Eisenhowers War Of Words

Argues that Eisenhower was a stronger president than previously believed and was responsible for many important accomplishments in the area of foreign policy and the quest for peace.

In his magisterial bestseller "FDR," Smith provided a fresh, modern look at one of the most indelible figures in American history. Now this peerless biographer returns with a new life of Dwight D. Eisenhower that is as full, rich, and revealing as anything ever written about America's 34th president.

This book contains a selection from the more than 300 letters written by Dwight D. Eisenhower to his wife, Mamie Eisenhower, during World War II. Included are Eisenhower's impressions of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, and George Patton, and details of the planning of Operation OVERLORD and the Battle of the Bulge.

In Dwight D. Eisenhower's last speech as president, on January 17, 1961, he warned America about the "military-industrial complex," a mutual dependency between the nation's industrial base and its military structure that had developed during World War II. After the conflict ended, the nation did not abandon its wartime economy but rather the opposite. Military spending has steadily increased, giving rise to one of the key ideas that continues to shape our country's political landscape.In this book, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower's farewell address, journalist James Ledbetter shows how the government, military contractors, and the nation's overall economy have become inseparable. Some of the effects are beneficial, such as cell phones, GPS systems, the Internet, and the Hubble Space Telescope, all of which emerged from technologies first developed for the military. But the military-industrial complex has also provoked agonizing questions. Does our massive military establishment--bigger than those of the next ten largest combined--really make us safer? How much of our perception of security threats is driven by the profit-making motives of military contractors? To what extent is our foreign policy influenced by contractors' financial interests?Ledbetter uncovers the surprising origins and the even more surprising afterlife of the military-industrial complex, an idea that arose as early as the 1930s, and shows how it gained traction during World War II, the Cold War, and the Vietnam era and continues even today.

To Ike, rhetoric were the central weapon for waging - and winning - the Cold War. Understood as a strategic art of selection, arrangement, nuance, timing, and audience adaptation, rhetoric became, for Eisenhower, the preferred means of conflict resolution.

Draws on hundreds of newly declassified documents to present an account of the Suez crisis that reveals the considerable danger it posed as well as the influence of Eisenhower's health problems and the 1956 election campaign.

A classic of World War II literature, an incredibly revealing work that provides a near comprehensive account of the war and brings to life the legendary general and eventual president of the United States. • "Gives the reader true insight into the most difficult part of a commander's life." —The New York Times Five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower was arguably the single most important military figure of World War II. Crusade in Europe tells the complete story of the war as he planned and executed it. Through Eisenhower's eyes the enormous scope and drama of the war--strategy, battles, moments of great decision--become fully illuminated in all their fateful glory. Penned before his Presidency, this account is deeply human and helped propel him to the highest office. His personal record of the tense first hours after he had issued the order to attack leaves no doubt of his travails and reveals how this great leader handled the ultimate pressure. For historians, his memoir of this world historic period has become an indispensable record of the war and timeless classic.

"An excellent book . . . D'Este's masterly account comes into its own." —The Washington Post Book World Born into hardscrabble poverty in rural Kansas, the son of stern pacifists, Dwight David Eisenhower graduated from high school more likely to teach history than to make it. Casting new light on this profound evolution, Eisenhower chronicles the unlikely, dramatic rise of the supreme Allied commander. With full access to private papers and letters, Carlo D'Este has exposed for the first time the untold myths that have surrounded Eisenhower and his family for over fifty years, and identified the complex and contradictory character behind Ike's famous grin and air of calm self-assurance. Unlike other biographies of the general, Eisenhower captures the true Ike, from his youth to the pinnacle of his career and afterward.

When President Dwight Eisenhower left Washington, D.C., at the end of his second term, he retired to a farm in historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that he had bought a decade earlier. Living on the farm with the former president and his wife, Mamie, were his son, daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren, the oldest of whom, David, was just entering his teens. In this engaging and fascinating memoir, David Eisenhower—whose previous book about his grandfather, Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—provides a uniquely intimate account of the final years of the former president and general, one of the giants of the twentieth century. In Going Home to Glory, Dwight Eisenhower emerges as both a beloved and forbidding figure. He was eager to advise, instruct, and assist his young grandson, but as a general of the army and president, he held to the highest imaginable standards. At the same time, Eisenhower was trying to define a new political role for himself. Ostensibly the leader of the Republican party, he was prepared to counsel his successor, John F. Kennedy, who sought instead to break with Eisenhower’s policies. (In contrast, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, would eagerly seek Eisenhower’s advice.) As the tumultuous 1960s dawned, with assassinations, riots, and the deeply divisive war in Vietnam, plus a Republican nominee for president in 1964 whom Eisenhower considered unqualified, the former president tried to chart the correct course for himself, his party, and the country. Meanwhile, the past continued to pull on him as he wrote his memoirs, and publishers and broadcasters asked him to reminisce about his wartime experiences. When his grandfather took him on a post-presidential tour of Europe, David saw firsthand the esteem with which monarchs, prime ministers, and the people of Europe held the wartime hero. Then as later, David was under the watchful eye of a grandfather who had little understanding of or patience with the emerging rock ’n’ roll generation. But even as David went off to boarding school and college, grandfather and grandson remained close, visiting and corresponding frequently. David and Julie Nixon’s romance brought the two families together, and Eisenhower strongly endorsed his former vice-president’s successful run for the presidency in 1968. With a grandson’s love and devotion but with a historian’s candor and insight, David Eisenhower has written a remarkable book about the final years of a great American whose stature continues to grow.