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Political Pundits, Conventional Wisdom, and Presidential Reputation, 1945-1963

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Political Pundits, Conventional Wisdom, and Presidential Reputation, 1945-1963 POLITICAL PUNDITS, CONVENTIONAL WISDOM, AND PRESIDENTIAL REPUTATION, 1945-1963 A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Stephen K. Tootle August 2004 This dissertation entitled POLITICAL PUNDITS, CONVENTIONAL WISDOM, AND PRESIDENTIAL REPUTATION, 1945-1963 BY STEPHEN K. TOOTLE has been approved for the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences by Alonzo Hamby Distinguished Professor of History Leslie A. Flemming Dean, College of Arts and Sciences TOOTLE, STEPHEN K. Ph.D. August 2004. History Political Pundits, Conventional Wisdom, and Presidential Reputation, 1945-1963 (350pp.) Director of Dissertation: Alonzo Hamby An elite cadre of political journalists shaped presidential reputation in the years between the end of the Second World War and Kennedy’s assassination. These pundits influenced politics in a way that is scarcely imaginable today. Walter Lippmann was easily the most prominent journalist of the 20th century. From the negotiations at Versailles to the Vietnam War, the most powerful people in the world read his columns and valued his insight. Arthur Krock and his colleague James Reston at the New York Times had access to, and the trust of, presidents and government officials of the highest rank. Drew Pearson occupied the opposite end of the spectrum of respectability, but he was perhaps the most popular of all the political pundits. In addition to his newspaper columns, Pearson also had a radio show with millions of faithful listeners. Marquis Childs’ column for the United Features Syndicate ran in all the largest markets in the United States and occupied a prominent place on the editorial page of the Washington Post. Joseph and Stewart Alsop collaborated on their “Matter of Fact” column and were at the center of a Georgetown social scene that included cabinet members, Supreme Court Justices, ambassadors, and foreign heads of state. Taking their experiences and prejudices into account, the elite journalists established the reputations of the presidents in three chronological phases. They formed their First Impressions before the president even took office. The period After the Honeymoon determined the working conventional wisdom of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. As each president approached the end of his term, the columnists interpreted their Perceived Legacy. Taken together, the elite political journalists shaped and distorted how the interested public understood the deeper significance of contemporary events until Kennedy’s death. By the end of the 1960s, the pundits had lost the ability to create conventional wisdom. But between the deaths of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, they reigned. Approved: Alonzo Hamby Distinguished Professor of History v Table of Contents Page Abstract Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1. Missouri Mule………………………………………………………………28 Chapter 2. Incompetence, Political Failures, and the Great Upset Victory………….....55 Chapter 3. Exit Limping……………………………………………………………….107 Chapter 4. The Dream Boy and the Limits of Sincerity.……………………………...146 Chapter 5. Years of Frustration………………………………………………………..178 Chapter 6. Second Term Doldrums…………………………………………………...217 Chapter 7. The Second Coming……………………………………………………….251 Chapter 8. Crisis and Martyrdom………………………………………………….….286 Chapter 9. The End of Consensus…………………………………………………….326 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..339 1 Introduction Just before Harry Truman left the White House in 1953, columnist Walter Lippmann called the Truman administration “a bad case of fatty degeneration.”1 Yet, in 1995, following the publication of Robert H. Ferrell’s book Choosing Truman, USA Today Magazine ran a story with the headline “Harry S. Truman: America’s Last Great Leader?” With the benefit of four decades of hindsight the authors were able to run through a list of Truman’s accomplishments including items such as the support for the United Nations, the decision to drop the atomic bomb, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, a democratic Japan, the National Security Act of 1947 (introducing the Office of Secretary of Defense, Department of the Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and eventually the Department of Defense), the 1948 executive order ending racial discrimination in the armed forces, the Berlin Airlift, recognition of Israel, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), protection of South Korea, and his recommendation for universal health coverage.2 Historians seemed to agree with the reevaluation as well. A 2001 poll of historians conducted by the cable television channel C-SPAN found Truman to be the 5th greatest president.3 The historians polled at the 1 Walter Lippmann, “Morale and Discipline,” 2 December 1952, The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy, ed. Clinton Rossiter and James Lare, (New York: Random House, 1963), 153-154. 2 Susanne A. Roschwalb and Gordon L. Smith, “Harry S. Truman: America’s Last Great Leader?” USA Today Magazine (January 1995), 86-87. 3 C-SPAN Survey of Presidential Leadership, “A Site to Complement C-SPAN’s 20th Anniversary Television Series, American Presidents: Life Portraits” 2000. http://www.americanpresidents.org/survey/historians/32.asp (8 September 2003). The results of the poll were released to the public on February 21, 2001. Truman ranked 4th in “Crisis Leadership,” 7th in “Economic Management,” 7th in “Moral Authority,” 5th in “International Relations,” 5th in “Administrative Skills,” 7th in “Vision/Setting an Agenda,” and 5th in “Performance Within Context of Times.” 2 beginning of the 21st century clearly saw something in Truman that Walter Lippmann had not seen at the end of 1952. In his diary entry for September 9, 1958, columnist and political pundit Drew Pearson recalled a conversation he had that day with the Soviet ambassador. The Russian wanted to know “why [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles had so much power over Eisenhower. I didn’t like to say that it was because we had a lazy President. I explained it was because Eisenhower likes to delegate responsibility.”4 Columnist Joseph Alsop went even further, referring, in private, to Eisenhower as a “yellow son of a bitch” for failing to confront Red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy.5 Yet decades later, in the same C-SPAN poll of historians that had ranked Truman so highly, Eisenhower ranked as the seventh greatest President in the category of “Administrative Skill” and number five in the category of “Moral Authority.”6 In addition, Stephen Ambrose, one of the most popular historians of the last twenty years and Eisenhower’s most important biographer, told an interviewer that he considered Eisenhower “the finest man I’ve ever known.” Ambrose continued: “Whenever I’m facing a tough decision, and especially if there’s any morality involved in it, I always ask myself, ‘What would Eisenhower do?’ Now I don’t always live up to that. But I do ask myself that. He was the most moral man I've ever known. I would rank my father in a special category, of course. But Eisenhower knew the difference between right and wrong, and he never did something that was wrong, certainly not knowingly. He almost never lied. He did lie to Hitler about where he was going to invade, and he lied to Khrushchev about what Francis Gary 4 Drew Pearson, Drew Pearson Diaries, 1949-1959 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 479. 5 Joseph Alsop quoted in Robert W. Merry, Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop— Guardians of the American Century (New York: Viking, 1996), 274. 6 http://www.americanpresidents.org/survey/historians/33.asp 3 Powers was doing over in the middle of his country. But other than that, I never caught him in a lie.” The interviewer then asked if Ambrose considered Eisenhower the greatest American of the last fifty years. Ambrose corrected him. “Hundred. Now I'm not pushing this, and I know that I'll never get agreement on it, but when people talk about who was the greatest American of the twentieth century, there is no question in my mind who it was.”7 John Kennedy’s historical reputation followed a very different path. In his memoirs, columnist Joseph Alsop recorded how he looked back at the Kennedy years with “the most unabashed feelings of romantic nostalgia and delight.”8 Just before Kennedy’s election in 1960, Walter Lippmann informed his readers of “the precision of Mr. Kennedy’s mind, his immense command of the facts, his instinct for the crucial point, his singular lack of demagoguery and sloganeering… his coolness and courage.” To Lippmann, Kennedy had all the, “recognizable marks of the man who, besides being highly trained, is a natural leader, organizer and ruler of men.”9 Despite Kennedy’s short time in office, historians agreed with many of those favorable first assessments. The 7 Stephen Ambrose, interviewed by Bill Kauffmann, “The Best-Selling Historian Talks about D- Day, Eisenhower, Lewis and Clark, The Great Railroads, and What’s Wrong with History Today,” The American Enterprise 11 Sept 2000, 13. 8 Joseph Alsop, with Adam Platt, I’ve Seen the Best of It: Memoirs, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), 436. 9 Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980), 522. Steel went on to note that most pundits followed Lippmann’s lead in praising Kennedy, except for Arthur Krock, who felt that Lippmann had lost all sense of proportion. Krock reportedly said, “I may be getting old and I may be getting senile, but at least I don’t fall in love with young boys like Walter Lippmann.” Ibid. 4 same poll of historians that had confirmed the rehabilitation of the reputations of Truman and Eisenhower also reaffirmed that Kennedy’s reputation had not suffered with time.10 Why did the historical judgments of Truman and Eisenhower differ so much from the assessments of contemporary pundits, while both journalists in the past and current scholars praise Kennedy’s leadership? It is easy enough to scrutinize the various historians’ polls on presidential greatness.
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