Word: ike
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Loud-mouthed presidential brothers are nothing new, however. One has to go back to the Eisenhower era to find a president whose siblings kept their shenanigans in the shade. And even Ike's brother Edgar, a highbrow industrialist from Tacoma, Washington, liked to get in his digs at his brother the president. "Edgar's been criticizing me since I was five," Ike once joked at a press conference...
...Eisenhower brothers kept their political disagreements largely to themselves. And, nepotism be damned, Ike drew his youngest brother Milton, a university president (Johns Hopkins) and long-time civil servant into his inner circle. Milton gave Ike important advice on his direct telephone line to the White House, and made the 40-minute drive to Washington from his home in Baltimore several times a week. It was Milton who encouraged Ike to accept the Republican nomination in 1952, and it was Milton who said he should seek a second term in 1956. He also advised Ike's 1953 atoms-for-peace...
...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...
...time, Joe McCarthy was loose, with all the blackbirds of his paranoia. When Ike federalized the Arkansas National Guard to integrate the schools of Little Rock, the country had an ugly glimpse of things to come. If we think of the '50s now as the last golden age, a period of moral poise, they seemed at the time very different. Archibald MacLeish wrote in 1955: "We have entered the Age of Despondency, with the Age of Desperation just around the corner." Someone is always saying that; it is almost always true...