ONE HUNDRED YEARS

A review of Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster’s The Century (1999)

(Rating 5 of 5)

I received this book as a Christmas present from my parents in 1999.  With six days to go before the ‘end of the century’ I crammed in the entire book in under a week so I could experience the twentieth century right before it went away.  After that I put the book aside and had not opened it again since my senior year of high school.  However with the twentieth century over a decade in the past I decided to open it up again and reexamine the time period that gave to us antibiotics, Hitler, computers, and practiced communism.  

In his classical story Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving tried to demonstrate how life in America rapidly changes.  If a man went to sleep for thirty years he would wake up to find the world unrecognizable.  In the twentieth century you don’t have to do a story where a man skips thirty years, if you missed five straight weeks you would be struggling to catch up.   As each year passed, society rolled out a new piece of technology often changing life as we know it. 

“The change was sudden and dramatic, and how could it not be?  The automobile was, after all, the first significant improvement in self-guided transportation since the bicycle (which, after its introduction in 1839, had a similarly dramatic effect upon the nineteenth century).  And by the time it became widely available to anyone with a few hundred dollars, the car had already begun to redefine nearly every facet of life.

            The burgeoning automobile age established a new since of freedom and individuality: people no longer had to make their plans according to train schedules, and they traveled not with hundreds of strangers, but by themselves or with family and friends.  At the same time, it also established a new, wider sense of community: small towns and villages that existed miles away from anyplace else were now connected to each other by roads, granting people who had long lived in isolation the opportunity to enjoy up-to-date medical care, higher-quality education, and whatever else lay ‘down the road.’” (p.103)

The car becoming a device every family had to have changed the way people lived

One of the biggest mistakes of the twentieth century was the establishment of prohibition.  It was supported across the political spectrum by people who were foolish enough to believe that you can change bad personal behavior by simply making said behavior illegal.  Prohibition only succeeded in making drinking less public, led to a major crime wave, and wasted lots of money.  Unfortunately prohibition goes on today, just not with alcohol, but in this new madness called the drug war waged by over-budgeted vice squads.    

“One cause that united both minister and Klansmen was the Eighteenth Amendment.  The movement to ban the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages had once been led by Progressives, who cited growing studies showing the medical risks of heavy drinking and alcohol’s destructive influence on marriage and family.  But by the time Prohibition was enacted, its driving force was puritan, who hoped it would beat back the forces loosing modern morals, and the nativist, who saw it as a way of rejecting the wine-drinking immigrants of southern Europe. Of course, it did neither.” (p. 119)

Prohibition gave wealth to mobsters such as Al Capone

This book also allowed me to once again appreciate the accomplishment of Charles Lindbergh, despite that the guy personally was giant rat dressed as a man; he was one hell of an aviator. 

Charles Lindbergh

“By the mid-1920s, the airplane seemed to have more potential as a circus act than it did as a vehicle for transportation.  Carnivals and county fairs featured daredevil riders performing stunts like wing-walking and parachute jumping, and spectators bought rides at five dollars a thrill.  Barnstorming pilots, evangelists for aviation’s future, hopped from airfield to airfield, moving without maps, going as far as their gas supplies would take them, gathering circus crowds whenever they were alit.  But while people everywhere found the flying machines interesting, the general mood was one of ‘you’ll never get me up in one of those things.’  Then came Lindy.” (p.136)

The biggest monster in world history

Nothing would alter the world more than the most awful events of the twentieth century: World War II and the Holocaust.  Both the events and their aftermath would transform the direction of the human race, and the one who brought both these things about was tyrant Adolph Hitler.  Because this man lived millions would die as he succeeded in brainwashing a nation.

“Early in his career, Hitler had discovered that he had an extraordinary talent for the kind of oratory that would appeal directly to such feelings, and once the moment of public vulnerability arrived he exploited it to the fullest.  In speeches that often ran two hours or longer, he would hold a crowd of up to half a million spellbound, taking time first to warm up and sense the mood of his audience, then diving in to do his work.  Sweating profusely, shaking with fury, he would build the attitude of his listeners into a frenzy, playing with an assortment of techniques that would make them first laugh, then cry, then explode in a fit of rage.” (p.168)

Allied Leadership

While there was a worldwide depression going on and mad men rising to power life still went on, and before Facebook, World Wide Web and cable television (or any television) there was Life magazine capturing the world in some of its greatest and not so great moments. 

“Among the places the New Deal pictures appeared was a fresh new photo magazine called Life.  Started in 1936 by Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Life was an instant success.  The mere idea of a photo magazine was so exciting to thirties’ readers, it inspired more than a quarter million of them to buy subscriptions even before the first issue had been published.  And once Life hit the newsstands, its popularity rose so quickly, Luce nearly killed it when he couldn’t raise advertising rates fast enough to pay for the magazine’s skyrocketing circulation.” (p.192)

One of my favorite aspects of this book is the articles that were written by various people who were at major historic events or were just aware they were living in unique times.  The one written by Karla Stept about the German takeover in Austria is especially powerful. 

“All of this was a complete shock to us, because we had never heard of things like this happening in Germany.  And we found out later on, they never did happen there.  It was an Austrian specialty.  What took five years to accomplish in Germany took them only twenty-four hours in Austria.  One should not forget that.  For five years in Germany they had worked up to this by adding one thing to the next.  In, Austria they did it in just one day.  The Germans had to learn to be anti-Semitic.  The Austrians always were.  They must have harbored all that rage for hundreds of years.  And now suddenly they were free to express it.” (p.200)

The beginning of the twentieth century saw a world that was ruled by Europe but by the century’s midpoint that was coming to fast end.  The great European empires were stretched out financially, physically, and morally.  In the modern world it was not going to be acceptable for people to be governed by governments thousands of miles away, who were given little to know say on how it was conducted.

“One of the most far-reaching consequences of the Second World War was the abrupt end that it brought to colonization.  The finish came at the urging of the United States, which had long argued that colonial empires were inconsistent with its belief in democracy, and at the expense of the crippled European powers, particularly Britain, whose rule had dominated the map for centuries.  But the change was inevitable: if they had done nothing else, the century’s wars had confirmed the legitimacy of the dusty old order and its subjugation of the masses (though the surge in the world’s population would probably have forced the issue if war had not).  Even the Moscow-led Communist insurgencies, seizing power sometimes with little popular support, cynically claimed the mantel of democracy.” (p.308)

The automobile changed the way people traveled the television changed the way people stayed home.  You could listen to radio and work, television involved your most important sense: sight.  People now had a window to the world in their living room.

“There were something irresistible about television, and while few understood just how important it would become (more a new environment than a new mass medium, as inescapable as the weather, wrote Richard Reeves), they wanted to there when it took off.  In the medium’s early years there was Howdy Doody and the World Series, but only when the rectangular cathode-ray tube was perfected in 1950 and the price of the average DuMont and Philco dropped to $200 in 1953 did the age of television truly descend upon the nation.  By 1960 more than 45 million television sets found homes, not only in the suburbs, where their elaborate wood cabinets fit quite nicely into the family room or the den, but also in the inner-city taverns (where bartenders complained that patrons spent too much time watching and not enough time drinking.)” (p. 331) 

With television’s rise came a new kind of media celebrity.  Now not only would people’s work be famous but also their image.  America had always had celebrities, you can say our first was Ben Franklin, but now the celebrity’s image was burned into public retinas.  It would give some people everlasting fame, but they would never be normal again.

“Elvis Presley was one of two mass media figures who came of age in the fifties.  The other is Marilyn Monroe.  That the age of television should have produced one of the biggest movie stars in history would seem to be a paradox, but just as Elvis was more than just a musician, Marilyn was more than a movie star.  She was Marilyn, the object of mid-century wish fulfillment for men, of envy for women, and of fascination for quite nearly everyone with eyes.” (p.346)

Do I even need captions?

Just as the colonial empires were falling apart internationally, at home, a new revolutionary movement was starting that would tear down the system of Jim Crow and challenge the very public consciousness to the injustice that nation had let go on for centuries.  The legacy of the movement still battles on today.

“To be alive in the sixties was to feel exhilarated, present, not necessarily happy but at least fiercely awake.  To be young in the sixties was to be all this and more.  Along with the ‘consciousness-raising’ and pleasure (particularly sexual pleasure, freed from the fear of pregnancy when the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill in 1960), the sixties glorified youth and freedom; the years also maligned old age and tradition, discipline, and conformity that had been the hallmark of the most recent decade.” (p.370)

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the primary leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and easily the most visible

John F. Kennedy, the second youngest president and the youngest elected, took office on January 20, 1961 and arrived like a breath of fresh air.  Kennedy had an energetic presidency that created the P.E.A.C.E. Corps and challenged the nation to go to the moon.  He had his setbacks such as the Bay of Pigs disaster and the late response to the Civil Rights Movement, however his greatest hour occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he got the Russians to take the missiles out of Cuba.  The nation was traumatized when the President was taken from them, on television.

“Anyone alive and aware on November 22, 1963, when the news from Dallas arrived across the radios, television, and phone lines, in the form of frantic voices of neighbors calling over suburban lawns and the somber tones of tearful school principals speaking to their students from loudspeakers, remembers in sharp detail where they were and what they were doing.  More interesting is those who can recall what they felt.  For most, the information stuck like a poisoned tipped dagger, delivering to they system equal amounts of grief and disbelief.” (p.384)

Kennedy didn’t live to see his moon landing, but it happened before the end of that decade.  For years some cultures had worshiped the moon, and everyone has looked at it.  It was Neil Armstrong however, who walked on it and stuck our flag in it. 

“Still, like Lindbergh’s feat in the twenties, the astronauts’ mission had provided a balm for the pain of their own crazy decade, perhaps most importantly in the views their lunar camera captured when they were directed back towards earth.  At home, mo matter where you stood, the sixties looked messy and unreadable, like a painting viewed too close to make out anything but the texture of the brush strokes and the smudge of color.  Yet from out there, in the dark eternity of the universe, the planet projected a picture of harmony, an essential beautiful orb, ordered and still.” (p.419)

This the 20th century for me

America saw one president murdered on TV, and then they saw a second one fall. Richard M. Nixon had been a major figure in politics since the late forties, served in the House, Senate, and as Vice President to Dwight D. Eisenhower.  After losing the presidency to Kennedy in 1960, then the California governorship to Pat Brown in 1962, he seemed finished.  However he would stage the ultimate come back a take the presidency in 1968.  Yet he would lose it all by 1974 in the Watergate scandal that brought him low.   

“Schlesinger called this new, more muscular executive ‘the Imperial Presidency,’ and while he had seen its beginnings in the administrations of other leaders, it was Richard Nixon who seemed to him to have taken the arrogance of power to a new level.  After all, it was one thing for a president to claim executive privilege in the conduct of war, but Nixon had extended the definition of national security to encompass much o this domestic decision-making, indeed as a justification for any and every executive act.  ‘When the president does it,’ he said, famously, ‘that means it is not illegal.’” (p.439)

Whatever ones personal opinion of Ronald Reagan, no one can deny he changed the political landscape of America.  The dynamics of American politics completely changed with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 more than any since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932.

“Ronald Wilson Reagan was the most significant president in forty years.  When, in 1980, he was elected to the nation’s highest office, catapulted by anger over Carter-era interest rates and the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, some had feared the former California governor for his simplistic and extremist rhetoric, particularly on issues of foreign policy.  Still, most people assumed the old maxim would apply—the one that said that the office had a tendency to smooth the edges, turn all men into moderates—and that Reagan’s would ultimately be a presidency like that of his two recent Republican predecessors: conservative, yes, but unchallenging either to the long-established principles of containment as regards foreign policy or to the consensus on social policy that had been in place since the time of Roosevelt and the and the New Deal.  They could not have been more wrong.” (p.475)

The HIV virus was discovered the same year that I was born, I have been reminded of that every significant birthday I have ever had.  The gay rights movement less than a decade from Stone Wall was finally gaining some strength, then a new virus that nailed them first and practically decimated a generation.  And since it was that group that fell first, the government hesitated to even get involved, the far right even praising the disease as god’s cure.  Had the government taken action sooner who knows how many lives could have been saved?   

“By 1986, fear had even penetrated the nation’s bedrooms.  For years, medical science had been scoring success after success, so many that there was the feeling that disease was about to become an anachronism. Along with technology, medicine had been society’s best advertisement for progress, boasting an uninterrupted flow of accomplishments leading to the bettering of human life.  Then came the deadly pandemic known as AIDS.  The acronym (for ‘acquired immune deficiency syndrome’) started out from the page ominously, like a finger of fate resurrected from the time when plagues like the Black Death ravaged whole populations in medical Europe.  Now AIDS appeared capable of wiping out as much of a quarter of those alive in out own time, an Old Testament kind of scourge spread primarily through sexual contact, which in itself represented a cruel piece of irony, for now man’s most intimate act, the one that conceives life and gives pleasure, could also take life away.” (p.494)

Now you cannot talk about the twentieth century without mentioning computers, after all I am word processing this on a computer and placing it on a blog.  We now live in a world for computers that humans just live in. 

“To many people, the computer was a positively magical device—not a machine in the usual sense, but something else.  It was not, after all, like a mechanical wristwatch or a car or any of the traditional kinds of machines with which one was familiar, the kinds that could be opened up and examined, with their levers and gears moving.  Open up a computer and it looked nothing like what it did, for information was stored there and retrieved from there in ways invisible to the human eye.  And the computer didn’t even do ‘work’ in the traditional sense, either.  Most machines are like slaves. The automobile, for instance, starts and is propelled forward by its driver’s commands, but a computer is more like a partner, a collaborator—performing functions at the behest of its user, yes, but also taking in information, interpreting it, then delivering back recommendations that inform the user’s next set of commands.” (p.551)

computers

The Berlin Wall did not survive the Century

In close, The Century is a remarkable read about a remarkable time.  The twentieth century began with President William McKinley and ended with President William J. Clinton, it starts with funeral for Queen Victory and ends with one for the Princess of Wales (who just posthumously became a grandmother).  In 1900s the old world was smashed and replaced by bi-polarization that terrified the world with the thought of nuclear destruction. Yet, that new order did not see the end of the century as the Cold War ends with the Berlin Wall coming down and Soviet Union falling.  Then Americans could spend the final decade wondering who their President was having sex with, completely oblivious to the horror that was coming in the next decade.  

         

{Video is the 2012 CJF Honorary Tribute to Peter Jennings}

EXPECT GREAT THINGS

A review of James T. Patterson's Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974 (1996)

Part of the Oxford History of the United States Series

(Rating 4 of 5)

My march through the ages has me now arriving at James T. Patterson's Grand Expectations, covering an era where my grandparents were building their families and my parents were kids. Since this book is about the recent past it is far more tangible than anything I have read so far. It begins in the world where America—with her allies—had just one World War II. Everything seemed so perfect for America was all-powerful, the world's most free nation that had just freed the world, the reforms of the New Deal will protected us from another Great Depression, and science would soon cure everything.

Very soon however the American people were about to learn that they were far from invincible, several members of their nation's minority populations were not free, and the nation had some tough times ahead. This was not entirely a bad thing for although grand expectations* had led to some great disappointments those disappointments led to people great and small to take actions to make things better. At the beginning of this book half the nation is still legally segregated and the opportunities for minorities and women were extremely limited, at the end legal segregation was dead and things in America had changed greatly for those oppressed peoples. The battle for equality was far from over but things were very different.

Like the rest of the series this book covers America from various directions. It looks at the top from the various administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. It explores things from the point of view of civil rights leaders such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Medgar Evers. The book even takes a look at some of the more extreme activists such as Malcolm X, who was for most of his career a black nationalists and not a believer in equality. The book examines at the sixties counterculture and the famous concert at Woodstock. It also covers the average Americans who were just trying to get along with their lives and who really enjoyed the show 'All in the Family.'


(President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jackie)



(President Johnson sworn in after assassination)


(Controversial civil rights leader Malcolm X)

“No performer aroused more alarm than Elvis Presley. Elvis, twenty years old in 1955, was the son of poor Mississippi farm folk who had moved into public housing in Memphis when he was fourteen. HE pomaded his hair and idolized Brando and Dean, whose Rebel Without a Cause he saw at least of dozen times and whose lines he could recite from memory. Presley learned to sing and play guitar while performing with local groups, often with people from his Assembly of God congregation. In 1954, he recorded 'That's All Right' and a few other songs, mainly in the blues and country traditions, thereby exciting Sam Phillips, a local loved black music and had recorded such musicians as B.B. King earlier in the 1950s. But the color line barred them from fame. 'If I could find a white man with a Negro sound,' Phillips is reputed to have said, 'I could make a billion dollars.'” (p.372)

(Rock icon Elvis Presley)

“The civil rights act was nonetheless a significant piece of legislation, far and away the most important in the history of American race relations. Quickly upheld by the Supreme Court, it was enforced with vigor by the State, for there were many thousands of hospitals, school districts, and colleges and universities affected by provisions of the law. Although many southern leaders resisted, most aspects of enforcement proved effective in time, and the seemingly impregnable barriers of Jim Crow finally begin to fall. Black people at last could begin to enjoy equal access to thousands of places that had excluded them in the past. Few laws have such dramatic and heart-warming effects.”(p.546)

There are some parts of the book I am very critical of. The book lacks a type of poetic feel that was present in previous volumes such as Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty and David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear. Also often this book strongly leans to the negative. I am not saying one should not be critical when need be, for example there are several sections in David Walker Howe's What Hath Good Wrote that are very critical at times but nevertheless has a strong sense of wonder. This book very much lacks that at times. The moon landing is barely covered. For thousands of years humans had look at the moon and often worshiped it, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went out and walked on it, and Patterson strongest stance on the matter is: it did not give us as much scientific information than we would have liked. While criticizing President Kennedy's foreign policy—again, nothing wrong with criticizing, especially the Bay of the Pigs disaster—he reduces the entire Peace Corps to just a single sentence. He also feels at times he needs to say something critical every time he says something positive. When discussing Cuban Missile Crisis he feels he needs to balance the positive view of Kennedy's handling of the event view with a more critical one, despite the fact that the critical view's argument is extremely weak. In some ways Patterson's seems to be so caught up in the era's disappointments to appreciative its wonder.


(Moon Landing)

I still highly recommend this book it is very insightful look into to how America was and the American people themselves at the end of World War II to how disappointed they were after the disastrous Vietnam War and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union chilled the air for the entire era as the nation that though it could to anything had to learn its limits. America in this era was a nation of high hopes and great disappointments.

*If the reader was given a hundred dollars every time the words 'grand expectations' came up the reader would probably finish with a few thousand dollars.

{Video is of JFK's Cuban Missile Crisis speech and MLK's 'I have a dream speech.'}

I LIKE IKE

A review of Michael Korda’s Ike: An American Hero (2007)

(Rating 5 of 5)

Michael Korda’s Ike is a fascinating look into one of the most famous men of the twentieth century. He was a first-rate solider and statesman, this life-long solider would leave office warning the nation of the growing military-industrial complex. This is an incredible story of a boy from Abilene, Kansas who would rise to become one of the most famous figures on the world stage. If history had not intervened he probably would have retired from the army a bird colonel and we never would heard about him.

The book begins with Korda explaining how the United States mistreats its heroes of the past, through endless amounts of revision it tears down one giant after another. Then the narrative shifts to the moments before the great invasion of D-Day. General Eisenhower is making not only on the most important decisions of his life, but in all of world history. Then from there the story changes again, it goes back to his time as a boy. Actually Korda spends a minute trying to explain the entire family history leading up to the birth of David Dwight Eisenhower whose first two names would later be switched around. There is almost no hint of what was ultimately going to come. His army career is pretty basic he moves slowly up the chain of command with his commanding officers seeing his greatest value as coaching the base’s football team.


(Dwight D. Eisenhower of World War I)

Eisenhower gets married to Mamie Doud, and she ends up becoming a typical Army wife always looking to ‘push hubby’ through. Eisenhower played no significant role in World War I; he was just a staff officer, although, he did run into another officer, only slightly senior to him, George Patton.


(Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie)

“Both men were fiercely ambitious, but Ike did his best to conceal his ambition, whereas Patton wore his on his sleeve. Unlike Ike, Patton was eccentric, erratic, vain, deeply emotional, and a full-fledged military romantic, in love with the whole idea of glory, capable of writing, as Ike would surely not have been, of his beloved cavalry, ‘You must be: a horse master, a scholar; a high minded gentleman; a cold blooded hero; a hot-blooded savage.’ Such words—and sentiments—came easily to Patton, who saw himself (and wanted others to see him) as a cavalier, a swashbuckling hero on horseback, a student of war history and war poetry; and who at times seriously believed himself to be the reincarnation of great warriors of the past. Perhaps no solider has ever had a more romantic view of war, and, at the same time, a better understanding of its hard practicalities, than Patton.”p.148

(General Patton)

Dwight D. Eisenhower spent sixteen years at the rank of major. He was just a major when Herbert Hoover was elected president in 1928, which is odd when it is considered that Major Eisenhower would be the next Republican to win election. Eisenhower spent a few good years as the top aid to General MacArthur when the General was the Chief of Staff of the United States Army. At this point Eisenhower had actually made lieutenant colonel.


(Herbert Hoover the last president elected before Eisenhower)

“MacArthur’s remaining year as Army Chief of Staff was painful, as Roosevelt, with the deft political cunning for which he soon became famous, carefully undercut the position of the person he regarded as one of the two ‘most dangerous men in America,’ while all the time continuing to profess admiration and warm affection for him, he was only too aware that the New Dealers, as they were already beginning to be known, viewed him with deep suspicion, hated him for his reactionary political views, and were afraid he might harbor political ambitions which would bring him in open conflict with the administration—that he might become, in fact, the proverbial ‘man on a white horse’ in the event of a fascist putsch in America. In short, their feelings about General MacArthur were a paranoid as his about them.”p.205

(General MacArthur)

When World War II broke out Eisenhower would begin to make his mark on the world, in a little over three and half years he would rise from lieutenant colonel to five-star-general. In that time he over saw the invasion of Sicily and the invasion of the Italian mainland. As the Supreme Allied Commander, he had to be both politician and solider. He was great at both roles. In the politician angle he had great success, especially in Britain. While in Britain there was one lady there named Kay Summersby, who Eisenhower may have known a little too well. She was officially his chauffeur but she proved to be a lot more than that.


(Ike as general)


(Ike's wartime gal)

“Perhaps the only people of consequence who snubbed Kay were King George VI, who was always petrified by the slightest hint of an improper relationship because of the misfortunes of his older brother, and who deliberately treated her like a chauffeur, which is to say a servant; and General Marshall, who considered part of his job to telephone Mamie once a week, and was deeply suspicious of Kay Summersby. Whatever virtues Ike may have had, however—and he had many—discretion about his friendship with Kay was not one of them, and people can hardly be blamed then or now for drawing the logical conclusion.”p.284

(King George VI did not like Kay)

During the D-Day invasion Eisenhower, like General Grant in the Civil War—as Kordra points out—was concerned with armies not territories. His primary mission was to defeat the Army of Germany not to capture particular points of real estate. It was this attitude that attracts his primary criticism as a general. However, it was Eisenhower who kept allies bound together and united no matter how hot-headed their leaders’ personalities may have been, Eisenhower got the best out of each of them.


(The General giving orders)

“Since 1945, almost everybody has had a say about the supposed mistakes that were made in the last year of the war—especially the presumed failure of on the part of the western Allies to take Berlin and the failure to confront the Soviet Union over the borders and the independence of the eastern European countries. Many if not most of these have been blamed on Roosevelt, but it should always be borne in mind that the president did not live to write his own memoirs, or to criticize those of others. Ike, when he came to write his, was careful not to join in postwar criticism of Roosevelt. Ike himself had shown no interest in wasting the lives of American soldiers to get to Berlin, and several times he offended even angered Churchill by going over the heads of the prime minister and the president to deal directly with Stalin, as if he himself were a head of state, to ensure that there would be no accidental clashes between Allied and Soviet troops as their front lines began to touch.” p.432-3

When Eisenhower he served in a number of posts, finally, in 1952, Eisenhower decided to run for the Republican Nomination for president. He would win beating Senator Robert Taft, and he would go on to win the election against his Adlai E. Stevenson. He would have an eventful and successful presidency. Under him there would be an inter-state highway system and an end to the Korean War. He would send soldiers to protect the ‘Little Rock Nine’ students who braved the way against segregation in education and all other aspects of life. The Cold War would continue with spy planes and talks of a ‘missal gap.’ There also was the crisis in Hungry and Suez Canal.

“It was the end of more than Eden’s career—it was the end of Britain’s remaining pretensions to independent, imperial power; it was the end of the fiction, still persisting from World War II, that the United States, Great Britain, and France were equal world powers. (Britain would shortly abandon Malaya, Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and much else besides; France would shortly lose Morocco, Algeria, and most of its African colonies.)


(President Dwight D. Eisenhower)

Ike had acted swiftly, decisively, and undeniably for the good; and although he felt great sympathy for his old friends in Britain, and even greater sympathy for the gallant but ill-advised Hungarians, he carefully managed events to avoid a clash with the Soviet Union, and he preserved peace—not a perfect peace, to be sure, or one without victims and compromises., but still peace. The Soviet Union had threatened to use atomic weapons on London and Paris at the height of the Suez Crisis, and in order to discourage American intervention in Hungary, but Ike had taken all this blustering calmly in his stride and kept a firm control of events.” p.693-4

Eisenhower retired for good, in 1961, when his successor John F. Kennedy, who had beaten Ike’s vice president, Richard Nixon, took office. He would live into 1969, just long enough to see Nixon, whose daughter would marry his grandson, become president.



Michael Korda wrote a great biography on the thirty-fourth president very detailed and informative. There are also historical allusions to other time periods littered thought the book, which as a history buff, I really do appreciate that. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wanted to know more about Dwight D. Eisenhower and World War II.

{Videos are as follows, the first is an Ike campaign ad made by Walt Disney, the second is President Eisenhower's famous farewell address.}