The Education of Dwight D. Eisenhower
BY D. W. BROGAN IT is unnecessary to introduce Richard H. Rovere to the readers of the Spectator or of the New Yorker. He is the most philosophical and reflective of Washington correspon- dents, writing, as he does, for journals less under the pressure of giving the news than are, say, the correspondents of the Manchester Guardian or the New York, Times. Freed from the tyranny of the date-line, Mr. Rovere can afford to look before and after, and he does both here.* For in this brilliant and exciting collection of reprinted pieces, Mr. Rovere re- counts both his first impressions of the Eisenhower administra- tion (they were unfavourable) and his later verdict on it.
That the Eisenhower administration should start with two ,strikes on it in the eyes of Mr. ROixre was inevitable. Just as to the old-fashioned Republican, like Senator Taft, there was something intrinsically wrong, unnatural, in airy Demo- cratic administration, so to an old New Dealer like Mr. Rovere there was something menacing, obscene, immoral in any Republican administration. But there was another reason for Mr. Rovere's attitude. The defeat of Mr. Stevenson, not the victory of General Eisenhower, was, for the American intel- lectuals, the tragedy of 1952. Never had the intelligentsia hhd a candidate more after their own heart than the 'Eggheads' had in Adlai. Mr. Rovere did not fall into the trap that swallowed up so many British reporters and observers of thinking that Mr. Stevenson would win. (Had British and Canadian voters been allowed to vote, he would have, but the presidential franchise has been confined for years past to American citizens, and they continued to like Ike, even when they were offered the alternative, not of Robert Taft, but of Adlai Stevenson.) 'The People' betrayed them; it went for Ike in a very big way indeed and the defeated and discomfited clercs, faced with this treason of the People, could only murmer 'Vous l'avez voulu.' They waited for the new administration to give the measure of its competence and character and they had the joys of Schadenfreude in plenty as they watched the new brooms sweep dust under the carpet and trip over Dixon-Yates, and saw the new American' un- guided missile, Mr. Dulles, shoot off into outer space. Above all, they had , McCarthy. There, in the Senator from Wisconsin, was the real acid test of the new administration; if he was not denounced at once by the leaders of his own party. McCarthy would dominate it.
* AFFAIRS or STATE. TuE EISENHOWLR YEARS. By Richard H. Rovere. (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, $4.50.) No admirer of the hammer of the Reds, I haVe never thought that McCarthy was as important as all that, or that all he said was untrue. Not, perhaps, a rigid moralist in politics, I ant not as shocked as 1 should be by the more disgusting spectacle of the British public, or too much of it, slavering over that self-confessed murderer, liar and coward, Malenkov. It would be, I hope, unjust to judge the Eden administration by the necessary tolerance it must show for the guests it rashly wished on itself, and it was, unnecessarily severe to judge the Eisen' hower administration by its attitude to McCarthy, although General Eisenhower's toleration of the slanderous attacks on General Marshall hardly came up to the standards of courageous loyalty taught (I learn from Mr. Marquand) at West Point. So it will be a pity if too much attention is paid to the very brilliant reporting of the McCarthy hearings or the Cohn and Schine antics. 'The evil that men do lives after them' and the demoralisation of the American information services and of the State Department is an accomplished fact that, one may hope, occasionally disturbs the dreams of that righteous Presbyterian, Mr. Dulles. But the lesson that Mr. Rovere teaches (after having to learn it himself) is that Mr. Dulles's bark is a lot worse than his bite (and, for a very good reason—there isn't any bite). And even if Mr. Dulles is as bad a Secretary of State as Lord Simon was a bad Foreign Secte' tary, he has a boss, General Eisenhower. That boss has imposed and followed out a policy that does not differ very much from the Truman-Acheson policy, except in being mote timid and yielding. Otherwise, as Mr. Stevenson put it, `theras nothing wrong with American foreign policy that a good We of lockjaw wouldn't cure.'
It is not in dealing with foreign policy that Mr. Rovere will be most useful to British readers, but in dealing with internal: policy and politics. I see no reason to change my long-held view that the British public doesn't want to karn about American politics, that it prefers to ask silly questions 0e, `When will the Americans get a Labour party?', but if it doe' want to learn, it will find in Mr. Rovere a most illuminating and adroit teacher. Take, for instance, the case of the We Senator Taft. He might, but for the decision of General Eisenhower to run, have been President of the United States. If he had been, the British public would have known nothing about him but a set of misleading clichds coined by the a''; Arbuthnots of the Left. Yet, as Mr. Rovere shows, Senator Taft was a much more interesting, useful and admirahcil Senator than most and one that the Republican party Ile°,.0 now. It is true, I think, that Senator Taft was not much 0°1 careful about the company he kept than are Sir Anthony Eden and Mr. Dulles. There was something distasteful in seeing 'e undemagogic a Senator as Mr. Taft playing along with .1°,1 McCarthy. He must have known that all that he stood for vi'd as odious to Joe, and Joe's pals, as all that Dean Acheson alle for. At any rate, he heroically resisted all old-school fi loyalties, betrayed the American equivalent (a pale enoagte equivalent to be sure) of the Establishment—all to no Petvap, or public good. And, a point that Mr. Rovere does not Int,es Senator Taft showed that truly senatorial arrogance that am+ from not having, from never having had, executive respohn's, bilities. He was often plain silly; a believer in verbal solatt°„ge but 'take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his again.' It's a pity.
But the main theme, the main novelty, of Mr. Rovere's is the assessment of President Eisenhower. General Eisenh°,7,,d not only started under the handicap of having had the taste' to defeat Mr. Stevenson, he started under the handic; of being a professional soldier. The only other President ssl had passed through the Academy was Grant, and it was innocently assnmed that one West Pointer was like another, like Melville Goodwin or like Sam Grant. Mr. Eisenhower was neither like General Goodwin nor like Captain Sam Grant. He had had plenty of political experience of the kind that Americans call `politicking.' (He had served in a quasi-political capacity near General MacArthur.) But he had not had to deal, openly, with politics on a national scale. He transferred many military notions of organisation to the White House; where they are of doubtful value. (I have heard a devoted Eisenhower supporter, with much experience in the federal government. express grave doubts about the relevance of the military chain- of-command principle to White House problems.) Then, to put no fine point on it, General Eisenhower and President Eisenhower, unlike Senator Truman and President Truman, was not a reading man. He was, by the captious, even described as lazy. Certainly no President since Coolidge has found the mere burden of the presidency as manageable, in terms of time, as has Mr. Eisenhower. But what we see here is his learning his job, not as fast as Mr. Truman learned it, but pretty fast all the same. We see him in some respects much better served than Mr. Truman. Mr. Humphreys is a much better Secretary of the Treasury than any the Democrats produced, and even `Engine Charlie' Wilson is not as silly as he often sounds. But the great strength of the administration is Mr. Eisenhower himself. For Mr. Rovere, the proof of the President's educa- tion is his role at Geneva. 'He radiated an earnestness and a Pacific intent that forced Premier Bulganin to go on record with an acknowledgement of it.' One result, which Mr. Rovere forbears to dwell on, was the British invitation to Messrs. B. and K., but we can't blame Ike for that. He, according to all accounts, is ready to welcome Marshal Zhukov to Washing- ton, an important differerfce that suggests that maybe General Eisenhower has a wisdom denied to our leaders. At the moment of writing, it looks very probable indeed that General Eisenhower will be elected for a second term. Mr. Rovere suggests many reasons why we should not take this tragically. as a proof of American immaturity or as, a danger to world Peace. After all, as Mr. Rovere with more than mere Plausibility suggests, General Eisenhower and Colonel Truman have a lot in common, not merely their policies but their origins and biases. `An Amurath an Amurath succeeds.' Maybe, and why not?
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