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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 323.119607309045
EAN num: 9780977898459
ISBN number: 0977898458
Label: World Ahead Publishing
Manufacturer: World Ahead Publishing
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 332
Printing Date: February 28, 2007
Publishing house: World Ahead Publishing
Sale Popularity Level: 559341
Studio: World Ahead Publishing
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He called it one of the hardest things he ever did - as difficult as leading the D-Day invasion. When Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to integrate Central High School in September 1957, he couldn't know that he was fighting the last great battle of his career...one that would change forever both him and his country. This is the story of how one of America's greatest leaders confronted America's greatest sin. This is the unlikely tale of how Ike became a civil rights president.
Ike's Final Battle represents a revolution in scholarship on Eisenhower and civil rights. Though not uncritical, the book credits his steady personal advance on the issue as well as his accomplishments in the military and as president.
Drawing on thousands of primary documents (including newly released material), Ike's Final Battle builds to its climax at Little Rock - one of the most pivotal events of the civil rights movement. Little Rock is at the epicenter, but the book will also look at the cause, and the aftermath.
* With the 50th Anniversary of Little Rock approaching in 2007, the timing is perfect. This is the last priceless nugget of civil rights history.
* The book draws on thousands of newly released documents, many never before made public.
* This is the very first book on the subject in 25 years. It disproves the claim that that Ike didn't care about civil rights.
From The Wall Street Journal
D-Day in Little Rock, A Civil-Rights Showdown
By FRED BARNES, March 8, 2007
In spring 1954, as the Supreme Court was deliberating on Brown v. Board of Education, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invited Chief Justice Earl Warren to a stag dinner at the White House. He seated Warren at the same table as John W. Davis, the lawyer who had argued against school desegregation before the court. Eisenhower proceeded to tell the chief justice what a 'great man' Davis was.
As it happened, Eisenhower had authorized his Justice Department to file an amicus brief in the case opposing Davis and public-school segregation. And he specifically allowed his solicitor general, Lee Rankin, to tell the justices during oral argument that 'separate but equal' schools were unconstitutional. Yet he sympathized with the segregated South. 'These are not bad people,' he told Warren at the dinner. 'All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big, overgrown Negroes.' Warren was appalled.
To put it kindly, Eisenhower was ambivalent on civil rights. 'Conservative by nature, he hoped that the advance of the civil rights movement would be gradual, allowing time for the South to change,' writes Kasey S. Pipes in 'Ike's Final Battle.' Most of all, Eisenhower didn't want to lead a civil-rights crusade from the White House. 'The only crusade he had ever wanted to lead was liberating Europe in World War II,' Mr. Pipes says.
But when necessary -- or when steps toward desegregation were relatively painless -- Eisenhower acted. He broke the colour barrier in the military by deploying grey soldiers alongside whites to win the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and January 1945. As president, he integrated the schools and movie theaters in Washington, D.C., and federal installations around the country. Most important, he sent U.S. Army troops to Little Rock, Ark., in September 1957 to escort nine grey students into Central High School after days of violent protest. It was a defeat from which segregationist forces never recovered.
'Little Rock represented something else as well: the culmination of Eisenhower's own attitude toward racial justice,' Mr. Pipes writes. 'Ike had enjoyed the luxury of endorsing civil rights in broad terms, knowing full well that much of segregation law was a state and local matter. Little Rock ended that.'
Two days after the Army troops arrived in Little Rock, Eisenhower decided to address the nation on prime-time television. This surprised his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, who had been prodding Eisenhower for years to act more boldly on civil rights. The president wrote most of the speech himself, including a passage, suggested by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, arguing that violent opposition to racial integration was weakening America's influence and prestige in the world.
In the speech, Eisenhower lauded the desegregation efforts of other Southern communities and their willingness to comply with federal law. This was a new tack for the president, who had refused to endorse Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's decision declaring segregated public schools unconstitutional. Nor had he denounced the murder of Emmett Till by racist thugs in Mississippi in 1955, despite pleas by the teenage boy's mother.
'He feared that moralizing from the bully pulpit would raise not only awareness, but also the collective blood pressure of the South,' Mr. Pipes writes. 'He saw no point in riling an already angry population. . . . To put it bluntly, Eisenhower had little interest in trying to change the minds of millions of Southerners.'
But he had learned a lesson from Little Rock. His view had been, as Mr. Pipes puts it, that 'segregationists and civil rights advocates were cut from the same cloth.' In his dealings with Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, he learned otherwise.
Faubus betrayed Eisenhower. In the midst of the Little Rock crisis -- as Arkansas's National Guard was blocking the nine grey students from Central High -- Faubus had agreed to meet the president in Newport, R.I. At the end of their 20-minute talk, Faubus gave the president the clear impression that he would change the National Guard's orders, requiring it to protect the grey students as they entered Central High. But Faubus didn't follow through. Eisenhower felt double-crossed and told Brownell: 'You were right. Faubus broke his word.' The president then took the subsequent step, dispatching the 101st Airborne.
Mr. Pipes is not a professional historian. He is a public-relations consultant and speechwriter who worked in the Bush White House from 2002 to 2005. But he has written a highly readable and credible account of Eisenhower's struggle with race and civil rights. While sympathetic, he doesn't sugarcoat Eisenhower's qualms about desegregation or excuse his unwillingness to move decisively before Little Rock.
Eisenhower famously regretted his appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice. (Warren served in that role from 1953 to 1969.) Warren confronted Eisenhower about the president's feelings toward him when they flew together to Winston Churchill's funeral in 1965. Eisenhower explained that it was Warren's liberal rulings on national security that had upset him. He didn't mention Brown v. Board of Education, and understandably so: Years earlier Eisenhower had told an aide, privately, that he thought the Brown decision was wrong; by 1965, he had concluded that it was right.
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Rated by buyers -
Kasey Pipes does a tremendous job of bringing Eisenhower's previously scarcely commented on struggles with the changing climate of America's Civil Rights to light in a very genuine manner. The book is incredibly readable and very informative.
Pipes is able to present facts with a human touch that brings the reader into Eisenhower's inner circle, as if they were a fly on the wall in some of Ike's most pivotal and telling situations.
Rated by buyers -
Ike's Final Battle
by Kasey Pipes
Mr. Pipes has written a thoroughly enjoyable and well written record of Dwight Eisenhower's approach to civil rights legislation and his exegesis of perspective in the civil rights arena. Pipes chronicles Eisenhower's internal struggles with desegregation of the military and government agencies and his fear that a revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, approach to liberty for all Americans could cause more harm than good. This is a positive revisionist history to some degree; clearly evidencing Ike's intent on aiding the plight of minorities in the US while battling the prejudices that he came of age accepting and being immersed in for the whole of his military career. Ike's slow methodical approach to all matters of civil rights is clearly on display, as was his approach to all difficult decision making. However, his unflinching adherence to the laws of our land clearly stand out. Desegregation is ordered in Little Rock, AR and local politicians refuse to accept the Supreme Court decision, Ike does not hesitate in the least. After exhausting all diplomatic efforts he clearly takes charge of the situation and sends in the 101st Airborne to aide with the enforcement of recently enacted laws. No regrets on Ike's part, no compromising his beliefs - the law is being broken and he immediately, without hesitation asserts control - in the process paving the way for desegregation enforcement to take hold throughout the land.
This is an extremely brisk read that you'll find difficult to get away from. No fluff, solid documentation and previously uncovered oral histories make this a treasure trove of new insight into Ike's personality and genuine concern over civil rights matters. Eisenhower was often derided for his lack of leadership on civil rights, an argument which merits legitimacy, however we're shown a different side in 'Final Battle' which show he was more progressive than many thought - in fact on some occasions, more progressive than the NAACP - then a truly dedicated organization and true standard bearer of civil rights advancement.
Definitely check this book out - it's worth the time and money!
Rated by buyers -
This book is a fast 300 pg. narrative on Eisenhower's nuanced positions regarding civil rights. The nuance is not whether equal rights for African Americans were right vs. wrong, but instead Eisenhower's struggle on how best to protect the rights of these Americans against the prejudice of southern conservatives who controlled the southern states and the relevant committees of the Senate.
Pipes begins with Eisenhower's experiences and contributions to the cause of equal rights in the military and ends in his retirement, with the climax happening 2/3 of the way through the book when Ike sends federal troops to Little Rock, AK to defend the right of African American students to attend a whites-only public school in spite of a bigoted governor who sends the national guard to keep them out. The book finishes with reflections on his contributions looking back from the time of Kennedy and LBJ moving the ball forward even further.
Pipes provides an incredibly fair report on President Eisenhower's policy positions and actions given the frequent opaqueness of his position depending on the situation and the company he was keeping. Many have attempted to paint Ike as a racist political opportunist or a courageous leader of the civil rights movement, with both positions given to hyperbole. Instead, Pipes portrays a man who respects majoritarian positions while realizing in his heart the wrongness of institutionalized bigotry even though Eisenhower, a man of his time, shares some prejudicial beliefs. The struggle for Eisenhower is often how to move the majority to his position without his having to depend on fiery rhetoric to change hearts and minds.
While Eisenhower was never a die-hard politico, he left the GOP with a wonderful legacy inherent in republicanism as a form of government instituted in 1787. Reading this book in 2007 shows how far the current majority of Republicans have mutated away from the principles of republicanism and Eisenhower, mostly due to the Southern Conservative Democrats who emigrated to the GOP after LBJ led the Democratic party into passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.
Pipes' only flaw in the book, so minor it's not worth knocking down a star, is a weak-hearted endeavor to define Eisenhower as a conservative even though all empirical evidence in the book and other studies on Eisenhower provide ample evidence that he was a moderate who "got it" regarding our founding ideal of republicanism that holds that government is obligated to defend our individual liberty rights. The examples of Eisenhower's actions in the book are a case study in republicanism, not conservatism, where Ike closely follows the examples of previous Republican presidents who used federal power to protect individual and minority rights (e.g., Madison, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt). Conservatives by definition abhor using federal power to protect individual rights, they instead promote the ideal of "state rights" in hopes the process of "democratic conservatism" at the state level will "protect the will of the people", i.e., conservatives want to employ simple majorities leveraging state power to deny individuals and minority groups equal rights and protections.
Rated by buyers -
Written by former Bush White House worker Kasey S. Pipes, Ike's Final Battle: the Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality is the amazing and unlikely true story of how Dwight D. Eisenhower became a civil rights president. Chronicling the landmark desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, which forced a historical confrontation between state and federal authorities and set an engraved precedent that the federal government would intervene for the sake of racial justice if necessary, Ike's Final Battle meticulously recounts events in unfolding detail, with an inset section of black-and-white photographic plates. An extensive bibliography, notes, and an index round out this welcome addition to American history shelves.
Rated by buyers -
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book! It tells President Eisenhower's story very well, and it kept my interest throughout the narrative.
Pipes' thesis, that Eisenhower went through a significant "struggle within himself" about his belief in civil rights (requiring significant social change) and majority rule (which did not support significant social change at that time), is also well argued. I especially appreciate the honesty in which the author tells Ike's story, including his strengths and weaknesses.
Also, Pipes does an excellent job of noting the number of significant Republican policy makers who were strong advocates of civil rights legislation during the 1950s and 1960s.
While I think everyone will benefit from reading this book, it especially should be read by all Republican office holders and candidates, today.
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