Eisenhower's glowing foreign-policy reputation ignores his tragic post-White House cheerleading for escalation in Vietnam.
By Dominic Tierney
The Atlantic - Apr 18 2014
Today, everybody likes Ike. Liberals see Dwight Eisenhower’s foreign
policy as a model of strategic restraint. Conservatives view him as a
tough but shrewd warrior president. But there’s another side to Ike,
one that’s often ignored: The story of his political life after leaving
the White House. Ike in winter became a ferocious hawk on Vietnam who
helped propel America deeper into the quagmire.
Eisenhower was the son of pacifist Mennonites who fretted about his
love of military history. He became a hero of World War II and the
architect of D-Day. And Ike also understood the price of war. After
becoming president in 1953, he hammered out a truce in the Korean War.
In 1954, Eisenhower resisted entreaties to intervene in Vietnam
following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Indeed, during the last
seven-and-a-half years of Eisenhower’s presidency, only a single
American service member was killed by hostile fire (in Lebanon in 1958).
Eisenhower famously left the White House in 1961 warning about “the
military-industrial complex.”
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