Fifty years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered troops to
Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce a federal court order
desegregating the city's Central High School, a leading authority
on Eisenhower presents an original and engrossing narrative that
places Ike and his civil rights policies in dramatically new light.
Historians such as Stephen Ambrose and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
have portrayed Eisenhower as aloof, if not outwardly hostile, to
the plight of African-Americans in the 1950s. It is still widely
assumed that he opposed the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 "Brown v.
Board of Education" decision mandating the desegregation of public
schools, that he deeply regretted appointing Earl Warren as the
Court's chief justice because of his role in molding "Brown, " that
he was a bystander in Congress's passage of the civil rights acts
of 1957 and 1960, and that he so mishandled the Little Rock crisis
that he was forced to dispatch troops to rescue a failed
policy.
In this sweeping narrative, David A. Nichols demonstrates that
these assumptions are wrong. Drawing on archival documents
neglected by biographers and scholars, including thousands of pages
newly available from the Eisenhower Presidential Library, Nichols
takes us inside the Oval Office to look over Ike's shoulder as he
worked behind the scenes, prior to "Brown, " to desegregate the
District of Columbia and complete the desegregation of the armed
forces. We watch as Eisenhower, assisted by his close collaborator,
Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., sifted through candidates
for federal judgeships and appointed five pro-civil rights justices
to the Supreme Court and progressive judges to lower courts. We
witness Eisenhower crafting civil rights legislation, deftly
building a congressional coalition that passed the first civil
rights act in eighty-two years, and maneuvering to avoid a showdown
with Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, over desegregation of
Little Rock's Central High.
Nichols demonstrates that Eisenhower, though he was a product of
his time and its backward racial attitudes, was actually more
progressive on civil rights in the 1950s than his predecessor,
Harry Truman, and his successors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon
Johnson. Eisenhower was more a man of deeds than of words and
preferred quiet action over grandstanding. His cautious public
rhetoric -- especially his legalistic response to "Brown" -- gave a
misleading impression that he was not committed to the cause of
civil rights. In fact, Eisenhower's actions laid the legal and
political groundwork for the more familiar breakthroughs in civil
rights achieved in the 1960s.
Fair, judicious, and exhaustively researched, "A Matter of
Justice" is the definitive book on Eisenhower's civil rights
policies that every presidential historian and future biographer of
Ike will have to contend with.
General
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