Eisenhower : turning the world toward peace /

During the centennial of Dwight Eisenhower's birth, Harold Stassen, former Minnesota governor and special assistant to President Eisenhower, has published the memoirs of his service to that president. Based on personal files, recollections, and newly declassified Eisenhower Library documents, Stassen discusses the Eisenhower presidency, beginning with Stassen's role in convincing Eisenhower to run. Most of the book focuses on foreign policy and Stassen's differences with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. In his revision of the Eisenhower presidency, Stassen goes beyond earlier, more balanced reassessments, such as Robert Divine's Eisenhower and the Cold War (CH, Jun'81), Fred Greenstein's The Hidden-hand Presidency (CH, Mar'83), and Stephen Ambrose's Eisenhower (v.2, CH, Feb'85), and refers to Eisenhower as the most brilliant leader for world peace in this century and as the person who started the movement away from the Cold War by "reaching out" to the Russians. Although at times overburdened with long documentary quotations and, at one point, a two-page chronology of the Korean War and firing of General Douglas MacArthur (which Stassen called "arbitrary, vindictive, humiliating"), the book provides new insights into the Eisenhower presidency, especially on the formulation of the "open skies" proposal at the 1955 Geneva Conference. Public and undergraduate libraries. -E.T. Smith, Barry University