U.S. Presidents - Cold War and New Millennium Edition

I read it last summer and agree with the thumbs up. Check out his brief Hoover bio published in 2009.

I thought some of the funniest stuff had to do with the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover sequence. "Keep Warren at home. Don't let him make any speeches. If he goes out on a tour somebody's sure to ask him questions, and Warren's just the sort of damn fool that will try to answer them"--Palin! I came away liking Taft and Harding, two guys who clearly didn't want the job.

the roaring 20s!

I knew Eisenhower had a poor civil rights record--alluded to that in an early post on this thread--but I thought that was primarily a matter of misguided inaction, of just hoping the issue would magically go away. But going by Leuchtenburg's book (which seems to me to be about as even-handed as these things get), he was much worse than that--his inaction, his actions, his words and attitudes.

No rhetoric for Ike, just following the law, and he let Nixon and LBJ take the lead in getting the '58 civil rights bill through the Dixiecrat-dominated Senate. One of the frustrations of Ike is how he never risked his enormous popularity on anything noteworthy.

Something I've never come across before: Oliver Jensen, around the time Eisenhower was leaving office, recasting the first two sentences of the the Gettysburg Address into Eisenhower-ese. I realize deadpan wasn't invented yesterday, but there's something about the tone here that feels very modern. As funny as Tina Fey as Palin:

I haven’t checked these figures but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual. Well, now, of course, we are dealing with this big difference of opinion, civil disturbance you might say, although I don’t like to appear to take sides or name any individuals, and the point is naturally to check up, by actual experience in the field, to see whether any governmental set-up with a basis like the one I was mentioning has any validity and find out whether that dedication by those early individuals will pay off in lasting values and things of that kind.

(Leuchtenburg cuts the excerpt off there; there's more at http://powellhistory.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/if-eisenhower-had-given-the-gettysburg-address/.)