Sublime

What Truman and Eisenhower had in their favour was earnestness. They were self-taught, hardworking, strong-willed men.

For Lyndon Johnson, Monday was a day of applause. Whatever Truman’s feelings toward him had been before, Texas was indispensable to the President’s own election chances in 1948, and two of the men most important if he was to carry Texas were on the train with him: Sam Rayburn and Tom Clark. And, as Evans and Novak were to put it, “for all of his co

Eisenhower’s decision to accept personal responsibility for the U-2 flights may have been the finest hour of his presidency. Rather than force Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell to walk the plank for reasons of state, Eisenhower acknowledged his own culpability.

The cabinet was Eisenhower’s sounding board. The National Security Council (NSC) was his instrument of policy.

In 1954, the Eisenhower administration introduced a reinsurance plan to backstop private insurance companies against “abnormal loss” if they expanded their coverage to individuals not adequately covered by health insurance. The reinsurance plan, in Ike’s view, was a “middle way” between government and private insurance.

The Truman Doctrine articulated a willingness to provide economic and military aid to Western European countries under pressure; Greece and Turkey were early recipients. The Marshall Plan, named for President Truman’s secretary of state George Marshall and announced at Harvard in June 1947, in what is arguably the most significant commencement spee

He would direct questions to each person around the table, and all members were free to contribute their thoughts on any subject, regardless of their responsibilities.”

In his role as elder statesman, he buttressed Kennedy at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and refrained from criticizing Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam.