Eisenhower stresses the importance of education in America

Eisenhower stresses the importance of education in America
By Gary Blankenship
Senior Editor, The Florida Bar News

May 1, 2008

According to the granddaughter of a famous U.S. president and general, the United States must do a better job of understanding the rest of the world — how it functions and views this country — and the U.S. needs a better understanding of the challenges it faces to remain a super power.

“We have to demand more of our students. We are in la la land if we think we are the top of the heap and we are going to stay there forever,” Susan Eisenhower recently told the Bar Board of Governors.

Eisenhower is a board member and chair emeritus of the Eisenhower Institute, [affiliated with] Gettysburg College where her grandfather, Dwight D. Eisenhower, served as president after eight years in the White House. She is also president of the Eisenhower Group, Inc., a consulting company on political, business, and public affairs matters.

Her visit to the board during its Washington, D.C., meeting was arranged by President-elect Designate Jesse Diner, who also sits on the Eisenhower Institute board. Diner noted she is an expert on Russia, nuclear weapons and power generation, nuclear weapons nonproliferation, and space issues partly through her service on several NASA advisory boards.

Eisenhower talked about the way her grandfather approached problems.

“He was many things and among those many things he was a great strategist. He had the ability to do many things. He had a remarkable perspective to look at things from the other person’s perspective,” she said of the man a generation knew as Ike.

He expected the same of others — even encouraging his young grandchildren to engage in lively dinner table discussions.

“He always said, ‘If you’re going to get into this, give me an analysis of how the other guy is going to look at it.’”

One of the first major questions facing President Eisenhower when he took office was national policy toward the Soviet Union — should he continue to strengthen President Truman’s containment policy, adopt a tougher stance, or seek a softer approach?

Ike, she said, appointed a broad spectrum of experts, ranging from those who favored a much tougher approach to those who favored backing off, to study the issue.

After the final reports, the president listened carefully, then got up and without notes gave a 45-minute summary of the various recommendations. Then he decided that an enhanced containment strategy would be the policy of the Eisenhower administration.

“This was a president who formulated national security in three ways,” she said. “One was military ability and capability, economic health of the country was another, and the third was your moral authority as a nation.

“Today it would be interesting to know how Dwight Eisenhower would be tackling a number of issues we face going into the election this year.”

One difference would be a matter of perspective, she said. For example, many politicians have likened the 9/11 attacks to WWII. While serious, Eisenhower said there is massive difference in scale.

For example, during the blitz of Britain, every three weeks that country lost the same number of civilians as people killed on 9/11. Overall, she noted, 72 million people died in WWII, 47 million of them civilians. The U.S. lost around 416,000 soldiers, while the former Soviet Union lost more than 10 million soldiers, and even more civilians.

“In the 1950s, electrical generation used 10 percent of the nation’s fuel consumption. Now the usage is 40 percent and in the next 20 years is expected to rise another 40 percent in the U.S. and 60 percent globally,” she said.

Even without the concerns of global warming, fossil fuels can’t meet that demand, she said. “We’re all going to have to go into nuclear power plants; that looks like the only alternative,” Eisenhower said. Yet, she added, it takes 10 years to get regulatory approval for a nuclear plant and no new nuclear plant has been built in this country in 30 years.

It’s also estimated that there are $1 trillion of infrastructure needs in the U.S., Eisenhower said, including the necessity of replacing much of the satellite fleet that serves the global positioning satellite system that is increasingly a part of everyday life.

The costs of education — key to the country’s future — are also rising rapidly and the country is engaged in two wars that are costing $10 billion a month with a total projected cost of between $2 and $4 trillion.

“These are huge challenges at a time when we don’t feel as rich as we used to be,” Eisenhower said.

However, she expressed optimism that the country, once it fully understands the challenges, will meet them.

“I believe that history has a tremendous amount to tell us,” she said. “You’re not going to replicate the leaders of years gone by, but you can replicate the processes they used.”

Eisenhower said her grandfather did not believe in the “indispensable man” theory of leadership. “He believed in process and he led by sound processes, which is something all of us can aspire to.”

But she also said better education is necessary in the U.S. to address those problems, adding that generally people in other countries know more about the U.S. than U.S. citizens know about them. As an example, she said virtually everyone in Europe and Asia can spell her name — and almost no one in the U.S. can. She once gave a pop quiz to a U.S. audience with an average age of 40, and they couldn’t name more than one U.S. ally in WWII and they could only name Winston Churchill as a contemporary of her grandfather and a war leader.

Another example is few American’s know that China has tied up most of the world’s available coal production, and is opening a new coal-fire electrical plant every week and two new nuclear plants every year.

“If the students we raise don’t know anything about China, we have a very big problem,” Eisenhower said.

Similarly, “Today I’m surprised that anyone is even remotely surprised that Russia has the second largest oil supply and the world’s largest natural gas supply,” she said. “That’s what Hitler was after [WWII].”

Those resources are behind current Russian prosperity and its growing economy. Russia has enough reserves to run its government for three years without taking any tax revenues, Eisenhower said, and has a trade surplus with the U.S.

Despite those challenges and problems, little of current politics addresses them.

“We are just burdened by all these personal attacks in this campaign, and I think this is most regrettable, because we have some very big issues about how we are going to spend our resources and how we are going to meet the challenges of the future,” she said. “Everyone is out with their little five-step plan. This is tactics, not strategy. If your objective is to be the world’s only superpower, you’ll make a whole set of resource allocations based on that. If you want to be the world’s greatest democracy, those allocations will be somewhat different.”

While this country, unlike Russia, has not had the great debate about where it is going, Eisenhower said that time is coming soon.

“Then I feel absolutely confident we will mobilize around the issues and then get down to business,” she said.