Eisenhower 1956

This account by David Nichols of Eisenhower's handling of the Suez crisis in 1956 too often reads like a timeline on steroids, with lists of attendees at innumerable meetings. But the effort to get through that underbrush is worth it for Nichols's detailed telling of how the president handled health crises (heart attack, abdominal surgery), a re-election campaign, the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Eisenhower emerges as a principled but pragmatic leader. The least interventionist president of modern times, he went to the United Nations to try to secure a cease-fire in the Suez war, and when that effort was thwarted in the Security Council by a veto of the aggressor nations (and World War II allies), Ike went to the General Assembly instead. It is almost quaint to read about a president who puts peace above all, but as Nichols points out there was a nuclear anvil hanging over the nation's head, and Ike thought the only way to win World War III was to avoid it. It is saddening to read an account of such an admirable leader in the midst of such a disheartening presidential campaign 60 years later.