In Defense of Twelve White Guys:

The President's Commission on National Goals

and the Search for Post-Sputnik American Identity

Paper presented April 1, Arrogance of Power Conference, University of Mary Washington,

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida

c. Robert H. Zieger, March 15, 2005

            It is questionable as to whether the devastating impact of the events of 9/11 has forced or even encouraged Americans to rethink or critically assess their basic institutions or sense of national identity. President Bush and his advisors have encouraged Americans to celebrate their way of life, often invoking the idiom of personal consumption and ill-defined conceptions of national unity. Ubiquitous bumper stickers proclaim “The Power of Pride,” while, in the words of national security critic Stephen Flynn “our marching orders as citizens are to keep shopping and traveling.” It is true that President Bush, former Attorney-General Ashcroft, and others have advanced new definitions of civil liberty that in theory impose limitations on personal rights and innovations in investigative procedures that seem almost revolutionary, but in practice these initiatives little impinge on the activities of the vast majority of American citizens who appear to show at best sporadic interest in the erosion of the Bill of Rights. The administration, decries columnist Anna Quindlen, has fused “patriotism . . . with consumerism; if you were afraid to go to the Gap, the terrorists had won.”

            At the same time, the Bush administration has stressed the military or quasi-military character of the threat to Americans and has privileged military response. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon do require change in values and polities, but not change among Americans. Rather, America’s unparalleled military might will is to be the instrument of change elsewhere, most notably the Middle East. Quite literally, the administration aims to fulfill the old Wilsonian project of making the world safe for democracy, which it defines as being a system of governance and social relations essentially identical to that prevailing in the United States, but to accomplish it in a unilateral idiom quite at odds with the Wilsonian conception of a League of Nations

            In the late 1950s, the nation faced an earlier challenge, one that triggered widespread public anxiety and a remarkable surge of self-examination and public soul-searching that stands in sharp contrast to the celebratory character of much of today’s post-disaster discourse. Ironically, it was an ostensibly peaceful, scientific demonstration that plunged the country’s pundits, journalists, clergymen, political leaders, and opinion formers into a remarkable spate of public self-scrutiny. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first earth satellite, dubbed “Sputnik,” and thereby aroused both an immediate panic and a longer-range reassessment of America’s character, goals, and purposes contrasts with the country’s reaction of the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 

            The political leaders, pundits, journalists, and other cultural gatekeepers of the late 1950s did not normally speak the language of “identity.” Their preferred rubrics were “goals” or “national purposes.” They did regard the country as standing at a crossroads, however, and did believe that the American people faced challenges that called into question the nation’s basic values and institutions. They feared that the America’s very success in generating consumer plenty was creating a feckless citizenry that would prove unequal to the task of meeting an increasingly vigorous, successful, and dynamic Soviet (or Sino-Soviet) challenge. Thus, throughout the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, business, political, journalistic, and academic leaders launched a series of initiatives designed to awaken a complacent populace to the physical and moral threat that Communist success posed. In wide-ranging congressional hearings, the pages of Life magazine, the reports of the Rockefeller Brothers Special Project on the American Prospect, and special campaigns designed and promoted by the Advertising Council, the nation’s public tribunes sought to reconcile America’s vaunted material plenty with the need to cultivate the toughness of spirit and resolve to face down what appeared to be an increasingly effective Communist challenge. Of all the diverse initiatives launched during this era of doubt and introspection, it was an initiative launched by President Eisenhower, the President’s Commission on National Goals, presided over by twelve white guys, that best articulated that sense of national crisis and, at least in certain respects, most productively posited an agenda for positive civic action.

I: Sputnik

            While concern about Americans’ ability to meet the Soviet challenge permeated the years of the mid-to-late 1950s, it was the successful launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik on October 4, 1957, that galvanized public concern. This spectacular demonstration of Russian technological prowess brought a number of closely related fears to the surface. An enemy that could fire a satellite into space could, it was widely believed, reach American cities with nuclear warheads, an apprehension that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev did nothing to discourage. Beyond the immediate sense of sudden vulnerability, though, lay the belief that the Soviet regime had found ways to mobilize the intellectual and economic capacities of its citizens while Americans frittered away their patrimony in mindless consumption and frivolous amusements. In November, the editors of Life warned that "Khrushchev may well calculate that if he is ever to start a major war, now he will find the United States most divided and unnerved." Another Soviet launch on November 7–this one with a much larger payload, including the dog Laika–intensified the alarm. Scientist George Price, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, declared that "Unless we depart utterly from our present behavior, it is reasonable to expect that by no later than 1975 the United States will be a member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

            Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson shared the general sense of alarm. The American people, he declared, “must be summoned to ‘battle stations’. [sic]” In the fall and winter of 1957-58, he held highly publicized hearings in which witnesses highlighted the administration’s failures and spoke of a dangerous “missile gap.” Declared Massachusetts Senator and presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy on a 1959 television panel addressing the question “Can the Democracy meet the Space Age Challenge?,” the country now faced its “Most critical peril since the time of Lincoln.” Friends of the administration joined the chorus. Thus, in February, 1959, a leading Eisenhower factotum, educator, diplomat, and governmental scientific expert James B. Conant, warned the president that “we are in a period of real peril,” for even in the 1930s “we were not faced . . . with the kind of struggle which [now] characterizes our divided world. . . .”

            Fundamenal criticisms of American society in general proliferated. The initial sense of crisis triggered by Sputnik remained, now increasingly focusing on the putative failures and weaknesses of the American people. Even before Sputnik, a spate of popular and scholarly indictments of virtually every phase of American life had burst forth. America, it seemed, once the stalwart guardian of freedom, had become a land of tail-finned gas-guzzlers, ticky-tack suburbs, decaying and ineffectual schools, and selfish and feckless citizens. Americans, economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, lived in an affluent society in which private indulgence masked public squalor. Hidden persuaders, social critic Vance Packard warned, were corrupting a gullible and pampered public. Writer John Keats was particularly vocal in a series of best selling books whose very titles indicted an America seemingly awash in a sea of mediocrity, blandness, and indulgence. The Crack in the Picture Window (1956) savaged conformist suburban life-styles, while The Insolent Chariots (1958) ridiculed the country’s love affair with dysfunctional automobiles and Schools without Scholars (1958) joined a host of critics of the aimlessness and triviality of public education.

            Young congressional staffer Robert F. Kennedy, head counsel in probes of labor union corruption, caught the zeitgeist in his 1960 book The Enemy Within. Corruption in the Teamsters’ union, he declared, joined “other evidences of [America’s] moral and physical unfitness.” He pointed to recent television quiz show scandals and to revelations that American school children were overweight and physically unfit. Economic abundance had “so undermined our strength of character that we are now unprepared to deal with the problems that face us.” Union corruption and similar evidences of public dishonor were “merely the symptom of a more serious moral illness.” “Disaster is our destiny,” he warned, “unless we reinstall the toughness, the moral idealism which has guided this nation during its history.”

            The president himself endorsed this mordant view of the quality of life in the United States. Thus, in June, 1960, he warned graduating seniors that “freedom is imperiled where peoples, worshiping material success, have become emptied of idealism. Peace with justice,” he admonished, “cannot be attained . . . where opulence has dulled the spirit. . . .” Critics of American education contrasted diligent, focused Russian youngsters with milkshake-slurping, slack-jawed American boys and girls. Tawdry scandals involving popular quiz shows and radio personalities led to somber reflections on the country’s descent into moral decay. “The citizens,” declared an academic observer, “seem to have lost . . . courage and power. . . [and to be afflicted with] anxiety and weakness. . . .”

            Soviet achievements loomed large. On the surface, to be sure, the death of Stalin and the accession of Nikita Khrushchev suggested an easing of tensions. Khrushchev’s rough peasant charm–to say nothing of his denunciation in 1956 of the excesses and pathologies of Stalinism–conveyed a new openness and accessibility. For some American leaders, however, it was precisely the Soviet premier’s affability and ebullience that made him even more dangerous than his predecessor. Soviet achievements in technology, economics, and education lent troubling credibility to the Red regime. Expanding and popular Soviet initiatives among former colonial peoples, symbolized by triumphant visits of Khrushchev and Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Bulgarin to India, Egypt, and other underdeveloped nations triggered alarm at the highest governmental circles. Thus, warned C. D. Jackson, one of Eisenhower’s most trusted advisors, emblematic of the new post-Stalin Soviet theat was the Burmese government’s rejection of U.S. aid projects while its leaders were making “economic googoo eyes at Moscow. . . .” Indeed, the combination of Russian scientific and economic progress and Khrushchev’s popular appeal, fulminated U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1957, made the Soviet leader “the most dangerous person to lead the Soviet Union since the October Revolution. . . .”

            Thus, the enemy was no longer the implacable Stalin,. It was now the boisterous Khrushchev, brandishing impressive statistics on economic growth, educational achievement, and scientific accomplishment even as Russian satellites glittered in the night sky. Whereas men of the Truman-Marshall-Acheson generation had worried about a triumphant Red Army and communist unions and politicians in war-torn Europe, men of the Eisenhower-Kennedy generation feared the appeal of Soviet economic and military achievements for impoverished former colonial subjects in Asia and Africa. Thus, in December, 1960, General Dynamics CEO and former U.S. Secretary of the Army Frank Pace warned college students that “the cold hard facts still are that the Communist states are making giant strides, not only militarily but in the economic and psychological fields as well. We have no time to lose." And looming beyond the Russian steppes, he added, was the specter of "over half a billion dedicated zealots, the Chinese Communist nation. . ." challenging the West and competing for the hearts and minds of people of color.

II: Doubts about American Resolve

            Indeed, Soviet space success and the educational and scientific infrastructure that produced it encouraged the troubling belief that a disciplined, authoritarian society might in fact be better equipped to compete in the modern world than an individualistic, consumer society. Editors, officials, academics, and military leaders wondered if democracy and pluralism were compatible with the nation’s survival in the competition with a ruthless, dedicated, and efficient foe. Thus, declared CBS correspondent Howard K. Smith, moderating an April, 1960, television broadcast titled “How Can You Get Things Done in a Democracy?,” the United States faced competition from “a powerful autocracy that can apply the swift changes [necessary for military and educational development] without having to go through time-consuming elections. . . .” In his first national television interview, sage Walter Lippmann worried along the same lines: The Soviets, he observed , had a “great sense of purpose [while] we do not at present have that sense of purpose. . . .” Senators, educators, journalists, and intellectuals endlessly and often pessimistically discussed the question that Lippmann posed: “Can a loose democracy compete with a . . . dictatorship?”

            Much of the blame for America’s new technological vulnerability and moral decay devolved upon the president. Believing that ill-informed journalists, ambitious politicians, and hardware-hungry service chiefs were grossly misrepresenting implications of Soviet successes, Eisenhower sought to calm the public in a series of reassuring speeches and press conferences. He pointed to the crudeness of the Sputnik launch’s technology and its inapplicability to direct military purposes. Still, the notion that the administration was in denial about the crisis facing the country gained currency. Thus, when on November 25 the president suffered a stroke, the sense of a nation in peril and governed by a sickly and distracted old man became pervasive. The president, declared Walter Lippmann–a close observer of every occupant of the White House since William Howard Taft–was simply “not aware of the nature of the world as it is. . . [and] is out of date. . . .not preparing the country for the needs of the 1960s. . . .not meeting the real challenge of the Soviet Union. . . .”

            Culpable though he was, according to even friendly observers, Eisenhower was not alone in bearing the burden of blame. The American people themselves bore much of the responsibility for national distraction and complacency. Proponents of national strength and resolve were shocked at the findings of pollsters that indicated indifference or ignorance on the part of the public over the implications of Soviet space achievements. Thus, a Gallup Poll during the week after the first Soviet launch found that almost half the respondents felt no particular alarm and over 60% viewed the Soviet achievement as a positive technological development. In October, pollster Samuel Lubell took it upon himself to supplement his structured interviews in New York to ask citizens informally what they thought of Sputnik and was shocked by the complacency and indifference he encountered. “‘There’s only one thing that worries us,’” an elderly man told him. “‘It’s all these taxes. . . . Let someone else worry about sputnik.’” A few months later, a Life magazine reporter was appalled when another survey revealed that 4 million Americans had not even heard of Sputnik. Declared Paul O'Neill, many more–a “complacent majority”–remained disengaged or indifferent. A year later, James Conant remained “disturbed both by the present complacency and the confusion even among the leading citizens. . . we cannot meet the Soviet challenge unless people are willing to make more sacrifices. . . .”

            Throughout the post-Sputnik period, dire warnings of complacency were continually juxtaposed with celebrations of American prosperity and plenty. On the hustings in the fall of 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy hammered away at the theme of lethargy and lack of resolve. “A man who has extra fat,” declared the lean contender, “will look doubtfully on attempting the four-minute mile,” a reference to British runner Roger Bannister’s remarkable recent feat. But “A nation replete with goods and services, confident that ‘there’s more where that came from,’ may feel less ardor for questing.” At the same time, however, it was dangerous to tell the voters that they had it too good. The call for sacrifice had to be couched in sufficiently broad and ambiguous terms to permit citizens to exempt themselves from the blame and guilt implicit in calls for self-restraint and discipline.

            The pages of Life magazine, a leading voice in the condemnation of national indulgence, graphically revealed the dilemma. Earnest articles and editorials might well remind citizens that the "Romans were complacent before the Visigoths sacked the city," but as General Motors told Life’s readers, “There’s Nothing Like a New Car for Festivity.” Material plenty might be sapping the nation’s resolve but any hint of slackening consumer demand sent the country into a recession. Thus, throughout the sharp economic downturn of 1958-59, even as critics lashed out at spirit-sapping abundance, car dealers insisted that “You auto-buy now.” Here then was the critical dilemma that faced post-Sputnik moralists: the bounty of the American economy was at once America’s glory and its nemesis.

III. The Perils of Prosperity

            One way out of the dilemma was to point to the advertising and television industries as the culprits. Indeed, popular writer Vance Packard made a career out of castigating Madison Avenue, whose machinations provided endless grist for the mills of comedians and pundits. Newscaster and commentator Edward R. Murrow assailed the television networks for their role in making Americans “wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent." Charged a trade union official participating in a symposium on American values sponsored by the Advertising Council, “advertisers whet our appetites for a still higher standard of living and make us still softer and more the slaves of the things they have taught us to use.” The people, in short, were being seduced into lives of sloth and ease by devious men in gray flannel suits whose cynical stimulation of desire deflected citizens from proper attention to public duty.

            But offloading responsibility onto the advertising industry was finally no resolution to the dilemma either. Who were financial and cultural elites to tell American citizens what was good for them or where their civic duty lay? Woe betide the politician who would set himself up as an arbiter of popular taste or an enemy of ever-expanding consumption. Moreover, millions of Americans remained on the margins of the vaunted material abundance of the 1950s, as candidate Kennedy himself frequently charged. Arguments that combined a critique of wasteful consumption, on the one hand, with acknowledgment of the plight of the poor and excluded on the other raised disturbing questions of income redistribution and economic equality. In the 1950s, Democrats no less than Republicans, trade unionists no less than corporate executives, were committed to consumer-driven economic growth, and thus to avoidance of talk of equity and redistribution, as the key to American progress.

            Moreover, in a deeper sense, America was about consumption and commerce. The argument over which type of republicanism–commercial or civic–best defined the national character had long been settled in favor of the former. It was too late now for America’s leaders and publicists to apply the brakes, shift gears, and redefine the national style. We were, in the words of historian David Potter’s important 1954 study of the national character, a People of Plenty, not a people of restraint and sacrifice. Advertising and television, then, were merely vehicles through which Americans were brought to their destiny, not an insidious alien force corrupting the people. Declared one industry spokesman, advertising “really powers our whole incentive system,” and was crucial to the “tremendous upsurge which the American economy has experienced in our time.”

            Thus, guardians of public purpose were left with a conundrum. In the struggle against Communism, which now took on dangerous new dimensions, the American people had to stand firm and remain true to their heritage of struggle and sacrifice. At the same time, however, the “free enterprise” economy created the cornucopia of riches that elevated the living standards of all. Indeed, in the words of one celebratory publication, “‘Of all the great industrial nations, the one that clings most tenaciously to private capitalism[,] has come closest to the socialist goal of providing abundance for all in a classless society.’” Yet could a people blessed with this bounty find the mettle necessary for competition with the disciplined Red masses?

            In the end, all this talk of moral and physical decline amid unparalleled international tensions and thermonuclear vulnerability grew diffuse and unfocused. Liberal critics of the Eisenhower administration saw more opportunity than threat in the Sputnik phenomenon. Frustrated by the fiscal conservatism of the Eisenhower administration along a whole range of domestic issues, northern Democrats, liberals, racial minorities, and laborites viewed the Soviet achievement as offering a chance to promote a progressive domestic agenda. Soviet inroads into the Third World, for example, highlighted the need for vigorous civil rights measures at home. Seemingly spectacular gains in Soviet economic performance underscored the low growth rate and toleration of high levels of unemployment that, they charged, stemmed from Eisenhower’s bean-counting budgetary priorities. The Sputnik-inspired cry for scientific and technical expertise opened the door for federal aid to education. The alleged missile gap, in short, might well prove just the opening needed to carry forth the interrupted agenda of the New Deal and continue the process of building a fairer, more positive social order.

              Others highlighted the specifically military threat. For people such as the members of the Gaither Committee, New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin, and generals such as Maxwell Taylor and James Gavin, it was Communist military intentions and capabilities that demanded response, pure and simple. Expansion of the defense budget, accelerated development of intercontinental missiles, beefing up conventional forces to offer resistance to Communist subversion in Southeast Asia, and perhaps mass construction of bomb shelters would provide what was needed to confront the Soviets and their clients. Those stressing the essentially military nature of the post-Sputnik crisis rarely invoked the images of sybaritic sloth or moral corruption, although they did worry that public reluctance to bear heavier tax burdens might impede necessary build-up. Thus, declared congressional preparedness zealot Representative Dan Flood of Pennsylvania, “I would rather have red ink in the books [to pay for military build-up] than red blood on the streets of America.”

            But for many influential American writers, pundits, and public moralists, the Sputnik challenge transcended specific concerns about military capacity and social reform. Often in extreme language reflective of a classic moral panic, these people depicted the crisis as lying at the very heart of the American way of life. Thus, declared James Conant, “Our existence and our freedoms are both in danger.” Wrote Walter Lippmann in the summer of 1959, “Without a revival of American purpose Mr. K. is likely to win the competitive race . . . [and] if he does win the race our influence as a world power will inevitably decline.” Conant, Lippmann, and a host of other commentators and editorialists called for sacrifice and resolve.

            Yet how would calls for sacrifice resonate among a populace schooled in the virtues of consumption? Finding the wherewithal for greater military spending, foreign aid, and enhanced education, declared foundation executive Dean Rusk in December, 1957, would require an end to “waste and frivolous consumption,” but he acknowledged that it was probably not wise for anyone such as himself associated with the Rockefeller Foundation to make this point publically. Quite apart from the incongruity of the wealthy Rockefellers urging restraint on ordinary citizens, Rusk added, “most people’s human reaction [is] that they are not consuming enough.” Did the “twilight struggle” not imply a certain degree of economic leveling, lest popular resentment erode the nation’s noble mission? Or could a formula be found that would promote expanded economic growth as a means of disguising the sacrifice necessary for meeting the renewed Communist onslaught? Could perhaps an authoritative, definitive statement of the country’s mission provide the basis for moving the people to accept the burdens of continued world leadership and for squaring the national commitment to an expanding bounty with the need for discipline and sacrifice in a world suddenly grown so perilous?

IV: The Quest for National Goals

            Throughout the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, business, political, journalistic, and academic leaders launched a series of initiatives designed to awaken a complacent populace to the physical and moral threat that Communist success posed. In wide-ranging congressional hearings, the pages of Life magazine, the reports of the Rockefeller Brothers Special Project on the American Prospect, and special campaigns designed and promoted by the Advertising Council. In May, 1960, for example, Life announced “a Crucial New Series [:] The National Purpose,” which featured reflections on the nation’s heritage, its current dilemmas, and its future prospects by Adlai Stevenson, Billy Graham, Archibald MacLeish, James Reston, Walter Lippmann, and other luminaries. “More than anything else, the people of America,” declared Life’s editor–in-chief Henry Luce, “are asking for a clear sense of National Purpose.” Simultaneously, a Senate committee chaired by Washington Democrat Henry Jackson was holding hearings, ostensibly on National Policy Machinery, that in fact kept circling back to the theme of national purpose and national goals. Attributing steadfastness of purpose, disciplined conduct of affairs, and implacable commitment to the ideals of Communism to America’s Soviet and Chinese adversaries, Luce, Nelson Rockefeller, George Kennan, and other notables repeatedly warned that without a clear sense of national purpose, America could not compete with such relentless foes. Said Rockefeller, “as a people we have got to have a clearer sense of national purpose. . . .This, I think, is a fundamental and most important problem we face in the future,” A sentiment to which Jackson added “This determines whether we will survive.”

            Indeed, the advertising industry itself shared in the sense of national crisis highlighted by Sputnik. Business leaders and advertising executives were not immune to these apprehensions. Declared Ad Council Executive Director Ted Repplier in February, 1960, “We are [still] behind in ICBM’s. . . while the Russians go from one triumph to another.” Moreover, Soviet successes in Asia and Africa were now being followed by a bold grab for influence in Cuba: “Communism now evidently has a boothold in our backyard.” “Everybody says we are entering the Golden Sixties,” Repplier admonished the Council’s board of directors, “yet only a very stupid man could say that everything is rosy.”

             The advertising industry, sensitive to criticisms of its role in promoting indulgence and consumption, joined in the effort to steel American resolve. Indeed, in 1961-62, the Council devoted substantial creative talent and financial resources to creating a campaign designed to awaken Americans to the need for vigilance, resolve, and sacrifice in the face of the Sino-Soviet challenge. Thus, in the fall of 1962, the Council launched its Challenge to Americans campaign, employing stark images of Communist resolve and apocalyptical rhetoric warning of the peril to America. In the words of one planning document, “We have never in our history faced this kind of world-wide struggle–a struggle in which the odds are, in many ways, against a democracy.”

            Young and Rubicam’s magazine and newspaper layouts stressed the themes of crisis and the underdog status of the United States. Graphics depicted a bold and dark alien challenge, ruthless in its determination and powerful in its capabilities. An outsized, starkly black-and-white head shot of Lenin, glared implacably at the viewer under the boldfaced warning: ‘WE ARE CHALLENGED.” Another image depicted a fist-pumping Nikita Khruschev against a white backdrop occupying the top one-fifth of a page. Below him, radiating cracks visually associated with the Soviet Premier’s descending fist fractured a black wall-like mass. The caption read: “WE ARE CHALLENGED: BE STRONG OR BE SPLIT.”

            Nor was the message merely that our Soviet adversaries were determined and powerful. Not without a sense of rueful irony, Ad Council Executive Director Ted Repplier, pointed as well to the problems that plenty and affluence posed for a people faced with such stern challenges. “The 1960s,” he predicted, “will be a testing time for America.” The Russians, he declared were “a pioneering, intelligent, hard-working, and dedicated people,” while Americans “have had it too good too long.” It was time for “us to pull up our socks, tighten our belts” and redress “out current softness and ethical shabbiness.”

            V: The President’s Commission on National Goals

            Of all the diverse initiatives designed to awaken Americans to the challenge that faced them and to articulate a sense of national purpose, however, it was the President's Commission on National Goals, appointed in January of 1960 and delivering its report ten months later that captured the greatest contemporary public attention. The Sputnik launches, coupled with dire reports of American military vulnerability and pervasive questions about the nation's spiritual, moral, and political health formed the immediate backdrop to the President's call in his January, 11, 1959, State of the Union message for the creation of a commission consisting of "A group of selfless and devoted individuals." Their deliberations and reports would serve as "long term guides" toward "goals that must stand high. . . ." The commission would study particular problems of economic performance, international relations, and social concern, but above all its deliberations were designed "to inspire every citizen to climb always toward mounting levels of moral, intellectual and material strength. . . [and to] spur pride in individual and national achievements." Powerful and prosperous, the country appeared too often to lack direction and common purpose. Declared the President, "We Need a National Goal."

            The Eisenhower Commission consisted of eleven white males, all but one of whom lived and worked along the Northeastern corridor. Chairing the Commission was Brown University President Emeritus Henry Wriston. Half of the commissioners had direct ties to the scientific-military-industrial complex; two--former Harvard president James Bryant Conant and du Pont CEO Crawford Greenewalt--had played major roles in the Manhattan Project. All were vocal supporters of the main tenets of postwar American foreign policy. There was little ideological conflict among the commissioners, with AFL-CIO president George Meany and University of California Chancellor Clark Kerr representing the "left" end of the narrow spectrum and Greenewalt and his brother-in-law, former Virginia Governor Colgate Darden, holding down the "right." The Commission's staff director was William Bundy, a consummate Washington insider and organizer, between stints as director of the CIA's Office of National Estimates and deputy Secretary of Defense under John Kennedy.

            The Eisenhower Commission was privately funded, in accordance with the President's hopes that it could be free of partisan or official influences. In fact, Eisenhower and his staff spent a good deal of time in the year between announcement of the project, in January, 1959, and its actual launching a year later trying unsuccessfully to get funding from the Ford Foundation and other major private donors. Eventually, the President, perhaps embarrassed by frequent questions about the phantom commission at news conferences, turned to his mentor in the ways of academic politics, Henry Wriston. After his departure from Brown in 1955, Wriston had become head of the American Assembly, a public service adjunct of Columbia University that Eisenhower had established during his university presidency with funding initially from the Harriman family estate. Under Wriston's energetic direction, the American Assembly arranged for foundation grants to finance the project--now somewhat scaled down in scope and ambition from the plans initially circulating in administration circles--supplied staff and secretarial support for the Commission's work, and in January, 1960, initiated the Commission's deliberations.

            The president’s charge to the Commission called upon its members “to identify the great issues of our geneation” and to “give us the basis for coordinated policies in both the domestic and international areas.” Framing its discussions inevitably would be keen awareness of the “aggressive [international] Communist conspiracy.” Yet the commissioners were enjoined to focus its attentions on America’s domestic institutions with a view to improving education, public welfare, and “individual well-being.” Nor should the Commission’s deliberations and reports be narrowly technocratic in tone or content. “The Commission,” Eisenhower counseled, “has the opportunity to sound a call for greatness to a resolute people.” To be sure, many key issues were ambiguous and complex, “But through the haze of indecision one sees the strong and vibrant image of a future America . . . .”

            Wriston and Bundy, in consultation with other Commission members, steered clear of broad, philosophical reflections, identifying instead a series of concrete public concerns on which its deliberations and reports would focus. There would thus be sustained consideration of education, science, economic growth, technology, agricultural policy, urban issues, and social health and welfare problems. Two chapters would deal with foreign policy but the Commission was agreed that however much the Soviet threat lurked behind the enterprise, these reports would focus on the positive aspects of US diplomacy and avoid detailed discussions of military concerns and diplomatic strategy. Notable by its omission in the Commission’s emerging agenda was any specific focus on race relations, a circumstance that Wriston, Bundy, and others fretted about but could find no way to accommodate. Once early meetings of the commissioners had established these agendas, commission staff then set about organizing discussion of the topics thus identified. This process consisted largely of recruiting established experts to write authoritative commentaries on the various topics, which would serve as the basis for the Commission’s summary statement of National Goals.

            The papers written provided the basis for the commissioners' ongoing deliberations, which culminated in a final meeting early in November. At this session, the commissioners adopted a 23 page statement of goals prepared by Bundy and his aides on the basis of ongoing consultation with the individual commissioners and several common meetings. Although the energetic and authoritative Wriston worked hard to gain consensus among his colleagues, lingering differences in emphasis, especially between Greenewalt and Meany, insured that the final report would contain "additional statements," if not formal dissents, from some members.

            In the published report, titled Goals for Americans and issued by Prentice-Hall two weeks after the presidential election, the statement of goals and these mildly dissenting "additional statements" were followed by the expert-written essays. These occupied almost 300 pages of text. The tone and tenor of these papers was broadly consistent with the statement of goals, but the Commission carefully informed readers of Goals for Americans that the papers were offered only as "interesting and relevant discussions of vital issues," not as expressions of views endorsed by the Commission whose "own position is set forth solely in its own Report," that is to say, the 23 page discussion of goals preceding these essays.

            The small size, relative homogeneity, and quasi-secretivity of the Eisenhower Commission encouraged the notion that the nation's Olympian solons were hard at work ruminating on the country's plight. Wriston and Bundy carefully guarded the Commission's work from public scrutiny. There were no leaks and, despite the divisions in opinion that surfaced in Goals for Americans, no efforts on the part of Commissioners or staff to appeal directly to the public through the press. The few press reports that did appear were respectful, accepting without apparent skepticism the official view of the Commission as a council of wise men, cogitating in disinterested fashion about the state of the nation.

            The reports themselves reflected the different times in which they were drafted and published. Indeed, Goals for Americans, while dutifully cataloguing the challenges and difficulties facing the country, was programmed from the start to strike a positive note. For all the tribulations of the latter years of his presidency, Eisenhower still commanded vast public respect. As a military man, he stood above the partisan battles and fractional disputes and had commanded a diverse, even polyglot army in a fashion that seemed to combine democratic simplicity with vast personal authority. The press, and implicitly the public, trusted him to appoint commissioners who shared his general perspective while at the same time plausibly claiming that they were men of individual principle and integrity.

            Given the his prestige and reputation for disinterestedness, Eisenhower was free to choose like-minded men who could plausibly take on the persona of disinterested sages. The only commissioners remotely representing constituencies were Meany and Greenewalt. Once the president had tapped Wriston to head up the project, the former Brown president, along with Bundy, had a free hand in choosing the expert authors of the discussion chapters. They operated within the tight world of the Ivy League universities, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the liberal Cold War consensus. John W. Gardner, executive director of the Carnegie Foundation, wrote the chapter on education, while Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation did the chapter on science. Thomas Watson of IBM wrote on technology and Kerr himself authored a chapter on economic organization. Among the more notable contributions were the essays on "The Democratic Process" by Cornell political scientist Clinton Rossiter and the essays by Herbert Stein and Edward F. Denison (on employment and economic growth) and August Heckscher on American culture. Historian William L. Langer, a key figure in the World War II predecessor to the CIA, the Office of Secret Services, surveyed foreign policy, while veteran foreign and defense policy practitioner John J. McCloy contributed the chapter on "Foreign Economic Policy." Wriston himself produced an introductory essay on "The Individual," and Bundy concluded the volume with reflections on "A Look Further Ahead."

            A more skeptical later generation might have considered the heavy CIA-national defense orientation of so many of the principals in the Goals commission as suspect, perhaps even sinister. Commissioners Conant, Killian, Gruenther, Pace, and Greenewalt had been central figures in defense industry, weapons development, nuclear research, and military life. Moreover, Bundy and his aide Guy Coridan came to the Commission directly from the CIA, while the authorship of the chapters on foreign policy by Langer and McCloy strengthened the military-intelligence cast of the enterprise.  Indeed, even at the time of the Commission’s appointment, critics called attention to the gender composition and age profile of the body. Even so, declared New York Times pundit Arthur Krock, “Nestors are essential to wise counsel and sound decisions,” even if the average age of the commissioners was a venerable 62.

            In the late 1950s, however, virtually no one even commented on the apparent military-defense orientation of the Commission's principle figures. So complete was the pre-Vietnam Cold War consensus that the press and the broad public made little distinction between pressing domestic problems and problems relating to military and foreign policy affairs. The raging debate over educational standards and performance, for example, was largely couched terms of education's contribution to America's place in the world arena. Widespread criticisms of rampant consumerism, public complacency, and selfishness were usually expressed in terms of undermining the nation's ability to project its virtue and its power in the contest against Communism. Was a national highway system needed? Did higher education require enhanced support? Then Congress would pass a National Defense Highway Construction Act and a National Defense Education Act.

            Even the politically moderate members of the Goals commission were pre-disposed to view the federal government as a central, dynamic, and positive force in domestic as well as foreign affairs. These were people who had come of age during the depression and World War II. Commissioners Greenewalt and Darden apart, few associated with the project doubted that government should play an expanded role in education, management of the economy, civil rights, and social policy.

            A positive view of government action was evident throughout the 23 page statement of goals. To be sure, the commissioners sought to buttress the "free enterprise" system, but they held that "Increased investment in the public sector is compatible with this goal." They called for drastic increases in expenditures in education, public health, social welfare, and housing. Goals for Americans urged "Further urban renewal programs, costing as much as $4 billion per year. . .," and a doubling of educational expenditures by 1970 to $40,000,000,000 a year, noting diffidently that "The federal role must now be expanded." Though the Commission paid homage to voluntarism and private enterprise (the word "capitalism" made no appearance in the statement of goals), it made no apologies for the current level of federal activity. It pledged the country to sustaining a growth rate of from 3.4% to 5% annually and to steady progress "toward our goal of full employment," which entailed finding jobs for 13.5 million entrants into the labor force in the 1970s, all the while improving living standards, boosting competitiveness, and avoiding inflation. All this, they believed, could be achieved "without extraordinary stimulating measures."

            In foreign affairs also, the Commission posited an expanded governmental presence. It urged dramatic expansion of US foreign aid and a more vigorous US presence, especially in the Third World. Here the Commission's report revealed that distinctive mix of moral confidence and practical uncertainty that characterized foreign policy elites of the late 1950s. On the one hand, there was no hint of doubt in Goals for Americans of the inherent superiority of the American way of life or of the superiority of western values and institutions generally. "[W]e must never lose sight of our ultimate goal," intoned the Commission, which was "to extend the opportunities for free choice and self-determination throughout the world."

            Yet there could be no denying the physical power and exemplary appeal of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. "[I]t will be a major task to prevent their expansion in the coming decade," warned the commissioners. Soviet economic advances, scientific achievements, and military strength, along with Communism's constant threat of internal subversion especially in developing nations, required that "We must be ready to make the sacrifices necessary to meet the rising costs of military" preparedness. And it was likely that "Over the next decade, Communist China may be more aggressive than the U.S.S.R."

            The combination of moral certitude and practical vulnerability was particularly evident in the commissioners' remarks on the developing world. Commissioners acknowledged that the legacy of western colonialism along with miserable living conditions made the Third World uniquely vulnerable to the superficially attractive designs of Moscow and Peking. Through the example of our superior domestic institutions and achievements and through generous public and private investment abroad, the commissioners hoped, the advance of Communism might be stemmed. Fixated on the US-Soviet rivalry, they conveyed little sense that the choices and policies of developing countries responded primarily to their own cultural, political, and economic concerns and not to the dictates of great power rivalry. In the final analysis, their blend of righteousness and doubt posited the distinct possibility of a future world order increasingly inhospitable to US and western interests and values. After all, "The United States, while omnipresent, is not omnipotent," they cautioned, and "Whether nations will prefer freedom to totalitarianism" was by no means clear.

            But this uncertainty was rare in Goals for Americans. Apart from these doubts as to how other, presumably less steadfast and sophisticated, peoples might act, the commissioners repeatedly reaffirmed their faith in the American way and in the American people. To be sure, they acknowledged the concerns that had, at least indirectly, given birth to their efforts. Wriston, for example, in his overview essay on "The Individual," noted the persistent "mood of doubt regarding our system. . . " Clinton Rossiter added that ". . . time and space are closing in on us" and that "The quiet times are gone forever." Government had made mistakes. Soviet advance in outer space underlined the need to revitalize American institutions.

            But throughout the volume ran the theme that for every problem there was a solution. Observed Wriston, "The characteristic historical tone of American life has been optimistic." Rossiter had little doubt that the country was eminently capable of achieving "a new order of imagination all through the structure of democracy." Yes, the introduction to the report acknowledged, "the nation is in grave danger," a danger primarily posed by the military power and meretricious appeal to the world's dispossessed by Communism. But the commissioners had no doubt that "We can continue to improve our own way of life, and at the same time help in the progress of vast numbers in the world. . . ." In the final analysis, "our past performance justifies confidence that [even the most lofty goals]. . . can be achieved. . . ."

            The work of the Eisenhower Commission reverberated throughout the 1960s. By October, 1962, over 200,000 copies of Goals for Americans had been sold or otherwise distributed and it remained in print through the decade. It served as a text in innumerable civic forums, adult education classes, and college classes. Through an arrangement with the Advertising Council, the work of the Commission was widely publicized. One handsomely produced poster, widely distributed in 1961, featured full-face portraits of Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, with the headline above declaring that "We Are Challenged as a People [--] We Are Summoned as a Nation." Newspapers awarded the initial report extensive coverage and the follow-up forums and assemblies generated much local press attention. Commission members appeared in a series of television documentaries aired by public stations. These films were broadly distributed and provided the basis for organized public discussion in towns and cities around the country.

            A particular feature of the Eisenhower Commission's work was the follow-up activity coordinated by the American Assembly. Through the early 1960s, the Assembly, with funds provided by the Johnson Foundation and other private groups, held elaborate regional meetings at which hundreds of business, labor, religious, academic, and civic leaders used Goals for Americans as the basis for forums which extended typically over a three-day period. Local sponsorship was usually provided by a university or public affairs group, such as the Town Hall of Los Angeles. The tone of these meetings, organized and overseen by Wriston's bright, earnest aides at the American Assembly, was sober and diligent, with the community leaders participating generally sharing the world view of the prestigious commissioners. Even so, local participants sometimes challenged what they saw as the bland and establishment tone of Goals for Americans. The most notable example occurred at an assembly held at Duke University in May of 1961 at which civil rights activists criticized the report's failure to highlight racial injustice and secured adoption of strong civil rights statements.

            Meeting throughout 1960, the Commission produced a report, Goals for Americans, that put forth a broad program of social reconstruction, using the introspective mood initially generated by Sputnik to call for constructive social programs, enhanced education, and, although in a subdued voice, racial equality. Broadly reflecting the experience of the twelve white men of mature years who comprised the Commission, the report exhibited a belief in purposeful public action as well as the idea that meeting international challenges required social action at home as well as military prowess abroad.. It would be hard to imagine such an initiative today. External attack has not led to internal scrutiny or to programs of domestic reconstruction. Indeed, it appears that President Bush is using the approval he has gained through his anti-terrorist leadership to promote adoption of tax and economic policies that are designed to starve the federal government and diminish its capacity for assertive action in domestic affairs. Twelve white guys they might have been, but the President’s Commission on National Goals held forth a degree of purposeful civic action that contrasts sharply with the current mood, which manages to combine smug self-satisfaction with an embracing of sweeping curtailments of personal freedoms and due process. Today, the only voices calling for social reconstruction in a changing world are liberal ones. As such commentators as Cass Sunstein, Alan Wolfe, and Kevin Mattson urge (in Wolfe’s phrase) a “Return to Greatness,” possible only with an energetic government armed with a vision of national purpose, they could do worse than to revisit the work of these twelve white guys.  

Notes