Very deceptive. No one but a complete idiot paid 91% taxes. The tax code then was chalk full of various loop holes and the effective tax rate on the richest was likely no different than today.
I recall the 1950s and one of the buzz words then was 'brain drain'. It was used by the British to describe the outflow of some of the best and brightest from Britain to the US. Under the socialist governments of the 50s, Britain had a 90% tax rate on their rich, but they didn't have the loop holes that the American tax code had. Tens of thousands of British scientists, business execs, entertainers and others in high income professions voted with their feet and moved to America where they would be allowed to keep most of what they earned and that was with the US 91% top marginal tax rate.
The only real test of if we are taxing the rich 'enough' is not what the marginal tax rates are, but the percentage of total tax revenues they pay, and today with lower marginal rates and far fewer loopholes the richest 10% pay more than the remaining 90%. That was not true in the 1950s.
Another point on Ike and the "Military-Industrial Complex." That statement was made in Ike's farewell address in 1961 and it has been totally and intentionally misconstrued ever since. When Ike said it, it was a slap at the incoming Kennedy administration who had campaigned on the idea of a 'missile gap' saying that Ike's administration had allowed the US to fall behind the Soviets and promising to build bigger and better ICBMs to counter the Soviet threat.
The problem is that there was no missile gap then and the Soviets did not have a single missile in their arsenal that could hit us with a nuclear warhead. ( Not one. Their war heads were way too heavy.) Ike knew it and Kennedy knew it too but he used that ploy anyway. Ike was concerned with exactly what happened in the 60s --- a runaway arms race that was actually started by Kennedy. Not to mention the Cuban Missile Crisis where the Soviets took the chance of positioning short range missiles in Cuba since they could not hit us from their own territory.
Kennedy started that crisis during his presidential campaign 2 years eariler. As to spending on defense, through Eisenhower's administration, all but the first several months in a time peace, the defense budget represented nearly 30% of the entire Federal budget. It has never been that high since.
There was indeed a need for science and engineering excellence after Sputnik was launched and Ike seemed completely caught off guard--I believe he was playing golf at the Augusta National in October of 1957 when the news came in. Also Ike was roundly criticized for his projects--the vision of an interstate highway system (modeled after the autobahns he saw in Germany). I was a kid then, but I distinctly remember relatives claiming it was an intrusion into state's rights to build their own roads and charge tolls (although we did have some U.S. highways, Rt. 66, for instance). Not wanting to antagonize Mr. K, he also did not lift a finger to help Hungary in its independence move against the Soviets ... and he did little more than referee the Suez Crisis, or manage (when he could help the French and quickly snuff it out) the growing threat of communism in S.E. Asia...to me he was acting in some of the finest liberal traditions; hardly what you'd call Reaganesque. In saying that, however, I still remember him as being a pretty good president.