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Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy

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Mr McMahan from Georgia makes an excellent point with which I concur: this book is all about Ike's organization of the National Security Council and its methods of advising him. Reviews of it suggested to me that it might treat the substance of his Cold War decisions in the 1953-54 period. Instead, the book merely recounts them, with no effort to justify the conclusions Ike and his advisors arrived at. If you do not already find their conclusions self-evident (and the development of the Cold War proved some of the key ones wrong), you will be frustrated by this book rather than enlightened. (If you need the chronological summary of the evolution of Ike's Cold War policy, however, you can do worse than to consult this book.)

One note: Bowie and Immerman make a great deal of the Solarium exercise in which selected task forces "gamed" three potential courses of action for US policy in the Cold War. As anyone who has been a military officer would see, Solarium was a classic military planning exercise, right down to the "throw-away COA." Ike was a highly evolved general officer and knew how to use a staff. Possibly related, my principal conclusion from this book is that his overriding objective for every policy decision was to minimize risk.

Bowie and Immerman posit that "credit for shaping ... strategy (of Cold War) belongs to President Dwight D. Eisenhower." By the end of the Truman Administration, the initial confrontational phase of the Cold War was reaching a steady-state. The Truman Administration set up the basic framework for the American side, but due to crises (foreign and domestic) had not had the time to set longer-term goals. Eisenhower, a man used to a more bureaucratic, organized approach, followed Truman and institutionalized much of what the Truman Administration had begun. Bowie and Immerman continually suggest how Eisenhower personally oversaw what (rhetorically) comes across as a kind of revolutionary retooling of America's Cold War response. But their own thorough use of documentation continually shows what took place under Ike was a bureaucratic evolution, one building upon the Truman Administration's somewhat sparse initial outline. The authors' penchant for "Ike cheerleading" (and to a lesser extent, "Truman diminishing")is a continuous distraction, and is a direct outgrowth of the overblown thesis (or maybe its the other way around.) It is unfortunate that Cold War historiography often gets caught up in this sort of "partisan" behavior, particularly concerning Eisenhower. Ike was unjustly considered to be mediocre for so many years that a large number of historians felt it necessary to resurrect his image. The resurrection has succeeded; Ike certainly had a very good grasp on foreign policy issues and deserves to be ranked among the more effective Presidents ever. But there simply isn't the discontinuity between the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations that is suggested here. An example: the authors go to great detail in showing how the Eisenhower Administration reexamined the goals of the Cold War struggle; they are impressed by the thoroughness and awareness of Ike and his people. What is the result? Containment, the same exact guideline devised under Truman and carried forward to the end of the struggle. NSC-68, which did temporarily occupy the Truman Administration, had mostly been abandoned by Truman by the end of his second term, as seen by the downward revisions of projected military budgets. (If Truman actually believed that 1954 would be the "time of maximum danger," would he have been more concerned with budgetary matters than defense?) The authors point out these things, and yet continue to claim extraordinary achievements under Eisenhower. Ike deserves his due as Cold Warrior (mainly for organizing the bureaucracy and pushing foreign aid), but he was not radically different than what came before him. The authors' research suggests this -- its unfortunate that they seemingly didn't realize what their own research suggested.