Eisenhower and the Cold War Arms Race: “Open Skies” and the Military-Industrial Complex

Some people have all the luck. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of them. His running mate and vice president, Richard M. Nixon, was later tarnished by the Vietnam War and forced to resign because of the Watergate scandal. Plenty of things like those happened on Eisenhower's watch. He almost got the country into a war in Vietnam at the time of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. He undertook to overthrow legitimate governments with covert Central Intelligence Agency operations across the globe. Eisenhower engaged in so many crises that his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, coined the term “brinkmanship” to denote the art of getting into a crisis and then getting out of it. Eisenhower pre-delegated authority to field commanders to unleash nuclear weapons. On his watch the United States innovated the hydrogen bomb and began a nuclear buildup that ended with thousands of launch systems and tens of...