“He boasted that he was a Modern Republican (Progressive is the term today).”
Good luck finding any source that will back you in labeling Eisenhower a ‘Progressive’. I remember the Progressive wing of the GOP of that era, the Rockefeller Republicans of the Northeast, and Eisenhower was hardly one of them
Eisenhower was perhaps the last of the small government Republicans. He was for a balanced budget and suspicious of big government working in tandem with big business, whether it be the ‘military-industrial complex’ or the ‘scientific technological elite’ that he mentioned in the same speech.
And it wasn’t just talk. Unlike Nixon and most every Republican President since, Eisenhower didn’t leave behind a host of new domestic programs that made the government bigger and more intrusive. His sole big spending program was the Interstate Highway System, something he saw as a military necessity from the time he participated in the first motorized cross-country military expedition in 1919.
Actually the Progressive movement was contemporaneous with TR in the early 1900’s, Correct?
And thank you for the information on Eisenhower. My “Perhaps,” was based upon his reputation in some very Conservative circles of being more a politician than a Statesman, as well as my reading of his leadership at SHAEF.