Ike's Bluff
President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World
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Evan Thomas's startling account of how the underrated Dwight Eisenhower saved the world from nuclear holocaust.
Upon assuming the presidency in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower set about to make good on his campaign promise to end the Korean War. Yet while Eisenhower was quickly viewed by many as a doddering lightweight, behind the bland smile and simple speech was a master tactician. To end the hostilities, Eisenhower would take a colossal risk by bluffing that he might use nuclear weapons against the Communist Chinese, while at the same time restraining his generals and advisors who favored the strikes. Ike's gamble was of such magnitude that there could be but two outcomes: thousands of lives saved, or millions of lives lost.
A tense, vivid and revisionist account of a president who was then, and still is today, underestimated, Ike's Bluff is history at its most provocative and thrilling.
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Often derided as an inattentive national grandfather, Eisenhower emerges as a subtle, sharp-witted master statesman in this probing study of his foreign and security policies. Historian Thomas (The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898) paints a colorful, richly detailed portrait of a man whose habit of hiding his cutting intellect, volcanic temper, and poker-player's instincts behind public grins and vague pronouncements amounted to a profound political strategy. Eisenhower's low-key nuclear brinkmanship anchors the book. Thomas argues that Ike's deliberately ambiguous statements about using nuclear weapons caused the Soviets and Chinese to back off. His duplicity and indirection prevailed in everything from the Suez Crisis to his battle against bloated defense budgets. The result, Thomas contends, was an audacious geopolitical gamble: while dreading the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, Ike embraced a doctrine of massive retaliation that put nuclear war at the heart of American strategy and then adroitly used it to defuse military confrontations. Thomas's appreciation of Eisenhower is sometimes too sunny; he says little about Ike's approval of CIA-sponsored coups in Iran and Guatemala and the troubled interventionist path they charted. Still, his vivid, compelling profile of Eisenhower the man and the shrewd operator should spark reconsideration of his presidency. Photos.
