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For Eisenhower, it was nuclear weapons’ destructive potential, not the image of a protracted conventional war, that destroyed the ’logic’ of war. He believed that thermonuclear weapons made any notion of victory incoherent. Meaningful defence could then only be deterrence. Facing this new setting, Eisenhower reassessed the dynamics of international relations and altered his behaviour accordingly. During his first three years as president, he relied on the ’Detroit Deterrent’, the belief that the US industrial capacity would enable it to triumph in any such war of attrition. By 1956, however, the combination of thermonuclear weapons and growing Soviet intercontinental delivery capabilities made Detroit Deterrent obsolete in his mind. By the end of his presidency, therefore, superpower relations had begun to operate according to this new logic, the logic of ’thermonuclear revolution’.

This chapter examines the idea of cross-cultural leadership through the military career of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s successful leadership as the supreme Allied commander stemmed from nearly two decades of preparation. Serving overseas during the interwar period under generals such as Fox Conner and Douglas MacArthur, Eisenhower came to appreciate both the need for truly unified allied commands and the leadership behaviors essential for their effectiveness. He recognized the importance of flexibility, accountability, humility, consultation, patience, and trust in his relationships with fellow officers and foreign leaders. During the war, Ike proved especially deft at working with political leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, with Allied military commanders like Bernard Montgomery and Charles de Gaulle, and with his senior military subordinates like George Patton.

The rough-and-tumble of Chicago politics did not deter Archibald J. Carey Jr., who maintained his strong commitment to public theology and his belief in the Republican Party as an effective vehicle for advancing the civil rights of African Americans. He remained steadfast in his conviction that clergy should be involved in electoral politics to push policies and initiatives that would benefit the disadvantaged. To achieve this objective, Carey forged a close alliance with Illinois senator Everett M. Dirksen and became an enthusiastic supporter of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns. He was rewarded with political favors and appointments that satisfied his political aspirations and helped him advance black civil rights. Under the Eisenhower administration, Carey served on various United Nations committees and as a spokesman for American foreign policy. However, he would later defect to the Democratic Party.

This chapter points out that Dwight D. Eisenhower attempted to market foreign policies using the rhetoric of peace. It contends that the Eisenhower administration incorporated a psychological warfare strategy that used the language of peace to sell the Cold War and convince the world that the Soviet “peace offensive” was nothing more than propaganda and maskirovka originating from the Kremlin. He demonstrated to the world that the United States earnestly sought peace, but that Soviet hostility and intransigence thwarted American peacemaking and compelled the United States to adopt policies of strength. Eisenhower maneuvered his policy and rhetoric so that he met expectations at home and abroad for progress toward peace while avoiding any conciliation in actual policy.

This chapter argues that President Dwight D. Eisenhower's externally focused beliefs about the origin of threats shaped his intervention decisions. Eisenhower was, of course, concerned about the nature of other states' regimes in a broad sense. His World War II experience was dedicated to defeating Germany, and he was a committed anticommunist. But in terms of immediate American foreign policy, Eisenhower focused on the external foreign and security policies of other states, and if these policies were satisfactory, he was willing to largely ignore domestic issues in those states. Thus, it is not that Eisenhower did not care at all about internal issues, but rather that he saw them as relatively insignificant, in terms of how the United States should prioritize threats.

This chapter examines how the people of Kansas retreated into a quiet centrist conservatism that was relatively more bipartisan and apolitical than would have been expected, especially in a state with such a long Republican history. The conservatism of the period included rare hints of the more aggressive political and religious movements that were to brand the region as part of the red state Middle West in later decades. The chapter first considers the increasing feeling of political isolation in Kansas that was evident by the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term. It then looks at the rise of Harry S. Truman as U.S. president after Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945, along with Kansans' renewed emphasis on homes, hometowns, and hometown religion as the essential ingredients of Middle West life. It also discusses the religious situation in Kansas during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

President Eisenhower easily swept to victory in 1956, defeating Adlai Stevenson, whom he had also beaten in 1952, despite crises and wars that had suddenly flared in Hungary and Egypt. When the events of 1956 are examined through public and private records, the president’s response to these crises appears to confirm his claim that he would not allow policy making to be hostage to the wishes of the public. Instead, he made clear time and again that he would proceed with what he thought was the “right” course for US interests, irrespective of the American public’s reaction to the policy or to his reelection campaign. At the same time, he was ready to invoke public opinion in the United States and throughout the world to try and bend other statesmen to his will.

This chapter examines Dwight D. Eisenhower's legacy in the area of liberal democratic internationalism during the period 1953–1977. Until 1947, the American foreign policy choice had been between a Wilsonian advocacy of democracy and a Rooseveltian preference for nonintervention. A third option had emerged since then: intervention for dictatorships, even against indigenous political forces that might be seeking to create constitutional, democratic regimes. The chapter first provides an overview of American realism and mass politics in the twentieth century, with emphasis on the modernity of fascism, communism, and democracy, before discussing American foreign policy during the Eisenhower years. In particular, it considers the Eisenhower administration's policy decisions with respect to Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam. It also explores the geopolitical realism of American support for democratic governments abroad.

This chapter explores how Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev viewed the resolve of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, considering Khrushchev's decision making surrounding the 1958 Berlin Crisis. The historical record shows that Eisenhower's early statements were particularly influential to the formation of his reputation, as they created expectations of how he would behave in the future. However, Eisenhower was unable to solidify his reputation for resolve at the 1955 Geneva Summit, as Khrushchev perceived Secretary of State John Foster Dulles rather than President Eisenhower as being in direct control of negotiations at the summit. Yet, in the year leading up to the 1958 Berlin Ultimatum, Khrushchev's perception of who was in control of U.S. foreign policy shifted to emphasize the importance of Eisenhower to America's Berlin policy. And the president's statements leading up to the Berlin Crisis led Khrushchev to believe Eisenhower was unlikely to make major concessions on the issue. Eisenhower's subsequent firm response to the Berlin Crisis then confirmed Khrushchev's expectations of the president's resolve. Accordingly, Eisenhower established a reputation for resolute action that would last until the end of his presidency. Further evidence suggests that Eisenhower's actions as a general during World War II were influential to Khrushchev's early perceptions of the president.

This chapter examines Dwight D. Eisenhower's policy on foreign affairs during his tenure as president of the United States, especially his agenda regarding the fight against Communism. Eisenhower's views on international relations and his attitude toward Asia debunk the story that he threatened John F. Kennedy about opening diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. He never seriously considered challenging Mao Zedong's hold on power in China. Eisenhower gave precedence to Europe, and saw his most serious challenge as coming from the Soviet Union. His time on the battlefield in World War II had reinforced his conviction that America's critical disputes and opportunities would arise in Europe. The people he gathered around him—those with whom he argued and to whom he listened, both military and political—strongly agreed with that European bias. This was true of his personal circle and his key foreign policy adviser and executer John Foster Dulles.

A year before Americans went to the polls, the 1952 election promised to be a “critical” election. The leading potential candidates were positioning themselves to continue the “great debate” over America’s Cold War foreign policy, providing the voters with a real choice on key questions such as the geographic extent, economic cost, and military emphasis of containment. By the time of the two party conventions, however, the Democrats and Republicans had opted for candidates who essentially agreed with Truman’s policy toward the Soviet Union. Dwight Eisenhower’s victory was therefore important, not because it marked a key moment of change in the direction of US policy, but for the exact opposite: it sustained the Cold War consensus, ensuring that a Republican administration would continue with the central thrust of its Democratic predecessor.

The massive outpouring of public piety that characterized the postwar years accompanied a vigorous campaign against secularism, both at home and abroad. Dwight D. Eisenhower came to see the limits of Judeo-Christian terminology by the mid-1950s, perhaps with the help of his Catholic speechwriter Emmet J. Hughes. But other public figures (and many ordinary citizens) embraced that language, along with the dominant, Judeo-Christian exceptionalist understanding of democracy. Conflicts over religion and education continued, and theorists such as John Courtney Murray, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Will Herberg honed their arguments for religion’s political centrality, even as Niebuhr began decrying religious nationalism and anti-secularism. At the same time, some Jewish thinkers challenged Judeo-Christian terminology itself. The Catholic writer John Cogley also expressed doubts about anticommunism’s prominence in American Catholic thought. On the pluralist side, the liberal Protestant theologian Edwin E. Aubrey and the Jewish philosopher Horace M. Kallen offered positive renderings of secularism in the early 1950s, as part of their groups’ continued effort to identify open-ended tolerance as the central democratic ideal. Yet anticommunism and the accompanying critiques of secularism continued to dominate American public life through the McCarthy era.

This chapter focuses on Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, in stark contrast with FDR and Harry S Truman, did not aspire to be an activist president. As a career soldier, Eisenhower considered it his duty to remain above politics, and consistently strove to operate behind the scenes when guiding national policy. The general consensus of historians, however, is that he “only appeared to be a passive chief executive.” One of the reasons why people believed Eisenhower was not in control of his administration was that he would sometimes deliberately duck questions at press conferences by pretending to garble his syntax. His penchant for behind-the-scenes management of his administration has led political scientist Fred I. Greenstein to label this method of governing as “hidden-hand leadership.”

This chapter explores tensions surrounding the administration of the Refugee Relief Act. Immigration conservatives attempted to limit the liberalizing aspects of the Refugee Relief Act by administering the program in an arguably overly restrictive manner. When the Eisenhower administration appointed an Italian American immigration reform advocate, Edward Corsi, to reform the failing program, he was red-baited and chased out of office by the leading immigration restrictionist in Congress, Francis Walter. But Corsi vehemently protested his ousting. His counterattack sparked a public debate about the nature of the program and also prompted discussions about the relative inclusion of ethnic Italians in the United States. This chapter examines how boundaries of racial and ethnic inclusion continued to be contested in the postwar period and further explores how those debates impacted the construction of American immigration policies.

This chapter delves into the depths of one of the most important developments within modern American politics, the creation and institutionalization of executive privilege. In facing a fervent Congress in the grips of McCarthyism, Eisenhower issued a letter denying testimony to the Senate for the Army-McCarthy hearings. His letter included a memo from Attorney General Brownell that claimed the president had an inherent constitutional privilege to deny information to Congress or the public if it was in the public interest and for national security. This action institutionalized the Cold War Paradigm in the executive branch and created an extra-constitutional power for the president. Eisenhower issued several executive orders concerning classification and public dissemination of government information, along with the creation of the Office of Strategic Information (OSI) within the Commerce Department to oversee these policies. Eisenhower claimed historic precedent to justify his inherent constitutional power, regardless, it showed a learned response that changed executive power. Congress would respond in 1955 by creating the Special Subcommittee on Government Information chaired by Rep. John Moss, given jurisdiction for oversight on all executive branch information policies and practices. With the issue of freedom of information institutionalized in Congress, a 12-year legislative power struggle would unfold between Congress and the White House ending with the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966.

In the third chapter I discuss Taylor’s leadership of the army (1955-1959) and his opposition to massive retaliation. Taylor attempted to reform the army by installing new combat divisions for the atomic battlefield, and he argued forcefully for the buildup of conventional as well as tactical nuclear capabilities for limited war. Taylor used congressional hearings and talks at war colleges and the Council on Foreign Relations for pointed critiques of national strategic priorities. Some of his colleagues in the armed forces thought him untrustworthy, but a closer reading of the record shows that they objected to his 1960 memoir more than to his actions in office. President Eisenhower still respected Taylor in 1959 and offered him the position as NATO’s supreme military commander.