EISENHOWER: SOLDIER AND PATRIOT
by Stephen E. Ambrose
ISBN 978-0-945707-39-4 $37.50
635 pages including notes, bibliography and illistrations.
Published in 1990 this definitive birth-to-death biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower by Stephen E. Ambrose brings to life the only man in the twentieth century to achieve his country's highest military and civilian ranks. Eisenhower: Soldier and President is an abridgement of the two-volume biography by Ambrose.
Ambrose, one of the editors of the Eisenhower papers, has combined a masterful story of the European war theater, and a spellbinding and surprising tale of Eisenhower as presidential candidate, president and elder statesman with a sympathetic, admiring and realistic portrait of Eisenhower the man.
This is the only full-scale biography that is based on original sources, many only very recently available, and it is the only complete account of Eisenhower's relations with the people closest to him, most of all Mamie, his son, John and Kay Summersby, as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and, indeed all the world leaders of his time.
Professor Ambrose's biography is the product of twenty years of research, including innumerable interviews with the subject himself. It is filled with incidents, anecdotes, and quotations not previously published. In addition he examines Eisenhower's feelings about Germany, the Russians and communism; about his own career as a solder before World War II; about Washington between the wars; about his commitment to a United States of Europe. Revealed here is how Eisenhower was persuaded to run for the presidency, the candidate's behind-the-scenes activities during the 1952 Republican convention, and his relations with President Harry S Truman and Senators Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy. Also presented are Ike as President-elect and the whole new set of problems he has to deal with. Ambrose provides us with the first assessment of a Cold War President based on access to the entire record, and the result if full of surprises on a wide range of issues that faced the President over the next eight years. Many of the documents unearthed by Ambrose have never been seen by anyone else since Ike wrote or read them, and they cover a broad range of subjects: Eisenhower's rejection of the near-unanimous advice of the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and the State Department to use atomic weapons; the Eisenhower-Nixon relationship civil rights and McCarthy; and Ike's most private views on and relationships with de Gaulle, Anthony Eden, Nixon, Khrushchev, and Dulles among many others.
Ranking Eisenhower as a great President (just below FDR and Wilson among those of the twentieth century), Professor Ambrose provides us with an extraordinary portrait of a good man who lived life to the fullest, and who made a real contribution to the Presidency.
