Eisenhower (20 page)

Vinson was unable to corral the difficult personalities and equally failed in bringing the Court to terms with the full meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. As a result, his death in 1953 gave Eisenhower the opportunity to energize the Court with a leader.

Vinson and Ike had been friends, bridge partners, and mutual admirers. News of his sudden death startled Eisenhower, then vacationing in Denver. He released a statement lauding Vinson’s “efficiency, dignity and integrity.” At the funeral, held at the National Cathedral in Washington, Ike paid his respects quietly, stone-faced and grave. A few seats away, Truman, another friend and confidant of the chief justice’s—their shared card game was poker—fought tears.

With Vinson buried, Eisenhower quickly turned to the question of his successor. He relied on Brownell, whose combination of legal and political acumen made him an extraordinarily capable judge of judges. In Ike’s first and most important appointment, however, the president had already made a commitment, albeit a nonbinding one. After winning the 1952 nomination, Eisenhower had spent time with the governor of California, Earl Warren. When California conservatives floated the idea of placing MacArthur’s name on the state’s November ballot, some aides worried that it could hurt Ike’s prospects by splitting Republican votes and tipping the election to Stevenson (Truman had carried California in 1948). Warren, then in his third term as governor, reassured Eisenhower that a MacArthur candidacy would go nowhere. No one knew California politics better than Warren, and his “advice was on the mark,” Brownell recalled.

In those early meetings, Ike grew to like Warren. Both were hearty men, comfortable in the outdoors, strong, straightforward, and likable. Both were veterans, though Warren’s service hardly compared with Ike’s. Both were patriots, devoted to the service of their nation. As moderate Republicans with opponents on both left and right, they had common enemies, though their stiffest challenges tended to come from conservatives. And though Warren was more proficient in domestic affairs and Ike in international relations, both believed strongly that America needed to be engaged in the world, and both regarded the nation’s isolationists as provincial. Even their backgrounds bore some similarities. Like Eisenhower, Warren was raised in modest circumstances: his father was a railroad man blackballed by the Southern Pacific in Los Angeles who then moved his family to rural Bakersfield and raised Warren and his sister there. And, perhaps most important, both were practical and largely nonideological. Ike championed the middle way; Warren eschewed partisanship, refusing to endorse candidates in most partisan races (one of those annoyed by that practice was Nixon, who asked for Warren’s support in his first congressional campaign but did not receive it).

Eisenhower had considered appointing Warren to the cabinet, most seriously weighing him as a candidate for secretary of the interior. Then, before leaving for Korea, he phoned Warren to tell him he regretted not offering him a cabinet post but pledging to find an appropriate role for him later. In that conversation, Eisenhower told Warren—how firmly was later debated—that he would give him the “first vacancy” on the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the administration would keep Warren in mind for other openings. Brownell lit upon the idea of making him solicitor general, where Warren—who had not practiced law since moving from state attorney general to governor in 1943—could freshen his legal skills while waiting for a vacancy. Warren pondered the offer, then accepted on August 3, 1953, in a coded cable from Europe.

Returning home later that month, Warren quietly began to wrap up his governorship, announcing on September 3 that he would not seek a fourth term. Then, before the White House had a chance to announce his appointment, Vinson died. Warren assumed the position was his since Ike had promised him the “first vacancy.” To Eisenhower, however, the promise had been offered for an associate justice seat, not for that of chief justice, and he did not feel bound to deliver that position to Warren.

Rather than tap Warren, Ike weighed possible candidates: he considered John W. Davis, a Democrat and the lawyer representing South Carolina in its campaign to maintain school segregation; several leading circuit court judges; and Arthur Vanderbilt, chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Brownell admired Justice Jackson and briefly considered elevating him to chief justice and appointing a new associate justice, but Jackson’s squabbles with Black had sullied his reputation, and as a New Deal Democrat, Jackson was hardly right for Ike’s first nomination to the Court. Further proving that he did not consider himself bound to Warren, Eisenhower sounded John Foster Dulles out regarding the secretary of state’s interest in the position, but Dulles declined, saying he was “highly complimented” but more interested in continuing in his “present post.” Eisenhower never mentioned that offer to his attorney general.

Warren, meanwhile, played what cards he had. He called on friends with ties to the White House and then departed for Santa Rosa Island, off the California coast, where he made himself hard to reach while letting Eisenhower stew in the prospects of breaking his word. Warren announced that he was hunting deer with his sons, but really he was trying to make himself unavailable. “It was kind of a hideout,” he conceded later.

As Brownell and Eisenhower sifted through their options, they decided they needed to be back in touch with Warren to clarify his understanding of the president’s promise. A Coast Guard vessel was dispatched to fetch Warren from Santa Rosa. Back onshore, he conferred with Brownell by telephone. As Brownell attempted to explain that Eisenhower did not feel bound by his earlier pledge, Warren was adamant. “First vacancy,” he insisted, “means first vacancy.”

Sensing that they were making no progress, Brownell proposed a face-to-face meeting. Two days later, the two men met privately at McClellan Air Force Base, outside Sacramento. Warren came in his hunting clothes. They retired to a hangar, where they talked for several hours and Warren continued to insist that Ike honor his word. Brownell flew home, and Warren boasted to a friend that the job was his. Brownell leaked the idea to a few friendly reporters in Washington. Their reports were well received. Finally, Ike made it official the next week, naming Earl Warren as the fourteenth chief justice of the United States.

After confirming Warren’s appointment on September 30, Ike explained the reasons for his choice:

From the very beginning, from the moment of the unfortunate death of my great friend, Mr. Vinson, I have been thinking over this whole thing. I certainly wanted a man whose reputation for integrity, honesty, middle-of-the-road philosophy, experience in Government, experience in the law, were all such as to convince the United States that here was a man who had no ends to serve except the United States, and nothing else. Naturally, I wanted a man who was healthy, strong, who had not had any serious illnesses, and who was relatively young—if you can call a man of approximately my age relatively young—relatively young with respect to some others that I was thinking of.

The press corps was so unsurprised by Eisenhower’s announcement that reporters barely asked about it. Instead, they focused on how the leak had been orchestrated and largely ignored the qualifications of the chief justice designate. Warren, meanwhile, assumed his new duties with alacrity. Because Eisenhower made the appointment while Congress was in recess, Warren took his seat immediately. He left California on the weekend of October 2 and was sworn in on October 5. He arrived without even a robe and had to borrow one. It was a bit long, and he stumbled over the hem on his first trip to the bench. Ike and Mamie traveled up the Hill for the event, sitting in the front row as Warren was administered the oath.

From those who praised the appointment, including his brother Milton, Eisenhower accepted compliments. To those who criticized his selection, including his brother Edgar, Ike was brusque. “To my mind, he is a statesman,” Ike lectured his older brother. “We have too few of these … Here is a man of national stature (and I ask you when we have had any man of national stature appointed to the Supreme Court), of unimpeachable integrity, of middle-of-the-road views, and with a splendid record during his years in active law work.” When Senator William Langer, North Dakota’s slightly wacky representative, held up Warren’s nomination and subjected the chief justice to a bevy of false and salacious charges, Eisenhower fumed at the attack on “one of the finest public servants this country has produced.”

Once Warren was seated, contacts between Eisenhower and him were rare but friendly. Ike invited Warren to a dinner and apologized when he was forced to miss a Court reception for Justice Burton. When Warren was confirmed, he thanked Eisenhower profusely. “No greater honor, responsibility, or opportunity in life could possibly come to me,” he wrote. “I want to say to you that the remaining useful years of my life will be dedicated to serving the cause of justice in a manner justifying the confidence you have reposed in me.”

And yet, even in those early months, there were hints of future conflicts. Eisenhower knew that the Court would soon face the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the maintenance of separate schools for black students, no matter how “equal” their facilities. He also knew that Warren’s record in that area, though by no means fully developed, suggested he would be unlikely to uphold segregation.

Eisenhower’s own musings on that topic suggested he remained ambivalent, just as Brownell had sensed when they first discussed the matter a year earlier. On July 20, Eisenhower lunched with “my great friend” Governor James Byrnes of South Carolina. Byrnes warned the president of the South’s fear of desegregated schools and its determination to resist. One of the four cases consolidated under
Brown v. Board of Education
arose in South Carolina, and Byrnes hinted that the wrong ruling could trigger riots. His graver fear, however, was the same one that troubled Eisenhower: What if school districts, ordered to integrate, simply closed, denying black and white children alike the benefits of a public education? A few days later, Eisenhower wrote in his diary: “Improvement in race relations is one of those things that will be healthy and sound only if it starts locally. I do not believe that prejudices, even palpably unjustified prejudices, will succumb to compulsion.” Eisenhower worried that a Supreme Court ruling that failed to acknowledge those truisms was doomed to produce defiance of the Court. “I believe that federal law imposed upon our states in such a way as to bring about a conflict of the police powers of the states and of the nation, would set back the cause of progress in race relations for a long, long time.”

All through late 1953 and early 1954, Eisenhower fretted to Brownell about Supreme Court action that would invite southern backlash. In November, with Governor Byrnes coming for dinner the next day, Eisenhower shared his fears about schools closing. Brownell offered to reassure Byrnes, suggesting that desegregation could proceed gradually: “Under our doctrine, it would be a period of years.” Still, Eisenhower wondered whether the federal government would be forced to take over schools. As the Supreme Court deliberated over
Brown
, Ike became more and more worried. In January 1954, Brownell, undoubtedly tipped off by Warren, informed Eisenhower that the Court was inclined to rule on the constitutionality of segregation first, then return later to a discussion of how to remedy any constitutional violation that it found. “I don’t know where I stand,” Eisenhower replied, “but I think the best interests of the U.S. demand an answer in keep[ing] with past decisions.”

That remark leaves Ike’s ultimate view unclear but strongly suggests he would have been most comfortable with a ruling that preserved existing institutions—and thus segregation. When Brownell told him that the Court apparently wanted to defer issuing an order for as long as possible, Eisenhower laughingly said he hoped they could put it off until the next administration.

In spite of those remarks, there is no evidence in Eisenhower’s diaries, directives, or actions as president that he was racist or that he was indifferent to the suffering of black Americans. But his instinct for the middle way, so useful in matters of military and budget, was inhibiting in the area of civil rights, as was his appreciation for order. Eisenhower was a Texan by birth and a Kansan by upbringing. Many of his friends were Southerners. He sympathized with them, with their fears of letting their children share classrooms with black children, with their discomfort at upending a fragile social order.

Eisenhower described his “middle way,” as he put it to one confidant, as a rejection of extremism: “Anything that affects or is proposed for masses of humans is wrong if the position it seeks is at either end of possible argument.” That was shrewdly put, though hard to apply in civil rights. Indeed, Ike explicitly exempted “the field of moral values” from his advocacy of centrism; there, he conceded, compromise was sometimes undesirable. Blinkered by his upbringing and friendships, however, Ike ignored his own wise recognition that moral undertakings generally and civil rights specifically warranted unambiguous support rather than compromise.

And yet Ike’s record on civil rights, commencing with the nomination of Warren, helped propel the very movement that discomfited him. He relied heavily on Brownell in making judicial appointments, knowing well that the attorney general was a leading advocate of civil rights. Eisenhower appointed Elbert Parr Tuttle, John Brown, and John Minor Wisdom to the Fifth Circuit, which oversaw the Deep South, and Frank Johnson to the district court in Alabama. Those were inspired choices, and together they enforced federal protections of civil rights with great courage and fortitude. He demanded that the military fulfill its order to desegregate, announced but not enforced under Truman. He ended segregation in the nation’s capital and included a smattering of blacks in appointments to subcabinet positions, sometimes with great symbolic significance. On August 16, 1954, Ernest Wilkins, an assistant secretary of labor, was filling in for the secretary and attended that day’s cabinet meeting. It was the first time an African-American ever attended a meeting of a president’s cabinet.