Dreaming of the Eisenhower Years

By LANCE MORROW

Ronald Reagan preaches "a New Beginning," but Americans trying to envision his Administration sometimes find their minds drifting back to the 1950s. Ike, they tell themselves. Maybe, if he won, Ronald Reagan would turn into a kind of Eisenhower. Or at any rate, maybe the effect would be the same: a long quiescence, an essentially sane and minimalist White House presiding over a "normality" that the nation has not experienced for a generation. Even some voters who are chilled by Reagan's politics and his followers have begun to take wistful consolation in the thought that the future under Reagan might be a kind of doubling back to the simpler past of the '50s: not the most ennobling American era, they admit, but not such a bad one either. Worse things have happened, such as 20 years of assassinations, riots, Viet Nam and Watergate, OPEC's extortions and the dollar's humiliation. Apres Ike, le deluge. Eisenhower's '50s begin to seem an almost golden time.

The Eisenhower-Reagan comparison is an interesting and almost subliminal effect now forming in the American psyche. It has gone largely unexamined. It is an intuition, a form of anticipatory nostalgia. It may also be an exercise in hopeful self-deception.

The psychological mechanics are tricky.

For years Dwight Eisenhower's historical reputation bumped along in the lower ranks of American presidencies. One 1962 poll of American historians and political scientists placed him rather degradingly in the spot between Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur: a mediocre and listless ex-soldier summoned from the links. Ike's sarcastic contemporaries liked to joke about "the bland leading the bland," about his goofy grin and the stack of Zane Grey westerns on his night table. He was forever playing golf or fishing, or otherwise treating the White House, they said, as a pleasant retirement home. And there was Ike's language, those famously incoherent press conference sentences that used to move across an idea like a dense fog; the technical term for the disease is anacoluthon, the sentence that careers around several corners and then lands in a ditch, its wheels spinning unintelligibly. Ike's press secretary, James Hagerty, used to edit the transcripts of his press conferences (body and fender work) before letting him be quoted directly.

But the years since Ike yielded to John Kennedy have changed the perspective on Eisenhower's '50s. He has profited by comparison with the Presidents who followed him; Jack Kennedy promised in 1960 to "get the country moving again," but American society came down with motion sickness. Eisenhower's was the last complete presidency that began and ended without tragedy or trauma and disgrace.

The General's reputation in recent years has been revised and rehabilitated, sometimes rather extravagantly. In the Viet Nam era, liberals like I.F. Stone and Murray Kempton found brilliance in Eisenhower previously undetected by intellectuals; he had resisted the best efforts of his advisers to get him to help the French in Indochina in the weeks before Dien Bien Phu. Despite CIA adventuring around the world, despite the American-sponsored coups in Guatemala and Iran, despite that sunbathing Marine exercise on the Lebanese beaches in 1958, despite Foster Dulles' fondness for leaning far out over the brink, Eisenhower kept the nation out of war. In Nixon Agonistes, Garry Wills called Ike "a political genius." Nixon, for his part, recorded in his Six Crises that Eisenhower "was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of those words." (Those phrases may be the purest elixir of Nixon's thought that was ever bottled.)

Princeton Political Scientist Fred Greenstein has spent several years establishing the case in a scholarly way. Eisenhower, says Greenstein, was an extraordinarily intelligent, experienced and sophisticated President who worked hard, but deliberately concealed much of his effort. "Hidden-hand leadership," says Greenstein, permitted Eisenhower to maintain his own dignified aura and personal authority with the nation (a moral authority never even approximately regained by his successors), while actively managing his presidency. Even those garbled answers at press conferences, Greenstein thinks, were a stratagem meant to conceal, soothe and deflect. Once, when Hagerty advised Ike to refuse to answer any questions about the Formosa Straits, the situation being especially tricky then, the President replied: "Don't worry, Jim. If that question comes up, I'll just confuse them."

Today, the comparative rehabilitation of Eisenhower's reputation works in a subtle way to legitimize the idea of a Ronald Reagan presidency. It is as if an anticipatory revisionism on Reagan were already at work.

If he now seems somewhat simple and inexperienced and possibly not up to the job, an undercurrent suspicion goes, well, they said that about Ike once, and look what they are saying now. In other words, this impulse instructs voters to mistrust any unfavorable judgment of Reagan now as a hedge against future revisionism. Reagan borrows some shine from Eisenhower's retrospective glow.

But do Eisenhower and Reagan--in temperament, education, experience, talent, knowledge and techniques of leadership--have much to do with each other? Some of their characteristics are similar--the winning American grin, the air of decent good guy. In both, the voter senses a remarkably steady emotional grip, a self-confidence; both inspire loyalty. In neither have Americans detected those dark glints of paranoia and compulsion that eventually repelled them in some Presidents after Ike.

Both Reagan and Eisenhower have taken a sort of chairman-of-the-board view of the presidency. Like Eisenhower, Reagan would draw heavily upon industry and commerce for his highest appointees. Reagan and Eisenhower share a preference for successful businessmen as friends and advisers (also an enthusiasm of Richard Nixon's). Reagan in Sacramento, like Ike in Washington, favored a 9-to-5 workday regularity, delegating responsibilities heavily to Cabinet and staff.

Philosophically, Ike was a pragmatist. "The path to America's future," he declared in 1949, "lies down the middle of the road." He liked to be called a "responsible progressive." Reagan talks a much harder ideological line; he is the fount of Reaganism, after all. But, in Sacramento, Reagan demonstrated a flexibility about raising taxes and welfare payments that wen against his own strict dogmas.

The actor, who performed his World War II service making training films in Hollywood, possesses a respect for the military that borders on awe. Eisenhower, after a professional lifetime in uniform, took a more jaundiced view. He knew more about war and arms than his Defense Secretaries and Joint Chiefs ever did. He did not hesitate to contradict them. He resisted military spending. He believed in "nuclear sufficiency," not superiority; he knew that nuclear weapons had forever, unalterably, changed his old profession. Eisenhower was not inclined to rattle the saber too much. Ironically, it was the Democrats in 1960 who campaigned blusteringly about the "missile gap," which they said Ike had permitted.

The most profound differences between Reagan and Eisenhower spring from contrasts in their backgrounds and experience. Eisenhower had orchestrated the largest and most complex military operation in history--the retaking of Western Europe. In that job, he functioned as supreme diplomat as well as soldier. Ike's expertise in foreign policy was thorough, practiced and instinctive. He dealt with men like Churchill on an equal basis. Reagan has worked as an actor and served a creditable eight years as Governor of the nation's most populous state. That experience may exceed Jimmy Carter's when he arrived in Washington, but it does not stack up well against Eisenhower's.

Perhaps Eisenhower's greatest asset was his credibility with the American people. If they wished to doze off through the '50s, they counted on Ike to wake them when anything important came up. Reagan, for all of his crinkling swell-guy charm, says things that tend to keep people sitting bolt upright, with sweat on their palms.

But the core of the psychological comparison lies deeper than resumes and managerial techniques. It has to do with symbols, with faith and luck. Whatever his talents, Eisenhower was an extraordinarily lucky man; he seemed to arrive at the White House between great disasters, and he did nothing to hurry new ones along. The present idea of the Eisenhower years, however, the marmoreal glow that they impart to Reagan in some people's minds, is a nostalgic distortion, an unconsciously artful forgetfulness about what the Eisenhower years were really like.

A certain Happy Days sentimentality has encouraged the idea that America in the '50s was touchingly innocent, but at the time the nation seemed infinitely more complicated than that, hugely varied, exuberant and, at this distance, rather strange. The benign nimbus of Eisenhower presided over all of it, and if people snickered at him behind his back, they seemed like adolescents wisecracking about the Old Man, Oedipal maybe, but not completely malicious.

The decade was a manic burst of inventive, occasionally screwball materialism, a wild exfoliation of pastels and plastics, superhighways and suburban tracts. The entire culture seemed to have teen-age glands. New, unsettling dimensions suddenly opened: the interstate highway system, the picture window, the grainy little black-and-white universe of television. Gas was cheap, and bright big-finned Detroit cars with Dynaflow or Hydra-Matic swooshed Americans up and down the landscape in rhapsodies of mobility, well-being and heedlessness. In 1954, Oklahoma A & M College surveyed its students to ask their greatest fears and problems. The students answered that their greatest worry in the world was finding a parking space.

The decade was in many ways fascinating and often fun. Everyone who lived through the period carries a mental collage of its dense popular culture; one remembers it now with a small smile of disbelief at the ingenious pointlessness of it: Milton Berle and Pinky Lee, My Little Margie and American Bandstand, Gorgeous George and Johnny Ray, and Elvis televised from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show. Grace Metalious (Peyton Place) and Mickey Spillane were available for mildly salacious excitement; the new tranquilizers (Miltown, Thorazine) saw to the jitters of civilization; Fulton Sheen and Norman Vincent Peale attended to the soul.

The immense energy of the time left many introspective. The virtues of the time were conformity, domesticity, respectability, security, attention to religion. Norman Mailer hated the whole business enough to call the '50s "one of the worst decades in the history of man." And the dark side was dark enough. A thin film of nuclear terror coated the psyche.

For a time, Joe McCarthy was loose, with all the blackbirds of his paranoia. When Ike federalized the Arkansas National Guard to integrate the schools of Little Rock, the country had an ugly glimpse of things to come. If we think of the '50s now as the last golden age, a period of moral poise, they seemed at the time very different. Archibald MacLeish wrote in 1955: "We have entered the Age of Despondency, with the Age of Desperation just around the corner." Someone is always saying that; it is almost always true.

The Reagan years, should they come to pass, will occur in a different world. The Eisenhower years were postwar boom-time; American power dominated the world then, and gasoline cost 30-c- per gal. But even then Americans were skittish, with a sense of things sliding out of their hands, of an un controllable future.

Whoever wins the presidency must restore to some extent a sense of the future's manageability. What Reagan evokes about the '50s is an attitude of militant nostalgia, a will almost to veto the intervening years and start again on earlier premises. Ike and the '50s are symbols of a state of mind. But as Albert Camus wrote in 1940, when the future was perhaps least man ageable of all: "We will not win our happiness with symbols.

We'll need something more solid."

-- By Lance Morrow

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