Why I Like Ike
Reeves, Richard
Why I Like Ike by Richard Reeves Most of us "liked" Ike, but respect was something else—at least until recently. Now the second volume of Stephen E. Ambrose's workmanlike and intelligent...
...He not only listened...
...God take me.' He was ready to go home, back to Abilene, back to the heart of America, from whence he came...
...The work ends with these sentences: "'I want to go...
...Simon & Schuster $24.95...
...This is what Ambrose wrote of the president as he prepared for a summit meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and French Premier Joseph Laniel at the end of 1953: "Eisenhower thought both European leaders were just hopeless on these colonial questions...
...This president came to office among the best qualified in American history, having lived many places in the world, worked with the leaders abroad and at home, and "in his spare time" was reading the Federalist Papers at his desk in the Oval Office...
...Now, I think again that Ike was the man for that time...
...Race, unfortunately, did not seem to be one...
...That came from our greatest soldier, but we still don't get it...
...The President...
...But, if he did not have the commitment to push civil rights...
...At best, to robbing every people and nation on earth of the fruits of their own toil...
...he had the wisdom to keep his mouth shut in public...
...His great heart stopped beating...
...He is author, most recently, of Passage to Peshawar, published by Simon & Schuster...
...As always when he got back from Augusta," Ambrose mentions in an aside after Ike had been playing golf with rich cronies in Georgia, "Eisenhower was full of sympathy for the white southerners' point of view!' As for the president and the senator from Wisconsin, Ambrose concludes that Ike's way may have been paved with good intentions, but it led to overestimation of the strength of McCarthy's noisy supporters on the Republican right and then to cowardice: "He was determined to destroy McCarthy, as he destroyed Hitler, but...the direct assault against Hitler was replaced by an indirect assault against McCarthy, one so indirect as to be scarcely discernible, and one which contributed—at best—to McCarthy's downfall...
...That is more money than a man is going to make in his lifetime...
...He seemed open in many areas, to many ideas...
...In other words, it may have made Eisenhower mad as hell if people thought he was stupid or weak, but it did not confuse him or deter him from continuing in a seemingly unspectacular way to do what he thought was right for Americans and possible in America...
...Ambrose's first volume, Eisenhower...
...Ambrose, who was associate editor of Eisenhower's papers and spent five years with the former president at the end of his life, is sorrowfully critical of his subject in two areas: his passive resistance to civil rights for blacks and his unwillingness to act against his party's most poisonous member, Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...national security, he had-the sense and political clout to get his army out of an unwinnable war in Korea, and, again and again, he spoke in words that should be engraved on buildings around the country: "Ladies and gentlemen, there is no amount of military force that can possibly give you real security, because you wouldn't have that amount unless you felt there was a similar amount that could threaten you somewhere in the world...
...It will, I would guess, stand as the definitive work for a decade or two...
...Where will it lead.us...
...At worst, to atomic warfare...
...Over the years, impressed by thebrilliance and commitments of Adlai Stevenson, I questioned that young enthusiasm...
...Then someone will produce a more judgmental version of the great American story of the poor boy from Kansas, a football player, who went on to lead the most powerful nation of his time...
...In the president's view, they were simply blind to the strength of nationalism as a force, and he feared that their refusal to meet demands for self-government would lead to the loss of the Third , World to Communism ." So, all in all, I found myself still liking...
...Eisenhower, both volumes, is an admirable and professional job...
...Seen that way, Eisenhower, who kept a diary to guide biographers, comes off as a sophisticated, determined and sane.leader...
...there is ample evidence here that he heard what people were saying...
...Beneath Ambrose's pleasant glow of hero-worship, the book generally does not even choose between the worth of actions and passions...
...Ike may have been a nice racist...
...Eisenhower...
...This Ike was not the syntax scrambler we saw on television...
...That is as critical as this volume gets in covering Eisenhower's life from the day he became president in 1953 until his death in 1969...
...What world can afford this sort of thing for long...
...The organization is chronological, day-by-day in the White House and beyond...
...Richard Reeves, whose work formerly appeared regularly in this space, is a syndicated columnist...
...Soldier, Generalof-the-Army, President-elect, covered the years from 1890 to 1952...
...Ambrose, a professor of history at the University of New Orleans, found Ike "appealing . . . firm, fair, objective, dignified, he was everything most Americans wanted in a president...
...Growing up in a Republican family, I can remember writing an essay as a high school freshman regretting that I wasn't old enough to vote for him...
...As president, Eisenhower, among other things not always associated with moderate conservatives, increased the national commitment to government support of education and the elderly—and he used massive amounts of federal money to build the modern road system essential to the country's post-war boom years...
...Perhaps it is only nostalgia, but I would be happy, in some future election, to have to choose between two such men...
...Now the second volume of Stephen E. Ambrose's workmanlike and intelligent biography* confirms what some of us first suspected, reluctantly, then knew: Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, was a gifted and moderate leader who usually knew exactly what he was doing and was personally sensible and secure enough not to need constant private reinforcement or public adulation...
...That does not mean that he always understood the right or the possible...
...In the area he knew best...
...The jet [fighter] plane that roars over your head costs three-quarters of a million dollars...
...We are in an armaments race...
...There is a lot Eisenhower knew, at least intellectually, that he and we ignored and continue to ignore at our great peril...
Vol. 16 • January 1985 • No. 12
