Difficult though it is to believe for one of my generation, it has been more than half a century since Dwight David Eisenhower left the White House after 41
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2 decades of exemplary public service. At the time — January 1961 — many of us welcomed his departure. We even more ardently welcomed the arrival of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and, with him, a new generation of political leadership: younger, more daring, more open to the “new ideas” about which the New Frontiersmen talked so loudly and excitedly.
Too often we forget, even after having had half a century to think about it, that, as Jean Edward Smith puts it in this fine new biography, Eisenhower was “the only president in the twentieth century to preside over eight years of peace and prosperity.” This was not because he was a cautious, passive caretaker president but because his long, distinguished military career had led him, as earlier their own experiences of war had led Ulysses Grant and William T. Sherman, to hate war. In 1953, when he took office, the United States was in the midst of the Korean War, a conflict the American public loathed. “Ike believed the country wanted peace,” Smith writes, “and he was determined to provide it. War was neither a board game nor a seminar exercise for armchair intellectuals.” So he got the country out of Korea, refused to rescue France from the folly of Dien Bien Phu (thus keeping the United States out of Vietnam) and declined to go along with France and England in their subsequent folly at Suez.
(Random House) - ’Eisenhower in War and Peace’ by Jean Edward Smith
We will never know what Kennedy would have done about Vietnam as we slipped gradually into the quagmire there, but we do know that the war was enthusiastically boosted by McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow and the other “armchair intellectuals” he brought into his administration. We do know that it was carried on by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, before the latter finally extricated us from it. Scarcely had we caught our breath than George H.W. Bush led us into war with Iraq, though he at least had the sense to stop as soon as the job was done. Instead it was left to his son and namesake, poked and prodded by neocons with no personal experience of combat — chickenhawks, as they’re known in some circles — to take us not merely into Iraq but into Afghanistan as well.
So now is a very good time for this war-happy capital city to reacquaint itself with the life and example of Eisenhower, who has faded too quickly from the collective memory. Because for several years we have been busily sentimentalizing the soldiers of the “Greatest Generation” whom he led to victory in Europe, we remember him as a military leader. But he was in the White House far longer than he was general of the Army and supreme commander of Operaton Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe that began on D-Day 1944, and his White House years need a more thorough exploration than many previous biographers have given them.
Smith, whose long, distinguished career includes superb one-volume biographies of Grant and Franklin Roosevelt, provides just that. He devotes some 230 pages to World War II and 210 to the White House (out of a total of 766 pages of text). This near-exact balance is appropriate, as the two periods had equal importance in Eisenhower’s life. To be sure, he was a military man at heart — he organized the White House much as he had organized the Allied command — and a somewhat (but certainly not wholly) reluctant candidate for the presidency, but his place in American history may be more likely determined by his White House years than by his military record.
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