Dick, Jack, and Ike

This SNL sketch was about Reagan, but it was actually a pretty accurate depiction of Dwight Eisenhower.

After 1952, RN had the reputation of a hatchetman.

In his autobiography, RN, he wrote:

I also criticized Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whose policies toward international Communism, I said, had lost us China, much of Eastern Europe, and had invited the Communists to begin the Korean war. I used a phrase that caught the —and the commentators' wrath—when I charged that Stevenson was a graduate of Acheson's “Cowardly College of Communist Containment.” Many years later, when I was President, Acheson and I became friends, and he was one of my most valued trusted unofficial advisers. In this campaign, however, his clipped moustache, his British tweeds, and his haughty manner made him the perfect foil for my attacks on the snobbish kind of foreign service personality and mentality that had been taken in hook, line, and sinker by the Communists.  Today I regret the intensity of those attacks. 

Video documentary (start at 37:30)

Heart Attack and  Stevenson, election eve broadcast 1956 (see Matthews p. 113):

I must say bluntly that every piece of scientific evidence we have, every lesson of history and experience indicates that a Republican victory tomorrow would mean that Richard Nixon would probably be President of this country within the next four years. I say frankly, as a citizen more than a candidate, that I recoil at the prospect of Mr. Nixon as custodian of this nation's future, as guardian of the hydrogen bomb, as representative of America in the world, as commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.

Nixon on Eisenhower:

He was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of those words. Not shackled to a one-track mind, he always applied two, three,or four lines of reasoning to a single problem, and he usually preferred the indirect approach where it would serve him better than the direct attack on a problem. His mind was quick and facile. His thoughts far outraced his speech and this gave rise to his frequent ‘scrambled syntax’ which more perceptive critics should have recognized as the mark of a far-ranging and versatile mind rather than an indication of poor training in grammar.

JFK 1956:  Profiles in Courage and Democratic convention




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Color version (gets a little heated around 5:30):


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