If you think of our 34th president as little more than the babysitter-in-chief during the prosperous '50s, think again. Dwight Eisenhower was bequeathed an atomic bomb and was the first American president not to use it. He ground down Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism until both became, as he said, “McCarthywasm.” He stimulated the economy to lift it from recession, built an interstate highway system, and, for good measure, turned an $8 billion deficit in 1953 into a $500 million surplus in 1960. (Ike was the last president until Bill Clinton to leave his country in the black.)

The Eisenhower of veteran journalist Jim Newton’s rendering is shrewd, sentimental, and tempestuous. He mourned the death of his first son and doted on his grandchildren but could, one aide recalled, “peel the varnish off a desk” with his temper. Mocked as a blunderbuss, he was in fact a meticulous manager. Admired as a general, he was a cham­pion of peace. In Korea and Vietnam, in Quemoy and Berlin, his generals urged him to wage nuclear war. Time and again, he considered and rejected it. And it was Eisenhower who appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren and who enforced desegregation in the schools.

Rare interviews with John Eisenhower, along with access to newly declassified documents, make for a gripping and revealing narrative.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist who began his career as clerk to James Reston at the New York Times. Since then, he has worked as a reporter, bureau chief and editor of the Los Angeles Times, where he presently is the editor-at-large. He also is an educator and author, whose acclaimed biography of Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice for All, was published in 2006.

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