As an acute observer of the era, William Lee Miller, noted in a 1958 essay, Ike was ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. He “combined the perennial grandeur of success in battle with the familiar friendliness of the man next door.” He found a way to reconcile the cross-cutting tendencies of the American character: the “practical, competitive, individualistic, externally-minded, environment-mastering and success-seeking on the one side, and the spiritual, idealistic, friendly, team-working, moralizing, and reform-seeking on the other. Mr. Eisenhower exactly summarized both.”
