The Eisenhower Way

A new administration enters the White House, succeeding an unpopular president and inheriting a failing war in a volatile region, while being challenged on several fronts by the specter of nuclear confrontation. Such is the scenario that awaits the president who will take office in 2009, yet it bears many similarities to the situation when Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953. Though few presidents seem to look toward Ike as a foreign-policy model, his “brand of realism,” says Jonathan Rauch, a _National Journal_ senior writer, has “never been more relevant than it will be in the post-Bush cleanup that is about to begin.”