Skip to main content

Ike's Bluff


Oliver Stone devoted a whole episode to Eisenhower, and it wasn't very complimentary.  He wanted to counter the recent spate of "I like Ike" books that have come out like this one.  Ike's "Hidden Hand' leadership has been both praised and derided by historians over the years.  Among many of Stone's and Kuznick's allegations is that the US essentially fought a proxy war in Vietnam under his watch, covering 80% of France's military expenses, and providing additional logistical support.  This was one of many proxy wars and other covert activities carried out during Eisenhower's administration.

Evan Thomas counters with the view that Eisenhower, being an excellent Bridge player, knew how to bluff at propitious moments in the Cold War, to avoid direct confrontation with the USSR, or full scale involvement in Vietnam, not wanting to repeat Korea.  His mission was to "avoid any war," says Thomas, at least directly.  This doesn't excuse him from the numerous covert activities that led to the deposing of leaders like Mossadeq in Iran, but it does put these events in the larger context of Ike's administration.  It reminds me of the foreign policy Obama has set in his administration.


Comments

  1. The review you've been waiting for:

    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/oliver-stone-cherry-picking-our-history/

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...