Every era creates the history that it needs. This is not to say that historians should
distort the past to suit the present.
The noble though elusive goal of objectivity is still worth striving
for. Evidence must be gathered and
sifted with logical precision.
Conclusions must not go beyond what the evidence can logically
support. Still, the whole process begins
by asking questions that matter in the historian’s present. And it rests on assumptions that often go
unquestioned in the historian’s present.
The result is history that makes sense for, and matters to, the
present.
Consider the case of President Dwight David
Eisenhower. During the 1950s, most
Americans wanted to see their own era as a time of consensus, confidence, and
conserving postwar gains. To make this
view believable, they were willing to see their president as a genial bumbler
presiding over "happy days." That
image remained, through the 1970s, the dominant view among professional historians.
By the early 1980s, revisionist historians offered a
new image: a prudent
"hidden-hand" crisis manager who avoided global war. As John Robert Greene says, they “began to
examine—and ultimately praise—Eisenhower for the decisions that he made that
avoided disaster.”[1] This
stood in marked contrast to his successors who took us into
In the late 1980s, a new school of postrevisionist
historians began to ask why, if Eisenhower had such careful control of policy
and crises, he failed to ease cold war tensions and build a more peaceful
world. Their answers centered on what
they considered Eisenhower's irrational anticommunism. They viewed him as (in the words of Piers
Brendon) “a man divided against himself … thwarted by his own internal
contradictions,"[2] especially
the contradiction between his desire for peace and his desire for cold war
victories. In the post-cold war era, it
seemed plausible to see his fervent anticommunism as a tragic mistake or
aberration. Some historians seemed to
treat Eisenhower as a metaphor for the entire nation—a nation essentially
committed to a positive and admirable goal of peace, but somehow sadly derailed
for four decades by the fatal flaw of anticommunism. With the end of the cold war, this
interpretation suggested, we could get back on track and pursue real security
more fruitfully.[3]
But the cold war ended many years ago, and there is
still little sign of any fundamental reorientation. The geopolitical situation has changed
dramatically. It is the language of
I call this structure “apocalypse management.” Its basic premises are simple and
familiar: The United States faces
enemies who wish to, and very well may, destroy the nation and its way of life.
Thus every confrontation with these foes is an apocalyptic struggle. But the traditional apocalyptic solution of
eliminating evil is ruled out. The enemy
threat is now a permanent fact of life. The
best to hope for is to contain and manage it forever. As long as every apocalyptic danger is
skillfully managed, preserving the precariously balanced status quo, the nation
will be secure. Enduring stability—preventing dangerous change—is the only kind
of victory to hope for, and the only kind of permanent peace.
This book tells the story of how Eisenhower and his
administration created this new linguistic paradigm, how it profoundly
influenced their policymaking process, and how it came to dominate American public
discourse in the 1950s. Treating
language, policies, and practices as components of a single historical process,
this book yields a picture of a president and an administration far more
consistent and unified than the postrevisionists saw. This is a picture that makes sense for the
early 21st century, because it helps to explain the continuing
consistency in the
This book is not a comprehensive history of
Eisenhower's national security policies, much less of his presidency as a
whole. (Significant domestic developments,
which are an important part of the full story of apocalypse management, are scarcely
mentioned.) Parts I, II, and III offer a
detailed history of Eisenhower and apocalypse management from 1953 to 1955,
when the pattern emerged, was tested in the crucible of foreign policy
formation, and triumphed as the dominant mode of discourse in American
political life. Part IV examines some
salient examples of how the paradigm was applied in foreign affairs between
1956 and 1960.
The paradigm, not the president, is the principal
subject of the book. But the paradigm
and the president are indissolubly linked.
I study Eisenhower, his administration, and their cold war struggle, because
they offer the clearest window into the origins, structure, functioning, and
implications of the pattern of language that still dominates American public
life. I give particular attention to
nuclear weapons policies, because the bomb was the most potent symbol of the
apocalyptic shadow that spread across American political discourse in the
1950s.
To understand the enduring patterns in
Michael Hunt defines ideology in foreign policy as
“sets of beliefs and values, sometimes only poorly and partially articulated,
that make international relations intelligible and decision making
possible.” Michael J. Hogan traces the
origins of
The notion of “national interests,” so often posited
as an objective constraint and motivation for national security policy, is always
refracted through an ideological lens. As
Frank Ninkovich points out, interests “have no objective existence apart from
the way people constitute and interpret them.”
Thus, ideological frameworks “are a condition of our knowing.”[5] Ideological commitments limit the range of
responses that policymakers’ are willing to entertain. And when they consider options from within
that range, their ideological commitments strongly influence the choices they
make. The cold war, for example, was
created by human choices and human imaginings more than by objectively given
constraints. Cold war leaders limited
themselves to an unnecessarily narrow range of options because of their
ideological commitments.
However, to study ideology as a set of inner mental
events is to chase a chimera. Peter Lyon
and John Newhouse are surely correct:
“Precisely what the private Eisenhower privately thought may never be
known”; “ No one knows precisely what he had in mind.”[6] The only things we can know with even minimal
certainty are what someone said and what someone did. Most often, the saying comes before the
doing. Language is the essential matrix
of action and policy. Every decision to
pursue power, wealth, pleasure, or any other goal is shaped from the very
beginning within the nexus of language. As
Daniel Rodgers says, "the making of words is indeed an act, not a business
distinct from the hard, behavioral part of politics.…The old dichotomy between
behavior and ideas, intellectual history and the history of politics, never in
truth made much sense. Political talk is
political action of a particular, often powerful, sort."[7]
To understand history one must study not just events,
but discourse. Frank Costigliola, citing
the work of Michel Foucault, has defined discourse as “the unquestioned
beliefs, practices, and rules that restrict (but of course do not wholly
determine) how people think and act.” A
discourse, then, is a pattern of language that reflects an ideological
commitment. As Costigliola notes, the
“most significant meanings” of historical events are not discovered, as if they
exist objectively; they are assigned in a complex process of interpretation: “People who are more privileged in terms of
class, race, gender, and other markers have more to say in assigning meanings
to objects and events.…What people in society ‘know’ is heavily influenced by
relations of power.”[8] Discourse may best be defined as a pattern of
language, assuming and expressing a set of basic assumptions, deployed in the
context of power.
It is appropriate to study Eisenhower from the
perspective of discourse, and not only because of his immense influence and
power. Contrary to popular impression,
he was very careful with words. He
painstakingly edited speeches, memos, and letters. When he wanted to, he could speak at length,
in rather precise and lucid words. He
recognized that (in his own words), “If our attitudes are muddled, our language
is often to blame.” Eisenhower's words
were never merely means to pragmatic ends. He considered the production of
words essential to the real business of governing. As John Lewis Gaddis says, the Eisenhower
administration often acted as if it could materially disadvantage its opponents
by "merely making pronouncements and striking poses." "Words were extremely important in this
cold war situation,” the president told his National Security Council.” He was probably more right than not when he
wrote to his friend General Alfred Gruenther that "there have never been
any great differences within the Administration on fundamentals. Most of the talk centered around the question
of 'what can we say and how can we say it.'"[9]
Of course, Eisenhower and his advisors were hardly
free to deploy whatever words they liked. They were constrained, to some
degree, by the interests of others and by events beyond their control. Their language must always be studied in its
interplay with actual policy and all the other factors that shaped policy. They were also limited and constrained by the
discourse that preceded them.
By 1952, most Americans embraced the fundamental
principle of the Truman administration's discourse—that the
But how, and toward what goal? The Truman administration articulated its
answer in a secret policy directive, NSC-68.
Yet the document was frustratingly vague. The world had to move toward “some kind of
order, on somebody’s terms,” it said. To
insure that those terms would be American, the
The elites of the Truman era were not bent on
triggering the kind of radical change that is always implied by apocalyptic
language. On the contrary, as Paul
Chilton has argued, the cold war discourse of containment was rooted in the
tradition of political “realism,” which is linked to “the absence of motion, to
stasis, and more precisely to the physical restraint of undesired motion. Since spatial concepts map metaphorically
onto time, we are also talking about absence of and prevention of undesired
‘movement’ in time, that is undesired change:
'security' is a guarantee of a particular state of affairs over time.”[11] Yet Truman’s policy of containment remained
poorly defined. It could be read to mean
gradual coercion to compel fundamental internal change in the
The Truman administration’s blending of the
apocalyptic and "realist" traditions, publicly cloaked in Wilsonian
internationalism, gave cold war discourse its unique character. Threat construction was at the center of the
entire discursive enterprise. “Realist”
and apocalyptic patterns of language both require the perception of some dire
threat.[12] Because the conflict between order and
disorder was presented as absolute, every change in the status quo came to
represent an apocalyptic change—a total chaos—and change itself appeared to be
inherently threatening.
As a candidate in 1952, Eisenhower played on that
sense of threat. He scored the Democrats for an unacceptably weak policy of
mere containment, in
Eight years later, the nation had achieved a certain
kind of clarity. Many people contributed
to this change, but no one as much as the president. Eisenhower had a preeminent power over the
meanings of crucial words and events at the time when the cold war settled into
a seemingly permanent way of life. His
great contribution was to take fragments he inherited from Woodrow Wilson,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman, and so many others and bind them together into a
new discursive pattern, setting a new goal for
Eisenhower called this goal by many interchangeable
names: victory, stability, security,
freedom, peace. I call it “apocalypse
management.” Before the end of his first
term,
In Eisenhower's new discursive model, the cold war was
still an apocalyptic struggle; communism, nuclear war, and economic
mismanagement all threatened to destroy the nation utterly. But these threats had to be accepted as
permanent facts of life. The best to
hope for was to contain and manage them. As long as they were skillfully managed
forever, the
I ask: What did
he mean when he spoke of peace, war, and victory? Toward the end of the Eisenhower era, I.F.
Stone noted that, thanks to the president , “quite suddenly peace has become a
respectable word again.” At the same
time, though, C. Wright Mills warned:
“Peace is such an altogether ‘good’ word that it is well to be suspicious
of it. It has meant and it does mean a
great variety of things to a great variety of men. Otherwise they could not all ‘agree’ upon it
so readily and so universally.…Everybody agrees upon peace as the universal
aim—and into it each packs his own specific political fears, values, hopes,
demands."[15]
Historians have largely forgotten Mills’ cautionary
words; they have rarely problematized peace.
Peace—along with war, victory, stability, security, and the other key
terms in the vocabulary of national security discourse—are not objects to be
described, like trees or telephones.
They are interpretive categories.
Each word carries many meanings; each meaning carries with it a
particular worldview and a particular set of cultural and political
concerns. In this book I treat peace,
war, victory, stability, and security as symbolic concepts with variable
meanings. I ask how Eisenhower’s
presidency transformed the meanings of those words in ways that still profoundly
influence American life.
In a previous book I traced how Eisenhower developed
his ideological vision before he became president.[16] He wanted to base his work, and his life, on
a fixed set of clear and simple ideas.
Once he crystallized his set of fixed ideas in the mid-1940s, he
remained committed to it for the rest of his life. He was, to a greater extent than most
historians have realized, an ideologue. In
this book I find a relative coherency in Eisenhower's words and policies as
president by setting them in the context of the ideological framework he
brought into the White House. His
ideology was, as Tom Wicker has written, “as ruthless in purpose as any foreign
creed.”[17] Indeed, for Eisenhower it was a creed—or more
precisely, as he often said, it was his faith.
Eisenhower was raised in a devoutly Christian home,
although he seems to have abandoned specifically Christian practice for most of
his adult life until he became president.[18] His forebears took for granted an essentially
Augustinian vision of life as a struggle between selfishness and
self-restraint. They called the innate
impulse to self-aggrandizement “original sin.”
Eisenhower eschewed the term but retained the basic premise: selfishness could never be rooted out of any human
being. He also embraced the contrary
view that every human being could subdue the darker impulses through strenuous
effort. But he assumed that everyone
needed the help of societal institutions to restrain individual
selfishness: "The basic purpose of
all organization is to produce orderliness,” he told a friend, “which means
restriction upon irresponsible [i.e., selfish] human action."[19]
There was only one great question in Eisenhower's
worldview: Would the selfish impulses be
restrained voluntarily by the individual?
If not, they would have to be restrained by some external force. He allowed no third possibility. He assumed that every religion was devoted
primarily to encouraging people to choose self-restraint and supporting them in
their voluntary effort. Democracy had
the same goal. The essence of freedom
was the freedom to restrain voluntarily one's own selfishness. The greatness of democracy was that it
allowed every individual to choose self-restraint voluntarily. Wherever selfishness reigned, it would lead
to chaos and conflict, which would inevitably elicit totalitarianism.
Since selfishness had to be restrained, either
voluntarily or by force, every society had to be either democratic or
totalitarian. This dualism grew directly
from the other great influence on his ancestors’ religiosity: the apocalyptic tradition. Eisenhower saw history as an uncompromising
war between the selfish and the self-controlled, one that would have to be
fought to the bitter end. But this led
to a theological contradiction.
Apocalypticism prophesied that historical tensions themselves would
ultimately produce a climactic battle that would put an end to history. Augustinian theology, on the other hand,
insisted that selfishness was not produced by historical circumstances and thus
could not be ended by historical processes.
Although it was very possible that the evil might annihilate the good,
there was no way for good to annihilate evil within history.
(An excursus on terminology: My fellow historians of religion will
recognize that, in the strictest sense, the words apocalypse and apocalyptic
refer to a genre of literature, first developed in
There is no evidence that Eisenhower ever thought
about the world in explicitly theological terms. Nevertheless, his discourse betrayed both a
strong apocalyptic and a strong, countervailing Augustinian streak. He once boasted of the nickname fellow
officers had given him before World War II:
“Alarmist Ike.”[21] He never stopped being “Alarmist Ike,”
articulating and fearing worst-case scenarios triggered by humanity’s innate
selfishness. To counter these effects of
original sin, he charged leaders (including himself) to serve as models of
self-restraint, teamwork, and devotion to duty.
He told himself and his subordinates that leaders must never show even a
hint of despair. Rather, they must speak public words that would inspire the
confidence needed for self-sacrifice.
Willed optimism was the emotional correlate of self-restraint.
By 1945, although the general spoke publicly of
cooperating with the Soviets, he was privately convinced that communism was the
new embodiment of the forces of selfishness that could trigger global conflict
and chaos. Soon he was speaking of
peacetime as merely “the period extending from the present until the assumed
ideological war begins.” Yet he
earnestly warned against another “hot” war.
So he called for “a secure wall of peace”: an international order so stable that it
would contain the threatening Soviet chaos forever. The alternative was the end of civilization,
leaving the
His speeches proclaimed that the way to win the
ideological war without a hot war was to make
When Eisenhower left the military to become president
of
During the late 1940s, Eisenhower settled on his life
task. He would persuade his fellow
citizens to renew their nation spiritually and strengthen its moral fiber by
following a “middle way” between self-assertion and social cooperation. And the essence of that spiritual renewal, as
he described it, was widespread public affirmation of his own words advocating
willed optimism, duty, and voluntary self-restraint. He hoped that the White House would give him
the greatest platform of all for proclaiming his inspirational words.
Chapter 1 here shows that, at the outset of his
presidency, Eisenhower was actively affirming this relatively unified and
coherent set of ideas (although he never indicated that he consciously
understood the overall unity and coherency of the pattern). The rest of the book shows that throughout his
eight years of decisions about the cold war, national security, and nuclear
weaponry he continued adhering firmly to these basic assumptions. Even though he often embraced policies that
seem contradictory to later historians’ eyes, his choices appear more consistent
and comprehensible in light of his enduring pattern of discourse.
In studying Eisenhower, I have problematized not only
the notions of peace, victory, and security, but also the notions of threat,
danger, and insecurity. The latter, like
the former, are interpretive categories, always in the eye of the beholder. This approach has led me to this book’s most
important conclusion. The Eisenhower
presidency locked the nation into the cold war's enduring paradox: A single-minded pursuit of national security
consistently undermined the nation’s sense of security.
In some respects, this outcome was inevitable from the
day Eisenhower took office. His
ideological discourse held out no hope for peace with the communists. So he neither initiated nor contemplated any
concrete steps that would foster a closer relationship or any sense of
mutuality between the two great powers. From
his Augustinian perspective, the enemy’s threat had to be eternal because it
was a manifestation of the eternal power of sin. His apocalyptic inclination required a
profound moral and ideological dualism.
In both his public and private words, he attempted to foster hope for
the good by warning of the growing power of evil. So his often-voiced hopes for the "free
world” were bound to heighten fears of weakness and vulnerability. This pattern was not crafted merely for
rhetorical effect. The same pattern also
continued to form the foundation of his private discourse.
The form of his apocalyptic discourse also required
that the enemy always be there, if only to render the discourse
meaningful. The
Since the paradigm assumed that threats might come
from anywhere on the globe, its ideal of peace and stability required the
Perhaps it was inevitable that, after eight years in
office, he left his nation not at peace but at war. Although the war was largely a cold one,
blood had been shed during his years in office, and the seeds of a massive hot
war in
National insecurity could grow more readily because it
was relatively invisible. The public
discourse of the Eisenhower era did not so much deny the growing state of
national insecurity as ignore it. Amid
the unprecedented affluence and the sense of relative social calm of the 1950s,
the
Could Eisenhower have done differently, under the
circumstances? In principle, of course,
yes. Though he could not control the
choices of others, to which he had to respond, every “fact on the ground” gave
him room to choose among a range of options. That includes the most important
facts for any cold war historian: the
choices made by the leaders of the
But what if peace means reciprocal interaction among
nations with mutual respect, compromising one’s own interests to build
relationships that benefit all?
Eisenhower sometimes used this sense of peace in his public
rhetoric. Many historians, correctly
crediting him with wanting to avoid war, have mistakenly assumed that he was
seeking peace in both senses of the words.
Hence the common view that Eisenhower was caught in self-contradiction. This is a profound misunderstanding. A single ideological vision drove all of
Eisenhower’s policies. Within this
vision, hot war was an evil to be avoided, but not the greatest evil. Hot war was in fact an eminently thinkable
possibility if he thought it necessary to keep the
Whenever he had to respond to new external events and
historical developments, Eisenhower chose the seeming safety of the familiar
over the risk of innovation. On each of
these occasions, old discourse proved more powerful than new events in shaping
policy. And on each of these occasions, his
response ensured that the nation and the world would live under an ever-growing
cloud of nuclear threat and national insecurity.
Ultimately, though, the question of Eisenhower's
options and judgments about his choices are irrelevant to my main
purpose—describing the interaction between discourse and policy during his
presidency, so that we can better understand the legacy of that presidency. I
hope that future historians who write syntheses and evaluations of the
Eisenhower presidency (and other presidencies[28])
will recognize apocalypse management as one crucial thread in the story. But synthesis and evaluation is not my
task. My subject is not so much the
history of Eisenhower and his administration, but the history of apocalypse
management and its role in producing a national insecurity state. I focus on the Eisenhower era because it gave
rise to apocalypse management and provides so many good examples of how
apocalypse management can function in the policymaking as well as rhetorical
processes of a presidency.
Today most of
No doubt there are people and groups in the world who
would like to do the
Precisely because the paradigm of apocalypse
management continues to shape
Parts of this book were written with financial support
from the
I have received valuable critical responses to, and encouragement for, my work from a number of generous historians. Martin Sherwin, general editor of the Stanford Nuclear Age series, encouraged and supported the project from its earliest stages. Anders Stephanson read more than one draft and made very valuable suggestions for improving it. Irwin Gellman and Paul Chilton read the entire manuscript and helped to improve it in numerous ways. At various stages in my work on Eisenhower I received help and support from Stephen Ambrose, Richard Immerman, Melvyn Leffler, Robert McMahon, Geoffrey Smith, David Patterson, Charles Chatfield, Michael Hunt, Frederik Logevall, Linda Killen, Klaus Larres, Kenneth Osgood, Andrew Johnston, Bruce Pickering, Robert Ivie, and Martin Medhurst. On my home campus, I have benefited from the opportunity to exchange ideas with Robert Schulzinger, Thomas Zeiler, Frank Beer, and Bryan Taylor. Muriel Bell, my editor at Stanford University Press, patiently offered invaluable aid through a long process of evaluation. My colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies have graciously indulged and supported my research, which stretched the boundaries of our discipline. Michael Fox, Andrew Thurlow, Megan Sijapati, Matthew Wittmann, and Alexs Thompson were enthusiastic, efficient, and helpful research assistants. I wish to express my appreciation to all of these people, who helped to make this book possible. They share in whatever credit is due, while the mistakes are wholly my own. And I shall always treasure the wisdom of my son Miguel, who asked, at a very tender age, the most crucial question: “What’s so important about Eisenhower, anyway?” I hope this books helps to provide a meaningful answer.
[1] Greene, “Bibliographic Essay,” 215. Greene quotes William Bragg Ewald: “Many terrible things that could have happened, didn’t.” He cites, as other examples, Stephen Ambrose’s widely read biography (Eisenhower, Vol. 2: The President) and Robert A. Divine’s influential study of Eisenhower's foreign policy (Eisenhower and the Cold War). Divine (154, 155) concludes that his "foreign policy achievements were negative in nature…an enduring model of presidential restraint."
[2] Brendon, Ike, 255, 383. Eisenhower speechwriter Emmet J. Hughes was perhaps the first to call his former boss “a man divided against himself”: Ordeal of Power, 238.
[3] For surveys of the transition from revisionism to postrevisionism, see Greene, "Eisenhower Revisionism,” and Rabe, “Eisenhower Revisionism.”
[4] Hunt, “Ideology,” 222; Hogan, A Cross of Iron, x; Kimball, The Juggler, 4. Hunt has developed and applied his views at length in Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy
[5] Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, 2-9.
[6] Lyon, Eisenhower, 402; Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, 95. Newhouse credits this insight to Andrew Goodpaster, who worked as closely with the president as anyone. There is a large literature on the cognitive psychology of political decision-making, and Eisenhower has received some attention in this literature, particularly in relation to his foreign policy as president. For a good overview, see Immerman, “Psychology.” I have not employed this approach in the present study, since I am trying to avoid drawing any conclusions about inner mental events.
[7] Rodgers, Contested Truths, 5. See also, e.g., Beer and Hariman, “Realism and Rhetoric in International Relations,” 20.
[8] Costigliola, “Reading for Meaning,” 289-290.
[9] Eisenhower, “Address to American Bar Association,” 9/5/49, Vital Speeches of the Day XV (September 15, 1949): 708; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 155; NSC, 1/21/55, FRUS 1955-1957, 2: 93; Eisenhower to Gruenther, 2/1/55, PDDE, 16: 1539. Eisenhower's calculated use of language has been argued most extensively in Medhurst, Dwight D. Eisenhower. For his pre-presidential years, it is thoroughly documented in GE. See also Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War, 7; Griffith, "Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth," 93-94.
[10] NSC-68, 4/14/50, in May, ed., American Cold War Strategy, 52, 41, 29. On the language and rhetoric of the Truman administration, see Underhill, The Truman Persuasion; Hinds and Windt, The Cold War as Rhetoric; Medhurst, “Truman’s Rhetorical Reticence, 1945-1947,” 52-70; Theoharis, “The Rhetoric of Politics”; Ivie, “Literalizing the Metaphor of Soviet Savagery,” 91-105; GE, 13-16.
[11] Chilton, “The Meaning of Security,” 202.
[12] In the field of international relations theory, there is now a large literature studying foreign policy and international affairs as discursive constructions. The notion of threat construction is a central concept in this literature. In this study, I have not been guided by any specific theoretical formulations from IR, though I have been influenced by that literature. For an informative example, see Campbell, Writing Security. The final chapter of Campell’s book offers a useful survey of this approach in IR.
[13] Greene, The Crusade, 188. On Eisenhower’s campaign rhetoric, see GE, 274 ff.
[14] Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower, xix.
[15]
Brendon, Ike, 381; Mills, The Causes of World War Three,
117-118. According to the
[16] The following paragraphs summarize the basic findings of GE.
[17] Wicker, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 139.
[18] Eisenhower's parents were both devout adherents of sectarian evangelical Christianity. His father was raised in the River Brethren church. His parents, particularly his mother, later became involved with the Jehovah’s Witness church. Jerry Bergman has suggested a strong influence of the latter tradition on Eisenhower, but his argument adduces no substantial evidence: “Steeped in Religion,” 148-167. The evidence for direct influence of these traditions on Eisenhower is so slim and inconclusive that it does not seem worthwhile to speculate on it. (I have not been able to consult either Bergman’s book-length study nor Jack Holl’s study of Eisenhower and religion, both now in preparation.) The Christian influences upon Eisenhower do not bear the marks of any particular denomination. After leaving home, he joined no church and prided himself on being a religious freethinker. When friends urged him to join a church, if only for good form, he explained that, though he was “very earnestly and seriously religious,” he avoided commitment to any specific church because ”I have always sort of treasured my independence”: Eisenhower to Cliff Roberts, 7/29/52, PDDE 13: 1284-5. On Eisenhower's decision to join a church in 1952, see Keller, “The Intellectuals and Eisenhower,” 235-242. A good, though somewhat dated, bibliography for a study of Eisenhower’s religion is in the notes to the relevant chapter in Pierard and Linder, Civil Religion and the Presidency.
[19] Eisenhower to William Robinson, 2/12/52, PDDE 13: 986.
[20] Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 272, 19, 70. On the Augustinian foundations of “realism,” see Johnson, The Quest for Peace, 56-66. There is no evidence that Eisenhower was familiar with Niebuhr’s writings or thought, although other important government officials in the early cold war years knew his work and expressed a debt to it; see LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 46-48, 63.
[21] Eisenhower to Alfred Gruenther, 2/24/42, PDDE 1:131; Miller, Ike the Soldier, 310. On Eisenhower's alarmism in World War II, see GE, chapter 1.
[22] Eisenhower to JCS, 5/10/47, PDDE 8: 1701; broadcast speech from Washington, 2/2/51, Pre-Presidential Papers, Principal Series, Box 197, "Report to the Nation 2/2/51”; speech to Congress, 2/1/51, Vital Speeches of the Day XVII (February 15, 1951): 259, 260; “Eisenhower Reveals Europe’s Plight,” U.S. News & World Report, 9/7/51, 83.
[23]
Diary, 1/1/50, PDDE 11: 883; diary, 3/8/47, Ferrell, ed., The Eisenhower Diaries, 140; Melanson, "The Foundations of
Eisenhower's Foreign Policy," citing the notion of a "corporate
commonwealth" as developed by
[24]
Inaugural Address,
[25]
H. W. Brands, Jr., "The Age of Vulnerability: Eisenhower and the
[26] Eisenhower to John Doud, 8/23/46, PDDE 7: 1250.
[27] Memorandum of Conference, 6/16/59, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 41, “Staff Notes June 16-30 (2).”
[28] Although cold war presidents offer the clearest examples of apocalypse management at work, the paradigm has its roots in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and was clearly at work in the George W. Bush administration's response to the 9/11 attack. For the latter, see Chernus, Monsters To Destroy, especially Chapter 9. In future work I plan to explore FDR’s role in the creation of the apocalypse management paradigm.
[29] Rumsfeld interview with Robert Burns, Associated Press, October 5, 2001; Lemann, “Next World Order,” 44.