Against the black background of the atomic bomb, the United States does not wish merely to present strength, but also the desire and the hope for peace. The coming months will be fraught with the fateful decisions, and this assembly, in the capitals and quarters of the world, from the hearts of men everywhere, be they governed or governors, may they be the decisions which will lead this world out of fear and into peace. To the making of these fateful decisions, the United States pledges before you, and therefore before the world. Its determination to help solve the atomic dilemma, to devote its entire heart and mind to find a way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life. Host Richard Striner, that is Dwight Eisenhower and 81950 three speech at the u. N. About an initiative that dominated much of his presidency, and that is the future of nuclear weapons. You have a new book about him called ike in love and war. There are many books about Dwight Eisenhower. What is different about yours . Guest i wanted to do several things. I wanted to write a comprehensive story of his life, but i wanted to explain a lot of the remarkable behindthescenes achievements during his presidency, many of which have only emerged over the past several decades, because he kept them carefully hidden. As i got into the book more anymore, i found myself captivated by the story of his emotional development. I learned a lot about that as i went along, and as i went along i found that my book was telling among other things a tale of tragic love. Host the diaries of Dwight Eisenhower were a major source with you. What kind of diarist was he and was he a reliable conservator of his thinking or was he preserving history . Guest that is a very interesting question. Eisenhower had a very strategic mind. He was extremely calculating. He spoke and wrote for effect, and his diary in particular is mysterious to me, because there were some occasions when i thought he was writing what mightve been bogus entries in the diary for the purpose of creating a misleading impression in the minds of those who read it. I cannot prove it, but circumstantial evidence leads me to suspect it. Host at the end of the book, i will jump to your conclusions. This is what you wrote. He was a strange man, so likable in many respects but so selfish and distant, a man of many moves. The power of analysis was formidable. The emotions that drew him were mysterious. One of the themes throughout your book is his temper, and it is so in contrast to what he presented as himself as a politician and the steadfastness he had during the war. Talk about his temper and how it affected him and the way he worked. Guest one of the greatest emotional challenges of his life. He did have a terrible temper. He admitted it both in private and in public. Most of all in a series of remarkable interviews in his presidency with cbs anchorman walter cronkite, he explained that in the course of his presidency he would go through a calculated ritual. He would invite white house aides into the oval office, and they knew that there duty was to stand while he cursed a blue streak and they would leave and he would think them ever thank them later. He inherited this terrible temper most likely from his father david. Ikes remarkable mother taught him early on to practice the fine art of emotional selfcontrol, and he would struggle all his life to do that. Host two phrases always associated with eisenhowers presidency. One is the hidden hand, and the other is middleweight politics. Middle way politics. Guest the hidden hand was a term coined in a book published in 1982, the hidden hand presidency. The book was a revelation to a great many people, two historical scholars to historical scholars, a lot of people including Adlai Stevenson liberals who had perceived ike as an out of touch duffer long past his prime. Eisenhower was creating that impression deliberately to create Maneuvering Room for himself. He was willing at times to play the fool in order to create Maneuvering Room. That is that extraordinary thing for any politician to do. The only thing close to it that i have seen in my study of the presidency was the way that lincoln interacted with the abolitionists during the civil war. In private he actually encouraged some of them to trash my own reputation. He said i could use that come the pressure that will create. Can you imagine any politician encouraging his allies to diminish his own reputation for tactical effect . The book laid out a compelling case for eisenhower the strategic maneuverer and the deceptive message, and it prompted a great deal of further scholarship, particularly by a historian David Nichols who explored the war behind joe mccarthy, on behalf of civil rights. Very interesting story. As for the middle way, i have been interested in the tradition of centrism in american politics for a long time. In 2010 i wrote a book about it called lincolns way. My own political and ideological tendencies tend in that direction. I am not advocating wishywashy moderation. I admire Decisive Action when needed. It is just that i am an independent thinker, and eisenhower was too. I find myself often repelled by what seems to me the elements of folly that can crop up on the left or the right. I reserve to myself the right to steer my own course and to borrow whatever elements of wisdom make emanate from the left or the right, and eisenhowers presidency, eisenhower became an exemplar. One of the things i seek to do in this book is to explore his ideological development, because his thinking traversed a rather twisty course. He veered back and forth, and one of the most interesting things of all to me was the way his intellectual and ideological Development Related to his underlying emotional development. It is one seamless mental continuing, and i think i have broken new ground in that respect. Host you referenced her career in previous books. How many books this is for you . Guest oh dear. I think over a dozen. Some in my judgment more significant than others. I think this is probably number 15. I have written on all sorts of things. I chose the profession of history for the potential freedom it could give to study not only different subjects into interdisciplinary work, so i have written about economics, architecture film, president ial history, and ive had a wonderful time doing it. Host you also were involved with the Eisenhower Memorial Commission to develop the memorial a couple of blocks from cspans office here. What did you do for them . That was it extremely interesting tour of duty. As a Smalltown College professor, i needed to supplement my income. Living in annapolis, i was within good striking distance of washington d. C. , and i at the time i should find consulting jobs. I was introduced to a most remarkable men, a air force general with a phd in history, quite remarkable. He was the executive director of the de dwight d. Eisenhower memorial commission. Congress voted in 1999 to build a memorial to ike. It took over 20 years to do for lots of reasons, but in my work with carl for the commission, i learned a tremendous amount about eisenhower that i had not known before, and after a biography of lincoln in 2020, worst of all possible years to publish anything with covid, this was my First Venture in biography. I decided i liked biographical work very much, so it was time to do a book on eisenhower. Host lets jump into his biography. You referenced his mother and father and the influences they had. Received born and raised . Guest he was born in denison, texas, but the town he grew up in was abilene, kansas. Host you talk about his fathers temper, which you may have inherited. His mother remained in influence throughout his life. In what ways . Guest it is a remarkable story. Both of his parents had to belong to a german protestant sect called the river brethren, an offshoot of the mennonites. They were committed pacifists. Both of his parents, david and ida. His father was a sorry role model, he was very hard to love. I just been arian, moody, withdrawn, where as eisenhowers mother was quite the opposite. She was witty, sparkling, good humor. I worshiped her ike worshiped her into his old age. Growing up that way, he did not want to become a mamas boy. He began looking around for father substitutes in abilene and found a whole series. Men who taught him the rugged manly arts, including how to shoot. 20 years before ikes birth, abilene had been the epicenter of the wild west. It was a violent and dangerous town, and only the action of lawmen made it as a place for decent people to live. One of ikes mentors was a guy that claimed to be a deputy to wilde hill wilcock. He committed himself to learn and master the fighting arts. He had been interested in ancient military history as a kid, and off he goes to west point. How does he reconcile his life as a soldier, a warrior with the ideals of the mother whom he revered . In my opinion, the template formed in his mind very early. He compromised by mastering the fighting arts but then using them to deliver his mothers fondest wish, peace as the tough lawmen had brought safety and peace to abilene, so here you have the beginning of this story of a career soldier Vice President soldier who as u. S. President gave the United States eight years of uninterrupted abuse. You can find the glimmering seven answer in his childhood. Host also a tragic love story. There were three women involved in this aspect of his life, and i want to spend a minute on each one of them. We could spend an entire program just talking about this. But as a capsule of how these women impacted him, and the obvious one is maime. Gladys harding, mimi dowd, and cates others be kate sotherby. How they affected his life . Guest i did not know about gladys until in the course of preparing my own biography i read all of the other eyes biographies i could get my hands on, and it was a military historian who wrote a semiautobiographical work, because it only covered ikes career through the end of world war ii, but his coverage of ikes childhood and early adulthood were quite remarkable, and he told the story of gladys. As soon as i read it, i thought to myself this is really important, because she was his first love. He had an ardent crush on her in high school, the feelings were reciprocal. When he came back from west point in the summer of 1915, they had a passionate courtship. He proposed to her. She said she loved him but waited before committing himself to very hurt she was a serious musician, and she was not sure that she could live the life of an army wife, and she needed to take her time sorting out her feelings. She left on a concert tour. Eisenhower got his first orders, he was sent to Fort Sam Houston in san antonio, texas, and they were separated and he was absolutely an emotional agony. He loved this woman, and she was not omitting herself, and in san antonio he met this cute, effervescent woman and one thing led to another. They get engaged on valentines day in 1916. How could i have known that Gladys Harding made the decision to give it all up for them . When she heard the decision that he was engaged to someone else, she was so heartbroken that her decisionmaking process went off the tracks, and she said yes to a proposal that she had received earlier from a man that she did not really love. Her marriage was loveless. The story of the documentation behind this, the love letters, it is an interesting story, but ive probably talked too long about this already, but it is a key item, because maime dowd could have been something of an emotional consolation prize. I put it this way in the book. It appears he settled for a pleasant instead of a passionate relationship, because he dated her, they had fun. The relationship worked on its own turns terms and he had to get on with gladys. He paid a price for this. Anyway, the marriage succeeded quite well at first on its own terms, but then there were troubles. First of all and most tragically in 1920 when their first child, a cute little boy, whom maime nicknamed ikey. The little boy died of scarlet fever, and both were devastated. Sometimes shared grief can bring men and women closer together. According to defendants, that is not what happened. They retreated into private worlds of sorrow, and things were never quite the same. Ike was signed to the panama canal. Maime came with them, and the conditions were horrendous. The quarters they lived in, and infested, rickety house. Ike had learned to rough it and enjoy that sort of thing for the manly ruggedness of it. Maime was in purgatory, and she began to consider divorce. They patched things up in washington d. C. Later in paris, the amended things, and had a pleasant social life. In the 1930s, ike was sent to the philippines, and maime refused to come along. This time ike was the one to consider divorce. His marriage to maime was a relationship in which they bore deep grudges. In world war ii he meets this former fashion model, a volunteer driver in the british motor transport corps named kate sothersby. Four years there was gossip about whether Dwight Eisenhower and kate had an affair. In my mind there is no question whatsoever that they did, but where is the controversy has been the sensationalistic controversy over extramarital sex, in my opinion the story was far more transcendent because i believe kate was the love of Dwight Eisenhowers life and vice versa. He had the kind of Emotional Experience he had with gladys. Now he has a second chance, you see. And he gave her up in 1945. Why . I engage in some speculation about that too. I am not sure this was a conscious decision on his part, but he was the former war hero in america from world war ii. He had proven his skill as a warrior, that was only the first half of the Lifelong Mission that it dawned upon him in childhood. He had to prove he could use the fighting arts to keep the peace. How could he do that if he got a divorce from maime i just took life easy with kay sothersby resting on his laurels . Divorce was fatal to president ial aspirations. He had to make this terrible all or nothing choice, and the evidence from the years in between his wartime and president ial careers is so clear, the poor man was absolutely miserable. He was angry, frustrated, fit to be tied. That is the story, he made an excruciating sacrifice, and it was playing out way down deep throughout his president ial years. It is an extraordinary story. Host we have to move on to the most important chapter of his early life, his graduation from west point and entry into the military. I cannot spend a lot of time with these interesting stories, but i was fascinated to find out from your writing that he was a nonconformist at west point and frequently find himself in trouble there . It does not square with the disciplined general and president that we solve it around, so what was that all about . Guest it was all about lots of things. He was an independent thinker, a nonconformist. He was mischievous, and he was rebellious. It was a rebellion against the lofty standards of his mother, rebellion against the lackluster teaching at west point, which bored him stiff, but he had an innate rebellious trait. It was part of his emotional nature, like his anger, but that is what it was all about, and he was almost constantly in trouble at west point. It is a fascinating and funny story. Host he just missed combat in world war i. How did this affect them . Him . Guest he was furious. He wanted very much to get into action. He was denied the opportunity, and he swore at the end of the war that he would in his own words cut a swath from then on to make up for this. It was an understandable feeling in a trained career soldier. You want to take the leadership skills you have been taught and applied those leadership skills in the nation of your profession. It is not necessarily warmongering, though some generals like George Patton did become something along the line of warmongers. Not in the case of ike. He had a Lifelong Mission to keep the peace, but he needed to use those fighting arts. Something of a contradiction, perhaps, but not really. Host yours is a story of important people, especially in the military early on and later in politics who saw something in Dwight Eisenhower and became mentors to propel him along in his success. Someone by the name of Brigadier General foxconn you said changed ikes life. Guest he was a brilliant man. A historical scholar as well as a career soldier, and he became a mentor for ike during the panama canal episode. He gave ike postgraduate instruction consisting of all of the things about the strategy of warfare that should have been taught at west point but were not. He and ike had a wonderful mentorpupil relationship, and he saw in ike potential for high command. A number of people in the 1920s were sought that another world war was likely, and connor appointed himself as something of a talent scout for the next work he knew was coming. She wanted to propel ice an hour into the upper echelons of the military, and he did just that. Host one of person who impacted him another person who impacted and was general Douglas Macarthur, appointed army chief of staffing 1930, and you said about the relationship as someone who worked for him, he was a boss so capricious that ike was led to the brink of emotional and physical breakdown. How did that eisenhower and macarthur relationship work both then and later on . Guest at first when macarthur became chief of staff and he selected eisenhower to become his chief of staff officer, ike was dazzled to macarthurs grandiosity, is procedure. He was a hero in combat in world war i. He was wealthy, clinically wellconnected, and he had this charisma that he used one people were susceptible to it to dazzle people, and eisenhower was dazzled at first, but before very long the insufferable side of Douglas Macarthur took over. He was a fatuous egotist. His personality became more histrionic, or ludicrous, and when eisenhower served under him in the philippines, macarthur, the sheer nonsense that macarthur generated, his avoidance and denial of the military duties he had been given, in eisenhowers eyes he was a pitiful frog, a phony, contemptible, but he was a tyrannical boss. By 1938, eisenhower knew he had to get himself out of there. She could not work for this man any longer, so through networking he arranges that. Macarthur became another american war hero during world war ii. Whether she deserved to be regarded as a hero is arguable from the standpoint of military history, but he continued to have this prestige, this glamour, and he had president ial aspirations. After world war ii, the dynamics between ike and macarthur continued to play out in the republican. During the korean war, macarthur was given command by president harry truman, and eventually truman fired macarthur for insubordination. Macarthur wanted to escalate the korean war into a fullfledged war with Mainland China using nuclear weapons, and eisenhower inherited the situation but he was elected in 1952. He had to find a solution to it. He forced an pharmacist and brought an end to the unwinnable war and earned macarthurs undying contempt. Host the third influencer was the Successor Army chief of, george b marshall. You write that they became an Important Team in the coming war. Guest yes, marshall was a brilliant officer, a truly heroic individual. He was the opposite of macarthur , the egomaniac. George marshall was a man of supreme self abdication, a man of conscience, a man of duty. He would also become under harry truman the secretary of state, who was to give the world the marshall plan. Marshall like ike wanted to lead troops in combat during world war ii, and he was poised to do so many ways. When Operation Overlord were shaping up, the Division Campaign that would culminate in dd, many people presumed George Marshall would be in command. Franklin roosevelt offered marshall a choice. You can have the command of overlord if you want to or you can continue to and marshall said, mr. President , i will do whatever you wish. Why fdr chose eisenhower is an interesting question. I am not alone in this, but i think it is because fdr, a machiavelli and politician could see that similar political gift in eisenhower. With George Marshall, what you saw was what you got. With eisenhower, you had the shrewd ability to maneuver. Fdr needed that in world war ii to maintain unity in the coalition. Susan it seemed like the ability to handle the politics of the coalition trumped the fact that he had never seen combat at this point. And he was handed this most important operation. Richard that is absolutely right. He had to begin learning on the job and at first his lack of combat experience was a very serious impediment, but he learned and he learned fast. By the time fdr selected him as commander for overlord, he had surpassed marshall in direct combat experience. He by then eisenhower had commanded three landings, the torch landings, in sicily, in africa, and in the Italian Campaign culminating in the battle of salerno. Ike had tremendous experience within one year as a combat commander. Susan and he found himself hammering out war strategy with George Marshall, Frank Kendall franklin roosevelt, and churchill. What was his actual working relationship like with fdr and churchill, and the army is a small place full of human beings. How were others reacting to the media erotic of the meteoric rise of eisenhower . Richard eisenhower deftly managed the political and personal interactions with franklin roosevelt. He learned a lot from fdr. Likewise, from his relationship with churchill. One interesting story here is the evolving strategic judgment of fdr in deciding the priorities for military campaigns and eisenhower at first, like marshall, found himself on the other side in policy disputes with churchill and the british and with fdr. Nigel has recently argued fdrs military judgment as a war leader was better than almost other participants and i agree, fdr was a magnificent wartime leader. Anyway, eisenhower had to cultivate churchill, get along with him, and rosen felt roosevelt was a keen observer of how well eisenhower was managing that. But again, churchill was averse. He became increasingly averse to the cross channel invasion because he and other british leaders were increasingly nervous about the prospect of failure. Fdr and eisenhower were committed to going ahead. As to other reactions to the meteoric rise of eight within the army high command, his own friend George Patton began to be resentful and jealous. He concluded eisenhower really did not deserve the brakes he had been getting and that patton could do a better job. Both men had presumed in the next war that Eisen Eisenhower would be serving under patton. George marshall i think was jealous of ache after ike got the opportunity to use the Army Marshall had built in the crusade in europe against hitler. There were tensions between marshall and ike. There was a master of prestons master apprentice relationship between them. Susan let me take a minute here and tell people where we are. We are talking with and he has a new book called ike in love and war but before we get to that, we want to watch a one minute 32nd reading of the order of the day from the Eisenhower Library as dday began and after we listen, i want you to spend a moment talking about his particular leadership skills that made this day a success. Soldiers, sailors, airmen on that allied expeditionary force, you are about to embark on the great crusade. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the german war machine, the elimination of nazi tyranny, and security for us in the free world. Susan his leadership skills. What made it a success . Richard in assuming command of Operation Overlord, he was taking responsibility for an operation that might very well have failed. The cross channel assault upon Hitler Atlantic was a formidable challenge that could have easily gone wrong. There were so many factors that could have spun events out of control, not least of all the weather. He had to make a do or die decision in the midst of a channel storm in the few days leading up to dday. He had to decide whether or not to believe that meteorological predictions and the skeptics were predicting absolute disaster for the dday armada if his judgment pro proved to be wrong. He decided to take the chance to go ahead and he composed one of the most fascinating documents of his public life, second only to his warning about the militaryindustrial complex later. June 5, 1944, he composed a failure message to be broadcast to the American People if the dday landing was defeated and he took all the responsibility himself. That is a testament to character and honor of do dwight d. Eisenhower and the leadership skill under pressure. Down the road, he was in Emotional Turmoil over this but he had had that his whole life. One this is one demonstration of leadership skill he showed in the dday campaign. Susan case numbers be, summers be, you said she helped sustain him during these years with stress. Heres a clip from 1974 so we can see her later in life talking about dwight d. Eisenhower. General eisenhower had a wonderful knack of getting along with people of all different nationalities. He did not think of himself as an american or british or french or polish or anything, he just thought what was best for the whole allied effort. Susan in your words, what role did she play with eisenhower during these three years . Richard there is no question about the fact that they became deeply in love with each other and ike was gradually trying to come to grips with the implications of this for his marriage, for the rest of his life. In her old age, Kay Summersby in the months before she died put together a book called past forgetting my love affair with dwight d. Eisenhower in which she produced a teller tell all memoir that became the subject of immediate controversy and the been controversy ever since. I find the book credible. I am not alone in this. For a number of reasons. Which my book explains. But she wrote the book, she decided to write the book upon publication of another book, a book about harry truman, a socalled oral history of german by a writer who interviewed history of harry truman by a writer who interviewed. This book came out in 1973 after trumans death. And in that book, the author, miller claims that truman claimed that just after germany surrendered, eisenhower sent his chief of staff a letter saying he wanted to return to the United States, be relieved of command, get a divorce so he could marry Kay Summersby and according to miller and truman, George Marshall sent eisenhower a scathing reply telling him, the letter almost scorched with fiery indignation, if you do that, i will hound you out of the army, i will make the rest of your life a living hell, do not you dare do anything like that. And then truman allegedly said the last thing i did as president , i got those letters from eisenhowers file in the pentagon and destroyed them. So when the book was published, Kay Summersby was stunned, she had not known that ike had even considered spending the rest of his life with her and so then she decided, i am going public, ike was the love of my life and i dont have dont have much longer to go and so i have to tell this story. Show then she wrote her book past forgetting. So historians and others, regarding the veracity of plain speaking and past forgetting has rolled down the decades, i have come to the conclusion that both accounts are probably quite true, that there were a number of confirmations, Major General harry long, trumans military aide, said in an interview in the 1970s that the exchange of letters was factual, i saw them, i brought them to truman in the oval office. And then in 1996 at the truman library, a man who was an aide to truman was interviewed by a historian and was asked about the eisenhower marshall letters and he said he saw them. As soon as marshall received the letter, he called me and he said, you make me an appointment with president truman immediately and i want to sit in i want you to sit in as a witness. Marshall said essentially what harry truman supposedly said. I believe it all happens, what happened to the letters, god only knows. Allegedly truman sent them off to marshall saying these belong in private files, not in pentagon files where they can be used in dirty politics. If marshall sent them, likely he destroyed them, or not. But might surface decades later. It is an interesting story. Now i could be wrong, but i dont think so. I am not saying i can prove it, i just think it because of the sheer weight of evidence. The whole thing makes perfect sense from the standpoint of ikes emotional development, and the light it shed upon the very strange behavior of eisenhower between the war and his presidency, if we presume she was telling the truth, his behavior makes a lot more sense, at least that is what i think. Susan this brings us, unfortunately we have 10 minutes to talk about a very important presidency. First, after the war ended, harry truman on the one side and tom do we on the other were both romancing eisenhower to get into politics. How ultimately did he decide to go with a republican . Richard that is an interesting question. In my opinion, he had a foot in both camps in terms of partisan loyalties and ideological proclivities. He was a democrat, eisenhower, in high school. He had certain conservative notions that needed to be developed and explored. On the other hand, he had the potential to be quite liberal. He really was instinctively a centrist and that played out through the policy he developed as president but finally what it took was the actions of others. This is a very interesting story. William robinson, thomas dewey, people were the kingmakers, the people who kept pushing ike in 1951. He was fighting. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming because once he decided to commit and seek the presidency, he found out in real life what he would probably known, he was a natural politician on board to play the political game. Fdr saw this. His presidency is the next topic we will talk about. Susan yes. But with short time. There is so much. Race relations, the interstate highway. I want to spend a few moments on the issue that framed his presidency, cold war relations with russia and americans legacy. What legacy did he leave with us . Richard nuclear deterrence. Frightening. But the alternative was the Nuclear Secret could not be on invented. The technology was out there and the technology and the weapons were out there, so what to do about it . She crafted a strategic architecture of deterrence. One of the most interesting books about like in recent years is called ikes bluff, which is where he delved into evidence showing that eisenhower played a deliberate game of bluff to make people wonder whether he really was prepared to push the nuclear button. In thomass opinion, it was all the loss of a poker player and i am convinced that is all the bluff of a poker player and im convinced that that is quite right. He wanted to know what the exact capabilities of the soviets were. Susan one flaw of his leadership style was his aversion to fire people who did not serve him well. Again, this can be a very complex story, but where do you think that came from and how did it impact the success of his presidency . Richard its hard to say where it came from. I am speaking principally of the dulles brothers, many believe allen dulles was an incompetent and dangerous person to put in charge of national security. I had his strategic reasons for keeping both dulles brothers had to be managed at at their worst they could be quite dangerous, quite reckless, John Foster Dulles showed that in the suez crisis in 1956. By then i think he should have been dismissed. His brother should have been dismissed long before. White why was i so averse to firing anyone . I dont know, but i think the psychology may be connected, however farfetched this might sound, to his emotional relationship with others. The loyalty, to his marriage. The pain of terminating the relationship with Kay Summersby. I am just guessing. But it was a weakness, certainly. He should have shuffled the deck and got rid of certain people who were not serving him well. Susan another one of those people he seemed like he wanted to fire was Richard Nixon in the second campaign. How did he handle that . Richard he handled it through avoidance. That is a very strange story. Nixon was foisted onto eisenhower in the 1950 two campaign for political reasons in the republican party. Eisenhower thought about dumping nixon in 1956 but he chose to engage in avoidance and wishful thinking. Yes, i think it would have been perfectly simple to tell nixon, love, you are a great guy, but politics being what it is, i need someone who has politics that are slightly different, no hard feelings. He could have easily done it. He didnt. He should have. Susan we have five minutes left. Eisenhower has come in fifth place in leadership rankings in cspan surveys. You described him as a masterful president. Make the case. Richard for all the reasons we have been discussing. He was an extraordinarily capable leader. He did the American People in a world of good, not least of all in bringing about a well grounded age of good feelings, the nation was in a state of near hysteria in 1952. There was that joe mccarthy phenomenon, it anticipated the donald trump phenomenon, that condition that connection is quite direct. Eisenhower thought deliberately to isolate mccarthy and calm down the nation and bring reconciliation and healing, somewhat like joe biden is trying to do now but the circumstances now are less conducive to success than they were under ike. I generally avoid these superlative rating games, although i am quick to rate Abraham Lincoln number one, in a class by himself. Eisenhower, way up there. Every person and leader is unique, so is ike. But i have developed the highest admiration for him. He was a remarkable leader whose policies, achievements, have a great deal to offer us right now in the way of guidance. Susan as you know, at the age of good feelings that he worked so hard to create for america was shortlived. The middle way has clearly unraveled in this country in politics. What ultimately is his legacy . Richard his legacy was to do his utmost while he lived, when he had the power to do good, to bring to the world the best achievable outcomes in some very dangerous years. Nothing lasts, anything can go bad. In my epilogue, i observe that there is another lesson for ike from like because no matter what we achieve, things will go wrong, and new service of the people will have to arise and meet the challenge and do their best to put white put right what has gone wrong and measure up the achievements of ike should be inspirations in the years to come. That is what i think. Susan Richard Striner and his new book, ike in love and war i want to thank you for spending an hour with us, talking about the life and accomplishments of dwight d. Eisenhower. Richard it has been a pleasure. All q a programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our cspan now app. This week on the cspan network, the house and Senate Return with both changes taking ups federal spending bills to avoid a Government Shutdown deadline of september 30. Monday, we will have live coverage of 9 11 come murmuration ceremonies from 9 11 Memorial Plaza in new york city on the pentagon. Later, President Biden will deliver remarks on 9 11 from alaska. Tuesday, gary gensler testifies before the Senate BankingCommittee Oversight hearing. Thursday, the rules and Bylaws Committee will meet to consider state plans for 2024 primaries, caucuses, and delegate selection. Friday and saturday, coverage of the prey, vote, stand summit in washington, d. C. 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On cspan on monday, the museum will observe the anniversary of the attacks with a commemoration ceremony. All events are available on cspan now or on cspan. Org. British Prime Minister fielded questions from the house of commons during the weekly question time session. They addressed funding for rebuilding public schools, illegal immigration, solar energy infrastructure, the economy, and inflation, and animalel