Who likes Ike? Well, nobody, really, Harold Lavine suggests here—except only the voters, with whom Eisenhower is still at least as popular as he was last November. Mr. Lavine, associate editor of Newsweek, analyzes the difficulties and internal strains that have faced the Eisenhower administration so far, recounting not only the errors made but the lessons learned. This is the third in a series of appraisals of the American political climate, since the Eisenhower revolution, which seasoned analysts of various shades of political belief are contributing to our pages. Preceding articles have been Robert Bendiner’s “The Liberals’ Political Road Back” (May 1953) and A. H. Raskin’ “The Outlook for Labor Under Eisenhower” (April 1953). In an early issue, J. K. Galbraith will write on Eisenhower and the Conservative Revolution, with special reference to economic policy.
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Hardly anyone still likes Ike, except the voters. For what they’re worth the public opinion polls all insist that Dwight D. Eisenhower is even more popular right now than he was on Election Day. On May 20, George Gallup reported that 74 per cent of the men and women his pollsters had questioned approved of the President; two weeks later, on June 3, he went further: only 16 per cent had any criticism to make of anything the President had done. That anyone could have attained such perfection in the minds of the voters may sound incredible; yet on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats alike believe that Dr. Gallup’s figures are probably right; many Democrats, in fact, are seriously considering the possibility of running for reelection next year with the slogan: “Ike needs more Democrats in Congress to carry out his program.”
Mr. Eisenhower’s popularity is all the more astonishing because among the politically minded—and especially in Washington—the Eisenhower administration generally is considered a bitter joke. The cries of disaster echo down the corridors of the Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department—almost everywhere one goes, except of course the White House. Washington correspondents usually are fence-sitters on principle; holding a strong opinion is a luxury that few feel they can afford, since they must stay on friendly terms with everyone. Yet the National Press Club bar, where the correspondents congregate, has now become a wailing wall. If the overwhelming majority of the voters approve of the Eisenhower administration, the overwhelming majority of the men who write the stories and newscasts on which the voters base their views disapprove. One of the most widely syndicated of the Washington columnists customarily refers to Mr. Eisenhower himself as “that pot of military mush.”
On the Hill, the Democrats in general and the New Dealers in particular, who stand foursquare on the principle that any Republican administration is a national calamity, naturally are gloating now, “We told you so.” The New Dealers are full of dire predictions that Mr. Eisenhower eventually will turn all the federal government’s lands and resources into a great big grab-bag for private industry; that not a law for regulating industry will be enforced; that not a dam or power line will be constructed. They consider it only a matter of time before the Smoot-Hawley tariff law is resurrected. They profess to fear that, in order to balance the budget and reduce taxes, the Republicans will gradually emasculate the nation’s armed forces and destroy the foreign-aid program. As they watch farm prices sag and interest rates climb, they dourly foresee another great depression.
The attitude of the Democrats is such a mixed one it sometimes borders on the neurotic. Hearing the reports from back home about Mr. Eisenhower’s popularity with the voters, they are almost convinced they’ll never return to power unless their predictions of disaster come true; consequently, as professional politicians, they can’t help feeling a certain satisfaction whenever cattle prices drop another cent. On the other hand, as Americans, they can’t help wanting the Eisenhower administration to succeed.
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By And large, the Republicans in Congress are only a little more pleased about the Eisenhower administration. The small band of liberal-minded, internationalist Republicans—the men who were known as “Eisenhower Republicans” long before his return from Europe—naturally expected to come into their own when he moved into the White House; instead, they have seen their influence steadily dwindle. Nor is the Republican right wing too happy. If the Democrats, New Dealers, and “Eisenhower Republicans” can point to a dozen compromises that Mr. Eisenhower has made with liberal Republican principles, the right-wing Republicans can point to scores that Mr. Eisenhower has made with the Republican platform, starting with his failure to repudiate the Yalta agreement. The more extreme right-wingers put it quite simply: “We’re against socialism, whether it’s Democratic socialism or Republican socialism.” And every right-winger is anguished by the failure to balance the budget and cut taxes.
At the Pentagon, the anti-administration feeling is particularly intense. The admirals and generals are less disturbed by what the administration has been doing than by what they fear it still will do. One reason is that neither Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson nor his assistant Roger M. Kyes have made any secret of their conviction that most of the admirals and generals are incompetent to plan a defense program or even comment on one. Another is that former Defense Secretary Louis Johnson made everyone in the Pentagon allergic to dissertations on how this nation’s greatest security lies in her economic system. The Johnson concept, which Wilson and Kyes share, found the United States a second-rate military power when the Korean war broke out; there was a bad moment, in fact, when the North Korean army seemed capable of driving the United States army into the Sea of Japan.
Nor do the Pentagon brass have too much faith in Mr. Eisenhower himself. No Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps officer ever could put full trust in a former five-star army general; the rivalries between the services are too intense for that. Moreover, although this is not widely realized, Mr. Eisenhower was not a popular chief of staff; a chief of staff must be a bear for detail, and Mr. Eisenhower dislikes detail.
The aspect of the Eisenhower administration that creates the most heat in Washington is the President’s failure to isolate and destroy Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Among the New Dealers and liberal Republicans (and this is true even in the White House), Senator McCarthy has become an obsession. The New Dealers seem to consider him the secret ruler of the United States government, bent on driving the nation to fascism; and the liberal Republicans are convinced that he plans to wreck the Eisenhower administration so that he can grab the Republican Presidential nomination for himself in 1956. In government agencies, McCarthy is the Devil incarnate; rightly or wrongly, government workers insist that, in drawing up new security regulations satisfactory to McCarthy, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. opened the way to destruction of the civil service. Morale is particularly bad in the State Department, which has been McCarthy’s principal target. And there is burning resentment in the Foreign Service over the failure of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to protect career officers against his attacks.
How explain this disparity between the anti-administration feeling among the politically minded and professionals and Mr. Eisenhower’s overwhelming popularity with the ordinary voters?
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The first and, perhaps, the principal explanation is one that was completely obscured by the premeditated passion of the Presidential campaign: hardly anyone ever liked Ike, once he started running for the Republican nomination, except the voters. The Democratic politicians favored Mr. Eisenhower only as long as they believed he was a Democrat; the New Dealers only while they harbored the delusion that he was a New Dealer. The Washington correspondents started turning against him the moment he revealed that he was a mortal, and not the deity they had been depicting. And the vast majority of professional Republican politicians never had much use for him; they accepted him as the Republican candidate reluctantly—and with many misgivings—only because they rightly suspected that most of the voters liked him.
None of these groups ever expected Mr. Eisenhower to run an administration they could approve of; if they are griping now, it’s because they haven’t been disappointed.
Nor have the voters been disappointed. New Dealers, of course, will insist that by and large the voters didn’t know what they were doing when they voted for Mr. Eisenhower, because they had been so completely hoodwinked by a campaign of deception plotted in the offices of Time, Life, and Fortune, and Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn; and they will add that, if the voters now seem satisfied with Mr. Eisenhower, that is only because the Luce publications and B., B., D. & O. have succeeded in continuing to keep them hoodwinked. To those who oppose the administration from the left, this is, unquestionably, a satisfying theory—but it does not accord with the facts.
Actually, the American people did not vote for the rhetoric of Mr. Eisenhower’s Time-Life-Fortune speech writers, nor for the pyrotechnics of B., B., D. & O. Nor did they, as most of Mr. Eisenhower’s rightwing critics maintain, vote for the Republican platform. They voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man.
He seemed a man they could trust. For that is Mr. Eisenhower’s most striking personal quality; whether justifiably or not, he inspires trust. He manages to project a feeling of utter sincerity that can make his worst banalities sound like the Sermon on the Mount. And what did he promise during the campaign? He promised to run a middle-of-the-road administration that would neither turn backward toward “Hooverism” nor race toward “socialism.” He promised to rid the government of Communists and fellow-travelers without endangering civil liberties. He promised to end inflation by balancing the budget, and eventually to reduce taxes. He promised a clean government and an efficient one; a foreign policy that not only would halt Communist aggression but that also would liberate the satellites. Most important of all, perhaps, he promised to find a way out of the blind alley in Korea.
That wasn’t a program to satisfy either the Chicago Tribune or the New York Post, but it was precisely what the American people wanted. And, believing in Mr. Eisenhower, they believed implicitly that he would do his best to carry it out.
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Mr. Eisenhower remains popular because the American people haven’t changed: they still believe in his program, and they still trust him to carry it out. For what has the President done actually to undermine that faith? Take Korea, perhaps the principal issue of the campaign: Senator William F. Knowland may consider the cease-fire a betrayal of Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek; George E. Sokolsky may predict that it will make the entire country Communist in a year. The average American who voted for Mr. Eisenhower did so because he wanted the war over with. While Knowland talks and Sokolsky writes, he cheers Ike.
Or take tidelands oil: there was moaning among Americans for Democratic Action when the President signed the tidelands oil bill, but, certainly, no one who voted for him could have shared ADA’s grief. During the campaign, Mr. Eisenhower had made it crystal-clear what his views were on the issue. Nor is there any reason to believe, as the New Dealers insist, that if the voters supported Mr. Eisenhower’s views, it was only because of lying propaganda.
Granting, however, that Mr. Eisenhower thus far has done nothing to undermine the average faith in him, the question still remains: is that faith justified? To say that no one listens to Knowland’s and Sokolsky’s dire predictions does not necessarily mean Knowland and Sokolsky are wrong. Wisdom is not always with the majority; the British cheered Chamberlain, and the French Daladier, when they returned from Munich bringing “peace in our time.” Nor are the New Dealers necessarily wrong about tidelands oil simply because they were defeated at the polls; there have been Republican giveaway programs before, including one called Teapot Dome.
Moreover, it must be recognized that Mr. Eisenhower during his first six months in office actually was riding on the momentum of twenty years of the New Deal. He took over a government which, in spite of the Republican campaign orators, was a going concern. Whether or not the economy was fundamentally sound is a question that New Dealers and Republicans can argue endlessly; the fact remains that it created 62 million jobs and put money in 155 million pockets. Regardless of the virtues and defects of the Truman foreign policy, it still was a policy, and it was working well enough so that Mr. Eisenhower could take his time about figuring out a substitute. The defense program might have been wasteful and inefficient, but planes and tanks were coming off the assembly lines; there was such a backlog of appropriations that Wilson could argue that cutting the 1954 budget wouldn’t affect the flow of arms.
However, the Eisenhower administration obviously cannot live on the momentum of the New Deal forever. Already, new problems are arising that will require new answers. The Eisenhower administration is not responsible for the drop in farm prices which began under Harry S. Truman, but if the decline continues the Eisenhower administration will have to figure out some way of stopping it—or else risk a farm depression. Nor can Mr. Eisenhower count on the nation’s general prosperity to last forever. Overseas, the conditions which created Truman’s foreign policy already are ceasing to exist. Mr. Eisenhower inherited a ready-made cease-fire plan from Truman, but now the problem of a political settlement in Korea—and perhaps a general settlement in the Far East—faces him. The death of Joseph Stalin brought a change in Soviet Russian tactics. It was Soviet intransigence that made the whole Western defense structure politically possible; with the Soviets now talking like relatively reasonable men—and the Europeans swooning before them like bobbysoxers—how long can this structure continue?
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The brutal fact, which even members of Mr. Eisenhower’s inner circle will now privately admit, is that when he took office in January neither he nor the members of his Cabinet were competent to work out a program or get it through Congress. For one thing, they harbored a fundamental misconception of how the government operates. They believed literally in all the grade school maxims about the sharp division between the powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. A good administration, they held, was one which could get all three branches working together in harmony. “Team” was a standard word in all their conversations. Like sixth-grade civics teachers, they repeated over and over again, “Congress passes the laws, and the President only executes them.” They actually seemed to feel that a President had no responsibility with respect to legislation except to say what he thought it should be. Having said his say, he could then go off fishing and leave the rest to Congress. Similarly, as members of the executive branch, they assumed that Congress, having passed the legislation under which they were to work, would then keep hands off them.
Allied with this was an incredible naivety about the nature of the two-party system. Again, the word that Mr. Eisenhower constantly used to describe the Republican party was “team.” He realized that certain differences of opinion existed within the Republican party, but the basic fact that both the Republican and Democratic parties were really coalitions seemed to escape him. That a Republican could actually be more opposed to his policies and more intractable than a Democrat was as inconceivable to him as that a West Point fullback could deliberately fumble the ball to let Navy win. Most important of all, the Eisenhower administration suffered from a delusion which invariably infects the minority party until it becomes the majority—the delusion that any difficulties that the United States may have got into were simply the result of incompetence, stupidity, venality, and, perhaps, treason in high places. Vastly oversimplified, the administration’s thinking went something like this: the budget has grown tremendously because the Truman administration was full of crooks who robbed the people blind; taxes are high because these New Dealers believe in high taxes and hate widows and orphans; the war in Korea has reached a stalemate because, for some mysterious reason, Dean Acheson didn’t want to win it; the Communists rule China because Owen Lattimore had a desk in the State Department; Poland is a Soviet satellite because Franklin D. Roosevelt was senile and dying when he went to Yalta and, besides, he was a tool of Alger Hiss.
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The Eisenhower administration has since learned better. Mr. Eisenhower’s education, in fact, started even before his inauguration. Fulfilling a campaign promise, he went to Korea and there found himself facing the same dilemma that had baffled Truman: the stalemate could be broken, but it would take more troops, more guns, more tanks, more planes, more ships—and, especially, more casualties. Nor would reaching the Yalu mean victory: as long as the mainland of China remained unconquered, all the United Nations would have achieved was a new stalemate along a longer line, pinning down more troops. To attack the Chinese mainland meant to risk a third world war—without allies and a continent away from the real enemy, Soviet Russia.
Confronted with these facts, Mr. Eisenhower reached the same conclusion Truman had—to continue the stalemate and work for a cease-fire based on the Indian proposal.
The second step in the Eisenhower administration’s education came with the attempt to repudiate Yalta. That didn’t prove as simple a problem as Mr. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, had thought, either. For, as they quickly discovered, Yalta wasn’t a surrender; it was a contract, arrived at, like all contracts, after bargaining. The Communists may have proved better bargainers than Roosevelt, but they had made concessions, too.
However, the most important lesson the Eisenhower administration learned was how the United States government and the two-party system really operate. Congress and the executive just don’t work as a team. They are constantly contending for power, and if one fights while the other keeps appeasing it, the latter will soon become a prisoner of the former. In his innocence, for example, Dulles thought he could gain the cooperation of Senator McCarthy by making McCarthy’s trusted friend, Scott McCleod, his chief security officer. What he actually succeeded in doing was to give McCarthy veto power over second-string State Department appointments, and second, to whet his appetite for more power.
The first few months of the Eisenhower administration were punctuated by similar concessions to Congress, all designed to gain “cooperation.” And they all had the same result: every concession simply led to demands by Congress for more power over the executive branch. The President finally got his back up when Senate Republicans decided to attach a rider to a minor appropriations bill under which the United States would automatically cut off appropriations for the United Nations if the UN voted to admit Red China. He suddenly realized that what Congress really wanted was to usurp his Constitutional power to conduct foreign policy, and that, unless the concessions to Congress stopped, the United States would become another France, with the government run not by three coordinate branches, but by the legislature alone—with the President an amiable figurehead.
Mr. Eisenhower had a similar experience when he attempted to carry out his campaign promise to balance the budget, halt inflation, and cut taxes without endangering the national defense. After examining the Truman budget, he realized that it didn’t have enough fat to make a balanced budget possible immediately, but he decided that he could make a start toward a balanced budget by taking a calculated risk in defense expenditures. Suddenly, he found the whole success of his plan endangered by a determined old man on Capitol Hill, Representative Daniel A. Reed, who insisted on cutting taxes at once.
Again, the absurdity of the civics textbook maxims became apparent. If the President kept hands off Congress, the Reed tax cuts would go through. Then a balanced budget now or later would become absolutely out of the question without destroying the whole defense program. The idea that “Congress passes the laws, and the President only executes them,” if followed literally meant abdicating as Chief Executive.
For just as a political party in the United States is not a party in the European sense, but a coalition, so a President of the United States is not merely the leader of his own party, but the leader of a coalition of voters (and cooperating leaders) in both parties, as well. Roosevelt could never have put his program through by relying on the Democrats alone. He was successful only when he could rally enough Republican voters behind his program to give him a majority of all the people. The right-wing opposition to Mr. Eisenhower within the GOP made him realize the necessity of following Roosevelt’s course in reverse.
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By June, Mr. Eisenhower had pretty much abandoned the misconceptions he brought into the White House with him. He not only accepted the necessity of taking an active part in the legislative process; he realized, further, that in doing so he would have to exert his leadership over the Republican party. His strength as leader came, of course, from his widespread popularity with the voters. And like Roosevelt, who had the same strength, he began to appeal over the heads of the Republicans in Congress and put his case before the voters.
Mr. Eisenhower’s first objective was his defense budget. The Air Force, which had been cut the most, was fighting to have the cuts restored. Mr. Eisenhower went on the air to assure the American people that he believed the defense budget would not endanger the nation, and then he made a five-state swing to say the same thing. And that just about ended the battle of the budget. As one Senator put it, “I’m still sure the budget is inadequate, but who am I to argue with the hero of World War ID”
It seems, in fact, despite his early bumbling, that Mr. Eisenhower has learned to act like a President. He has learned that he must fight for what he believes, and that when he does fight the odds are with him: given his popularity, the majority of Democrats and Republicans in Congress usually will yield to his wishes.
One of his problems is that many of his Cabinet members haven’t yet learned to act like Cabinet members. They have essentially a different problem. Unlike the President, they were never elected to anything. They can’t count on voter support. Thus, they have to rely on persuasion to get Congress to let them operate their departments the way they want to.
This requires skill. It can’t be done by constantly ducking for cover whenever Congress opens its mouth, which has been the Dulles technique. Nor will arrogance work. Wilson tried it: first, when his appointment came up for confirmation, and again when the Senate Armed Services Committee started considering the defense budget. The Senators beat his ears down both times, and when he appeared before them again he was a changed man—and a more effective one.
Wilson’s troubles have arisen from the fact that he persists in thinking of the United States government as simply a bigger business. The first time he appeared before the Armed Services Committee, a Republican complained: “He keeps treating us like members of his board of directors.” And, in fact, he constantly gave the impression that he was saying to himself: “Why should people like you have the right to cross-examine me? You’re just a bunch of $15,000-a-year men. I hire and fire people like you every day in the week.” Later, his attitude toward his new job was that it didn’t differ greatly from his old one at General Motors; it was strictly a production job, only bigger. In fact, he told his predecessor, Robert A. Lovett, as much. “I take it this job is 95 per cent production and 5 per cent that other stuff,” he said. And Lovett quietly replied: “No, it’s 95 per cent that other stuff and 5 per cent production.”
Like Wilson, most of Mr. Eisenhower’s aides formerly were big businessmen, for Mr. Eisenhower shared the professional soldier’s traditional veneration for big businessmen. They knew how to run things; they could get things done. As a result, several other members of the Cabinet have run into the same difficulties as Wilson. Quickest to learn how to operate in the government, perhaps, was Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, but Secretary of Agriculture Elmer Benson had an early lesson, too. Benson had very definite ideas about the New Deal program of farm subsidies; he was against them. And, perhaps, from the standpoint of pure economic theory he was right. As a practical matter, that didn’t make a bit of difference. Few farmers are professors of economics, but every farmer can write his Congressman and every farmer can vote. Benson was finally forced to run for cover, taking his theories about free farm enterprise with him.
By now Mr. Eisenhower has lost some of his uncritical admiration for big businessmen. At the same time his respect for professional politicians has grown. As a soldier, he thought politicians a grubby lot; as President, he realizes they are specialists in government as much as big businessmen are specialists in production. A Senator Robert A. Taft may not know how to set up a tank assembly line, but he can get a bill passed.
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The odds are that, sooner or later, several of the present members of the Cabinet will go. That happens in the course of every administration. Roosevelt’s first team was succeeded by a second, a third, and a fourth. Meanwhile, the changing national and world scene will have forced the Eisenhower administration to come to grips with the really difficult problem—developing a foreign and domestic program. No one could have predicted the New Deal from Roosevelt’s campaign speeches: he was a balance-the-budget man. Nor could anyone have predicted from Truman’s background as a border-state Democrat that he would turn left in the White House, too. It’s not at all unlikely that Mr. Eisenhower will follow the course that Roosevelt and Truman took. He, too, is a pragmatist. Faced with a set of circumstances, he, too, is inclined to dump theory. At a recent press conference, for example, he was asked whether buying up surplus butter to maintain the price accorded with his ideas of free enterprise. His answer was a long and involved one, but he ended by saying that, after all, the butter-surplus program had succeeded in stabilizing the dairy industry at not too great a cost; in effect, what he said was: Why talk about free enterprise? The program works.
In adjusting himself to changing conditions, the President does have this in his favor: in the past six months, he seemingly has managed to liberate himself from many of his preconceptions. And, unlike Truman, he never was the prisoner of twenty years of accumulated suspicion and distrust. As long as hardly anyone continues to like Ike, except the voters, he will have a free hand.
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