequate benefits. And by pulling back, it simply creates a vacuum whereby you have what he was just involved in. He sees Nazi Germany, you know, fascist Italy and the Japanese Empire

as the products of U.S. removal from world leadership. And it's very clear. That's his historical lesson. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. It's also the nuclear age. All of this has happened, of course, under Harry Truman's watch. And so we're suddenly in a brand new world with this incredibly intimidating technology

that we used to think was going to be ours and no one else's, but it's, of course, all over the world now. What was Eisenhower's strategy and how to deal with that reality? So he brings in John Foster Dulles, a secretary of state, and the two of them outline one of the most important kind of nuclear strategies of the Cold War, mutually assured destruction. Mad, everybody knows about it, right? All the listeners will. The idea is that through mutually assured destruction, you can actually move towards eventually some disarmament programs, which you see in the Eisenhower.

years in his negotiations and several summits with Khrushchev after Stalin died. Stalin dies immediately when he comes into office in 1953, which is important. And also important is that immediately at that point, Eisenhower says, has a very famous and important speech about the chance for peace. And it hinges for him on this sort of economic security dimension and also, you know, trying to prevent the nuclear cataclysm. So the mutually assured destruction doctrine requires more long-range bombers, more B-52s in the air, a robust plan to build more weapons. So by the time he leaves office, there's 20,000 nuclear weapons in the combined Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals. Yeah, submarine strategy, the whole thing. Submarine strategy. So it's what becomes the so-called

Trident of Air, Sea, and Undersea for the nuclear umbrella. Do you see the gaming out of a lot of different possibilities, including first strikes? This is in the policy planning. These are highly classified documents. Issues, one of the most famous ones of these was a National Security Council 162-163, which is under him, which is about building up the nuclear posture, but also emphasizing the kind of fiscal conservatism of that, because you don't need as much in the way of armed forces or, you know, that portion of the allocation of defense budgets if you're relying more on nuclear weapons. Right, right. He even threatens, he said to have threatened to use nuclear missiles on China.

in order to end the Korean War. Is that just speculation or did that actually happen? What he often would say, he would use euphemisms very frequently. And I think what you're referring to here is the not taking them off the table kind of language. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty clear when you look at his personal papers diaries, he found absolutely repugnant use of nuclear weapons and his particularly first use. But he, for strategic reasons, and actually Evan Thomas's book, Ix Bluff, talks about this in terms of the card player, expert card player in him. For strategic purposes, he regularly used euphemisms for the use of atomic nuclear weapons in the sense that he hoped that that leverage would therefore give some more capacity for the U.S. to negotiate other aspects of what it wanted,

security commitments, or demobilizing, that sort of thing. So the short answer is yes, and the long answer is it's highly, highly unlikely that Ike would have authorized the use of nuclear weapons. So the mutually assured destruction infers that he realized that no one was going to win this war. He was the one that really figured that out. I mean, not personally, but I mean, he was the president at the time that that is realized as a sort of chess move, right? That this is checkmate for the world as far as we can't even use these weapons unless it's destruction. Yep. It happened on his watch, you could say.

I think the technological developments of his period, the hydrogen bomb then in possession of both. the Soviet Union and the U.S. with roughly 800 times a destructive power of the weapons dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki just meant that it was obvious to him that a large-scale use of nuclear weapons would make the planet virtually uninhabitable and no one could declare victory. If you look at some of these policy planning memos that game out what first strike would look like, you know, 10% of the population left hardly feels like victory, particularly to someone like Ike who engineered the largest amphibious, you know, invasion in world history. And, you know, he did not want to see casualty counts. He would never have allowed it with the casualty counts like 90%. Yeah. So, so that's a, that's a huge part of it. There's also this element that at work in this moment, you mentioned his religiosity. You know, John Foster Dulles was an ecumenist, a very deep believer. You have a moment where the Cold War is being waged partly in the U.S. as a kind of Judeo-Christian set of sensibilities. and there's a real debate about the morality of the dropping the bomb at the end of World War II,

and this inflex lots of the public conversations in this period. Ike prays with Billy Graham, who was in favor of possible U.S. first use because the U.S. was a more morally righteous country. But nevertheless, the kind of moral and ethical set of concerns inflex a lot of how this administration, the Eisenhower administration, thought about nuclear strategy, thought about military strategy, and therefore made them somewhat more circumspect than a kind of secular, strategic, hyperrational logic might have you think. Interesting.

How does this play in Taiwan? I mean, we have taken, you know, we're on the side of Taiwan. We never signed a treaty with him. But he places that under the nuclear umbrella, doesn't he? Yep. Yeah. So the Taiwan Strait, there's two moments of Taiwan Strait significant tension under Eisenhower in the early 50s, not long after he's in the office, 54, 55, and then in 58.

At both times, he pledges a security commitment. you know, he sees it, as we've been talking about a lot, right? You do not betray your allies. These were the U.S.'s allies in the war. These are the U.S. allies coming out of the war. And that pledge should hold. I mean, you know, Eisenhower had, he's the last president born in the 19th century. Yeah. He's, you know, the highest commanding general since the Ulysses S. Grant to hold the presidency. And he has this kind of moral commitment, upright 19th century kind of Victorian sensibility about you, don't go back on your word sort of thing, right? So he's, you know, if you think about some of the arguments later in the Cold War, even about a kind of more transactional sense of supporting dictators

and that sort of thing, for him, it's, it's as simple as the U.S. gave its word to support the territorial integrity of Taiwan as they fled, right, mainland China, and that's it. That's the story, including nuclear security. Right. In our last episode for the president's series, we talked about, of course, Harry Truman. And I was fascinated by the fact that you could really root so much of the modern American political thought in Truman's presidency. You know, it's certainly to do with civil rights. And it really takes a turn towards what we know today. You can root in Eisenhower so much of the status quo, as I mentioned at the top of the show. You know, so much of certainly my generation that we accept as America's role in the world and the

way we view ourselves and our allies and so forth really starts with Eisenhower. And that's important to nail down in this conversation because we're now going to turn towards the domestic policy, which in many ways has contradiction. Of course, contradictions in this. Here we are, you know, creating this entire international policy modeled on Eisenhower's view, certainly, but at home there are these obvious contradictions. And the whole world sees that, just as they now see how we are, you know, sort of double standards going on here. It's a paradox in Ike. I mean, It's the hypocrisy that the U.S. will be dealing with for a long time. We have a superpower that the president presents as a protector for others in the world,

the freedom that they need to enjoy and the protection from their enemies. Meanwhile, at home, not everything is hunky dory, obviously. Absolutely. You know, I think many presidencies cast in sharp belief the domestic foreign divide. And this is a particularly good one. The Eisenhower years because of the actually the opposite, the connection between foreign and domestic, that the cold war really helps to generate the conditions for civil rights and civil rights progress in the U.S. At the same time, the president is pretty

ambivalent. I mean, I think historians are all over the place on their judgments about Ike and civil rights, but what you can say pretty clearly is he's slow. And coming to it slowly, incrementally, has some advantages for the civil rights movement and for Ike, but in terms of posterity, it doesn't necessarily make him look particularly good. It doesn't make him look particularly bad necessarily either. But that connection across the domestic and foreign is really important. You can think about infrastructure. You can think about the highway system.

There are a number of achievements on his watch. He keeps the highest tax bracket at 91%. I think he's the last Republican to have a balanced budget in about 1956. There's a lot to say about his domestic politics. And he does all that in just the first few years because then Congress shifts and he doesn't have the same ability to manipulate things through Republican. but he works bipartisanly. So he actually in some ways has an easier time with Democrats on foreign policy than he does

on Republicans because the Taft wing, while they're slowly, literally dying out, Taft died in 1953, are still there, obstructionists. They want to tie his hands. There's something called the John Bricker, the Bricker Amendment. John Bricker from Ohio tries to tie the hands of the presidency in terms of making treaties. Nevertheless, you know, these Democrats side with him often, but civil rights is the thorn in the side there, right? And this is, as you noted, we're seeing this odd constellation of Southern Republicans and Southern Democrats now coming together to favor segregation.

So we've mentioned it in passing several times there. How does the Cold War affect the civil rights movement? Yes. How are they related? So they are intimately and integrally related. And I think it's really important for people to consider this. So the Brown decision in 1954 actually has a State Department amicus brief, file. as part of it. This is rare. Don't take my word for it. Go read some. Con law. It's rare and it's

highly significant because the State Department and the wings of U.S. government more broadly are trying to wage the Cold War abroad. And the Soviet communism, Soviet propaganda is beating back the U.S. and the third world, the developing world, because they can say definitively with terrible photos and brief captions and stories, you don't even need to know the languages. that the U.S. is a country full of segregation, full of lynching, and not just people of color, but Jewish Americans, right, it looks really bad the kinds of systematic disfranchisement that's going on in the U.S. How is this the avatar of democracy in the world when the nation can't get its domestic house in order? And in fact, if you go slightly beyond Brown, if you think about Little Rock, one of the reasons that Eisenhower doesn't want to succumb to Orville Fobbus and those in Arkansas,

stopping people from going into the school is because of the optics, that it looks so bad to have these so-called obstructionists, as he put it in his speech bringing in the 101st Airborne, that this moment of domestic and foreign is really essential. And the Cold Wars also, so it's State Department amicus brief, the Brown decision, the optics, you know, the terrible images, everything that we know of the civil rights movement. Think about fire hoses and dogs, right? That's in France. That's in Algeria. That's in Brazil. That's in Argentina. that's in North and South Korea. It doesn't look good for the U.S.

And so the other piece of the story is, and there are amazing elements of this, foreign diplomats coming to the U.S., come to segregated Washington, D.C., and segregated Northern Virginia. And as they travel to New York, to the U.N., they get stopped. They can't eat at the same restaurants.

You know, these are heads of state of other countries. You know, you think about what recently happened with Zelensky coming to the White House and being berated. Now imagine hundreds and hundreds of times of that, low-level diplomats and high-level heads of state. It's terrible on the world stage for diplomacy. So even those who are really lukewarm on civil rights in both parties are saying, you know, we at least need to put sweep this under the rug. That's hardly altruistic and wonderful, but that is where they're landing more and more because of the Cold War.

I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Earl Warren was his appointee. Earl Warren becomes the Chief Justice, this becomes the Warren Court that has so much to do with civil rights. Was that intentional him appointing this California ex-governor? Don, I think you know the answer to that one. No. So at the convention in the summer of 52, to secure the delegates from California, the Ike team makes two basic deals. A little known but rising anti-communist by the name of Richard Nixon will become the vice president.

and then a famous governor and beloved son of the state of California, Earl Warren, will get the next Supreme Court opening. Did not know it would be the Chief Justice. And there are some very good little asides that you get in handwritten notes that Ike wasn't particularly happy that that way went that direction, but didn't know, you know, could not possibly know what decisions would come under the Warren Court. But of the really fascinating counterfactuals of this moment, if Ike hadn't won, you wouldn't have Nixon in the same way. You wouldn't have the war in court in the same way. You might have had a Taft presidency and a MacArthur vice presidency and Taft died in 53. I mean, it's just really this inflection point of 1952 and the way that the Cold War is waged domestically and internationally under Eisenhower. It's fascinating and critically important to understand this moment because it shapes really the next several generations.

Yeah. So Brown versus Board of Education is the 1954 decision to desegregate schools throughout the South. but it's specific to Kansas. And Little Rock comes next. I just want to establish that Ike was not seeing this come as a result of his presidency. He didn't run on this platform, not in the first term or the second, right? He's really poorly versed in politics, frankly. You know, if you look, his aides and advisors in the campaign of 52 are trying to get him more information.

He hasn't been focused on policymaking and politics, you know, international security questions, economic aid abroad. That's his bailiwick. So civil rights questions weren't really on his horizon. And he had a kind of naive sense that the American people would do the right thing, that in the end that it would sort itself out. And so ignominiously, one of the things he says after the Brown decision in 54 to desegregate the schools, is that it might have set back, quote, race relations up to 15 years. That's his quick take on what's going on.

And then he slowly sees what's called massive resistance in the South. A lot of southern states, the southern leaders come together, and they reject the Supreme Court's edicts. So in 1955, you get so-called Brown Decision 2, which says that it must be, that segregation in the public schools must be ended and desegregation and integration happen with, quote, all deliberate speed. So it's 55. Then also you see Rosa Parks, the Montgomery bus boycotts, Martin Luther King, Jr. Some of these folks are now coming to the White House. Ike is open to having, you know, major black leaders in the civil rights movement come to the White House. And then it's 57 that you see this really stark blast of states' rights absolutism in the face of the Supreme Court.

And for Eisenhower, he slowly moves, hoping that the figures in the state of Arkansas, so basically the central high school there told that it has to desegregate Orville Fobos, the governor, brings in the National Guard or his own National Guard troops and forcibly keeps the kids out who are supposed to desegregate the school by integrating into the school. Obstructionist mobs, many of you are listening have probably seen photos of this, spit on the students, you know, yell in their faces. It's pretty horrible what you see happening. Eisenhower increasingly becomes incensed. And slowly, but surely, he's on vacation, actually, in Newport, Rhode Island. There's a whole series of letters of his, which is interesting.

I won't come back to D.C. I'm always working. It's fine. If I come back, it will be as if this is a huge crisis. and then slowly over the course of about a month, he decided, oh, it is actually a big crisis. I'm going to have to come back to D.C. I'm going to have to give a major speech, which he does on September 24th, 57. And he says, I'm sending in the 101st Airborne. They're going to make sure that the Supreme Court's rulings are upheld. And he goes through a very long, it's a very long, like it's a brief history of the civil rights movement in that moment in this speech. It's televised at 9 p.m. to everyone. Some people think as many 60 million citizens watched it. And he cites that the Supreme Court has said that compulsory segregation laws are unconstitutional. This is the law of the land.

He even says very explicitly, our personal opinions about this have no bearing on the matter of enforcement. I don't care if you're a segregationist white southerner. You have to enforce this, whether you're a sheriff or the governor. And he goes through and he sends them in. And he also then says this, you know, as I said, a sort of naive hopefulness. I know the South. I've lived in the South. I've served with Southerners. They don't believe this either. You know, a little bit, that's presidential rhetoric. That's aspirational logic. But, you know, the way that historians tend to talk about this is you don't, Ike's view is you don't upset the apple cart of the direct commands down the chain of command. And when that happens, that's the time that a leader steps up.

In a sense, there's a perfect, being a general or former general is the perfect metaphor for his presidency and that he deals with the battlefield ahead of him and the tactics that he changes are all about, you know, how to win this battle in the long run based on the factors at hand. Eisenhower is often chalked up as a sort of a bit listless in his presidency. He's sort of taken it as it comes. But in fact, he's really reacting very strongly. I mean, in the end, he does the right things in the face of these challenges. He does. You know, there's another historical marker here. For the first time since Reconstruction, he passes a Civil Rights Act in 1957. He signs it. He helps push for it. He says, clearly there's a need, right? It's not all him.

And against virtually no Democrats support that, it still gets it through, even though, you know, the Congress is largely in Democratic hands. He's able to see the light, even though it took a while. And that sort of executive general sensibility, plus his real American exceptionalism, his belief that Americans could be better than they are and are the best around. You know, this hubris actually operates in his favor in this way of thinking. People will integrate. They will understand. And he saw that in the Army.

And he's, you know, he's so integration in the Army is one of his major kind of data points there. It works. We can all come together. We can fight a common foe. He's also dealing with heavy duty health problems. I mean, he has a bad heart and he's had several heart attacks and people think he should resign because of this. I mean, he's really dealing with mortality.

I want to skip to the end of his presidency in which he makes a very famous speech, his farewell speech. I mean, but before we get there, I just want to underscore what we're saying before. He's often dealing with the Pandora's box of the things he opens. And certainly the military industrial complex is opened, is the box that he opens in his presidency with this massive buildup and all the new forms of nuclear warfare. Suddenly he turns to this all back to the American people and says, watch out. something's going on here you need to know about. He does. You are so right.

So what I often say is that Eisenhower presided over the building of the military industrial complex and then in his latter years of his presidency and then culminating in the farewell address, he gets skeptical about it and then warns about it. If you think about that even longer trajectory from his time in the military, particularly in the Second World War, up until he leaves office in January 61, that is the rise of the U.S. Armaments industry and the military industrial complex. So he's seen it all through. And in fact, he line item vetoes, you know, Pentagon budgets and other items saying, you don't need that. You know, you're, I know better than anybody because I was the commanding general, the Supreme Commander for D-Day. So he has a good sense of that. And, you know, it's in his papers, one of the things that you see and one something I've been writing about is even late 58, early 59, he was working with his brother Milton and some other folks thinking about this military industrial complex or the armaments industry or the, or the, you know, the, intersection of big business in the U.S. and armaments as a kind of permanent establishment that

was new and needed to be checked. There's a few other elements of this story that are important, too. Eisenhower tries to veto a bill, does veto a bill, that he mostly agrees with because special interests in the oil industry have pushed it forward. It's sort of this template legislation that we now see a lot in the U.S. And he thinks that's the wrong way to go, that the special interest shouldn't dictate what the legislation is, even if it's stuff that he thinks is useful. and good deregulation or, you know, advancing American business interests in general. And he was very pro-business. In fact, most of his administration is staffed by business leaders.

It's a lot like the 20s and 30s, except most of those folks have changed in their social views. They accept the welfare state in some form. They accept the sort of new elements of the New Deal, even if they don't agree with it all. And the problem is that that's now created this huge government expenditure infrastructure and an enormous piece of that, especially in states like California that are growing, is the military industrial complex, which this new middle class, which is where we started, the new rising middle class, former GIs finally went to college, white picket fence, bought a suburban home. They don't want to end the military industrial complex. There's three and a half million

or so people by 1960 are directly employed in that industry. And they don't see it as government-led spending. They see it as sort of R&D and society and these important elements of business. They're not thinking of it in the way that Ike does. Yeah. So what is the actual farewell address? And when does it happen? So it happens in January 17th, 61, and it's really short, about 10 minutes. I played in class all the time. And he's often credited with coining the term military industrial complex.

And Eisenhower says, you know, I'm finally setting aside the trappings of a whole lifetime of service, the military, now the presidency. And I need to tell you about this sort of this burgeoning problem in American life. We've got a permanent arms industry. We've got a scientific technological elite that's running this thing. they're intersecting with sort of special interests. And a lot of scholars have said that this fits well with something I mentioned earlier, that the beginning of his presidency in 53, after Stalin dies,

he holds out this big hope for a chance for peace. And he's arguing for more focus on the sort of bread and butter issues. And by this point in 61, he's saying, you know, maybe we've gone too far with building up the nuclear umbrella, with building up the, you know, intercontinental ballistic missiles, with now the satellites and the space race and all sorts of, of other elements of the arms race. So as he decries all of that, and as he's built it up, you also see this pivot. As you said, he's older. He certainly looks like he's aged in office, as they all do. But this is the last moment of his presidency. And then within moments, it's the

JFK first inaugural. And he announces the new frontier. And it's kind of youth movement. And he brings in all these whiz kids from all over, from elite universities. They're kind of the scientific, technocratic elite, right? But the young one. And so there's a, it's a fascinating point, counterpoint at the end of his presidency. Kind of there's a youth movement and a changing of the guard, but they have not clearly taken on the warnings. In fact, the new frontier is about going to space and a whole other level of military industrial complex. I've always wondered. I mean, one of the interesting facts I've learned during this podcast series was how little America believed in a standing army, you know,

for most of its history. And certainly Dwight Eisenhower enters into the army during World War I, around World War I, when that mentality is still in place. You know, we raise an army to fight a war, but we don't live with an army amongst us. That's kind of what he's responding to with the military industrial complex. It's here. It's stuck with us. They're now controlling a lot more than we hope that they would or we plan that they would. It's now 40% at his time of global spending is on military.

It's just a brand new fact of life everywhere, thanks to this international alliance. Does he think that there's a solution to this in the farewell address? Well, oh, that's great. He doesn't give us a full solution. No. You know, it's worth quoting from it. So I'll pull it up for a second. So he says that it's the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry that is the new, that is new in the American experience.

Total influences economic, political, even spiritual and it's felt everywhere. State houses, federal offices, all over the place, right? And he recognizes the imperative of it, right, of this development. But the problem is that people aren't comprehending its, quote, grave implications. It's now structuring American society. It's sort of the Cold War state as garrison state. Or some people, some historians call it the warfare state. That this is now, the old injunctions against the standing military are gone. But for him, it's about not taking this process lightly, not letting those influences over, those influences from the military industrial complex take over government. I think that spiritual piece is really important to him. He presides over in his presidency, and these are really fascinating things. The putting under God in the pledge in 1954, under God as the national motto, pushes through it on all currency. And he's the first president to open his inaugural with a prayer. He famously says, I don't care what you believe, but America is a country of believers. So it's sort of faith-based presidency. And I think this spiritual element is really important to him.

Because in waging and winning the Cold War for Eisenhower, it's about ideology, it's about faith. You know, you can add in the civil rights dimension, it's about coming together as a people. And the problem of the military industrial complex is that it's inherently exclusionary. It's about one piece growing. It's about an us and a them. So it perpetuates the conflict. He's worried about that in disarmament, which he does very much believe in. Adams for peace was something that he coined.

He's pushing disarmament with Khrushchev. He opens skies is a strategic program that he starts so that you can have overflight surveillance so the countries can know what could, you know, Russia and the U.S. can know what kind of weapons they're putting out there. So, you know, if you add all that together, what's the model, what's the, how does this move forward? You know, one of the quotes that stands out and that's the speech is that we must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. And I think he sees, you know, the writing on the wall of perhaps a military industrial complex gets the U.S. into a war. Yes. Or makes the expenditure so much that they're an albatross around the knack of the nation state. And some ways you see some of that today, right? But meanwhile, his presidency ends with the Bay of Pigs. You know, that's, he sets up a lot with all of that in Vietnam and all the rest of us going on. It's extraordinary. We are skipping through so many things as we always do on these presidential episodes, Hungary, for one thing, 1956. There's many, many episodes. We'll come back to, I'm sure.

Iran, Guatemala. Oh, yeah, those things, too. But we must stop. Chris Nichols is a professor of history and the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Ohio University. Tell us about your new book coming up. I'm writing a book about the election 52. It will come as no surprise to listeners here, beginning with how did Eisenhower get into the election and Robert Taft, what were his views, domestic and foreign, and then talking about Ike in the White House and the transformation of domestic and foreign policy. The argument essentially is that 52 is this pivotal moment, as we've been explaining here, that really sets the key components of U.S. Cold War foreign policy and also establishes a new set of domestic policies that are kind of generational in their implications.

Chris, thanks a lot. Nice to see you. Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed this episode of American History Hit. Please remember to like, review, and subscribe. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And I'll see you next time.