EISENHOWER'S RECORD
HUITT, RALPH K.
Eisenhower's Record Affairs of State: the Eisenhower Years, by Richard H. Rovere. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. 399 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Ralph K. Huitt RICHARD ROVERE put together these forty-one...
...Apart from foreign policy, where the President has asserted himself, Rovere finds it hard to get at the human essence of the Eisenhower Administration...
...What is most timely is Rovere's attempt to strike a trial balance on the Eisenhower Administration...
...Policies are his merchandise...
...its awesome responsibilities sometimes bring out unsuspected qualities of greatness in a man...
...no one who has lived through the past six years could expect it to be so...
...They did with Truman and they have with Eisenhower—and in the same field, foreign policy...
...The Administration lacks the stamp of the President's personality and bears that of no one else—except, possibly, the collective one of the public-relations and advertising men who have provided its rhetoric and some of its policies...
...good salesman that he is, he does not try to force his preferences on the public...
...There is, for instance, his eloquent support, prior to 1952, of the Democratic foreign policy he now denounces...
...but that would not explain his swift swing full-circle from isolationism to interventionism before World War II...
...Rovere's account of the Eisenhower years does not try to tell all the truth, nor even the whole truth about what it touches upon, but the truth it does tell is cogent and worth a second reading...
...Richard Nixon appears to be "a politician with an advertising man's approach to his work...
...The "Eisenhower program" has consisted mostly of talk—about highways, about schools and "trade not aid," about the semantic distinctions between "moderate progressivism" and "dynamic conservatism...
...What kind of country do these men think this republic ought to be...
...It might he hard otherwise for a less neurotic generation to appreciate quite what happened...
...In this he is quite right...
...ton correspondents, "a civilized group and a civilizing influence" whose contributions "to the health and improvement of our society" have never been properly weighed and appreciated...
...But the Presidency contradicts Acton's slick dictum that power corrupts...
...Eisenhower would accept nomination again...
...As President he has been bored and uninterested in domestic problems, delegating his work to others, never really testing himself against the potentialities of his job...
...What kind of program fits their image of the good society...
...Contemporary reports like these deserve the accessibility a book gives them...
...He entered office with less experience that was relevant to American public life than any of his predecessors...
...He was nominated only because politicians who wanted Taft wanted victory more...
...In an introductory note the author pays tribute to the regular Washing...
...It is hard not to feel a premonitory twinge as McCarthy insists that unrelated data on the Malmedy massacre are a' "jigsaw puzzle" that "make a picture," or to follow with macabre fascination the insouciant depredations of Cohn and Schine...
...Nevertheless they furnish in this election year a sharply perceptive if not altogether detached commentary on the record...
...After a decade in the national market, Nixon is not personally identified with any policy- Dulles, on the other hand, is —with, in fact, quite a lot of policies, many of them contradictory...
...What kind of President has the five star general made...
...It is true, as Dulles points out, that he was working for Truman then and is not now...
...Reviewed by Ralph K. Huitt RICHARD ROVERE put together these forty-one pieces (written originally for magazines, principally The New Yorker) before he knew that Mr...
...he has found himself in the middle because "he is a middling type by temperament and a mediating personality by function...
...Both men, says Rovere, were unsuccessful at home, but 1 ruman built the great concert of free nations and Eisenhower has preserved it, adding to it a new partner, the Republican Party...
...And this book proves that that company should be identified broadly enough to include Richard Rovere...
...Foreign and military policies bear Eisenhower's own firm imprint...
...Rovere wonders when it is safe to believe that we have the real Dulles, speaking his own convictions...
...What is perhaps most troubling in these sketches of the President and the men around him is the apparent lack of focus on any set of principles...
...It is not all pleasant, to be sure...
...Eisenhower has no particular view of American life," says Rovere...
...He has resisted counsel that might have brought us war, and "American prestige is as high today as it has been at any time in the last six or seven years...
...A better one, Rovere suggests, than anyone had a right to expect...
...The questions are not easy to answer...
Vol. 20 • July 1956 • No. 7
