Eisenhower (15 page)

Coverage of the Korea trip had been squelched by security and censorship, but once Eisenhower departed for home, the details flooded out. Truman derided the mission as “a piece of demagoguery.” The press was more generous. Newspapers lauded Ike for seeing the combat up close, and Americans dared to hope that peace was possible.

Back in the United States, Eisenhower completed the more prosaic but meaningful work of building his staff. He was a shrewd judge of men, neither intimidated by excellence nor distracted by polish. His eye for character helped him construct a strong inner circle to manage the government and supplement his already formidable group of advisers, including his brothers, military friends, and political supporters, many of the latter successful businessmen.

Before appointing his cabinet, Eisenhower created a position that redefined the modern presidency and filled it with a man whose cold intellect had impressed him since the beginning of his campaign. Sherman Adams was the political mirror image of Eisenhower. Clipped, slight, famously taciturn, he was every bit the Yankee as Ike was the Midwesterner. Adams grew up in New Hampshire, graduated from Dartmouth, prospered in the region’s timber industry, and then took to politics, rising through the ranks. In 1948, he was elected governor. New Hampshire was the perfect political stage for the ascent of a man who was admired by many but liked by few. He was an orderly and dedicated public servant, and he appealed to the voters of a state where the flinty held sway over the gregarious. In his role launching Ike’s political career, Adams had demonstrated administrative skill. He ran Ike’s campaign with efficiency and distaste for showmanship. (Typically, for instance, Adams dismissed the effect of the Madison Square Garden rally on shaping Eisenhower’s decision to enter the race; it was, he sniffed, a “dog and pony act.”) Adams could err—it was he who had abruptly pulled Ike’s praise for Marshall from the infamous Wisconsin speech—but he was decisive, and Eisenhower admired his grit. Ike, without ever saying so, made it clear he expected Adams to stay on. Adams was mystified. “To the best of my recollection, he never told me that in so many words,” Adams recalled in 1972, “but it was quite evident.”

Ike naturally borrowed from his military experience. Efficient organization, he had learned, required unified command. He wanted a single person to manage his schedule and appointments, a hardheaded manager who could protect him from unscheduled visitors and say no to those the president would prefer not to offend. Bedell Smith had performed that function during the war, and his office was a model of efficiency. Now, as president, Eisenhower wanted a chief of staff. He avoided creating that title, for fear it would seem too military, but he insisted on the position. Adams was named “Assistant to the President” and was soon known as “the Assistant President.” Having accepted, he said his farewells to New Hampshire and moved to Washington. Adams and Ike would never become intimate friends—Adams never joined Eisenhower at the bridge table or on the golf course, but Ike relied on him completely, and no one reciprocated his loyalty with greater ardor.

The most important position in the cabinet was secretary of state, and Eisenhower’s pick exemplified his ability to recognize a man’s flaws but not be overcome by them. John Foster Dulles was an austere and arrogant man, tall with sloped shoulders, mouth turned down at the corners, eyelids soft and puffy. Pious and imperious, he was prone to such deep concentration that guests would think he had forgotten they were in the room. His favorite exercise was a cold swim, sometimes in waters so frigid his staff feared for him. The son of a Presbyterian minister, and grandson and nephew of two different secretaries of state, Dulles was trained as a lawyer but drawn to the foreign service, as were two of his four siblings. By 1952, he had served presidents from Wilson to Truman, and was a leading member of the establishment, more suited to appointed than elected office. Named in 1949 to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate from New York, he took the job but lost his bid for reelection a few months later. No wonder, for if Dulles was indisputably brilliant, he also was undeniably cold. He was, in Churchill’s arch observation, “Dull, Duller, Dulles.”

The speechwriter Emmet Hughes, no fan of Dulles’s, recalled the twitching impatience with which Ike would listen to his secretary of state—“the brisk nodding of the head, in a manner designed to nudge a slow voice faster … the restless rhythm of the pencil tapping his knee … the slow glaze across the blue eyes, signaling the end of all mental contact.” Eisenhower chafed at Hughes’s description (he regarded the Hughes memoir as a betrayal), but he too recognized Dulles’s limitations. After noting in his diary that Dulles was dedicated, tireless, and devoted to service, he added: “He is not particularly persuasive in presentation and, at times, seems to have a curious lack of understanding as to how his words and manner may affect another personality.” They occasionally disagreed. Ike watched his secretary closely at the outset and would forcefully overrule him in their later years together, but he never lost his admiration for Dulles’s devotion or intellect. Eisenhower understood that Dulles brought depth and intelligence to the administration. Their relationship would form the core partnership of Eisenhower’s administration.

Charles Wilson, Ike’s pick for secretary of defense, was Dulles’s exact opposite. Garrulous and outgoing, supremely confident and occasionally brash, the jowly, barrel-chested Wilson was tartly opinionated and outspoken. He came to Eisenhower from General Motors, and as such served as both cabinet officer and symbol of the administration’s loyalties. Where FDR and Truman had found allegiance with labor, Eisenhower was more comfortable with executives, convinced that their expertise was required to restore fiscal soundness. During his confirmation hearings, Wilson initially resisted calls to divest himself of more than $2 million in General Motors stock. When one member of Congress asked whether he could make a decision that was adverse to GM’s interests, he famously replied that he could but that he did not believe he’d be forced to “because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” (The comment is frequently misquoted as “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”) That nearly tanked Wilson’s nomination and was just the first in a long line of inartful public statements that would mark his tenure. As with his assessment of Dulles, Eisenhower’s appreciation for Wilson was nuanced. He understood Wilson’s confidence was a source of strength and also a liability. “Mr. Wilson is prone to lecture,” Eisenhower noted in his diary. “This not only annoys many members of Congress, but it gives them unlooked for opportunities to discover flaws in reasoning and argument.”

Two more men would form the core of Ike’s cabinet, Herbert Brownell as attorney general and George Humphrey as secretary of the Treasury. Eisenhower and Humphrey hit it off at their first meeting. Recommended by Lucius Clay, who knew him from their work on German reconstruction, Humphrey arrived at Ike’s Commodore Hotel suite and introduced himself. Ike spotted Humphrey’s bald head and exclaimed, “I see you part your hair the same way I do.” A lawyer like so many of Eisenhower’s top advisers, Humphrey had joined the M. A. Hanna Company steelworks in 1917 as a legal adviser. By 1952 he was serving as its chairman, having already spent decades as its president. Genial, capable, and modest—Midwestern in every good sense of that word—Humphrey was a counterpoint to Dulles’s pomposity and Wilson’s brashness, but he was every bit as forceful and effective on budget matters as Dulles was in foreign affairs. Thrift was his dominant concern. “If you’re going to live a good life,” Humphrey liked to say, “you’ve got to live within your income.” Through his time in office, he insisted that the government do just that. He fought profligate spending, irritating liberals, and imprudent tax cuts, to the annoyance of conservatives. He exemplified Ike’s “middle way” and was often the most persuasive member of the cabinet. “When George speaks,” Eisenhower said, “we all listen.” Eisenhower’s initial fondness for the man never wavered; they hunted together at Humphrey’s Thomasville, Georgia, estate and socialized with their wives, a rarity among Ike’s professional associates. “He is,” Eisenhower rightly observed, “a sound business type, possessed of a splendid personality, and truly interested in the welfare of the United States.” In the Eisenhower cabinet, only Dulles would wield more influence.

Brownell was the cabinet member Eisenhower knew best upon taking office, their association dating to the 1952 campaign that Brownell had done so much to orchestrate. A piercingly intelligent and deeply principled lawyer, the soft-spoken, twinkly-eyed Brownell had counseled Ike in Paris and devised the Fair Play Amendment that secured his nomination. Brownell was shy but not retiring. He had an easy smile, and he filed away observations with the precision of a card counter. On Brownell’s first day in Washington, he witnessed a Negro family being ejected from a restaurant whose owner was enforcing the city’s Jim Crow laws. Brownell did not forget. He was deepest in the areas where Eisenhower was most lacking—domestic affairs and politics. As such, Ike might have regarded him with some suspicion. Eisenhower, usually wary of professional politicians, appreciated Brownell’s subtle mind and marveled that one so steeped in politics could be so guileless. “It would be natural to suppose that he would become hardboiled, and that the code by which he lives could scarcely be classified as one of high moral quality. The contrary seems to be true … His reputation with others seems to match my own high opinion of his capabilities as a lawyer, his qualities as a leader, and his character as a man.” Eisenhower then recorded a compliment reserved only for his brother Milton and very few others: “I am devoted to him and am perfectly confident that he would make an outstanding president of the United States.”

Eisenhower’s cabinet included two members whose mere presence represented breakthroughs. Oveta Culp Hobby was the second woman to serve in the cabinet and the first to do so in a Republican administration. And Ezra Benson, an apostle of the Mormon church, was the first clergyman of the twentieth century to hold a cabinet position. Benson’s faith informed his service: austere, hardworking, and intense, Benson kept a cot, a wooden chair, and a desk in his basement, where he worked each morning before heading to the office. Benson, who would not work on Sundays, came to the cabinet with the conviction that farm price supports, adopted during World War II to stimulate food production, were economically inefficient and morally suspect. He became a lightning rod in farm-state politics, as his reductions of price supports invariably enraged those whose livelihoods were affected. Benson was unflappable. “Oh Lord,” the motto on his desk read, “give us men with a mandate higher than the ballot box.”

Initially, Ike placed Hobby at the head of the Federal Security Agency, but once the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare formally came into being, Hobby took charge of it. Hobby, a Democrat, was married to a former governor of Texas and was active in that state’s journalism—she and her husband managed the
Houston Post
—and politics. During the war, she had deftly navigated Washington politics and overcame the discrimination of her day to forge a new force in the military, “an army of women,” as she and others referred to the Women’s Army Corps. She overcame resistance within the War Department and Congress to secure jobs for women and even redesigned the WAC uniform to make it more appealing. By the time she was through, the WACs were 200,000 strong, with three times that many applications. Hobby worked herself into exhaustion. When she resigned in 1945, her husband met her with a stretcher to take her to the hospital. She recovered and in 1952 spearheaded Democrats for Eisenhower. Eager to place a woman in a position of influence, Ike sought her out. It took some convincing, but she finally agreed. She would, again, work herself to a frazzle.

Once he had assembled his senior advisers, Ike recorded his thoughts about them in his diary. Brownell and Milton Eisenhower might make fine presidents. Dulles deserved to be regarded as a “wise man.” Wilson and Humphrey were admired businessmen, well positioned for their new duties. Vice President Richard Nixon, by contrast, warranted not a mention.

Beyond the formal positions of power, Ike added three other loyalists before his inauguration. James Hagerty, a second-generation newsman who had signed up with Tom Dewey, was an early member of the Eisenhower campaign team. He was among the first to accept a post with the new president—Ike made him press secretary—and he remained in that position to turn out the lights.

C. D. Jackson, another media businessman, agreed to take a short leave from Time-Life to join the White House staff. He had served under Ike in Europe at the end of the war and later as a writer during the campaign. It was he who had first come up with the idea to have Eisenhower pledge, if elected, to “go to Korea.” Given the consensus that the pledge sealed Eisenhower’s victory, Ike turned to him not just for speechwriting but for strategic insights. Acknowledging Jackson’s fierce anti-Communism and nuanced grasp of character, Eisenhower asked him to serve in the unusual position of director of psychological warfare. Jackson eagerly agreed, with the caveat that he would return to Time-Life after a short time in the White House.

As he filled positions in the first Republican administration in generations, Eisenhower bitterly disappointed one old friend. Bedell Smith had served him brilliantly in the war, acting as chief of staff and meticulously organizing the critical work of Ike’s headquarters. In the years since, Truman had made him director of Central Intelligence. But Smith’s loyalty was to Ike; during the campaign, he personally briefed Eisenhower on security matters and had repeated the favor just prior to Ike’s trip to Korea. With Eisenhower’s permission, Smith set up a small office at the Commodore Hotel during the transition, though Adams made sure he controlled Smith’s access to the president. Given their long relationship, the director of intelligence imagined a vaunted position for himself in the new administration—perhaps secretary of state or defense or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On December 19, he met with Adams and Eisenhower for an off-the-record discussion. Smith left visibly dejected. On the silent trip back to Washington, he muttered, “And I thought that it was going to be great.”