Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 166

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s, William I Hitchcock:




Although to contemporary viewers the Checkers speech appears saccharine and insincere, colored by Nixon’s wounded pride and class resentment, at the time it was hailed as an honest and, above all, gutsy demonstration. The New York Times ran a digest of editorial opinion from the nation’s newspapers on September 25, in which the speech was seen as “a smash hit,” and Nixon was described as “honest” and “sympathetic.” The Los Angeles Times, which had backed Nixon from the start, declared him “an adversary of evil and a champion of right.” The Dallas Morning News even styled him “the sort of he-man who has made this country what it is.”

Hundreds of thousands of telegrams flooded into the Republican National Headquarters calling for Nixon to stay on the ticket. His painstaking assessment of his debts and his modest income, combined with his antagonism toward liberal elites, resonated with millions of viewers. Nixon revealed an uncanny ability to identify with the financial insecurities and ideological anxieties of the American Everyman—who wanted to see him rewarded. There was no way to dump a fighter like Nixon. For once, Eisenhower had been outmaneuvered. “You’re my boy,” Ike told him when they met the next evening in Wheeling, but Eisenhower’s big grin hid the menace of that remark.

Nixon had saved his skin and his career. But at what cost? Ever after, Ike would treat him with suspicion and a certain disdain. Nixon’s failure to fall on his sword, his public pleading, his naked ambition, his almost painful self-exposure on television—all this repelled the proud Eisenhower. He could admire the way Nixon had fought for survival. But he could never trust him.

For Eisenhower religious faith was the single most important distinction between the free world and the communist world. The Soviet bloc was a monstrous tyranny that sneered at spirituality. Americans, by contrast, held to the belief that every individual was God’s creation. Human rights were therefore divine and not to be trampled underfoot by an all-powerful government. Eisenhower never tired of repeating his fundamental belief that democracy, which empowered individuals to govern themselves, offered the only form of government that could fulfill God’s purpose on Earth. If the cold war was to be won, spiritual power would be every bit as important, Eisenhower believed, as material and military might.

In the demonology of the cold war, the first few years of the Eisenhower administration hold an especially prominent place. It was then that two major CIA covert operations—in Iran and Guatemala—were launched, in addition to numerous smaller acts of subversion against communist-leaning countries. But these two covert actions, reprehensible and damaging as they were, tend to obscure our perception of the larger canvas. The CIA was more than just a cabal of putschists. In fact the CIA became an incubator for a much wider and arguably more consequential set of ideas and innovations about how America could use its power—its intellectual, scientific, military, economic, and moral power—to defeat communism everywhere in the world. The coups in Iran and Guatemala were symptoms of a larger pathology, namely, the delegation by the American president and Congress of enormous power and resources to a largely unaccountable and opaque agency to conduct a range of subversive and violent operations against the nation’s enemies. Here, in the story of the growth of the CIA, is the most striking evidence that Eisenhower, who warned later generations about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, did so much to build it.