Frank Gehry’s proposed design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, set to begin construction this fall on the National Mall, has met with mixed reviews. Critics, including the former president’s grandchildren, feel that Gehry’s concept—a collection of columns, metal tapestries, and, originally, a statue of Ike as a young boy—fails to capture Ike’s importance. Gehry’s recently announced design alterations aren’t likely to mollify the critics, though he has replaced the boy sculpture with one of Ike as an Army cadet. Those looking for a clearer understanding of the 34th president’s significance are better directed to Jean Edward Smith’s massive new biography, Eisenhower in War and Peace. As with the historian’s previous works, including comprehensive examinations of Ulysses S. Grant and Franklin Roosevelt, Smith leaves little on the cutting-room floor. This is Eisenhower in full.
Smith traces Eisenhower’s life from his days as a barefoot Kansas boy—the image from his 1945 homecoming speech in Abilene that inspired Gehry’s original design—to his retirement in Gettysburg, but the book is strongest when illuminating its subject’s often overlooked virtues. Even today, despite more positive recent assessments, Eisenhower’s presidency is often portrayed as a dull interlude between Roosevelt’s New Deal and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In this standard version, the forces of history swirled while Ike played golf and painted landscapes. The reality was quite different. The 1950s were tumultuous nationally and internationally; Eisenhower, a cool and commanding leader and sly politician, proved the right president for the time—as he had been the right supreme allied commander during World War II.
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