| Many recent accounts have argued for a reappraisal of Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was not an inarticulate incompetent who delegated away the power of the presidency. Indeed, the facts argue for an opposite conclusion. Nor was Eisenhower the reactionary portrayed in early revisionist accounts. Particularly on the issue of civil rights, his views were complex, and often ambiguous. While clinging firmly to his conviction that primary authority in this field belonged to the states, he nonetheless believed it wrong to deny economic or political rights to anyone because of race, religion, or national origin. Although he shared many southern preconceptions about blacks and race relations, bigotry was alien to his personality. Moreover, his personal attitudes were refracted through his perception of his duty as President. Eisenhower considered it his duty to use the authority of the presidency to insure both equality of opportunity and that the federal government did nothing to support segregation.;Traditionally, historians have considered the 1950s as a hiatus, a time when the government withdrew from civil rights, awaiting the return of a Democrat to the White House. In fact, the Eisenhower years witnessed great advances in civil rights. In the sixteen months before the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v Board of Education, Eisenhower ordered and effected an end to segregation in the District of Columbia and the armed forces. He also sought to eradicate discrimination practiced by the government and its contractors, and appointed blacks in unprecedented numbers to unprecedented high places in the executive branch. Although he harbored serious misgivings about the Court's decision in Brown, he never questioned the Court's authority or his own duty to enforce its decrees. He did believe, however, that, to be effective, desegregation should take place very gradually, while allowing time for attitudes to change. Along those lines, he and his administration sponsored and pushed through Congress the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction; and, by appointing liberals and moderates to the federal judiciary, Eisenhower insured an ongoing, but by the nature of the legal system, gradual process of desegregation in the South. |
