Ronald Reagan preaches “a New Beginning,” but Americans trying to
envision his Administration sometimes find their minds drifting back to
the 1950s. Ike, they tell themselves. Maybe, if he won, Ronald Reagan
would turn into a kind of Eisenhower. Or at any rate, maybe the effect
would be the same: a long quiescence, an essentially sane and
minimalist White House presiding over a “normality” that the nation has
not experienced for a generation. Even some voters who are chilled by
Reagan's politics and his followers have begun to take wistful
consolation in the thought that the future under Reagan might be a kind
of doubling back to the simpler past of the '50s: not the most
ennobling American era, they admit, but not such a bad one either.
Worse things have happened, such as 20 years of assassinations, riots,
Viet Nam and Watergate, OPEC's extortions and the dollar's humiliation.
Aprs Ike, le dluge. Eisenhower's '50s begin to seem an almost golden
time. The Eisenhower-Reagan comparison is an interesting and almost subliminal
effect now forming in the American psyche. It has gone largely
unexamined. It is an intuition, a form of anticipatory nostalgia. It
may also be an exercise in hopeful self-deception. The psychological mechanics are tricky. For years Dwight Eisenhower's historical reputation bumped along in the
lower ranks of American presidencies. One 1962 poll of American
historians and political scientists placed him rather degradingly in
the spot between Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur: a mediocre and
listless ex-soldier summoned from the links. Ike's sarcastic
contemporaries liked to joke about “the bland leading the bland,” about
his goofy grin and the stack of Zane Grey westerns on his night table.
He was forever playing golf or fishing, or otherwise treating the White
House, they said, as a pleasant retirement home. And there was Ike's
language, those famously incoherent press conference sentences that
used to move across an idea like a dense fog; the technical term for
the disease is anacoluthon, the sentence that careers around several
corners and then lands in a ditch, its wheels spinning unintelligibly.
Ike's press secretary, James Hagerty, used to edit the transcripts of
his press conferences before letting him be
quoted directly. But the years since Ike yielded to John Kennedy have changed the
perspective on Eisenhower's '50s. He has profited by comparison with
the Presidents who followed him; Jack Kennedy promised in 1960 to “get
the country moving again,” but American society came down with motion
sickness. Eisenhower's was the last complete presidency that began and
ended without tragedy or trauma and disgrace.
