Eisenhower Uncovered
11 Feb 05

Pearson Longman is delighted to announce the publication of Eisenhower by the highly acclaimed P.G Boyle.

Compared to all of his successors from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, Dwight D. Eisenhower seems to have an enviable record of achievement as president of the United States . His presidency, 1953-1961, was a period of peace, prosperity and national good will. He inherited a war in Korea and ended it in six months. In a succession of crises at the height of the Cold War in Indochina , Suez , Hungary , Berlin , Quemoy and Matsu , he maintained peace, while he worked closely with his allies, kept down defense spending and did not lose a single American soldier in combat. Meanwhile, on the domestic front the economy grew steadily, with near-to-balanced budgets and an affluent society, in which American popular culture flourished, especially in film, music and television.

Contemporary intellectuals, however, were scathing in their evaluation of Eisenhower as president and created a myth of a military man out of his depth in government and more at home on the golf links than in the Oval Office. Later revisionists and post-revisionists exploded this myth, yet they were still grudging in many respects in their recognition of Eisenhower’s accomplishments. The opening of new papers in Eisenhower’s presidential library, as well as comparison with his successors on such matters as misguided foreign interventions, from Vietnam to Iraq , and gargantuan budget deficits, has made a re-evaluation of Eisenhower’s presidency seem necessary. Eisenhower’s record had its blemishes, such as tardiness on civil rights, but overall, as Peter Boyle’s account elucidates, Eisenhower’s successors in the White House, as well as students and scholars, could have learned many lessons from a careful evaluation of Eisenhower’s steady hand on the wheel of the American ship of state in the 1950s.

Features include:

• Examination of Eisenhower’s early military career as well as his presidency
• Discussion of how he achieved his aims of avoiding war abroad and post-war depression at home
• Coverage of the tensions of the Cold War, the ending of the European empires abroad and the events of the McCarthy era
• Shows how Eisenhower’s last years as US president were shadowed by the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the U2 affair which darkened a slightly improving relationship with Krushchev’s Russia
• Discussion of how Eisenhower showed his deficiencies through failing to move on civil rights and racial issues that by 1960 were a major tide flowing through the country

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