Book praises Ike over civil rights
During his presidency, Eisenhower was often mocked as a "do-nothing president." In an age when wind-up dolls were common toys, a joke making the rounds suggested that if you wind up the Eisenhower doll, it does absolutely nothing for eight years.
That's because Eisenhower delegated authority, a carry-over from his military experience — and he was the hero of World War II, so he didn't need fame and didn't seek it.
But in the 1980s, Fred Greenstein pioneered a revisionist view of Eisenhower, suggesting that he was closer to being great than mediocre. Greenstein's intriguing book "The Hidden Hand Presidency" is an analytical study of Eisenhower's letters and papers that convincingly argued the man was actually a very active president, but usually behind the scenes or under the table.
Since then, Eisenhower's image has been steadily growing among scholars.
In that spirit, historian David A. Nichols has just published "A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution," a book that alleges that it was not John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson who deserve the lion's share of the credit for the civil-rights revolution, but Eisenhower, who was always a strong believer in justice across the board.
Nichols, a 68-year-old professor emeritus of history and an academic dean at Southwestern College in Kansas, said by phone from Winfield, Kan., that Eisenhower's views on civil rights "were severely denigrated by Chief Justice Earl Warren's memoirs," which were published posthumously.
"Warren ignored his own appointment as chief justice and his own bench of Ike appointees, all of them progressive," said Nichols, "because of the rivalry he had with Eisenhower over the presidency. One of the motives Eisenhower had in appointing Warren (the former governor of California) was to get rid of him as a future competitor for the presidency. Eisenhower was a strategic thinker if there ever was one. As Richard Nixon said, he was 'more devious than people realized."'
Warren was "loquacious" in his criticism of Eisenhower, "so it is evident they had a rift," said Nichols.
The author has not been able to verify the rumor that Eisenhower once said that appointing Warren "was a damn fool mistake." But it is clear, he said, that Eisenhower knew Warren's progressive views on race before he appointed him and was not surprised by his decisions. He said, "I wanted a man who felt the way we do — and a man who would be on the court for a long time."
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