The Collapse of a Vision

Liberals, who relaxed during the eight Eisenhower Years in the unaccustomed role of critics, regard that era as a kind of respite from the general advance of American politics. President Kennedy's campaign rhetoric emphasized that we must get this country moving again, and the period is most charitably described by liberals as one during which the gains of the preceding twenty years were consolidated.

Emmet Hughes, who calls himself a son of the New Deal era, demurs. He considers the Eisenhower years typical of American politics, not exceptional, and his book is less a memoir of the period than a lament for political purpose itself. Hughes joined the Eisenhower forces in 1952 as speech-writer and campaign strategist from a disinterested desire to save America's two-party system. He was less concerned about the possible arrogance and irresponsibility of a Democratic Party too long in power than about the increasing unreality of Republican leadership and policies too long without the experience of leading the government. Hughes was convinced that the Republicans' mindless oppositionism had been partly responsible for the paralysis which had, by 1952, stricken the Democratic Administration.

Hughes, of course, was also dazzled by the prospect of Eisenhower in the White House leading a government of National Union, and perhaps rebuilding both the national consensus and the Republican Party. No matter how severely he finally judges Eisenhower's performance, Hughes never disowns his early belief that Eisenhower was potentially the peace-mak-he appeared to be, and that a real hope was interred with his Administration's bones.

Frustrated Vision

Hughes stayed with the Eisenhower team through late 1954, returned to Time, Inc., for the years 1954-5, and only rejoined the team briefly for the second campaign. Thus he was not an active participant during the years of the real ordeals--1954, which "began with Dulles' proclamation of the doctrine of massive retaliation;" 1955, the year of the President's first heart attack; and the whole of the second term, when a "growing intellectual and moral confusion" caused the collapse of all the hopes and beliefs. Nonetheless, Hughes was sufficiently involved with Eisenhower's vision that he considers its frustration a tragedy, and he seeks an appropriately grand explanation for the collapse.

Part of the reason for the massive failure, of course, lies in the kind of men Eisenhower chose for his agents. Not until Hughes' book have the pettiness and vulgarity which distinguished the Eisenhower team--present company excepted--been so unambiguously depicted and decried. Cabinet meetings (which Hughes describes from his diary) were horrifying affairs, platitude succeeding platitude illiteracies compounding inarticulateness. It shocks to learn how crudely our leaders speak the language; one thought the pulp puppets of Seven Days in Many only talked that way because they'd just finished Advise and Consent. The truth is that Drury and Bailey and the others had flesh-and-blood models for their artless heroes. And ill-clothed in the cliches, ill-housed in the vapidity, were appallingly undernourished concepts of the problems that a trusting nation had confided to the care of these men. The intellectual frigidity of Dulles produced, of course, the greatest disappointments. Hughes is eloquent in describing both the tone of Dulles's thought and the ways it clashed with Eisenhower's; but, Hughes says, the President was stuck with the grand old statesman of the G.O.P., though all Eisenhower's hopes might be dashed on that rock.

Reluctant President

Hughes suggests two reasons why Eisenhower allowed himself to be contained behind the wall of Dulles' diplomacy. First, he describes Eisenhower as practically Hamlet-like in his reluctance to carry out his resolves. He was unwilling to indulge in political maneuver for fear the experience of "the gutter" would kill his very universality--his genius for peace. His caution and personal scrupulousness resulted in his inability to move foreign policy in the radical ways so clearly envisioned in Hughes' early speeches. The awkwardness of his diplomacy contrasted fatally with the hopefulness of his rhetoric.

The comparison with the Kennedy administration suggested by this observation does not escape Hughes; indeed, his second explanation for Eisenhower's ineffectuality derives from his general assertion that "there can be no just criticism of a political leader...without full reference to the political circumstances." This is really Hughes's theme: he says of the "open and receptive" George Humphrey, for instance, that the fact his vision of the world politics did not grow and widen "probably offers as much commentary on the political environment in which he found himself, as upon the individual." The Eisenhower ordeal has left Hughes much more impressed with the stupidity and viciousness of this country's "political environment" than depressed at Eisenhower's problematical missed opportunities. More precisely, Hughes considers Eisenhower a victim of that environment, rather than of either his personal failings or those of his immediate associates.

Clowns and Rogues

Much as Dulles and Nixon and Charlie Wilson bored and irritated Eisenhower, Hughes says he was provoked to real anger and disgust only by the clowns and rogues who populated Congress: Knowland, Bricker, Dirksen, Milliken, McCarthy. On the subject of Mr. Bricker and his Amendment, Eisenhower waxed especially splenetic: at a Cabinet meeting in early April, 1953, "the President, listening to the latest accounts of trying to appease Bricker, cried in anguish, 'I'm so sick of this I could scream. The whole damn thing is senseless and plain damaging to the prestige of the United States. We talk about the French not being able to govern themselves--and we sit here wrestling with a Bricker Amendment.'" (Italics D.D.E.'s.)

Eisenhower's reference to the immobilisme of the French Fourth Republic was--and--is apposite. Though its origins may have been different from the "politics of dead center" which has afflicted the American government, the effects, Hughes argues, have been the same. Hughes goes beyond Eisenhower's contempt for politicans in explaining the President's frustrations, and suggests that the failing lies deeply rooted in the country's most basic attitudes towards government and politics: "For not even the presidency can grandly excel the range of wisdom, the strength of will, the clarity of purpose of the people it must serve by leading. And this is true no matter whose presidency it be. For it remains, always and ultimately, theirs.

"It surely was so with the most popular--and the most criticized--of modern presidents."

Vitality Lost

Hughes does not go on to connect the election of Eisenhower himself with the apathy he diagnoses; he remains convinced that Eisenhower was chosen precisely to restore America's vitality, but that the deeds were not equal to the integration. Hughes's desire to see excitement and purpose re-introduced into politics is evident not only in his argument, but, less impressively, in his writing. No less than the presidents he criticizes, Hughes is too often rhetorical rather than substantive. In his first and last chapters especially he indulges himself with writing like this (describing the sources of his enthusiasm for Eisenhower): "it had been decreed by all things first bringing me to this political scene--all the untidy but sovereign miscellany of one's own convictions and commitments, granite beliefs and fragile fancies, clean perceptions and gray illusions." Like the magazine he's worked for too long, he insists, in his style, on making life out to be better than it is.

But these excesses occur less and less frequently as the book progresses. The intrinsic importance of Hughes' narrative and analysis far outweighs what rative and analysis far outweighs whatever stylistic attractions he has to offer. On the way to his conclusions, he sketches authoritative and compelling pictures of the surreal atmosphere of a campaign, the chaos which surrounds a change in administrations, the Tolstoyan confusion from which great decisions emerge. But his eye is always on the object, he is always looking for signs of that pervasive lethargy which befogs American politics. One of the places he finds it is in Adlai Stevenson's 1956 cappaign, which he considers a model of ineptitude. Significantly, it is not Stevenson's personal awkwardness which bothers Hughes, but the confusion in purpose behind his platform and speeches.

Simple Moral

Hughes concludes pessimistically. If Eisenhower failed so completely in lessening cold war tensions--and Hughes' account of the U-2 debacle is brilliant--it is hard to see who might succeed. Eisenhower was given a chance to galvanize the country which is not likely to be offered again to someone else. Hughes' moral is of text-book simplicity: In Eisenhower's fall/We sinned all.

It is not necessary to share Hughes' nostalgia for the days of hope in early 1953 to admire and value his book. His narrative has the fascination of testimony, and his argument is much more than a plea for a sympathetic judgment of Eisenhower (though it is certainly that). The inertia that humbled the architect of D-Day is currently blocking the efforts of his successor on every front, as Hughes ends by noting. He offers the defeat of his Eisenhower as a warning