Eisenhower: The White House Years

New York: Doubleday, 2011. First edition. Hardcover. Fine/fine. First edition/printing. Fine in fine dust jacket. Hardcover. 451 pp. with index. Illustrated with photographs. After his victory as a five-star general in Europe in World War II and a stint of Columbia University president (during which he also accepted the post of Chairman of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff), he was courted by Harry Truman and the Democratic Party to accept a nomination for President but, voicing his disagreements with the Democrats, accepted the Republican nomination instead and won the 1952 election. This work presents a study of his two terms in the White House, a period in which some critics called him the "babysitter in chief", and reveals how wrong they were. Eisenhower inherited the tomic bomb but refused to use it; he groud down Joe McCarthy and his Communist witch hunt; he stimulated an economy from post war recession, built the interstate highway system, and turned a $8 billion deficit into a $500 million surplus in 1960. Far from the Eisenhower of popular imagination (a benign figure armed with a putter and a winning smile and little else), biographer Newton reveals a shrewd, sentimental, and tempestuous man, a champion of peace.