Which is, after all, the only time that matters.…at the time.

I just wrote a long rebuttal to a recently Trump Deranged friend of impressive mind and credentials, who decided to go after, of all people, President Dwight Eisenhower for a speech in which he extolled moral values because, my friend’s Facebook post declared, “in real life the years of Eisenhower’s administration—essentially all of the 1950s—did not even come close to measuring up to the tenets of social, racial, ethnic and sexual justice and economic equity that most of us today believe are the standards of a just society.”

“That is an important reminder for all of us us that times do change,” he continued, “and that as right-thinking as Eisenhower’s words seem on the surface, they were spoken by the leader of a society that was very repressive in many ways—economically, socially, racially, sexually and otherwise.” This, to use the vernacular, pissed me off greatly. Ike has gone higher in my estimation of him as President the more I read about him and especially the more I watch other President struggle with the job he seemed to do effortlessly. (Of course, Ike may be the only one of our Presidents for whom the office could be considered a step down in difficulty and responsibility, after overseeing the Allied effort to save the world in World War II.)

Here, with minor edits to protect the guilty, is what I posted in response to that slap at Ike:

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But this is the purest form of Presentism, and a grossly unfair assessment of Ike, one of our most under-rated and effective Presidents. It is always easy to go back and condemn figures of the past who did not have the benefit of many decades of accumulated experience and wisdom; easy and wrong. It is by this standard that we saw efforts in demented regions like San Francisco (and our own) to strip historical honors from, among others, the Founders, because they were not sufficiently psychic to reject their society’s and culture’s mistaken beliefs, such as the inherent inferiority of other races to theirs.

 I’ve studied Eisenhower’s own writings and those about him. His vision of the Presidency was that his job was to protect and preserve the culture, not change it; that the culture would evolve and change in its own time, when society was ready for it. As a result, Eisenhower led a United States that honored and trusted its institutions at a level that seems astonishing today. He had a great part in that.

Nobody accused him of being a “king,” but in Boston, even then a bulwark of the Democratic Party, kids listened to “Hail to the Chief” on the most popular children’s show (creepily titled “Big Brother”!) as a photo of Ike appeared (the one above, in fact) on the screen and we “toasted” the President of the United States with a glass of milk. The Horror.

 Eisenhower was, even then, attacked from the Left for being a passive leader, but subsequent revelations have shown that he was anything but, operating a “hidden hand” Presidency, viewing his public role as maintaining the dignity of the office and uniting the country and culture. Gee, what a concept.

It is a cliche now to mock the Fifties as a boring, “black and white” era that emerged into paradise a la “Pleasantville” (Good movie, ridiculous, arrogant Presentism. By the way, I grew up on “Pleasant Street” and had a wonderfully happy middle class childhood in a Greater Boston Cape Cod-style home my frugal but far from wealthy parents purchased for the equivalent of $25,000 in today’s coinage. ) Thanks to Ike’s culture, the middle class flourished. Poverty levels were low. Divorce was rare, single parent families among all races were a fraction of what they are today.

Kids weren’t getting stoned on illegal (now legal)  drugs, and the overwhelming cultural taboo made such drug use unpopular. Sex before marriage was, for a good reason if an unrealistic one, still considered a “sin,” and the culture enforced it. Most American went to church, which encouraged morality. Morality is a list behavioral norms that one obeys out of fear of punishment, and the greatest value of organized religion is that it keeps stupid and ignorant citizens in line because they don’t want to go to Hell. Ike maintained that…a series of openly hypocritical POTUSes (Like JFK, a supposed Catholic who cheated on his wife obsessively) eroded it to the point that arguing for traditional morality today gets one mocked.

Looking at the caliber of members of the Senate and the House today compared with who populated Congress in Ike’s day is like watching devolution at work. The US in the Fifties hadn’t dealt with Jim Crow, but the momentum was building and Ike let it build. The same with Women’s Rights. Ike didn’t directly confront McCarthy to avoid a party fracture, but documents show he was confident that Tailgunner Joe would destroy himself soon enough, which he did.

The major objective of Ike’s two terms was keeping an aggressive Soviet Union at bay, and he did that. We found out long after Ike left office that on two (or more) occasions he directly threatened to use the atom bomb, and dissuaded Russia from its plans every time, because they knew that the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during WWII wasn’t bluffing. (Today, that overt use of U.S. power would be called “bullying.”) Being POTUS in that era was especially difficult, as foreign policy naif Jack Kennedy found out when he almost immediately blundered his way into near nuclear war.

 If you listen to Sixties popular music, watch 50s movies, and recall 50s TV shows, you realize that art, creativity, imagination and risk-taking was flourishing under Eisenhower, and exploded soon-after, in the revolutionary Sixties. No, Eisenhower’s administration was true to his values and assessment of what was best for the nation at that time. The culture made progress: the color line was crossed in baseball, school segregation was ended, black entertainers—there were an astonishing number of them—(Sam Cooke, “Sachmo,” Johnny Mathis, Sammy David Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, many others ) were regularly crossing the color line on recordings and TV, and they weren’t singing about “ho’s” and pussies.

When Ike retired, unlike the last two Presidents, he adhered to the correct tradition of shutting the hell up about how his successors were doing even though he thought Kennedy was weak (he personally excoriated JFK over the Bay of Pigs fiasco), distrusted Johnson and disliked Nixon. He knew being President is hard, and that all of them need to be allowed to do the job as they see it. Would that President Trump had been accorded that same privilege.

Ike ushered the U.S. through a difficult transitional period—families had lots of kids because they were optimistic about the future, and had good reason to be—-and left the office of President and the country itself in better shape than he found them, though upheavals were coming—in their own good time. Yes, that’s an essentially conservative perspective, and that’s anathema to many, but he deserves respect and appreciation for his Presidency nonetheless. The Fifties seem like Oz today, and with the benefit of hindsight and 60+ years of lessons, mistakes and wisdom, we can see its flaws, but Ike’s 8 years were stable, prosperous, and productive.