On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Jim Farmelant wrote:
>> 2) Ike had almost the same ideology as the old guard in domestic policy.
>
> In what respects?
As far as Eisenhower himself was concerned, on domestic ideology, he and Taft thought alike. He was not convinced that Taft could win the 1952 election. But he had no qualms at all about supporting Taft for president IFF he would change his foreign policy views.
In December 1950, on the eve of leaving Columbia University to become Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR, the proto-leader of proto-NATO, which Ike created in the next 2 years), Ike arranged a meeting with Taft specifically to resolve this point. He wrote in his diary that if Taft would publicly support NATO, he Eisenhower would "kill off any further speculation about me as a candidate for president." He wrote out a very strong statement that he intended to release that evening if Taft would come around on foreign policy.
But Taft didn't. And that was the turning point.
Ike's pre-presidential record (which is vastly documented, esp. after 1941) is replete with utterances that chime with Taft on domestic and social policy. You have to cherry pick to find things that didn't. He was an archetypal midwest Republican. And his peers in the army (like MacArthur and Patton) were to the right of Taft. They sounded like G. Gordon Liddy. Those were the ideological bounds of his mental life until the age of 62, when he became president.
Now, the realities of obtaining the presidency and of being president changed his mind on lots of things in complex ways and pulled him toward the existing center through personal alliances. But that used to be the norm. Reality manhandled ideology.
The same thing happened to Nixon the arch-McCarthyite. He was a racist, anti-semitic, anti-union bastard to the day he died. But that's not how he ruled. And that's not how he talked when he was in power.
Michael