Word: ike
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Ronald Reagan preaches "a New Beginning," but Americans trying to envision his Administration sometimes find their minds drifting back to the 1950s. Ike, they tell themselves. Maybe, if he won, Ronald Reagan would turn into a kind of Eisenhower. Or at any rate, maybe the effect would be the same: a long quiescence, an essentially sane and minimalist White House presiding over a "normality" that the nation has not experienced for a generation. Even some voters who are chilled by Reagan's politics and his followers have begun to take wistful consolation in the thought that the future under...
...years Dwight Eisenhower's historical reputation bumped along in the lower ranks of American presidencies. One 1962 poll of American historians and political scientists placed him rather degradingly in the spot between Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur: a mediocre and listless ex-soldier summoned from the links. Ike's sarcastic contemporaries liked to joke about "the bland leading the bland," about his goofy grin and the stack of Zane Grey westerns on his night table. He was forever playing golf or fishing, or otherwise treating the White House, they said, as a pleasant retirement home. And there...
...years since Ike yielded to John Kennedy have changed the perspective on Eisenhower's '50s. He has profited by comparison with the Presidents who followed him; Jack Kennedy promised in 1960 to "get the country moving again," but American society came down with motion sickness. Eisenhower's was the last complete presidency that began and ended without tragedy or trauma and disgrace...
...adventuring around the world, despite the American-sponsored coups in Guatemala and Iran, despite that sunbathing Marine exercise on the Lebanese beaches in 1958, despite Foster Dulles' fondness for leaning far out over the brink, Eisenhower kept the nation out of war. In Nixon Agonistes, Garry Wills called Ike "a political genius." Nixon, for his part, recorded in his Six Crises that Eisenhower "was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of those words." (Those phrases may be the purest elixir of Nixon's thought that was ever bottled...
...maintain his own dignified aura and personal authority with the nation (a moral authority never even approximately regained by his successors), while actively managing his presidency. Even those garbled answers at press conferences, Greenstein thinks, were a stratagem meant to conceal, soothe and deflect. Once, when Hagerty advised Ike to refuse to answer any questions about the Formosa Straits, the situation being especially tricky then, the President replied: "Don't worry, Jim. If that question comes up, I'll just confuse them...