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It's no surprise that the biographer of Douglas MacArthur and Ulysses S. Grant clearly conveys the military talents that enabled Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) to ensure the Allies' victory in World War II, but Geoffrey Perret is equally perceptive when dealing with the personality behind the famously genial grin. Perhaps marked by his father's coldness and grim religious zeal (though his mother... More

It's no surprise that the biographer of Douglas MacArthur and Ulysses S. Grant clearly conveys the military talents that enabled Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) to ensure the Allies' victory in World War II, but Geoffrey Perret is equally perceptive when dealing with the personality behind the famously genial grin. Perhaps marked by his father's coldness and grim religious zeal (though his mother was a lively, cheerful woman), Eisenhower never expressed his feelings easily, even to his cherished wife, Mamie. His intelligence and scholarly gifts got the poor boy from Kansas into West Point; his administrative and training abilities made him too valuable at home to be employed for active duty in World War I, much to his chagrin. Professional fulfillment and fame as the general who won WWII couldn't change the self-controlled habits of a military lifetime, and Perret depicts Eisenhower as reluctantly drawn into politics by a sense of duty. Covering his presidency, Perret doesn't let him off the hook about such touchy matters as U.S. involvement in the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's elected government or the biased hearing that lifted physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance. But the author obviously likes Ike, and he helps his readers understand why most Americans in the 1940s and '50s did too. --Wendy Smith

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