Despite plenty of warts, Hitchcock’s Eisenhower was a hardworking, skillful president. Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War...
A lengthy, well-documented argument that “the era from the end of the Second World War up to the presidency of John F. Kennedy deserves to be known as the Age of Eisenhower.”
Throughout his presidency (1953-1961), most commentators considered Dwight Eisenhower “a lightweight, an amateur, an orthodox pro-business do-nothing president, a lazy leader who, despite all his grinning, was often callous and distant, more interested in golf than governing.” In the decades since, his reputation has risen spectacularly, and this measured, mostly admiring biography by Hitchcock (History/Univ. of Virginia; The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, 2008) does not rock the boat. In his campaign promises, Eisenhower expressed the importance of ending the Korean War, battling communism, and balancing the budget. He accomplished all three, but the details are often unsettling. He considered using atomic weapons to break the Korean stalemate. Luckily, Stalin died in the spring of 1953, and his successors felt the war was a distraction. Eisenhower despised Joseph McCarthy, but once the senator self-destructed, the administration embraced his red-hunting agenda. The last Republican to give balancing the budget priority, Eisenhower succeeded three times and barely missed five times. Modestly opposed to discrimination, he enforced desegregation in the District of Columbia and armed forces. However, unnerved by Southern outrage when the Supreme Court ended school segregation, he confined himself to platitudes on law and order and discouraged Attorney General Herbert Brownell from enforcing it. Hitchcock praises Eisenhower for avoiding nuclear war when many colleagues yearned to get on with it, but he criticizes his enthusiasm for covert operations which, even when successful, proved calamitous. An internationalist who expanded many of Franklin Roosevelt’s social programs, he never won over traditional conservatives in the party. “Modern Republicanism” peaked with Eisenhower, marked time with Nixon and Ford, crashed with Reagan, and never recovered.
Despite plenty of warts, Hitchcock’s Eisenhower was a hardworking, skillful president. Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace (2012) remains the best modern biography, but Hitchcock’s is a worthy competitor.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7566-8
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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