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Detachment, however, had its price, and Eisenhower's contempt for politics often hobbled his leadership. Though he despised Wisconsin's demagogic Senator Joseph McCarthy, he refused to say a public word against him—even when McCarthy viciously attacked George Marshall, and even when a word from the President might have brought McCarthy to heel. "I am convinced that the way for me to defeat Senator McCarthy is to ignore him," Eisenhower noted in a personal memo in April 1953. "Never to admit that he has damaged me, upset me, or anything else." Again, Ike's above-the-battle concept of the presidency was partly responsible for his party's loss in the 1954 congressional elections. Never again was he to have a Republican Congress. He conceived of the President's role as only one of a team running the country. For the last six years of Eisenhower's tenure, Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn, the Democratic congressional leaders, helped to shape his domestic policy.
Not even serious illness could disrupt the tranquillity of his first term, however. Late in the summer of 1955, the President, fishing and golfing in Colorado, suffered the first of his heart attacks but recovered quickly. Less than a year later, in June 1956, he was stricken again, this time with ileitis, which required major surgery. To his credit, Nixon, then Vice President, responded with tact and humility in a situation that might have stopped other men. After two such illnesses, it seemed impossible that Ike would run for reelection. But he did. "I want to finish what I have started," he said. On the eve of election, he was confronted with two simultaneous crises, the Hungarian Revolution and the Anglo-French invasion of Suez. Ike did nothing to stop the Russians in Hungary—there was almost nothing he could do—but he put a fast brake on the European allies. In both instances, his judgment was probably correct. Suez might have been avoided by more astute American diplomacy, however, and the Eisenhower Administration did little thereafter to ease the Arab-Israeli confrontation that even now seriously threatens world stability.
In a sense, however, Eisenhower had already completed the job of healing he had set out to achieve. Thus he might be remembered better by historians if he had stepped down at the end of the first term. Re-elected even more overwhelmingly in 1956 than in 1952 (57% of the popular vote v. Stevenson's 42%), he almost immediately ran into trouble. His Secretary of the Treasury, George Humphrey, disavowed his budget as too big. The economy slipped toward the worst recession since 1932. After a century of neglect, the problems of the nation's blacks burst forth. In 1954, the Supreme Court finally outlawed school segregation. Though Ike did not help to implement the decision, he did act when he had to, sending troops into Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 to enforce a court-ordered desegregation decree. In October 1957, Russia's success with Sputnik I cast a pall of self-doubt over the entire country—a mood that was ultimately to spur popular support for federal programs to aid education and science. There was a sense of drift, a feeling that Eisenhower was by then more figurehead than President. In November 1957, Ike, for the third time in less than three years, suffered a major illness—a stroke.