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I Like Ike
I like him quite a bit.
Does someone who likes Ike have a place in the American Republican Party today?
Published in General
Done briskly and efficiently, and with a border patrol that had nothing like today’s personnel and budget.
“In all those things which deal with people’s money, or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative.” -Ike
That must be the part Snarky Maddow really adores.
Very few campaign slogans in history have seemed so apt to me. I’ve been watching Eisenhower videos for a few hours now–trying to figure out what it is about him that’s making me feel something I don’t feel when considering any candidate in the current field.
It’s an unfair and impossible comparison, obviously. No one now alive had the opportunity to do what Eisenhower did–thank God. Obviously, we can’t now have a candidate who planned and carried out the invasion of North Africa, France, and Germany, and became the first Supreme Commander of NATO. No candidate now could give the impression that he had lived through and mastered those times because none of them did.
There is something about him that is likeable. Not loveable, not full of charisma, not the person from who you can’t take away your eyes–but very clearly a full-grown adult with nothing to prove. He truly appears to be someone who took the job only because yes, he supposed it was true that he was good at big jobs, and probably should do it, given that he knew he could handle that kind of responsibility.
He doesn’t seem to me to convey a trace of the insecurity and narcissism that characterizes almost every contemporary politician. And that makes sense: How could a man be more qualified? He wasn’t someone with “great promise.” He was General Eisenhower: He’d already lived up to that promise. I have to imagine that being the president felt like a challenging and meaningful retirement job, not the summit of his career.
I don’t think anyone could be likeable like Ike now, because no one has the kind of record of accomplishment that would allow him to be so fundamentally at ease with himself.
I like him. I can see why everyone did.
At one point even the Democrats wanted Ike on the ticket. He was a political enigma up until the time he declared as a Republican.
I don’t get the question. Are you saying that today’s Republican Party has no room for “middle-of-the-roaders” like Ike? My take is that we are living in completely different times and a moderate these days is significantly left of Eisenhower.
Ike was clearly a moderate in his time. Then came 20 years of non-stop liberal programs — Medicare, Medicaid, vast expansions of welfare and public housing, etc. — that continue to this day.
Social Security was functioning as intended in the 50s, at the start of the Baby Boom. When Social Security began, there were 40 workers paying into the system for every person receiving checks. Now it’s 4 to 1 with a projection of 2 to 1 in 2030. And Medicare is in the same boat. It is, to borrow an over-used word from our liberal friends, unsustainable.
Ike would be trying to reign in government programs in the 21st century. He sounds like a modern-day Republican to me.
I’d say, Americans do not know it, but they know that they need politicians. Americans are uniquely incapable of thinking about good gov’t as a whole–people tend to assume it means democracy, then how do you deal with disagreements, & how could you trust other people to sacrifice when you would not, &c.
Eisenhower had the sense of duty Americans once learned about in school–I mean about Roman statesmen. But he had none of the harshness. He seemed like a democrat & yet had aristocratic habits. He made America look like it might achieve this, too. Americans were in a position to be looked down upon by someone quite so glorious as him & yet he never looked down on them. He was almost a Washington, but he also shook your hand.
Me too. He spoke in a manner that was very reassuring. You get the immediate sense that he has his head screwed on straight. He knows what he is talking about and is confident without being boastful. Sort of a perfect father figure.
Are you researching a new tome on Ike? Loved your Thatcher book.
His presidential library in Abilene, Kansas, is the only one I’ve ever visited (I’ve been there multiple times), so I can’t compare it to others. The war era is more than half of the museum, and quite a bit of it is dedicated to the D-Day decision, and what was riding on that call. The letter that he hand-wrote, taking full responsibility for its possible failure, is there.
Actually, the presidential years seem more like an afterthought in a way. Once you make a call like that, the museum seems to indicate by its design, nothing even comes close.
Let me add something that really disappoints me–what I have heard about the Eisenhower memorial. Maybe Eisenhower is too big to fit today’s America, never mind the GOP. Maybe this is something the folks on Ricochet should consider. What memorial that singular man deserves-
I have no idea what he’d make of the US in 2015, and it’s interesting to wonder. And I’m not sure what I meant by the question, either: I was hoping the responses would help me figure it out.
I’m groping at it, but I just feel certain that no one–of any age–looked at Ike and had an uneasy sense that Ike might just be too young and inexperienced for the job. There’s just something about him that comes across to me–from the videos, anyway, I never saw him in person–as adult in a way no one does now. And obviously, that’s true: No one could have faced a greater test of leadership prior even to considering a political career.
And he gives the impression–it’s hard to put into words–of representing the best of the American temperament. He was obviously no longer an innocent. But he was an optimist in principle, which is different from being a naif or in denial. He seems to have been guided by a strong sense of decency. I can’t say quite what I’m responding to. But I like him. I don’t respond that way to any contemporary politician. I look at voting records, accomplishments, I think, “Perhaps he wouldn’t be so bad,” I think, “He’d have to be an improvement, at least,” but that basic feeling–I like him–isn’t something I can find in myself.
Well to be fair there is no room in the democratic party for us grover cleveland democrats.
Very few presidents have followed a similar career trajectory. The other ones that come to mind are George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Ulysses S. Grant.
Mitch Daniels had that feel, for his short time on the national stage. I also have the feeling of listening to an adult when I hear Ike that I don’t when I hear anyone running now or who has run recently. But I suspect that Mitch Daniels would have come close.
Claire – part of the problem is that that type of man is just gone now. Everyone wants to be JFK. Everyone wants to be young. Men are asked to express emotion that, my guess, would have made Ike squirm.
And here comes the controversial part. Part of the reason, maybe, just maybe, that today’s politicians are less, for lack of a better word, stoic than Ike is because the electorate, and particularly the need to convey your message to women and non-anglo groups, means taking an approach that requires ditching that stern but compassionate male personna that worked for so long. Women used to vote like their husbands. Now, they vote as they like. And there are a lot more unmarried women voting. The country was dominated by a more uniform, anglo culture where that personna was respected and valued (and still is today in many of those same cultural circles). And Ike’s personality would never sell to that new multicultural electorate. One of the side effects of a multicultural society is that it tends to throw out the parts of the dominant culture that were actually beneficial in making room for other viewpoints.
Don’t shoot me, please.
I think that has to be right. I think what we’re sensing is the difference between men who have spent their lives trying to climb up the greasy pole and a man who had absolutely no need of that job for his vanity or to satisfy a longing for power. He did it because he knew he could handle it, and because no one was more qualified to convey the message he did–and in doing so, persuaded many when, I suspect, few others would have been successful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNbfa1QyYg
Claire,
I think I posted his D-Day speech a while ago. I love it. There were 10,000 casualties on the first day. Nobody thought that was a problem. Everyone knew that it had to be done and by doing it a great nightmare was finally being brought to an end.
“Your task will not be an easy one.”
Regards,
Jim
I’m one of them, and nothing about it makes me more long for politicians who sound as if they might be good at doing what men do, as opposed to making sure I have plenty of welfare handouts but no sense of a role I could play, meaningfully, in a country that is still a stable and peaceful land of opportunity–one in the hands of capable adults who deeply understand that the rest of the world is not like the United States.
I would hardly shoot you. I agree that we’ve failed to do a good job of explaining to women that the opportunities for them would be so much better for them if they refused to be patronized and held themselves to much higher standards.
Ike didn’t go to national security briefings. He chaired them. He was the most knowledgeable guy in the room. In today’s dangerous world now more than ever we need a man like Ike. I really wish David Petraeus would run for President. I think he has a lot Ike potential. Claire touched on this. People voted for Ike based on what he accomplished. He was a proven commodity. Unlike today where people tend to vote on a a persons potential and on how they make us feel.
I just don’t think the electorate believes that United States is fundamentally different anymore. It’s not the candidates’ fault. Even the best statesman can only lead an electorate so far – and never to a point that is beyond their belief system. And the electorate just does not believe that the United States is different. Without that sense of purpose, they want bread and circus. The serious adult statesman would never get their vote. And of course the electorate cares so much about the bread and circus because the federal government has become the main purveyor of bread and circus for many. That crowds out any chance of putting value on the role of the U.S. in the world and the role of a limited government in the U.S. – both of which imply that the president be an adult and treat you like an adult.
Fundamentally, its all about culture. Unfortunately, our culture has changed. The recent generations were just not taught about how unique the country and its mission really are. And voters of all generations have come to see the role of the federal government as provider. That is why the president must empathize with your daily needs. Uncle Sam provides for them, so you better vote for the guy to whom you can relate.
And the stern, principled, clear cut fatherly figure of Ike would never meet that test.
I feel this way too. I wonder if it’s a yearning for adult leadership in a nation that has become more and more childish since 1960.
Run this past the common-sense test. What’s more likely, really–that everyone around us has become more childish, or that we’ve become older? When I really subject that one to scrutiny, I wonder. (I’d swear everyone is becoming more childish, but I wonder if I’m making sense. Is it possible that I’m becoming old and irritable? I wouldn’t be the first.)
I can offer two anecdotes about Ike. A few years ago I worked with an elderly Irish immigrant who emigrated to the US in the Fifties from northern Ireland, when he was in his twenties, and had attended church as a child with C.S. Lewis.
He said that during the war, an aunt with a baby carriage or shopping cart was having difficulty crossing a road due to heavy traffic, (likely caused by the presence of many American soldiers). Suddenly, a car stopped and Gen. Eisenhower emerged, and he helped her across the road. I imagine he was being both kindly and trying to set an example to American troops as to how to behave as guests in war-time Britain.
My dad was serving in the Army during WWII in north Africa, ferrying men and war material across an inlet in Bizzerte, Tunisia, when a jeep rolled up and out stepped Gen. Eisenhower. When my dad and the other soldiers moved to salute, Ike insisted on shaking hands instead. I assume he did this to show he valued them as human beings.
There’s a speciality American boutique in Paris that sells things like pancake mix.
The owners of the store have, I think, retired. I hope. They used to be Monsieur and Madame Michel, and I worked for them as a fille au pair. Monsieur opened the store to thank Americans. Because his earliest memories were the troops and the candy bars. Everything about America filled him with trust and gratitude, to the point that he left his infant son in my care. US troops not only knew how to behave, but imprinted themselves so positively in his mind that improbably, he only wanted an American teenager as a babysitter. Americans were inherently qualified. “Here’s the key to our apartment, everything in it, and our firstborn. We have to work at the store, but we know we can trust you. You’re an American teenager.”
The store is still open and still selling Aunt Jemima’s.
David Stockman is another big Ike fan. A major point seems to be being willing to exact taxes to pay for government. As opposed to running endless deficits, I find nothing to argue with. But as others have observed, there’s very little, if any, discussion in Stockman’s work (I’m thinking primarily of “The Great Deformation”) relating to his appreciation of Ike that at all challenges the growth of government from the post-civil-war era to his own. Spending less than you take in is a good idea. But maybe so is not taking in as much.