Two Americans: Truman, Eisenhower, and a Dangerous World.

Jones, Brian Madison

Two Americans: Truman, Eisenhower, and a Dangerous World. By William Lee Miller. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. 416 pp.

From William Lee Miller, the author of Lincoln's Virtues (Vintage, 2003), comes a new study of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and the decisions each man made on important issues during dangerous times. According to Miller, both Truman and Ike embraced America's responsibility for worldwide leadership in the postwar period, and his book is an examination of their similar upbringings, overlapping career tracks, personal interactions, and grand political choices, sometimes made together, that shaped the following four decades of American history.

Miller offers a fresh look at the style and the substance of both men from their secular and provincial roots through their presidencies. The author juxtaposes their lives during the Great War when Ike trained troops back home and Truman commanded troops in France and during their formative years of the interwar period. Fortune fell upon both at the beginning of World War II: Truman became a U.S. senator and achieved distinction investigating waste in defense procurement, and Eisenhower was summoned to Washington to develop early plans for the American war effort in the Pacific. These roles propelled both men into even greater responsibilities and prominence.

The author's approach to chronology is unique and appropriate. In the early chapters, he follows both men at roughly the same moment in history when their careers were quite dissimilar. Later chapters are topical, as Miller focuses on how each man dealt with specific political and diplomatic issues as well as each one's own presidential style. Miller works with some printed primary sources, including the memoirs of George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and, of course, Truman and Eisenhower. But much of his narrative depends upon the perspectives and details offered in biographies of Truman by Robert Ferrell (Harry S. Truman: A Life [American Political Biography Press, 2007]) and Alonzo Hamby (Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman [Oxford University Press, 1995)], and in studies of Eisenhower by Stephen Ambrose (e.g., Eisenhower: Soldier and President [American Political Biography Press, 2007]) and Carlo D'Este (Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life [Holt Paperbacks, 2003]).

The crux of Miller's narrative is the crucial years between 1945 and 1953 when Truman and Eisenhower coexisted in and around Washington. One served as president of the United States and the other as army chief of staff, advisor to the new secretary of defense, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) commander. In an impressive chapter on Harry and Ike and the origins of the Cold War, Miller concludes that after Truman established containment as basic American strategy, Eisenhower became the voice of containment at NATO. Miller describes the rift that emerged between the two when Eisenhower declared for the presidency in 1952 and campaigned against the corruption and Cold War incompetence of Truman's administration. Miller faults Ike more for this break than Truman, but describes both as behaving as adolescents when it came to the other. Regardless of the personal animosity, the policy of waging Cold War begun under President Truman was built into bipartisan permanence under President Eisenhower. From containment to deterrence, according to Miller, Truman and Eisenhower built and sustained the Cold War consensus and the "pattern of responsibility" for the Cold War, as Acheson described it, was the work of both men (p. 196).

Miller's perspective is analytical and direct when comparing and contrasting the key decisions made by his subjects. On the issue of civil rights, for example, Miller sees the gains of the Eisenhower era as significant, despite Ike's tepid endorsement of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, his simple understanding of the executive's role and the separation of powers, and the passing of a weak civil rights bill. Truman, by contrast, pressed the issue of integration of the military and more directly confronted segregation throughout his presidency, if only with words rather than deeds. On McCarthy, Miller concludes that Eisenhower's hidden-hand technique was superior to Truman's dismissive and insulting comments when dealing with the senator from Wisconsin. Miller faults both men for perpetuating the nuclear arms race but also credits both for saying "no" to nuclear war when it became clear to each that such a war was unwinnable.

In the end, Miller's narrative is engaging and readable. The lack of archival research and scholarly notes suggests that Two Americans was written for popular rather than academic audiences, but Miller's style, perspective, and focus makes the book entertaining and valuable. Indeed, Two Americans is an insightful contribution to the literature on the origins and course of the Cold War and on the great moral questions faced by the two men who presided over that dangerous time.

--Brian Madison Jones

Johnson C. Smith University