ABSTRACT
Dwight D. Eisenhower brought to the Presidency the conviction that the country had had its full measure of new programs during the past twenty years and that it wanted consolidation without undermining past achievements. Eisenhower’s apparent lack of appetite for power seemed difficult to understand, even to experienced Washington observers. In Adams, Eisenhower had found a perfect replacement for his wartime chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith. Smith, who had served Ike in a comparable capacity at shaef, excelled at being Eisenhower’s “son of a bitch.” As vital as Adams’s role was as the logical target for anti-Eisenhower attacks, the Governor’s personal prestige with the President could not match the relationship established by some of the Cabinet members. The Dulles-Eisenhower relationship, one of the most discussed aspects of the Administration, is generally acknowledged to have warmed up very slowly. Eisenhower, although a novice to party politics, operated behind the scenes to move the mechanism of government.
