President Fails as National Shrink: One Lesson of Sputnik?

Abstract

Dwight D. Eisenhower's political legacy remains ambiguous. There is no other way to account for the continuing shifts in historians' judgments about his two terms as president: years when so much in foreign and domestic policy seemed put on hold, and yet years when so much else that characterized the 1960s was presaged or prepared. At the time, Ike was attacked from the left and the right, and since his retirement liberals and conservatives both have serially attacked or applauded this or that element of his legacy, be it his devotion to limited government and balanced budgets or suspicion of the military-industrial complex. But almost all historians have tended to agree that the Eisenhower years were a time when our nation's mood, at least, was placid, optimistic, and self-confident, thanks in part to Ike's avuncular style and surpassing prestige. Now Robert Divine reminds us that during his last three years in the White House Eisenhower presided over a confused and frightened electorate. Shocked by the Soviets' launch of Sputnikthe first artificial earth satellite-on October 4, 1957, Americans turned to Eisenhower for reassurance, as if he were expected to play national shrink. And Eisenhower (according to Divine) let them down. Upon receiving this book for review I decided to punch up the author's name on the Penn library's computer, just to see how large his oeuvre has grown. The answer is sixteen books written or edited by Robert Divine and covering topics ranging from isolationism in the 1930s to the U.S. entry into World War II to the origins of the Cold War, the nuclear test ban treaty, the Sputnik crisis, Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam War, and the Carter and Reagan terms. In every case Divine probes the connections between the foreign and domestic policies of the presidents, and in almost every case his highly readable books are as useful in undergraduate lectures as in advanced seminars. That is because one can count on Divine to be empirical, accurate,