Volume 25, Number 7 · May 4, 1978
The Days of the Dulleses
By John Phillips
Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network
by Leonard Mosley
The Dial Press/James Wade, 530 pp., $12.95
This book is not what you'd call a scholarly work, but it has the virtue of retrieving a mood from the recent past. Through the Sixties and early Seventies there was a tendency among some who contributed to this and kindred periodicals to hark back tenderly to the Eisenhower administration. If only we'd known what was coming next, these writers seemed to say, we would never have made such harsh judgments. What was experienced as the torpor of the Fifties looked to them ten years later as a haven of stability and content. What was perceived as Eisenhower's indolence, and derided as 'passive' and 'female,' and after his heart attack simply as a case of arteriosclerotic decay, now was considered keen judgment. Ike had had all his marbles after all. He knew what he was doing: he got us out of a 'no-win' war in Korea that had been Truman's fault anyway and kept us out of Vietnam, which was more than Kennedy did.
Review, 7580 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |