I can recall people griping about Reagan, Carter, Clinton (of course), Bush II (of course), Bush I...hell even FDR, Truman, Lincoln and Kennedy.

But I've never heard anyone bitch about Ike. Why is that?

If it's all about military experience and glory, maybe we should elect Stormin' Norman Scwartzkopf and everyone will be happy...

I think that's because nobody HATED Eisenhower. They may have voted against him but they didn't hate him.

Then there was that nifty warning about the military-industrial complex...

ike only made one big mistake in his career and i have posted about it. so i have bitched about ike; of course i was a stevenson supporter as a child.

the mistake.

he used the cia to over throw the first iranian, persian democratic government. he installed the shah. this had tragic consequences for the future of middle eastern politics and foreign affairs.

dwight david eisenhower screwed the pooch and mucked it up first rate. we now live with the consequences of his stupidity.

Ike was a liberal Republican domestically.

Eisenhower took the Roosevelt/Truman big government vision and turned it into a workable model that created the most successful superpower the world has seen.

Eisenhower was moderate to liberal in his political views but he had the menace of the Soviet Union and Red China to use to keep both the conservative and liberal factions of the two parties on control.

He instituted the federal highway system, expanded the GI Bill Benefits and levied the highest tax rate on the wealthiest tax bracket ever. He started the modern civil rights movement.

This resulted in the largest middle class in the history of the United States and the most phenomenal economic growth recorded in the United States.

I think Liberals don't talk much about Eisenhower because they assume that because he was a Republican, he must have been a conservative, and conservatives would really rather forget the lessons we learned about big government in the 50s.

All those buttons said so.

I like Ike...

I must have been a mere infant when he was President (hahaha) but even then he made me happy and safe.

(I think Roosevelt was President when I was born but I do remember Ike's picture in my classroom at school)

Ike left office in 1961, just a tad too far back for many to recall.

And his accomplishments were maintaining stability, peace and prosperity. Not making a legacy.

esox:

Ike left office in 1961, just a tad too far back for many to recall.

And his accomplishments were maintaining stability, peace and prosperity. Not making a legacy.

Perhaps...

But Kruschev and Francis Gary Powers might have an argument about that peace thing.

Oops.

I was born just before he became President. Just before. Barely.

But I do remember my parents talking about him when I was very little.

They were stout Democrats who believed in the New Deal. You would have thought having a Republican in office would have been a big deal to them, especially since they supported Adali Stevenson (we were from Illinois).

Paul Krugman says that when you have the vast majority of people in the middle class with a small poor class and a small rich class, that there is little in the way of divisive politics. I guess you have less to lose or less to gain from one party or the other controlling the government when everyone is pretty much equal.

It certainly seemed to be that way in the fifties. The only real mar on that period was the racism that still existed in most of America, something Ike pushed hard against, since he felt an obligation to the Black men and women that served under him in World War II. I understand that Ike was even in favor of a single payer universal health care system and it would have gone in place had it not been for the objection to blacks sharing hospital rooms with whites.

Shame. If the SPUHC had been as successful as the highway system, we would be a lot better off today.

The high rate of taxation for the top ten percent of the wealthy had destroyed the gilded age and the fifties represented the largest middle class population America had ever seen.

When you have a large middle class, there is not much reason to be politically divisive. Without a lot of hatred in politics, it was easy for a Republican president to be left of center and still be liked by everyone.

Besides, who could argue with those nifty interstate highways? Ike changed America forever.

he authorized the cia overthrow of the first democratic govenment ever in iran-persia. that was the terrible blemish on his record. we live with that horrendous mistake today.

There was some bad business in South America too. And Eastern Asia.

Foreign policy in the cold war was pretty brutal and heartless. There were a lot of things we could have done better, but then it is hard to tell what the results would have been.

We probably would not have had a Cold War at all if we had not dropped the Atomic bomb on Japan. The soviets never forgot that we were the only nation willing to do that.

But if we hadn't done dropped the bomb on Japan, we could have ended up with a Japan that was divided in much the way that Germany was divided after the war and maybe that would have been worse than what we ended up with.

History sucks because now that we can see it, we can't do anything about it.

He managed to keep Curtiss LeMay from blowing up the world, which was a tall order in itself.

Yeah Ike was real desperate for notoriety, as if WW2 didn't give him assurances of his historical self...he had to challenge the USSR.

The only contention about Ike NOT keeping the US peaceful is in your starry eyed brain...Night Star Eighter.