Eisenhower speaks on grandfather’s influence

Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, spoke with UCA students and faculty about the role her grandfather played in the civil rights movement and the 1957 Little Rock Central High School Crisis Feb. 23.
Eisenhower’s lecture was part of the Arkansas Civil Rights Symposium in the College of Business auditorium.
Eisenhower is president of the Eisenhower Group, which provides strategic counsel on political, business and public affairs projects. She is also chairman emeritus of the Eisenhower Institute, which honors the legacy of the late president.
Eisenhower said her grandfather and his administration prepared for possible social unrest and even civil war after the Supreme Court desegregated public schools in its 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka ruling.
“Few people realize that the Eisenhower administration was already planning for disturbances in American cities, understanding that this was going to necessitate very careful and subtle management of this issue to keep it from exploding into a nationwide situation,” she said. “There was considerable concern that not all of military would not remain loyal to the government, and words of civil war entered the vocabulary from time to time.”
For the Little Rock Central Crisis, President Eisenhower decided to send in the 101st Airborne Division, the same troops that were sent into D-Day in World War II.
D-Day was the day the Battle of Normandy began, where the United States and other countries invaded the mainland of Europe to fight the Nazi occupation.
Eisenhower said that her grandfather believed these troops would remain loyal.
She said her grandfather had a lot on his plate during the Little Rock Central Crisis.
While the Little Rock crisis occurred, she said, President Eisenhower was dealing with international security crises such as the nuclear threats of the Cold War.
“Eisenhower was a war hero and two-term president who came into his second term with an enormous array of crises unfolding around the world,” she said. “[He] managed the nuclear age and the dawn of the space age, which occurred just days after the Little Rock Crisis. This puts in sharp relief the challenges of managing both a domestic crisis and what was perceived as an international security crisis simultaneously during this period.”
Junior Trenton Lyle said he was impressed with Eisenhower’s speech and said he learned a lot from her lecture.
“I never really made the connection between Eisenhower and the Little Rock Nine. I thought that [it] was interesting to know that the Eisenhower [administration] really was the pioneer to the Civil Rights Movement,” Lyle said. “He had two civil rights acts signed under his presidency before John F. Kennedy did.”
Eisenhower said there were scholars who tried to make the case that her grandfather had no real role in civil rights legislation, and that his attorney general was the true leader in shepherding the passage of the acts.
“Now if there was any good that was done, they mostly wanted to prove it was someone else who did it and I just went along for the ride as the passenger,” Eisenhower said, reading a letter her grandfather wrote about his presidency.
“He didn’t look like any passenger I’d ever run across,” Eisenhower said. “This was somebody who was clearly in charge of his world, his space, his intellectual approach.”
President Eisenhower also had a driver who was African-American, she said, which caused the old joke that the driver desegregated the south. If President Eisenhower’s driver could not stay in the same hotel that the president was staying in, President Eisenhower would go somewhere else.
“What made [President Eisenhower’s actions during the Little Rock Crisis] effective and long lasting is that he clearly articulated the principles involved and then took action,” she said. “And it was something that paved the way for Americans to think about the civil rights issue. It was critical that he outline these principles not just for the American people but for the international community as well.”