30: Ike
The United States in 1952 was ready for new leadership. The country had been helmed by a president from the Democratic party for the last twenty years, creating party stagnation, and worse still, the charismatic and popular Franklin Roosevelt had died, leaving control of the country in the hands of Harry Truman, a man whose legacy consists of being the only world leader who has ever used nuclear weapons, who lead an already war-weary nation into the Korean War, and a man whose unpopularity was so apparent that the Chicago Tribune famously printed newspapers proclaiming “Dewey Defeats Truman” before election results were finalized in 1948. Truman declined running for a second elected term in 1952, causing the Democratic party no end of turmoil, as they scrambled to find a presidential candidate, ultimately settling on Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, a man who had done no presidential campaigning before the convention and won no primaries, effectively being talked into it by party officials. He had no chance and he knew it, having famously quipped “how can a man named Adlai beat a soldier named Ike?”
Stevenson’s opponent of course was Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower. An affable and good natured Kansan, Eisenhower was a career army man, having graduated from West Point in 1919 and who steadily rose through the ranks during the period between the two world wars, being promoted to Brigadier General just two months before the attack at Pearl Harbor brought the US into World War 2. Eisenhower then made a name for himself with a string of victories and ultimately successes in defeating the Nazis in North Africa, liberating Sicily from the Fascists, and ultimately gaining command of all US forces in Europe by 1943. He prevailed over the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge, and upon liberating concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, he made it a point to extensively document the horrors of the camps, leading to successful persecutions of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg trials and making modern Holocaust deniers jump through many more hoops to justify their hateful ideology. He did all of this without at any point drawing the ire of locals whose lands his armies were ultimately marching through, and working successfully with not only many of his fellow US generals, but many generals and politicians among the French resistance, the British, and the Soviets, becoming good friends with both Charles De Gaulle and Soviet Marshal Zhukov. War in many ways is a competition to see who is best at killing and death, and to find a general who is as adept at warcraft as his fellows MacArthur and Patton but without the spectre of hatred that MacArthur and Patton drew is a rare and marvelous thing indeed. Military personnel understood and respected Ike’s competence, but even more than that, they liked Ike.
So beloved was Ike among vast swaths of the American populace, that both the Democratic and Republican parties attempted to recruit him as a potential presidential candidate in 1951, with Eisenhower accepting the Republicans’ offer due to their harder-lined stance against communism. Ike was so well liked during a national presidential campaign that he got Irving Berlin to write him a campaign song that merely espoused how well liked Ike was without maligning his opponents.
Any anti-Ike campaigning had nothing to do with him, but rather his association with his running mate Richard Nixon who was accused of graft*, and his association-by-non-repudiation of anti-communist nutjob Senator Joe McCarthy. Ike himself was bulletproof. Despite the fact that prior to the 1972 Nixon campaign’s Southern Strategy the American South would have sooner voted for a bucket of margarine for president than someone of the party of Lincoln, Ike focussed his campaign on the South in an attempt to win them over. It didn’t really work, he only won Tennessee, Virginia, Texas, and Florida among southern states**, but he made up for it by winning literally every other state in the union, despite not focussing his campaign on those areas. America liked Ike.
As President, Ike balanced his conservative principles of frugal government spending with an understanding that many New Deal policies such as Social Security and farm subsidies were ultimately beneficial to the nation as a whole, so while he sought not to expand the New Deal’s policies, he neither curtailed them. He was a general who hated the loss of life present in war, and so he immediately followed through on his campaign promise to put an end to the Korean War***. A formative assignment in his young Army days surveying America’s highways drove his ultimate mark on American society however: the construction of America’s Interstate Highway system. The ease of conveyance of goods and people that interstates provided Americans both drove an already booming post-war economy, and allowed baby-booming American families the freedom to move away from city centers and live in suburbs where they could have large homes in which to raise their 2.4 children, where they could have massive yards, a 2 car garage, and a golden retriever. Ike however was no great orator. While he was happy to regularly engage with the American press corps and thus communicate with the people, Ike communicated plainly and simply, which on one hand made his speeches friendly and approachable, but also gave him no “The only thing to fear is fear itself” or “It’s morning in America” moments. Ike in this way embodied a kind of paternal figure for the majority of the nation. He was plain spoken. He was supportive of America but did not spoil it. He was protective of America, and he plainly loved it.
The first time President Ike Eisenhower appears in The Hudsucker Proxy is during a newsreel about Norville Barnes’s success as the inventor of the Hula Hoop and savior of Hudsucker Industries. At one point Norville receives a phone call; as he does, the screen splits and a still image of Ike appears opposite him as he nervously hears the five sentences the President has to say to him:
Hello Norville, this is the President. I just wanted to congratulate you. I’m very proud of you. Mrs. Eisenhower is very proud of you. The American people are very proud of you.
Prior to this moment, Norville has been an underdog. He has been the unhirable hick, the mail room fall-guy, the stock swindle fall-guy, an object of ridicule in the press, and the booster of a nonsense ridiculous toy. No matter how much his secretary and (inexplicably) the clocktower keeper believed in him, his success is ultimately still tied up in his ability to get the American people to support him and his company with their wallets. Without them he is merely a fall guy waiting to happen. Once he wins this support, the greatest possible expression of that support is this moment, a phone call from the ultimate paternal figure, America’s Dad, Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower telling him that he’s proud of him.
Ninety seconds after Ike has issued his congratulations, Norville in his striking new pinstriped suit is taking a press conference where he arrogantly strolls through the Hudsucker lobby, overconfidently bragging about his sudden promotion to the office of president, wrongly stating “I don’t think they promoted me because they thought I was a shmoe”, and stating that he is content to rest on his laurels for the time being, stating “an idea like this sweet baby doesn’t just come overnight” when asked what’s next for Hudsucker Industries. In one moment as he speaks to Ike, Norville is a nervous wreck, incapable of believing his own good fortune as Ike congratulates him. Less than the amount of time that it takes to brush one’s teeth later, Norville has started his own descent into his own pride, ultimately culminating in nearly being fired, nearly being committed, and nearly falling from the top of the Hudsucker building to his own demise. Norville is at the highest of highs that he possibly can be as Ike gives him his congratulations. It’s all downhill from there.
For all of his benevolence and good will, the Eisenhower presidency wasn’t all wine and roses for everyone. While Ike signed a civil rights bill in 1957, it was mostly as a necessary legal follow up to the supreme court decision Brown Vs. Board of Education three years earlier, and would pale in comparison to the subsequent decade’s Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1968. Ike was not necessarily a fan of the hardline witch-hunt tactics of senator Joe McCarthy’s House Unamerican Activities Committee, but he also wasn’t about to let commies run loose in his state department, so he allowed it to continue under his watch, letting dozens of notable natural born and naturalized Americans such as Paul Robeson, Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Miller, J Robert Oppenheimer, WEB DuBois, Orson Welles, and Albert Einstein suffer losses of government jobs and contracts, blacklisting and onerous investigations bordering on harassment in the name of anti-Communist sentiment. Eisenhower likewise turned his back on what little strides American LGBTQ citizens had made in the first half of the century, with executive order 10450 among other things explicitly stating that no gay person should be knowingly employed in any capacity by the federal government, causing more terminations due to homosexuality to occur under his watch than for communist party membership. While there was little activity in terms of influential writing or protest in the women’s liberation movement during Ike’s presidency, it’s tough to imagine an era bookended by Rosie the Riveter and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex on one end and burning bras and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique on the other without some unrest happening just below the surface during the 1950s, with American women having tasted a sense of security and freedom for the first time having entered the workforce during WW2, and immediately having it snatched away from them. Lacking civil rights protections that would come with subsequent legislation and supreme court decisions, American women could be denied basic banking services, were commonly victims of sexual harassment in the workplace with no legal recourse, were unable to use effective birth control or family planning mechanisms, and could be fired for pregnancy among other injustices. Eisenhower’s benevolent paternalism only extended to the right kind of American citizen, and it not so much that he actively punished the “wrong” kind of American as he turned his back on them and let whatever forces that already existed wreak havoc upon them, be they Black Americans demanding an end to Jim Crow, women seeking a life outside of the kitchen and nursery, gay Americans simply seeking a decent living as a government bureaucrat, or any brand of leftist seeking to no longer be a cog in the machine of capitalism.
Ike’s voice appears a second time in The Hudsucker Proxy after he congratulates a speechless and flustered Norville Barnes. After his ego has grown uncomfortably large and his success of the Hula Hoop proves to be profoundly inconvenient to the Hudsucker board, Sidney Mussburger concocts a scheme to discredit Norville’s success by claiming that the Hoop was secretly the invention of Buzz the elevator operator. Between this and being dumped by the lovely Amy Smith / Archer who he still seems to think is from Muncie, Norville ends up in a state of despondency, nearly being committed to a psychiatric institution by the psychoanalyst Dr. Bromfenbrenner. As he leaves Ann’s 440 to stumble back to the Hudsucker building where he very nearly commits suicide, he hears five messages of his own failure echoing in his head. First is Amy condemning his own hubris, saying “you’re not so slow but you’re not so swell either, and it looks like you’re an imbecile after all.” Afterwards is Sidney Mussburger, reminding him of his own insecurities, repeating “but your friends called you dope, dipstick, lamebrain”. Next is Buzz the elevator operator, reminding him of his own cruelty at the height of his hubris “please buddy, running the elevator it’s all I got!” Penultimately is the disembodied voice of Ike Eisenhower, represented not by his face like Amy, Sidney, or Buzz but by a pair of American flags flapping in the breeze, saying “Norville, you let me down. You let Mrs. Eisenhower down. You let the American people down.” Lastly Mussburger returns reminding Norville of the dire consequences of his own failings, saying “when you’re dead, you stay dead”.
please note the difference between how Sidney Mussburger is portrayed in Norville’s head
and how Ike Eisenhower is portrayed in Norville’s head
Ike’s voice in this second instance is the ultimate repudiation of Norville’s success that caused Ike to call him in the first place. While it’s all in his head, Norville may as well be hearing the Son of Man at the final judgment saying “I never knew you, depart from me you worker of evil, and may you be cast into the lake of fire.” Ike’s imaginary repudiation, even though it happens in such simple terms, is so powerful it causes Norville to ponder the end of his own life. Ike’s belovedness caused him to be an incredibly powerful man in the imagination of the average American, especially the white, male, and rich American that by this point Norville is. Ike Eisenhower saying “I’m very proud of you. Mrs. Eisenhower is very proud of you. The American people are very proud of you” thus represents the Zenith of Norville Barnes’s existence on the planet, while the same voice proclaiming “You let me down. You let Mrs. Eisenhower down. You let the American people down” represents its nadir.
Norville likes Ike, and all he wants in this world is for Ike to like him back.
* Not a lot is made of the foreshadowing of Nixon’s bad deeds during his presidency based on his VP run in 1952, but it’s tough in retrospect to not see criticism of him as a California Senator as being somewhat prescient. His emotional speech where he insists that the only thing he received from someone who could be seen as attempting to curry political favor during his time as a California senator was his dog Checkers reads less as a heartfelt bare-all confession and more as a dress rehearsal for his future denials of wrongdoing.
** If you define what is and isn’t “the south” differently than I do, for the record Ike also won Oklahoma and Missouri and lost Kentucky and West Virginia. Regardless imagine telling any modern Presidential candidate about someone who won Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida and see how into it they are.
*** sort of. North Korea and South Korea are technically still at war as of this writing, but Ike was instrumental in turning “actually at war” into “technically at war”, and while things are still tense, there’s certainly less overall bloodshed when one is merely technically at war.
In addition, while it does not fit the scope and flow of this essay, any summary of Ike’s legacy as president would be incomplete without a discussion of his use of coups d’etat as a substitution for armed foreign conflict as a means of advancing American interests abroad. While Ike opted not to engage in out-and-out war with Guatemala under Jacobo Arbenz or Iran under Mohammed Mossadeq, the American-backed coups against these two men remain a sticking point of policy and governance in their respective regions to this day, and if I do say so, not in a good way. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, please take a moment to research them and the ways they were removed from power in the interest of American oil and banana companies and the repercussions that their removal caused.