Nine Millionaires and a Plumber
Donald Trump is not the first president to embrace America's richest, and most powerful, citizens.
Note: Today’s posting discusses several parallels between the Eisenhower and Trump presidential administrations. It is not intended, in any way, to equate the two presidencies.
“Nine millionaires and a plumber” is how President Eisenhower’s critics summed up his first cabinet. Eisenhower had never held elected office, or belonged to a political party, before his presidency. Consequently with one exception, Eisenhower staffed his original cabinet with successful, and wealthy, businessmen rather than politicians. The exception was the Secretary of Labor, Martin Durkin, formerly president of the Plumbers and Steamfitter’s Union.
These men were proud of their success, and contribution to America. Charlie Wilson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense and former CEO of General Motors spoke for many of his wealthy colleagues when he declared, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
Eisenhower’s presidency has another link with President Trump. When Trump promotes “Make America Great Again” to what era is Trump actually referring? Certainly not any Democratic presidency. Nor either presidency of the two Bushes; young Bush gave America two Middle East wars topped off with the 2008 Financial Crisis while elder Bush was booted from office after breaking his “Read my lips, no new taxes” promise. Nor the Reagan presidency whose 1980 campaign slogan was “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Reagan, like Trump, was looking back to an earlier, golden era. (Trump appropriated Reagan’s campaign slogan after dropping the collegial “Let’s”) And it certainly wasn’t the Nixon era besmirched by the Watergate scandal.
So, we are left with President Eisenhower and the nineteen-fifties; the earliest decade Trump and his generation can recall. For today’s older Americans, the hazy fifties conjures a vision of peace and prosperity. The United States had won the Second World War in the process becoming the leader of the Free World. At home, traditional American families laughed at I Love Lucy, listened to Dinah Shore sing See the USA in your Chevrolet, shimmied with hula-hoops, and danced to rock-n-roll.
The fifties, then, must be the golden age to which Trump wishes to restore America.
Like Trump, who has inherited wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Eisenhower inherited the Korean War, a war in which American troops were dying every day. Two months after winning the presidency in 1952, Eisenhower made a secret trip to Korea. Eisenhower, the top European commander during the Second World War, concluded that the war was unwinnable without a major escalation that would require, perhaps, the use of nuclear weapons to counter the massive Chinese army that was supporting their North Korean allies.
Eisenhower ended the fighting but was unable to end the war. A peace treaty was never signed. Instead, an armistice, little more than a temporary ceasefire, was signed on July 27, 1953. Legally, Korea has been frozen in a state of war for over seventy years.
Eisenhower, like Trump, also inherited a massive illegal immigration problem. In 1954, Eisenhower instituted “Operation Wetback” (“Wetback” was a common term for Mexicans who entered the United States illegally—often by swimming across the Rio Grande River). The Mexicans were largely workers who had been invited into the United States as part of the Bracero (Spanish for “laborer”) program established during World War II. Mexico, not wishing to enter the war, provided the United States temporary laborers rather than military support. After the war, Washington turned a blind eye to the illegal workers who failed to return to Mexico. Like today, American farmers had become dependent on the hard-working, and low-wage, workers from south of the border.
But unlike today, by the mid nineteen-fifties, Mexico was suffering from its own labor shortages and demanded the laborers be returned. Eisenhower complied, but declined to use Federal troops to expedite the deportation. Instead Eisenhower authorized border patrol agents to use military-style tactics to round-up and deport 1.3 million illegal Mexicans (proportionately equivalent to about 2.7 million today). The results were mixed; many of the deported Mexicans quickly returned to the United States.
More successful was President Eisenhower’s efforts to build an Interstate Highway System.
It wasn’t easy. Eisenhower proposed spending $50 billion ($590 billion in 2024 dollars) to construct the Interstate Highway System. The cost was massive. The total federal budget that year was only $71 billion.
Funding wasn’t the only issue. Eisenhower’s right-wing opponents claimed his national highway system was “creeping socialism,” a denunciation heavily used during the Cold War. A few politicians even argued against free polio vaccines available to children as a “back-door” to socialized medicine. (Polio killed 3,145 children in 1955, crippled many thousands more, and condemned hundreds to an “iron lung.”).
But Eisenhower out-smarted his critics and their fear of a socialist takeover with a simple name change. The highway system would be renamed the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The new highways, Eisenhower asserted, would not only provide civilian transportation but would also be essential to evacuate cities and move military convoys during an atomic war.
That left the issue of how to pay for the massive new infrastructure. Unlike today, Eisenhower insisted that the highway program be “pay-as-you-go” and not contribute to budget deficits. This meant increasing fuel, tire, and other vehicle-related taxes—tax increases the automobile, oil, and trucking industries adamantly opposed.
The highway lobby had, for years, petitioned Congress to eliminate vehicle-related taxes and fund highway construction from general taxation sources, claiming that everybody, not just drivers, benefited from better roads. A gasoline tax increase was unthinkable.
Ultimately, a compromise was reached to increase federal gasoline taxes from two cents to three cents a gallon ($0.35 in 2024 dollars). These taxes would be deposited into a Highway Trust Fund to assure they were spent on highways and not diverted for other purposes.
Once the tax issue was resolved, the legislation flew through Congress. Six weeks later, on August 13, 1956, work began on the first stretch of road near St. Louis, Missouri. The final segment of the original highway plan wasn’t completed until 1992 when I-70 opened through Glenwood Canyon, Colorado.
The Interstate Highway System revolutionized American travel and transportation. Contrary to the highway lobby’s grim predictions, the automobile, trucking, and oil industries thrived after the Highway Act was passed. Rather than the trucking industry being driven out of business, the new superhighways fueled trucking’s explosive growth: fifteen-fold from 1956 through 2006.
Concern over creeping socialism was a major political issue during the nineteen-fifties. Organizations such as the Keep America Committee and the John Birch Society claimed the fluoridation of public water supplies and the new polio vaccines were communist plots designed to slowly wipe out entire populations. The Indiana Textbook Commission even banned the book Robin Hood as communist. Robin Hood, as every schoolchild knows, robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, a concept the Indiana commission considered subversive. Book banning, though, wasn’t just political. For decades, Boston had banned scores of books the city considered obscene including Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
The hunt for communist sympathizers reached its pinnacle under Senator Joseph McCarthy who brought hundreds of Americans before his House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), often with little justification. McCarthy relied on degradation, intimidation, and the threat of imprisonment to extract testimony. Just being brought before the committee resulted in guilt by association, destroying reputations and careers. In Hollywood, an estimated three-hundred executives and artists were blacklisted. But others chose to cooperate, “not to save their lives, but to save their swimming pools,” as film director Orson Welles dryly commented.
Eisenhower abhorred McCarthy’s methods but chose not to challenge him directly—McCarthy enjoyed considerable support with many Americans. Instead, in April 1954, Eisenhower, in a brilliant political gambit, arranged to have McCarthy’s investigation of the U.S. Army aired on live television.
Eisenhower knew his man. Millions of Americans soon saw McCarthy badgering and belittling American war heroes. When Lt. Colonel Chester T. Brown refused to answer a question, McCarthy fumed, “Any man in the uniform of his country who refused to give information to a committee of the Senate which represents the American people, that man is not fit to wear the uniform of his country.”
McCarthy had finally gone too far. It was one thing to belittle a Hollywood screenwriter, but quite another to bully a decorated war hero. Joseph Welsh, the Army’s legal counsel during the hearings, admonished McCarthy, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
America had seen enough; McCarthy was little more than a common bully. The Senate agreed, and, in December 1954 censured McCarthy for his unsubstantiated accusations and violation of Senate behavioral standards (67 senators voted in favor of censure, 22 against). After the censure, McCarthy fell into obscurity. He died of liver failure in 1957.
During McCarthy’s five years as chair of the Senate HUAC committee, not one person was sent to prison as a communist agent.
By 1960, Americans were ready for a change and rejected Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, choosing instead the young, vibrant John F. Kennedy as the nation’s thirty-fifth president.
Historians didn’t initially think particularly well of Eisenhower. For years they considered Eisenhower an affable but bumbling caretaker who spent much of his presidency golfing and fishing, an impression reinforced by Eisenhower’s vibrant successor, John Kennedy, with his young family and eloquent, inspiring speeches.
Eisenhower’s greatest quality was his quiet self-assurance. In 1982, after gaining access to Eisenhower’s private presidential papers, Fred Greenstein wrote The Hidden Hand Presidency. The book described how Eisenhower intentionally avoided the spotlight, steering policy quietly through his staff. Eisenhower’s definition of leadership was simple:
“Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”
On Another Topic
Marc Andreessen, inventor of the Netscape browser and a leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist, in a January 17 New York Times interview discusses How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Fascinating look at an overlooked President and a clever one. I long for those days. But Operation Wetback?