EISENHOWER AS NATO COMMANDER

This chapter argues that the salutary tone of the literature on Dwight David Eisenhower's tenure as SACEUR stems from three sources. First, most of the scholarship in what would be called 'Eisenhower revisionism' in the 1980s made his command of strategic matters central to its claim that the president was a sophisticated and cautious thinker on nuclear matters. Second, the survival of NATO itself as the most successful alliance in history has discouraged critical scholarship, even after the end of the Cold War. Finally, because Eisenhower's role was largely military in function, and subservient to a wider set of goals forged by the civilian internationalists around him, his performance in NATO was less controversial than when he translated that experience into leadership of the United States. The chapter also provides account of the events that brought Eisenhower from New York to Paris and back to Washington in the heady, nerve‐racking days of the Korean War