Skip to main content

Ike gets a makeover

Eisenhower appears to be the latest president under reconsideration for his achievements, although Ike has generally been held in high regard by historians for his bipartisanship and "hidden hand" approach.  I think most presidential polls by historians have him in the Top Ten.  Nevertheless, Jean Edward Smith feels compelled to remind us what a good president Dwight Eisenhower was in his new book, Eisenhower in War and Peace,

In recent years, the “I Like Ike” sentiment has gained momentum with biographers and historians, among them Michael Korda, Jim Newton, and now, Jean Edward Smith with his new biography of Eisenhower. Much as he did with his 2007 doorstop biography of FDR, in Eisenhower in War and Peace Smith sifts through mountains of earlier appraisals, anecdotes, and historical documents and synthesizes the information into a crisply written and meticulous analysis of Eisenhower.

It is a much taller order rescuing U.S. Grant from the bottom of the presidential barrel, which Smith tried to do in Grant. 

Comments

  1. I would be open to reading this one (I have it on my request list -- I reenlisted as a judge).

    Newton talked about Eisenhower in Los Angeles last year. Eisenhower's ideas about even basic civil rights were appalling but he believed in following orders and did that. But he also had many good things to say about Ike. I sometimes wonder if it takes a republican (or a Johnson -- sort of the same thing) to get some of these big spending bills like the highway act and the education initiatives through. Sort of the Nixon to China phenomena.

    And thanks for noting Smith is a man. For some reason all these years I thought he was a she.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd be up for Ike. I have his biography in the Schlesinger presidential series, which I believe Brand is now editor-in-chief. He is the only Republican president since TR that I can relate to. Not that Ike was in any way progressive, but at least he wasn't a dyed-in-the-wool conservative.

    I was surprised to see Smith take on Grant. I would think he focused on his pre-presidential days in the biography, as Grant's administration was racked with scandals. He is definitely bottom of the presidential barrel.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That would be fun -- maybe we can all read different versions. May take me awhile to get the Smith bio, but I'll work it. I also read this one last year. Not a great book, but interesting case study on something I didn't know much about:

    http://www.amazon.com/Eisenhower-1956-Presidents-Crisis-Suez-Brink/dp/1439139334

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ike does seem like a good read and I'm sure it is a decent choice for a group read.

    Well, I finally got a copy of "Fruitlands" by Richard Francis. Took a long time to get it. Hopefully, it will be worth the long wait.

    As for that book on Roger William, it's still not in either of our two library systems so I can't read it for now. Also, I'm just finishing up Chris Bohjalian's "The Double Bend". This is defo a good fictional read.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm in! Depending on what happens in the next couple weeks, I may also be reading the Newton bio.

    ReplyDelete
  6. ... but I can read Ike, although I will probably go with the book I already have.

    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...