Because I know relatively little about the 1950s, a gap in my knowledge base but probably not for either of my two regular readers, I’m currently absorbed in a book entitled “The Age of Eisenhower: America and the world in the 1950s” by William I. Hitchcock.
The ‘50s were a time of relative prosperity for the United States because of several positive trends: a growing and better educated population; pent up consumer demand after fifteen years of hardship; cheap oil and energy; technological and scientific advances; healthy trade surpluses; and, President Eisenhower’s obsession, at least during his first term in office, to balance the budget.
Tax rates were high and remained high throughout the decade despite a campaign promise made in 1952 by candidate Eisenhower. Marginal tax rates for the lowest bracket ranged from 20% and 26% (ALL working people paid income and social security taxes then, unlike today). Someone who earned $20,000 in 1953, the equivalent of $175,000 today, faced a marginal tax rate of 52%. The top rate, for those earning more than $200,000 in 1953, was 91% although few people made more than that.
President Eisenhower grew up “down the road” from Colorado in Abilene Kansas but I didn’t realize the strong ties he had to Colorado. His campaign headquarters for the 1952 presidential election was in Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel, and he often visited and vacationed in Colorado.
After an exhausting international summit in 1955 when he traveled to Geneva to meet the heads of Britain, France and the Soviet Union in an unsuccessful attempt to ease cold war tensions, Eisenhower planned an extended vacation in Colorado, spending a few hours each day conducting business from a command center at Lowry while otherwise, relaxing golfing, fishing, painting, then meeting friends for evening card games at his presidential suite in the Brown Palace Hotel.
Seven weeks away from the White House on September 23 1955, President Eisenhower completed a few hours of paperwork, played eighteen holes of golf at the Cherry Hills Country Club with the pro, wolfed down a late lunch, then returned for nine more holes complaining of indigestion and heartburn. At two the next morning he awoke with a searing pain in his chest and was eventually transported to Fitzimmons Hospital where it was determined a blot clot had caused the President to have a heart attack.
Although medically incapacitated through early 1956 when he was eventually well enough to return to Washington, his day-to-day duties were never transferred to Vice President Nixon (they apparently weren’t close) but instead were delegated to a committee of trusted advisors. (President Biden’s diminished mental acuity allowed this to occur during his term in office too.)
The biggest crisis of Eisenhower’s first term occurred in July 1956 during another illness when he delegated a crucially important decision to Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, whose brinkmanship ended up kicking off the Suez Crisis.
Colonel Nasser became the ruler of Egypt in 1952 when he led a coup that overthrew the existing monarchy. To build on Egyptian independence, he planned a massive project to build a hydroelectric dam along the Nile. To keep in his good books, Britain and America had agreed to finance most of the cost of the project but in July 1956 Dulles told Nasser than America would withdraw its financial offer unless Egypt stopped being friendly to the Soviets.
Nasser’s response was to nationalize the Suez Canal owned by a British/French consortium that unilaterally collected tolls from ships that passed through the canal and who’s economies were both dependent on the oil shipped through the canal.
After the announcement by Nasser, Britain, France AND Israel conspired to force a confrontation that they hoped with topple the Egyptian government. There plan was to have Israel invade Egypt then use this as an excuse to insert a joint British/French peacekeeping force to protect access to the Suez Canal by creating a buffer zone between Egyptian and Israeli forces, ostensibly protecting world trade. Despite the theoretical close ties between the United States and the three co-conspirators, the Eisenhower administration was left completely in the dark by the events that eventually unfolded the week before the November 1956 presidential election.
With the Soviets ready to step in and a world war imminent, Eisenhower cut military aid to Israel and imposed economic sanctions on Britain that eventually forced the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Egypt.
There is much more to this story than the duplicity of supposed allies but as Eisenhower began his second term in office, he asserted that henceforth America’s obligation was to police the Middle East.
The more things change, the more things seem to stay the same.
