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Book Review: Eisenhower: The Public Relations President, by Pam Parry

Pam Parry, with foreword by Mary Jean Eisenhower Eisenhower: The Public Relations President. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. 169 pp.Pam Parry is a strenuous defender and advocate for President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a transformational figure in the field of public relations. That much is evident from her book's title, dedication to another "Ike enthusiast," and foreword written by Eisenhower's granddaughter. The deeply respected five-star general and former Supreme Allied Commander returned home to soldier through two presidential terms in intermittent poor health marked by the Korea War, rising McCarthyism, explosive desegregation standoffs, and simmering relations with the Soviet Union. Why Eisenhower should also be enshrined on a "metaphorical Mount Rushmore of presidential public relations practitioners" (p. 129) is the subject of Pam Parry's dissertation and subsequent book. Although Craig Allen's book Eisenhower and the Mass Media covers the same ground and more, Parry contributes focus on the administration's innovations in light of the then-emerging field of public relations as a political tool.Chapter 1 establishes Eisenhower as an astute observer of Nazi propaganda and psychological warfare, and a believer that public opinion was essential to winning the war. Although he was frank with reporters, he held them in no special regard, and he treated them as soldiers under his command (they were only too happy to oblige), a trait he would carry with him to the White House. Nevertheless, he had confidence in the power of information and introduced the field of public information training to the military.Chapter 2 looks at the presidential campaigns of 1952 and 1956. In 1952, Eisenhower was the first president to hire a Madison Avenue advertising agency to produce a national campaign strategy using television and radio ads. His Democratic challenger, Adlai Stevenson, refused to sully the office he sought with what he believed to be the crude business of advertising. Whether or not the ads affected the election outcome in 1952, in the 1956 reelection campaign, Eisenhower relied heavily on television and broadcast media advertising because he was convalescing from a heart attack.Unlike Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose natural charisma, speaking ability, and love of a crowd was legendary and made them darlings of the media, Ike mangled syntax and struggled to master the new medium of television. Transcripts of his televised press briefings are incoherent, and reporters derided him for his inability to articulate an idea. A less confident commander might have been deterred by his first disastrous foray into televised politics when he agreed to announce his candidacy for president in 1952 via live television broadcast in a torrential downpour to a half-empty stadium in Abilene, Kansas, his home state. After an awkward See It Now appearance that same year, Edward R. Murrow recommended he seek professional advice. The president worked with actor Robert Montgomery to improve his television delivery, though without notable success.It is not as a practitioner but rather as an innovator that Parry argues for Eisenhower as a public relations game changer. Chapter 3 focuses on Eisenhower's decision to put news conferences on the record, undermining the press corps' power to shape and break news. Although not actually changing the news conference content, televised news conferences brought the president directly to the public through a controlled news filter that remains the specialty of press managers to this day. …