Dwight 'Ike' Eisenhower - The best biography on America's Second World War President

Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower

Eisenhower: Soldier and President
by Stephen E. Ambrose
Paperback (1991)

Stephen E. Ambrose draws upon extensive sources, an unprecedented degree of scholarship, and numerous interviews with Eisenhower himself to offer the fullest, richest, most objective rendering yet of the soldier who became president. He gives us a masterly account of the European war theater and Eisenhower's magnificent leadership as Allied Supreme Commander. Ambrose's recounting of Eisenhower's presidency, the first of the Cold War, brings to life a man and a country struggling with issues as diverse as civil rights, atomic weapons, communism, and a new global role. Along the way, Ambrose follows the 34th President's relations with the people closest to him, most of all Mamie, his son John, and Kay Summersby, as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Harry Truman, Nixon, Dulles, Khrushchev, Joe McCarthy, and indeed, all the American and world leaders of his time. This superb interpretation of Eisenhower's life confirms Stephen Ambrose's position as one of our finest historians. Eisenhower is one of the greatest leaders of our century. Ambrose really gives you the details without boring, and mundane facts. Feel what is must have been like to plan the D-Day invasion, and then deal with the Cold War. Eisenhower was a masterful leader often practicing Carnegie principles to motivate his people. Charismatic, and brilliant, people instinctively followed him. Ambrose does an awesome job of putting us in Ike’s shoes.

Eisenhower
by Geoffrey Perret
Hardcover (1999)

It's no surprise that the biographer of Douglas MacArthur and Ulysses S. Grant clearly conveys the military talents that enabled Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) to ensure the Allies' victory in World War II, but Geoffrey Perret is equally perceptive when dealing with the personality behind the famously genial grin. Perhaps marked by his father's coldness and grim religious zeal (though his mother was a lively, cheerful woman), Eisenhower never expressed his feelings easily, even to his cherished wife, Mamie. His intelligence and scholarly gifts got the poor boy from Kansas into West Point; his administrative and training abilities made him too valuable at home to be employed for active duty in World War I, much to his chagrin. Professional fulfillment and fame as the general who won WWII couldn't change the self-controlled habits of a military lifetime, and Perret depicts Eisenhower as reluctantly drawn into politics by a sense of duty. Covering his presidency, Perret doesn't let him off the hook about such touchy matters as U.S. involvement in the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's elected government or the biased hearing that lifted physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance. But the author obviously likes Ike, and he helps his readers understand why most Americans in the 1940s and '50s did too. --Wendy Smith

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