Dwight D. Eisenhower - Legacy and Memory

Legacy and Memory

After Eisenhower left office, his reputation declined. He was widely seen as having been an inactive, uninspiring president compared to his vigorous young successor. Despite his unprecedented use of Army troops to enforce a federal desegregation order at Central High School in Little Rock, Eisenhower was criticized for his reluctance to support the civil rights movement to the degree which activists wanted. Eisenhower was also criticized for his handling of the 1960 U-2 incident and the international embarrassment, the Soviet Union's perceived leadership in the nuclear arms race and the Space Race, and his failure to publicly oppose McCarthyism. In particular, Eisenhower was criticized for failing to defend George Marshall from attacks by Joseph McCarthy, though he privately deplored McCarthy's tactics and claims. Such omissions were held against him during the liberal climate of the 1960s and 1970s. Since that time, however, Eisenhower's reputation has risen. In recent surveys of historians, Eisenhower often is ranked in the top 10 among all U.S. Presidents.

Historian John Lewis Gaddis has summarized the turnaround in evaluations by historians:

Historians long ago abandoned the view that Eisenhower’s was a failed presidency. He did, after all, end the Korean War without getting into any others. He stabilized, and did not escalate, the Soviet-American rivalry. He strengthened European alliances while withdrawing support from European colonialism. He rescued the Republican Party from isolationism and McCarthyism. He maintained prosperity, balanced the budget, promoted technological innovation, facilitated (if reluctantly) the civil rights movement and warned, in the most memorable farewell address since Washington’s, of a “military-industrial complex” that could endanger the nation’s liberties. Not until Reagan would another president leave office with so strong a sense of having accomplished what he set out to do.

Although conservatism in politics was strong during the 1950s and Eisenhower generally shared these sentiments, his administration concerned itself mostly with foreign affairs (an area that the career military president was more knowledgeable about) and pursued a hands-off domestic policy. Eisenhower looked to moderation and cooperation as a means of governance. Although he sought to slow or contain the New Deal and other federal programs, he did not attempt to repeal them outright and in doing so was popular among the liberal wing of the Republican Party. Conservative critics of his administration found that he did not do enough to advance the goals of the right: "Eisenhower's victories were," according to Hans Morgenthau, "but accidents without consequence in the history of the Republican party."

Eisenhower was the first President to hire a White House Chief of Staff or "gatekeeper" – an idea which he borrowed from the United States Army. Every president after Lyndon Johnson has also appointed staff to this position. Initially, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter tried to operate without a chief of staff but both eventually appointed one.

Eisenhower founded People to People International in 1956, based on his belief that citizen interaction would promote cultural interaction and world peace. The program includes a student ambassador component which sends American youth on educational trips to other countries.

Eisenhower described his position on space and the need for peace during his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, New York City, September 22, 1960:

The emergence of this new world poses a vital issue: will outer space be preserved for peaceful use and developed for the benefit of all mankind? Or will it become another focus for the arms race – and thus an area of dangerous and sterile competition? The choice is urgent. And it is ours to make. The nations of the world have recently united in declaring the continent of Antarctica "off limits" to military preparations. We could extend this principle to an even more important sphere. National vested interests have not yet been developed in space or in celestial bodies. Barriers to agreement are now lower than they will ever be again.

On the whole, Eisenhower's support of the embryonic space program was lukewarm until the Soviet launch of Sputnik. Later historians have suggested that Eisenhower privately wanted the Soviet Union to launch a satellite first, thereby establishing an overflight precedent that would allow the United States to orbit without Soviet protests, as the latter's closed society had far more to lose from such overflights than the United States did.

Eisenhower warned about the emerging military–industrial complex in his Chance for Peace Speech:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ... Is there no other way the world may live?

Eisenhower was the first president to appear on color television. He was videotaped when he spoke at the dedication of WRC-TV's new studios in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 1958.