William I. Hitchcock contends that his book The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s “offers a comprehensive account of the president and his times and concludes with a decisive verdict: Dwight Eisenhower must be counted among the most consequential presidents of modern American history” (p. xvi). He further claims that Eisenhower left a lasting legacy in foreign policy and domestic policy and transformed the office of the presidency. Hitchcock writes that Eisenhower was “principled but adaptive, ideological at times but usually pragmatic, a problem solver who dominated his cabinet, the military, and the bureaucracy and put his imprimatur on the age” (xvi). He offers a highly favorable portrait of Eisenhower, one that is much too flattering in its depiction of the 34th president of the United States.
Hitchcock, a professor of history at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, conducted his research at the Eisenhower Library...