Nichols, David A. A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution.

• Author: Kotlowski, Dean J.
• Position: Book review

Nichols, David A. A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. 353 pages. Cloth, $27.

Early in his study of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's civil-fights policies, historian David A. Nichols relates a most revealing anecdote. While a high-school football player, Eisenhower confronted a predicament in which each of his teammates refused to play center in the upcoming game. Why? The center on the opposing team was African-American. Although Ike usually played split end, he broke the deadlock that day by agreeing to play center. Then, he made a point to shake hands with the lad standing opposite him an act that aroused a "bit" of shame among his teammates. "But," Eisenhower stressed years later, "I did not make a speech" lecturing them about the importance of fair play (p. 16).

Almost a half century later, President Eisenhower would likewise base his civil-rights program on obtaining results rather than engaging in political grandstanding or moralistic speech-making. Nichols emphasizes this tangible side of Eisenhower's record as he sets out to demolish the "myth," perpetuated by even the general's most friendly biographers (notably Stephen E. Ambrose), that America's thirty-fourth president was "no leader at all" on the question of racial equality (p. 1). Nichols also challenges the thesis of historian Robert Frederick Burk (The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights, 1984) that Eisenhower did little to advance civil rights beyond intervening, in one exceptional case, to support school desegregation, approving a pair of weak laws, and backing "symbolic equality" for blacks.

Nichols has a lot of ammunition to use in making his assault on conventional scholarly wisdom. Ike, after all, exceeded his Democratic predecessor and successor in two fields related to civil rights. Unlike President Harry S. Truman, Eisenhower successfully desegregated public facilities and schools in Washington, D.C. Unlike President John E Kennedy, who, out of deference to southern racists in his party, often found himself naming segregationists to federal judgeships, Eisenhower's appointments to the federal bench were, on racial matters, superb. They included such staunch civil-fights liberals as John Minor Wisdom, Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and Simon E. Sobeloff, whom Eisenhower appointed to serve on U.S. Courts of Appeals, as well as William J. Brennan, Jr., and Earl Warren, both of whom...