Sometimes presidents take actions that surprise just about everybody, including themselves, and a good example is President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision fifty-one years ago to issue Executive Order 10730. Within hours after Eisenhower approved this document on September 24, 1957, U.S. Army troops arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas, to stop the violence that had prevented the first African-American students from attending previously all-white Central High School. A federal court had approved a plan to desegregate Central High, but a violent mob surrounded the school and threatened the safety of the black students. Yet just two months earlier on July 17, Eisenhower had declared that he would never take the step he had just authorized. He told reporters at a news conference, “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send Federal troops … into any area to enforce the orders of a Federal court, because I believe [the] common sense of America will never require it.” The president wasn’t trying to mislead anybody when he made that statement, and he certainly didn’t change his mind about important matters unless he had good reason. So why did Eisenhower take an action he never thought would be necessary?

Part of the answer is that the president had counted on the “common sense” of the American people, but he found that “demagogic extremists” had taken control of the situation in Little Rock as the school year began in September 1957. Some white southerners were simply unwilling to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision three years earlier in the case of Brown v. Board of Education that racially “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional and had to be desegregated. Those who were determined to resist received encouragement from the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, who thought he needed the support of white segregationists when he ran for reelection in 1958. In defiance of a federal court order, Faubus had used Arkansas National Guard troops to bar African-American students from Central High. Eisenhower met with Faubus, and the governor indicated that he would change the troops’ orders so that they would protect the students. Faubus returned to Arkansas, however, and instead removed the troops from the school. Eisenhower was angry that Faubus had misled him and had created conditions in which demonstrators who threw rocks and yelled ugly racial epithets had the upper hand. He knew that he had to act.

It’s also surprising that Eisenhower took bold action to enforce a court order with which he disagreed. Eisenhower had reservations about the Brown decision, and he sympathized with white southerners who said that the court was asking them to make a sweeping change far too quickly. Yet he also knew that “if the day ever comes when we can obey the orders of our Courts only when we personally approve of them, the end of the American system as we know it, will not be far off.” So Eisenhower put aside his own feelings and dispatched the troops. He did so mainly to restore law and order rather than to advance civil rights.

Eisenhower had one more important reason for taking his unexpected action: he was worried about the international effects of the civil rights crisis in Little Rock. The United States was engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, a competition in which both sides were trying to show that their way of life was better and should be a model for countries around the world. When Eisenhower appeared on television only hours after he issued his executive order, he told the American people, “Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation.” He appealed to Arkansans to help end the trouble at Central High so that the federal troops could be withdrawn and the “blot upon the fair name and high honor of our nation in the world will be removed.” Cold War concerns, then, as well as a duty to insure that the laws were faithfully executed explain why Eisenhower took important action on September 24, 1957, that he could not have imagined only a few weeks earlier.

Chester Pach is associate professor of history at Ohio University. He is the author of The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, rev. ed.