@camlok,
Quote:Quote:I mean, when Ike was president, people slept peacefully,
Not the people of Guatemala, who "with a man like that in charge" were slaughtered, had their democratically elected government overthrown and became, as has been the case myriad times, the servants of American greed.
It's really easy to judge other people by your standards or to judge people of other ages by the standards of your age...
Communists really were out to take over the entire world in the decades following World War II and the concerns which Ike and the Dulles brothers had about communism in our own hemisphere were well-founded, even granting that they created grief in some instances.
Ike will mainly be judged by the things which DIDN'T happen when he was president, the most major of which was World War II being restarted on a 3500 km front.
Ike had three tools to try to use in the Cold War, one of which was overwhelmingly expensive, and the other two of which were cheap. The expensive thing, restarting World War II on a 3500 km front against the Soviet Union, was avoided altogether. The two things which were relatively very much cheaper were the use of covert operations, and the creation of a nuclear deterrent so overwhelming that nobody with the brains of a chicken or anything better than that would ever try anything. That included that gigantic fleet of B 36 bombers which was never used in combat. A.B. 36 bomber fleet only looks expensive before you compare it to the cost of a Third World war.
In the case of the Dulles brothers, Ian Fleming, James Bond, and our goofball CIA, again there was collateral damage, but nothing like the damage from a Third World war and, again, that was the choice.
The GOP slogan at the time was peace, progress, and prosperity and it was more than just a slogan, it was real. For eight years, nothing really bad ever happened to the United States.
A B-36 bomber next to a B-29. The B-29 was the largest and heaviest bomber created during World War II: