Eisenhower: A Short Bio Of A President Long On Leadership Skills

My friend and former editor Frank Wilson offers a good review of Paul Johnson's Eisenhower: A Life for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

As recounted in Eisenhower: A Life, a new brief biography by the British writer Paul Johnson, the life of Dwight David Eisenhower was one of steady, uninterrupted success - five-star general, supreme commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, 34th president of the United States, elected twice, both times by landslides, and still popular when he left office. Heck, just a year before he died, he hit a hole-in-one on the golf course.

Yet one feels sad when one finishes Johnson's book. Not for Eisenhower, but for the country he served so well.

A joke making the rounds as his presidency neared its end told of the Eisenhower doll: You wound it up and it did nothing for eight years. But we could use plenty of that nothing these days. As Johnson points out, Eisenhower gave America nearly "a decade of unexampled prosperity and calm. The country had emerged from the Korean War and the excesses of McCarthyism. Inflation was low. Budgets were in balance or with manageable deficits. The military-industrial complex was kept under control. . . . Thanks to Ike's fiscal restraint, prices remained stable and unemployment only a little more than 4 percent."

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

 

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20141014_Short_bio_of_president_long_on_leadership_skills.html

 

You can also visit Frank Wilson's popular literary blog Books, Inq via the below link:

 

http://booksinq.blogspot.com  

Note: As for keeping the "military-industrial complex" under control, one should bear in mind that it was the so-called military-industrial complex that has kept us safe all of these years, won the Cold War, put us in space, took us to the depths of the ocean, gave us the Internet and other technological advances, and even killed bin Laden.

Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle To Save The World

My friend Joseph C. Goulden wrote an interesting review of Evan Thomas' new book on President Eisenhower for the Washington Times.

After leaving the White House in 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower fretted about what future generations would think of his legacy, stating that the peace and prosperity that marked his two terms “didn’t just happen, by God.” But as Evan Thomas writes in his study of the Eisenhower presidency, “[Ike] had trouble articulating just how that had happened. He never could admit that he had kept the peace by threatening all-out war. His all-or-nothing strategy worked brilliantly.”

A mystery that will never be resolved to the satisfaction of most historians is whether Eisenhower  would have used the  U. S. nuclear arsenal in the event of war with the Soviet Union. At one point Mr. Thomas hedges the answer by writing that “It is likely that Eisenhower had no intention of ever using nuclear weapons, as his closest aide, Andy Goodpaster, believed.”

But who can be sure? Ike kept his own counsel on the subject of how to maintain credible deterrence in eight years of incessant confrontation with Moscow. In years of meticulous research, Mr. Thomas found not a person — nor a document — that revealed Ike’s intentions. But Mr. Thomas hints at his own conclusion in the very title of his book “Ike’s Bluff."

With the Soviet Union defunct and the Cold War long ended, many younger Americans do not realize the fears that gripped much of the country during the 1950s.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/nov/9/book-review-ikes-bluff/