Difficult though it is to believe for one of my generation, it has been more than half a century since Dwight David Eisenhower left the White House after 41 / 2 decades of exemplary public service. At the time — January 1961 — many of us welcomed his departure. We even more ardently welcomed the arrival of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and, with him, a new generation of political leadership: younger, more daring, more open to the “new ideas” about which the New Frontiersmen talked so loudly and excitedly.
Too often we forget, even after having had half a century to think about it, that, as Jean Edward Smith puts it in this fine new biography, Eisenhower was “the only president in the twentieth century to preside over eight years of peace and prosperity.” This was not because he was a cautious, passive caretaker president but because his long, distinguished military career had led him, as earlier their own experiences of war had led Ulysses Grant and William T. Sherman, to hate war.
For more on this story, visit: “Eisenhower in War and Peace” by Jean Edward Smith – The Washington Post.