EISENHOWER.

• Author: Greenstein, Fred I.
• Position: Review

EISENHOWER by Geoffery Perret Random House, $35

DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER is the least well understood of the modern presidents: enormously popular with the American public from his time as supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II through his death in 1969, but long held by analysts of American politics to have been a non-performing president.

A poll of specialists on the presidency conducted the year after Eisenhower stepped down relegated him to the rank of 19th century nonentities like Chester Arthur. Within two decades, however, a transformation of Eisenhower's reputation had begun in the scholarly literature. As the inner records of his presidency came into the public domain, an Eisenhower emerged who was far removed from the image he cast as figurehead president--giving the lie to the 1950s joke that it would be terrible if Eisenhower died and Vice President Nixon became president, but infinitely worse if Sherman Adams (Ike's stony-faced chief of staff) died and Eisenhower became president.

How interesting to discover, in the declassified record, that Eisenhower really was president--a skilled political operator with an interesting and complex personality who engaged in the kinds of politicking that many believed he left to subordinates. But he politicked in a nonstandard manner, with an indirect approach that preserved his popularity by leaving it to his subordinates to carry out his administration's most controversial policies.

With the 2000 campaign underway, the time is right for a biography that yields insight on this insufficiently understood leader, and gives a benchmark against which to measure the candidates--not to mention giving them food for thought about how to approach the presidency.

Unfortunately, Geoffrey Perret's Eisenhower is ill-suited for those purposes. It falls short of the standard set by Stephen Ambrose's two-volume life, published in the early 1980s and updated in 1992. Ambrose's perspective is clearer and more explicit than Perret's, which is incomplete in its coverage and use of sources, choppy in its narrative, and dogmatic in its interpretations.

A related deficiency is Perret's tendency to pronounce on what Eisenhower was thinking when the record is silent on the matter. In one such instance, Perret goes so far as to read his subject's unconscious mind, declaring that Eisenhower regretted that he was constitutionally ineligible for a third term in 1960. This bit of clairvoyance is suspect...