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Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution
Simon & Schuster
September 2007
On Sale: September 4, 2007
368 pages
ISBN: 1416541500
EAN: 9781416541509
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Fifty years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered
troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce a federal court
order desegregating the city's Central High School, a
leading authority on Eisenhower presents an original and
engrossing narrative that places Ike and his civil rights
policies in dramatically new light. Historians such as Stephen Ambrose and Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., have portrayed Eisenhower as aloof, if not outwardly
hostile, to the plight of African-Americans in the 1950s. It
is still widely assumed that he opposed the Supreme Court's
landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating
the desegregation of public schools, that he deeply
regretted appointing Earl Warren as the Court's chief
justice because of his role in molding Brown, that he was a
bystander in Congress's passage of the civil rights acts of
1957 and 1960, and that he so mishandled the Little Rock
crisis that he was forced to dispatch troops to rescue a
failed policy. In this sweeping narrative, David A. Nichols demonstrates
that these assumptions are wrong. Drawing on archival
documents neglected by biographers and scholars, including
thousands of pages newly available from the Eisenhower
Presidential Library, Nichols takes us inside the Oval
Office to look over Ike's shoulder as he worked behind the
scenes, prior to Brown, to desegregate the District of
Columbia and complete the desegregation of the armed forces.
We watch as Eisenhower, assisted by his close collaborator,
Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., sifted through
candidates for federal judgeships and appointed five
pro-civil rights justices to the Supreme Court and
progressive judges to lower courts. We witness Eisenhower
crafting civil rights legislation, deftly building a
congressional coalition that passed the first civil rights
act in eighty-two years, and maneuvering to avoid a showdown
with Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, over
desegregation of Little Rock's Central High. Nichols demonstrates that Eisenhower, though he was a
product of his time and its backward racial attitudes, was
actually more progressive on civil rights in the 1950s than
his predecessor, Harry Truman, and his successors, John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Eisenhower was more a man of
deeds than of words and preferred quiet action over
grandstanding. His cautious public rhetoric -- especially
his legalistic response to Brown -- gave a misleading
impression that he was not committed to the cause of civil
rights. In fact, Eisenhower's actions laid the legal and
political groundwork for the more familiar breakthroughs in
civil rights achieved in the 1960s. Fair, judicious, and exhaustively researched, A Matter of
Justice is the definitive book on Eisenhower's civil rights
policies that every presidential historian and future
biographer of Ike will have to contend with.
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