Dwight D. Eisenhower Covert action

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This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It's January 1961 -- Muddy Waters, Elvis Presley, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie are all on the radio. The Cold War is hot, and President Eisenhower is about to leave office. He gives a farewell address from the White House, and he's sitting at his desk with an American flag hanging behind his mostly bald head. He's wearing his thick clear-framed glasses. And he has on a vest and tie under his suit jacket.

Some Americans are listening to him on the radio, but a lot are watching him on black-and-white television sets from their homes in the suburbs. And Eisenhower looks into the camera and issues them a famous warning: 'Beware the rise of the military industrial complex.'

DWIGHT EISENHOWER CLIP: We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations. Now, this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.

Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved -- so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It's amazing how much clearer the recordings are getting, right? This speech was so memorable because Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953 having risen to fame as a five-star general and a World War II hero. Yet, here he was eight years and two terms as president later, warning them about military buildup.

One of my guests for the episode is Stephen Kinzer, the former New York Times correspondent and author of 'The Brothers,' which is a biography about two brothers who ran the State

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 Department and the CIA during Eisenhower's administration. I asked Stephen about Ike's cautionary plea against the military industrial complex.

STEPHEN KINZER: I think his warning against it was sincere. It's certainly a warning we've fully ignored. But I think there's another subtext that people don't often understand: When he was railing against inflated defense budgets and giant military establishments, what he was also saying is: Covert action is the way to go. We don't need to invade countries anymore. We have ways to overthrow regimes and foment Civil War and start problems covertly.

So, by warning against the growth of the huge military establishments, what he was saying is essentially, 'My policy was right: small military establishment, nuclear deterrent, and secret but intense campaigns of covert action.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: In this episode, we'll be exploring two types of covert action: the international espionage type and how the use of that under Ike's administration started to change the perception of America's leadership on the global stage, and then the other type of covert action is the kind that Eisenhower practiced as part of his own leadership style -- a sort of working behind the scenes to accomplish his agenda.

So, let's dive right into the American presidency of the 1950s. I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Washington Post, and this is the 33rd episode of “Presidential.”

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: We have two fantastic guests for this episode -- University of Virginia professor and historian Will Hitchcock and Stephen Kinzer, whom you heard from a moment ago. I'm going to turn first here to Will, who spent about eight years working on a biography of Dwight Eisenhower that's set to come out pretty soon.

So, Will, what was Ike's childhood like? And I'm particularly fascinated by the detail that his mother was a pacifist. But maybe you could just paint a portrait of the home he grew up in.

WILL HITCHCOCK: Sure, well Eisenhower was born in Texas, actually, and he lived there just only a couple of years and moved back to Abilene, Kansas, which is where his parents had originally founded a family.

And he grew up in Abilene in very modest -- I think, really, even one could say poor -- family circumstances. He was one of six boys. And those six boys shared two bedrooms. Four of the boys slept in each other's bed. His father worked in a creamery, and Eisenhower and all of his brothers also worked in the creamery in the summer and after school.

They were a hardscrabble sort of Central Plains family that worked very hard, that were poor, that went to church regularly. They came from a Mennonite community. And Eisenhower, pretty much every night, gathered with his father and the family Bible and they read scripture together. His parents did later go on to become Jehovah's Witnesses, and that is interesting when you think that Eisenhower became one of the great warlords of the 20th century, and his parents became connected to this pacifist sect.

And so, there they lived in very difficult circumstances. Eisenhower was an extraordinarily happy

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 young man in Abilene, and he always thought of himself as a man who came from Kansas. He wanted to be buried there, and he is buried there. He set up his presidential foundation there. So, he identified really strongly with those simple virtues in central Kansas at the beginning of the 20th century.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And do you see the ways that the religion in his household, and later the pacifism of his parents, affected him and shaped his views?

WILL HITCHCOCK: Eisenhower didn't exactly go through a period of rebellion, but he decided to go to college at West Point, the U.S. military academy, which was a bit of a shift for his family. He went off to West Point, joined the Army and became an Army officer and spent the next 30 years building his career as a world famous Army commander.

But his religious principles -- it's quite interesting. He never went to church after he left Abilene. He never participated, really, in formal religious ceremonies of any kind. And here's an interesting fact: Eisenhower was not baptized until he became president. In February of 1953, Eisenhower decided, well, he was now president so he ought to be baptized – because that would send a signal to the American public that church-going and worship of God was an important American value. And that's what he believed.

So, he was actually baptized in the Presbyterian faith, which was Mamie's family's faith, in 1953 as a sitting president -- the only president ever to be so baptized. He avoided organized religion as an adult because he had been so steeped in it as a young man. But he often said, 'I'm the most religious person you know’ to anybody who ever asked.

He was profoundly devoted to kind of core principles of thinking about man's relationship to God, and he was governed by a very strong moral code. He knew a great deal of scripture because he had to read it and recite it with his family as a young man. So, I find him interesting on this score.

He publicly did not wish to be perceived as manipulating religion for political purposes. At the same time, he wanted Americans to be religious. He was the man who put 'Under God' into the Pledge of Allegiance. He was the man who put 'In God We Trust' on the American currency. He believed in these symbols that demonstrated that Americans were God-fearing and religious, because, of course, that was the great contrast with the Soviet Union and so-called atheistic communism.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, when he ends up going to West Point, he didn't actually have really great grades. He wasn't a standout, top-of-the-class student, right? He was even a bit of a prankster.

WILL HITCHCOCK: He wasn't bookish, that's for sure. The most distinctive feature about him as a college kid, if you like, was that he was a great athlete. We might imagine Eisenhower nowadays as an old man or as a sick man, because he was sick as president. But, in fact, as a young man, Eisenhower was incredibly athletic -- very, very gifted as an athlete. He played football until he wrecked his knee.

He was called in local newspapers of the time 'The Huge Kansan,' because he was so muscular and strong as a football player. But he did hurt his knee, so then he went on to to be the head of the cheerleading corps, which was also a role of real social prominence. He also played baseball very,

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 very well and thought about a professional career briefly.

So, he loved sports more than he loved his school work, no doubt about it. And he loved sports for the rest of his life. He was very much an outdoorsman, and of course became an avid golfer. And certainly Eisenhower was an enormously competitive man. He wanted to be the smartest, strongest, fastest quickest guy in the room at all times. And boy, he played golf in the same spirit. He didn't like to lose.

And he was of course a brilliant a brilliant card player, both poker and bridge. In the Army, he made a lot of money playing poker -- so much so that he stopped playing because he was taking too much money off of his Army buddies, and he feared it would make him look bad. He was a brilliant card player and bridge player for the rest of his life.

So, this is a really smart man, whose competitive juices are always flowing. And that came out at West Point, as well as later in his military career and his political life.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Beyond just the competitive spirit, are there any other traits that he displayed when he was younger that you could look at and say, 'Hm, this guy could go on to be president one day?'

WILL HITCHCOCK: One of the things that people have always said about Eisenhower that surprises contemporary listeners and readers is that he had enormous amounts of charisma.

If we look at pictures of him now, we're likely to see a black-and-white picture of a kind of elderly man, baldish, wearing a rumpled, double-breasted suit. But Eisenhower was a charisma machine, and everybody who talks about him -- who knew him -- speaks about this.

When he walked into the room, the place lit up. All the heads swiveled and said, 'Who's that guy?' And it was Eisenhower. He was athletic. He walked on the balls of his feet. He had enormous hands. He charged into a room full of people. Everyone wanted to know him. These are the intangible qualities of leadership that most of his contemporaries recognized in Eisenhower very early. And it's no accident that senior commanders kept on asking Eisenhower to come onto their staff. They’d say, 'I want to mentor you. I think you're going places.'

This happened throughout his career. Most famously, of course, it was George Marshall who found Eisenhower and promoted him up above many others because he could see his intelligence and his ambition. But also, Eisenhower -- and this is the other key principle about his personality -- he was not a prima donna. He was not a George Patton. He believed in hierarchy. He was immensely loyal to the men that he worked for and he expected loyalty in return. And those were very, very useful qualities to him in his military career and his political career.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: OK, so now to my favorite question, which is: What would Ike be like on a blind date?

WILL HITCHCOCK: Well, he was enormously courteous. He was very, very much a gentleman. He was quite shy when it came to, you know, making moves. He was very handsome. He was confident, but he was a little bit shy around around women. We know this not only because of what Mamie would later say, but of course Eisenhower had a love interest during the war who wrote a number of rather revealing memoirs after the war and spoke about Eisenhower's

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 awkwardness when it came to sort of intimate relations.

But at the same time, he was a sentimental man. He was deeply sentimental. He had a big soft streak. When the doors were closed and no one was watching, he was kind of a puppy dog. So, I think Eisenhower would make the kind of first date that you would say, 'That guy is a sweetheart. I think maybe we should have a second one.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, that maybe feeds into…Ike ended up meeting this girl, Mamie, while he was stationed in San Antonio early in his career. And she came from a wealthy family. She grew up with a lot of help around her. So, I love the stories about how once Ike and Mamie were married, Ike was actually the one who would do a lot of the household chores, right? Like, cooking dinner. And when she was pregnant, he let out her dresses because he could sew.

What was what was their relationship like? And what sort of partnership did they have? What sort of influence did she have on him?

WILL HITCHCOCK: Mamie was very important to Eisenhower, especially in his young career, because, as you say, she came from upper middle-class family. Her father made his fortune in the meatpacking industry in Colorado. They lived in a large house in Denver. They were members of country clubs. They were well-off. Eisenhower came from nothing, and he had a military background. Those were two strikes against him, as far as Mamie's family was concerned. But Mamie was incredibly charming, very outgoing, a very practical can-do type of lady, who devoted herself to Eisenhower's career.

They moved constantly. They moved almost every year. They lived in very modest army barracks, and she made the best of it. She was great at making friends. The two of them were very social and outgoing. They liked to host parties. They liked to travel. They were much beloved -- the kind of people that their contemporaries wanted to be around, and Mamie was a big part of that.

They were devoted to each other as a young couple, and they were brought together in tragedy because their first son died at the age of two just before Christmas in 1920. And it it absolutely shattered both of them, especially Eisenhower. He was profoundly grief-stricken. Mamie wrote later that some of the light went out of his life forever after that that tragedy. So, they weren't just a frivolous couple. They knew and shared this profound tragedy.

They then went on to have another child, John, whom they raised to adulthood. But it was a very difficult time for them. And Eisenhower sent flowers to Mamie every day on their little son's birthday for the rest of his life.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I'm going to pause here and experiment with switching up the format a little bit. I had mentioned last week how it's getting to the point where I really seriously can't cover even just all the highlights of a presidency. So, the rest of this episode is going to explore mainly the idea of covert action. But first, I thought I'd do a little '10 Things To Know About Eisenhower list,' just to make sure you leave this episode knowing the big factoids.

Okay, so in no particular order…

Number one: Eisenhower was born in 1890, which makes him the last president born in the 19th century.

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And number two: He served as the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and he oversaw the Western Front's invasion of France and Germany. So, this includes, of course, the famous invasion of Normandy.

Number three: his party affiliation. Initially, kind of like war hero Zachary Taylor -- if you can remember all the way back in that presidency that far -- no one really knew what Eisenhower's politics were. So, Harry Truman actually courted Ike to succeed him as Democratic presidential candidate. But then, Eisenhower had to essentially make it public that he considered himself a Republican.

Number four: his presidential campaign. OK, so this was in 1952, and he used the now iconic slogan, 'I Like Ike.' He ended up beating the Democratic candidate Adlai Stephenson in a landslide. He's also the only general to serve as president in the entire 20th century.

Number five: highways. Eisenhower's the one who pushed for the U.S. to have an interstate highway system, which he authorized in 1956.

Number six: space. Following Russia's launch of Sputnik, Eisenhower decided to put more emphasis on space exploration, and he established NASA in 1958.

Number seven: the U-2 incident. In 1960, there was an American spy plane that was shot down over the Soviet Union, and the U.S. put out this cover story about it, but then Russia produced the American pilot that they had captured, and Eisenhower's administration ended up pretty embarrassed by this whole affair.

Number 8: civil rights. Eisenhower proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which established a Civil Rights Commission and it also put an official civil rights office inside the Justice Department. This was the first significant Civil Rights Act since the late 1800s.

Eisenhower also enforced the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate public schools. So, when a school in Little Rock, Arkansas went against the Supreme Court's decision and was denying entry to black students, Eisenhower famously sent in federal support to ensure that the black students could enter the school.

Number nine: In 1959, both Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union and became the 49th and 50th states.

And now, number 10: his health. While he was in office, Eisenhower had both a heart attack and a stroke, as well as surgery on his intestine because he had Crohn's disease.

OK, so, that list hopefully fills in some of the gaps we would otherwise have had. Now, I'm going to turn back to Will Hitchcock and covert action with Ike.

As a president Eisenhower had something of a calm hands-off public demeanor, but was very active behind the scenes. Is that a trait or a leadership tactic that we see earlier in his life and his career as well, before he becomes president?

WILL HITCHCOCK: Eisenhower worked for almost 10 years for Douglas MacArthur, the greatest

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 soldier before World War II of his generation. And Douglas MacArthur was a terrible egomaniac who talked about himself in public non-stop. Although he was a very accomplished soldier and an elegant public figure, he was very difficult to work for. And Eisenhower suffered terribly under MacArthur's command, and he worked with him in Washington and he worked with him in the Philippines, when MacArthur was sent to the Philippines in the 1930s.

MacArthur was the kind of soldier and leader that Eisenhower did not want to be. So, when he began to take on more and more command authority, especially during the Second World War, his goal was not to be the center of attention all the time. His goal was to stress teamwork, to delegate significant responsibility to powerful, smart subordinates who he believed could get the job done.

That's really the crucial feature of his World War II leadership. And I think it's one of the things that, after the war, people said about him that was his greatest quality.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So maybe let's skip ahead now to his presidency. How much did he sort of carry over the style he had as a general versus adjusted to a new leadership style in the White House?

WILL HITCHCOCK: His strengths carried over from his military leadership. One good example of this is the way that he ran both his Cabinet and the institution he created, the National Security Council. Now, today, the NSC is just one bureaucracy of many that serve the White House and the president. But in Eisenhower's day, the National Security Council was the center of government. It very much mimicked the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he'd created during the Second World War to lead the alliance.

So, in the National Security Council, all the members of the Cabinet that had security responsibilities, as well as all the military leaders, met. And they met once a week, and they talked through problems at length, and they studied papers and they really thought through the implications of policy problems. To me, this is the kind of attention and focus that Eisenhower brought to international foreign-policy problems that many presidents in our contemporary times have trouble replicating.

The other thing that I would say that's characteristic of Eisenhower from the war years and also in his presidency -- he had a very good knack for identifying the big problems and he knew how to say, 'That problem you've brought to me is a second-tier problem. It's a big one, but we're not going to deal with it now because we've got this other thing we're dealing with and that's the number one problem.'

And publicly, that often came off as not caring about some of the details of government. But usually, it was because he was really deeply engaged in a small handful of problems that he focused on.

And then the last thing I'd say on that question of what did he bring from his military experience into the White House -- strategic patience. So, what does that mean? That means don't overreact. Not every single problem that comes across your desk is a crisis. And he was remarkable in his willingness to wait, to say, 'Give it a day. Let's give this a week. I'm not sure we need to act yet.'

And again, publicly, this sometimes came off as if he was not focused -- not acting with sufficient

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 speed. But in reality, he had a sense for understanding that problems evolve, and that sometimes when they change there's a more advantageous time to act. I love this about Eisenhower. He had the guts and the courage to show restraint and patience and not overreact all the time.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Let's zoom in on a couple big moments or episodes in his presidency. And for the first, how about let's talk about his handling of Senator McCarthy. Now, this seems to be an example of how Eisenhower could work his will behind the scenes, right? So, tell me what sort of problem McCarthy was presenting Eisenhower, and then how he ultimately handled this.

WILL HITCHCOCK: So, of course, when he comes into office in the beginning of 1953, McCarthy and McCarthyism is already a major factor. It's already a burning issue. It had been since the beginning of 1950. Eisenhower and McCarthy were both Republicans, and Eisenhower, as he was running for president, didn't want to distance himself too much from McCarthy because he feared that he would be sending a signal to the Republican Party that he was being critical of the Republicans. And, as you know, he chose Richard Nixon as his vice president. Now, Nixon in 1952 was known as essentially the McCarthyite that you could bring home to your mother. He was the clean-cut, happy warrior, but he was one of the most rabid anti-communists in the Congress. And that is exactly why Eisenhower put him on his ticket.

So, I think we have to remember that Eisenhower sought to benefit from the anti-communist Red Scare attitudes that many Americans shared. Of course, he personally loathed McCarthy and his tactics. But he understood that he couldn't dump on McCarthy directly. So, he comes into office having won the presidency, and Eisenhower does what Eisenhower often does, which is he waits. He doesn't go toe-to-toe with McCarthy, but McCarthy begins, as your listeners will know, he begins to hold hearings into a variety of issues that concern Eisenhower deeply -- one of which was whether or not George Marshall, former defense secretary and secretary of state, had in some way been sympathetic to the communists in China. Maybe Marshall himself was somehow traitorous.

And that really steamed Eisenhower, because Marshall had been Ike's mentor. But also, McCarthy begins to prod into the background of the Army itself, and he begins to ask questions and hold hearings about whether the Army is pursuing some kind of cover-up of Reds in the military. Well, this really starts to get on Eisenhower's nerves, and he wants McCarthy to be destroyed, but he, himself, is reluctant to do it.

And the men to whom he delegates the McCarthy problem are, on the one hand, Richard Nixon, who has good ties with the right wing and the Republican Party, but also his attorney general Herbert Brownell -- not a man that's well known to Americans today, but a person who is very influential in the Eisenhower period. And Nixon and Brownell worked out a strategy for basically embarrassing McCarthy and undercutting him, and also not cooperating with McCarthy's committee.

Between those two men, they managed to wall off McCarthy from Eisenhower, and eventually, McCarthy's own craziness starts to undermine him and weaken his credibility. Eisenhower understood something about McCarthy -- that he would eventually create enough traps and pitfalls that he, himself, would fall into them. So, again, it's an example of strategic patience: Wait until this guy runs out of steam. Wait until he hangs himself, in a sense.

And that's what McCarthy eventually did.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, with me now is Stephen Kinzer, the former New York Times journalist and the author of several books, including 'The Brothers' -- about John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state under Ike, and his brother Allen Dulles, the first CIA director. Thanks so much for being here, Stephen.

STEPHEN KINZER: It's good to be with you.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, how was it that these two brothers ended up in Ike's administration?

STEPHEN KINZER: The Dulles brothers were hugely influential foreign-policy figures, and they came into office through two different means. So, John Foster Dulles, who became secretary of state, was the leading corporate lawyer of his generation. His specialty was representing American corporations that did business in other countries. And his subspecialty was bending the governments of other countries to the will of American corporations. This was the skill that made him the highest paid lawyer in the United States during the 1940s.

He became intensely interested in world affairs because his legal practice immersed him in the affairs of various countries. He advised Eisenhower when Eisenhower became a presidential candidate. He wrote some of Eisenhower's speeches. So, by the time Eisenhower was elected, John Foster Dulles was already firmly established as one of the leading foreign-policy figures in the Republican Party. His nomination as secretary of state did not surprise anyone. In fact, he was the logical candidate.

Allen Dulles came in in a different way. Allen Dulles had worked in the OSS, the wartime secret service of the United States. He was always fascinated with covert operations. Allen Dulles was the co-author of the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA.

Eisenhower did try to resist appointing him up to a certain point. He was not like his brother, the obvious candidate. But in the end, Eisenhower selected him. This was the first time in history that two siblings -- brothers -- had controlled the overt and covert sides of American foreign policy.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, what does it tell you about Eisenhower that these two men served in leadership positions in his administration?

STEPHEN KINZER: The greatest surprise to me in writing 'The Brothers' was to understand Eisenhower's role in all this. So, my book tells the story of all these covert operations, and those seem to contradict, in some cases, the genial image of the smiling grandfatherly Ike that has been so widely accepted. In fact, Eisenhower was a very tough guy under that smile.

Eisenhower was an intense supporter of covert action, even in its most extreme forms -- fomenting civil wars, overthrowing governments. These were tactics that Eisenhower thought were completely legitimate. Now, during the period that Eisenhower was in office, he called his foreign policy 'The New Look.' And The New Look had two basic principles: the first was a reduced standing army to save money, and then, to compensate for that, a strong nuclear deterrent.

We now know that The New Look had a third pillar, which was covert action. No one knew that at the time -- Eisenhower never spoke about why he favored covert action so strongly. And he couldn't have, because he never admitted that he was ever involved in any of it. In fact, in his

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 memoirs, he explicitly lies about how he finds out about various operations and what his role was. He came from the generation where it was really possible to believe that these secrets would never emerge.

Now, why was he so strongly supporting this policy that seems to contradict the image we have of him? I think there are at least two reasons. The first is that Eisenhower, as the commander of allied troops in Europe, was aware as very few other people were that covert operations had played an important role during World War II -- not just the breaking of Nazi codes, but a host of other covert operations. So, Eisenhower would have come out of World War II with a strong appreciation for what covert action could do.

Secondly, I think Eisenhower would've seen covert action -- assassinating foreign leaders, overthrowing governments -- as a kind of a peace project. Here was a guy who had had to send kids off to die by the thousands. This must have weighed on him. And suddenly, CIA Director Allen Dulles comes to him with a way to resolve a seemingly intractable or dangerous foreign problem at almost no cost to the United States. Very few Americans, if any, would ever die. Very few people at all would die; and the cost in dollars would be very low. So, this would have fascinated Eisenhower as a way to avoid possible wars.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you think he realized the downsides of it as well, in some way? Or at least wrestled with it on a moral level?

WILL HITCHCOCK: Because there hadn't been covert actions in the past, neither Eisenhower nor either of the Dulles brothers ever thought about something that we think about now -- which is the long-term consequences of covert action. We now realize that when you overthrow a government as Eisenhower did, for example, in Iran in 1953, the story doesn't end in 1954. It keeps going all through history, and we're still paying the price for some of those interventions. That wasn't clear at the time, and nobody had the creative imagination to think about what the effects of these interventions would be.

So, we have documents in which he actually encourages Allen Dulles to go further than he wants to go. At one point, Allen Dulles, for example, presented a plan to carry out an arson campaign in Cuba in which sugar fields and other large plantations would be burned to the ground. Eisenhower said this was too small, something bigger had to be thought of.

It was Eisenhower who became, as far as we know, the first president of the United States to order the assassination of a foreign leader -- something he did twice during the summer of 1960. He ordered the murder of Fidel Castro, which, of course, was never successful. And he ordered the killing of the prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who was indeed assassinated. So, Eisenhower fully understood everything the Dulles brothers were doing. It's not true, as some people were saying, that he divorced himself from foreign policy, or he let the CIA go wild like a rogue elephant. This is completely untrue. Everything that John Foster Dulles did as secretary of state and that Allen Dulles did as head of the CIA was known and approved by President Eisenhower.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, Eisenhower is often viewed and spoken of as a peacetime president. Given all the covert operations, do you think that that's their right label for him -- peacetime president?

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10 STEPHEN KINZER: There was a secret world war going on during the Eisenhower presidency. What that war was is debatable. In the eyes of the Eisenhower administration, the American people, the press and the American political establishment -- the war was between the Soviet bloc and the American bloc. They saw the world in entirely black-and-white terms. Everything that happened in the world in their minds was a product of the Cold War. And if there was trouble being made for the West or an American company in some developing country, it was immediately presumed that this was fomented by the Soviets or part of an effort to attack the United States.

Other people would say that the war of the 1950s was quite different -- that it was a war in which the dominant powers in the world -- Europe, the United States and Russia -- were seeking to maintain their control over Africa, Asia and Latin America; and the newly emerging nations were fighting for their independence and for a national voice in the world. In that case, I think you can say that, from the perspective of history, Eisenhower greatly misjudged the power of nationalism in the ‘third world.’

He never understood it as a force in itself outside the Cold War. Many countries in the world -- from Iran and Guatemala, to Indonesia to Burma, to India to Egypt -- wanted to break out of the Cold War paradigm. They didn't want to be on either side. These were countries that were gravely underdeveloped. They wanted to focus all their attention on domestic problems and not pay attention to the outside world.

The Americans, particularly the Dulles brothers and the Eisenhower administration, could not accept this. It was urgent for them that every country be on the side of the United States or else it was an enemy.

And by misunderstanding the force of nationalism in the developing world, the Eisenhower administration felt compelled to launch interventions that ultimately wound up turning many of those countries against the United States and weakening the American security that they had sought to strengthen.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: When you look around today, what do you see as the most profound lasting legacy of Ike's administration and the Dulles brothers? Where do you think the imprint they've left is most obvious?

STEPHEN KINZER: I think the Eisenhower administration and the Dulles brothers misjudged the world in some important ways -- they charged into countries and disrupted political systems in very destructive ways. In some countries like Iran and Guatemala, politics is still shattered as a result of interventions launched by the Eisenhower administration.

I also think that the Eisenhower administration missed a big chance with the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin. At that time, the new leadership in the Kremlin sent out some peace feelers. And they had a concrete suggestion, which was: Why don't we have a summit that will be the Big Four -- France, Britain, the United States and Soviet Union -- and see if we couldn't talk through some of our problems and work out kind of a new approach to European and global security?

The French were in favor of this, and Britain thought this was a great idea. But John Foster Dulles was firmly against it. With Eisenhower's blessing, he vetoed the idea of any contacts with the Soviet Union. The reason was -- as Dulles explained -- that, since the Eisenhower administration was relentlessly portraying the Soviet Union as the font of all evil and the eager destroyer of all

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 11 freedom and possibility for human life on Earth, it would seem incongruous for the U.S. to be sitting down at a table with Soviet leaders.

I think that also was a great missed opportunity. So -- although you have to place yourself back in the frenzy of that era -- history, I think, suggests that in foreign policy Eisenhower and his principal advisers made some far-reaching misjudgments.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, I'm back with Will Hitchcock now to focus on one particularly powerful episode in the Middle East during Ike's administration -- and that was the Suez Crisis in 1956. So, Will, tell me why this was such a tipping point, both for Eisenhower and also for America on the world stage?

WILL HITCHCOCK: So, in 1956 in Egypt, the new Egyptian leader Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser decides to nationalize the Suez Canal.

What does that mean? Well, the British and the French had built and owned the Suez Canal, and they benefited by taking money out of the tolls from all the shipping. Nasser, who had recently come to power in Egypt, says, 'We're going to put an end to that.' He doesn't say, ‘We're going to close it,’ but he says, 'We're going to take control of it.'

Well, the British and the French say, 'Well not so fast. We built it. It's ours and we want to control it.' So, they decide they're going to mount a military invasion of Egypt to take back the Suez Canal and probably overthrow Nasser. Eisenhower comes into this, and says, 'No way. Absolutely not. I'll stand in the way of this crazy idea. And I will do everything I can to block this invasion.'

Why would he do such a thing? It's his allies, after all. But Eisenhower believed that the whole world was watching, and he was interested in cultivating friendships among nationalist leaders in the third world. He wanted America to be seen as a liberating power. So, he did everything that he could, especially using a great deal of economic leverage and behind-the-scenes pressure to undermine the British and French invasion.

He hurt them in a variety of ways, cutting off economic aid to these allies. And the British and French had to withdraw -- humiliated, wounded. And Eisenhower had participated in this wounding. Well, why did he do it? Because he wanted America to replace the colonial powers in the Middle East. And that's what happened after the Suez crisis was over. He reached out to a variety of leaders in the Middle East, mostly monarchs and other strongmen, to say, 'America is here to be your friend.'

And in January 1957, Eisenhower issued the Eisenhower Doctrine, which was a statement that said: We will give you economic aid, military aid and we will intervene if the Soviet Union is perceived to be intervening in the Middle East.

So, the Suez Crisis was a fascinating moment. The colonial powers were humiliated, and America moved into the vacuum, and Ike said, 'We will stay and fight because we think the Middle East is economically so important for the West.'

And that was a statement that you can now see as the beginning of a half century and more of American influence and intervention in the Middle East. Not the kind of intervention the colonial powers preferred, but rather the kind of intervention that America prefers -- using economic and

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 12 military aid and influence, rather than outright military intervention of the kind that the United States has engaged in in the last 15 years.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: When you look around today and you look at Middle East affairs, where do you feel Eisenhower's legacy most strongly, do you think?

WILL HITCHCOCK: Well, the thing that's so fascinating about Eisenhower's handling of world affairs was that he managed to avoid military interventions again and again and again.

He brought to a close the Korean War because he knew it was unwinnable. He avoided open military intervention in Suez. He avoided going to war with the Russians over, say, Berlin or Hungary. He was a person who saw military conflict as inevitably unpredictable, and as leading to huge costs and danger and in the nuclear world -- something that had to be avoided. So, if there's one legacy, I think, it's that he provides a model of how to manage world affairs without resorting to military conflict first – to use that as an absolute last resort.

That's not to say Eisenhower didn't use power. And here I think is his legacy that very much continues today. Eisenhower did a great deal to create what we might call the kind of covert military industrial complex. He expanded the CIA enormously. He expanded the overflights of the Soviet Union through the U-2 spy plane. He built enormous, enormous numbers of ICBMs and intermediate range nuclear missiles. He expanded the atomic and nuclear power of the United States enormously.

So, he built the military industrial complex, and he built a spy network to help guide him in exercising that power. So, it's not as if he was an isolationist. He wanted to run the world a certain way, avoiding overt military conflict but using covert power where he could.

And that's a legacy that I think still very much lingers today -- this belief that Americans often have that covert power, and a lack of transparency, is really the best way to to govern certain difficult problems. And I would say that's a somewhat lamentable legacy of his time that still has carried on into the present.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Is there a way in which, you know, that preference for covert action is sort of echoed in his own leadership style as well?

WILL HITCHCOCK: Eisenhower is 'Father Knows Best.' That's the motto of the Eisenhower administration. Publicly, he is a man who reassures the country that all is well -- that Eisenhower is in command, that the presidency and the nation know what they're doing. Privately, he's sweating the details. He's working very hard. He's breaking the rules. He is overthrowing governments. He's building nuclear weapons. He does not believe, actually, as leader, in transparency.

And that's kind of, if you like, a ‘50s family metaphor. Dad doesn't share his personal finances with the children at the kitchen table in the ‘50s. That will come later, but in the ‘50s, Dad's in command. Again, this is a simplistic view, but it's very much the attitude that Eisenhower projected. And I think it's perhaps what Americans expected from their president in the decade of the ‘50s.

I think it's also an unfortunate legacy of his era that sometimes appears in the modern presidency, which is the idea that you can't trust the people with all of the secrets -- that there's a lot of things

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 13 about government that people should not know. And Eisenhower believed this very strongly. Remember, he was a commander in the Second World War fighting the Nazis, and he had a lot of secrets that he didn't want anybody to know about. He carried that belief in the need for secrecy and for the sort of dark arts into the White House with him. And he felt that the public -- all they wanted to know was that things were in good hands, and then they would trust their government.

I think that sense of trust and belief that what's going on behind closed doors is in the national interest -- I think that's broken down for sure in our modern times.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Tell me a little bit more about that -- about the ways in which you see Eisenhower as something of a curtain raiser for the modern American presidency.

WILL HITCHCOCK: I think on a couple of issuesisenhower prefigures problems that are going to come later. On the domestic side, he confronts a burgeoning civil rights crisis that he doesn't really understand, and he's not quite sure how to manage it. But what he does do is he opens the way for much greater federal government participation in solving what was then seen as a states rights' issue -- namely, civil rights -- that African-Americans should have civil rights. He believed in that. On other issues on the domestic side, Eisenhower believed in the management of prosperity, essentially that the government had an important role in creating stability, holding back inflation, balancing the budget. And he did those things because he believed that was the appropriate government role.

He introduced religion into public life in a way that no president had really done in the 20th century previously. And that was something that has had carried on into American public life since.

He believed in securing the legacy of the New Deal -- the idea that government had a role to look after its citizens. That was something Republicans hadn't done before, and he secured that. So, on the domestic side, he was quite influential.

And then on the foreign and international domestic side of his leadership, he was hugely consequential in securing America's international role. Remember, much of the Republican Party in the 1950s was still isolationist. And even today, we sometimes hear cries from especially the Republican side of the divide for withdrawing from the world and focusing on domestic problems. Eisenhower said, 'No way. We live in a global village. America is the greatest country in the world. We have a role to pay and we must play it. We don't have to go to war with everybody, but we will engage with the world, be a good ally and a good leader in world affairs.' And that is very much the attitude that all subsequent presidents have taken. So, Eisenhower defined the idea of a sort of permanent American presence on the world stage.

So, in all of these ways, he's a wonderfully interesting transitional figure into the modern presidency. The presidency was tiny when Franklin Roosevelt was in office, and it wasn't much bigger when Truman was there. By the time Eisenhower leaves and Kennedy comes in, it's a very different picture. The country's much more powerful, much more wealthy. It's a global nation.

Eisenhower understood that dramatic change was happening to the United States in the mid-part of the century. And he prepared the presidency as an office to handle that much wider global role.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 14 So, he's a fascinating guy who, in many ways, represents America's own ambiguities and paradoxes. We like to think of ourselves as, in a way, all from a small town somewhere in the Midwest, with earnest rural values of family and church and so forth. But, in fact, when push comes to shove, we can also be a very aggressive nation and pursue our interests with real firmness and even recklessness. And Eisenhower carried with him a lot of these tensions.

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