Seeing Red: Eisenhower, the Republicans, and the Anticommunist Consensus

Abstract

With most of the valuable and revealing sources on political issues during the Eisenhower years having been available for several years, the conventional wisdom concerning the thirty-fourth president has become fairly well established. Interpretations that were considered revisionist ten or fifteen years ago now command wide acceptance from historians who write about Eisenhower. That he was a strong leader in the White House (strong enough, indeed, to call the shots in domestic policy as well as to dominate his relationship with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles); that he could be (and was) alternately manipulative and forcefully directive in order to control events about which he particularly cared; that he had a well developed set of political views and could articulate them clearly (at least when off the public stage)-all of these themes have come to characterize the preponderance of scholarly literature on Eisenhower.' This is not to say, however, that points of disagreement have disappeared, or that historians have run out of Eisenhower-era topics about which they can argue opposite sides of the issue from the same evidence. Such a topic is that about which Jeff Broadwater writes in Eisenhower and the AntiCommunist Crusade. Its title notwithstanding, this study does more than assess Dwight D. Eisenhower's conduct in the White House with respect to the issue of domestic subversion. Like Richard M. Fried's recent study, Nightmare in Red (1990), it provides a sound overview of the nature and dimensions of the lengthy anticommunist frenzy in post-World War II America that both predated and outlived Senator Joseph McCarthy's meteoric crusade. Just as the activities of that whole era have erroneously been labeled McCarthyism, Broadwater points out, so too has Eisenhower's handling of McCarthy been treated as if it fully explains his stance on anticommunism generally. The author directly challenges this view, noting that Ike's dealings with McCarthy actually sug-