Sublime

Jimmy Carter had been elected president in 1976 and faced the full force of the capital shortage. His response, of course, was drawn from the Roosevelt era. That era opened on the Depression, and part of the solution to the Depression was to increase taxes on the investing class and put money into the hands of consumers. Carter followed the same pl

In Vietnam, Ike took the lead and kept the United States out of war. In Iran, he listened to the advice that bubbled up from below and authorized the CIA-directed coup that ousted Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s legitimately elected prime minister, terminating democratic government in Teheran and installing what became the twenty-five-year dictatorship

First on the president’s agenda was a comprehensive social insurance program that would provide unemployment compensation and old-age and survivor benefits, as well as aid for dependent children and the handicapped.

His accomplishments at home and abroad were great: opening up China, achieving arms control with the Soviet Union, ending (if too slowly) the Vietnam War, desegregating the Southern schools, increasing benefits for the elderly and the disabled, creating the Environmental Protection Agency.

Insofar as Iranian national aspirations were concerned, Eisenhower was sympathetic. But he had a blind spot. He worried about the shutoff of Iranian oil to the West.

Less well known is his expansion of Social Security in 1954 to provide coverage for an additional ten million self-employed farmers, doctors, lawyers, dentists, and others; his decision to increase benefits 16 percent for those already enrolled; his raising the minimum wage by a third (from 75¢ to $1 an hour),g his decision to provide the funds for