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Master of Arts / Department of History / Derek S. Hoff / In the years immediately after World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted that he did not want to run for office. However, the general, persuaded by the efforts of Citizens for Eisenhower groups, reversed his decision before the 1952 election. The new politician did not take an easy path to the White House, however, as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the leading conservative Republican, fought to represent the GOP. Eisenhower aligned with the moderate faction, the party’s traditional source of power, and joined the Republicans during the early stages of a civil war in the party. From the time Eisenhower received the presidential nomination in 1952 until his death in 1969, he committed himself to leading the GOP and establishing moderate, not conservative, Republicanism as the party’s ideology. However, this aspect of Eisenhower’s political career has largely been ignored by historians. The analyses of Eisenhower that focus on his presidency, rather than his military career, concentrate on policy decisions, omitting the president’s role as party leader during a transformative era. This oversight not only skews Eisenhower’s legacy but also renders analyses of the conservative revolution in American politics incomplete. Before conservative Senator Barry Goldwater secured the Republican nomination in 1964, a very important moment that augured —but did not guarantee — the future triumph of the conservative wing, Eisenhower worked to stop his campaign. Had Eisenhower succeeded, the GOP and American politics could have followed a much different trajectory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Utilizing documents from throughout Eisenhower’s political career, this study argues that although Eisenhower failed to halt conservatism, he influenced the course of the GOP. During the 1950s and 1960s, Eisenhower helped revitalize the party, improved the party’s organization, and contributed to conservatism’s delayed ascendancy. Furthermore, Eisenhower merits recognition as a party leader who worked tirelessly on behalf of moderate Republicanism, not just as a man with impressive coattails for Republicans to cling to during elections.

Historians of the founding years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) acknowledge General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s role as the first Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), yet they ignore the effect Eisenhower’s rhetoric had in the creation of a sense of unity among Western European nations. Rhetorical analysis of Eisenhower’s time as SACEUR offers scholars a unique look into the founding years of NATO and the beginning of European unification. Using Kenneth Burke’s theory of the four master tropes, I analyze how Eisenhower’s role in the development of NATO was important to the eventual development of a unified Europe.

Between 1953 and 1963, during the administrations of President Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, the United States government transformed the way it formulated and executed foreign and defense policies. These changes gave the White House its own foreign policy staff, in the form of the National Security Council, and increased the powers of the Secretary of Defense. Most of these changes began under Eisenhower in the 1950s. Eisenhower, however, delayed making several key reforms despite the recommendations of his staff. He believed some reforms were unnecessary and remained ambivalent about others. Moreover, he wanted to avoid sending complex reorganization legislation through Congress, which Eisenhower feared would allow legislators to interfere in matters of the Executive Branch. Democrats in the 1960 presidential election capitalized on the failure to push through these reforms. The Democratic attacks proved remarkably compelling to a bipartisan audience. Kennedy used this bipartisan agreement to enact many of the reforms Eisenhower had ignored. The motivating factor for many of these decisions was not merely an attempt by either President to concentrate power in the White House, it was a belief that the post-1945 world was so unstable that only giving the White House unfettered access and oversight of the levers of power could ensure the safety of the nation. This work merges Diplomatic History with the field of American Political Development to examine these dramatic changes to the structure of the US government. Historians traditionally have examined these Kennedy era administrative changes in isolation. Studying them together with those that took place under Eisenhower yields a more complete picture of how the national security state developed. Despite Eisenhower’s reluctance to adopt some of the reforms embraced by Kennedy, both presidents believed that major reforms were necessary. Any sound analysis of the ways the contemporary United States makes its foreign and defense policies requires understanding momentous changes that took place during the transformational period of the early Cold War

Dwight D. Eisenhower has been criticized as an anti-intellectual by scholars such as Richard Hofstadter. Eisenhower’s tenure as president of Columbia University was one segment of his career he was particularly criticized for because of his non-traditional approach to education there. This paper examines Eisenhower’s time at Columbia to explain how anti-intellectualism played into his university administration. It explains how his personality and general outlook came to clash with the intellectual environment of Columbia especially in the wake of the faculty revolt against former Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler. It argues that Eisenhower utilized the Columbia institution to promote a Cold War educational agenda, which often belittled Columbia intellectuals and their scholarly pursuits. However, this paper also counter-argues that Eisenhower, despite accusations of anti-intellectualism, was an academically interested man who never engaged in true suppression of free thought despite pressure from McCarthyite influences in American government, media and business.

This thesis explores how the campaign for the The Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways was a product of the 1950s military-industrial complex, which developed from a nationalist project seeking to confirm American exceptionalism during the early Cold War.

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This is an analysis of the U.S. Army's personnel decisions in the Second World War. Specifically, it considers the U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall's appointment of generals to combat command, and his reasons for relieving some generals while leaving others in place after underperformance. Many historians and contemporaries of Marshall, including General Omar N. Bradley, have commented on Marshall's ability to select brilliant, capable general officers for combat command in the war. However, in addition to solid performers like J. Lawton Collins, Lucian Truscott, and George S. Patton, Marshall, together with Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lesley J. McNair, often selected sub-par commanders who significantly underperformed on the battlefield. These generals' tactical and operational decisions frequently led to unnecessary casualties, and ultimately prolonged the war. The work considers six case studies: Lloyd Fredendall at Kasserine Pass, Mark Clark during the Italian campaign, John Lucas at Anzio, Omar Bradley at the Falaise Gap, Courtney Hodges at the Hürtgen Forest, and Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr. at Okinawa. Personal connections and patronage played strong roles in these generals' command appointments, and often trumped practical considerations like command experience. While their superiors ultimately relieved corps commanders Fredendall and Lucas, field army and army group commanders Clark, Hodges, and Bradley retained command of their units, (Buckner died from combat wounds on Okinawa). Personal connections also strongly influenced the decision to retain the field army and army group commanders in their commands.