Dwight Eisenhower by The Editors of New Word City

Author:The Editors of New Word City [The Editors of New Word City]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business and Economics/Leadership
ISBN: 9781612307145
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2014-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

“Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?”

Dwight Eisenhower eventually managed to discredit Joe McCarthy not by openly attacking him, as Harry Truman had done, but by publicly ignoring him. Engaging him openly, Eisenhower felt, would legitimize the senator and his actions. But in 1954, he spotted his chance to undermine McCarthy. After the senator’s aides sought favors for a former staffer who was serving in the Army, Eisenhower persuaded the Senate to conduct live televised hearings on McCarthy’s actions. Americans watched as McCarthy struggled, never detecting Eisenhower’s machinations.

Even after he learned that Eisenhower had issued an executive order instructing members of the executive branch to ignore his subpoenas, McCarthy was fooled. “I must admit I’m somewhat at a loss as to know what to do at this moment,” he said. “I don’t believe that this is the result of President Eisenhower’s own thinking.”

McCarthy finally self-destructed in the hearings when he accused yet another innocent person of being a communist, an event immortalized in the words of U.S. Army counsel Joseph N. Welch: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Censured by the Senate, McCarthy slipped into alcoholism and died three years later in 1957.

Off the political battlefield, Eisenhower’s weapons of choice were tact and persuasion. Writing for Reader’s Digest in 1968, he praised the effectiveness of “cajolery, even a little head-thumping here and there - to say nothing of a personal streak of obstinacy which on occasion fires my boilers.” While he tended to seem stiff and formal - hardly surprising, given his military background - he also drew on a large group of advisers.

Eisenhower’s subtle, pragmatic style of leadership also won him legislative victories. Judging that the public favored New Deal-style programs, he made amicable alliances with the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate to extend Social Security, raise the minimum wage, and even pass a sweeping infrastructure initiative, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This $25-billion commitment changed the face of America, sent the railroads into senescence, and revolutionized commerce.

Eisenhower was hardly a New Dealer. But as he had demonstrated as Allied commander in World War II, he knew how to work with others. When Republicans in Congress refused to go along with him, they lost their majorities in the 1954 mid-term elections. Eisenhower, meanwhile, sailed to re-election in 1956. But he remained at heart a fiscal conservative and didn’t retreat from critical issues like putting limits on defense spending, wrestling inflation, and checking the rise of the military-industrial complex. In the recession of 1958 - at that point, the deepest since the Great Depression - Eisenhower refused to prime the economic pump with deficit spending. Astonishingly, he managed to convince enough of the Democratic majority in Congress to back him. When he left office, Eisenhower bequeathed a balanced budget to his successor John F. Kennedy.

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