Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) From the start, William F. Buckley, Jr., and National Review exhibited an oppositional temperament, as captured in the magazine''s opening declaration that it "stands athwart history, yelling Stop." But it was also clear from the outset that those whom WFB intended to Stop were not just liberals but their handmaidens in the Republican Party, the RINOs of the day whose capitulations to liberals, in and out of Congress, contributed to the left''s cultural hegemony. Chief among WFB''s Republican targets at that time was the much-revered Dwight D. Eisenhower. Even before National Review launched--in November 1955, roughly midway through Ike''s presidency--Buckley had begun registering his disappointment with the former Supreme Allied Commander of World War II. In some of his earliest published writing, WFB lamented that there existed between the two major parties an "ephemeral battle line dividing two almost identical streams of superficial thought," that only "trivia" separated "the 1952 Republican from the 1952 Democrat.
" By June 1955, in an article titled "The Liberal Mind," published in Facts Forum News, Buckley was likening Ike to the sitting Soviet premier: [W]e know more about the workings of the mind of Nikolai Bulganin than we know about the workings of the mind of Dwight Eisenhower. [T]he life of Bulganin makes sense in a way that the life of Eisenhower does not. NR''s debut issue also lamented the growth of "a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy." A decade later, when WFB ran for mayor of New York City, the Republican target of the oppositional temperament would be John V. Lindsay--but even then, the betrayal of Eisenhower weighed heavily on Buckley, as recorded in The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966): Even under the moderate Eisenhower--the Republican exemplar, according to the rules of prevailing opinion--the registration figures continued to polarize, as they had during the preceding two decades. Two years before the good general came into office, the national registration figures were 45 percent to 33 percent in favor of the Democrats, according to Dr. Gallup. When he left the pulpit, eight years later, the infidels had in fact increased, the figures having separated to 46 percent Democrats and 30 percent Republicans.
What did emerge in the post-Eisenhower years among Republicans was a hunger for orthodoxy, for an intellectual discipline in the formulation of policy. It was fueled in part by the long diet of blandness that had produced a body lacking in tone and coordination. WFB''s eulogy was prepared in advance as Eisenhower lay dying. The accomplishments of Dwight Eisenhower will be copiously recorded now that he is gone, that being the tradition, and tradition being what one has come to associate with General Eisenhower, who comes to us even now as a memory out of the remote past. During his lifetime he had his detractors. There are those who oppose Dwight Eisenhower because he was the man who defeated Adlai Stevenson. In their judgment it was profanation for anyone to stand in the way of Adlai Stevenson. And so, when Eisenhower was inaugurated, they took up, and forever after maintained, a jeremiad on America the theme of which was: America is a horrible country because a banal and boring general with not an idea in his head gets to beat a scintillating intellectual who is in tune with the future.
These gentry did President Eisenhower a certain amount of harm, and in later years they took to referring routinely to his tenure as "boring," "lacking in ideals," and "styleless." Their criticisms never actually took hold. America wanted Eisenhower in preference to Stevenson; and however keenly we felt the death of Stevenson, it wasn''t--speaking for the majority--because we had failed to confer the presidency upon him. Stevenson was born to be defeated for the presidency. Among the critics of Mr. Eisenhower also from the liberal end of the world are a few who reckoned him as quite different from what it is generally supposed that he was. There are those--one thinks of the singularly acute Mr. Murray Kempton, who all along has led that particular pack--who saw Mr.
Eisenhower as perhaps the most highly efficient political animal ever born in the United States. They believe that his aspect of indifference to practical political matters was one of the most successful dissimulations in political history. He had, they maintain, the most accomplished sense of political danger that any man ever developed, and he always knew--they maintain--how to defend himself against the ravages of political decisiveness by a) setting up another guy, who would easily fall victim; and b) appearing to be innocently disinterested in the grinding of political gears. The record is certainly there, that over a period of a dozen years, it was, somehow, always somebody else who stood between him and the tough decisions: a Sherman Adams, a Richard Nixon, a CIA. General Eisenhower never really developed any mass opposition. His critics were either formalistic (the Democratic Party); or personal--men who held him responsible not for what he did, but for what he failed to do. It is I think this category of critics of the General which is the most interesting. Not the liberals, but the conservatives.
It is hardly a surprise that liberals would have faulted Eisenhower''s performance as president, they having so hotly desired the election of another man. But the conservatives, or at least many of them, were genuinely disappointed that he let the federal government grow at a rate no domesticated Democrat could reasonably have exceeded. Disappointed by his failure to take decisive action against the Soviet Union notwithstanding unique historical opportunities, as for instance in Hungary, Egypt, and Cuba. Disappointed by his dismal unconcern with the philosophy of conservatism (of which he was a purely intuitive disciple) at a point in the evolution of America when a few conservative philosophers at his side might have accomplished more for the ends he sought to serve than the battery of sycophantic (and opportunistic) big businessmen with whom he loved to while away the hours. The critique of General Eisenhower from the right will perhaps be the most interesting historical critique (to use the Army term): and one somehow feels that the General, retired from office, had an inkling of this. Never was he so adamantly and philosophically conservative as when he last addressed the nation, via the Republican Convention at Miami Beach, a fortnight ago. Meanwhile we are left to mourn the (imminent--Editors: Please supply if necessary) passing of an extraordinary man, a genius of personal charm, a public servant manifestly infected with a lifetime case of patriotism. His country requited his services.
No honor was unpaid to him. If he was, somehow at the margin deficient, it was because the country did not rise to ask of him the performance of a thunderbolt. He gave what he was asked to give. And he leaves us (or "will leave") if not exactly bereft, lonely; lonely for the quintessential American. END. John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) As early as 1957, WFB described John F. Kennedy as an "ideological wraith," marveling at how the junior senator from Massachusetts had mastered "the art of voting Liberal and appearing conservative.
" When, a year later, Senator Kennedy proposed that the United States adopt an "underdog" strategy with the Soviet Union, pursuing diplomacy through disarmament, NR recoiled in "utter amazement": [W]e suppose Senator Kennedy was merely making a campaign speech. We hope his dreams of reducing "the [missile] gap" by reliance on calls for disarmament are not unduly disturbed by memories of a book he once wrote. The title was Why England Slept [1940]. During the 1960 election, WFB again scored JFK for weakness on foreign policy, anticipating the themes later to inform David Halberstam''s The Best and the Brightest (1972): "The most educated men in our midst and the most highly-trained--and those who trained the Kennedys--have not been understanding the march of history, in which [Fidel] Castro is a minor player, though at the moment great shafts of light converge upon him and give him a spectacular brilliance." After the Bay of Pigs, NR condemned Kennedy''s "contemptible" inaction, arguing that it "left.700 brave Cubans to die, and 6 million others to live in slavery." Nor did Buckley believe the USSR had "blinked" in the Cuban Missile Crisis: "President John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, has formally given our bitterest enemy a pledge that we will enforce the nonenforcement of the Monroe Doctrine!.
How can it be maintained that we have won a great victory when Khrushchev is, in October, ahead of where he was in May?" Kennedy took note of his erudite critic. Upon receiving his honorary degree from Yale in June 1962, the president told the graduates he was "particularly glad to become a Yale man because as I think about my troubles, I find that a lot of them have come from other Yale men.not to mention William F. Buckley, Jr., of the class of 1950." With JFK''s death, WFB found himself, rhetorically, in a tight spot: He had to acknowledge the intense mourning, yet he also felt compelled to remind his readers that JFK was a real, and controversial, person and that the conservative challenge to the Kennedy program needed, perforce, to be carried to his successor. WFB penned two JFK eulogies, the first somewhat rushed, presumably produced on tight deadli.