Alan J. Levine
In the 1960s, the Eisenhower years were ‘revisioned’ as a period of stagnation, instead of the era of fantastic prosperity and progress it really was.
Most people, even those like myself brought up on the absurd “goofing and golfing” image of Dwight D. Eisenhower, now recognize that he was an exceptionally fine president. In my opinion, he was a great president, whose excellence has exceeded that of any of his successors.
That is despite the fact that much that is still said about Eisenhower and his administration simply regurgitates the silly ideas about his policies entertained at the time, and not just by liberals. National Review, for example, was not especially friendly to Eisenhower in the 1950s.
One such falsehood is the idea that Eisenhower was hostile to desegregation in the South. That seems to have been a product of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s personal hatred for the man who had destroyed his hopes of becoming president and who, after leaving the Oval Office, was critical of many of the more dubious later decisions of the Warren Court. It was under Eisenhower that Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. acted as a friend of the Court in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Warren court desegregated public schools. Eisenhower’s journal, a letter to his close friend Everett Hazlett, and remarks he made during the Little Rock crisis in 1957 all show that he regarded desegregation as just. He thought, however, that it might have been wiser and would have evoked less opposition had it begun in higher education rather than lower down.
It’s true that Ike was understandably unenthusiastic about the rulings of the Warren court that undermined anti-crime efforts, such as Mapp v. Ohio, which seriously restricted the use of evidence in criminal cases, and Miranda v. Arizona, which hampered police interrogations. Whatever merits of these rulings hold in the protection of the innocent, there is no doubt they paved the way for our current nightmare of a police force hamstrung by overbearing legal oversight.
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