Word: ike
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sort of chairman-of-the-board view of the presidency. Like Eisenhower, Reagan would draw heavily upon industry and commerce for his highest appointees. Reagan and Eisenhower share a preference for successful businessmen as friends and advisers (also an enthusiasm of Richard Nixon's). Reagan in Sacramento, like Ike in Washington, favored a 9-to-5 workday regularity, delegating responsibilities heavily to Cabinet and staff...
Philosophically, Ike was a pragmatist. "The path to America's future," he declared in 1949, "lies down the middle of the road." He liked to be called a "responsible progressive." Reagan talks a much harder ideological line; he is the fount of Reaganism, after all. But, in Sacramento, Reagan demonstrated a flexibility about raising taxes and welfare payments that wen against his own strict dogmas...
...resisted military spending. He believed in "nuclear sufficiency," not superiority; he knew that nuclear weapons had forever, unalterably, changed his old profession. Eisenhower was not inclined to rattle the saber too much. Ironically, it was the Democrats in 1960 who campaigned blusteringly about the "missile gap," which they said Ike had permitted...
...most profound differences between Reagan and Eisenhower spring from contrasts in their backgrounds and experience. Eisenhower had orchestrated the largest and most complex military operation in history-the retaking of Western Europe. In that job, he functioned as supreme diplomat as well as soldier. Ike's expertise in foreign policy was thorough, practiced and instinctive. He dealt with men like Churchill on an equal basis. Reagan has worked as an actor and served a creditable eight years as Governor of the nation's most populous state. That experience may exceed Jimmy Carter's when he arrived...
Perhaps Eisenhower's greatest asset was his credibility with the American people. If they wished to doze off through the '50s, they counted on Ike to wake them when anything important came up. Reagan, for all of his crinkling swell-guy charm, says things that tend to keep people sitting bolt upright, with sweat on their palms...