Customer Reviews

Ike: His Life and Times

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Most biographies of Eisenhower tend toward long and excessively complimentary. Brendon does an excellent job of balancing his subject's strengths and weaknesses in a relatively short book with a style which is both easy to read and dramatic. He is an elegant and incisive writer, with an eye for exactly the right anecdote or quote to capture the essence of a famous personality.

Brendon's much shorter biography of Winston Churchill Winston Churchill: A Biography is equally good. Both are recommended.

Brendon's best book is his outstanding history of the 1930's The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. Brendon does for the interwar period what Tony Judt does for the post-war period in his equally outstanding Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.

It was difficult for Piers Brendon to find enough bad things to make Eisenhower look bad but where he didn't have enough he invented it.

For instance, Eisenhower according to Brendon, was supposed to find anyone that was more conservative than Brendon cared for, to be beneath contempt. Interestingly enough Eisenhower was a fairly liberal man for a general and then President, but he also plainly believed that a President is supposed to represent the people of this country and not a faction. When Eisenhower hesitated to speak out against someone like Sen. Joseph McCarthy because the man represented a valid viewpoint in the country, Brendon excoriates him. Let's remember that the Kennedy's supported Sen. McCarthy as well until it was politically troublesome.

The real problem with Eisenhower was that he wanted to please everyone and ended up pleasing very few. On the other hand, he was a good man who was the last President to balance the national budget.

If more Presidents were like Ike, we would be in a great deal better position in the world today. And probably a great deal richer as a country.

Covers IKE's life from his childhood through his Presidency