Did Ike really "solve" the problem?
Ike won the 1952 election and brought in a Republican US House and Senate and thus initially had the political freedom to do things like this operation in defiance of the Democrats.
However, what this article fails to mention is that just weeks after this operation, the Democrats regained control of Congress in the 1954 elections and would hold it for the next 40 years!
That was a fatal problem that Ike could not solve.
Backbones aren't easy to come by?