Why We Still Like Ike
The General Slyly Convinced Americans He Was Above Party
In July 1959, JFK had dinner with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. at Hyannis Port, and late in the evening over drinks and cigars, the politician told the historian what he really thought of the sitting president. “No man is less loyal to old friends than Eisenhower,” Kennedy said with what Schlesinger later described as “contempt.” Eisenhower was “terribly cold and terribly vain,” Kennedy continued. “In fact, he is a shit.”
Most Americans, at the time and later, took a very different view of the 34th president. From 1944, when he led the …
