Actually Eisenhower was known as a do nothing president.
Spent inordinate amount of time on the golf course and let America recover from the war with little or no interference from the government.
Which was a good thing! But them's the facts.
Those are the best kind of Presidents.
I was thinking more about what Ike did before he became president...perhaps the memory of the voters were still focused on his presidency.
Turns out that he cultivated that impression very assiduously. More recent scholarship has shown that Ike was in fact very engaged, especially (and naturally) on the foreign policy side of things. And very wily, too.
He certainly wasn't a "do nothing" general. The contest was not "the greatest president" it was the "greatest american."
I don't know much about Eisenhower, but I was always bothered by the speech he gave at the end of his presidency, to beward the "military industrial complex".
On one hand, he would know. On the other, well, we all know who freaks over that.
By the way , I voted totally for Washington.
Eisenhower was also a real UN man...although he'd hopefully renounce the UN of today.
"He was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and I mean that in the best sense of those words."
-Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises
Ike said he would go to Korea and see for himself what was happening. He flew over the front in a light plane, took note of the new helicopter evac of the wounded and observed, "Except for sporadic artillery fire and sniping there was little action at the moment, but in view of the strength of the positions the enemy had developed, it was obvious that any frontal assault would present great difficulties."
One look had decided what was arguably the greatest military planner of the 20th century to fold the war.
When the Lebanese government was collapsing and Ike sent in the Marines, he had them occupy only Beirut and the adjacent airport. He said, "If the Lebanese army were unable to subdue the rebels when we had secured their capital and protected their government, I felt, we were backing up a government with so little popular support that we probably shouldn't be there."
Ike warned the French not to garrison 10,000 troops at Dien Bien Phu: The French know military history," I said. "They are smart enough to know the outcome of becoming firmly emplaced and then besieged in an exposed position with poor means of supply and reinforcements."
I guess not, eh?
When the U2 crashed and F.G. Powers and the plane survived, against all expectations and design Ike at first stuck with the pre-arranged "cover story, but when Khrushchev produced the proof (Powers and the plane), Ike ordered a full confession, explaining "In the diplomatic field it was routine practice to deny responsibility for an embarrassing occurrence when there is even a one percent chance of being believed, but when the world can entertain not the slightest doubt of the facts, there is no point in trying to evade the issue."
Both Nixon and the StainMaster could have taken that advise to heart.
As Murray Kempton, the late Liberaltarian said after meeting Eisenhower, "I was too dumb to understand him then. It would take ten years before I looked at his picture and realized that the smile was always a grin."