From sublime to sinister

I greatly admire Eisenhower, both as allied commander — an almost impossible job, especially with the British pecking at him — and commander in chief. I'm scarcely alone in respect. Historians' ranking of President Dwight Eisenhower has soared in recent years; in the 2024 Greatness Survey White Paper, he came in at #8, one above LBJ.

(You already know who ranked lowest, 11 percentage points behind Andrew Johnson, bibulous reactionary that he was, and a full 17 points short of — and this will sound familiar — crooked-cronies-huddling Warren G. Harding. Now unfamiliar was the 29th president's unaware distance from his friends' banditry.)

What looms exceptional in Eisenhower's favor among political historians was his Republican determination to leave intact Democratic New Deal social programs, namely Social Security, a decision in distinct opposition to systemic GOP sentiment. Eisenhower was a thoughtful conservative: He sought social stability, respected tradition and honored pragmatic precedence, thus instinctively he rebelled at ideological proposals aimed at upending what the American public was by then accustomed to and quite pleased with; again, chiefly, old-age insurance.

As exceptional in my book is that Ike deplored the far right. "Their number is negligible and they are stupid" was the emphatic thrust of his 1954 letter to older brother Edgar. Fraternally steeped in the sort of rotting ignorance now common throughout the Republican rank and file, Edgar had taken Eisenhower the Younger to task for sustaining foreign and domestic policies fashioned by his two Democratic predecessors — adding unwisely that he was being duped by menacing political advisers. Ike let him have it, but good:

How can you say I am getting "bad" advice; why don’t you just assume I am stupid, trying to wreck the nation, and leave our Constitution in tatters? I assure you that you have more reason, based on sixty-four years of contact, to say this than you do to make the bland assumption that I am surrounded by a group of Machiavellian characters who are seeking the downfall of the United States and the ascendancy of socialism and communism in the world.

But, though correct about the 1950s' far right being "stupid," Eisenhower erred in asserting its negligibility. Swarms of avid crackpots were out there, waiting to be led.

A year after his letter to Brother Edgar, William Buckley founded National Review, aiming to mold the discordant factions of social conservatives, economic libertarians and singularly focused anti-communists into a coherent whole — a GOP "fusion" — structured on their communal hatred of world socialism. Largely through the masterful NR contributions of "Come-let-us-reason-together" former Trotskyite Frank Meyer, still employing Hegelian/Marxist synthesis theory, Buckley succeeded. The irony.

There the story might have ended less notoriously, had it not been for Barry Goldwater, Buckley's golden boy. As the latter, Meyer and a few other ultraconservative doctrinaires engaged cerebral quests, the Arizona senator rallied his "woke" base of far-right ideology, which Eisenhower had aptly labeled "stupid." Their numbers, however, were not "negligible"; this was no "tiny splinter group."

More irony followed. Otherwise keen political observers mused that Goldwater's historic trouncing by LBJ in '64 was possibly the Republican Party's beginning of a swift end. If only. In the 1970s Goldwaterism morphed even more hideously into the "New Right," an opportunistic politico assemblage of Moliérean Tartuffes and assorted wingnuts. (The movement's Creator from Arizona, by the way, disowned the whole lot of 'em, disdaining the unworkable mixture of religion and politics — the clash of uncompromising Christianism and necessarily negotiable governance.)

From there, imagine the pictorial pages of a Republican history being flipped rapidly before your eyes. In seconds you witness the emergence of venomous Gingrichism, intensified evangelical fundamentalism, George W. Bush's brutish unitary executive theory, the right's unquestioning hyperpartisanship — all culminating in the vivid pseudoconservatism, rightist extremism and post-Weimer Republic politics of the vicious Donald J. Trump.

It is well that 20th-century medicine was unable to extend the life of Dwight David Eisenhower into the 21st century. If it had, this coming October he'd turn 135. Enter my imagination. On that birthday, Ike would again assess the state of the American union, the nation he led in helping defeat global fascism, and in irremediable sorrow pull out his old regulation Army pistol — and blow his brains out.