Eisenhower: The White House Years

The political skills Dwight Eisenhower honed while commanding a fractious WWII alliance made for a great presidency, according to this appreciative but also probing biography. L.A. Times editor-at-large Newton lauds the 34th president's "middle way" rejecting extremes of left and right%E2%80%94including the anti%E2%80%93New Deal ravings of his ultra-conservative brother and the anticommunist witch hunts of fellow Republican Joseph McCarthy%E2%80%94to extract peace and prosperity during the turbulent 1950s. At home, Newton notes, Eisenhower steered a fiscally responsible course between Democratic domestic spending and Republican tax cuts and military boondoggles, while initiating a colossal interstate highway system. He championed a massive nuclear deterrent, but resisted pressures to use it and persistently defused geopolitical crises. The Eisenhower-approved coups in Iran and Guatemala were exceptions of which Newton provides trenchant critical accounts. Eisenhower's timid middleism on civil rights looks uglier, but Newton (Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made) notes that, once the courts ruled, Ike took his marching orders and sent troops to enforce school desegregation. Drawing on declassified documents, Newton's narrative, especially of the many international crises, is clear, brisk, and insightful, a timely study of a master of consensus politics with lessons for today's polarized Washington. (Sept.)