Here in what Gore Vidal once so aptly called the United States of Amnesia, we tend to forget who it was that shaped the last half of the American Century: Dwight David Eisenhower.
He is the general who smashed nazism in the ’40s, then came home and, as president …
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Launched the interstate highway system, emulating the autobahn he so admired as a young infantry officer in World War I. A transformed, mobile, more vigorous and vastly wealthier country was the result.
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Recalling the crude computers of Bletchley Park and their heroic contributions to cracking the German Enigma cipher, he insisted upon funding the research that laid the groundwork for America’s preeminence in computers and software.
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He started our space program and, to his immeasurable credit and against immense political pressure in a time when the very impetus for the space program was fear of the Soviets, insisted it be placed under civilian control.
I remark all that because, slightly more than one year into the Obama presidency, a year marked by all-out foaming-at-the-mouth dementia on the part of a so-called conservative party that is in fact radical in its prescriptions and in many respects intensely hostile to American ideals, Obama seems to me like nothing so much as an Eisenhower Republican.
The details are different, but the likenesses cannot be denied.
For starters, Obama is as cold-blooded about hunting down and killing our enemies as any president in memory. At the rate that Taliban are being killed, and al Qaeda leadership being killed, you’d think Uncle Sam was paying a bounty for scalps. He is condemned for seeking accommodation with the Muslim world wherever possible; Eisenhower smacked-down the French and British plan to seize the Suez Canal and got nothing but grief from his right.
Second, he displays the same sort of forward-looking realism that distinguished Eisenhower. Health-care and insurance reform are not, as the oddities now known as ‘conservatives’ like to insist, the Utopian fantasy of America-hating Marxists and anarchists with sticks of dynamite tucked in their coat pockets; they are, to the contrary, an indispensable component of protecting this nation’s future. There is no possible end but national bankruptcy if we won’t prepare for the huge slug of retirees about to begin showing-up in hospital emergency rooms with chest pains and worse.
The curtain is going down on the carbon era and, as Eisenhower did in computers and space, Obama is looking for ways to reposition the nation for the world that is going to be here a decade from now, and 25-years from now. He is right to do that; it’s what a national, genuine-article leader ought to be doing.
Millions of discharged servicemen came home to an economy lopsidedly devoted to war production and abruptly idled by the end of hostilities. The retrenchment of America’s manufacturing base needed years and Eisenhower entered office with a transforming and uncertain economy still finding its feet and re-creating itself to meet the needs of rapidly expanding global trade.
The demagogue Joe McCarthy found followers unable to cope with a transforming world and looking for somebody to blame for their discomfort, hemming Eisenhower on his right and forcing him, of political necessity, to stand idle as they savaged George Marshall and yammered about “losing China.” Today we have known idiots Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin playing the same shabby game and at the same ruinous cost.
Obama has refused to be distracted and kept his eye on the ball the whole while. If what passes for a conservative today had any brains, or memory longer than a puppy’s, they’d rejoice to see a near clone of one of their party’s best presidents back in the White House.
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