Remembering Dwight Eisenhower

Over the course of this year, the centenary of William F. Buckley’s birth, we will republish an article by him weekly. This week’s column reflects on the legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower, written at the time of his passing.

T he accomplishments of Dwight Eisenhower will be copiously recorded now that he is gone, that being the tradition, and tradition being what one has come to associate with General Eisenhower, who comes to us even now as a memory out of the remote past. During his lifetime he had his detractors. There are those who opposed Dwight Eisenhower because he was the man who defeated Adlai Stevenson. In their judgment it was profanation for anyone to stand in the way of Adlai Stevenson.

And so, when Eisenhower was inaugurated, they took up, and forever after maintained, a jeremiad on America the theme of which was: America is a horrible country because a banal and boring general with not an idea in his head gets to beat a scintillating intellectual who is in tune with the future. These gentry did President Eisenhower a certain amount of harm, and in later years they took to referring routinely to his tenure as “boring,” “lacking in ideals,” and “styleless.”

Their criticisms never actually took hold. America wanted Eisenhower in preference to Stevenson; and however keenly we felt the death of Stevenson, it wasn’t — speaking for the majority — because we had failed to confer the Presidency upon him. Stevenson was born to be defeated for the Presidency.

Among the critics of Mr. Eisenhower also from the liberal end of the world are a few who reckoned him as quite different from what it is generally supposed that he was. There are those — one thinks of the singularly acute Mr. Murray Kempton, who all along has led that particular pack — who saw Mr. Eisenhower as perhaps the most highly efficient political animal ever born in the United States. They believe that his aspect of indifference to practical political matters was one of the most successful dissimulations in political history. He had, they maintain, the most accomplished sense of political danger that any man ever developed, and he always knew — they maintain — how to defend himself against the ravages of political decisiveness by (a) setting up another guy, who would easily fall victim; and (b) appearing to be innocently disinterested in the grinding of political gears.

The record is certainly there that over a period of a dozen years, it was, somehow, always somebody else who stood between him and the tough decisions: a Sherman Adams, a Richard Nixon, a CIA. General Eisenhower never really developed any mass opposition. His critics were either formalistic (the Democratic Party) or personal — men who held him responsible not for what he did but for what he failed to do.

It is, I think, this category of critics of the general which is the most interesting. Not the liberals, but the conservatives. It is hardly a surprise that liberals would have faulted Eisenhower’s performance as President, they having so hotly desired the election of another man. But the conservatives, or at least many of them, were genuinely disappointed that he let the federal government grow at a rate no domesticated Democrat could reasonably have exceeded; disappointed by his failure to take decisive action against the Soviet Union notwithstanding unique historical opportunities, as for instance in Hungary, Egypt, and Cuba; disappointed by his dismal unconcern with the philosophy of conservatism (of which he was a purely intuitive disciple) at a point in the evolution of America when a few conservative philosophers at his side might have accomplished more for the ends he sought to serve than the battery of sycophantic (and opportunistic) big businessmen with whom he loved to while away the hours.

The critique of General Eisenhower from the right will perhaps be the most interesting historical critique (to use the Army term); and one somehow feels that the general, retired from office, had an inkling of this. Never was he so adamantly and philosophically conservative as when he last addressed the nation, via the Republican Convention at Miami Beach.

Meanwhile we are left to mourn the passing of an extraordinary man, a genius of personal charm, a public servant manifestly infected with a lifetime case of patriotism. His country requited his services. No honor was unpaid to him. If he was, somehow at the margin, deficient, it was because the country did not rise to ask of him the performance of a thunderbolt. He gave what he was asked to give. And he leaves us if not exactly bereft, lonely; lonely for the quintessential American.