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This is the introduction thread for the book Eisenhower in War and Peace.

BY Jean Edward Smith

The Moderate

Was Ike a great president?



Eisenhower in War and Peace, By Jean Edward Smith, Random House, 950

Why has Dwight D. Eisenhower received such short shrift in the world of presidential biography? One reason is that Eisenhower was the only Republican president in an era of liberal dominance, his two terms bookended by four crucial Democratic presidents—Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman before him, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson after him. They and their string of liberal achievements—civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—have enjoyed more attention than Ike has had, from admirers and critics alike.

Meanwhile, the contemporary conservative movement has turned its back on Eisenhower. Republican presidential candidates applaud Ronald Reagan as their hero, forgetting that Ike, too, was once a member of the GOP pantheon. His pragmatic streak runs counter to the conservative movement’s animating conviction that the federal government is an albatross around the nation’s neck—a sentiment that has fired up virtually every major Republican presidential candidate since 1980, leaving no room for tributes to a moderate president like Ike.

Numerous presidential biographies in recent decades have defended their subject’s greatness. Historians have reaffirmed George Washington’s brilliance, bolstered John Adams’s reputation, and resurrected Truman’s legacy. Now comes Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace, which seeks to lift Ike’s reputation just as David McCullough’s best-selling biography did for Truman.

Smith rates Eisenhower with FDR as America’s “most successful�� 20th-century presidents, resting his assertion on the theory that Eisenhower orchestrated an era of prolonged peace, promoted international stability, and established a record of economic prosperity here at home. Eisenhower “ended a three-year, no-win war in Korea with honor and dignity,�� Smith coos, “weaned the Republican Party from its isolationist past, �� tamed inflation, slashed defense spending, balanced the federal budget, and worked easily with a Democratic Congress,�� among other achievements.

But Smith’s vividly written biography is more convincing in its portrait of Ike’s military career than in its lofty claim of his greatness in the White House. He shows that Ike’s penchant for order, his search for consensus, and his affinity for alliance building are all traceable to his military career. Raised in poverty in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower excelled on a competitive entrance exam, which won him a spot in West Point’s class of 1915. The academy provided him a gateway to a better life, and his ardor for football and other sports made him, one soldier recalled, a “physical culture fiend.��

Several hardships informed his early career. His three-year-old son died from scarlet fever in 1921—“the greatest �� disaster in my life,�� Eisenhower said—and work became a balm. But despite his eagerness to prove himself under fire, he missed participating in World War I by a matter of weeks. Learning of the Armistice, he vowed he would “[cut] myself a swath that will make up for this.��

Ike’s prediction came true. He commanded a newly formed tank corps based in Gettysburg, protected soldiers from the Spanish flu, and later helped the Army return to a peacetime footing. Superiors consistently lauded him as a natural leader who had a talent for organizing men and materiel and solving logistical challenges with speed and common sense. His assignments took him around the world—experience that proved invaluable in World War II and beyond, when he built a reputation as a skilled military commander with a diplomatic touch.

Eisenhower’s superiors pushed him up the ranks. Serving in the late 1920s under General John Pershing both in Washington and in Paris, Eisenhower helped write a comprehensive military analysis of the U.S. role in World War I. His assistance during the 1932 crackdown on the Bonus Army march in Washington blotted his record, but he went on to serve as General Douglas MacArthur’s virtual chief of staff in Manila, where MacArthur praised him as “a brilliant officer.��

Smith hails Eisenhower’s achievements as Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, when he held the fractious Allies�� coalition intact—winning the confidence of George Marshall, FDR, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, and even Joseph Stalin. Although his combat inexperience hampered his strategic decisions, he was adroit at building alliances and ultimately proved himself more political sophisticate than military genius.

Eisenhower in War and Peace leans heavily on details of military strategies and clashing wartime personalities—describing Patton’s antics and British-U.S. tensions, for instance. It devotes less attention to the evolution of Eisenhower’s politics and foreign and domestic policy views. In a book hailing Eisenhower’s presidential greatness, his presidency receives only 250 of its more than 750 pages of text.

Smith makes it hard to discern the origins of Ike’s progressive Republican politics. The book doesn’t fully explain why a commander in chief immersed in military culture learned to disdain McCarthyism and became such a strong defender of civil liberties. What effect did his son’s death have on his subsequent career and worldview? How did Eisenhower’s visit to the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald affect his understanding of human nature and war, and shape his approach to global affairs during his White House years? The book is silent on all of these questions. There is ample discussion of Ike’s mistress, Kay Summersby, but Smith shortchanges more consequential matters, like the origins of Eisenhower’s views on racial equality, his thinking on gender in 1950s America, his attitudes toward unions and corporations, and his economic vision beyond balancing budgets.

Smith argues that Eisenhower’s presidency was significant domestically because he accepted the New Deal as a legitimate social force and refused to heed the calls of bumptious conservatives to destroy the welfare state. Instead, Eisenhower practiced the politics of common sense. He agreed to expand the Social Security program, achieved racial integration in the U.S. military (building on Truman’s agenda), and repudiated the witch-hunt for Communists in the federal government and other domestic institutions. In doing so, Ike breathed life into moderate Republican politics as few leaders have done in recent decades.

But other aspects of Ike’s greatness in domestic affairs aren’t as convincing. His civil rights record was less robust than this biography claims: far from exercising moral leadership, Eisenhower’s politics were, above all, cautious, his approach, incremental. He framed his 1957 decision to enforce school integration in Little Rock as a simple defense of law and order—not an endorsement of racial equality.

Ike’s legacy as commander in chief is also a mixed bag. He refused to use nuclear weapons when his military and other advisers proposed it as an option to save French forces at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, brought a swift end to the Korean War, and expressed his antimilitarist convictions in a farewell speech warning of the perils of the military-industrial complex. But he nevertheless embraced anticommunism as the overriding goal of the nation’s foreign policy, ousted democratic leaders in Guatemala and Iran (as Smith makes clear), and led civilian defense drills across the United States that sent an absurd message to the public: nuclear war was actually winnable. His administration also helped usher in the age of the hydrogen bomb and the doctrine of “massive retaliation.��

Ike was exceedingly popular for much of the 1950s, but winning reelection doesn’t necessarily translate into presidential greatness. His campaign slogan, “I Like Ike,�� evoked Eisenhower’s convivial personality but didn’t convey any policy ambition. Indeed, it left the impression that he felt more at home playing country club golf courses with his wealthy friends than using the bully pulpit to propound his vision of a just society. Though Eisenhower overwhelmingly won two presidential elections, Kennedy’s narrow 1960 victory was due, in part, to his critique of Ike’s incremental politics.

Smith’s defense of Eisenhower’s presidency is as engaging as it is ambitious and impressive. But the resulting portrait of Eisenhower reads too much like an effort to burnish his legacy. Ike’s presidency was more consequential and more fascinating than the literature on the ��50s conveys. A better-balanced treatment of Eisenhower’s White House years would have made this biography as subtle as it is smart.

by Jean Edward Smith

Source:

Eisenhower in War and Peace
Jean Edward's Smith's new biography obliterates earlier arguments that Eisenhower’s was a dull, torpid presidency.
By Erik Spanberg FEBRUARY 21, 2012

History, we’re told, repeats itself. Those who write history, however, are another matter.

Historians do tend to agree on the greatest presidents �� Lincoln, FDR, and Washington �� and often come up with similar names one rung lower. Usual suspects in the latter category include Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson.

After that, though, the rankings shift with historical cycles and reinterpretations of eras and achievements although those on the bottom (hello Warren Harding, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan) tend to stay there. Ulysses Grant is perhaps the lone bottom-rung president whose stock has risen to a notable degree.

A Supreme Confidence
A level-headed leader of men and nations—Eisenhower is revered today by both conservatives and liberals.
By GERARD BAKER
February 18, 2012

Presidencies, like good wines, improve with age. When a president leaves office the excess of familiarity has sown its bitter harvest of contempt—or at least boredom. There is too much excitement about his successor, too much anticipation of the new, for a completely fair appraisal of the outgoing chief executive's legacy.

But as the promise of the successor usually goes unmet and the heat of contemporary political battles cools to a more even temper, judgments mature, and the old guy starts to look a little better.

George H.W. Bush left the White House a rather forlorn failure in political terms but within a few years was getting the credit he deserved for elegantly navigating the immediate post-Cold War minefield. Bill Clinton went out of office not so much under a cloud as enveloped in a miasma of Monica Lewinsky- and Marc Rich-scented scandal but today looks better and better as historians emphasize his budget-balancing and welfare-reforming legacy. Richard Nixon, the closest any president has come in the past century to being run out of town on a rail, at least gets credit for his China démarche.

Presidencies, like good wines, improve with age. When a president leaves office the excess of familiarity has sown its bitter harvest of contempt—or at least boredom. There is too much excitement about his successor, too much anticipation of the new, for a completely fair appraisal of the outgoing chief executive's legacy.

But as the promise of the successor usually goes unmet and the heat of contemporary political battles cools to a more even temper, judgments mature, and the old guy starts to look a little better.

George H.W. Bush left the White House a rather forlorn failure in political terms but within a few years was getting the credit he deserved for elegantly navigating the immediate post-Cold War minefield. Bill Clinton went out of office not so much under a cloud as enveloped in a miasma of Monica Lewinsky- and Marc Rich-scented scandal but today looks better and better as historians emphasize his budget-balancing and welfare-reforming legacy. Richard Nixon, the closest any president has come in the past century to being run out of town on a rail, at least gets credit for his China démarche.



Source: The Wall Street Journal

He Made It Look Easy
‘Eisenhower in War and Peace,�� by Jean Edward Smith

By JOHN LEWIS GADDIS
Published: April 20, 2012


President Eisenhower waves to crowds after his inauguration, 1953

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s memoirs came out while I was in graduate school in the 1960s, and one of my professors commented �� not entirely facetiously �� that he’d been surprised to see print on the pages. My fellow students and I were being taught that despite Eisenhower’s victories in World War II, the presidency had been beyond his capabilities. Like Ulysses S. Grant, another general to make it to the White House, Ike won elections easily, but did not rise to the responsibilities these thrust upon him.

Jean Edward Smith challenged that argument about Grant in a well-received biography published a decade ago: Grant had been a better president than contemporaries or previous biographers realized, Smith maintained. In “Eisenhower in War and Peace,�� Smith, who is now a senior scholar at Columbia after many years at the University of Toronto and Marshall University, makes a more startling claim. Apart from Franklin D. Roosevelt (whose biography Smith has also written), Ike was “the most successful president of the 20th century.��

Historians long ago abandoned the view that Eisenhower’s was a failed presidency. He did, after all, end the Korean War without getting into any others. He stabilized, and did not escalate, the Soviet-American rivalry. He strengthened European alliances while withdrawing support from European colonialism. He rescued the Republican Party from isolationism and McCarthyism. He maintained prosperity, balanced the budget, promoted technological innovation, facilitated (if reluctantly) the civil rights movement and warned, in the most memorable farewell address since Washington’s, of a “military-industrial complex�� that could endanger the nation’s liberties. Not until Reagan would another president leave office with so strong a sense of having accomplished what he set out to do.

But does Eisenhower merit a place in the pantheon just behind Franklin Roosevelt? Smith’s case would be stronger if he had specified standards for presidential success. What allowances should one make for unexpected incumbencies, like those of the first Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman, Johnson and Ford? Or for holding office in wartime? Or for “black swan�� events �� economic crashes, natural disasters, protest movements, self-inflicted scandals, terrorist attacks? What’s the proper balance between planning and improvisation, between being a hedgehog, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, and being a fox?

Smith doesn’t say. But he does carefully trace Eisenhower’s preparation for the presidency, and that’s what this biography is really about. (Only a quarter of the book is devoted to the White House years and beyond.) From it, Eisenhower’s own views on success in leadership emerge reasonably clearly. To reduce them to the length of a tweet �� an exercise my students recommend, and which Ike might well have approved �� they amount to achieving one’s ends without corrupting them.

Ends, Eisenhower knew, are potentially infinite. Means can never be. Therefore the task of leaders �� whether in the presidency or anywhere else �� is to reconcile that contradiction: to deploy means in such a way as to avoid doing too little, which risks defeat, but also too much, which risks exhaustion. Failure can come either way.

Exhaustion was the problem in World War I, in which the costs on all sides allowed no decisive outcome. As a young (and disappointed) Army captain, Eisenhower was kept stateside during the hostilities, training troops in the use of the recently invented tank. After peace returned, he and his fellow officers assumed there would be another war, but they had to plan for it under conditions wholly different from the profligacy with which the last one had been fought. With cuts in military spending that left ranks reduced, Eisenhower’s generation took limited means as their default position.

Doing as much as possible with as little as possible required setting priorities, so Eisenhower made himself an expert, during the 1920s and 1930s, on the theory and practice of limited means. The theory came from the 19th-century Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, whose difficult classic, “On War,�� Eisenhower mastered, as almost no one else in the Army at the time did. The practice came from serving on staffs: of Fox Conner in Panama, who introduced him to Clausewitz; of John J. Pershing in Paris, who had him map World War I battle sites; of Douglas MacArthur in Washington and the Philippines, from whom Eisenhower learned the pitfalls of arrogance in command; and, in the final years of peace, of the indispensable George C. Marshall, who catapulted Eisenhower above hundreds of more senior officers to make him, after Pearl Harbor, the Army’s chief planner.

Eisenhower’s skills were not those required to command armies on battlefields: in this respect, he lacked the talents of his World War II contemporaries Bradley, Patton and Montgomery. But in his ability to weigh costs against benefits, to delegate authority, to communicate clearly, to cooperate with allies, to maintain morale and especially to see how all the parts of a picture related to the whole (it was not just for fun that he later took up painting), Eisenhower’s preparation for leadership proved invaluable. Lincoln went through many generals before he found Grant, Smith reminds us. Roosevelt found in Eisenhower, with Marshall’s help, the only general he needed to run the European war.

There were setbacks, to be sure: the North African and Italian campaigns, the Battle of the Bulge after the triumph of D-Day. But because Eisenhower showed himself to have learned from these crises, Roosevelt and Marshall never lost confidence in him. At the same time, Ike was perfecting the art of leading while leaving no trace �� the “hidden hand�� for which he would be known while in the White House. The best wartime example, Smith suggests, was the way he gave his subtle support to Charles de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French, which left Roosevelt �� no fan of le grand Charles �� with a fait accompli. Eisenhower was getting to be good at politics as well as war.

Politics beckoned, after his victories, as it did with Grant before him, but the situations they inherited upon becoming president could hardly have been more different. Facing no credible external enemy, the United States in 1869 was as inward looking as it ever had been or would be. But by 1953, its interests were global and threats seemed to be too. Grant, in the aftermath of the Civil War, struggled to maintain any weapons more lethal than those required to fight American Indians. Eisenhower controlled weaponry that, if used without restraint, could have ended life on the planet.

Success in his mind, then, required not just avoiding the corruption of ends by means, but also their annihilation. How could the United States wage a war that might last for decades without turning itself into an authoritarian state, without exhausting itself in limited conflicts on terrain chosen by adversaries, without risking a new world war that could destroy all its participants? And how, throughout all of this, could the country retain a culture in which its traditional values �� even the bland and boring ones �� could flourish?

Eisenhower’s greatest accomplishment may well have been to make his presidency look bland and boring: in this sense, he was very different from the flamboyant Roosevelt, and that’s why historians at first underestimated him. Jean Edward Smith is among the many who no longer do. The greatest virtue of his biography is to show how well Eisenhower’s military training prepared him for this task: like Grant, he made what he did seem easy. It never was, though, and Smith stresses the toll it took on Eisenhower’s health, on his marriage and ultimately in the loneliness he could never escape. Perhaps Ike earned his place in the pantheon after all.

John Lewis Gaddis teaches history and grand strategy at Yale. His latest book is “George F. Kennan: An American Life.��

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 6, 2012

A review on April 22 about “Eisenhower in War and Peace,�� by Jean Edward Smith, erroneously attributed a distinction to Ulysses S. Grant, who, like Eisenhower, won elections easily. It was Benjamin Harrison �� not Grant �� who was the last general before Dwight D. Eisenhower to become president. (Like Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield and Chester A. Arthur all attained the rank of general and also reached the White House subsequent to Grant.)

Source: The New York Times

Link to remainder of article:

War-averse commander in chief

By Jonathan Yardley February 17, 2012
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 / 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.

Source: The Washington Post

Remainder of article:

Book review: 'Eisenhower in War and Peace' by Jean Edward Smith

This is a comprehensive biography of the president and an assessment of his leadership qualities on and off the battlefield.
March 11, 2012|

By Wendy Smith, Special to the Los Angeles Times

Jean Edward Smith's massive work, the first comprehensive biography of Dwight D. Eisenhowersince Stephen Ambrose's two-volume work in the 1980s, joins a flurry of recent books �� grandson David Eisenhower's affectionate memoir ("Going Home to Glory"), L.A. Times editor at large Jim Newton's presidential portrait ("Eisenhower: The White House Years"), and scholar David A. Nichols' study of the Suez crisis ("Eisenhower 1956") �� in viewing Eisenhower as the embodiment of a midcentury spirit of consensus noticeably absent from the current political scene.

He was "a progressive conservative [who] believed traditional American values encompassed change and progress," writes Smith, who follows that assessment with a pointed comment from a letter by Eisenhower that is difficult to imagine being written by a prominent Republican today: "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would never hear of that party again," he observed to his brother Edgar. "There is a tiny splinter group that believes you can do these things��.but their number is negligible and they are stupid."

Eisenhower would never have been that blunt in public. From the very beginning of his military career, Smith argues persuasively, Eisenhower was a shrewd political operator who concealed his acumen and ambition behind an affable façade. Born in 1890, he grew up in poverty; his dour father, a failure in business, practiced a grim variety of Christianity so off-putting that Ike did not join a church until after he was inaugurated as president and then only because he deemed it politically necessary. The six Eisenhower brothers (a seventh died in childhood) were all driven to high achievement by their father's cautionary example, and everyone agreed that Ike was the one who most resembled their cheerful, problem-solving mother.

Remainder of article:

The Romance of Realism
By David Greenberg

Source: The New Republic

The histories we write say as much about our own times as about those we study. The current polarization in Washington has prompted a nostalgia for parties that were less ideologically uniform and more prone to compromise. Fashionable “pragmatism�� has similarly infected thinking about foreign policy, as the fallout from the Iraq war lingers in the air a decade on. Unnamed Pentagon sources doomsay any proposed use of American force (but don’t you try to cut their budget!), while the left, tinged by guilt over its decades-long estrangement from the services, holds up medal-bearing military realists as paragons of wisdom.

These conditions have combined to inspire a rehabilitation of Dwight Eisenhower. Indeed, every few years another fat biography tries to do for Eisenhower what David McCullough did for Harry Truman and Edmund Morris did for Theodore Roosevelt—that is, to canonize him. Geoffrey Perret’s 685-page Eisenhower (1999), Carlo D’Este’s 848-page Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life (2002), Michael Korda’s 779-page Ike (2007), Jim Newton’s 451-page Eisenhower: The White House Years (2011)—all were well-researched, well-written, and utterly worshipful.

Remainder of review:

The Economist - Review

The Eisenhower presidency
O lucky man!

A Republican president who was touched by fortune



NAPOLEON believed that ability counts for little in military men if they are not also blessed with opportunity; what he wanted most were lucky generals. Jean Edward Smith's superb new biography of the “military statesman�� who became the 34th president of the United States shows how often Dwight “Ike�� Eisenhower's opportunities owed much to what Niccolò Machiavelli called fortuna.

He was lucky that West Point adopted competitive entry in time for him to be selected and that he was allowed to serve in spite of a football injury. His career was rescued repeatedly by older generals, who recognised his ability. His guardian angel, Fox Conner, whom he met at Camp Meade in 1919, became a lifelong mentor. Conner protected him from court martial over a trivial allowance claim in 1921, sent him to the general staff school at Fort Leavenworth in 1925, and a year later rescued him from command of the 24th Regiment, a unit for black soldiers which had such a bad name it was known as the “infantry's Siberia��.

Opportunity came at last when George Marshall chose Eisenhower to be commander of all American forces in Europe in 1942, a year after America entered the war, and then when Franklin Roosevelt chose him, instead of Marshall, as the D-Day commander, partly because of Winston Churchill's dislike of Marshall.

It was an almost miraculous career. Although he had seen no action, Eisenhower was promoted over 228 senior officers when he took over the American high command in north Africa, and he leapfrogged over more experienced British soldiers when he was made commander in chief of the allied forces just seven months later, in 1943. Yet neither north Africa nor the first European landings in Italy was well handled. Mr Smith, a well-known American biographer and former professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, acknowledges Eisenhower's many talents. But unlike several previous American writers (including Eisenhower's own grandson), he does not do so by portraying British commanders as almost uniformly incompetent in comparison.

Another virtue is Mr Smith's sophisticated handling of Eisenhower's infatuation for his beautiful Anglo-Irish driver, Kay Summersby, the subject of much prurient speculation. Mr Smith lists the circumstantial opportunities and concludes: “Whether he and Kay were intimate remains a matter of conjecture. But there is no question they were in love.��

Eisenhower's luck held good in 1945 when he told George Marshall he meant to leave Mamie, his wife of 29 years, for Summersby. Marshall stamped on the idea and Eisenhower ran for president. Mr Smith attributes the unusual bitterness of the 1952 campaign less to political partisanship than to fear: the Democrats' fear that Senator Joe McCarthy would publicly describe their candidate, Adlai Stevenson, as homosexual and Eisenhower's fear that his correspondence with Marshall over his proposed divorce would be leaked.

Much of John Kennedy's political magic came from the way journalists contrasted his youth and vigour with Eisenhower's elderly bumbling, his illnesses and his golf. But political craftiness was as important for Eisenhower as his good fortune, as laid out in a 1994 biography by Fred Greenstein, a Princeton academic, entitled “The Hidden-Hand Presidency��. In fact, Kennedy played golf much better than Eisenhower did.

The Eisenhower that Mr Smith portrays was not just a “military statesman”—as Britain's General Montgomery called him—but also a very successful president. He ended the war in Korea, refused to allow America to get involved in rescuing the French in Indochina (one idea had been to drop three atom bombs there), forced Britain, France and Israel to back down over Suez and faced down China over the Quemoy-Matsu crisis. At home he sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, to escort nine black children to school. He presided over peace and, on the whole, prosperity.

Eisenhower also left two mighty endowments for the North American economy. He pushed through the visionary St Lawrence Seaway, which takes seagoing ships to Chicago. As a young officer in 1919 he had accompanied the army's first convoy across a continent where you sometimes had to navigate roadless tracts with a compass. Thirty-six years later he sent to Congress the legislation that created the interstate highway system. A fiscal conservative, Eisenhower believed in strong government, and knew how to use it.

Source: The Economist

Book Discussion on Eisenhower in War and Peace with the author Jean Edward Smith



JUNE 23, 2012
Book Discussion on Eisenhower in War and Peace
Jean Edward Smith talked about his book, Eisenhower in War and Peace. He responded to questions from members of the audience.

The ninth annual Roosevelt Reading Festival was held by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in the Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center in Hyde Park, New York

Eisenhower Weighs Chance for Peace in the Cold War and related media

Eisenhower Weighs Chance for Peace in the Cold War (3:40) TV-PG

On April 16, 1953, after the death of Russian Premier Joseph Stalin, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers what is known as his “Cross of Iron�� speech before the American Society for Newspaper Editors, contrasting the philosophies of the Soviet Union and the United States.

Video:

Julie & David Eisenhower, Jean Edward Smith: 2012 National Book Festival

Julie Nixon Eisenhower, David Eisenhower and Jean Edward Smith discuss Dwight D. Eisenhower at the 2012 Library of Congress National Book Festival.

For captions, transcript, and more information visit ....

Link:

Video

Ike Reconsidered Conference (all videos included)



Source: Roosevelt House and Hunter as well as the Eisenhower Foundation

Praise

“Magisterial.”—The New York Times

“[A] fine new biography . . . [Eisenhower’s] 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.”—The Washington Post

“Highly readable . . . [Smith] shows us that [Eisenhower’s] ascent to the highest levels of the military establishment had much more to do with his easy mastery of politics than with any great strategic or tactical achievements.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Always engrossing . . . Smith portrays a genuinely admirable Eisenhower: smart, congenial, unpretentious, and no ideologue. Despite competing biographies from Ambrose, Perret, and D’Este, this is the best.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“No one has written so heroic a biography [on Eisenhower] as this year’s Eisenhower in War and Peace [by] Jean Edward Smith.”—The National Interest

“Dwight Eisenhower, who was more cunning than he allowed his adversaries to know, understood the advantage of being underestimated. Jean Edward Smith demonstrates precisely how successful this stratagem was. Smith, America’s greatest living biographer, shows why, now more than ever, Americans should like Ike.”—George F. Will

Folks, I want to thank assisting moderator Teri for doing a yeoman's job in adding all of the books and references in the Bibliography done by Jean Edward Smith for the book Eisenhower in War and Peace - what a great effort.

Everyone, please look through this list - there are tons of great books and references that you might want to read after Eisenhower in War and Peace.

by Jean Edward Smith

Make sure to check it out:

/topic/show/...

Indeed, Bentley, awesome work, Teri.

It really is - that Bibliography was quite intimidating.