The President and the Apprentice
Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961
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- £21.99
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- £21.99
Publisher Description
More than half a century after Eisenhower left office, the history of his presidency is so clouded by myth, partisanship, and outright fraud that most people have little understanding of how Ike’s administration worked or what it accomplished. We know—or think we know—that Eisenhower distrusted his vice president, Richard Nixon, and kept him at arm’s length; that he did little to advance civil rights; that he sat by as Joseph McCarthy’s reckless anticommunist campaign threatened to wreck his administration; and that he planned the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. None of this is true.
The President and the Apprentice reveals a different Eisenhower, and a different Nixon. Ike trusted and relied on Nixon, sending him on many sensitive overseas missions. Eisenhower, not Truman, desegregated the military. Eisenhower and Nixon, not Lyndon Johnson, pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through the Senate. Eisenhower was determined to bring down McCarthy and did so. Nixon never, contrary to recent accounts, saw a psychotherapist, but while Ike was recovering from his heart attack in 1955, Nixon was overworked, overanxious, overmedicated, and at the limits of his ability to function.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This gargantuan tome from Gellman (The Contender) is an avowed revisionist history of its subject, a brief for the Eisenhower-Nixon defense that takes on the many historians who rate the two men poorly. Striking at the "lingering mythology" and "unsubstantiated argument" that Ike and Nixon didn't get along, that the general ignored his vice president, and that Nixon secretly saw a psychotherapist, Gellman does his best to rehabilitate Nixon and along the way further Ike's rise in presidential rankings. He succeeds surprisingly well. While his take on the two men sometimes approaches a whitewash, the two presidents' detractors will have a tough challenge responding to Gellman's spirited book. Part of its strength lies in the author's efforts to make Eisenhower more liberal and engaged than he's often depicted to be. For instance, Gellman credits Ike with ending Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist reign of terror and Ike, not Truman, with desegregating the military. But for all the book's revisionist energy, it lacks art. Wearying, unnuanced declarative sentences march across the page without interruption or much variety, and too many details obscure Gellman's arguments. Nevertheless, this is an important work, and one sure to cause controversy.
