MORE ON EISENHOWER

At the risk of being "presentist," it seems to me plausible that the best historical parallel for the current election is probably the controversy over the Korean war in 1952. President Truman had outlined an expansive national security strategy in NSC 68 (and later in NSC 141, just before he left office), one that defined American national commitments to fight Soviet communism in terms that were destined to be very expensive in the long term, much like President Bush. Truman's domestic policies had also left large deficits and had created worries about the fiscal stability of the country in the long term, much as President Bush has.

As Stephen Ambrose puts it, Eisenhower's political task was to be as ambiguous as possible on the issue of the war while persuading the public that he would do something about it. He had to appeal to that part of his hard-core Republican base who believed that Truman's policy of containment was not aggressive enough. He also had to appeal to that part of the public that wanted to pull out of Korea. Recall that many of the soldiers in Korea were national guardsmen who were quietly leading private lives before the outbreak of the war; criticisms abounded that the troops were not well armed or trained, and many critics of the administration worried that the war was unwinnable and should simply be abandoned. In 1951 and 1952, "the majority of Americans . . .considered entering the war a mistake, wanted to pull American troops out of Korea as rapidly as posisble, and supported numerous proposals to achieve a negotiated peace" (from Ralph Levering's The Public and American Foreign Policy 1918 - 1978, 102, quoted in Richard Melason, "The Foundations of Eisenhower's Foreign Policy: Continuity, Community and Consensus," in R. Melanson and D. Mayers, Reevaluating Eisenhower (1987), p.41).

Two weeks from election day, Eisenhower made a campaign promise that he would "go to Korea," a promise that Stephen Ambrose argues "practically guaranteed the result" in the election. Ambrose writes:

The response was enthusiastic. The nation's number-one hero, her greatest soldier and most experienced statesman, was promising to give his personal attention to the nation's number-one problem. It was reassuring, it was exciting, it was exactly what people wanted to hear. He had not, it is important to note, made any promises about what he would do in Korea.

(For the quote, and for references for the analysis in the first two paragraphs, see Ambrose, Eisenhower, 569-570, as well as the Melanson piece cited above.)

The war was a "divisive, increasingly partisan domestic political issue" (Melanson 41). Charges of treason and "appeasement" flew from the halls of the Senate and from the press. Senator Joseph McCarthy argued that the foreign policy of the Truman administration was part of a nefarious plot "to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us military, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East, and to impair our will to resist evil" (America's Retreat from Victory (1951), 171). And recall that McCarthy had some electoral success during this period as well; I'm not sure if his book was as much of a best-seller as those of his contemporary heirs, but I suppose that that's beside the point.

Of course, John Kerry is no Dwight Eisenhower. But neither is George Bush. And public support for the war in Iraq is still stronger than support for the war in Korea was in 1952. At the very least, though, two lessons can be drawn from the 1952 campaign:

1) Arguing about war during presidential campaigns is what Americans do. Just as denunciations of war critics are part of the political landscape, so are the war critics themselves. It may be one of the disabilities of democracies during war time that they do not speak with a united voice, but any policy that presupposes a united voice is in reality an attempt to short-circuit the electoral process, or -- more likely -- to tilt it in favor of the incumbent. Any successful foreign policy in a democracy must reckon with domestic critics. According to Melanson and other standard accounts, after taking office Eisenhower's policy consisted in the "New Look" (a reduction in troop strength coupled with a reliance on American air power and atomic arsenal) combined with increased funding for CIA operations abroad. The virtue of the second was, of course, that it took place outside of the public eye and was relatively cheap and effective, at least in the short term. The conditions of publicity that obtain after Watergate and the Iran-contra scandals may preclude reliance on the second option for the next president, but it is possible that large-scale deployment of troops may be both counterproductive and unsustainable in the long run. This is clearly one of the major dilemmas for contemporary foreign-policy making.

2) A president or presidential candidate who can credibly claim that he will devote full attention to the war effort may, in fact, provide the public with something that they desire. President Bush has not done this. Both in the extent of his long periods away from the White House and in his unwillingness to engage the public directly, Bush has shown himself to be relatively aloof from the pressing issues of the war. A surprise trip to Iraq to serve Thanksgiving dinner is not going to cut it. Now it could be that the administration looks at the contemporary media landscape through the lens of the particular public relations difficulties of their incumbent and has decided that more exposure will only hurt Bush. If Kerry is smart, though, he will attempt to persuade the public that he will be more personally engaged in the pressing issue of the war, or at least that he will be an improvement over Bush.

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On Truman's national security strategy and Eisenhower's reactions to it, see Melanson, 51, and C. Pach and E. Richardson, The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1991), 88-9.

NOTE: lightly edited for grammar, 4/10.

For the charge that the President is spending too much time away from the White House, see Josh Marshall here. For a response, see Pejman Yousefzadeh, here.

The fact that modern technology allows you to do your teaching and advising and most of your research from the beach at Waikiki, for example, is not a sufficient counter to critics who would accuse you of neglecting your duties if you were to do so for long periods of time. It's ironic, though, that the same communications revolution that allows for the President to govern from Crawford, in a minimal sense at least, also creates new kinds of constraints on the exercise of power itself. We have a twenty-four hour news cycle and the attendant availability of information, however abstract and unreliable. You might bemoan that fact and try to question the virtue and motives of the creators and transmitters of those news sources (see here, for example). But it strikes me that such complaints are about as effective as complaining that a particular hill creates tactical difficulties in a particular campaign. Yes, Afghanistan is mountainous with lots of caves. Yes, we have a hyperstimulated media culture. Welcome to the policy challenges of the contemporary world.