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3. Eisenhower and Reagan: Comparing Learning Styles
- State University of New York Press
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CHAPTER 3 Eisenhower and Reagan: Comparing Learning Styles “He was enormously popular during his eight years in the White House. In contrast to Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, he not only entered but also left office riding high in the polls. Yet when he stepped down the experts who make it their business to observe presidents closely did not join in the public adulation.”1 The coy ambiguity of this description, written by one of the “experts,” hints at the similarities between the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations. Fred Greenstein, who has studied each of these two presidents carefully, is describing both. There are other similarities. Both leaders saw their election as a call to reduce the role of government in the private sector, as a “mandate for change.” Eisenhower adopted this phrase for the title of one of his autobiographies, wherein he explained, “I wanted to make it clear that we would not be simply a continuation of the New Deal and Fair Deal. . . . In initiating a reversal of trends based on such beliefs—trends which by 1953 were twenty years old—we were setting in motion revolutionary activity.”2 Almost forty years later, Reagan explained his campaign for the presidency in nearly identical terms: “Now, people were rebelling, trying to get government off their back and out of their pocketbooks. . . . After a half century that had given them the New Deal and the ‘Great Society’ 31 and produced a government that took an average of forty-five percent of the national wealth, people were just fed up.”3 Whether or not their elections were “mandates,” both Eisenhower and Reagan clearly were popular. They were the only two postwar presidents (prior to Bill Clinton) to leave office after serving complete terms with public approval ratings surpassing 50 percent.4 Perhaps a good part of their success came from the personal rapport each of these presidents seemed to have with the American public. Eisenhower was a returning war hero who made a bold promise to extricate the United States from Korea—and then delivered. Reagan was a symbol of American resurgence who vowed to eradicate the “malaise” of the 1970s and to replace it with “a spiritual revival in America.”5 Both men radiated a supreme confidence and optimism that responded perfectly to the American public’s yearning, in the early 1950s and late 1970s, for a renewal of American pre-eminence.6 Perhaps some of this popularity also stems, ironically, from both presidents’ unusual ability to dissociate themselves from their own policies. In the 1950s, many observers considered John Foster Dulles to be the real architect of the Eisenhower administration ’s foreign policies—and particularly of its foreign policy failures . Dulles’s somber personality and strident anticommunist moralism made him a lightning rod for popular dissatisfaction. His rhetoric of liberation in Europe and his relentless opposition to communism around the world caused the public, as Richard Immerman put it, “to suspect Dulles of being a paper tiger, and an irresponsibly hypocritical one.”7 Many also suspected Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, of having undue influence over the president, and he took a good deal of the blame for unpopular domestic policies.8 Eisenhower, meanwhile was portrayed by Washington Post cartoonist Herblock as a smiling, vaguely naive weekend golfer. Perhaps he was not entirely “in charge,” but Ike was easy to like. In the Reagan administration, the “troika” of James Baker, Edwin Meese, and Michael Deaver (and, in the second term, Chief of Staff Donald Regan) appeared to be the real policymakers in the White House—to such an extent that the popular media for a time labeled Meese the “acting president.” Scandals eventually forced Meese and Regan out of the White House, but the “lightning-rod effect” that had helped Eisenhower in the 1950s served Reagan equally well in the 1980s.9 A popular image as a grandfatherly 32 Eisenhower and Reagan [3.231.217.209] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:52 GMT) cowboy-actor who cared little for the details of his own policies may not have been particularly inspiring, but nor did it lend itself to pointed criticism. And so, in the cases of both Eisenhower and Reagan, their aides took the blame for their failures, while the presidents themselves took the credit for their successes. Both are aptly described by the term coined to describe the latter: the “Teflon president.” Each man, however, was ultimately responsible for his own administration’s policies. And...