Ike's Spies; Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1981. First Edition. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xi, [3], 368, [2] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. DJ edges worn: small tears, small chips. Inscribed by Ambrose on half-title. Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 - October 13, 2002) was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American history. Ambrose was a history professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. From 1971 onward, he was on the faculty of the University of New Orleans, where he was named the Boyd Professor of History in 1989. During the 1969-1970 academic year, he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. He founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans in 1989 serving as its director until 1994. The Center's first efforts, which Ambrose initiated, involved the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans about their experiences, particularly any participation in D-Day. By the time of publication of Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, in 1994, the Center had collected more than 1,200 oral histories. Based on privileged access to the president and his private papers, this classic Cold War-era history by bestselling historian Stephen E. Ambrose gives an inside look at the way President Dwight Eisenhower managed America's secret operations as general and as commander in chief. During his time in office, Eisenhower projected the image of a genial bureaucrat, but behind that public face, he ran the most efficient espionage establishment in the world, overseeing assassination plots, the growth of the CIA, and the overthrow of governments. This book gives a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most ambitious secret operations in American history, including the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman's government of Guatemala; Operation AJAX, which toppled Iran's Mossadegh; and the U-2 flights over Russia. Some of Ike's most conspicuous intelligence missteps are also discussed, including the failure to predict the German attack during the Battle of the Bulge and the tragic encouragement of freedom fighters in Hungary, Indonesia, and Cuba. "Ike's Spies" is indispensable to anyone interested in the development of America's Cold War spy operations.