Eisenhower’s Farewell Address | A Primary Source Close Read w/ BRI

0:05 Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Bill of Rights Institute’s. Close Reads. I’m Kirk Higgins, and I’m really glad that you’re joining us today. For those of you who are new to this program in this format, each week or every other week, we find a different resource that we look at and try to unpack, to look at different themes and ideas that are sort of prevalent throughout American history. And this week we’re going to be looking at Dwight D.

0:26 Eisenhower’s farewell address. To help me with unpacking this document, I am fortunate to be joined by Dr. Stephen Tootle welcome Stephen. Nice to be here. Stephen is the professor of History at the College of Sequoias and is a visiting professor of history at the Ashbrook Centers Master Program for Teachers. And I’m really hoping, because he’s done a bit of writing

0:47 on presents and he can help me sort of understand a little bit more about what Eisenhower has got going on in this speech. Fairwell addresses are always really interesting to me because it is sort of that last public pronouncement of a public figure. And Dwight Eisenhower’s case, he had been a public figure for a really long time. And so I guess Stephen just sort of to open up our discussion, what is it about this?

1:10 What can we learn, I guess, from presidential farewell addresses? And I guess, why do we have them at all? Is this a tradition that’s been around forever, or is this sort of a thing that’s evolved in importance over time? Well, it’s a long standing tradition. George Washington famously set the precedent for giving a farewell Address, and his Farewell Address was written by Alexander Hamilton.

1:33 And Eisenhower explicitly patterned his Farewell Address on Washington’s Farewell Address in that he wanted it to be a sort of. Warning about how he was leaving the. Country and what he was most worried about as he was leaving office. And in Eisenhower’s case,

1:54 he actually conceived of his Farewell Address as being, like, a series of addresses, and it ended up coalescing into one speech. But I never took his role as a statesman very seriously.

2:15 And he considered one of the things. That he was supposed to do as. President was educate the public on what government was supposed to be doing. And so Eisenhower also was very good about his private thoughts and feelings being made public.

2:37 And what I mean by that is that he was always very consistent. What he was saying in private was always very especially in terms of the broad theories of governance, always match. What he was saying privately and publicly were always pretty much the same. I mean, you can see in a top secret document, you take the secret stuff out,

2:58 and he was saying exactly the same thing in public. Yeah, that’s really interesting. And I’m really fascinated by that Washington connection, because I didn’t know about that, but I got a lot of sort of Washingtonian vibes from this. Vibes, strange word to use. A lot of Washingtonian feelings, though,

3:19 because you see a public official who, like Washington, was a general beforehand, but you see someone who is retreating from the public eye for the first time and trying to be as transparent about that as possible. I think maybe for me, the big question for this is

3:39 what is revealed about Eisenhower’s thinking about the executive branch broadly, from the role of the presidency through his Farewell Address? Well, he had a deep sense of history. I think, in his high school yearbook. He was most likely to be a history teacher, I think, and he was primarily influenced by the examples of Washington and Lincoln.

4:01 And he was a very sophisticated reader of Lincoln in particular, really understood the subtleties of leadership and statesmanship from Lincoln. And as far as his conception of government, you have to also maybe remember why he ran for president in the first

4:21 place, and that was to restore balance not to the force, but to the US. Government, because after Truman’s victory in 1948, he was really concerned that the Republican Party would go away, that the vision of government represented by the Republican Party would go away, and that politics would be left,

4:43 on one hand, to Democrats and on the other hand to Demagogues. And he wanted to make sure that that didn’t happen. So he put himself in this very particular historical role when he decided to run for president. And then his farewell address is

5:04 a reflection on how or whether he achieved his goals. So you can really get a pretty keen insight into his philosophy of governance by looking at not just how he conducted himself through eight years in office, but also where he saw his own failings as he was leaving office.

5:28 Great. Well, I think that’s a great transition for us to just find out a little bit more about who Dwight D. Eisenhower was. So Dwight D. Eisenhower we know both as president, but also had a distinguished military career, premiere in World War II, head of the Allied Forces during the Second World War. So, Stephen, in your best three minutes, who was Dwight D.

5:48 Eisenhower, and how did he end up as president, and what were some of the sort of the high points of his presidency? Gosh three minutes. Okay, I can do this. Born Abilene, Texas, raised in Kansas and primarily associated with Abilene, Kansas.

6:09 And I’m sorry, who was born in Denison, Texas? Raised in Abilene, Kansas, and primarily associated with Abilene, Kansas. Went to West Point largely for the free education. His family is pretty poor, and they wanted to find a way so that all the boys could go to college, and he wanted to go to the Naval Academy, but he was too old, and so he went to West Point.

6:33 When he got out of West Point, he made the military a career and rose fairly slowly in the ranks, but had been marked by George Marshall for having a first class mind, so that in the case of hostilities ever breaking out again, he would be one of the people who would be first consulted and tapped for a leadership role.

6:56 So during World War II, he ends up becoming supreme allied commander of all the forces in Europe, and as such had to deal with all of the political issues of managing that coalition when the war was over. He was a national hero

7:16 and known for his great smile and sunny demeanor, but also his way of managing people and communicating ideas and took over the formation of NATO. Served as the president of Columbia University briefly, and as I mentioned earlier,

7:37 he was a little bit alarmed by Harry Truman’s election in 1948. He’s one of the few people who was so popular that he could have run for president as either a Republican or a Democrat. And in fact, here’s an interesting side note. For many years, we didn’t know who was lying in this story about Truman

7:59 and Eisenhower, where Eisenhower said that Truman had offered to let him run for president in Truman would step aside and be the vice president. And later on Truman said, no, that never happened. And so we never knew who was telling the truth. Was Eisenhower telling the truth that Truman had offered him

8:21 the presidency, or was Truman telling the truth? And a few years back at the Truman library, they discovered an unmarked book that had never been opened or indexed. And it was a missing Truman diary from this era. And in that diary, they found that Truman

8:42 had recorded that, yes, he had offered Eisenhower the presidency. So Eisenhower was telling the truth, and Truman was maybe not remembering things accurately, but that’s one of those cases where we did actually have a diary, a secret diary that solved it anyway. So he runs for president. And he’s a tremendously popular his popularity among two term presidents

9:07 is almost unparalleled in the history of modern polling at least. And. Guided by. I’d say. The traditional republican understanding of the office. With an emphasis on. As I said earlier. Restoring some sense of balance

9:28 to the federal government based on the philosophies of individual liberty. Protecting economic opportunity. And really protecting America’s representative institutions. And so there were major accomplishments during his presidency.

9:49 The most visible was the interstate highway system, which really revolutionized everything about American life and commerce. It was the largest infrastructure program in American history. So it’s also useful to point out the traditional dichotomy of people think that Republicans are for small government. And Eisenhower never understood it that way.

10:11 He didn’t think of small government, big government. He thought of a concept we would call subsidiarity, which is having the appropriate level of government solve the problem. And in the case of how do you build an interstate highway system? Only the federal government can do that. So again, probably the most concrete accomplishment used a lot of concrete of his administration.

10:35 Next was starting a space program, which he wanted to start a space program that was in balance with what was possible in a federal budget. So he wanted to have a space program, but he also didn’t want to use space.

10:56 He didn’t like the stuff where we’re just racing with the Soviets for no reason. And one of the reasons we didn’t really develop a lot of intercontinental we didn’t develop a lot of rocket programs for the delivery of nuclear weapons. It was much cheaper and much more accurate to use an all jet air force in order to deliver nuclear bombs.

11:20 Yes, he created the space program NASA, but in addition, he also created a world class air force capable of vast nuclear superiority over the Soviets. Next, civil rights.

11:41 It’s really remarkable what his civil rights record was in total, especially if you take a step back. A lot of people were frustrated at the time that more wasn’t accomplished. But then when you start actually looking at it, you realize that it was Eisenhower who actually desegregated the military. Truman had ordered the desegregation but never actually did it.

12:02 And Eisenhower and his staff went through and actually desegregated the military, desegregated Washington DC. And desegregated every part of the federal government that he had exclusive power over. Also pro civil rights Attorney General,

12:23 pro Civil Rights Solicitor General, pro civil rights Press Secretary means that his messaging in regards to civil rights was pretty consistent. So we see Eisenhower backing the sit in which that seems maybe a little bit radical, but towards the end of his presidency, but of course also managing to appoint pro civil rights justices to the Supreme Court

12:49 and managing to make sure that the Brown decision would be a unanimous decision decided by a pro civil rights Supreme Court. And the other I’d say civil rights thing that he accomplished was probably dealing with McCarthy and McCarthyism, which it was Dwight Eisenhower who really

13:15 orchestrated the downfall of Joseph McCarthy. And we now know that Eisenhower was central to making sure that McCarthy was marginalized and then his political career destroyed. And then finally in waging the Cold War, what Eisenhower really hoped to accomplish was he completely reoriented American

13:40 defense posture with the Soviets at the end of the Truman administration. We were really trying to match the Soviets man for man and outdo the Soviets at what the Soviets were good at. And Eisenhower said, this is foolish. We need to find a way of waging the Cold War without destroying what’s great about the United States.

14:01 And so his national security policy, if you want to do another close read sometime, NSC162/2 maybe less famous than his farewell address, but it really outlines the national security policy of the Eisenhower administration for the next eight years. And he’s remarkably consistent. He had already thought deeply about these issues.

14:21 I’ll tell you another Truman-Eisenhower contrast. If you look at the two men’s diaries from when they became president, on the day that Truman became president, he goes in front of the press and he says, boys, if you pray, pray for me now. He writes in his diary, it felt like a hay bale had hit him over the head. Eisenhower’s first day in office, he sits down and writes in his diary,

14:42 and he says, this just feels like a continuation of the issues I’ve been working on for a long time. He’s one of the few people on earth where the presidency was not the most complicated and difficult thing that he did in his life. Another anecdote from the campaign trail was the weather was really bad when he announced his candidacy in Abilene.

15:06 And he made this kind of off handed remark like, I haven’t worried about the weather since June of 44. Who cares about what the weather’s like when I’m giving my announcement speech compared to making the decision to go on D Day? So he was one of the people who could really put the presidency in its historical context because of his study

15:29 of American history, but also the jobs that he had before taking office. Yeah, that record is just tremendous. And it’s tremendous to think that this is almost another life beyond what he accomplished during the Second World War and even the things he was doing during the inner war period, which were not insignificant, not as significant, obviously, as what he would do later.

15:53 But it’s tremendous, and to me, it makes that context and really appreciate that context, I think, brings to light this speech even more, which we can dive right into. And I always like starting these things at the beginning, which obviously seems like a logical place to start, but oftentimes, and unfortunately, we can only do excerpts because we don’t have time to go through the entire speech, but oftentimes the intro gets cut.

16:16 But I love his intro here because after Stephen, you’re going through that list of things that he’s been doing and these accomplishments and these complex things he’s been working on. He begins by expressing gratitude to the radio and television networks for providing them with the opportunity to speak to the nation. And that strikes me as interesting for a couple of reasons.

16:37 One, because I think it does show in a true humility that I think, again, is reminiscent of sort of a Washingtonian kind of mindset, but it also very much places us in the historical context that it is right. Television, radio, maybe a little bit, but television as a medium to speak to the entire nation isn’t brand new, but it’s certainly not old hat at this point.

17:00 It’s still a fairly new thing. That paragraph really strikes me and him laying out what’s about to happen in transitioning. The office of the presidency, I think, is something that we often take for granted in the United States. But that transfer of power, being at the center of what it means to move from presidency to presidency and transfer the power between political

17:23 parties, in this case, it is so critically important that I find it fascinating that those are the two blocks that he begins his speech with. Well, you’re right. The context for banking, radio and TV is also because we’re significant, because the 1950s are the decade when televisions became common,

17:44 and the 1960s were the decade when televisions became universal. So by the end of the 1960s, the majority of American households did have TVs. That was not true when he took office. It was a very tiny percentage. And it wasn’t until the 1960s when it became almost universal. So it was Eisenhower who really set a lot of the precedents with regard to how

18:07 to deal with the TV networks and working closely with them. And he wasn’t afraid of he believed in communication and messaging, so he was willing to discuss communication and messaging with professionals. And people teased about this, saying that this is just like selling soap or something.

18:28 But Eisenhower took those roles seriously. And then with regards to handing it off to President Kennedy, he was very concerned about President Kennedy because he considered Kennedy to be too much of a belligerent cold warrior. And so, of course, he’s handing power off to President Kennedy, but he considered he wanted to warn

18:51 the American people kind of against what Kennedy was pitching. And another interesting contrast is Eisenhower’s farewell address, which is warning, what we need is balance, and Kennedy’s inaugural address, which is saying we don’t need any balance at all. We need to bear any burden. Eisenhower’s speech is saying we absolutely do not need to bear any burden.

19:13 We need to balance our many burdens in government. Yeah. And that’s a good transition to this next segment that we’re going to take a look at, which is where I think Eisenhower starts. He doesn’t speak directly to that balance that comes a little bit later, but here he begins to lay out a direct connection to American history, which I think speaks to his reference for

19:36 the importance of history, which we’ve discussed. But also he traces here sort of the purpose behind America’s intervention in different engagements throughout the world, and begins talking about using the phrase, the conflict now engulfing the world. Right? Which is is that sort of the Cold War?

19:58 I think and correct me if I’m wrong on that, but I found these two paragraphs as sort of his diving into what’s going to be the sub. Stance of his speech to be really powerful in that he frames it in a historical framing. Right. So that’s sort of what this is grounded in and then begins to turn his attention towards what this is going to mean moving

20:22 forward, or how it is that we can continue to live up to that legacy. Well, I mean, there’s so much that’s interesting in your question in these first few paragraphs. But the first thing I would note is that the 19th is also the high point for religious practice in America. And Eisenhower always coupled whatever

20:43 issue he was trying to teach about with religious liberty. And so one of the things that’s interesting, if you go back to every time that he mentions religious liberty and civil rights, he always put them together because he knew that Americans already accepted and desired religious liberty. And so he would use that existing belief in order to get Americans on board with civil rights.

21:06 And so that’s another good example of how he would use what people already believed in in order to get them to take the next step. And so you see this reference to religion and religious liberty in both of these paragraphs. So again, what we want, and we see him saying to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations, and to strive for less

21:30 would be unworthy of free and religious people and then progress. He had this darker view of human nature, that perfection was not possible in government. So he was constantly teaching the American people to strive for progress towards these goals that we’ll never actually accomplish. And then we also sometimes think of Eisenhower as being a moderate.

21:54 But he wasn’t a moderate in terms of how he viewed the Soviet Union. He was willing to negotiate with them, but he always understood it as a hostile ideology. And he knew the dangers of preaching for security above all else, because it’s Eisenhower who said, if all you want security, go to prison.

22:17 But he knew we had to face this threat of an aggressive Soviet Union that was trying to take over the world. But his point was we have to face the Soviet threat without losing what’s special about the United States. Yeah, and I think that he categorizes the Soviet Union as atheistic

22:39 in character, I think speaks directly to what you were talking about. That’s part of the threat that he sees facing us. Because you had mentioned Kennedy’s inaugural address, which follows this, this line really jumps out to me to meet it successfully. There is called for not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather a prolonged and rather those which enable us to carry

23:03 forward steadily, surely and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle with liberty to stake. And that to me speaks to, I don’t know, that’s an amazingly complicated thing to try to address to a nation, because what I see him saying there is look, this is going to take sacrifice, but the sacrifices of such a complex

23:25 nature that it’s not as easy as just attacking something right? Like, what’s the phrase to hammer everything’s nail kind of a thing. And I think that’s kind of a theme that comes through in this speech. But that’s a hard thing to try to communicate to the American people. I think again, it’s part of what he was trying to teach people was that he always

23:52 had this thing where he didn’t like it when people talked about how great somebody was as a crisis manager because if you’re a great crisis manager, that means that you’re having a bunch of crises. And he always thought it was strange when people would be criticized for making their own jobs look easy. And so this is something that absolutely

24:13 happened to him where for many years in presidential rankings, people would rank John Kennedy as being this great president because he was such a great crisis manager and nobody gave Eisenhower any credit, even though Eisenhower his point was like, I didn’t have a bunch of crises because I was dealing with them before they became a crisis.

24:37 And it’s really insightful of you to note that in this speech because that was a constant frustration that he had. You probably heard this in regards to law, but people say that a crisis makes bad law and Eisenhower believe that a crisis makes bad policy too.

24:57 Yeah, and he touches on that a little bit too in this next section here, which is a little bit longer, but I think really critical for understanding what he’s trying to lay out because he kind of lays out these two big threats that he sees facing us. But he begins this section by talking about that people should be concerned with the offers of miraculous solutions, which is always something that

25:25 I always like to listen for when I’m listening to politicians because anybody who’s offering me a perfect solution to a complex problem I tend to be a little bit hesitant of personally because these things are complex. And I think, like you had noted, eisenhower had been dealing with complex situations for a very long time at this point. And I think this point also to the perfectability that you mentioned but that cautioning against miraculous solutions to be really stood out.

25:50 And then here too is where it begins to really speak about that balance. The need to maintain balance in and among national programs, balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage and balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable. Balance between our central requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual.

26:12 Balance between action of the moment and national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance in progress, lacks of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration. Yeah, go ahead. Well, if you have a question? No, please, go ahead. There’s so much in here

26:34 that is full of insights into how he viewed the presidency. First is that he understood that you don’t have to teach security, you have to teach freedom. People understand I want to feel safe. And if you don’t feel safe,

26:55 the temptation for every politician is to simply give you the promise of security. And insecurity is a bottomless pit. It’s a hole that can never be filled because you can always be made to feel more safe. So what he’s doing here is re emphasizing balance over and over and over again.

27:17 Yes, we have legitimate security needs, but we also have to focus on the stuff that is unique and precious and valuable in the American system. Another interesting thing that I hadn’t thought about it, so you just brought it up, the role of data and governance. Eisenhower and Kennedy were right at this transition period where computers and data

27:44 analysis and social science was people were advocating for its use in governance. And especially if you look at the excitement among liberals in the Kennedy administration about the use of data, saying, oh, we could never do this stuff before because we couldn’t process data fast enough. But now that we have these things called computers, we can use that in our economic

28:07 forecasting and modeling and all this stuff. And Eisenhower resisted all that because he wanted governance to be based on values and he was aware of how data could be manipulated. So you see here this emphasis in the historical

28:29 values of the American system of government and saying, this is what we should be thinking of in government decision making, how to balance these values, because the temptation is going to be now that we have the ability to gather all of this data, we can solve any problem.

28:51 And he said this is a temptation we should absolutely not fall into. Yeah, and I appreciate too, that he’s not saying that the pursuance of trying to solve that problem is the problem. He’s saying that it’s almost as though having too much confidence in the fact that we immediately have the absolutely perfect solution. We should dedicate everything we possibly have to that one thing.

29:14 There’s a reason to be cautious. And I think that’s a good transition too. Again, the most famous part of the speech talking about the military industrial complex and what always jumps out to me in this is that it’s not as though he is arguing against any sort of mixing of private industry in the military.

29:39 And it seems as though he’s almost saying, like, look, historically this has changed over time. The way that these arms are produced has changed over time. Part of that’s out of necessity. But it’s a reality that this is now a new thing that we are dealing with and we need to be mindful of that new thing and be vigilant of it. And again, within the context of that balancing,

30:00 which to me almost seems like he’s looking for that perfect restilian mean or something, it seems to me that he’s saying, look, beware of the military industrial complex, but that doesn’t mean necessarily be afraid of the military or be afraid of big industry or interesting government. What it seems to me was a warning against was be mindful that there is a potential

30:24 that this could develop problems within our democratic system. And he had also remembered all the times during his presidency when he had been the one who had prevented military action. And in particular, he was worried about the United States getting involved in a bunch of small wars.

30:45 So he had a very strict set of rules that he would follow before committing American forces. I might be paraphrasing, but he kind of said over the years, if you prepare for a bunch of small wars, you’re going to end up fighting them. And so he was worried about what would happen if somebody who wasn’t

31:07 Dwight Eisenhower was saying, we don’t want to get involved in these wars, because he knew that the political criticism would be, oh, you’re not being tough enough on the Soviets. It’s funny that he gives this warning about the military industrial complex

31:31 and also its effect on higher education, and that ends up becoming famous. And after the farewell address, he would often express in letters his frustration that people were not looking at the totality of the speech and they were only focusing on this one

31:54 part when part of the speech is about the importance of balance. And people would then take this part out of context when he wanted it understood as part of the whole context. In the context of the whole speech. Yeah, it’s interesting. And again, thinking about our big question, again, how is this reflecting his view as what a president ought to do?

32:17 This educational piece, I think, is an interesting one. We can touch on that a little bit more towards the end. But it does very much feel like he’s trying to lay out a threat that he is seeing in a public way so that the public can engage in it in an informed way, that they’re paying attention to what he thinks is critically important.

32:40 Another thing to mention I mentioned that how he dealt with McCarthy, one of the things that Eisenhower said is, I won’t deal in personalities. So he would only speak in terms of principles of governance. He wouldn’t have come out and said, and John Kennedy is what I’m worried about, because he said he would never engage in personalities.

33:01 So he famous. When he was dealing with McCarthy, he wouldn’t say his name, for instance. He would joke privately, for instance, after McCarthy was gone, he said, I think it should be McCarthy wasn’t, which I thought was a pretty good line, but he never said that stuff publicly. He would only say it off the record. Yeah. I mean, that’s fascinating. Right.

33:22 And I think it speaks to who he was trying to be as a public official. And his interesting thing about how one thinks of themselves when they are a public official, I think being mindful of that there’s a tradition of that in American history. But being mindful of that, there is a part of you that is public, meaning it’s owned by the public.

33:44 In a certain sense. I think it’s an interesting concept that sometimes we don’t think about as much as we could. I never thought of himself as being the head of state. And it’s funny to think about this now because we just expect this behavior from president now. But imagine if President Biden or President Trump or President Obama had simply never said the names of people who criticized him.

34:10 It’s just absurd to even think about that as being, in other words, taking your role as head of state so seriously that you would never criticize your opponents by name in public. Yeah, and I think that’s such an interesting thing, too, because, again, looking at this passage, because even though he is in that position

34:33 of a head of state here, too, you see him using the we pronoun a lot and really associating himself as a citizen. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert, knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together. Putting himself in with that with the

34:55 American people, I think is really interesting. And two, I just want to highlight, because you had mentioned this word before, statesmanship, which I think is a word that sometimes we see and we’re okay, statesmanship. But I think there’s a lot to that word. And I think here he’s really it feels to me like he’s beginning to speak to the next president in this sentence, considering himself,

35:17 we as a part of the public moving forward, but also calling out the need for the statesmanship or the role of the head of state guiding the, quote, ship of state right towards the right end. I think it’s really interesting. So you had mentioned statesmanship before, so you can say a little bit about what Eisenhower saw that what that word may have meant to him and how he saw himself as a stateman.

35:40 Well, he absolutely believed that the role of leadership was statesmanship. And he would, I think, been pretty comfortable with this contrast I’m about to tell you, which is I always find it useful to contrast statesmanship with sophistry. Sophistry is the idea that you can tell

36:02 a lie or a version of the truth in service of a lie. And statesmanship is when you tell a version of the truth that gets people to take the next step towards a larger truth. And if you think of what Eisenhower was doing in this speech, he was saying, I’m giving you the version of the truth

36:23 that I think will help you to take the next step that you need to take. And you can sort of turn this over in your mind as you think about the role of a statesman in a representative form of government, which is to say, I’m supposed to be your leader, but I’m also supposed to reflect public opinion.

36:46 But for Eisenhower, what he saw in statesmanship is and it gets back to his vision of human nature, is he believed that human beings were infinitely complex. He had seen the horrors of Nazi Germany, for instance, and he knew that the worst evils in all of human history had been

37:09 committed by people who didn’t think of themselves as being evil. And so within every human being, you have a nature that’s capable of doing evil, but you also have a nature that’s capable of doing good. And what a statesman should do is a statesman should encourage the good side of you, if that makes sense.

37:32 So he knew that the way that you could tell if someone was a statesman is a statesman is someone who brings out the good side of America, brings out the good side and encourages the good side in American politics and culture and society, using what people already believed

37:52 in order to get them to be a little bit better. He thought it was good that people were religious. He famously can we curse? I can tell an anecdote, but it involves a curse word. But he famously started his Cabinet meetings, and he was one of the last presidents to really use the Cabinet as

38:12 an advisory committee, which we can also talk about. So he wanted to start his cabinet meetings with a prayer. And there was one meeting where they had some pressing issue, and they started the meeting without a prayer. And after a few minutes, Eisenhower turns to John Foster Dulles, who is his Secretary of State, and says, god damn it, Foster, we forgot the prayer.

38:39 He also said something kind of like, everyone should have a religion and I don’t care what it is. He knew that people had various beliefs about faith and that he wanted to be able to build on those things in order to encourage the good part of their nature. So you can sort of see in this,

39:00 it’s the task of statesmanship to mold, balance and integrate these and other forces doing well within the principles of our democratic system ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society. In a way, he’s kind of summarizing everything I just said. Well, Stephen, thank you again, and we’ll be sure and share the Eisenhower Library’s email link in the description as well.

39:22 So if you want to check out this document or other documents that they have, you can get the whole collection that Stephen was just mentioning. But Stephen is a lot of fun walking through this with you and I hope we can do it again sometime. Absolutely. And thank you all again for joining. Please do like and subscribe to the video. If you haven’t and you want to get more content.

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