Eisenhower - Softcover

It's no surprise that the biographer of Douglas MacArthur and Ulysses S. Grant clearly conveys the military talents that enabled Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) to ensure the Allies' victory in World War II, but Geoffrey Perret is equally perceptive when dealing with the personality behind the famously genial grin. Perhaps marked by his father's coldness and grim religious zeal (though his mother was a lively, cheerful woman), Eisenhower never expressed his feelings easily, even to his cherished wife, Mamie. His intelligence and scholarly gifts got the poor boy from Kansas into West Point; his administrative and training abilities made him too valuable at home to be employed for active duty in World War I, much to his chagrin. Professional fulfillment and fame as the general who won WWII couldn't change the self-controlled habits of a military lifetime, and Perret depicts Eisenhower as reluctantly drawn into politics by a sense of duty. Covering his presidency, Perret doesn't let him off the hook about such touchy matters as U.S. involvement in the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's elected government or the biased hearing that lifted physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance. But the author obviously likes Ike, and he helps his readers understand why most Americans in the 1940s and '50s did too. --Wendy Smith

new, in-depth life of Eisenhower offers fresh perspectives, not only on World War II and the Korean War but also on the Cold War, the civil rights movement, McCarthyism, the U-2 crisis and Vietnam.
        
Geoffrey Perret's Eisenhower gives us, for the first time, the whole man. It brings together a huge amount of material, much of it made available to researchers only in recent years. The result is nothing less than an original, authoritative and provocative portrait of Eisenhower, as both soldier and president.
        
Far from being the easygoing and pliant figure often depicted by his critics, Eisenhower is revealed here as a complex, tough-minded and highly capable man, one who rose to the top of the world's most competitive profession, the modern military. His career as a soldier would prove to be an excellent preparation for most, though not all, of the major challenges he face