February 25, 2012

The Greatness of Ike

By ROSS DOUTHAT

THIS year, two decisions will be made with long-term implications for how we think about the presidency. In November, voters will decide whether to give Barack Obama a second term in office  {The Republican Party, by virtue of its insane candidates has assured the Bland One Re-election}. And sometime before then, the National Capital Planning Commission will decide whether to go forward with Frank Gehry’s plan for a Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.

The Gehry design is, well, Gehry-esque: it reimagines the traditional monumental form, using huge metal screens to depict the landscape of Eisenhower’s Kansan childhood while devoting far less space to his accomplishments in World War II and the White House. (The only significant statue will portray Eisenhower as a barefoot boy, rather than a war leader or president.)

The design has been widely criticized — by the Eisenhower family, by architectural traditionalists and by right-of-center columnists like George Will and David Frum. Some of the critiques are purely aesthetic, but the most important ones are substantive: as planned, the critics argue, the memorial sells the supreme allied commander’s greatness short.

What’s interesting, though, is that by emphasizing Eisenhower’s ordinariness rather than his heroism, Gehry is arguably being conventional rather than radical. As conceived, his memorial would ratify Eisenhower’s current place in our national memory, not revise it.

Gehry’s vision, as The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott writes, implies that while “Eisenhower was a great man ... there were other Eisenhowers right behind him, other men who could have done what he did.” Far from being a bold reimagining, this is a near-perfect summary of the way many Americans already regard their 34th president.

It’s not that Americans don’t like Eisenhower or think fondly of his service to their country. (Jean Edward Smith’s new “Eisenhower in War and Peace” is the latest in a line of briskly selling Ike biographies.) But he is not nearly as beloved as many of his midcentury contemporaries. He’s overshadowed as a war leader both by F.D.R. and by his many colorful subordinates, and his two-term presidency has attracted little of the posthumous enthusiasm that made his “give ’em hell” predecessor a folk hero and his martyred successor an icon.  {One imagines that since Ike cut the marginal tax rate on top bracket income earners from 92% to 91%, there are few in that top bracket that remember him with any particular fondness.}

In a 2011 Gallup poll on the greatest president, Eisenhower came in a lame 12th, in a tie with Jimmy Carter. He performs solidly in scholarly surveys, but he’s frequently ranked behind his prominent 20th-century rivals.

In part, this underestimation is a result of the political persona Eisenhower cultivated — an amiable, grandfatherly facade that concealed a ruthless master politician. In part, it reflects the fact that his presidency has always lacked an ideological cheering section. Liberals (who preferred Adlai Stevenson) generally remember the Eisenhower administration as a parenthesis between heroic Democratic epochs, while conservatives (who favored Robert Taft) recall a holding pattern before their Goldwater-to-Reagan ascent.

But ultimately Eisenhower is underrated because his White House leadership didn’t fit the template of “greatness” that too many Americans pine for from their presidents. He was not a man for grand projects, bold crusades or world-historical gambles. There was no “Ike revolution” in American politics, no Eisen-mania among activists and intellectuals, no Eisenhower realignment.

Instead, his greatness was manifested in the crises he defused and the mistakes he did not make. He did not create unaffordable entitlement programs, embrace implausible economic theories, or hand on unsustainable deficits to his successors. He ended a stalemated conflict in Korea, kept America out of war in Southeast Asia, and avoided the kind of nuclear brinkmanship that his feckless successor stumbled into. He did not allow a series of Middle Eastern crises to draw American into an Iraq-style intervention. He did not risk his presidency with third-rate burglaries or sexual adventurism. He was decisive when necessary, but his successes — prosperity, peace, steady progress on civil rights — were just as often the fruit of strategic caution and masterly inaction.

Perhaps “other men” could have achieved this combination of steadiness, competence and successful crisis management, as the Eisenhower memorial’s impersonal design seems to suggest. But few of them have occupied the Oval Office these last 50 years. Instead, from the 1960s down through the eras of George W. Bush and Barack Obama — from “pay any price, bear any burden” to “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” — the defining vices of the modern presidency have been hubris, recklessness and overreach.

This is why the memorial controversy really matters. Eisenhower deserves a monument that puts him where he belongs — in the very first rank of American leaders — because the nation needs to be reminded of where true presidential greatness lies. Plenty of politicians combine inspiring rhetoric with grand ambitions. Far fewer have the gifts required to steer the ship of state away from every rock and reef, and bring it, eight long years later, undamaged into port.