Eisenhower: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century, and: General Eisenhower: Ideology and Discourse (review)

The two books highlighted in this review illustrate the continuing interpretive debate about Dwight D. Eisenhower and history. The first falls into the revisionist school, providing a brief summary of the life of what its author believes to have been a man of enormous character, ability, and historical standing. The second takes issue with this, viewing Eisenhower, as do the post-revisionists, as a good but flawed individual who failed to live up to his potential and to his own purpose, that of long-term world peace. Both are intelligent, readable, and in their own way contribute to the literature, though the second, based on research in the manuscripts at the Eisenhower library, is in this regard more valuable.

Kinnard's biography is perhaps the shortest one now available (although it competes with a new one of similar length by Tom Wicker). Its brevity is both a strength and a weakness. A strength because the reader can easily manage it in a sitting or two, the narrative straightforward and lively. It is a weakness because of its lack of interpretive detail and synthesis of the latest research. This book generally tells what happened but not why, including importantly, why Eisenhower decided to become a candidate for president, thus risking his reputation as a military hero. There is no mention, to give other examples, of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the reason for Eisenhower's choice of Lebanon as a place for military intervention in 1958, or what Eisenhower recommended in his advice to Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. Larger questions include whether Eisenhower for strategic and domestic policy reasons misled the American people about the extent of the Soviet threat and thus unnecessarily moved the free world into protracted cold war.

Chernus addresses this question, drawing upon the ideas of rhetoricians such as Lynn Hinds and Theodore Windt, Jr., and their interpretation of the work of an historian, Norman Graebner, to examine Eisenhower's statements. Chernus believes that Eisenhower, like his predecessor, exaggerated the threat of communism and that "alarmist Ike" used apocalyptic words in a way that perpetuated and needlessly prolonged a dangerous and expensive cold war (Chernus, p. 179). Chernus examines the decade from 1942 to Eisenhower's candidacy for the presidency in 1952 and concludes that Ike's private and public discourse revealed an "ideology" and "religious language" that continued Harry Truman's approach to the Soviet Union, one in which there were "no conflicts of interest in the world which would not be settled by peaceful adjustment and thus largely on American terms" (p. 13). Desiring to "ward off the triple threat of communism, financial collapse, and war," Eisenhower sought the opportunity as president "to rally the domestic masses, through his rhetoric." Ike, says Chernus, seemed obsessed with and projected onto the world stage the struggle he felt between the natural tendency toward selfishness and the necessity of self-restraint. Unfortunately, "salvation meant endless containment, stable order . . . universal restraint, and conformity to immutable universal goals" and any change of the status quo "a fundamental threat to the United States" (p. 303).

Examining the rhetoric of statesmen is helpful. And that is the principal contribution of this book. Unfortunately, the author has not sufficiently tied Eisenhower's words to his intellectual development and his response to the times in which he lived. A correspondent once asked Eisenhower which books he thought had the greatest influence on him. He responded the Holy Bible, Bancroft's History of the United States, and Clausewitz's book On War. The first and the second of these were major sources of Eisenhower...