Wednesday, October 29, 2008

An Order of Wisdom, Please

As you all know, folks, Eisenhower remains one of my favorite Presidents. In terms of rankings, I'd put him at either 5 or 6 (I flip-flop Eisenhower and Kennedy frequently). So, yes, it pleased me greatly to stumble upon this quote by Fareed Zakaria, a quote that more articulately states this admiration than I could, clearly. "Perhaps the wisest American president during the cold war was Dwight Eisenhower, and his greatest virtues were those of balance, judgement, and restraint. He knew we were in a contest with the Soviet Union, but - at a time when the rest of the country was vastly inflating the threat - he put it in considerable perspective. Eisenhower refused to follow the French into Vietnam or support the British at Suez. He turned down several requests for new weapons systems and missiles, and instead used defense dollars to build the interstate highway system and make other investments in improving America's economic competitiveness. Those are the kinds of challenges that the next president truly needs to address." Senators McCain, Obama, are you listening?...........................................................P.S. Look, I know that Eisenhower wasn't perfect. His strategy to install that miserable Shah in Iran, in particular, was especially wrong-headed (hell, we're still paying for that one). But overall, he showed a hell of a lot more restraint than many of those who preceded/followed. That is FOR sure.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Eisenhower refused to follow the French into Eisenhower.

Eisenhower is the President that put us in Vietnam and let the French off the hook there. You and or Zakaria don't know history.
It was Eisenhower that created the American obligation in Vietnam and carries the full weight of what came later. Other Presidents were obligated to carry out his commitment after he canceled the elections called for in the treaty of the departure of the French and the in 1956 that would have prevented the war and put Diem in power.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

So, Johnson was "obligated" to fabricate the Gulf of Tonkin incident and oversee the deaths of 31,000 Americans who never got the right to be even become "vets"? Interesting.

Anonymous said...

Johnson was "obligated"

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

I think what Zakaria was referring to was that Ike didn't send in troops to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu or replace them with our troops once they, the French, were defeated. Compare this to Truman, who, feeling brow-beaten after the Chinese nationalists were routed by the communists, felt the need to enter the Korean conflict. You see what I'm saying here, the difference in restraint, etc.?

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

Was the decision to halt the elections in 1956 a mistake? Yes. But that's with a half-century of perspective. You have to realize that, at that time, for an American president to let another country fall to communism (and, yes, Ho Chi Minh was a hardcore Bolshevik/thug), he would have had a lot of 'spainin' to do. I can't conceive of another American leader of that time acting differently. As for the "obligation", Kennedy ultimately didn't take it as seriously as Johnson did, obviously. Too bad a bullet had to take his life.

Anonymous said...

The succeeding President does not get the option of turning back the page of the predecessor.
Nice bit of revision you are trying to do but not having those elections was a violation of a treaty, chosen by a President of the United States.
A violation that took the choice away from a sovereign people.
That's not a retrospective view - that's factual events.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

Well, I think that Kennedy, prior to his death, was on the verge of turning back that page on his predecessor (as well as on his own prior actions). It was Johnson who opened an entirely different chapter, a decidedly bloody one in fact. And then, of course, came Nixon. I tend not to believe in unicausality regarding complex historical events. Sorry.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

So Obama won't have the option of turning back the page on Bush/Cheney? I mean, if not, then why the hell are we voting for him? Yeah, I voted for him (no viable third options, unfortunately).