Washington: A Life by Ron ChernowMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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Review: How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions by Susan EisenhowerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
From the introduction to One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America:
The inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower was much more than a political ceremony. It was, in many ways, a religious consecration.
Though such a characterization might startle us today, the voters who elected Eisenhower twice by overwhelming margins would not have been surprised. In his acceptance speech at the 1952
Republican National Convention, he promised that the coming campaign would be a “great crusade
for freedom.” As he traveled across America that summer, Eisenhower met often with Reverend Billy Graham, his close friend, to receive spiritual guidance and recommendations for passages of Scripture to use in his speeches.
I came away from that book seeing Ike as the first in a line evangelic-controlled conservatives. Now from this biography by a granddaughter I see him as an last in a line of enlightened, wisely moderate Republicans.
From the "Shaping the Middle Way" chapter here:
“The frightened, the defeated, the coward and the knave run to the flanks . . . under the cover of slogans, false formulas and appeals to passion— a welcome sight to an alert enemy,” he said at an American Bar Association Labor Day Address in 1949. “When the center weakens piecemeal, disintegration and annihilation are only steps away, in a battle of arms or of political philosophies. The clear-sighted and the courageous, fortunately, keep fighting in the middle of the war.”
Ike promoting moderation as a political ideology. He was also pro-NATO and anti-isolation. Could he even get the nomination of the GOP today?
I find myself carefully watching modifiers in my language and being suspicious of universal qualifiers. From "Ike’s Rules for Good Governance":
Regarding the president’s manner of speech, Larson recalled: “I quickly learned that [he] would practically never use comparables and was death on superlatives.”
Of course now reading of his direct action on The Little Rock Nine and considering our current Republican administration's reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement makes passages like this seem particularly relevant:
This violence against the black population was “indefensible,” the president later recalled. “and the administration, as well as all other sensible people, was outraged.” 30 Extremist groups promised more violence, and the South was already exacting revenge on innocent blacks by denying them credit, firing them from their jobs, and threatening their families . They promised more bloodshed if the black community “pushed too the whites too far.” 31 Despite this, in Eisenhower’s 1956 State of the Union address, he outlined his administration’s determination to address voting rights. The president was mindful that the 1950 national census had revealed that fewer than one in four African Americans voted.
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