Eisenhower 2
Eisenhower 2Eisenhower
"I do not want to be president of the United States, and I want no political office or political connection of any kind," said General Dwight David Eisenhower to a stream of prominent visitors to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe, near Paris during the last half of 1951. Despite Eisenhower's often-repeated declaration against holding political office, American business leaders and politicians continued to urge him to run for the White House. They told him that the "stalemated" Korean War, and scandals in Washington divided the nation and took away from it's prestige. Eisenhower admirers work laboriously to persuade the general that he was what the American people wanted and needed for the country; however Eisenhower loathed the partisanship of the political arena and lacked any burning desire to hold public office. In early 1952 Eisenhower hesitantly entered politics, and ran for president under the Republican ticket.
"My first day at the president's desk," Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his diary on January, 21 1953. "Plenty of worries and difficult problems. But…today [just seems] like a continuation of all I've been doing since July of 1941-even before that. To Eisenhower the political game was a new experience, but all the demands of the presidency were very familiar. As Supreme Allied commander and Army Chief of Staff, Eisenhower developed beliefs and ways of doing things that would shape his presidency. During the months between his election and his inauguration, Eisenhower carefully organized an administration that reflected his style of leadership, and his assessment of the needs of the nation.
Eisenhower took a view towards dealing with congress that many of his predecessors didn't. Many of the presidents before Eisenhower seemed to be "at war" with congress, but Eisenhower decided that nothing would get done without cooperation on both sides. Because he enjoyed only slight Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Eisenhower worked assiduously to win the support of all factions of his party. When unable to do so, most notably in fights over the Bricker amendment and the investigations into communist subversion, Eisenhower used his power indirectly, and with decidedly mixed results, to disarm his opponents. Yet by the close of the Eighty-third congress in 1954, Eisenhower succeeded in gaining enactment of much of his legislative program and in strengthening his leadership of the republican party. He insisted that his Democratic predecessors had upset the constitutional equilibrium between the White House and Capitol Hill and promised to exercise restraint in order to restore the balance. In addition, he praised the legislature in somewhat textbook-like fashion as a great unifier, the mechanism of democracy that forged consensus. Sometimes Eisenhower complained that legislators were interested in nothing other than their own reelections, and that they were working only for themselves without the peoples best interests at heart. He often felt that Congress was too vulnerable to the influence of pressure groups and special interests which rarely promoted common good. To ensure that legislative action furthered the nation's and...
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