While he was in office, Eisenhower appeared to be the Grandfather-in-Chief. Well along in life, with plenty of experience behind him, he and his wife, Mamie, looked like fixtures from a bygone era. He played a lot of golf while president, but he wasn’t very good at it. A popular bumper sticker of the time read, “Ben Hogan for president. If we are going to have a golfer in the White House, let’s have a good one.” (Hogan was one of the finest professional golfers in the country.)

The president’s intellect seemed to be aging as well, and some referred to him as “Old Bubblehead” or the White House as “The Tomb of the Well-Known Soldier.” His public statements could be confusing, and his speeches were hard enough to follow that one journalist went to the trouble of rewriting the Gettysburg Address as Eisenhower might have said it. Lincoln’s famous opening “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal” in Eisenhowerese would have been “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 the 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.”1

Given Eisenhower’s amiable befuddlement, most people assumed that the strong characters he had appointed to top positions, such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were the ones really calling the shots in this presidency. Eisenhower gave these appointed officials a lot of leeway and did not seem too concerned about the details of what they did. It seemed that the old general was merely a figurehead at the top of the national government, someone to wave and smile at the people. For these reasons, when a poll was taken of historians about past presidents in 1962, the year after Eisenhower left office, he was ranked twenty-second of the thirty-one presidents who had served to that point.

Question 1: From what you know about Eisenhower so far, does he seem overrated or underrated by the 1962 historians’ poll? Why?