PolitiFact says Doris Kearns Goodwin was mistaken in saying no U.S. combat deaths under Eisenhower

During the May 8, 2011, edition of NBC’sMeet the Press, historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin offered a striking statistic about combat casualties under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Host David Gregory began the exchange by playing a video clip from Robert Kagan, a foreign policy scholar and commentator who has advised several Republican office-holders.

"The American people," Kagan said, "have an interesting quality in their character which you can trace all through their history. They want their presidents to be men of peace, but they also want to know that, if necessary, the American president can kill."

Gregory asked Goodwin whether she thought Kagan had a worthwhile point in analyzing President Barack Obama’s recent success in ordering the killing of al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden.

"I think that's right," Goodwin said. "I mean, think of two of our most lovable presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, what was his slogan? Speak softly and carry a big stick. This was a big stick. Eisenhower, having won World War II, could then take enormous pride in the fact that not a single soldier had died in combat during his time. So I think what happened in this thing is, it's not just the public perception of Obama that's strengthened now because he acted as commander in chief, but you never know what happens internally to a president when they take a risky thing and it works. JFK took control of his presidency after the Cuban missile crisis. This guy will now take control of his presidency. I think he's going to be able to trust his own judgment even more than the military, and that's huge psychologically. And America feels better again. I mean, that's the huge thing that we don't know about how long that will last. But our prestige and our sense of ourself is now heightened for a while, and everybody wants that."

We thought we’d look into whether Goodwin was correct that "not a single soldier … died in combat" during the Eisenhower presidency.

We knew that Goodwin’s claim had problems when we checked the starting and ending dates of the Korean War. It was an active conflict through the signing of a truce on July 26, 1953. Since Eisenhower was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1953, he served as commander-in-chief for the final six months of the war. His presidency ended on Jan. 20, 1961.

The final six months of the Korean war included a battle that became emblematic of the war -- the Battle of Pork Chop Hill. The battle produced many casualties at a time when the powers were negotiating an armistice, even though the battle was fought to control a topographic feature that had little inherent value. In his book The Korean War, Max Hastings wrote that the battle reflected both the "courage of the defenders and the tactical futility" of that stage of the war.

How many casualties were there during those six months? We didn’t find any official government data with casualties separated by year, but we did find a private collection. The veteran-supported Korean War Project has a website that offers day-by-day casualty figures for the war. So we looked at the figures for the first six months of Eisenhower’s presidency and found 3,406 casualties....

In addition, Eisenhower was president during the start of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall, the names of the fallen begin with Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr., with a casualty date of June 8, 1956. The number of casualties in Vietnam remained much smaller than the number during the final part of the Korean War. The first battlefield fatality came in late 1961, almost one year into the Kennedy Administration.

Eisenhower also presided over some small-scale military deployments in or near Taiwan, Lebanon and Cuba, and he was president during the Suez crisis of 1956. But we were unable to confirm any casualties for these events....