(See Cover) The President of the U.S. looked once more at the reports arriving in his vacation office near Newport. The weeks of patient working toward peaceful solution were over; a mob, stirred by the governor of Arkansas, still stood in the way of nine Negro youngsters who, by court order, were entitled to join 2,000 whites at Little Rock Central High School. Two aides and a secretary watched silently as President Eisenhower, his decision made, picked up a pen and signed a historic document: it ordered Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson to use the armed forces of the U.S. to uphold the law of the land in Little Rock.
The Pentagon was ready: informed that the President's order was on the way. Wilson rapped out his own instructions. The ground and air forces of the Arkansas National Guard were placed in federal service, safely out of the hands of Governor Orval Faubus. who had used them to defy the U.S. Government. Army Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor called Fort Campbell, Ky. and assigned the 327th Battle Group of his old outfit, the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division, to bring law to Little Rock. Tough, battle-tried Major General Edwin Walker was placed in command of all troops in the Arkansas district. Air Force Secretary James Douglas soon had eight C-130 and 38 C-123 transport planes on the way from Tennessee to Fort Campbell.
That night, just eight hours after President Eisenhower signed his orders, the first trucks of the 101st Airborne drove up to Central High. It was one of the nation's most painful moments, and the first use of U.S. troops in a Southern racial crisis since Reconstruction days. Explained the President in a radio-TV speech to the nation: "The very basis of our individual rights and freedoms rests upon the certainty that the President and the executive branch of Government will support and insure the carrying out of the decisions of the federal courts, even, when necessary, with all the means at the President's command. Unless the President did so, anarchy would result."
Life of the Party. The President did not mention Orval Faubus by name, but it was Faubus, more than any other, who had confronted the U.S. with a choice between law and anarchy. During the previous three weeks, egged on by racists around him, he had stirred Little Rock into emotional turmoil. Ambitious for a third term, eager to win political support from Arkansas segregationists, he had thwarted a federal court integration order by calling out his National Guard to "prevent violence" in a city where none existed. What the National Guard was really being used for was to bar the nine Negro children from Central High. Making each new step more drastic than his last, Faubus made inflammatory statement after inflammatory statement. He called off the National Guard in response to an injunction issued against him by U.S. District Judge Ronald Davies, spurning Judge Davies' alternative offer: to change the National Guard's orders so that the militia would uphold—rather than defy—law and order.