Eisenhower and the American Crusades

Herbert S. Parmet’s Eisenhower and the American Crusades is a major assessment of the American presidency during the critical period of America at mid-century. The book follows the career of General Dwight Eisenhower from 1952 when he decided to leave his NATO command to campaign for the presidency, to his retirement at Gettysburg nearly nine years later.. His entry into politics was well-timed. A mood of conservatism was sweeping the country; surveys indicated that the majority of Americans felt it was time for a change from two decades of executive control by those who had permitted events to get out of hand. Parmet offers a convincing refutation of the idea of the Eisenhower years as being placid or boring. No years that contained McCarthy and McCarthyism, a war in Korea, constant fears of nuclear annihilation, and spreading racial violence, could be so described. For Parmet, Eisenhower was a stabilising force in a time of conflict. He may not have been a political genius, but he knew perhaps better than anyone else around him exactly what the people wanted and how they wanted it.