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EISENHOWER, DWIGHT D. 1890-1969

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1953-1961

Ike's Presidency Reconsidered

Dwight D. (" Ike") Eisenhower was once portrayed as a dull, somewhat lazy president; in a 1962 poll of historians he was ranked twenty-second of thirty-one presidents. In the minds of more-recent historians, however, Ike is considered to have been a shrewd, moderate, sensible, deeply patriotic man—and today is ranked often among the top ten of U.S. presidents. Eisenhower could campaign with Richard Nixon but distance himself from Nixon's partisan and often inflammatory rhetoric. Eisenhower, above all others, could warn of the threats posed by the "Military-Industrial Complex" at a time when the American public was responding favorably to calls for increased defense spending.

Role as President

His reputation as a donothing president in part was due to his belief in governmental noninterference in state and local politics. He did not believe that as president his role was to initiate social change. Instead, he believed his job was to represent the voice of reason in warning against federal spending sprees and peacefully ushering the United States through dangerous times. Faced with challenges from the Democrats to increase military spending after the Soviets launched Sputnik, Ike resisted. Criticized for not doing enough on civil rights, Eisenhower nevertheless remained determined to let the social movement follow its own natural course. (In one case, however, he did bring presidential dictum to bear on state matters by sending federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas. He maintained that he did so to restore social order rather than to enforce a federal mandate.) Having inherited high price levels from Truman, Ike demanded and received budgets nearly in balance, and twice the administration even ran surpluses.

Government Continues to Grow

Yet despite his proclamation in 1950 that further growth of government was "a creeping paralysis" and a greater danger to freedom than the atomic bomb, government contined to grow during his years in office. Vast new bureaucracies such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were created. Ike signed legislation ensuring the expansion of federal power, such as the National Highway Act. Eisenhower presided over the creation of a new cabinet-level department, Health, Education, and Welfare. Although he publicly denounced the "Military-Industrial Complex" at the end of his second term, his foreign policies had entangled the United States in Vietnam (then called Indochina) and had permitted the Communist takeover of Cuba. He kept the United States out of Egypt during the Suez Crisis and out of Hungary in 1956, yet his perceived complacency about the new Soviet missile threat—which terrified most Americans—left him open to charges that he had allowed a "missile gap" to develop. Ironically, when Ike scored successes—by limiting government's role in shaping the economy, for example—they were credited to factors outside the White House.

Post-Eisenhower Era

After Ike's presidency, the federal bureaucracy, already primed to grow dramatically, exploded with the dual stimuli of the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam. Eisenhower died in 1969, at the peak of the Vietnam War, a conflict whose embers he had at least fanned a little.