>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^E00:00:04 ^B00:00:24 >> Carolyn Brown: Well, good afternoon, everyone and thank you for your patience. I'm Carolyn Brown. I'm the Director of the Office of Scholarly Programs in the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library. And it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon for a lecture by our distinguished colleague, Dr. William Hitchcock, entitled "The Ike Age -- Eisenhower, America and the World of the 1950s." We are not in the 1950s, so would you please turn off any cell phones that might go off and disturb the program or our speaker. Today's event is sponsored by the John W. Kluge Center, a center that was established with a very generous endowment of Mr. Kluge to create a scholarly venue on Capitol Hill where the world's finest mature scholars might have opportunities to share their wisdom with the nation's leaders, a space where the world of affairs and the world of ideas might have opportunities to come together for mutually enriching conversation. In addition, the center supports some of the finest of the rising generation of scholars, many of whom are here, clustered over there on that side of the room. And we do a number of lectures such as this one and small symposia and conferences. If you'd like to know more, you can sign up for email notification in the back or pick up a Kluge Center brochure. Our speaker today, Dr. William Hitchcock, is the Henry A. Kissinger Scholar in Foreign Policy and International Relations. This chair was established by the friends of Henry Kissinger, to enable outstanding thinkers and practitioners and scholars to engage in research on foreign policy and international affairs. We've had a range of people from the scholarly side to the practitioner side. Its part of the -- the chair is part of a larger Kissinger program which also includes a Kissinger lecture and we have lectures -- major lectures by that lecture from time to time. But, returning today's event, William Hitchcock is Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and a senior scholar at the Miller Center for Public Policy. His work and teaching have focused on international diplomatic and military history of the 20th Century, and in particular, the era of a world -- the World Wars and the Cold War. He has written widely on transatlantic relations, European history and politics; and I'm just going to name a few of his major works to give you an idea of the depth and scope. "France Restored -- Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe," that was 1998; a coedited volume with Paul Kennedy "From War to Peace -- Altered Strategic Landscapes in the 20th Century"; "The Struggle for Europe -- The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945 to the Present"; "The Bitter Road to Freedom -- A New History of the Liberation of Europe," and this book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize, and a financial times best seller; and the last one I'll mention, "The Human Rights Revolution -- An International History," which was coedited with Petra Goedde and Akira Iriye. He's now at work on a new book, what he's been working at the Kluge Center, "The Age of Eisenhower -- America and the World in the 1950s." But when I talked to Will yesterday and he knew I was kind of looking to see some of the interesting angles on this, one of the things that struck me is he characterized this book as a new adventure, and we always love it when scholars are on an adventure. Now, these are my words. I would say this new book crosses the Atlantic, changing the balance of his focus from Europe to the US -- obviously, there's a lot of interconnection. And has also posed an interesting challenge which I know many of you will be interested in even aside from many interests you have in Eisenhower, which has to do with the -- what happens when you're trying to write a biography, or you're trying to write a history and what are the difference between those two genres. I mean, how as a scholar, you can solve that sort of the ticklish problems that arise. So, I think we're in for a real treat both to learn more about the Eisenhower years from Will's perspective, and also get some insights into the writing and thinking about history and biography. So, please wait -- [laughter] excuse me. Please, welcome, I was trying to say, our friend and colleague, Will Hitchcock. ^M00:05:42 [ Applause ] ^M00:05:48 >> Will Hitchcock: Thank you so much, Carolyn. I think this is without a doubt the most beautiful room I ever had the privilege of speaking in. This is -- when I came to the Library the first day here in December, I said to Carolyn, "I can't believe you get to come to work here every day." And I -- I still get goose bumps coming up the grand staircase or down these beautiful halls and looking at these ceilings. And although the blinds are pulled, Travis, you were showing me the extraordinary view of the Capitol right out the window. So, we're having a reception afterwards, just make sure you peek out the windows to get a sense for the grandeur of the room that we're in and the institution that we're in. And so, that just is a good segue to thanking the Kluge Center and to thanking Carolyn Brown, and the outstanding staff of the Kluge Center, and of course, to the scholars that make up the intellectual community that I got to the privilege of joining for the last five months and I'll be here for just another month as I feel the grains of sand of my leave time slipping through my fingers. I'm going to savor it. I also want to thank the supporters of the Henry Kissinger chair who created the fellowship to honor the former Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger, and I feel privileged to hold this position. Some of you, if you're real scholars of Eisenhower in the '50s, you know that the young Henry Kissinger was rather a critic of Eisenhower. I didn't like his nuclear policy. I thought it was a little stodgy, not nimble enough, not clever enough. But I hope and I assume -- and I believe -- that Dr. Kissinger, if you were here today -- let me just make sure he's not here today [laughter]. Perhaps he softened his views on the 34th President. He would not be the only person to have changed his mind about Eisenhower. When I tell my academic friends and colleagues that I am working on a book about President Dwight Eisenhower, I often see certain expressions flash across their face -- surprise, worry, and then genuine alarm sets in [laughter]. Well, what explains these reaction amongst my university colleagues, my scholarly colleagues? There are three concerns that my colleagues sometimes express. I feel like I'm being attacked. Good. Three concerns; first, I'm writing a biography. Many of us love to read biography, but the truth is that academic historians don't consider biography to be a very sophisticated genre of writing. It's thought to be a methodological straightjacket, the mere stringing of events together in a neat row focused around a single life, a biography many scholars feel is too limiting, too confining for the big questions that historians like to grapple with. Second, academic historians frankly are uneasy with presidents -- and presidential biography, especially. And this has to do with a suspicion, the presidential history is a kind of court history, written by admirers and ideological fellow travelers whose chief -- whose aim is chiefly to show why their president is really the greatest of them all. To write presidential history, many scholars quietly claim, is to revert to an earlier time when the role of the historian was to build national character rather than to question it. And finally, the third reason for the surprised or dismayed reaction of my scholarly colleagues, is that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Republican and a rather square one at that [laughter]. My colleagues say, if I'm going to make all these -- the error of writing a biography out of a presidential biography, why don't I -- and to write about a Republican, why don't I make an interesting one like Teddy Roosevelt, or Reagan, or Nixon, somebody with some edge to it? Why old square Ike? Well, you know, this gets old after a while. In response to my colleagues, I make the argument that it's important for university-based historians to write about presidents precisely because so few of us do it anymore. It's a fact that the crowded field of presidential historians, the folks that we see on the news hour in the evening offering up presidential anecdotes, that field is composed almost entirely of writers and journalists, rather than scholars who work in university history departments, interacting with other historians, teaching students, learning about new developments in the historical field. And as a result, many presidential biographies of the kind that we're familiar with, tend, first of all, to be well written, since many of the authors are journalists. But I'm afraid, in my opinion, they also tend to be quite traditional, somewhat predictable and not necessarily of sustaining the analytical bite that I think our best history must have. So what I'm going to do today is to show the historians can bring much to the study of the presidency that goes beyond, and also includes a straightforward biographical narrative. We could be both biographers and historians at the same time if we balance these imperatives just so. ^M00:10:58 My thesis today is that the period in American history from 1945 to 1961 ought rightly to be known as the "age of Eisenhower." That's the payoff line, in case you're looking for the lead. The age of Eisenhower -- I, too, am, of course, lobbying for the greatness of my guy; but nonetheless, it's an age of Eisenhower I think is distinctive. The designation of a collection of years as a presidential age is a venerable device, perhaps best used by an illustrious predecessor, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whose "Age of Jackson" and "Age of Roosevelt" were books that used a colorful cast of politicians and intellectuals, journalists and business figures, to illuminate the central ideological tensions of a particular time. Now, attempting this for the Eisenhower period is a little tricky. Eisenhower was not a divisive figure like Jackson, nor did he transform American government the way Franklin Roosevelt clearly did. However, I believe that Eisenhower's legacy was nonetheless enormously significant. His impact was what scholars call "discursive," my first jargony word -- we're about 10 minutes in, I hope it'll be my only one; but his impact was what scholars called "discursive." The age of Eisenhower gave rise to a number of conceptual frameworks that set this time period off against, on the one hand, the political era of the new deal, and also divided it from the fractures of the late '60s and the early 1970s. To put another way, Eisenhower articulated certain powerful political arguments about what America's problems were in the 1950s and how they should be addressed. His diagnosis of America's troubles and his proposed remedies were infused, I think, by a deeply conservative ideology. And the reason all this matters over half a Century later, is that the arguments Eisenhower made still resonate in our politics today. There were, I think, at least three discursive achievements, or cognitive frameworks, that emerged from the age of Eisenhower. I'll enumerate them briefly and then I'll come back to explain them all in more depth -- in a moment. First, Eisenhower, who wanted to be known as a man of peace and who championed that cause, institutionalized the concept of a permanent state of war. During his presidency and, indeed, even before he took office, he argued that America was threatened by an insidious, hostile, and global, geopolitical and ideological threat -- international communism. And that only the most extreme measures of national preparedness could prevail over this threat. In the name of peace, he insisted on dramatically expanding America's nuclear arsenal, as well as increasing the size of the military industrial complex. Second, Eisenhower, having identified the external enemy, also drew the attention of Americans to what he thought was the principal internal threat to American freedom. No, not communism, but the unchecked growth of the federal bureaucracy. Eisenhower used his prestige and popularity to legitimate a full-scale rhetorical attack on the new deal and its political legacy, even though he proved as president to be quite willing to use the levers of federal and executive power to engineer important public works project and to advance significant social policy. Eisenhower, though, he would not have liked the term and it's not his term, proved to be a big government conservative and inaugurated an era in which conservatives would publicly denounce the evils of government, while nonetheless embracing the powers and privileges of the presidency. Third, Eisenhower's belief in the need for vigilance against both external enemies and internal threats to freedom, made him anxious about the increasing laxity and materialism, the materialism of the American people. The 1950s was a time of unprecedented consumerism, commercialism, suburbanization and affluence in American life. How could a people awash in consumer goods remain vigilant against external and internal enemies? To generate a continued spirit of self-sacrifice and zeal, Eisenhower stressed what I would call, this is -- these are my words, what I would call the "virtues of a moral economy." A concept that ask Americans to resist the temptations of material goods and renew their commitment to the values of piety, personal sacrifice, and fiscal rectitude. Americans, Eisenhower suggested, should enjoy their prosperity, but never lose sight of their ongoing fight in defense of freedom. It is well to remember in this context that Eisenhower never tired of using the term "crusade" in describing his purpose in government. That was, of course, famously, the title of his World War II memoire, "Crusade in Europe," and his entire campaign in 1952 was called "This Great Crusade." It was a term that he was comfortable with and used constantly. Now, some of you are thinking, "Gosh, who'd knew that Ike did so much as president? Wasn't he just that good fellow who spent most of his presidency golfing and whose real passions were fishing and the cooking up steaks on the grill with his gang of wealthy businessmen and reading pulp Westerns?" All true. Those were many of his great passions. But, exactly, that's what we often come away with when thinking about Eisenhower. It's interesting to me as a historian to reflect on how a man as smart and is talented as Dwight Eisenhower came to be thought of as such a mediocrity. You know, historicizing the problem of Eisenhower as a diminishing presence in our collective political memory is really quite interesting. I mean, think of Eisenhower's accomplishments. He climbed up to a position of preeminence inside the American army. He proved himself to be a master of wartime leadership. He went on to command the NATO alliance with distinction and he served as president of Columbia University, where he began in the late 1940s to articulate his political ideas. He then won election to the presidency in 1952, and again, in 1956 into huge landslide elections. How did such a man come to be thought as dull, as average, as ordinary? Well, the effort to write off Eisenhower as an unsophisticated rube began as early as 1952 when the Democrats labeled Eisenhower "a captive hero." That's a great term, "a captive hero." He's been taken captive by the [inaudible] and he's sort of -- his hands and arms are being moved by other forces. Eisenhower, the argument went -- was an empty suit behind which lurked the far right politicians such as Robert Taft, the deeply conservative Ohio senator, or the disgraced former President, Herbert Hoover, still a very major, somewhat secretive figure in the - on the right of Republican party. Adlai Stevenson who ran against Eisenhower twice tried in 1956 to make Eisenhower out to be asleep at the wheel. He said, "He doesn't know what's going on and doesn't care enough to find out. The President doesn't run the store." That was Adlai Stevenson's argument in 1952 and 1956, "the President doesn't run the store." And the Democrats kept this up for eight years, and they helped to create an image of Eisenhower as a benevolent dummy in the White House, and this was a surprisingly enduring trope. But liberals were not alone in criticizing Eisenhower. During the Republican primaries of 1952, the Robert Taft forces depicted Eisenhower as a cat's paw for Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, whose so-called moderate wing of the party was trying to maintain its influence. Conservatives also scorned Eisenhower during his presidency. The writers of the National Review, for example, under William F. Buckley's editorship saw Eisenhower as a phony conservative, too keen on seeking arms negotiations and peaceful agreements with the Russians instead of seeking outright victory in the Cold War, and they chided him for his timidity in grappling with the size of the federal government. When Barry Goldwater published "Conscience of a Conservative" in 1960, Eisenhower and the moderate Republicans were among his main targets. So, neither liberals nor conservatives liked him much. Eisenhower, therefore, had no natural set of activists, no polemicists, no political partisans to defend and speak out for his legacy, and it shows in the historical record. ^M00:20:08 Well, all this made it rather easy for John Kennedy in the election of 1960 to use Eisenhower as a foil. Kennedy did not need to run against Nixon, he could run against Eisenhower's generation. On the campaign trail, Kennedy excoriated Eisenhower's leadership as bland, unimaginative, sclerotic, and accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Kennedy at the Los Angeles Democratic Convention in July 1960 painted the Eisenhower years as a lost era. He said, "Seven lean years of drought and famine have withered the field of ideas [laughter]." I love that, but of course, he had Ted Sorenson doing this for him, so it's just not fair. "Seven lean years of drought and famine have withered the field of ideas," Kennedy said of the Eisenhower years. He called on Americans to leave behind men of Eisenhower's generation who saw it "only the safe mediocrity of the past." -- past, I guess. "The old era is ending. The old ways will not do," said Kennedy. In what was to be the keynote of his campaign, Kennedy declared it was time for a new generation of leadership. Well, with Eisenhower's departure from office in 1961, the New York Times journalist, James Reston, wrote an essay on Eisenhower, and I know that Reston supported Eisenhower. I've seen the -- so, this is interesting. And he said -- he wrote a long essay that really read like an epitaph of a political career. "Eisenhower," he said, "was not in tune with the worldwide spirit of the age, which was convulsive and revolutionary. He was merely a good man and a wicked time, a consolidator in a world crying for innovation; a conservative in a radical age; a tired man in a period of turbulence and energetic action." Thanks very much, Ike [laughter]. Don't let the door hit you on the back of the head on your way out. In the 1970s and the 1980s, much more documentary material from the Eisenhower years became available to scholars, and this changed Eisenhower's reputation significantly. The [inaudible] of the National Security Council, a group Eisenhower relied on heavily for managing his administration were especially revealing. They showed that Eisenhower was closely involved in the running of government, that he was fully engaged, indeed, in some of the more devious and politically suspect actions of his presidency, such as the ouster of the Iranian prime minister, the coup in Guatemala, the militarization of American aid to South Vietnam, and a massive increase in America's nuclear weapons arsenal. So, Eisenhower was rediscovered and revised only to be redrawn as a kind of a shrewd, even duplicitous man, often secretive and calculating while maintaining a public image of an affable, genial, bumbling, avuncular golfer. Some of the more recent biographies, and you may have seen that Eisenhower is sort of hot again, and there have been a number of books out about lately. I think some of the more recent biographies have started to let this revisionism go a little too far. Biographers like Evan Thomas and Jean Edward Smith, who happily accept the idea of an engaged and deeply informed and managerial Eisenhower, have actually quietly dropped much of the critical aspects that the early revisionism brought out. And so, the latest version of Eisenhower -- this is a cliff note, if you were thinking about reading Jean Edward Smith's 900-page book -- the latest version of Eisenhower is a sort of super Ike. He's a master leader who never makes a bad mistake. He has an uncanny ability to handle any crisis and never break a sweat. Evan Thomas suggests this in the subtitle of his most recent book which is called "Ike's Bluff." The subtitle is "President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World [laughter]." He was going to save the world but do it secretly, so as not to take credit for it. Well, this is the problem with presidential biography. There's an inflationary quality to it. Biographers try to outdo one another and crowding more laurels on the brow of their favorite president. And this is where the historian can I hope encourage a deeper analysis. Well, this brings me back to my three legacies, my three discursive legacies which I want to elaborate on. More than any piece of legislation or executive decision, I argue that Eisenhower's true significance was to create a new way for Americans to think about national security, government and society in the postwar era. Let me take you back to my three themes. Eisenhower's effort to keep the peace by institutionalizing a permanent state of war against external enemies; his rhetorical attack on the growth of federal bureaucracy while using the power of the presidency and the federal government; and three, his development of a vocabulary of spiritual revival and moral vigilance that could balance America's growing material wealth. In each of these three areas, I hope you will recognize -- I hope you will recognize -- some of the fault lines and tensions that still characterize our own times. My first claim is that Eisenhower helped to legitimate and institutionalize what we might call the modern warfare state. Now, this is paradoxical. Eisenhower wished very much to be thought of as a man of peace, and if you go to Abilene and I urge you to do so, Abilene, Kansas, and see his bronze statue there outside the presidential library, you'll see Eisenhower in his World War II uniform standing square, hips on his -- hands on his hips, fists on his hips, with the words, "Champion of Peace" in big letters right on the marble in front of him. That's what his own image of himself was. He spoke frequently and ardently about his desire for peace precisely because he knew so well the horrors of war. But, his strategy for creating peace was to massively increase the offensive strategic power of the United States. This marked a decisive change in American history. Before 1941 when the United States had a tiny army of a mere nine divisions, it was inconceivable that the United States would need a permanent standing army of over a million men. Even after World War II, it was Dwight Eisenhower who, as chief of staff of the army, had to demobilize the United States Army that had won the Second World War. It killed him to do it. His letters are full of moans and groans. "I can't believe we're destroying the greatest military we've ever -- anyone's ever created, et cetera." But he had to do it. Demobilization -- 16 million Americans wore uniforms in the Second World War; Eisenhower had to get it down to a handful in just a few months. But with the advent of the Korean War when America was caught unprepared to wage a major conflict in Asia, the United States realized it was going to have to maintain significant military power on a permanent basis to protect its interests globally and deter future attacks. Eisenhower, in the first months of his presidency, we know, did end the Korean War. That's part of his great legacy as a champion of peace, but he did not shrink the military posture of the United States -- quite the reverse. Eisenhower based his defense policy on deterrence, which required the accumulation of massive power by the United States, not just in conventional military capabilities, but in the huge expansion of nuclear weapons. The Ike Age was, of course, the nuclear age. Now, in order to justify such a rapid buildup of nuclear forces, Eisenhower had to make an argument, and to make an argument to the public about the mortal threat that faced Americans from international communism. And he did make that argument with great emphasis. His first inaugural address, ladies and gentlemen, his inaugural address -- his handshake with the nation, if you like -- was striking for its stridency. "Forces of good and evil," he began, "are amassed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history." It's 1953. Now, it's not 1941 or 1944 on the eve of D-Day, it was 1953 on the cusp of the greatest period of prosperity that America would ever know. "In the global struggle, communists," he said, "would resort to any means to secure their ends." He said, "They know no god but force, no devotion but its use. They tutor men in treason. They feed upon the hunger of others. Whatever defies them, they torture, especially the truth." His chilling conclusion was that in 1953, "freedom is pitted against slavery, lightness against the dark." Well, with such a foe, compromise was impossible. It's a remarkable inaugural address, very pessimistic. The official security policy of the administration issued in October 1953 made nuclear weapons its centerpiece. Eisenhower was a hands-on participant in its formulation and Lyon edited the document. The assumptions were simple -- the Soviet Union seeks "eventual domination of the non-communist world." To counter this threat, the United States must maintain conventional military forces and develop a nuclear arsenal capable "of inflicting massive retaliatory damage by offensive striking power." Eisenhower wanted to signal that America's intention was "to react with military force against any aggression by Soviet Bloc armed forces. In the event of hostilities, the United States -- get this -- will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions." That's the American official document, secret, of course, of Eisenhower's defense strategy. Nuclear weapons will be used like any other weapon in the arsenal. He confirmed this in a private conversation with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In December 1943, he said, "Oh, Winston. We've come to the conclusion that the atom bomb has to be treated as just another weapon in the arsenal." The consequences of this nuclear strategy were significant. Economically, it was expensive. Although, Eisenhower is often credited with slashing the defense budget, the reality is a little more complex. Compared to defense expenditures during the Korean War -- yes, Eisenhower trimmed defense spending. But, compared to the peace time budgets of 1945 to '50, Eisenhower virtually quadrupled annual defense expenditures. ^M00:30:41 In 1950, before Korea, the United States spent a whimsical $13.7 billion on defense. But from 1954 to 1960, the United States spent on average $45.8 billion a year on defense. So, Eisenhower significantly increased annual defense spending. Overall, if we take this age of Eisenhower period as our marker -- by the way, $45 billion a year on defense, now we're spending 682 billion, so, you know, this really is ancient history. Well, this huge nuclear program required Eisenhower to stress the constant dangers and threats that lurked in the world, thus, even in his second inaugural address, 1957, four years after Stalin's death, and in the midst of an unprecedented economic boom inside the US, Eisenhower stated, "Rarely has the earth known such peril as today." In 1957, "Rarely has the earth known such peril today." Eisenhower argued that Americans could not relax their vigilance. "Americans must accept that to attain peace, we must be aware of its full meaning and ready to pay its full price. We must pay the costs of our own needed military strength." Those were his words from the second inaugural. A central claim of the age of Eisenhower then was that Americans were under constant, unwavering and insidious threat from an ideological and geopolitical menace -- international communism. In response to this threat, Americans would have to tolerate the evolution of the national security state and agree to place the nation on what amounted to a near-permanent war footing. And Eisenhower at no point sought to hide what he was doing. In his famous farewell address in 1961, he openly admitted, "We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions." He said it -- those were his words. Only then did he somewhat paradoxically caution Americans to guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military industrial complex. He did not question the need for that complex that he had done so much to create. "America would find peace only by being permanently prepared for war, whatever the cost," and that surely is a legacy that has been fully and wholly integrated into the most basic principles of US national security ever since. Eisenhower was its principal author. My second claim for the importance of the age of Eisenhower concerns his paradoxical attitude toward the federal government, and here again, I think you'll see some contemporary echoes. We've seen that -- Ike sounded a clarion call about America's external enemies, but Eisenhower also believed that America faced a serious internal threat in the form of a growing federal government and bureaucracy. It's funny. You don't think of Eisenhower as an ideologue or really as particularly polemical or political. But, boy, if you read his speeches, you'd be amazed to find just how sharp he was on these issues. In Eisenhower's view, the great issue of the 1950s was the creeping growth of the modern state. As he put it in his Columbia inaugural address, October 1948, "Human freedom is today threatened by regimented statism. In today's struggle, no free man, no free institution can be neutral. Americans," he stressed, "must be vigilant in the fight against an all powerful paternalist state. The new deal," he felt -- "The new deal had encouraged Americans to become dependent upon government. The citizen was becoming a mere ward of the state, and the result was a creeping socialism that he likened repeatedly to a stealth dictatorship. Eisenhower's criticism of the legacy of the new deal were drawn not only from some of his close friends and his buddies, his golf partners and so on, who were, of course, among America's wealthiest men, but also from a current of intellectual thought that had been gaining force in the immediate postwar years. Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist working at that time in Britain, had published the best selling volume just at the end of the war called "The Road to Serfdom." Hayek argued that the welfare state would create a culture of dependence on government, and in his words, "smother the creative forces of a free civilization." Hayek was hardly alone in developing a theoretical critique of the expansive ambitions of a postwar state. A new generation of conservative and libertarian authors, including Ayn Rand, Russell Kirk, the young William F. Buckley, provided firepower to the counterattack against the new deal and the Roosevelt-Truman legacy. Eisenhower was deeply influenced by all this. You know, you'd think he didn't read a book, but trust me, he was enormously well read, deeply au courant and followed magazines' articles very carefully and we know that because he wrote so many letters to his correspondents saying, "I just read this extraordinary document. Thank you for sending me that article." He was very well-read man, and he was very influenced by this new social and economic critique. He confided to his diary at the start of 1949 that "In the name of social security," he put that in quotation marks, "we are place more and more responsibility upon the central government and this means an ever-growing bureaucracy is taking an ever-greater power over our daily lives." In a speech in December 1949, before he was president, of course, in Galveston, Texas, he picked up a theme. "If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison [laughter]. Oh, they'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their head. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government." Dwight Eisenhower, you know, Barry Goldwater, maybe, but Dwight Eisenhower? But there it is, 1949. His views about the threat of excessive government power extended to civil rights policies, perhaps the most pressing social issue of his time. When asked as a candidate in 1952, running for president, what should be done about the federal government on -- by the federal government on civil rights for African Americans, Eisenhower took a very restrictive view. There had been much debate at that time in the immediate postwar years about creating a fair employment practices commission, that would compel desegregation in certain industries that were working on federal contracts. It was a law that President Truman had repeatedly called for but Southern Democrats consistently blocked. Eisenhower took a position, he stuck to throughout his 1952 campaign and which reflected his own beliefs, and I'll tell you what he said. "I do not believe we can cure all the evils in men's hearts by law. I really believe we can do more by leadership and getting the states to do it than by making it a federal compulsory thing." It was a standard response to the civil rights question. Federal government really has no role in taking the lead on civil rights according to Eisenhower. So, Eisenhower's views were what we would call "old school conservative." Government should be minimalist, they should not look to solve the daily needs of -- and wants of the public, and certainly should not traduce the rights of states, and the traditions of local communities. Well, as president, Eisenhower found it very hard to govern along these principles. Just as I would argue, all of his conservative successors have also found that drowning government in the bathtub is not so easy, and maybe not even so desirable after all. Let me just give you a few examples of how Eisenhower actually governed, keeping in mind his conservative views. On civil rights, Eisenhower was actually deeply torn about what federal policy should be. His personal view was that segregation was wrong and that it should be stopped in areas where the federal government could exercise control as in the armed forces and right here in the federal capital, in Washington, DC as President Eisenhower moved to end segregation in the District of Columbia. But he believed the federal government should not use its power to demand change overnight in the South. This, he felt, would be hurtful, dangerous, counterproductive. In 1954, the Supreme Court under the guidance of Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom Eisenhower of course had appointed to the court, issued a unanimous rule in the Brown v. Board decision, that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Eisenhower was furious, furious at Warren, the man he had just recently appointed chief justice. He feared this decision would stir up much trouble in the South, and he was right. It triggered the massive resistance policies of segregationists across the South. In 1957, when Little Rock, Arkansas implemented the law and allowed nine African-American school children to attend the central high school in that city, the state's governor, Orval Faubus blocked the move, using the Arkansas National Guard to halt the enrollment of these students. He defied federal law, banning segregation in public schools, and in doing so, he directly challenged the federal government and the Supreme Court. ^M00:39:59 Now, Eisenhower, had a decision to make -- he could avoid confrontation; he could allow this defiance to continue and choose to side with advocates of state's rights; or he could use the power of the federal government to insist that the law be respected. Well, we know how it ended. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to protect the Little Rock Nine as they attended school and he federalized the national -- the Arkansas National Guard. He imposed federal control over the situation and asserted the right of the Supreme Court to be the law of the land. In a time of crisis, Eisenhower chose to limit -- to insist on the supremacy of federal law over the states. We all applaud this decision, I dare say, but it stands in tension with his argument. The federal power was always to be mistrusted or the behind government power [inaudible] dictatorship. Nor was Eisenhower afraid to invoke the powers of the presidency when it came to executive privilege. In the long drawn-out spectacle of McCarthyism, the [inaudible] as you probably know, came during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. McCarthy, you will recall, had alleged a series of improprieties and corruption within the department of the army. And he used his subpoena power to call army officers to testify before his committee. Eisenhower, who had tried desperately for the first year and a half of his presidency to avoid any public clash, in fact any public statement at all on McCarthy and McCarthyism saw this as a challenge to the power of the presidency, and he forbade any member of the executive department to testify before McCarthy's committee. He invoked executive privilege and he starved McCarthy's committee of the witnesses that it needed to continue, and before long, McCarthy's hearings collapsed. Eisenhower's move has been called the most absolute assertion of presidential right to withhold information from Congress ever uttered to that day. It's another example where many of us will applaud his -- Eisenhower's use of the privileges of presidential power, but we also have to note the basic tension between this strategy and the conservative boiler plate that he so frequently invoked when describing the evils of expansive government power. Let us recall, too, that Eisenhower who decried federal spending and expensive social welfare programs oversaw a significant expansion of the social security program, having said that everyone would just go to prison if he wants social security, he actually significantly increased it. In 1954, he signed a law that expanded old age and survivor benefits to an additional 10 million Americans. Interestingly, he made the case for doing this for expanding social security by putting it in the context of a tradition of self-reliance. Very interesting. A man who works and saves should be rewarded. Social security was, Eisenhower said, "a reflection of the American heritage of sturdy self-reliance, which has made our country strong and kept it free. The self-reliance, without which, we would have had no pilgrim fathers and no hardship defying pioneers. Well, this was a wonderful way to square the idea of personal industry and savings, with, of course, what has become the largest nonmilitary expense in the annual federal budget. Industry, savings, discipline -- his keywords. Eisenhower didn't stop with social security for his real pet project. Perhaps his greatest legislative legacy was the Interstate Highway System, the construction of 47,000 miles of highway at a cost estimated to be about $130 billion and counting. Not only did the highway system depend upon higher taxes in the form of fuel surcharges, but it also did a great deal to kill all passenger rail travel in the United States, contributed to environmental problems and encourage suburban sprawl. But, of course, it triggered an enormous boom economically, and highway projects remain a crucial sector of government spending through which the federal government can augment a job's programs, as we just saw in the recent TARP program. So, Eisenhower, a rhetorical champion of small government, in fact expanded executive power and committed huge federal resources to the largest ongoing public works and welfare projects in our nation's history. Eisenhower sought to develop a critique of big government while availing himself of the powers of the presidency and the federal bureaucracy to make social policy and advance the nation's prosperity. He would not be the last conservative president to do so. So far, I've argued that President Eisenhower developed a rhetorical leadership style that premised on the idea that America faced both an external enemy communist threat and an internal enemy in the form of this ever increasing smothering federal government bureaucracy. Okay. To meet these challenges, Eisenhower believed that Americans would have to remain vigilant in their struggle to defend freedom at home and abroad. But Eisenhower was worried. He was a great warrior. He was not nearly as optimistic and positive. He -- he was a [inaudible]. He was worried that Americans might not be fully up to the task of meeting these challenges. The reason for his concern was that Americans were becoming too wealthy, too prosperous and losing the hard edge that such constant struggle required. What could the president do about that? And this brings me to my third and last legacy of the age of Eisenhower, the articulation of what I would call a moral economy for Americans, that is, a vision of an America that could maintain its moral and spiritual zeal, even as it became ever more wealthy and prosperous. The effort to balance material wealth with spiritual values was not new to Eisenhower. This conundrum is as old as the 13 colonies. What was different about the age of Eisenhower was the scope and the scale of the affluence that Americans enjoyed at that time. By every conceivable measure, the age of Eisenhower was a time of unprecedented economic growth. National output, wages, home ownership, consumption of durable goods all rose at a remarkable pace, indeed at rates that are unimaginable today. In the age of Eisenhower, median family income rose 58%; consumer spending went up 60% in the same 15-year period. Now, it might be expected that the President would bask in the reflected glow of his countrymen's well-being, yet it appears that this amazingly -- amazing prosperity actually worried Eisenhower. He put it this way in the 1952 letter -- "The more intimately I become familiar with the desperate difficulties that abound in the world today, the more convinced I am that solutions must be firmly based in spiritual and moral values." What Eisenhower wanted, he said, was "to see men's moral and spiritual aspirations woven together with a kind of political and economic arrangements required to advance those aspirations. If Americans measured their power in material values only," he said, "then we are right down there with the communists," who, of course, thought only in materialist terms. So America's predicament in the '50s for Eisenhower required not just guns, and not just butter, but also God. Well, Eisenhower was uniquely prepared to deliver spiritual guidance to the nation. He was raised by parents who belonged to a sect of Mennonites called the "Brethren." And as a child, Eisenhower read the scriptures everyday with his parents and his brothers. His young life revolved around hard work and religious devotion. After he left home at the age of 20, he never went to church again until after he was elected president. His religion was learned and practiced among family, at home, and he never felt at ease in an established church. His father read a German -- a bible in German to the family. However, as president, he wished to emphasize the importance of religious faith in American life. On February 1, 1953, Eisenhower was baptized at the National Presbyterian Church here in Washington, DC, by the Reverend Edward Elson. He was the only president ever to be baptized in office. Eisenhower personally wrote a prayer that he delivered at the start of his inaugural address, and he began the habit of opening every cabinet meeting with a prayer. In 1953, Eisenhower presided over the first National Prayer Breakfast, a tradition that has continued annually every year since then. He encouraged church leaders to work together to extol the virtues of faith in the struggle against communism. Eisenhower also initiated a National Day of Prayer on September 22, 1954. And just two months later in an address to the very first national conference on the spiritual foundations of American democracy, which he had encouraged and had been planned by Reverend Elson, the president stated his belief that democracy could defeat communism only if it was filled with "fervor and spiritual convictions." He ended his speech to the gathered churchmen by saying that he hoped they would "take the Bible in one hand and the flag in the other end march ahead," something that Teddy Roosevelt could easily have said. As you may know, it was Eisenhower who also approved the altering of our pledge of allegiance by adding the words "under God," and he approved of the placing of the words "In God we trust" on our paper currency. In 1956, the phrase "In God we trust" was officially adopted as the national motto, replacing the traditional and unofficial motto, "E pluribus unum." ^M00:50:03 Eisenhower believed that religion was necessary not only to combat America's external enemies, but to ensure that government, that insidious lurking threat was also kept in check. A government that was not guided by spiritual concerns would be a poor steward of a nation's resources. One of his themes in the 1952 campaign had been that the growth of the federal budget deficits under Truman was a failure of moral leadership; to allow government to grow unrestrained indicated a failing of self-discipline. A moral government would be one that balanced its budget, trimmed expenses and checked its own appetite. He returned to this theme in his farewell address, that famous document eight years later. He declared that budget deficits and the "plundering of our national wealth," "for our own ease and convenience" would in turn weaken democracy and harm the "political and spiritual heritage of our grandchildren. Democracy based upon deficit spending," he said, "would be merely an insolvent phantom." What was all this about? Eisenhower's efforts to define the contours of a moral economy tell us much about his vision of American government and society. We can hear in these pronouncements, a man whose ideal form of government was voluntary, communal, a communal association of citizens, not a coerced people under the rule of a powerful state. Community without government was Ike's ideal, perhaps harkening back to his own youth in Abilene where farmers, cattlemen and dairymen like his father, could work equitably together, each adhering to his own faith, creating a rural ideal far from the reach of the federal government. Ike's moral economy was premised on a view of Americans as a spiritual people, not relying on their government, but empowered by their government to demonstrate their own God-given talents, to produce wealth and prosperity as a form of spiritual labor. Abundance, in this view, was not an end in itself, but the reward for a life of industry and godliness. In this sense, Eisenhower saw no tension between spiritualism and wealth. He sought, instead, to interweave the two and to forge in the process of people whose worldly wealth was undergirded by spiritual reserves. Well, let me just wrap up. I've suggested here today that Dwight Eisenhower is perhaps the preeminent example of a president who is caught between his own conservative instincts, and the powerful forces of modernization, economic growth, and technological change that were turning America into the world's largest, richest and strongest nation. The last president born in the 19th Century, Eisenhower had one foot planted squarely in the agrarian past of his Kansas boyhood, with its simple rhythms and pieties. Yet his other foot stood in the age of total war, the jet age, the nuclear age, and on the threshold of globalization. Eisenhower's attempt to square these competing forces is in many ways the story of postwar America. Surely, we can recognize ourselves in the age of Eisenhower. We consider ourselves a peaceful people, and yet we maintain a military establish that is by far in a way the largest in the world. We are a people who love to hate our government, but hate to part with any of the things that it gives us and does for us. We are a pious and deeply religious nation, yet we are also astonishingly materialistic and we see prosperity as a sign of virtue. To observe Dwight Eisenhower grappling with these paradoxes is to better understand the origins of our own time. We have seen the age of Eisenhower, ladies and gentlemen, and it is us [laughter]. Thank you very much for your attention. ^M00:54:12 [ Applause ] ^M00:54:22 I'd love to have questions and comments and recollections or thoughts. Yes, sir? >> [Inaudible]. >> Will Hitchcock: Yeah. >> Every time I read about it, you always say [inaudible]. ^M00:54:36 [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] ^M00:54:50 >> Will Hitchcock: Well... >> [Inaudible]. >> Will Hitchcock: Hard to say. It was at the midst of a long running crisis over Berlin from 1958 up to the building of the Berlin Wall, so it was at a very hot moment in the Cold War, and Eisenhower was determined to try to strike some kind of balance, some kind of -- not necessarily a deal, but actually, he was trying to ratchet down the tensions with Khrushchev over Berlin. The Berlin Crisis had started in 1958, Eisenhower said, "Look, why don't we talk this through? Let's relax. Let's step back. We'll have a summit. It'll be fine." Meanwhile, over -- flights over the Soviet Union are occurring and Eisenhower is gaining from this intelligence and Khrushchev felt that he'd been -- and in fact was, of course, lied to publicly because Eisenhower denied knowing anything about these flights, and then they produced the evidence that they had from the shoot-down. So, it was an embarrassment, a setting back of US-Soviet relations, a tense moment. Do we know that that would have been the breakthrough moment that might have somehow averted the building of the Berlin Wall? Impossible to know. Impossible to know. I seriously doubt it because after all, what was driving the Berlin Crisis was the hundreds of thousands of East Germans that were fleeing through Berlin to come to the West. So, that was not going to be resolved by a -- necessarily by a US-Soviet deal. And the building of the Berlin Wall, as we know, we Cold War scholars know, was really championed by the East German leadership who said, "We're going to plug this wall and we're going to do it ourselves." And so, in a way, there's a much more important drama going on than just the summit at the top. So, I think that it is a missed opportunity, but we'll never know if there was something really major that might have been brokered at that time. It's a good question. Yeah, thanks. Yes? >> Based on the scholarships, do you have the recommendations for the elements of a compromise that would enable the Eisenhower Memorial on the National Mall to go forward [laughter]. >> Will Hitchcock: Well, first of all, there was a -- there was an [inaudible] it wasn't really an [inaudible] sort of an opinion piece, just a couple of weeks ago saying, "Let's not have one at all." Maybe some of you saw that was in the post. So, who cares? Let's not do it. He's gotten the memorial out in Abilene. He's got Gettysburg. I think it's terrific to have an Eisenhower memorial, and I think that one of the things that the designers are struggling with is one of the things that I, as a historian is struggling with. Eisenhower is one of the very few people in the world -- I can maybe -- I can only think possibly of two other people for whom it could be said, that being President of the United States wasn't necessarily the biggest thing to have happened to him in his life. His leadership of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in the Second World War is so great, such an achievement. And so the one -- the element, the thing for which he was the most prepared, the endpoint of all of his training, his great moment in life came, he fulfilled his mission wonderfully, and then, he sort of said, "I guess they want me to be president, and I guess I can do that." So, they're struggling with that fundamental tension. Is he America's great war hero or is he a president whom -- as I think I've revealed today, we still don't fully understand. I think the memorial reveals these tensions and I think it's very clever, though problematic to have the young boy Eisenhower -- as I think was proposed in the original model, sort of sitting in the corner of the space looking up at then what our whole series of panels and diagrams and dioramas and sort of -- and statues about his future life. You know,"Young Dwight, this is you in 40 years [laughter]." And, that's just a little too clever by half. I mean, I think maybe we'd wind down that -- the idea of making him into a Kansas boy, of thinking about his future is clever, but the fact is that he left Abilene at 20, he never went back. He went back occasionally to dedicate his library. He didn't want to go back to live there. He went to Gettysburg. He's like, you know, "Been there, done that. Not going to go back to Kansas." He said Kansas was terribly important to him as a young man, and I believe that, but -- so, I do -- I'm killing time here because I don't have a good answer for the compromise question [laughter], but as you see, it's -- I don't envy them for getting that. Yes, sir? >> As I recall... >> Will Hitchcock: Oh, there's a microphone that's coming. >> As I recall, part of Eisenhower's image is a passive leader while he was president derived from the opposite impression of his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who came across as a very active and aggressive proponent of a strong foreign policy in a sense of opposition to the Soviet Union and so forth. Could you comment a little bit on Foster's -- excuse me, Dulles' impression and influence over Eisenhower's view of foreign and defense policy? ^M00:59:53 >> Will Hitchcock: Sure. I think you're absolutely right. The impression was that Dulles had all the brains and he was aggressive and he was very hawkish, and then Eisenhower was following in his wake a little bit -- totally wrong. Totally -- I mean, that is to say, that was the impression, but it was a false impression. And we know this because we have so many detailed minutes from the National Security Council. Eisenhower dramatically enhanced to the functions and the scale of the National Security Council. He met the National Security Council, he chaired the meetings of the National Security Council; and if he wasn't there, Nixon chaired the meetings. Hundreds of these meetings, pretty much once a week, Dulles was there, but so were many of the other leading cabinet officials. Eisenhower was in total command of that circle, of that -- of his advisors on foreign and security affairs. He once said that, you know, "The only person that knows more about the world and about national security than John Foster Dulles, is me [laughter]." And, again, you know, he -- one has to just sort of reflect on how much he did know of the world. He knew, of course, having been in Europe throughout the Second World War and having had close ties with military and political figures throughout the war years, but even before that as a junior officer he spent a lot of time overseas, was very worldly, very cosmopolitan. He really did know -- had a -- he had a vision of the world. Dulles was initially much more hawkish than Eisenhower was comfortable being. He called for the liberation of Eastern Europe, the rollback of Eastern Europe. And some of that got into Eisenhower's early documents, and you look at, for example, the inaugural address. Actually, the first State of the Union address which came soon after his first inaugural address is very much a document inspired by Dulles, and it is still a sort of a campaign document saying, "We're not going to appease the Russians. We're not going to do deals with them. We want to liberate Eastern Europe." In fact, Eisenhower didn't fundamentally believe that. He understood that a balance -- a Cold War was better than a hot war. So, they made a very good pair. Eisenhower was kind of bored by Dulles; Dulles was very professorial, incredibly verbose, a know-it-all. Eisenhower had enough self-confidence to say, "I need this guy on my team. He's brilliant, but I'm not going to let him push me around. I mean, I'm going to tell him what to do." And his relatively moderate Cold War policy is a reflection of his ability to dominate Dulles. Yes, sir? >> In an effort to learn more about the modern presidencies, I've been watching West Wing reruns on Netflix [laughter]. So, my question is that -- what was the Eisenhower White House like compared to, say, the presidency today? I was thinking of messaging such as the Interstate Highway was advertised as part of defense. >> Will Hitchcock: Yeah. Yeah. >> And so, some comments on... >> Will Hitchcock: Well, I mean, Eisenhower was the first president to do a televised press conference -- to make his press conferences televised. He was not a particularly good extemporaneous speaker. Some historians, and even Eisenhower himself told a story that he did that deliberately. He would say, "Oh, we got a tough problem. I'm going to go out and confuse the press." And then he would go on and on and he would [laughter] mumble his way through these press conferences and everybody would be scratching their heads saying, "What did he say?" And he would say, "See you later. See you next week [laughter]!" I don't know that I buy that completely. That plays to the idea that he's cleverer than everybody else in the room. I think he was not fully comfortable with the medium of television. But, you know, one of the things that I have found interesting, speaking of the West Wing and the charismatic sort of president who just everyone is so [Background Music] impressed with his talents and his skill and his handsomeness and his charisma. Eisenhower, I've read lots of reports, contemporary reports and analysis of him, was thought to be enormously a charismatic man. We think of him as rather elderly, kind of grainy, black and white pictures of him, perhaps. He was a -- I mean, to use a sort of a vulgar term, he was a stud, at least he was perceived to be in the press and in the media; and all of his associates thought, "I've never seen a man as powerful as that guy. I'll follow him to the end of the earth." "Wow! Does that man fill up a room! He's got just, you know -- [inaudible] you wouldn't believe!" And these were not just, you know, junior folks with this impression. He wowed the titans of finance, the titans of industry. The press adored Eisenhower. He was -- largely Northeast Republican newspapers followed him very, very closely and very favorable to him in 1952, but the medium locals loved him. So, he had that quality that you see a little bit in -- is it Bartlet, right, from the West Wing, which is surprising. We -- might not have thought so. Yeah? There's some -- oh. Yeah? Yes. You were... >> Thank you. Most interesting -- and I think it's on, right? >> Will Hitchcock: Yeah, I think so. >> Something really troubles me having lived through that time and that is the use of the word "wealth," that being a time of wealth. It's so contradicts everything that people I know and my own family lived through, I would say it was not a time of materialism; it was a time of growing middle class, growing economic wealth, but if we were to contrast our homes today to what those of us who live through that time experienced, it was not a time of wealth. Now, maybe he had wealthy [inaudible] barons around him, but it was quite a stark, almost Spartan time for -- and I did not come from poor, but I came from a family that had military, feet on the ground -- or on a ship in World War II... >> Will Hitchcock: Yeah. >> ...and this was a chance for us to get education, this was a chance for us to have maybe two dresses. It was not a time of wealth, so maybe the naming of it as growing economic wealth, I can see from an economist viewpoint, the percentages of growth, et cetera, more people perhaps being [inaudible] and into someone of a better life. But, it did trouble me that... >> Will Hitchcock: Yeah. Well, that's very helpful, thank you. Everyone will have their own particular angle or vision on this, and of course, I'm trying to fly over this at a very high altitude and so I'll lose some of the local particularities. I think though that one must compare America, say, in 1960, and its overall status and income and growth rates and suburbanization and rates of material acquisition, the purchasing of durable goods, and automobiles, and stoves, compare that with 1930 or 1939 rather than today. Of course, by today's standards we might think, "Well, that's -- it was rather hard scrabble. But just -- yes, just two decades before in a very -- in less than a generation, in general, Americans felt themselves to have turned a dramatic -- turned a corner in a dramatic way, away from the legacies of the depression and towards this period of abundance. Of course, there were particular communities and individuals and families who were some -- who were -- are different places on that scale, so I appreciate your... >> But [inaudible] say, China, is a [inaudible]. >> Will Hitchcock: Yeah. Yeah, I suppose you could say that, of course, there's -- it's only on the average. Yeah, perhaps. That's very helpful, thank you. The gentleman -- oh yes. Is this the last one, Carol? Okay. Yes? >> I've read that Eisenhower was very troubled by Brown versus Board of Education and rather furious at Earl Warren for the decision, is that true? >> Will Hitchcock: Yes, and I'll elaborate. Maybe we can sneak one more in and then I'll see if we can... >> Eisenhower surely realized that the only real capital he had was his military career. And it's actually an interesting fact, isn't it, that he's the last person who has actually translated a military career into the US presidency. I suppose the one before him, who immediately comes to mind is Grant. Now, if you actually -- if that is your only real capital, you're coming out of a -- essentially a hierarchical government-paid structure. That is your career. Right? So, if you think about that? If you think about the aspect of someone who spent his whole life commanding and being obeyed and being paid by the government to command and be obeyed, don't you think that -- actually, it helps us resolve a number of these paradoxes in the same sense that the only other democratic leader who came out of the Second World War who had a very similar sort of background, which is de Gaulle... >> Will Hitchcock: Yeah. Yeah. >> ...actually stylistically has a number of those very similar aspects, which is there's a kind of a sense in which -- well, I mean, MacArthur had even -- president would have been quite another story, of course. But, don't you think that in some sense, besides the Kansas origins which you've stressed, I think there's a real sense in which it's really the fact that this is a military man that is crucial. >> Will Hitchcock: I do. I think it's essential -- an essential feature of his biography, perhaps the essential feature and I've come to believe that a military career is not necessarily -- perhaps not at all a particularly good preparation for the presidency doesn't exclude you or disqualify, of course not. But just as you say, it is a very particular kind of environment in which certain kinds of choices and behaviors are rewarded. Those are not always the ones that are rewarded in a give and take of American politics. ^M01:10:00 I really appreciate your mentioning de Gaulle because, of course, he and Eisenhower were men of -- very much the same era. They were born in the same year. They both fought in the Second World War and were -- as leaders, and they both tried to enter -- to lead -- they both tried to have an electoral political career after the war. De Gaulle tried and failed to create a rightwing political party. Initially, that he came back as president, but it was very difficult for him to do the hard work of actually creating a political party. Eisenhower, too, tried to create a political party, but he called the modern Republicans the second half of his presidency. So, we got to get rid of the old guard. We have to find some balance. We have to create a modern, which he really meant "moderate" Republican Party. He failed because he didn't fundamentally know how to do it. He just assumed people -- he would say, "I'm going up that hill, follow me," and it didn't work that way. And so, both of them have that in common as well, so that's a very helpful way of thinking about some of their strengths and their charisma and the reason they were so popular politically, electorally, but their weaknesses as actual practitioners of politics. And on Brown versus Board, absolutely, Eisenhower was very anxious, very, very anxious about it, and he really never forgave Earl Warren, which is -- I'm afraid, not a very positive note to end on, but there you are. Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much [applause]. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:11:36