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131 11 EISENHOWER REDUX I had no opportunity during Eisenhower’s eight years in office to ask him even one question, much less get a full scale interview, but almost two years after he left office, he agreed to give me an hour at his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I was writing Black Man’s America, and, like lots of other people , I had a number of lingering questions about his civil rights record in the White House. When I arrived and was shown to his office, I found the former president congenial and relaxed, leaning back in the chair behind his desk as we talked. The only ground rule for the interview was that my article would contain no direct quotes. Referring to the 1956 election, Eisenhower emphasized that he had been shocked at the number of Negroes voting “against” him despite his civil rights effort. He said he was puzzled after scanning the election returns from Negro areas, Harlem in particular. He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t even believe it. He’d expected much more support from Negroes. He acknowledged that Nixon had made a mistake by not seeking the Negro vote on a national scale in 1960, and specifically recalled that he mentioned to Nixon while in New York the matter of dropping by Harlem and explaining the GOP’s record. After returning to headquarters that evening, Ike said he learned that Nixon had been too busy and had eliminated the Harlem stop, a decision the former President attributed to the back-breaking aspects of campaigning rather than willful neglect. As far as his refusal during his first term as president to speak to Negro groups, Eisenhower said this was consistent with his policy of limiting engagements before separate racial, religious or nationality groups. As a former army commander, he believed all citizens were Americans and part of the whole, and that a president should appear before across-the-board groupings. Asked about the oft-heard criticism of his refusal to talk with Negro leaders at the White House, he said he wasn’t aware there was such a feeling. He said this wasn’t relayed to him by any of his advisors but that they Eisenhower Redux 132 knew about his feelings on dividing Americans and probably hesitated to ask him to break the policy. I found it incredible that no one on Eisenhower’s staff had brought to his attention the barbs the black press was hurling at him, particularly in his last term. In an interview after he left the White House, Fred Morrow had told me he wrote many memos of this nature to White House aides. Could they have neglected or even refused to share them with the boss? Upon giving that some thought, I concluded that Ike’s professed ignorance of any black criticism of his administration could also have been an example of a tactic he often used at news conferences when he didn’t want to address an issue: he’d simply state he wasn’t aware of it. I mentioned Eisenhower’s appearance before a black publishers’ summit , which had left a sour taste because he espoused “patience” in the civil rights arena. He still seemed puzzled about that, and said he couldn’t see why this would offend them. He then suggested that perhaps he was misunderstood . He said that he wasn’t telling Negroes to do nothing, but rather to keep pressing but not become so disillusioned they “quit” or become “fanatical.” To me, that explanation was even worse. How could 18 million Americans “quit” their struggle for the rights guaranteed to all citizens by the Constitution? What would lead any responsible person to believe that black Americans who had fought for their country with honor and bravery in two world wars might become “fanatical” on the final leg of the road to equality? And how did Ike define “fanaticism”? Besides desegregation of Washington, D.C., the Little Rock troop intervention , and appointment of Negroes to key U.S. posts, Eisenhower cited the passage of the first civil rights bill in more than eighty years as his biggest civil rights success. He described the legislative battle as a long and dreary road but one that ended with a law with some teeth in it to cope with voting problems. (This was an incredible observation as well, because if there was anything everybody else agreed upon about the...

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