Eisenhower (43 page)

“Faubus broke his word,” Eisenhower exclaimed. The president, Brownell observed, reacted as though the governor were a military subordinate who had failed him in battle. Brownell was less shocked. To him, Faubus was “a small-town politician” placing the national interest beneath his own reelection. Whatever the reason, Faubus had now backed himself into a corner. Compromise failed. Force would substitute.

On September 20, the governor was scheduled to appear before Judge Davies, but he skipped the hearing. In his absence, his lawyers asked Davies to recuse himself. Davies, his right eye bloodshot from a burst blood vessel, coolly refused, finding that the Faubus team’s affidavit in support of his removal was “not legally sufficient.” Their motion denied, the Faubus lawyers walked out, to the astonishment of Thurgood Marshall, there on behalf of the NAACP. That was Friday. Judge Davies ordered the black students admitted to school on Monday morning and specifically ordered Faubus not to obstruct. At 6:25 p.m., Faubus ordered the troops removed.

Having stirred public anger for weeks, Faubus became suddenly quiet. He left the state for a governors’ conference at Sea Island, Georgia. Increasingly furious, Eisenhower urged the people of Little Rock to demonstrate their respect for the law and their sympathy for the difficulties faced by the nine black high school students. He wanted company and summoned the Gang to join him. Ellis Slater, Bill Robinson, and George Allen all made the trip. On Sunday, they played eighteen holes at the Newport Country Club, then Ike cooked steaks for his foursome, joined by Mamie. Later, the men played three hours of bridge. Slater and the president beat Allen and Robinson by thirty-six points.

Beneath the easy atmosphere, however, Eisenhower, like the rest of the nation, braced for Monday. He had good reason to worry.

Egged on by a friend of the governor’s who insinuated himself into the crowd, hundreds of white men and women—their ranks swollen by Klansmen and White Citizens’ Council members—wheeled on any black person they could find. Four black reporters were among the first victims. “Kill them, kill them,” one person screamed. The students themselves, neatly dressed, dignified, and frightened, were surrounded by a spitting, screaming mob. The state’s National Guard, as ordered by Faubus, was gone, and the children defenseless. They made it into school, but by 11:30 a.m. the crowd outside the campus had grown increasingly violent. The police removed the children for their own safety. “I hope they bring out eight dead niggers,” one leader outside snarled. In Newport that night, Ike and Mamie wrapped up their day with a movie:
Song of the South
.

Woodrow Wilson Mann, the well-meaning mayor of Little Rock, knew he could not turn to his state government for help; it was, after all, the state government that was instigating the violence. After sending the nine students home on Monday, Mann anxiously waited. When Tuesday arrived, chaos ensued. Mann cabled Eisenhower for help:

THE IMMEDIATE NEED FOR FEDERAL TROOPS IS URGENT. THE MOB IS MUCH LARGER IN NUMBERS AT 8 AM THAN AT ANY TIME YESTERDAY PEOPLE ARE CONVERGING ON THE SCENE FROM ALL DIRECTIONS MOB IS ARMED AND ENGAGING IN FISTICUFFS AND OTHER ACTS OF VIOLENCE. SITUATION IS OUT OF CONTROL AND POLICE CANNOT DISPERSE THE MOB I AM PLEADING WITH YOU AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE INTERESTS OF HUMANITY LAW AND ORDER AND BECAUSE OF DEMOCRACY WORLDWIDE TO PROVIDE THE NECESSARY FEDERAL TROOPS WITHIN SEVERAL HOURS. ACTION BY YOU WILL RESTORE PEACE AND ORDER AND COMPLIANCE WITH YOUR PROCLAMATION.

Ike was out of choices. That morning, two years to the day after he suffered his heart attack, Eisenhower conferred with Brownell and General Maxwell Taylor. They now accepted the need to dispatch American troops to suppress a southern city, precisely the course that Eisenhower had regarded as unimaginable just two months earlier. Taylor favored the National Guard, but mobilizing those units would take time, and the Arkansas Guard was understandably confused, having just been withdrawn from the scene by Faubus. At 12:15 p.m., Eisenhower authorized the deployment of regular Army troops, drawn from the famed 101st Airborne. Seven minutes later, he signed the order. Half an hour after that, he decided to return to Washington. He left behind Mamie, who was still recuperating, but he called her through the tense evening, speaking to her twice before appearing on national television.

Eisenhower addressed the nation from his desk in the Oval Office. He wanted to speak “from the house of Lincoln, of Jackson and of Wilson.” Behind him were four portraits: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Robert E. Lee. Eisenhower was careful to frame the confrontation in terms of not his own views but those of the Constitution, the Court, and obedience to their congruent commands. He had labored over this address extensively, meticulously editing, softening its hardest edges. An early draft, for instance, described the district court as repeatedly “ordering” desegregation to commence, and Eisenhower changed that to “directing”; where that version said persons were “directed” not to interfere, he emended it to “instructed.”

Eisenhower refused to blame the South or the citizens of Little Rock for the crisis. Instead, he reviewed the sequence of events that had brought about the clash—from the Court’s ruling in
Brown
to the actions of the Little Rock school board to the approval of the desegregation plan by the district court in Arkansas and the judge’s issuance of orders to restrain those who sought to obstruct the plan. Once those orders were issued, Eisenhower explained, there was no longer room for disobedience. “Proper and sensible observance of the law then demanded the respectful obedience which the nation has the right to expect from all the people. This, unfortunately, has not been the case at Little Rock.”

Only once in his address did he seem close to anger, and it was, predictably, over the Cold War ramifications of this episode. “Our enemies,” he said, “are gloating over this incident and using it to misrepresent our nation.” He closed with a thinly veiled warning, presented as an enticement. “If resistance to the Federal Court order ceases at once, the further presence of Federal troops will be unnecessary,” he said, “and the City of Little Rock will return to its normal habits of peace and order, and a blot upon the fair name and high honor of our nation in the world will be removed.” If not? He did not say. The whole address took thirteen minutes; when it was over, he called to check on Mamie.

In Little Rock, the arrival of federal troops had precisely the intended effect. The racists who were brave enough to confront defenseless high school students shrank back in the face of the U.S. Army. Under the orderly supervision of the 101st Airborne, Little Rock’s black boys and girls were escorted into school to exercise their constitutional rights. Eventually, the mob lost heart and melted away. By November, the federal troops had been withdrawn, and though the students continued to suffer brutish indignities, they persevered. On May 25, Ernest Green became the first black student ever to graduate from Central High. A young black minister sat with Green’s mother: Martin Luther King Jr.

The showdown in Little Rock in 1957 did not solve the riddle of Eisenhower’s views on segregation. As Ike had long feared, some southern segregationists responded to integration orders by closing schools altogether. Indeed, Faubus helped spearhead that movement, winning approval from the Arkansas State Legislature for a bill that allowed him to close schools and lease them to private groups. After the 1957 school year, he shut down Central High and reopened it the following fall as a private school for whites only. His actions alarmed some Little Rock residents—some community leaders had lobbied for respect for the law even at the height of the confrontation—but Faubus was cheered across the South as he completed his expedient transformation from socialist youth to redneck officeholder. He served four more terms as governor of Arkansas.

For Eisenhower, Little Rock was both tragic and redemptive. Even before
Brown
, Eisenhower had dreaded the South’s response to court-ordered desegregation. With Little Rock, his worst fears were realized, and he deployed troops with the gravest unease. Yet Little Rock would come to stand—incorrectly, in one respect—as the high mark of Eisenhower’s commitment to civil rights. For while Eisenhower did defend integration with the full force of federal authority, there is no evidence that he did so out of sympathy for civil rights. He simply could not allow a governor to defy the orders of a federal court. As Eisenhower well recognized, that would have marked the effective end of federal authority and the acceptance of nullification as a constitutional principle. Race motivated Faubus throughout the crisis, but it did not drive Eisenhower.

In fact, Eisenhower’s approach to civil rights was more evident in the debate over that year’s bill on the issue than it was in Little Rock. At Little Rock, Ike was forced into a confrontation he sought to avoid but was determined not to lose. In his negotiations with Congress, by contrast, he moved cautiously forward. He compromised when he felt it necessary and achieved modest but real progress, joined by centrist elements of both parties. That was how Eisenhower imagined civilized, orderly progress.

When it was over, Brownell, the architect of so much desegregation in the Eisenhower years—the man who recommended Warren and Brennan, who stocked the southern courts with sympathetic judges, who wrote and lobbied for the Civil Rights Act of 1957—could take no more. He had warned Eisenhower that he intended to leave after the first term but had delayed his departure because of Little Rock. Now that the crisis had subsided, it was time for him to go. He worked hard on his resignation letter, drafting it by hand, extensively editing and refining it. He submitted it in October, and Eisenhower accepted it with regret and acknowledgment that Brownell had supplied the Department of Justice—and the nation—with “effective leadership, steadfastness of purpose and your own devotion to principle.”

“I shall be forever thankful,” the president concluded.

No sooner had Little Rock subsided than the American people were roiled again, this time from above. It was a cool October evening in Washington, where a weeklong series of meetings brought together scientists from the United States and the Soviet Union in a tentative Cold War exchange of collaboration and mutual suspicion. As the participants enjoyed a reception at the Soviet embassy, a reporter from the
New York Times
burst into the room with a breaking story out of Moscow. Tass, he said, was reporting that the Soviet Union had launched an earth-orbiting satellite, a scientific achievement that American and Soviet scientists had been pursuing for months. Richard Porter, an American who was part of the conference, tracked down another member of the delegation and whispered: “It’s up.” As word trickled through the crowd, Lloyd Berkner, America’s official representative to the international committee hosting the conference, graciously acknowledged the work of the Soviet scientists. “I wish to make an announcement,” he called out. “I’ve just been informed by the
New York Times
that a Russian satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement.” The Soviets beamed.

That was an uncommonly sanguine reaction on “
Sputnik
night.” The specter of a Soviet eye peering down from the sky sent Americans into an orbit of their own. Though hardly a technological marvel, the 183-pound aluminum sphere traveled at eighteen thousand miles per hour and was able to circle the earth every ninety-five minutes. On the satellite’s first passes over the United States, there were four sightings: two from Columbus, Ohio; one from Terre Haute, Indiana; and another from Whittier, California. NBC and CBS both interrupted their programming to broadcast the sounds of the ping that
Sputnik
emitted. News of the launch dwarfed all other stories—nudging aside the election of Jimmy Hoffa as president of the Teamsters and even news from Little Rock, where Faubus declared that he had acted in the tradition of Robert E. Lee in choosing loyalty to the people of his state over obligation to the federal government.
Sputnik
’s literal place above America spooked a Cold War jittery nation.

Eisenhower at first was barely troubled. He was in Gettysburg on “
Sputnik
night.” He had played eighteen holes of golf that morning, then inspected his cattle and toured a neighboring pig farm in the evening. He was home by 6:30 and spent the rest of the night with family, which he did not bother to interrupt to respond to reports of the Soviet satellite. He had some good reason for nonchalance. Unbeknownst to the American people, the U.S. government was already conducting regular overflights of the Soviet Union using the U-2 spy plane. So Eisenhower knew that the United States had long been exploiting this form of military reconnaissance. Moreover,
Sputnik
in theory validated the shaky defense of the U-2, namely, that flying through the airspace of another nation did not technically violate its sovereignty. In one other sense
Sputnik
validated Ike: he had proposed “Open Skies” at the Geneva Summit in 1955, and the Soviets had rejected it. Now the two sides had secretly achieved what the Soviets had publicly disdained—common occupation of the high ground.

All that made
Sputnik
initially seem inconsequential to the White House. In fact, Adams glibly derided it as a “celestial basketball,” an unfortunate phrase that mainly served to remind critics of his arrogance. For, as the White House soon learned, the public did not share its lack of concern. Within a week, an internal White House analysis concluded that the satellite had significantly altered the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union. In Mexico, editors of scientific journals reported that they were more inclined to seek submissions from the Soviets; in Europe, officials chided the United States for falling behind, and German politicians rethought the American tilt of their neutralism. Japanese Liberal Democrats stepped up their campaign to push U.S. forces off their soil, and Iranian officials were so chagrined that they avoided bringing up
Sputnik
with their American counterparts. Most worrisome was what might happen next. “The peculiar nature and dramatic appeal of the Sputnik, making its passes over every region of the earth, are likely to give it greatest impact among those least able to understand it,” White House analysts concluded. “It will generate myth, legend and superstition of a kind particularly difficult to eradicate or modify, which the Soviet Union can exploit to its advantage, among backward, ignorant, and apolitical audiences particularly difficult to reach.”