When Dwight Eisenhower was stricken by a heart attack on September 24, 1955, what began as a serious crisis wound up as a revealing episode in White House mass communication. The news traveled fast and left many unsure whether Eisenhower would survive, others fearing he might be too weak to continue effectively as president. Instantly endangered was an almost seamless public picture of Eisenhower, whose reputation for stability and trust had given not just scenery but also foundation to major presidential undertakings, including foreign policy initiatives, legislative pursuits, and programs for rebuilding the Republican party. This image of Eisenhower also...

Many of the details of good communication, if not the components of an effective public relations effort, were known to Eisenhower at a very young age. As a teenager in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower gained his opportunity to enter West Point after rallying the town’s civic leaders into a letter-writing campaign on his behalf. When his athletic career at West Point was shortened by injury, he became a cheerleader for the Army football team. In World War I, Eisenhower yearned to be near the action. Yet the talents his superiors recognized were those not of a fighter but of a teacher,...

The Christmas Eve telecast had been a big success, but even Robert Montgomery, the new TV consultant, had found it an ordeal. A second Eisenhower fireside chat two weeks later on January 4, prior to the president’s daytime State of the Union address on January 7, was no less strenuous. In preparation for that broadcast, Eisenhower had to stop working in the Oval Office and leave while technicians outfitted it with cameras, lights, and sound equipment. Thus the administration decided to delay further fireside chats until Montgomery had streamlined technical arrangements. One of Montgomery’s next projects was establishing a fixed...

The most significant single media advancement in the Eisenhower era came on January 19, 1955, when the first televised presidential news conference was held. Eisenhower got some impressive public relations mileage out of this event because his administration had taken steps to recognize the young field of television journalism. With TV reporters now able to cover the news conferences with cameras and microphones, the television industry applauded Eisenhower for liberating these events from traditions that had made them a bastion of print journalism. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave Eisenhower an Emmy award for his contribution to...

Internal activity in the Republican party was robust during Eisenhower’s first years as president. Eisenhower had agreed to run for president as a Republican because he wanted to block the party’s isolationist figures, notably 1952 candidate Robert Taft, and because he felt a duty to rebalance the two-party system, which he believed was endangered by two decades of Democratic control. At the time Eisenhower did not really identify with either party, writing that the “extremists . . . of reaction” on the Republican side “and of so-called liberalism” on the Democratic side “should be abjured like the plague.” Eisenhower’s “profound...

Nineteen-fifty-six marked perhaps the first occasion in which television played an important role in a presidential election. The new medium did not really make a difference in the actual outcome; Eisenhower’s victory over Adlai Stevenson was certain. Nevertheless, events did not lack a mystery element. The intrigue occurred much earlier in the year during serious public uncertainty about Eisenhower’s future. Acknowledging that Eisenhower could probably win the election if he chose to run, many experts nonetheless found it inconceivable that the sixty-five-year-old president, in the aftermath of a heart attack, would seek another four years in the White House.

Eisenhower’s...

While Eisenhower wanted Modern Republicanism and a modern strategy for effecting it, many scholars believed Adlai Stevenson was more in step with the times. By some accounts, including those of John Bartlow Martin in hisAdlai Stevenson and the World,Stevenson was the champion of modern politics in the 1950s, the first to articulate some historic initiatives—including educational and housing aid, federal medical assistance, and a nuclear test-ban treaty—that were enacted in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, the fact remained that none of Stevenson’s ideas went into law bearing his name. Stevenson’s losses to Eisenhower in 1952 and...

Since the 1830s national party conventions have been vortices of the nation’s political process, even though after World War II, as more and more contenders conducted primary election campaigns, the conventions only technically served their original function of nominating presidential candidates. Scholars feel the mass media helped account for the longevity of the conventions as well as for the irony that these affairs actually grew larger and more complex as their decision-making roles diminished. With television the major parties were able to transform their conventions from nominating devices into crucial components of their election-year publicity efforts.

A key motive in...

The 1956 Eisenhower-Stevenson contest generated intense interest for about seven weeks of the eight-week campaign period; the election week itself was overshadowed by the Suez Canal crisis and the Hungarian uprising, which hit just days before the voting and determined Eisenhower’s eighteen-point margin of victory. Voting research later showed that Eisenhower’s use of the media during the official campaign, as elaborate as it was, made little difference. By the time the campaign began, according to these findings, a majority of voters were convinced Eisenhower was acting in their best interests.¹ The president validated this impression on the eve of the...

Eisenhower’s public outreach after 1957 was not the energetic, often indulgent pursuit it had been through most of his first term. Efforts to sustain Eisenhower’s positive image became more labored beginning the night of the 1956 election, in part because the multi-million-dollar campaign was over, and also because numerous lifetime Republicans were grumbling that the president had been the only beneficiary. The first victim was Leonard Hall, the GOP’s national chairman. Though his 1956 national campaign had been a masterpiece, Hall nonetheless offered his resignation; that Eisenhower accepted it was surprising to some but not to those who were close...

The American public, in the form of the 1,500 people in George Gallup’s random sample, had its last opportunity to judge Eisenhower as president in early December 1960. Eisenhower’s final on-the-job rating was 59 percent, a respectable figure; to date, only Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have enjoyed higher measured levels of public confidence on their departure from office. Still, Eisenhower’s final 59 did not compare favorably to the 76 he had going into 1960 or to the nineteen other Gallup polls over the previous eight years in which his approval rating had been above 70 percent. Eisenhower’s public dialogue...

After half a century of public service, a major contribution to the Allied victory in World War II, and eight years of peace and prosperity as president, Eisenhower was entitled to an honored position in the roll call of past national leaders. He did eventually receive this historical acclaim, but, in a sad postscript, not during his lifetime. When he died in 1969, historians in a survey had rated him in the same class as Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur. Moreover, one of the final living images of Eisenhower, almost totally out of character for the man who had urged...

The Ike age marked neither the beginning nor the end of consensus leadership in the United States. Nor did mass communication explain all of the changes in the political system during the mid-twentieth century.

In the view of historian Alonzo Hamby, Eisenhower’s primary challenge was identical to that of all the presidents from Franklin Roosevelt on, continuing at least through Ronald Reagan. The right-angle turn was not in the advancing mass media. Instead, it was in the New Deal and the public’s expectation for what Hamby called “collectivist” democratic liberalism. Prior to the New Deal, the nation’s overriding concerns were...