The Campaign and Election of 1948:

The Democratic Party’s poor showing in the 1946 mid-term congressional elections—in which the Republican Party took control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time since 1928—considerably dimmed Truman’s prospects for re-election in 1948. Indeed, a public opinion poll taken in December 1946 revealed that only 35 percent of those surveyed supported his handling of the presidency.

Beginning in 1947, Truman worked assiduously to build support for his candidacy among key segments of the Democratic Party. He repaired his relationship with labor by vetoing the Taft-Hartley bill, courted black Americans by coming out in favor of civil rights, and continued to embrace programs (like national health insurance, a higher minimum wage, and a federal housing measure) dear to party liberals. Truman's anti-Soviet foreign policy won him support among Americans with roots in Eastern Europe and among anti-communist liberals. His decision in May 1948 to recognize the new state of Israel further solidified his relationship with American Jews. Just as important, by 1948, Truman had begun to employ a more relaxed, folksy, and sometimes fiery speaking technique. He combined both style and substance in launching effective attacks against the Republicans. Midway through 1948, however, Truman's popularity among American voters still languished.

Truman and the Democrats

Divisions within the Democratic Party hurt Truman's chances for re-election in 1948. Truman's weakness as a candidate led some Democrats to consider offering the party's nomination to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom they (incorrectly) believed to be a Democrat. On the eve of the Democratic convention, Eisenhower strongly denied any interest in the nomination, much to Truman's relief.

Two other challenges would prove more troubling to Truman's candidacy. In January 1948, Truman's former secretary of commerce (and vice president during Roosevelt's third term), Henry Wallace, announced his intention to run for President as a member of the Progressive Party. In September 1946, Secretary Wallace had delivered a speech critical of the administration's increasingly hard-line foreign policy towards the Soviet Union. Truman asked for Wallace's resignation, which he received. As a third-party candidate, Wallace, who for many years had been darling of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, threatened to rob Truman of the progressive vote.

Truman also faced the prospect of losing the votes of the conservative, southern wing of the Democratic Party, which threatened to bolt over the President's public embrace of African-American civil rights. He hoped he could keep southerners in the Party by making his support for civil rights more rhetorical than substantive, a strategy similar to that employed by President Roosevelt. At the Democratic National Convention in July 1948, however, Truman's approach collapsed after pro-civil rights Democrats—led by Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey and anti-communist liberals from the organization Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)—won a strong civil rights plank for the party's platform.

Truman was willing to accept the plank, holding out hope that southerners would stay in the party. He was wrong; the entire Mississippi delegation and half of the Alabama delegation walked out of the convention. The southerners that remained did so only to vote against Truman's nomination. By the end of July, southern Democrats had formed the States Rights' Party (also known as the Dixiecrats). It nominated Governor J. Strom Thurmond (SC) and Governor Fielding Wright (MS) for President and vice president.

Truman easily won the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in July, choosing liberal Kentucky senator Alben Barkley—after Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas turned down the vice presidential slot—as his running mate. In a fiery speech accepting the nomination, Truman declared "Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don't you forget that!" Truman then played his trump card: he announced his plan to call the Republican-led Congress back into session to pass his legislative program—an invitation to refute charges that it was a "do-nothing" Congress. Of course, Truman did not expect the Republicans to pass his program, nor should they have done so. But Truman's challenge did energize his fellow Democrats, putting the Republicans on the defensive and highlighting Truman's campaign strategy—to run against the Republican Congress.

The Republican Opposition

The Republicans in 1948 nominated New York governor Thomas Dewey for President and California governor Earl Warren for vice president. It was a strong ticket. Dewey had run in 1944 against FDR and lost a close race; he remained young, popular, and progressive. Strongly anti-communist, he was an internationalist in foreign affairs. On domestic issues, Dewey was a moderate critic of the New Deal, which he disliked more for its means than its ends. His main drawback was an aloof, icy, and bland personality; Alice Roosevelt Longworth described him as the "little man on the wedding cake." In spite of this defect, Republicans looked forward to the 1948 campaign, pointing to the GOP's victories in 1946 and Dewey's solid record.

Truman versus Dewey

Truman brought the Republican-controlled 80th Congress back to Washington in late July and presented it with his list of desired legislation. Congress met for two weeks, failed to pass any of Truman's proposals, and adjourned. Truman could now point to yet another example of the "do-nothing" Republican Congress and warn the electorate that a Republican presidential victory would bring only further neglect to the issues he believed important. On civil rights, Truman issued executive orders desegregating the military and ending discrimination in the civil service. No longer beholden to southern Democrats (who supported Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat candidacy), Truman could finally issue these long-promised initiatives that doubtlessly pleased blacks and liberals, two important segments of the Democratic Party.

Truman began the presidential campaign in earnest with a Labor Day speech to a large union crowd in Detroit. He stumped energetically throughout the fall, making several train tours across the country. These trips allowed him to take his case for re-election to voters in what leading Republican Senator Robert Taft had earlier derided as "whistle stop" speeches delivered from the rear of the presidential train. The longest trip was fifteen days, covered 8,300 miles, and took Truman from Pennsylvania to California.

Truman's "whistle-stops" were a combination of great politics and great theatre. He shook hands with voters, signed autographs, and made wise-cracks about his opponents. With some exaggeration and much fervor, he attacked the Republican Congress, warned that a Republicans White House would repeal the New Deal, and reminded voters that the Democrats had saved the country from the depression. Truman also tailored his message to his audience; farmers in Iowa, for example, heard the President claim, "This Republican Congress has already stuck a pitchfork in the farmer's back."Dewey embarked on several train trips of his own, speaking to large crowds. Unlike Truman, however, he campaigned much more cautiously. For starters, the polls indicated that he held a comfortable lead over Truman. Moreover, Dewey believed that his earlier run for the presidency, against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, had suffered from his combative style and attacks on the incumbent. He resolved in 1948, then, to speak mostly in generalities and to refrain from using invective. While he appeared "presidential" during the campaign, Dewey's bland campaign speeches only reinforced his milquetoast image among much of the electorate. Nonetheless, the final pre-election Gallup poll—taken in mid-October—became public the day before the election itself, giving Dewey a solid lead of 49.5 percent to Truman's 44.5 percent of the total vote.

The Election of 1948

On election day, November 2, Truman, along with Bess and Margaret, voted in their hometown of Independence, Missouri. Truman had lunch with several old friends and repaired alone to a local hotel to await the returns. At midnight, Truman heard NBC report that while he was ahead by more than one million votes, Dewey was still expected to win. At four in the morning, his secret service agents woke him and told him to turn on the radio: he was ahead by two million votes—and would maintain the lead. With victory in hand, Truman went to Kansas City, where he awaited Dewey's concession, which came by mid-morning. Two days after the election, as the Trumans returned to Washington via St. Louis, reporters snapped the most famous photo of Truman's career: an image of the President holding aloft a copy of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman."Truman had confounded the pundits. He won 49.5 percent of the vote to Dewey's 45.1 percent; 303 electoral college votes to 189 for Dewey. Thurmond and Wallace trailed miserably, each with 2.4 percent of the vote, although Thurmond took four southern states and their 39 electoral votes. Truman's victory came about because he won the support of most of Roosevelt's "New Deal" coalition: labor, Blacks, Jews, farmers from the midwest, and a number of southern states. Truman's victory, however, was far from overwhelming. He barely won California, Illinois, and Ohio, and lost the Democratic strongholds Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, and New Jersey. In fact, more Americans voted for other candidates than voted for him—far from the popular mandate Truman would have liked.

With the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, Vice President Harry S. Truman assumed the Oval Office. He surely knew he faced a difficult set of challenges in the immediate future: overseeing the final defeats of Germany and Japan; managing the U.S. role in post-war international relations; supervising the American economy's transition from a war-time to a peace-time footing; and maintaining the unity of a fractious and powerful Democratic Party.

But perhaps Truman's most daunting task was following his esteemed predecessor, who had remade American governance, the Democratic Party, and the office of the presidency during his unprecedented twelve years in office. Roosevelt's shadow would be difficult for Truman—or any Democrat, for that matter—to escape. Truman, moreover, lacked Roosevelt's stature, charisma, and public-speaking skills.

The new President did have other qualities that recommended him for the job. The public related well to Truman, thinking him hard-working and honest. Truman also seemed to relish making politically difficult decisions. Finally, Truman's experiences in Missouri politics—and especially his two electoral victories that brought him to the Senate—demonstrated a deft understanding of the various groups that made the political philosophy of liberalism and the Democratic Party the reigning institutions in American political life.

Organizing the White House

Truman asked FDR's cabinet to remain in place as he settled into the presidency. Yet the new President had little confidence in this group; by the spring of 1946, he had replaced many of those officials with men of his own choosing. Truman's appointees, however, were largely undistinguished and contributed little to his presidency. Most notably, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath became the center of a corruption scandal which cut into Truman's popularity.

Truman also inherited Roosevelt's staff of presidential advisers. By the mid-1940s, the President's staff included administrative assistants, appointments and press secretaries, and counsels to the President. It also included the Bureau of the Budget, formerly a part of the Treasury Department but, owing to the Executive Reorganization Act of 1939, now housed in the Executive Office of the President. The New Deal and the war years highlighted the increasingly important and powerful role that a President's staff played in policymaking. Several well-known members of FDR's team—like Harry Hopkins and press secretary Steve Early—did not join the Truman administration (though Hopkins answered Truman's call to service on a few occasions). Other Roosevelt staffers, like special counsel Sam Rosenman and budget director Harold Smith, continued to serve in their positions for a short time.

Truman, of course, placed his own trusted confidantes in key staff positions. Old friend Charles Ross —a highly respected Washington reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—came on as press secretary and Senate aide Matthew Connelly became the President's appointments secretary. The two most involved staffers in the Truman administration, however, were Clark Clifford and John Steelman. Clifford, the more important of the two, advised the President on political and foreign policy issues, replacing Rosenman as special counsel to the President in January 1946. Steelman became "the assistant to the President" in December 1946, a position from which he oversaw countless administrative tasks that were required in the White House. Truman, though, fearful of losing control over the policy process, acted largely as his own "chief of staff," meeting with aides, assigning tasks, and defining his administration's agenda.

During the Truman years, the President's staff continued to grow in size. On the domestic side, the most important addition was the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The Employment Act of 1946 created the CEA to help the President formulate economic policy; liberal Democrats in Congress particularly wanted the CEA to be a preserve for progressives and liberal New Dealers. Truman instead staffed the CEA with a mix of conservatives and liberals, although the liberal Leon Keyserling ran the CEA after November 1949 and worked closely with Truman. More importantly, Truman treated the CEA as a set of presidential advisers, rather than as an independent body, and made sure that it remained under his control.

Leading America after Depression, New Deal, and World War

Truman took office just as World War II entered its final stages. With Japan's surrender in August 1945, he now led a nation that, for the first time in nearly two decades, was not wracked by the traumas of economic depression or world war. Truman's chief task, then, was to lay out to Americans his vision for the country's future. Two related issues—the future of New Deal liberalism and the reconversion of the American economy from a war-time to a peace-time footing—topped his agenda.

As conceived and implemented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisers, New Deal liberalism committed the federal government to managing the nation's economy and to guarding the welfare of needy Americans. Truman would have to decide whether to maintain, advance, or retreat from these basic premises. During the war, for instance, the Roosevelt administration had geared the economy to meet the nation's war needs, implementing price and wage controls, rationing and allocating resources, and setting production targets for American industry. In short, the federal government regulated the American economy to an unprecedented degree. With the war's end, Truman needed to reorient the nation's financial system towards consumer production and clarify the government's future role in the economy.

In September 1945, Truman presented to Congress a lengthy and rambling twenty-one point message that nonetheless attempted to set the post-war political and economic agenda. Truman called for new public works programs, legislation guaranteeing "full employment," a higher minimum wage, extension of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (or FEPC, a war-time agency that monitored discrimination against African Americans in hiring practices of government agencies and defense industries), a larger Social Security System, and a national health insurance system. Taken together, these requests demonstrated an interest in maintaining and building upon the New Deal. On reconversion, Truman pushed for quick demobilization of the military—a political necessity as the troops and their families clamored for a hasty return to civilian life—and the temporary extension of governmental economic controls.

Truman's program went nowhere. While he won passage of a "full employment" bill—the Employment Act of 1946—the measure had no teeth. Republicans and conservative southern Democrats in Congress were dead-set against many of the other proposed reforms, including an extension of FEPC, national health insurance, and a higher minimum wage. The public, moreover, divided over the prospects of an enlarged social welfare state and continued government intervention in the economy; liberal Democrats and key constituents of the Democratic Party supported them, but many other Americans did not.

Reconversion stuttered and stalled—and Truman received the blame. In truth, rapid reconversion would have been difficult for any President, due to the variety and challenge of its objectives: increased production of consumer goods, full employment, higher wages, lower prices, and peace between labor unions and industrial management.

Ironically, a key Democratic constituency—labor—gave Truman the most headaches. In August 1945, Truman announced that he would maintain price controls but that unions could pursue higher wages. Beginning in late 1945 and lasting throughout 1946, a wave of strikes hit the steel, coal, auto, and railroad industries, debilitating key sectors of the American economy and stifling production of certain consumer goods. Truman remained steadfast in the face of labor's demands. To end the strikes and restore industrial peace, he recommended compulsory mediation and arbitration, warned that the U.S. government would draft striking railroad workers, and even took a union—the United Mine Workers—to court. The unions backed down and returned to work, for the most part with healthy gains. But by taking such a hard line, Truman had damaged his relationship with an important element of the party coalition.

Truman's other chief economic problem was the time it took to convert from military to civilian production. Consumer goods in high demand were slow to appear on the nation's shelves and in its showrooms, frustrating Americans who desperately wanted to purchase items they had forsaken during the war. Price controls proved a particularly thorny problem. When Congress preserved the Office of Price Administration but stripped it of all its power, Truman delivered a stinging veto. As controls began to disappear in mid-1946, prices shot upward; the rise in the price of meat—which doubled over a two-week period in the summer—received the most attention. In response, the government reinstituted price controls, angering meat producers who then withheld meat from the market. A New York Daily News headline read, "PRICES SOAR, BUYERS SORE, STEERS JUMP OVER THE MOON."The combination of high prices and scarcity angered consumers and voters, who often blamed the President. One woman wrote Truman specifically with the meat problem in mind, asking him, "How about some meat?" By September of 1946, Truman's popularity rating had sunk to 32 percent. Many Americans, including the President's supposed Democratic allies, wondered if Truman could effectively lead the nation. In the congressional mid-term elections of 1946, Republicans highlighted the problems of reconversion with slogans like "Had Enough" and "To Err is Truman," winning control of both the House and Senate. The future of Truman's presidency looked bleak as the 1948 presidential election loomed on the horizon.

Republicans in Congress

Ironically, Truman's legislative predicament actually sparked his political comeback. With Congress in the hands of Republicans—rather than members of his own party who were lukewarm (at best) to his proposals—Truman could let GOP leaders try to master the challenging task of governance. Truman also could define himself in opposition to Republican initiatives and wage a rhetorical war against the Republican Party.

Truman employed this strategy in several ways. In his January 1947 State of the Union address, he identified the need for legislation to solve the persistent problems of labor unrest and strikes. He offered no solution of his own, however, proposing only a temporary commission to study the issue and a declaration that he would sign no bill attacking organized labor.

Republicans in Congress took up Truman's challenge and passed the Taft-Hartley bill, which limited the power of labor unions by curbing union participation in politics, by approving state "right to work" laws, and by allowing the President to block strikes through a judicially mandated eighty day "cooling-off" period. Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley in June 1947, declaring that it "would take fundamental rights away from our working people." Congress overrode the veto; Truman, in turn, vowed to carry out the law's provisions and he even employed several of them—including the court injunction—to bring an end to some strikes. Nevertheless, in opposing Taft-Hartley, Truman recaptured the support of organized labor.

Inflation continued to be a problem in 1947 and 1948 as well, although prices did not rise as steeply as they had in 1946. Food prices, in particular, continued to soar. Truman suggested a return to price controls, albeit with the knowledge that congressional Republicans would reject such a measure—which they did. Republicans passed legislation mandating economic controls and rationing, which Truman signed, though he declared these bills "pitifully inadequate." Democrats made hay with Republican senator Robert Taft's suggestion that Americans "Eat less meat, and eat less extravagantly," which they conflated to "Eat less." Truman had managed to make inflation a Republican problem.

Finally, in 1947, Truman reaffirmed his support for liberal initiatives like housing for the poor and federal assistance for education. He vetoed Republican tax bills perceived as favoring the rich and rejected a Republican effort to raise tariffs on imported wool, a measure he deemed isolationist. These positions, combined with his veto of Taft-Hartley and his sympathy toward price controls, situated Truman as the chief defender of the New Deal against Republican encroachments.

Truman also took a stand in 1947 on civil rights. His unsuccessful 1945 proposal to extend FEPC was, in part, an effort to court black voters so important to the Democratic Party. In the summer of 1947, Truman became the first President to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to whom he declared his forthright support of African-American civil rights. Speaking to a crowd of 10,000, Truman declared that "The only limit to an American's achievement should be his ability, his industry, and his character." A few months later, his blue-ribbon civil rights commission—which he had appointed in the wake of the failure to extend FEPC—produced a report titled, To Secure These Rights, a detailed and unabashed brief for civil rights legislation.

Truman proceeded cautiously on this front, however. In early 1948, he sent his civil rights proposals to Congress, but did little to urge their passage. He also announced that he would issue executive orders—in the future—to desegregate the armed forces and to prohibit discrimination in the civil service. By early 1948, therefore, his support for civil rights was more rhetorical than substantive.

Nonetheless, as he pursued this strategy with increasing skill throughout the year, Truman stood poised to win Democratic votes. In his 1948 State of the Union address, Truman again called for civil rights legislation, national health insurance, a housing program, and a higher minimum wage. On a cross-country train tour in early 1948—dubbed a "whistle stop" tour by Republican Senator Robert Taft—Truman employed a new extemporaneous speaking style. Audiences warmed to this new public persona: the plain-spoken, hard-fighting Harry Truman from Missouri. Still, most political observers—and many Democrats—thought Truman would not win re-election in 1948.

After a rousing Democratic National Convention in which he claimed the nomination of a divided party—southerners had bolted in favor of segregationist "Dixiecrat" Senator Strom Thurmond (SC) and some progressives had supported Truman's former commerce secretary Henry Wallace - the President turned his attention to the Presidential campaign. He continued to run against the Republican Congress, even calling it into a special session to enact legislation. Truman also embraced more fully the cause of black civil rights by issuing executive orders desegregating the military and outlawing discrimination in the civil service. He won an upset victory that fall over his Republican opponent, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York. (For more details, see Campaigns and Elections.)

Fair Deal

Buoyed by his stunning victory, Truman announced an ambitious agenda in early 1949, which he called the "Fair Deal." It was a collection of policies and programs much desired by liberals in the Democratic Party: economic controls, repeal of Taft-Hartley, an increase in the minimum wage, expansion of the Social Security program, a housing bill, national health insurance, development projects modeled on the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority, liberalized immigration laws, and ambitious civil rights legislation for African-Americans.

Conservatives in the Republican and Democratic parties had little use for Truman's Fair Deal, however. National health insurance and repeal of Taft-Hartley went nowhere in Congress. Southern Democrats filibustered any attempt to push forward civil rights legislation. And Truman's agricultural program, the "Brannan Plan," designed to aid the family farmer by providing income support, floundered; it was replaced by a program that continued price supports. Congress did approve parts of the Fair Deal, however; Truman won passage of a moderately effective public housing and slum-clearance bill in 1949, an increase in the minimum wage that same year, and a significant expansion of Social Security in 1950.

Clearly, Truman had miscalculated in reading his electoral victory as a mandate to enact a liberal political, social, and economic agenda. Just as important, Truman regarded the "Fair Deal" as an opportunity to refashion the Democratic party into an alliance of urban dwellers, small farmers, labor, and African-Americans. Absent from this proposed coalition were white conservative southern Democrats. Moreover, public opinion polls showed that most Americans wanted Truman to protect the New Deal, not enlarge it. Likewise, Truman underestimated congressional opposition to a larger social welfare state—opposition strengthened by the public's lack of support for the Truman agenda. Whatever enthusiasm remained for the Fair Deal was lost, after the summer of 1950, amidst preoccupations with the Korean War.

Economic Growth

As Truman fought for the Fair Deal in 1949, he also battled a fairly severe economic slowdown. Both unemployment and inflation rose during the first six months of that year, heightening fears that the nation's post-war economic boom was over. Truman's economic policy sought to balance the federal budget through a combination of high taxes and limited spending; any budget surplus would be applied to the national debt. As the economy stalled, Truman in mid-1949 abandoned his hope for a balanced budget and gave some tax breaks to businesses. The economy responded by perking up in 1950. Truman's actions signaled that his primary concern was the maintenance of healthy economic growth, viewing ever-larger budget deficits as temporary expedients. It was a policy that succeeding administrations would follow repeatedly.

The Korean War, which began in June 1950, also affected the American economy. Truman and his advisers believed that American involvement in the war required economic mobilization at home. With the World War II experience in their minds—and uncertain whether the Korean War was merely the opening round of a longer and larger conflict - U.S. officials hoped that government intervention would keep unemployment and inflation under control, stabilize wages and prices, and increase military-related industrial production. In December 1950, Truman won congressional passage of the Defense Production Act and issued an executive order creating the Office of Defense Mobilization. Somewhat surprisingly, mobilization proceeded with few hitches: unemployment stayed low; inflation remained in check, albeit for a sharp, one-time surge in the last half of 1950; the hording of consumer goods subsided quickly; and military production increased. Nevertheless, many Americans complained about the government's intervention in the economy, especially its controls on credit.

Economic mobilization for the war effort did serve, though, as the setting for one of Truman's most stunning rebukes. By the end of 1951, the nation's steel industry faced a possible shut-down as labor and management could not agree on a new contract. Government mediation during the first several months of 1952 failed to end the stalemate. Throughout the ordeal, Truman's objectives were to avert a strike, maintain steel production, and stay on good terms with labor, an important Democratic constituency. In April, with no agreement in sight, Truman used his presidential authority to seize the steel industry; for the time being, it would be administered and overseen by the federal government. The seized steel companies took Truman to court to overturn his action. In June 1952, the Supreme Court declared the seizure unconstitutional by a 6-3 vote. Private management of the companies resumed, followed by a 53-day strike and a new contract, dealing Truman another political set-back.

Anticommunism and Senator McCarthy

Opposition to leftist political radicalism and the fear of subversion have long and intertwined histories in American politics and culture. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified in 1945, fear of—and opposition to—communism became a central part of American politics and culture. Politicians and the public seemed especially concerned that American communists or foreign agents might infiltrate the American government.

In November 1946, Truman created a temporary loyalty security program for the federal government to uncover security risks, i.e., Communists. Five months later, Truman issued an executive order making the program permanent. Other government bodies also tried to stymie the alleged subversive threat of communism. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), originally formed in 1938 with a mandate to investigate Nazi propaganda, launched an investigation of Hollywood screenwriters and directors in 1947.

Two spectacular spy cases intensified concerns over communism. In 1948, Whitaker Chambers, a former Communist and current editor of Time magazine, accused former Roosevelt aide and State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy; HUAC investigated these charges, complete with dramatic testimony from Hiss and Chambers. Less than a month after Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950, the British government arrested Klaus Fuchs, a German émigré scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Fuchs was charged with and then convicted of passing along A-bomb secrets to the Soviets with the help of American citizens David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; he served nine years of a fourteen-year sentence in the British penal system. The U.S. government executed the Rosenbergs in 1953. The Hiss and Fuchs revelations were all the more shocking because the Soviets had successfully tested an atomic bomb in August 1949—years before most experts believed they would have the ability to do so.

Even though the Truman administration supported several programs designed to root out communists and "subversives" from the American government, ardent anti-communists in both the Republican and Democratic parties hammered away at the threat of communist subversion and accused the administration of failing to protect the United States. Easily the most fabulous exploitation of the issue came from Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who in the days after the Fuchs arrest charged that the State Department was riddled with communist agents. McCarthy's fantastic allegations, the specifics of which he changed in subsequent appearances, electrified American politics by calling into question the loyalties of officials who conducted the nation's relations with the Soviets. McCarthy's charges also insinuated that Truman's loyalty program had failed miserably. McCarthy spent the rest of the Truman administration, as well as the first years of the Eisenhower administration, on a quest to expose communists in the State Department and the U.S. Army.

Truman did his best to calm the hysteria, which, by the spring of 1950, had been dubbed "McCarthyism." The President stated publicly that "There was not a single word of truth in what the Senator said." Senate Democrats organized a special subcommittee to investigate McCarthy's claims in the hope of proving them baseless. Their actions were to no avail as McCarthy—with the tacit support of most Republicans in Congress—continued to make his reckless charges and attack Truman administration officials. Military engagement in Korea and the defeats the United States suffered there only strengthened McCarthy's hand.

McCarthy was the most vocal congressional proponent of the "Red Scare," but he was far from its most effective legislator. That honor fell to Senator Patrick McCarran, a Democrat from Nevada, with whom Truman shared a mutual dislike, owing to a Senate dispute from the late 1930s over the Civil Aeronautics Act. In 1950, McCarran guided the Internal Security Act, which placed severe restrictions on the political activities of communists in the United States, through Congress. Truman vetoed the bill, claiming that it violated civil liberties; Congress easily overrode the veto, however. Two years later, Truman vetoed—on the same grounds—a McCarran-sponsored immigration bill restricting the political activities of recent immigrants to the United States. Congress again overturned Truman's veto.

Truman could do little, it seemed, to curb the excesses of the most ardent anticommunists. The political damage was immense as McCarthy, McCarran, and others charged the administration with being "soft on communism." Against the backdrop of the Korean War, Moscow's development of an atomic bomb, the fall of China to the Communists, and news reports of subversion and espionage, the "soft on communism" charge resonated with a jittery American public.

Accusations of Corruption

Accusations of corruption had dogged Truman since his earliest days in politics—a charge that was hardly surprising given his association with the Pendergast machine. During his presidency, the corruption charges proliferated, in part because they were effective political weapons for Truman's opponents. But these charges also resonated because some members of the administration did participate in ethically questionable, if not illegal, activities.

Truman's military aide, Harry Vaughan, a long-time associate of the President since World War I, was often at the center of these allegations. Vaughan clearly sought government favors for friends and businessmen; he even accepted seven freezers from an associate, one of which he gave to Bess Truman. (The freezers, however, were defective, and Bess's freezer broke after a few months.) In 1950, Democratic senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) headed an investigation into Vaughan's activities, finding Vaughn guilty of only minor ethical and legal breaches.

Fulbright's investigation also focused on influence-peddling in the federal government, especially in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a New Deal-era agency charged with providing government loans to struggling businesses. The Senator uncovered a web of questionable loans and kickbacks arranged by federal bureaucrats and private businessmen. Only a few of these questionable or illegal activities involved Truman administration officials directly; much of the corruption, rather, seemed a natural outgrowth of government-business relations in the 1930s and 1940s carried on by members of both major parties.

In any event, Republicans had a field day. They crowed that Vaughan's shenanigans and the shady dealings uncovered by Fulbright were examples of the "mess in Washington." Truman's critics exaggerated the extent of the wrong-doing and corruption, and pointed, though without much of a case, to the President's role in the scandals. Throughout the firestorm, Truman stood stoutly by his old friend, dismissing all of the allegations. While the President might have proven his loyalty, he also appeared to condone Vaughan's activities. And by the time Truman moved to clean up the RFC in early 1951 in the wake of Fulbright's charges, his actions were overshadowed by other events.

That year, investigations revealed the existence of serious criminality by high-level officials in the Internal Revenue Service and the Tax Division of the Justice Department. Truman and many in the administration blamed Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, who had proven to be more well-connected than competent as head of the Justice Department. Truman gave McGrath one last opportunity to remove the wrong-doers. McGrath botched this mission so badly that Truman demanded his resignation in March 1952. The bad publicity and further taint of corruption did nothing to help Truman's public standing, although McGrath's successor, James McGranery, did effectively address the scandals.

The Decision Not to Run in 1952

Truman had written privately as early as 1950—and had hinted to aides beginning in 1951—that he would not run again for the presidency. Most scholars agree that the Korean War, battles over economic mobilization, McCarthyism, and the allegations of corruption in his administration sapped his will to run for a third term. Public opinion polls, however unreliable, showed that Truman faced an uphill battle to win re-election.

Truman kept his own counsel throughout 1950 and 1951. He maneuvered behind the scenes to recruit his successor, focusing first on Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Fred Vinson and then on General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Both men refused his entreaties, with Eisenhower announcing, in January 1952, that he was a Republican. Truman next turned to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, who expressed interest but refused to commit. Finally, Truman stated publicly on March 29 that he would not be a candidate for President, declaring, "I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly."Governor Stevenson won the Democratic nomination at the party's convention in July, only to face the formidable Eisenhower in the general election. Truman campaigned hard for Stevenson, attacking the Republicans and Eisenhower with much of the same fury he had displayed in 1948. His once cordial relationship with Eisenhower turned bitter as a result. Nevertheless, Eisenhower proved too strong in 1952, winning a convincing victory over the Stevenson and the Democrats.

President Harry S. Truman confronted unprecedented challenges in international affairs during his nearly eight years in office. Truman guided the United States through the end of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the dawning of the atomic age. Truman intervened with American troops in the conflict between North Korea and South Korea and he supported the creation of the state of Israel in the Middle East. In sum, Truman's foreign policy established some of the basic principles and commitments that marked American foreign policy for the remainder of the twentieth century.

Truman's National Security Team

Truman inherited Roosevelt's national security team, though he would transform it—in terms of both personnel and organization—during the course of his presidency. At the State Department, Truman replaced FDR's last secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, with former senator, Supreme Court justice, and war mobilization director James F. Byrnes. Byrnes handled the opening rounds of negotiations at the postwar conferences of allied foreign ministers, but he proved problematic for the President. Truman replaced him in 1947 with Gen. George C. Marshall, Army chief of staff during the war, who had attempted to mediate the Chinese civil war during 1946. Marshall, in turn, was succeeded by Dean G. Acheson, a former undersecretary of state, in 1949. Marshall and Acheson proved inspired leaders and sometimes brilliant architects of United States foreign policy.

Truman also reorganized the nation's military and national security apparatus with passage of the National Security Act in 1947. The legislation had three main purposes. It unified the Army, Navy, and Air Force under a National Military Establishment (NME) headed by a civilian Secretary of Defense. Two years later, the NME was renamed the Department of Defense and made an executive department. The National Security Act also created the Central Intelligence Agency, the leading arm of the nation's intelligence network. Finally, the Act established the National Security Council (NSC) to advise the President on issues related primarily to American foreign policy. While underdeveloped and undernourished during its first years of existence, the NSC grew in prestige and power due to U.S. involvement in the Korean War. Over the coming decades, the NSC became a significant instrument of American foreign policy.

Entering the Atomic Age

When Truman ascended to the presidency on April 12, 1945, World War II in Europe was almost over; within a month, Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered. In the Pacific, however, the end of the war with Japan seemed farther away. As Truman took office, military planners anticipated that total victory would require an Allied invasion of Japan. The invasion would likely prolong the war for at least another year and cost, by one estimate, over 200,000 American casualties.

Truman knew that another option might exist. The top-secret Manhattan Project was at work on an atomic bomb, a device that one of the President's advisers described "as the most terrible weapon ever known in human history." While attending the Potsdam summit in July, Truman learned that a test of the bomb had been successful. The possibility of bringing the war to an earlier conclusion was exceedingly attractive; the added heft this new weapon might give to perceptions of U.S. power, while hardly determinative, also weighed on the President's mind. With figures for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands mounting and Japanese leaders offering few concrete hints of agreeing to the President's terms for unconditional surrender, Truman endorsed the use of the bomb against Japan.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Estimates of the casualties are notoriously slippery, but upwards of 100,000 people, perhaps—mostly civilians—perished instantly. Two days later, hearing no word from the Japanese government (which was in deep negotiations about whether to surrender), Truman let the U.S. military proceed with its plans to drop a second atomic bomb. On August 9, that weapon hit Nagasaki, Japan. The Japanese agreed to surrender on August 14 and then did so, more formally, on September 2. World War II was over.

Problems with the Soviet Union

Even before the end of World War II, tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States began to mount as both nations looked to shape the post-war international order in line with their interests. One of the most important flashpoints was Poland. At the Yalta conference in February 1945, the Soviet Union agreed in general terms to the establishment of freely elected governments in recently liberated areas of eastern Europe. Never fulfilling this promise, it established a Polish Communist-dominated puppet government in the spring of 1945 as the first of what would later become its eastern European satellites.

Truman hoped that the United States and the U.S.S.R. could maintain amicable relations, though he realized that conflicts would surely arise between the globe's most powerful nations. He believed that tough-minded negotiation and the occasional compromise would allow the United States nevertheless to achieve a modus vivendi favorable to American interests. A few of Truman's advisers dissented from even this guarded approach. Citing the situation in Poland, they warned that the Soviets would try to dominate as much of Europe as possible.

At Potsdam in July 1945, Truman met face-to-face with Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British prime minister Winston Churchill. The conference moved slowly and settled little. Stalin re-iterated his earlier pledge to enter the war in the Pacific against Japan—an offer Truman readily accepted—but American efforts to lessen Soviet influence over eastern Europe went nowhere. Nonetheless, as the conference came to an end, Truman wrote to Bess, "I like Stalin . . . He is straightforward. Knows what he wants and will compromise when he can't get it."In the coming months and years, Truman would change his opinion. Potsdam had been a personal success for Truman—he appeared to get along with his fellow heads of state—but the inability to settle outstanding issues, such as the future of Germany, the boundaries of postwar Poland, and the nature of wartime reparations hinted at serious underlying differences between the two nations. Secretary of State Byrnes tried in vain to work with the Soviets through the last months of 1945 and into early 1946, though without much success. At the same time, the Soviets tightened their control over eastern Europe and attempted to extend their influence into Turkey and Iran. The United States blunted Soviet intentions in those two nations through diplomacy and a show of military strength. Stalin heightened tensions with a fiery speech in February 1946, predicting a coming clash with capitalism.

The Early Cold War

Each of these developments frustrated and worried American leaders. Truman told Byrnes in January 1946, "I'm tired babying the Soviets." Others agreed. In February, George F. Kennan, the temporary head of the American embassy in Moscow, sent his assessment of Soviet foreign policy to Washington in what became known as the "long telegram." Kennan argued that the Soviets, motivated by a combination of Marxist-Leninist ideology and traditional Russian security concerns, were bent on expansion and were irrevocably opposed to the United States and the West, as well as to capitalism and democracy. He urged American leaders to confront and contain the Soviet threat. Two weeks later, former British prime minister Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, declared that the Soviets were bringing an "iron curtain" down across Europe—and that the United States and Britain needed to vigorously oppose Soviet expansionism. Kennan's analysis gave American officials a framework for understanding the Soviet challenge, Churchill's formulation brought the threat home to the public at-large.

Relations between the two nations continued to worsen in 1946. Britain received a $3.75 billion loan from the U.S. government to help it rebuild. In Stuttgart, Germany, Secretary of State Byrnes committed the United States to the reconstruction of that country both economically and politically—and promised to keep troops there as long as necessary. These two decisions hinted at an emerging worldview among government policymakers: American interests required more active protection from Soviet encroachment. It came as little surprise, then, when Truman dismissed Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace in September 1946 after Wallace gave a speech repudiating the administration's anti-Soviet foreign policy.

America sharpened its approach toward the U.S.S.R. in 1947. The President and his advisers grew more concerned that west European nations, still reeling from the devastation wrought by World War II, might elect indigenous Communist governments that would orient their nations—politically, economically, and militarily—toward the Soviet Union. Moreover, after the British government told American officials that it could no longer afford to serve as the watchdog of the eastern Mediterranean, Truman announced in March 1947 what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. He pledged U.S. support for the pro-Western governments of Greece and Turkey—and, by extension, any similarly threatened government—arguing that the United States had a duty to support "free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." In the summer of 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall announced a multi-billion dollar aid program for Europe, which became known as the Marshall Plan, that he hoped would encourage both political and economic stability and reduce the attraction of communism to Europe's suffering populations.

In 1948, the final pieces of the Cold War chessboard began to fall into place. In February, Soviet-backed communists seized control of Czechoslovakia, the last remaining independent democracy in Eastern Europe. In March, the Truman administration won congressional approval of the Marshall Plan. And throughout the spring and summer, the United States, England, and France—each occupying a zone of Germany—accelerated the process of merging those regions into a separate country that, by 1949, would become West Germany. The Soviets responded by blockading western access routes to Berlin which, while in their zone, was administered jointly by all four powers. Truman, determined not to abandon the city, ordered an airlift of food and fuel to break the blockade.

The Berlin stand-off lasted until May 1949, when the Soviets called off the blockade in return for a conference on the future of Germany. The meeting ended in failure after Stalin refused a U.S. and British offer to make the Soviet zone part of a democratic, unified Germany; the country would remain divided between West and East until October 1990. Just as important, the February 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet-American confrontation over Berlin spurred the creation of an alliance, largely on the invitation of European statesmen, between the United States, Canada, and Western Europe—what became known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO—to counter Soviet power. By mid-1949, Europe was divided politically, economically, militarily, and ideologically.

That year also marked the end of the U.S. nuclear monopoly. Truman had hoped that in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the development of atomic energy (for both peaceful and martial uses) would be placed under U.N. control. In early 1946, the Soviets rejected the U.S.-sponsored plan, which would have left the American atomic monopoly in place. Instead, the Kremlin redoubled its efforts to build a bomb which, through the aid of atomic espionage, came to fruition much more quickly than American policymakers and intelligence experts ever predicted.

Moscow's successful test of an atomic weapon in the late summer of 1949 forced the Truman administration to re-evaluate its national security strategy. Truman decided in January 1950 to authorize the development of an even more powerful weapon—the hydrogen bomb—to counter the Soviets, thus accelerating the Cold War arms race. In September, Truman approved a National Security Council document—NSC-68—that reevaluated and recast American military strategy. Among other things, NSC-68 stressed the need for a massive buildup of conventional and nuclear forces, no matter the cost. Truman greeted NSC-68, and its military and economic implications, with ambivalence, though the war in Korea, which began in the summer of 1950 and made the danger of armed challenge from the U.S.S.R. seem real and perhaps immediate, led to a more rapid implementation of the document's findings.

The United Nations

In the years after World War II, Truman worked diligently to assure that the United Nations—conceived by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a forum in which differences between nations could be resolved before they led to war - would be a significant player in international life. For the most part, he succeeded.

The new President sent a bipartisan delegation to the United Nation's founding conference in San Francisco in mid-1945, believing it essential that both of the major American political parties endorse the organization. The major roadblock to the formation of the United Nations came from the Soviets, who were slow to join. Truman managed to secure their participation after sending special emissary Harry Hopkins to Moscow. Some Americans would later argue, however, that the price of that participation—American acquiescence to a reorganized Polish government allied with the Soviets—was too steep. Nonetheless, the San Francisco Conference adjourned in June 1945 after its participating nations, including the Soviets, signed the founding U.N. Charter.

The United Nation's most significant accomplishment during the Truman years came during the Korean War. In the wake of North Korea's invasion of South Korea, the U.N. Security Council met, officially condemned North Korea's aggression, and pledged military support to South Korea. Though the United States provided most of the U.N. troops that fought in the war alongside the South Koreans, these forces were part of a multilateral effort. The Soviet Union, a member of the Security Council, could have vetoed U.N. involvement in the war were it not for their boycott of the meeting; Moscow was protesting the U.N.'s failure to seat a representative of the newly established—and communist—People's Republic of China.

Success and Failure in Asia

In Japan, which the United States occupied at the conclusion of World War II, General Douglas MacArthur oversaw a Japanese economic recovery and political reformation. Japan's new constitution took its cues from the ideals embodied in the American constitution. With the onset of the Korean War, the Japanese economy began its slow and steady rise to prominence, peaking in the 1980s.

The United States and the Truman administration proved less successful in shaping China's political future. In the wake of World War II, civil war resumed between supporters of nationalist Chinese leader Jiang Jieshi and the forces of Communist leader Mao Zedong. Truman sent General George C. Marshall to China in 1946 in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to mediate the conflict and form a coalition government. The administration determined privately that no amount of American aid could save Jiang, that western Europe more urgently required U.S. funding, and that the triumph of Mao's forces would not be disastrous to American interests. By August 1949, the State Department would issue a "white paper" outlining the administration's position on China and the reasons for the coming communist victory.

Two months later, on October 1, 1949, Mao declared the founding of the People's Republic of China. With Jiang's forces in full retreat to the island of Formosa, the President and his advisers confronted the firestorm in American politics touched off by the Chinese Communist victory. Republicans in Congress, including a group who wanted to reorient American foreign policy away from Europe and toward Asia, howled that the Truman administration had "lost" China. After Mao and Stalin agreed in early 1950 to a mutual defense treaty, critics of the administration's China policy redoubled their attacks. In this era of the Red Scare—Senator Joseph McCarthy leveled his infamous allegations regarding communists in the State Department in February 1950—the "loss" of China constituted a damning political charge.

The Korean War

Truman's troubles in Asia exploded on the Korean peninsula. In the wake of World War II, Korea had been partitioned at the 38th parallel, with the Soviets supporting a communist regime north of that boundary and the Americans a non-communist one in the south. On June 25, 1950, North Korea launched a surprise invasion of South Korea. The United Nations immediately condemned North Korea, while Truman and his advisers in Washington discussed the American response. Certain that the Soviet Union lay behind the invasion, they reasoned that failure to act would lead U.S. allies to question America's commitment to resist Soviet aggression. Truman resolved not to repeat the mistake of Munich, where the European powers appeased and condoned Hitler's expansionism. Scholars now know that the invasion was the brain-child of North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and that Stalin acceded to it only after making clear that the Soviets themselves would not become involved militarily and that Mao provide ground troops. Ultimately, the Soviets did provide the North Koreans with air support.

Truman ordered the American military, under the direction of General Douglas MacArthur, to intervene. The first U.S. troops did little to stop the onslaught as North Korean forces made rapid progress in their march down the peninsula. By August, the Americans were holed-up in a defensive perimeter on the southeastern tip of South Korea. MacArthur launched an audacious and risky counter-attack the following month that featured an amphibious landing behind enemy lines at Inchon on the western coast of South Korea, near the capital of Seoul.

MacArthur's gamble worked; American forces rapidly drove the North Koreans back to the border at the 38th parallel. MacArthur then received permission from the Truman administration to cross the border to secure the final defeat of North Korea and the reunification of the country. The danger, though, was obvious. The Soviet Union and China both bordered North Korea and neither wanted an American-led military force, or an American ally, on their doorsteps. In mid-October, meeting with the President at Wake Island, MacArthur told Truman that there was "very little" chance of Chinese or Soviets intervention. At the same time, however, the Chinese warned American officials though third-party governments that they would enter the war if the United States crossed the 38th parallel.

Disregarding these warnings, American forces pushed northward throughout October and into November 1950, coming to within several miles of the Chinese border. The Chinese entered the battle in late November, launching a massive counter-attack that threw the Americans back south of the 38th parallel; an American response in the spring of 1951 pushed the front north to the 38th parallel, the status quo antebellum. A brutal and bloody stalemate ensued for the next two years as peace talks moved forward in fits and starts.

American involvement in Korea brought Truman more problems than successes. After General MacArthur publicly challenged the administration's military strategy in the spring of 1951, Truman fired him. MacArthur returned home a hero, however, and Truman's popularity plummeted. Against the backdrop of McCarthyism, the failure to achieve military victory in Korea allowed Republicans to attack Truman mercilessly. Indeed, the war so badly eroded Truman's political standing that the President's slim chances of winning passage of his "Fair Deal" domestic legislation disappeared altogether.

Despite these setbacks, Truman's decision to stand and fight in Korea was a landmark event in the early years of the Cold War. Truman reassured America's European allies that the U.S. commitment to Asia would not come at Europe's expense—a commitment made more tangible in 1951 by increased American troop deployments to Europe and not Korea. The President thus guaranteed the United States to the defense of both Asia and Europe from the Soviet Union and its allies. Likewise, the Korean War locked in the high levels of defense spending and rearmament called for by NSC-68. Finally, the American effort in Korea was accompanied by a serious financial commitment to the French defense of a non-communist Indochina. In a very real sense, Korea militarized the Cold War and expanded its geographic reach.

The Creation of Israel

Between 1945 and 1948, Truman wrestled with the Jewish-Arab problem in British-controlled Palestine. Britain had searched for a solution to the conflict between Palestine's Jewish minority and Arab majority since the end of the first world war, but with little success; Arabs repeatedly rejected the British suggestion that a Jewish "national home" be created in Palestine. In February 1947, the British government, straining to uphold its other imperial commitments and with its soldiers constantly under attack by Jewish militias, announced it would shortly pass control of Palestine to the United Nations. The United Nations, in August 1947, proposed to partition Palestine into two states, one for an Arab majority and one for the Jewish minority. Jews, by and large, accepted this solution, while Arabs vigorously opposed the plan, as they had for the preceding decades. The prospect of partition ignited a savage and destructive guerilla war between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

The question Truman faced was whether to accept the U.N. partition plan and the creation of a Jewish state. While Truman personally sympathized with Jewish aspirations for a homeland in the Middle East, the issue involved both domestic and foreign concerns. The President and his political advisers were very aware that American Jews, a major constituency in the Democratic Party, supported a state for their co-religionists in the Middle East. In an election year, Democrats could ill afford to lose the Jewish vote to Republicans. On the other hand, Truman's foreign policy advisers, especially Secretary of State Marshall, counseled strongly against American support for a Jewish state. They worried that such a course was certain to anger the Arab states in the region and might require an American military commitment. As at least one high-ranking Defense Department official argued, access to oil, not the creation of a Jewish homeland, was America's priority in the Middle East.

In November 1947, Truman ordered the American delegation at the United Nations to support the partition plan. In the following months, though, bureaucratic battles among presidential advisers over the wisdom of the plan intensified, and Truman apparently lost control of the policy-making process. He ended up endorsing a plan—by mistake, apparently—that would have established the Jewish state as a United Nations trusteeship, rather than as an autonomous entity. Truman back-tracked furiously from his remark, though without clarifying U.S. intentions. Events in Palestine forced the President's hand, however. The military triumph of Jewish nationalists over their Arab opponents in the guerilla war made it clear that the Israeli nation would soon come into being. On May 15, the United States, at Truman's direction, became the first country to recognize the state of Israel.

Harry Truman lived for nineteen years after leaving the White House in 1953. He and his wife Bess returned to Truman's hometown of Independence, Missouri, where Truman spent his post-presidential years guarding and constructing his legacy and place in history. He also continued to comment on political events of the day.

Truman selected Independence as the site for his presidential library and oversaw its construction. Upon its completion, Truman spent a good deal of time at his office there, until health concerns in the mid-1960s limited his mobility and forced him to remain at home. At the library, Truman relished receiving important guests, meeting scholars who were studying his presidency, and speaking to groups of visiting school children. His trademark feistiness remained intact; he told one young history professor that he had better go home and read his books before trying to interview him again.

In 1955, Truman published the first volume of his memoirs; the second volume followed in 1956. Unfortunately, he hired ghostwriters and research assistants of questionable ability to help him through the process. As a result, the volumes were poorly organized, marred by leaden writing, and offered neither a comprehensive account of the Truman presidency nor many insights. Nonetheless, both volumes sold well upon their release.

Truman remained active in American politics after he left the White House. Eisenhower's handling of the presidency annoyed and angered Truman, who regularly criticized the administration's policies and politics in public appearances. He actively campaigned against Eisenhower in 1956. The personal relationship between the two men, already strained after Ike declared in 1952 that he would run for the Republican nomination, deteriorated throughout the eight years of Eisenhower's presidency. Truman had better relations with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He expressed reservations about Kennedy in 1960—thinking him too young and too Catholic to be a successful Democratic presidential nominee—but once in office, Kennedy and his wife charmed the ex-President. Truman felt even more comfortable with President Johnson, with whom he had enjoyed cordial relations while Johnson was on Capitol Hill. He never got along with President Nixon, however.

Truman found time to relax and rest in his post-presidential years. He was never far from his favorite bourbon and enjoyed clanking glasses with the old friends, political allies, and dignitaries who came through Independence. While his health permitted, he took regular walks around town. He traveled some, including a 1953 auto trip to New York during which a policeman stopped him on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for making an illegal lane change. It was Truman's only attempt at a long drive after leaving the presidency.

Harry S. Truman died on December 26, 1972, of old age rather than any specific sickness. Bess vetoed plans for an elaborate state funeral and arranged an Episcopalian service in the auditorium of the Truman Library. She had a Baptist minister and the Grand Masonic leader of Missouri conduct the proceedings. Truman was buried in the courtyard of his presidential library, with a simple stone epitaph that he himself had prepared. It listed the dates of his birth and death, the birth of his daughter, and his public offices from district judge to President of the United States. When Bess joined him ten years later, her marker read "First Lady of the United States."

Few Presidents were as dedicated to their family as Harry S. Truman. Although his father died in 1914, Truman’s mother, Martha Ellen, lived into her nineties—long enough to see him succeed President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Mama,” as Truman called his mother, passed away in 1947. She and her son had a very close relationship. A devoted Democrat and an astute political observer, she avidly supported her son's political career. In 1944, she chaired the first meeting of the female women workers in his campaign for the vice presidency. Truman corresponded regularly with his mother, often revealing in wonderfully expressive language his innermost thoughts about political affairs and family.

Truman's younger sister Mary Jane and brother Vivian were always close to him. Mary Jane, having never married, lived at home with "Mama" Truman and thus shared in all the news and attention that came their way. Vivian, who worked as the district director of the Federal Housing Administration, kept Truman apprised of political news from Missouri. The President often consulted his brother before making patronage decisions involving Missourians.

Truman was a doting and protective father to his daughter Mary Margaret. When Truman moved to Washington to serve in the Senate, Margaret was ten-years old. Thereafter, she would live half the year in Independence and half in Washington, until she was in high school. During the White House years, Margaret attended George Washington University. After graduating, she pursued a career as a vocalist.

Margaret performed frequently in public—she even went on a successful thirty-city tour in 1947—and showed some promise. Music critics, however, did not always offer good reviews of her performances. As a father, Truman could not abide the criticism, although he almost never responded publicly. On one particularly stressful occasion in December 1950, at the low point of the Korean War, his anger got the best of him. After reading a poor review of Margaret's performance in the Washington Post, Truman wrote the author: "Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!" A public uproar ensued after the reviewer released Truman's note to the press. Truman, though, maintained that the public understood he was just protecting his daughter, like any good father. Margaret finally gave up her quest for a musical career to marry Clifton Daniel, a highly successful New York newspaper editor, in 1956. They eventually had four children.

Harry Truman's life in the White House followed a regular routine. Truman usually awoke at 5:00 in the morning, dressed, and took a vigorous one or two-mile walk (at the Army's 120-steps-per-minute pace) around the White House grounds and neighborhood - wearing a business suit and tie! After an assassination attempt in 1950, the Secret Service took the President to various undisclosed locations for his daily walk. He then had a rubdown, a shot of bourbon, and a light breakfast. He tried to lunch each day with Bess and take short afternoon naps. At mid-day, Truman often took a few laps in the White House swimming pool, swimming with his eyeglasses on. In the evening, if no business was at hand, he and Bess would enjoy a cocktail, eat dinner, and then listen to music or watch a movie. Once or twice a week, he would slip away to a stag poker party with his male friends at a private home, seldom returning before midnight. Truman loved to tell and hear dirty jokes, and enjoyed visiting with and pulling strings for his old Army friends. He also relaxed by taking trips aboard the presidential yacht Williamsburg or by vacationing at the naval base in Key West, Florida. Truman almost always invited his male friends—and rarely Bess or Margaret—along on these excursions.

In 1950, just over 150.7 million people were living in the United States. Nearly two-thirds resided in urban or suburban areas. The average American white male could expect to live to age sixty-six, while white women usually lived to age seventy-two. African-American life expectancy, however, was considerably lower.

The most important demographic change during the Truman years, however, was the growth of the American population as a whole, which between 1940 and 1950 grew by over 14 percent, or 19 million people. Similar—and even larger—population increases had occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century, but that growth was fueled largely by immigration to the United States. Congress, however, passed laws in the 1920s that severely restricted immigration; these laws stayed in effect until 1965, meaning that the growth of the U.S. population in the 1940s was almost exclusively home-grown (with those immigrants who did arrive coming largely from Germany, Great Britain, and Canada).

The American Family

The engine of American population growth was the "baby boom." After years of depression and war, Americans, quite simply, were having more children. In 1940, American families had, on average, 2.6 children; by 1950 that number had jumped to 3.2. The baby boom was only one of the massive changes underway in the structure of the American family during the years immediately following World War II. The marriage rate began to rise rapidly during the Truman years; statistics showed that during the 1950s, 97% of American women and 94% of American men between the ages of 18 and 30 were married. Americans also got married at younger ages than at any time in the twentieth century. Finally, Americans stayed married in the 1950s; after an initial surge in the divorce rate, following the return of American veterans from overseas, the number of couples splitting up dropped precipitously.

Higher marriage and birth rates were just some of the significant changes in the lives of American women in the postwar years. During World War II, women joined the workforce in large numbers; by 1945, 19 million women were working outside the home. Two million women left the workforce in the immediate post-war years. Some did so out of choice, but many left because of federal employment policies which privileged returning veterans at the expense of working women. Nonetheless, women's participation in the workforce continued to rise in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, though with some caveats. Those who joined the workforce were older women, women of working-class means, and women of color. Moreover, these women often took jobs that paid poorly, offered fewer chances for advancement, and were less likely to be unionized.

If the increasing number of American women in the workforce marked one trend during the post-war years, another involved a renewed emphasis on domesticity. American women—white and black—were told by a host of experts that their primary responsibilities lay in the home. Their task was to raise and care for children, and ensure that husbands returned each day from work to a happy and well-cared for home. For women who worked outside the home, such advice meant double-duty as both homemaker and worker. Women who stayed at home, however, faced the possibility of an often intellectually and emotionally stultifying life, what the author Betty Friedan called "the problem with no name" in her groundbreaking 1963 book on domesticity, The Feminine Mystique.

Suburbia

One important development in American society during the Truman years was the rise of the suburbs, communities that sprung up adjacent to, but outside of, American cities. Of the nearly two million new homes built in the United States between 1945 and 1950—the outlines of this trend had become apparent in the 1920s, though the Depression and then the war cut it short—more than 80 percent were built in the suburbs. Inexpensive federal government mortgages, innovations in home construction, a fast-growing population, and burgeoning economic prosperity all contributed to the suburban housing boom.

Levittown, New York, just twenty-five miles from Manhattan, was the archetypal suburban community. The builder William Levitt put up 17,000 houses—and parks, stores, and churches to serve their residents—on several thousand acres of farmland in the 1940s; the venture proved such a success that Levitt built other suburban communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Americans, who were marrying and having children at dizzying rates, flocked to suburbs like Levittown for obvious reasons. Housing was affordable, the schools were good, and the streets were safe. The neighborhoods were made up of young families, providing a sense of community and shared experience.

Not all Americans were fans of the suburbs, however. Critics noted that suburban housing all looked the same, as did its residents: white, middle-class, young families in which the husband worked and the wife stayed at home with the children.

African-Americans

During the Truman years, African-Americans continued to move from the rural south to the urban north, a migration that began during the 1930s. One million blacks left the south in the 1940s; another 1.5 million left in the 1950s. In the north, Blacks found both more freedoms and better jobs, though they still encountered racial discrimination and violence when they moved into almost exclusively white neighborhoods later in the decade. Historians now trace both the origins of the divisive racial politics that split the Democratic party and the beginning of the so-called "urban crisis" to the immediate post-war years.

While the African-American civil rights movement would not explode in the national consciousness until the mid-1950s with the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board decision and the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott led by Martin Luther King, important gains in civil rights occurred during the Truman years. In 1946, the Supreme Court declared segregation in interstate bus travel unconstitutional. In 1948, the Court struck down restrictive housing covenants. And in both 1948 and 1950, the Court issued three separate rulings that chipped away at segregation in higher education, each of which helped pave the way for the Brown decision.

Civil rights groups were active during the Truman years as well. The NAACP pressed the federal government to desegregate the military, set up a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, and outlaw discrimination in the federal government employment practices. After the Court's 1946 decision concerning interstate busing, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began a series of "freedom rides" in the upper south to see whether the Court's ruling would be enforced. The most public demonstration of African-American equality, however, probably occurred in 1947 when Jackie Robinson, a second basemen for the Brooklyn Dodgers, integrated the "National Game," major league baseball. Robinson's prowess on the field—he led his team to the pennant and won the "Rookie of the Year" award—was surpassed only by his quiet dignity as he endured countless insults from fans, opponents, and even some teammates.

Labor

As Truman took office, American labor unions had reached the apogee of their power. In 1945, nearly 30 percent of all American workers were in a union, which gave organized labor significant political power. Quite simply, labor was the key member of the "New Deal coalition" assembled by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party because it could deliver millions of votes. But labor's power was apparent not just on election day but in the programs and governance of the New Deal and the American World War II homefront. The was especially true during the war, when labor's representatives, working with politicians, policymakers, and corporate leaders, helped organize the American economy to maximize production, provide fair wages, and avoid strikes and strife.

In the immediate post-war years, however, labor's power began to wane. Conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties looked to curb—and perhaps even end—the reformist impulse of New Deal and World War II-era liberalism. In practice, this meant trying to reduce labor's political power and eradicating government policies that gave unions a voice in the nation's political economy. The reconversion of the American economy that began in earnest in 1946 brought an end to many of the World War II commissions in which labor participated. Just as important, conservatives, backed by business interests, managed to pass the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, empowering industry and its political allies in their attack on labor. Finally, President Truman, unlike his predecessor, proved an ambivalent ally of labor. While he sympathized with the working man's desire for a better life, Truman, who was once a small businessman himself, possessed a general dislike of labor unions and the tactics embraced by their leaders. His antipathy for union leaders like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers was at times immense.

But labor's influence in the post-war years also ebbed because its strategies for maintaining and extending its power had failed. Through most of the twentieth century, unions had failed to gain a foothold in the South, where conservative politicians, local elites, and businessman feared that such progressive organizations would challenge the region's political, economic, and racial orders. During World War II, however, more than 800,000 workers, including over 250,000 blacks, joined unions. If the CIO could continue to organize the south, it reasoned that its political power—both nationally and locally—would grow accordingly. In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), one of the country's two most important labor federations, launched Operation Dixie, an effort to build unions in southern states. The CIO sent down hundreds of organizers states, opened up union offices, and aggressively courted southern workers. Operation Dixie failed horribly, however. White workers proved largely unwilling to join interracial unions, southern companies and industries counterattacked with aggressive anti-union propaganda, and union organizers were constantly harassed, threatened, and sometimes violently beaten.

Labor unions also suffered in the late 1940s and early 1950s because of the "Red Scare" (see below). Red Scare political culture proved especially corrosive to labor unions as its proponents questioned whether organizations or persons with liberal or progressive political agendas—like unions—might be allied with the Soviet Union or sympathetic to communism. In fact, a small number of union members were communists, a reality which union opponents exploited and exaggerated in their political campaigns. Second, anticommunists in unions vigorously purged their organizations of communists or suspected communists, a measure which proved divisive and morale-sapping, depriving unions of some of their best organizers.

The Red Scare

The Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s was not an anomaly; American history contains numerous incidents of violence and suppression of leftist political radicalism. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise to power of Russian communists in 1917, persecution of American communists produced what some historians call the "First Red Scare."The emergence of the Cold War and the dawning of the atomic age meant that the politics of anticommunism—practiced in its more benign form by President Truman, in a slightly less benign form by young politicians like Congressman Richard Nixon, and in a malevolent and destructive form by Senator Joe McCarthy—became a fact of American political life during the Truman years. Just as striking though, the Red Scare of the 1950s had both an unprecedented vitality and an extensive reach, affecting almost all aspects of the American experience. Films, television shows, museum exhibits, popular magazines, and comic books often portrayed communism as an anti-American virus fomented by American communists and leftists, Soviet agents, and suspicious foreigners who threatened to infect an unsuspecting public. Opening a copy of the March 4, 1947, Look magazine, for example—a glossy, picture-laden popular weekly—readers could enjoy an article entitled, "How to Spot a Communist." Americans could go to the movie theatre and see "The Red Menace (1949)" or "I Was a Communist for the FBI (1952)," propaganda films that warned of the communist threat in the United States and showed model Americans fighting it (though neither of these films, nor others of the genre, did well at the box office).

Still, it should not be surprising that the anticommunist crusade and fervor spread to local communities and local governance. Thirteen states established their own versions of House Committee on Un-American Activities, and many more states passed ordinances that either made communist organizations illegal or forced them to register with the appropriate authorities. State and local governments launched investigations of employees suspected of communist-leanings. Some of the most ardent anti-communist hunts occurred in the field of education, where local school boards investigated teachers for suspected communist leanings; at colleges and universities, some professors were fired for past or present communist affiliations. In sum, thousands of Americans were subjected to investigations, with hundreds losing their jobs and livelihoods. Many more lived in fear of the accusatory dragnet.

The history of the "Red Scare" raises an important question: how significant was the threat posed by American communists and Soviet espionage in the United States? With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, scholars have gained access to the Soviet Union's archives, in which they have found evidence of a fairly extensive Soviet espionage effort penetrating all branches and levels of the federal government. Moreover, these newly discovered Soviet documents reveal that the leadership of the American communist party took its orders from the Soviet Union and worked assiduously to recruit Soviet agents from the American population. Some scholars believe that these findings justify the extensive efforts to combat communism in the United States that occurred in the early 1950s. Other scholars disagree, conceding that while the new evidence demonstrates convincingly that the Soviet Union was directing such espionage, the anticommunist purges of the Truman years were overly destructive and indiscriminate.

When Harry S. Truman left the presidency in January 1953, he was one of the most unpopular politicians in the United States. The Korean War, accusations of corruption in his administration, and the anticommunist red-baiting of McCarthy and his allies had all contributed to the President's poor standing with the public. Truman's reputation, though, began to revive soon after he returned to private life. In part, this was because Americans began to see Truman as a feisty everyman from "Middle America" rather than a partisan Washington, D.C., politico.

But Truman's stature also rose in subsequent years because it became easier for both scholars and the public to discern and appreciate his significant contributions. Truman's conduct of American foreign policy deserves special commendation. The President and his advisers recognized that the Soviet Union threatened the political and military balance of power, as well as the healthy economic intercourse, that favored the United States and its allies in the aftermath of World War II. Truman responded to the Soviet challenge with a range of political, diplomatic, military, and economic initiatives designed to contain Soviet power and to construct an American-led bulwark against communism. In large measure, American officials followed Truman's approach to U.S.-Soviet relations until the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Several Truman foreign policy programs remain central to America's international posture even today. Commitments to Israel and South Korea are still hallmarks of U.S. policy towards the Middle East and Asia, respectively. Likewise, the United States remains the prime member of NATO.

Truman also left his mark on domestic affairs. He oversaw the conversion of the American economy from its World War II footing to one that emphasized both consumer and military production. While not without problems, this transition occurred about as smoothly as possible. Truman protected the New Deal and—with a rise in the minimum wage in 1949 and the enlargement of Social Security in 1950—built upon its achievements. He pushed forward the cause of African-American civil rights by desegregating the military, by banning discrimination in the civil service, and by commissioning a federal report on civil rights. Just as important, Truman spoke out publicly on the matter.

Finally, Truman engineered one of the most unexpected comeback victories in American political history. The dispiriting 1946 mid-term elections that gave the Republicans control of Congress, paired with the prospect of facing an accomplished Republican candidate like New York governor Thomas Dewey, dimmed Democratic hopes for a Truman victory in the 1948 presidential election. Truman, though, campaigned relentlessly and effectively, making congressional Republicans the main issue in the election. He defeated Dewey convincingly in November 1948 when almost no knowledgeable observers gave him a chance.

Some historians do find fault with Truman's record. They argue that Truman too readily accepted Douglas MacArthur's advice in Korea when he should have questioned his commanding general's assessment of Chinese intentions. Other historians point out that Truman's failure to keep politicians and the public more informed about U.S. policy towards the Chinese Civil War, and specifically the administration's reservations about Jiang Jieshi, led to the damaging political firestorm that exploded after Mao's victory. They argue that Truman responded too slowly and weakly to Senator McCarthy and that his support for African-American civil rights was underwhelming. Finally, many historians contend that Truman grievously erred in 1946 and 1949 by advocating liberal initiatives that expanded the welfare state and increased government intervention in the nation's economy for which a conservative polity had no appetite.

While these critiques are not without merit, they underestimate the difficult political circumstances in which Truman found himself. His own party was a composite of different constituencies and was divided grievously between progressives and southern conservatives; his Republican detractors also proved a strong and determined opposition, hungry to win back the White House. Truman therefore had to tread carefully and sometimes cautiously. Viewed in this context, Truman's achievements in both foreign and domestic affairs, where he confronted some of the most difficult challenges any American president has faced, appear even more significant.

Born in Texas and raised in Kansas, Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of America's greatest military commanders and the thirty-fourth President of the United States. Inspired by the example of a friend who was going to the U.S. Naval Academy, Eisenhower won an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Although his mother had religious convictions that made her a pacifist, she did not try to stop Eisenhower from becoming a military officer.

Popular War Hero

After graduating from West Point, Eisenhower experienced several years of professional frustration and disappointment. World War I ended a week before he was scheduled to go to Europe. After peace came, his career stalled. He did enjoy the personal fulfillment that came from marrying Mamie Doud in 1916 and having a son, John, in 1922. During the 1920s, he began to get assignments that allowed him to prove his abilities. He served as a military aide to General John J. Pershing and then to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines. Shortly before the United States entered World War II, Eisenhower earned his first star with a promotion to brigadier general. After the United States entered the war, Eisenhower went to Washington, D.C., to work as a planning officer. He so impressed the Army's chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, that he quickly got important command assignments. In 1944, he was Supreme Commander of Operation Overlord, the Allied assault on Nazi-occupied Europe. In only five years, Eisenhower had risen from a lowly lieutenant colonel in the Philippines to commander of the greatest invasion force in history. When he returned home in 1945 to serve as chief of staff of the Army, Eisenhower was a hero, loved and admired by the American public. Acknowledging Eisenhower's immense popularity, President Harry Truman privately proposed to Eisenhower that they run together on the Democratic ticket in 1948—with Truman as the vice-presidential candidate. Eisenhower refused and instead became president of Columbia University and then, after the outbreak of the Korean War, the first Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe. In 1952, he declared that he was a Republican and returned home to win his party's presidential nomination, with Richard M. Nixon as his running mate. "Ike" endeared himself to the American people with his plain talk, charming smile, and sense of confidence. He easily beat Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and again in 1956.

Moderate Republicanism

Eisenhower was a popular President throughout his two terms in office. His moderate Republican policies helped him secure many victories in Congress, even though Democrats held the majority in both the House and the Senate during six of the eight years that Eisenhower was in the White House. Eisenhower helped strengthen established programs, such as Social Security, and launch important new ones, such as the Interstate Highway System in 1956, which became the single largest public works program in U.S. history. Yet there were problems and failures as well as achievements. Although he secured from Congress the first civil rights legislation since the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War, he refrained from speaking out to advance the cause of racial justice. He never endorsed the Supreme Court's ruling in 1954 that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional, and he failed to use his moral authority as President to urge speedy compliance with the Court's decision. In 1957, he did send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, when mobs tried to block the desegregation of Central High School, but he did so because he had a constitutional obligation to uphold the law, not because he supported integration. Eisenhower also refrained from publicly criticizing Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who used his powers to abuse the civil liberties of dozens of citizens who he accused of anti-American activities. Eisenhower privately despised McCarthy, and he worked behind the scenes with congressional leaders to erode McCarthy's influence. Eisenhower's indirect tactics eventually worked, but they also prolonged the senator's power since many people concluded that even the President was unwilling to confront McCarthy.

Waging Cold War

Six months after he became President, Eisenhower agreed to an armistice that ended three years of fighting in Korea. Only on one other occasion—in Lebanon in 1958—did Eisenhower send combat troops into action. Yet defense spending remained high, as Eisenhower made vigorous efforts to wage the Cold War. He placed new emphasis on nuclear strength, which was popularly known as massive retaliation, to prevent the outbreak of war. He also frequently authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to undertake covert actions—secret interventions to overthrow unfriendly governments or protect reliable anti-Communist leaders whose power was threatened. The CIA helped topple the governments of Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, but it suffered an embarrassing failure in 1958 when it intervened in Indonesia. Eisenhower avoided war in Indochina in 1954 when he decided not to authorize an air strike to rescue French troops at the crucial battle of Dienbienphu. Yet after the French granted independence to the nations of Indochina—Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam—Eisenhower used U.S. power and prestige to help create a non-Communist government in South Vietnam, an action that had disastrous long-term consequences. During his last years in office, Eisenhower also "waged peace," hoping to improve U.S.-Soviet relations and negotiate a treaty banning nuclear testing in the air and seas. But the Soviet downing of a U.S. reconnaissance plane—the U-2 incident of May 1, 1960—ended any hope for a treaty before Eisenhower left office.

Rising Reputation

After leaving office, Eisenhower had a mediocre reputation with most historians. Some even wondered whether a President who often made garbled public statements really understood most issues or whether staff assistants made the important decisions for this general in the White House. As time passed and more records from the Eisenhower administration became available for research, it became clear that Eisenhower was a strong leader who was very much in charge of his own administration. Historians still point to the limitations in Eisenhower's record in areas such as civil rights, and they debate the long-term consequences of his covert interventions in Third World nations. Yet his ranking is much higher, with many historians concluding that Eisenhower was a "near great" or even "great" President.

Born on October 14, 1890, in a house by the railroad tracks in Denison, Texas, Dwight David Eisenhower spent his youth in the small farm town of Abilene, Kansas. His father, David, worked as a mechanic in a local creamery. His mother, Ida, a Mennonite, was a religious pacifist who opposed war. Eisenhower did family chores, delighted in hunting and fishing and football, and eagerly read military history. In 1911, he won an appointment to West Point, where he played football until he suffered a serious knee injury. His pranks, fondness for cards and smoking, and average grades earned him little respect from his teachers. They thought that he would be a good officer, but not a great one.

Rising in the Ranks

After graduating in the middle of his class—61st out of 164—Eisenhower spent the next few years at one disappointing station after another, beginning with a stint as a second lieutenant at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. It was there that he met and married Mamie Doud. At Camp Meade, Maryland, Eisenhower became friends with George S. Patton, Jr. Both Eisenhower and Patton published articles in 1920 advocating that the Army make better use of tanks to prevent a repetition of the static and destructive trench warfare of World War I. But Army authorities considered Eisenhower insubordinate rather than visionary and threatened him with a court-martial if he again challenged official views on infantry warfare.

Eisenhower was doubly fortunate when he was transferred to a new assignment in the Panama Canal Zone and got to work as executive officer for General Fox Conner, who appreciated Eisenhower's critical thinking about infantry warfare. Conner became Eisenhower's patron and arranged for a prized appointment that helped propel Eisenhower's career, as a student at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Eisenhower graduated first in his class of 245 officers, and he was quickly given important assignments. He served as an aide first to General John J. Pershing, commander of U.S. forces in World War I, and then to General Douglas MacArthur, the Army's chief of staff.

Eisenhower remained with MacArthur for seven stormy years. The two men were extremely different. They often disagreed, although Eisenhower, as the junior officer, still had to carry out the general's orders. Eisenhower loyally served MacArthur even when it meant dispersing the "Bonus Marchers," a group of unemployed veterans of World War I who protested in Washington, D.C., during the Great Depression. Despite their different styles, Eisenhower stayed with MacArthur when he moved to the Philippines in 1935 to organize and train the army of the Philippine Commonwealth.

World War II Hero

After World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, Eisenhower returned to the United States and eventually played an important role in the Third Army's field maneuvers in Louisiana. These training exercises, in which more than 400,000 troops participated, revealed Eisenhower's talent for strategic planning and earned him a promotion to brigadier general. Only days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower went to Washington, D.C., to work on U.S. war plans. Eisenhower impressed Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, a keen but stern judge of military ability who rarely spoke words of praise. Promotions and critical assignments followed quickly. In November 1942, Eisenhower commanded Allied troops that invaded North Africa in Operation Torch. The next year, he directed the invasions of Sicily and Italy. In 1944, he was the Supreme Commander in Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied western Europe. In only a few years, Eisenhower had risen from an obscure lieutenant colonel to a four-star general in charge of one of the greatest military forces in history.

By dealing sympathetically with Allied leaders, Eisenhower achieved the cooperative effort that enabled him to launch the D-Day invasion of Normandy, June 6, 1944. His terse decision, "Okay, let's go," despite the chance of poor weather won admiration from the Allied leaders and the troops that risked—and gave—their lives on the beaches of Normandy.

Postwar Achievements

After Germany's surrender in May 1945, Eisenhower received a hero's welcome at victory ceremonies in several Allied capitals, including Washington, D.C., London, Moscow, and Paris. Yet peace also brought controversy for Eisenhower in his role as the commander of U.S. occupation forces in Germany. He endured criticism for allowing the Red Army to liberate Berlin in the final days of fighting. Eisenhower, however, thought he made the right decision, as he adhered to previous agreements about how far troops should advance and avoided unnecessary casualties to the forces he commanded. Eisenhower had to take an unpopular step when he relieved his old friend George Patton as military governor of Bavaria because of the general's violation of orders against using former Nazis in government positions. Eisenhower also adhered strictly to a provision of the Yalta agreements that he return all Soviet citizens in the U.S. occupation zone—even political dissidents who had no desire to go back.

Eisenhower had clear views on what became one of the most controversial decisions that a President has ever made, when President Harry S. Truman authorized the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eisenhower expressed his ideas in July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference, a meeting between President Truman, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was replaced by Prime Minister Clement Atlee because of the results of the British elections. After news of the test in the New Mexico desert of the first atomic bomb reached U.S. officials at the beginning of the conference, Eisenhower told Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that the bomb was unnecessary, as Japan was on the verge of surrender. Eisenhower also feared that the first use of atomic weapons in combat would tarnish the image of the United States at the very moment when its prestige was at an all-time high. But Truman accepted the counsel of other advisers, who, unlike Eisenhower, had been at the center of discussion about the war in the Pacific, and authorized the Army Air Forces to drop whatever bombs were available—then two—as soon as possible.

At the end of 1945, Eisenhower returned to Washington, D.C., to become the chief of staff of the Army. He served in that capacity for two years and made important decisions to transform the wartime Army into a force prepared for the Cold War. After retiring from the position of chief of staff, he wrote a popular memoir of his wartime experiences, Crusade in Europe. He served as the president of Columbia University, beginning in 1948, although he returned occasionally to Washington to serve as informal chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as they discussed how to apportion service roles and missions in the nuclear age and how to allocate defense funds that fell short of their requirements. Soon after war broke out in Korea, Eisenhower returned to uniform as the first Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe, the "most important military job in the world today."

The Campaign and Election of 1952:

During an extraordinary military career, Dwight D. Eisenhower had done some things that few, if any, Americans had ever experienced. But he had not done something that was extremely common—he had never voted. Yet in 1948, many Americans hoped that the general would cast his first ballot—for himself as President. Even Harry S. Truman tried to interest Eisenhower in a run for the presidency. As the election year of 1948 approached, Truman, who became President when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945, seemed to have little chance of winning a full term of his own. In a private meeting, Truman proposed that he and Eisenhower run together on the Democratic ticket, with Eisenhower as the presidential candidate and Truman in second position. Eisenhower rejected this astonishing offer and probably thought that he would never again have to consider the possibility of a run for the White House. He also spurned requests from prominent Republicans that he seek the GOP nomination for President.

Truman won an upset victory in 1948, but during the Korean War, he became extremely unpopular. Truman's decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur as commander of United Nations forces was an important cause for public disapproval of the President. So too was the deadlock in the fighting in Korea. Republicans expected to win the presidency in 1952, and Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio became the leading candidate for the GOP nomination. But some prominent Republicans considered Taft an isolationist since he had opposed the formation of NATO and talked instead about building up defenses in the Western Hemisphere. They tried to interest Eisenhower in the Republican nomination, confident that his popularity would carry him to victory and certain that his internationalist policies were essential to success in the Cold War.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., of Massachusetts began an Eisenhower for President drive in the Republican Party. In public, Eisenhower said he had no interest in politics because he had to devote full attention to his duty as commander of NATO forces in Europe. But behind the scenes, Eisenhower began to offer encouragement to Lodge during the senator's visits to NATO headquarters near Paris. Finally, in January 1952, Eisenhower announced that he was a Republican and that he would be willing to accept the call of the American people to serve as President.

Soon there was clear evidence that voters preferred Eisenhower. In the New Hampshire primary, Eisenhower won a big victory over Taft. Yet in 1952, there was only a handful of presidential primaries. State conventions and party leaders chose most of the delegates to the nominating convention, and Taft had taken the lead before Eisenhower returned to the United States in June to campaign for the nomination. Some delegates—enough to make a difference in who got the nomination—were in dispute. At the Republican convention in Chicago, Eisenhower's political managers won a critical battle over the disputed delegates and managed to seat their delegates rather than Taft's in a few key states. As a result, Eisenhower won the nomination on the first ballot. For vice president, Eisenhower chose Senator Richard M. Nixon of California, who had helped his campaign managers secure votes in the dispute over delegates. Although he was just thirty-nine years old, Nixon had won national attention for his role in a congressional investigation of Alger Hiss, a former state department official accused of spying for the Soviets. Hiss went to prison after his conviction on a charge of perjury for denying that he had passed secrets to the Kremlin.

The Democrats picked Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, a witty and urbane politician whose thoughtful speeches appealed to liberals and moderate Democrats. His credentials were impressive: he was a Princeton-educated lawyer who had served as special assistant to the Secretary of the Navy during World War II, an influential member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations after the war, and a successful governor with an enviable record of reform. But as a campaigner, he was no match for Eisenhower.

Eisenhower inspired confidence with his plain talk, reassuring smiles, and heroic image. He kept a demanding schedule, traveling to forty-five states and speaking to large crowds from the caboose of his campaign train. The slogan "I like Ike" quickly became part of the political language of America. Eisenhower also got his message to the American people through 30-second television advertisements, the first time TV commercials played a major role in a presidential election.

Yet it was not just Ike's personal charm that mattered, his campaign used a clever strategy of ignoring Stevenson—Eisenhower never mentioned his opponent by name—and attacking Truman. And Eisenhower had a formula for victory—K₁C₂ (Korea, Communism, and corruption). The stalemated war in Korea, corruption in the Truman administration, and Communist subversion were the issues that Republicans emphasized throughout the campaign. Eisenhower held a clear lead over Stevenson in the polls, as voters looked to Eisenhower to clean up what even Stevenson had called "the mess in Washington."

Campaign Difficulties

Eisenhower, though, had his own problems to resolve, as unexpected difficulties disrupted his campaign. The most serious was a scandal over whether Nixon had used campaign funds for personal expenses. This charge was particularly embarrassing because of Eisenhower's promise that his administration would be "clean as a hound's tooth." Nixon answered the allegations in a nationally televised speech on September 23. In a masterly performance, Nixon denied that he had done anything wrong, but vowed that he would not give up his daughters' little dog, Checkers, also a gift to the family, no matter what the consequences. The public responded to the "Checkers Speech" with an outpouring of support, and Eisenhower kept Nixon on the ticket.

Eisenhower provoked criticism for his own actions when he campaigned in Wisconsin and appeared on the same platform with Senator Joseph McCarthy. The junior senator from Wisconsin had been front-page news for more than two years with his sensational allegations that Communist spies had infiltrated the State Department as well as other parts of the federal government. McCarthy never provided evidence that led to a single conviction for espionage or treason, but he was a major power in the Republican Party. Eisenhower disliked McCarthy, and campaign aides told journalists that McCarthy would get his comeuppance when Eisenhower stood next to the senator at a campaign stop and praised General George C. Marshall, who McCarthy had denounced as part of a Communist conspiracy. But after campaign advisors urged him not to pick a fight with McCarthy in his home state, Eisenhower omitted his defense of Marshall, his former mentor and boss during World War II, when he gave his speech. Eisenhower endured a torrent of criticism, even from some Republicans, that he had compromised his principles for political advantage.

"I had never thought the man who is now the Republican candidate would stoop so low," President Truman declared about Eisenhower's failure to defend Marshall. Truman at first had stayed out of the campaign, but eventually he plunged in. He resented the Republican attacks on his record, and he thought that Stevenson's erudite speeches were going over the heads of the American people. Truman traveled the country in a whistle-stop campaign as he had in 1948 and made angry and extreme charges. "There was a time when I thought he would make a good President," Truman told a crowd in Ohio, as he discussed Eisenhower's qualifications. "That was my mistake." Eisenhower, Truman insisted, was a "stooge for Wall Street." On another occasion, he said that the general was the puppet of "Republican reactionaries" who were telling Eisenhower what to say. Republican "truth squads" followed President Truman and replied to what they said were his "fabrications."

"There was a time when I thought he would make a good President... That was my mistake."

President Harry Truman, 1952

The best Republican response came from Eisenhower as the campaign neared an end. "If elected, I shall go to Korea," Eisenhower declared, a pledge that stirred hopes that the general would find a way to end the fighting. Truman considered this promise a cheap campaign trick. The Truman-Eisenhower relationship, once good, died in the bitterness of the campaign.

On election day, Eisenhower won a big victory with 55 percent of the popular vote and a landslide in the electoral college, with 442 votes to Stevenson's 89. He even scored well in what had been the Democratic Solid South, taking a larger percentage of the popular vote than any previous Republican candidate and capturing Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.

Eisenhower's coattails, however, did not carry many Republicans into Congress. The GOP won control of Congress, but only by narrow majorities—three seats in the House of Representatives, one seat in the Senate. In Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge lost his Senate seat to John F. Kennedy. Indeed, while the election of 1952 was a triumph for Eisenhower, it was not a mandate for the Republican Party.

The Campaign and Election of 1956

Eisenhower was such a popular President during his first term that there seemed little doubt that he would win reelection no matter who the Democrats nominated to run against him. Eisenhower had agreed to an armistice that ended the Korean War in July 1953. The return of peace brought strong economic growth that some people called the "Eisenhower prosperity." During 1955, the President's approval rating in the Gallup poll ranged between 68 and 79 percent.

But it was by no means certain that Eisenhower would run again. He told friends that he would be happy to serve only a single term. Then, in September 1955, the President suffered a major heart attack. For several months, as Eisenhower convalesced, there was doubt about whether the President could run again. By the beginning of 1956, however, Eisenhower had resumed a full schedule, and his cardiologist announced that the President was capable of serving a second term. On February 29, 1956, Eisenhower announced that he would seek reelection.

The President's illness made the choice of a vice-presidential running mate especially important in the eyes of many voters. Nixon had done a capable job of presiding over meetings of the cabinet and National Security Council during the President's recovery, but the vice president still had a reputation as a strident partisan rather than seasoned leader. And even Eisenhower had doubts about Nixon's "maturity." During early 1956, Eisenhower tried to encourage Nixon to take himself out of consideration for a second term by dropping hints that an important cabinet job—maybe secretary of defense—would be a good way to prepare for a run for the presidency in 1960. Nixon, however, refused to take the hints; Eisenhower decided not to confront Nixon directly; Nixon remained popular with party regulars; and in August 1956, the Republicans once more nominated Eisenhower and Nixon.

Adlai Stevenson faced a much tougher fight for the Democratic nomination than he had four years earlier. He even had to overcome Truman's opposition, as the former President made a last-minute endorsement of Governor W. Averell Harriman of New York. But the Democratic convention stuck with Stevenson and for vice president, chose Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

Stevenson had trouble finding effective issues. He scored a few points when he warned that a vote for Eisenhower would really put Nixon in the White House, especially after the President had another serious health problem that required abdominal surgery in June. Yet one of his major issues backfired when Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin endorsed Stevenson's proposal for a ban on the testing of nuclear weapons. Eisenhower denounced Stevenson for making sensitive issues of national security matters of partisan debate, and Nixon and other Republicans insisted that Stevenson would appease the Soviets rather than stand up to them.

The President Prevails

Eisenhower held a commanding lead in the polls, and his margin widened as he dealt with two foreign policy crises in the days before the election. The first occurred at the end of October, when Israel, Britain, and France attacked Egypt in retaliation for the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Although Britain and France were members of NATO, they planned the attack in secret, without ever informing the President. Eisenhower was livid over what he thought was the betrayal and stupidity of America's allies. He thought that the attack would only rally support for Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, who had nationalized the canal. Eisenhower condemned the Anglo-French-Israeli action and put muscle behind his words by imposing economic sanctions that forced the invaders to withdraw.

While Eisenhower confronted the dangers of the Suez crisis, Soviet troops invaded Hungary. The Kremlin was determined to crush the Hungarian government, which had withdrawn from the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-dominated military alliance. Although officials in the Eisenhower administration had previously encouraged the liberation of Eastern bloc countries, Eisenhower decided not to aid the Hungarian government for fear that such intervention might lead to a major war with the Soviets. The President condemned the invasion and assisted Hungarian refugees.

These two crises widened Eisenhower's margin of victory over Stevenson. Many citizens rallied behind the President at a time of international danger. On election day, Eisenhower won an even more impressive victory than he had four years earlier. He carried 41 states and received nearly 58 percent of the popular vote. He ran better in the South than he had four years earlier, even taking Louisiana—this was the first time that state had voted Republican since the end of Reconstruction. Eisenhower also cut into Stevenson's margins in many Democratic constituencies, including African Americans, who voted in larger proportion for the President than for any Republican candidate since Herbert Hoover.

The only bright spot for the Democrats was that they retained control of Congress, which they had secured in the midterm elections of 1954. Eisenhower was the first candidate since Zachary Taylor to win the presidency without having his party gain a majority of seats in either the House or the Senate. The election of 1956 was a resounding personal victory for Eisenhower but not a triumph for the Republican Party.

Although there were dangerous moments in the Cold War during the 1950s, people often remember the Eisenhower years as "happy days," a time when Americans did not have to worry about depression or war, as they had in the 1930s and 1940s, or difficult and divisive issues, as they did in the 1960s. Instead, Americans spent their time enjoying the benefits of a booming economy. Millions of families got their first television and their second car and enjoyed new pastimes like hula hoops or transistor radios. Young people went to drive-in movies or malt shops, often wearing the latest fashions—pegged pants for men, poodle skirts for women.

Yet the Eisenhower years were not so simple or carefree, and the President faced important and, at times, controversial issues in domestic affairs. Managing the economy involved important choices about how to maintain prosperity or how much to spend on what we today call "infrastructure." Protecting freedom and the rule of law necessitated difficult decisions as civil rights became an urgent national issue. Dealing with the effects of the Cold War at home required complicated action because of the sensational charges of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy about Communist infiltration of government agencies. In the eyes of a majority of the public, Eisenhower usually made the right choices, as he often enjoyed approval ratings of more than 70 percent in the polls. Yet Eisenhower also had critics, who believed that he had not used his powers as President vigorously or effectively to protect individual freedom and ensure justice.

[T]he Eisenhower years were not so simple or carefree

Modern Republicanism

During the campaign of 1952, Eisenhower criticized the statist or big government programs of Truman's Fair Deal, yet he did not share the extreme views of some Republican conservatives. These "Old Guard" Republicans talked about eliminating not just Fair Deal but also New Deal programs and rolling back government regulation of the economy. Eisenhower favored a more moderate course, one that he called Modern Republicanism, which preserved individual freedom and the market economy yet insured that government would provide necessary assistance to workers who had lost their jobs or to the ill or aged, who through no fault of their own, could not provide for themselves. He intended to lead the country "down the middle of the road between the unfettered power of concentrated wealth . . . and the unbridled power of statism or partisan interests."

As President, Eisenhower thought that government should provide some additional benefits to the American people. He signed legislation that expanded Social Security, increased the minimum wage, and created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He also supported government construction of low-income housing but favored more limited spending than had Truman.

Eisenhower secured congressional approval of some important new programs that improved the nation's infrastructure. In partnership with Canada, the United States built the St. Lawrence Seaway. His most ambitious domestic project, the Interstate Highway program, established in 1956, created a 41,000-mile road system. This highway project, which, as the President said, involved enough concrete to build "six sidewalks to the moon," stimulated the economy and made driving long distances faster and safer. Yet despite their many benefits, the new super highways also had adverse effects, as they encouraged the deterioration of central cities, with residents and businesses moving to outlying locations.

Eisenhower often got his way with Congress, especially during his first term. But in his last years as President, with Democrats in control of both the House and the Senate, Congress spent more for domestic programs than Eisenhower would have preferred. Although the President used his veto to block expensive programs, domestic spending still rose substantially, increasing from 31 percent of the budget in 1953 to 49 percent in 1961. Still, during the Eisenhower years, federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP)—a measure of the overall size of the U.S. economy—declined from 20.4 to 18.4 percent. During no presidency since Eisenhower’s has there been a decrease of any size in federal spending as a percentage of GDP.

Prosperity and Poverty

Although mild recessions slowed growth in 1953-1954, 1957-1958, and again in 1960, the economy expanded robustly during most of the 1950s. Unemployment was generally low, and inflation usually was 2 percent or less. Indeed, Eisenhower’s record of strong growth and low inflation was better than that of any other post-World War II President. Although Old Guard conservatives pressed Eisenhower to cut taxes, the President gave a higher priority to balancing the budget. Eisenhower had moderate success—three of his eight budgets were in the black. Wage earners enjoyed a prosperous decade: During the Eisenhower presidency, personal income increased by 45 percent. Many families used their purchasing power to buy new houses, frequently in suburban developments. Consumers also used their income to acquire many new household items, including television sets and high-fidelity equipment. A few families even made their purchases by using the first charge cards from Diners Club and American Express.

Still, many Americans did not share in the prosperity of the 1950s. About one in every five Americans lived in poverty by the end of the decade. The poverty rate declined during Eisenhower's presidency, but 40 million Americans were poor when Eisenhower left office. The South had almost half of the country's poor families. Yet during the 1950s, poverty increased in northern cities, partly because of the migration of African Americans who left the South for cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland because new farm machines had taken away job opportunities. Often these new African American urban residents had to settle for low-paying employment because of job discrimination. Children and the elderly were much more likely to experience poverty than adults from ages 18 through 65.

Even though poverty was widespread, poor people got little attention during the 1950s. It was easier to celebrate the abundance of a booming consumer economy. People who had lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s emphasized the economic security of the 1950s. It was not until the 1960s that affluent Americans rediscovered the poverty amid the prosperity.

Eisenhower and McCarthy

One of Eisenhower's most difficult political problems involved Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who had made headlines since 1950 because of his charges that Communist spies or sympathizers held high positions in the federal government. Republicans had gained from McCarthy's charges that the Truman administration was "soft on Communism." But after the Eisenhower administration took power, McCarthy continued his attacks, even suggesting that the President's nominees for important ambassador positions were disloyal or subversive. Republican leaders could not persuade McCarthy, a member of their own party, to halt his attacks on a Republican administration. The news media gave McCarthy significant attention, but his charges never led to a single indictment or conviction for espionage or treason.

Eisenhower also worried about Communist spies or agents, but he disliked McCarthy's outrageous methods, including a tendency to consider someone guilty until proven innocent. Eisenhower, however, did not want to criticize McCarthy publicly, as he was fearful that such a direct confrontation would demean his office or work to the senator's advantage: "I just won't get into a pissing contest with that skunk," the President declared.

In 1954, Americans got a good look at McCarthy in action when he held televised hearings on Communist influence in the U.S. Army. Eisenhower was outraged that McCarthy had made the Army—the institution in which the President had served for most of his adult life—a target. Nevertheless, he decided to work quietly, behind the scenes, to frustrate McCarthy's investigations. What did more to diminish the senator's power was television's ability to bring McCarthy's surliness into American living rooms. By 1954, 56 percent of American homes had television. Television could have a powerful political effect. Eisenhower used it to his advantage; he was the first President to allow television cameras in his news conferences and the first to have an advertising agency produce a television campaign commercial for his reelection. Television could also diminish political power, and that is what it did to McCarthy. After watching McCarthy on television, millions of viewers agreed with the question that Joseph Welch, a lawyer working for the Army, put to the senator: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"

At the end of 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy. Never again was the senator a major force in national politics. During the four years that he had the spotlight, however, McCarthy ruined many reputations by making reckless and unsubstantiated charges. Eisenhower played a significant, albeit limited, role in finally curbing McCarthy's power.

Civil Rights

Eisenhower did not like dealing with racial issues, but he could not avoid such matters after the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Eisenhower never spoke out in favor of the Court's ruling. Although the President usually avoided comment on court decisions, his silence may have encouraged resistance to school desegregation. In many parts of the South, white citizens' councils organized to prevent compliance with the Court's ruling. While some of these groups relied on political action, others used intimidation and violence.

Although Eisenhower did not endorse the Brown decision, he had a constitutional responsibility to uphold the Supreme Court’s rulings. He did so in 1957, when mobs prevented the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus saw political advantages in using the National Guard to block the entry of the first African American students to Central High. After meeting with Eisenhower, Faubus promised to allow the students to enroll, but then he withdrew the National Guard, which allowed a violent mob to surround the school. Eisenhower dispatched federal troops and explained that he had a solemn obligation to enforce the law.

Eisenhower’s action was significant as it was the first time since Reconstruction that a President had sent military forces into the South to enforce federal law. In explaining his action, however, Eisenhower did not declare that desegregating public schools as the Supreme Court had ordered was the right thing to do. Instead, in a nationally televised address, he asserted that the violence in Little Rock was harming U.S. prestige and influence around the world and giving Communist propagandists an incident “to misrepresent our whole nation.” Troops stayed in Little Rock for the entire school year, and in the spring of 1958, Central High had its first African American graduate.

But in September 1958, Faubus closed public schools to prevent their integration. Eisenhower expressed his “regret” over the challenge to the right of all Americans to a public education, but took no further action, despite what he had done a year earlier. There was no violence this time, and Eisenhower believed that he had a constitutional obligation to preserve public order, not to speed school desegregation. When Eisenhower left the White House, only 6 percent of African American students attended integrated schools.

Eisenhower's record included some significant achievements in civil rights. In 1957, he signed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The law provided new federal protection for voting rights. In most southern states, the great majority of African Americans simply could not vote, despite their constitutional right to do so, because of literacy tests, poll taxes, or other obstacles. Yet the legislation Eisenhower signed was weaker than the bill that he had sent to Capitol Hill. Southern Democrats secured an amendment that required a jury trial to determine whether a citizen had been denied his or her right to vote. In southern states, where African Americans could not serve on juries, such trials were not likely to ensure black access to the vote. In 1960, Eisenhower signed a second civil rights law, but it provided only small advances over the earlier law. The President also used his constitutional powers, where he believed that they were clear and specific, to advance desegregation, for example, in federal facilities in the nation's capital and to complete the desegregation of the armed forces begun during Truman’s presidency. In addition, Eisenhower appointed judges to federal courts whose rulings helped to advance civil rights.

Despite these actions, Eisenhower was only a limited supporter of civil rights. He urged advocates of desegregation to go slowly. He said that integration required a change in people's hearts and minds. Eisenhower was sympathetic to white southerners who complained about alterations in what they said was their way of life. He considered as extremists both those who tried to obstruct decisions of federal courts and those who demanded that they immediately enjoy the rights that the Constitution and the courts provided them. On only one occasion during his presidency—in June 1958—did Eisenhower meet with African American leaders. The President became irritated during the meeting when he heard appeals for more aggressive federal action to advance civil rights. He also failed to heed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s advice that he use the bully pulpit of the presidency to build popular support for racial integration. While Eisenhower’s actions mattered, so too did his failure to use his moral authority as President to advance the cause of civil rights. This issue, which divided the country in the 1950s, became even more difficult in the 1960s.

Dwight D. Eisenhower brought a "New Look" to U.S. national security policy in 1953. The main elements of the New Look were: (1) maintaining the vitality of the U.S. economy while still building sufficient strength to prosecute the Cold War; (2) relying on nuclear weapons to deter Communist aggression or, if necessary, to fight a war; (3) using the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry out secret or covert actions against governments or leaders "directly or indirectly responsive to Soviet control"; and (4) strengthening allies and winning the friendship of nonaligned governments. Eisenhower's defense policies, which aimed at providing "more bang for the buck," cut spending on conventional forces while increasing the budget for the Air Force and for nuclear weapons. Even though national security spending remained high—it never fell below 50 percent of the budget during Eisenhower's presidency—Eisenhower did balance three of the eight federal budgets while he was in the White House.

"Eisenhower did balance three of the eight federal budgets while he was in the White House"

Nuclear Diplomacy

Nuclear weapons played a controversial role in some of Eisenhower's diplomatic initiatives, including the President's effort to end the Korean War. As promised, Eisenhower went to Korea after he was elected but before he was inaugurated. The trip provided him with no clear solution for ending the war. But during the spring of 1953, U.S. officials attempted to send indirect hints to the Chinese government that Eisenhower might expand the war into China or even use nuclear weapons. Some historians think that these veiled threats may have encouraged the Chinese to reach a settlement. An increase in conventional U.S. military pressure during the spring of 1953 may have had a greater effect on the willingness of the Chinese and North Koreans to negotiate a settlement. There is also reliable evidence that the Soviet leaders who came to power after Stalin's death in March 1953 worried about U.S. escalation and pressed for an end to the war. Both sides made concessions on the question of the repatriation of prisoners of war, and the armistice went into effect in July 1953. Korea remained divided along the 38th parallel, roughly the same boundary as when the war began in 1950.

One of the legacies of the Korean War was that U.S.-Chinese relations remained hostile and tense. Like Truman, Eisenhower refused to recognize the People's Republic of China (PRC). Instead, he continued to support Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kai-shek's) Nationalist Chinese government in Taiwan. After PRC guns began shelling the Nationalist Chinese islands of Jinmen (Quemoy) and Mazu (Matsu) in September 1954, Congress granted Eisenhower the authority to use U.S. military power in the Taiwan Strait. The President knew that these specks of territory had no real strategic value but that they had symbolic importance, as both the PRC and the Nationalists claimed to be the only legitimate ruler of all of China. The crisis escalated when Eisenhower declared at a news conference that in the event of war in East Asia, he would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons against military targets "exactly as you would use a bullet." Eisenhower privately deplored Jiang’s stubbornness, but his own actions contributed to a crisis that seemed increasingly dangerous. The bombardment finally stopped in April 1954, although it is by no means certain that Eisenhower's nuclear warnings accounted for the PRC decision to end the crisis. Mao Zedong often questioned the credibility of U.S. threats and insisted that the Chinese could withstand any losses that came from a nuclear attack. U.S. and PRC negotiators met in intermittent negotiations, but a second Taiwan Strait crisis occurred in 1958.

U.S.-Soviet Relations

Just weeks after Eisenhower became President, Stalin's death brought what appeared to be significant changes in Soviet international policy. Stalin's successors began calling for negotiations to settle East-West differences and to rein in the arms race. Nikita Khrushchev, who established himself as the main leader in the Kremlin in 1955, called his policy "peaceful coexistence," yet Eisenhower remained skeptical of Soviet rhetoric. He used a sexist metaphor to explain his thinking to Prime Minister Winston Churchill: "Russia was . . . a woman of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, there was the same whore underneath." The President insisted on deeds that matched words, and in 1955, the Soviets changed their position and ended a prolonged deadlock in negotiations over a peace treaty with Austria. Eisenhower then agreed to a summit of Soviet and Western leaders in Geneva, Switzerland, in July 1955, the first such meeting since the Potsdam Conference in 1945.

The "Spirit of Geneva" eased tensions between the Soviets and the United States, even though the conference failed to produce agreements on arms control or other major international issues. Khrushchev rejected Eisenhower's proposal for an "Open Skies" program that would have allowed both sides to use aerial air surveillance to gather information about each other's military capabilities. The president was hardly surprised by Khrushchev’s decision; Eisenhower had made the Soviet leader an offer that would be difficult to accept while knowing that the proposal, whatever the Soviet reaction, would make a favorable impression on international public opinion. A year later, the President authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to begin top-secret intelligence flights over the Soviet Union by using the brand-new high altitude U-2 reconnaissance planes.

"Peaceful coexistence" did not extend to eastern Europe. In November 1956, Soviet tanks ruthlessly suppressed Hungary's efforts to follow an independent course free from Soviet domination. Administration officials had advocated the liberation of Soviet satellites, and propaganda agencies such as Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America had encouraged Eastern Europeans to resist. Eisenhower, however, decided not to take action to aid the Hungarian freedom fighters since any intervention carried the risk of starting a U.S.-Soviet war that could lead to a nuclear exchange. In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the administration toned down its rhetoric about liberation and instead emphasized hopes for gradual—and peaceful—progress toward freedom.

During his last years in office, Eisenhower hoped to achieve a détente with the Soviet Union that could produce a treaty banning the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and oceans. Hopes rose after Khrushchev visited the United States in September 1959 and met with Eisenhower at the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains. This summit produced no arms control agreement, but it did lead to good will and optimism known as "the spirit of Camp David." Eisenhower and Khrushchev agreed to meet again, along with the leaders of France and Britain, in Paris in May 1960.

The summit collapsed, however, in acrimony and bitterness in a dispute over the U-2 incident. As the meeting with Khrushchev approached, Eisenhower authorized another U-2 flight over Soviet territory. Damaged by a surface-to-air missile, the U.S. plane crashed on May 1, 1960, during the Soviet celebration of May Day. Not knowing that the Soviets had captured the pilot, the State Department and the White House issued a series of cover stories that the Kremlin exposed as lies. Despite his embarrassment, Eisenhower took responsibility for the failed U-2 mission and asserted that the flights were necessary to protect national security. Khrushchev tried to exploit the U-2 incident for maximum propaganda value and demanded an apology from the President when they met in Paris. Eisenhower refused, Khrushchev stormed out of the meeting, and the emerging détente became instead an intensified Cold War. Eisenhower was so distraught that he even talked about resigning.

Covert Action

Eisenhower prosecuted the Cold War vigorously even as he hoped to improve Soviet-American relations. He relied frequently on covert action to avoid having to take public responsibility for controversial interventions. He believed that the CIA, created in 1947, was an effective instrument to counter Communist expansion and to assist friendly governments. CIA tactics were sometimes unsavory, as they included bribes, subversion, and even assassination attempts. But Eisenhower authorized those actions, even as he maintained plausible deniability, that is, carefully concealing all evidence of U.S. involvement so that he could deny any responsibility for what had happened.

During his first year in office, Eisenhower authorized the CIA to deal with a problem in Iran that had begun during Truman's presidency. In 1951, the Iranian parliament nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British corporation that controlled the nation's petroleum industry. The British retaliated with economic pressure that created havoc with Iran's finances, but Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh refused to yield. Eisenhower worried about Mossadegh's willingness to cooperate with Iranian Communists; he also feared that Mossadegh would eventually undermine the power of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a staunch anti-Communist partner. In August 1953, the CIA helped overthrow Mossadegh's government and restore the shah's power. In the aftermath of this covert action, new arrangements gave U.S. corporations an equal share with the British in the Iranian oil industry.

A year later, the CIA helped overthrow the elected government of Guatemala. Eisenhower and his top advisers worried that President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was too willing to cooperate with local Communists, even though they had only a limited role in his government. Recent scholarship has shown that Arbenz was a Marxist, although he revealed his political convictions only to a few confidants. Arbenz also believed that Guatemala, because of its low level of economic development, required significant reform before it would be ready for Communism. Arbenz's program of land reform was a step toward modernizing Guatemala as well as creating the conditions for an eventual Marxist state. The land reform, however, produced strong opposition, as it involved confiscating large tracts from the United Fruit Company and redistributing them to landless peasants, who made up a majority of the Guatemalan population. American fears reached new heights when Arbenz bought weapons from Communist Czechoslovakia after the administration cut off Guatemala's access to U.S. military supplies. Eisenhower was not prepared to risk American security or credibility in an area where the United States had long been the dominant power. The CIA helped counterrevolutionaries drive Arbenz from power in June 1954. Guatemala appealed in vain to the United Nations, and administration officials denied that the United States had anything to do with the change in government in Guatemala. The new President, Carlos Castillo Armas, reversed land reform and clamped down on the Communists, and he also restricted voting rights and curtailed civil liberties before an assassin murdered him in 1957.

Guatemala was the base for another covert action that the Eisenhower administration planned but did not carry out before leaving office. Eisenhower decided that Fidel Castro, who came to power in Cuba in 1959, was a "madman" who had to be deposed. In 1960, the CIA began the training in Guatemala of anti-Castro exiles who would invade Cuba. The CIA hoped for a success similar to the Guatemalan intervention of 1954. What they got instead, soon after John F. Kennedy became President, was the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.

Middle East Rivalry

The intense rivalries in the Middle East brought Eisenhower into a confrontation with his most important allies, Britain and France. The origins of the Suez crisis of 1956 lay in the difficulties of the western powers in dealing with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the nationalist President of Egypt who followed an independent and provocative course in his dealings with major powers. Nasser bought weapons from Communist Czechoslovakia, and he sought economic aid from the United States to build the Aswan High Dam on the Nile. The Eisenhower administration was prepared to provide the assistance, but during the negotiations, Nasser extended diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China. Already tired of the Egyptian leader's playing off of "East against West by blackmailing both," the Eisenhower administration halted the negotiations over aid. Nasser retaliated by nationalizing the Suez Canal.

The British, French, and Israelis decided to take military action. The British, especially, considered the canal a vital waterway, a lifeline to their colonies in Asia. Both the British and French disliked Nasser's inflammatory, anticolonial rhetoric. The Israelis, who faced constant border skirmishing because of Egypt's refusal to recognize the right of their nation to exist, had powerful reasons to join the conspiracy. The three nations did not consult—or even inform—Eisenhower before the Israelis launched the first attacks into the Sinai Peninsula on October 29, 1956.

Eisenhower was outraged. He thought the attacks would only strengthen Nasser, allowing the Egyptian leader to become the champion of the Arab world as he opposed the aggressors. Eisenhower quickly condemned the attacks and used U.S. diplomatic and economic power to force all three nations to withdraw their troops. United States prestige in the Middle East rose. But Eisenhower hardly made good use of this advantage, as he announced a new program, known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, to provide economic and military aid to Middle Eastern nations facing Communist aggression. Yet it was nationalism, not Communism, that was by far the dominant force in the region.

Difficulties with Nasser also influenced Eisenhower's decision two years later to send Marines to Lebanon. For months, an internal political struggle had made Lebanon unstable. Then in July 1958, what appeared to be pro-Nasser forces seized power in Iraq. To protect Lebanon from a similar threat—one more imagined than real—Eisenhower sent in the Marines. The troops stayed only three months and suffered only one fatality. U.S. diplomats probably made a more important contribution by participating in negotiations that allowed the Lebanese factions to solve their political conflicts.

Intervention in Indochina

In Southeast Asia, Eisenhower sent U.S. weapons and dollars instead of troops. Like Truman, Eisenhower provided military aid to the French, who had begun fighting a war in 1946 to regain control over their colonial possession of Indochina, which included the current nations of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. By 1954, the Eisenhower administration was paying more than 75 percent of the French costs of the war. Yet the French were unable to defeat the Vietminh, a nationalist force under the leadership of the Communist Ho Chi Minh.

A crisis occurred in early 1954, when Vietminh forces surrounded a French garrison at the remote location of Dienbienphu. The French asked for more than weapons: they talked about a U.S. air strike, even with tactical nuclear weapons, to save their troops. Eisenhower considered the possibility of military action; indeed, he seemed prepared to authorize it under the right circumstances. Congressional leaders, however, would not provide their support unless any U.S. military action was part of a multilateral effort. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, however, could not persuade the British or any other major ally to take part in what he called United Action in Indochina. The President decided against an air strike, and the French garrison surrendered after weeks of brutal siege. At an international conference in Geneva, the French government granted independence to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Eisenhower hoped to salvage a partial victory by preventing Ho Chi Minh from establishing a Communist government over all of Vietnam. In 1954-1955, U.S. aid and support helped Ngo Dinh Diem establish a non-Communist government in what became South Vietnam. Eisenhower considered the creation of South Vietnam a significant Cold War success, yet his decision to commit U.S. prestige and power in South Vietnam created long-term dangers that his successors would have to confront.

A Memorable Farewell

In his Farewell Address, Eisenhower concentrated not on the threats he had confronted abroad but on the dangers of the Cold War at home. He told his fellow citizens to be wary of the "military-industrial complex," which he described as the powerful combination of "an immense military establishment and a large arms industry." Defense was a means to an end, and the American people had to be careful that they did not allow special interests to absorb an ever-increasing share of national wealth or to "endanger our liberties or democratic processes."

Eisenhower at times had difficulty balancing means and ends in protecting national security. He authorized covert interventions into the internal affairs of other nations and provided aid to dictators in the interest of protecting "the free world." He spent half or more of the federal budget on the armed services, even as he proclaimed that "every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired" was "a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed." Yet Eisenhower knew that real security meant preserving fundamental values. His Farewell Address summarized principles that had guided a lifetime of service to his country.

Audio of Eisenhower's Farewell Address of 1961, in which he famously warned about the dangers of the "military industrial complex".