Mr. Nichols was on Tavis Smiley's show on PBS last year and had the following to say about Ike... I think his words speak volumes about what a great man Dwight D. Eisenhower was.
"I don't want this to sound too political, because I'm really not political; I'm a scholar. But most of the histories were written by people who were inclined in a liberal-Democratic direction, and therefore, appropriately treasured Truman and JFK and Lyndon Johnson.
And so in a lot of cases, the professors, the people who wrote the history books, just didn't even encourage their graduate students to go do this research. Somebody could have had this book many years ago, but the researches involved in looking at documents, not just public statements, that's the problem with Eisenhower, because people were, I think legitimately, disappointed in how passionate or how lacking in passion his public statements were.
But he did important things. For example, he desegregated the District of Columbia - that hadn't been done by his predecessor. He finished desegregating the armed forces when most of the textbooks give Harry Truman credit for that, but Truman issued the executive order and didn't enforce it very well.
Eisenhower engineered the passage of the first civil rights bill in 82 years. He above all appointed important judges. He appointed five men to the Supreme Court, all of whom were pro-civil rights, pro-Brown appointees."
Well, we think of them legitimately because the acts of 1964 and '65 are monumental. There's no question of how important they are. And so I guess the distinction I would make is in the 1950s - not the 1960s - in the 1950s, Eisenhower was more progressive than Kennedy or Johnson or Truman in civil rights.
Now, when we get to the sixties, they are different about it. But I would point out that Eisenhower supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and in fact put strong public pressure on Barry Goldwater to support that act and repudiate his vote against it after he was president. And he supported it and he urged Republicans to support it, so it's hard to make that comparison, Tavis, exactly, because they're in different eras.
The fifties were not like the sixties, and nobody - people do criticize Eisenhower for not speaking out more forcefully, but he was a military man. He hadn't won the war in Europe by making speeches; it was not his temperament to do that, but neither in the fifties did JFK or LBJ speak out on these matters, and when it came to sending the troops into Little Rock, the Democrats were highly critical of him for doing that.
"[Eisenhower's] judicial appointments are so important; I think of Frank Johnson in Alabama who made the decision on the Montgomery bus boycott and made the decision in 1965 to force Governor Wallace to allow the march to Selma, and Frank Johnson, an Eisenhower appointee, spent 44 years on the federal bench and rendered such great service.
And Eisenhower just would not appoint segregationists to those positions. He refused to do so, whereas when Kennedy came into office - this is back to your comparison - Kennedy came into office in '61 and '62 and he began appointing segregationists again. Now, Kennedy did change directions in 1963, and he deserves credit for that. But up to that point, Eisenhower was really ahead of them in many regards, and above all with his judicial appointments."
Sadly, Ike's granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower, chose to endorse Barack Obama in the Washington Post back in February. She says she's a lifelong Republican but couldn't even be troubled to mention John McCain or any GOP candidates in her rationale for backing Obama.
Susan says:
"It is in this great tradition of crossover voters that I support Barack Obama's candidacy for president. If the Democratic Party chooses Obama as its candidate, this lifelong Republican will work to get him elected and encourage him to seek strategic solutions to meet America's greatest challenges. To be successful, our president will need bipartisan help."
If she looked at John McCain more closely, she'd see that he is in the mold of her grandfather, a quiet, honorable man who knows all too well the sacrifice paid for our freedoms. Ike may not have been the most eloquent speaker but he led by his deeds and actions (as shown by Mr. Nichols' testimony). I believe John McCain is a man in that same mold. Obama has lofty rhetoric and inspires many with his blank slate promises but his liberal ideology and shifting promises are a bad recipe for America and the free world. Sadly, Susan Eisenhower, has fallen into the trap of believing that we must befriend liberals and become like them in order to achieve bipartisan cooperation. Abandoning the values that made the GOP great, the values of Lincoln, TR, Eisenhower and Reagan will not save the GOP or America. I hope when McCain wins the election she speaks as glowingly about him as she did a few short months ago about the Obamessiah and his church of HOPE.
Speaking of Obama... read up on what Obama's mama (who grew up in Eisenhower's Kansas during the 50s) thought of Ike by clicking here.
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