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Eisenhower established a distinctive model of presidential leadership that Americans—now more than ever—ought to study. We might call it the disciplined presidency. Raised in a strict and frugal family and trained for a career of soldiering, Ike believed that discipline was the key to success. Not only did he apply discipline to his own person, maintaining his weight at a trim 175 pounds and quitting a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit overnight, but discipline infused his governing style. Coming into Truman’s disorganized and improvisational White House, Eisenhower imposed order on it,
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But he considered the president a national leader, above the partisan fracas.
“Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.”
“There is no greater pacifist than the regular officer. Any man who is forced to turn his attention to the horrors of the battlefield, to the grotesque shapes that are left there for the burying squad—he doesn’t want war. He never wants it.”
he did challenge McCarthy, repeatedly, and with the broader purpose of trying to defuse the explosive Red hunter. Yet it also overstates the case to claim that Eisenhower had a strategy.
“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?”
