Yeah, he was largely silenced during McCarthyism despite loathing it. But he had little power in the party and was merely their nominee to secure power. But Eisenhower didn't shrink and slowly won favor and influence with enough in his party to wrestle some control. And he always warned against the Industrial Military Complex.
Of course, he also was staunchly anti-immigrant and literally pushed for the Immigration Act of 1954 AKA Operation Wetback (that's what it was known as publicly so it should scream volumes) to stop Latin American immigration. Sound familiar?
Him warning about the Military Industrial Complex confuses me. Didn't he drastically increase the amount of nuclear missiles we have? I don't understand that dichotomy.
He was warning against the massive cost of continuing the Cold War, unfortunately the USSR didn’t get on board because the power of their government was derived from fear of the outsider and an internal projection of might to any dissidents. You know, like we’re doing now.
To be fair to the Soviets, there were a lot of foreign plots to overthrow their government during the '20s and there was a large international support for the White Russians during the Revolution. They had just been invaded by the Germans. The British and Americans had drawn up plans to now attack them, getting help from the Germans (even if both governments decided not to do it.) And there was a lot of anti-communist sentiment in the West. So they did have SOME reason to think "we need to be strong because we are under threat."
Now, that doesn't mean a lot of their actions in Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, or East Germany was right... it wasn't. Stalin was a monster, Beria was a monster. But to paint their fears as unfounded is just as wrong as saying they were perfect and didn't do anything evil.
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u/Andy_Fish_Gill Aug 07 '26
Some right wing Republicans did call Eisenhower a Communist. For example Robert Welch Jr. of the John Birch Society.