John Robert Greene. I Like Ike: The Presidential Election of 1952. American Presidential Elections Series. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. Illustrations. 224 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7006-2405-8; $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-2404-1.
Reviewed by Robert Dienesch (University of Windsor)
Published on H-War (November, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
I Do Like Ike
History is never stagnant. New research, newly released files, and of course new methodologies produce an evolving understanding of the past. Another element, which is often overlooked, is the historian, who affects the constantly changing nature of history. While documents can shed new light on events and methodologies can provide new avenues of research, it is the historian who assesses the material and reconciles it against other sources within a greater methodological framework. The history is shaped by the historian. While avoiding large discussions of the philosophy of history, this is important to consider when looking at any work being produced. However, historians evolve over time as well. New experiences, evolving philosophies and methodologies, and even criticism help mold historians throughout their careers. The result is that a historian’s body of work can change quite a bit over time.
This is clearly seen in John Robert Greene’s recent book, I Like Ike: The Presidential Election of 1952. Greene is the Paul J. Schupf Professor of History and Humanities at Cazenovia College, Cazenovia, New York. He has produced many fine examples of presidential history, including studies of both George H. W. Bush’s and Gerald Ford’s presidencies. In I Like Ike, Greene presents a persuasive study of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s campaign for the White House in 1952. As complex and carefully researched as his earlier works, Greene’s newest study presents a nuanced understanding of the issues at hand. Eisenhower, the famed general who commanded the invasion of Northwestern Europe, who was the first leader in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and who was loved by Americans far and wide, had avoided politics. Now he was thrust into the political spotlight in a dynamic campaign that put him in the White House for the first of two terms.
Greene’s study, however, is more than a history of Ike; it is also a testimony to the impact of the historian. This book is a reinterpretation of his first book, The Crusade: The Presidential Election of 1952 (1985). The Crusade was his reworked doctoral dissertation and it defended a revisionist thesis that Ike was far more Machiavellian in how he approached the nomination for the White House. Greene described Ike’s methods as nonparticipant politics. That is, Ike told people he did not want to run for the office but in fact he really wanted to. In this reexamination of a thirty-year-old text, the author reverses his original conclusions. Ike was not a Machiavellian playing the crowd to get elected. He sincerely did not want the job.
Greene lays out his argument clearly in the space of five well-written chapters supported by an appendix that examines the 1952 presidential election results backed up with excellent bibliographical and citation support. One of the greatest strengths of the text is that it is not simply a discussion of the Eisenhower campaign. The context of the campaign matters a great deal and Greene provides a discussion of both the Republican and Democratic preconvention campaigns in the first two chapters. He backs this up by then examining the parties’ conventions in the third chapter before going into the fall 1952 campaign in the fourth. The conclusion, chapter 5, looks at the legacies of these events.
As a historian and Americanist, I find this book particularly fascinating. I remember the 1985 text from my own research and I will be honest, I did not see Ike as a manipulator the way he was portrayed. However, Greene’s work did have a great deal of value because of how it approached the subject and how it laid out the material explaining his case. With that in mind, the revision of this text is an excellent piece of work that demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the complexities of a presidential campaign. This text is an excellent publication for anyone with an interest in either presidential elections or the Eisenhower period.
That an author can rethink their original conclusions should not be really surprising. Even that an author could reverse their conclusions should be understandable. Sadly, too few authors have that opportunity to go back and rework a key text like this. Perhaps all authors should be given that opportunity. In this case it has most definitely produced an enriching and captivating work.
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Citation:
Robert Dienesch. Review of Greene, John Robert, I Like Ike: The Presidential Election of 1952.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52185
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