In discussing Eisenhower’s presidency, Smith abandons his previous detachment and assumes the role of advocate, intruding on his narrative to beat back criticisms. Elsewhere in the book he is measured, but here Smith’s tone turns defensive and lawyerly, as when he writes that “those who would criticize Eisenhower for not moving fast enough on civil rights”—one area where the case for Eisenhower’s wisdom remains weak—“should remember that it was his judicial nominees who made the revolution possible.” Earl Warren, whom Ike named chief justice of the United States to fulfill a campaign pledge, obviously deserves acclaim for conjuring a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education; but to regard the Supreme Court as the driving force in the fight for racial equality slights the workaday heroism of the rank-and-file members of the civil rights movement, to say nothing of men like Thurgood Marshall and A. Philip Randolph who were at work well before Brown.

In these chapters, Eisenhower the political animal gives way to a less complex, almost marmoreal statesman: a man—a type—imbued by the American heartland with a granite integrity, and by his years of service with a soldier’s code of honor. The special pleading leads Smith into untenably broad claims. “Eisenhower gave the nation eight years of peace and prosperity,” he asserts. “No other president in the twentieth century can make that claim.” That is a strange sentence, for several reasons. It suggests that Ike somehow pulled off something that other presidents could not manage; but many presidents of equal or greater achievement did not serve a full eight years (TR, Truman) or did not happen to hold office amid a humming economy or a period of quiet abroad (Wilson, FDR). More important, the claim is not even true: there was a recession in 1953–1954 and another in 1957–1958, which was considered the worst downturn of the postwar era until the 1970s. And militarily, while Ike never initiated full-scale hostilities with another nation, the description of the Cold War, then at its most menacing, as a time of peace induces some cognitive dissonance. (It recalls Margaret Thatcher’s glib remark that the West won the Cold War without a shot being fired—a statement that surely confused the people of Korea, Angola, Nicaragua, and other sites of proxy wars.) Indeed, despite Ike’s realist posture on national security, the United States on his watch interfered in Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, and Vietnam. Eisenhower also approved the invasion of Cuba, as John F. Kennedy rudely learned, though Fidel Castro’s name does not appear in Smith’s book.

None of this is to deny Eisenhower’s genuine achievements. Perhaps the most under-appreciated of them (at least today) was his discomfiture of the America First wing of his party. By defeating Robert Taft, an isolationist stalwart, for the Republican nomination in 1952, Eisenhower brought his party into the modern age. But the battle was not quite over, as he learned when another Ohio senator, John Bricker, mobilized to amend the Constitution to curtail the president’s treaty-making power. The Bricker amendment—a backlash against Roosevelt’s wartime deals with Stalin and the various postwar United Nations treaties—had enormous popular support. After hoping in vain to snuff it out quietly, Eisenhower eventually realized that he had to oppose it publicly, which he did after Lucius Clay, John McCloy, Averell Harriman, and a bipartisan team of worthies went first. It fell to the Senate minority leader Lyndon Johnson to bury the amendment, which he did through his back-pocket legislative magic, pulling it off only after rousting a drunken Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia just in time to break a critical tie vote.

Smith also praises Eisenhower amply, as have previous biographers, for not going after the safety-net programs created by Roosevelt and Truman, as conservatives wanted to do at the time (and many now wish to do again). Ike worked amicably with LBJ and House minority leader Sam Rayburn to preserve and even at times to enlarge the New Deal state—especially once the Republicans lost control of Congress in the 1954 midterm elections and the pair of Texas Democrats became majority leader and speaker. Together they expanded Social Security to cover tens of millions among the self-employed, created (at the president’s instigation) the interstate highway system, and built the St. Lawrence Seaway, opening the American heartland to seafaring commerce. Ike called it Modern Republicanism. Academics called it the liberal consensus.