Word: ike
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...neither the inclination nor the need to worry about his financial or social status in Abilene. Ike revered an older man, Bob Davis, who taught him how to play poker and how to net fish on the banks of the Smoky Hill River. Davis was illiterate. Ike's best friend was Everett ("Swede") Hazlett, son of an Abilene physician who lived in the affluent part of town. In his exuberance Ike rounded up companions for baseball, football and camping from anyplace. His most famous fistfight was with Wes Merrifield, and according to Ike himself, the fight went more than...
...Ike's magic was to inspire foot soldiers and generals alike, blending English lords with plain Americans, reconciling and focusing the energies of haughty, contentious commanders such as Britain's Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery and the U.S Third Army's General George Patton. Holding the trust of the grandiloquent politicians such as Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt was just as challenging. It took all Ike had and four packs of Camels...
...sulking Democrats of Capitol Hill. They still smarted over the fact that he had interrupted their party's long grip on the presidency. He won Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson to his side as often as not. One evening after plying L.B.J. with Scotch, Ike pointed to his own chair in the Oval Office and said, "Senator, someday you should be in that chair." Johnson roared back to his office in the Capitol wearing that tribute like a battle ribbon...
...this warm and happy memoir there is a shadow, not over Ike's time or his achievements but over the U.S. of today. Jackson talks about it from his corner of Kansas above the Smoky Hill River, the same one that nurtured Ike. Was the unspoiled land and Abilene and the Eisenhower family -- and so many others like them in that era -- a one-time event in our history, now swept away by excessive wealth, greed, waste, softness and self-pity? Jackson confesses he has no certain answer. But he is worried by what he sees throughout the nation. When...
...farms, the ranches and the small towns were our sources of decency," says Jackson. "They seeded the cities in Ike's time. Now they are vanishing. Our cultural seed stock came from church, school and the community baseball team. We must now confront the Jeffersonian idea about living in harmony with the land. Is it mere nostalgia, or is it a practical necessity...