Outpouring of support from our worldclass exhibits. Our world class exhibit and programs like this are made possible by friends of the Eisenhower Foundation and other donors. I want to thank the foundation for supporting this lecture series tonight. Perhaps you are aware the Eisenhower Foundation is raising money to conduct a comprehensive exhibit renovation. It is the Largest Campaign in our foundations 73 year history and the First Comprehensive exhibit renovation in more than 45 years. The new exhibits will be unveiled this summer. We have been so encouraged by the response we have received thus far. I am pleased to report we have raised 98 of our goal. [applause] prof. Meredith we want to finish the campaign by june 6 so we can publicly announce this milestone too all veterans who join us at the eisenhower president ial library and museum to commemorate the 75th anniversary of dday. Many of our friends have already made a gift to the renovation and i would like to thank you for your trust and participation in this project. There is there is still time to participate and i hope everyone will consider a gift so that we can reach our goal. It gives me great pleasure to introduce tonights program. Louis galambos is a Professor Emeritus in the department of history and editor of the papers of the dwight d. Eisenhower. He has served as president of the Business History conference and the economic history association. A former editor of the journal of economic history, he has written extensively on u. S. Business history, business government relations, and the rise of the bureaucratic state. Hes the president and principle of the Business History group, a Business Consulting organization, and has been a historical consultant to at t and the world bank group. Here to share his book, eisenhower becoming leader of the world, louis galambos. [applause] prof. Galambos it is nice to be here. We will see if i can get this to stand up. Very good. Ok. The library has been very important to me. It was important during the paper. It was essential to do the eisenhower papers. It was important in doing a book. I do not know how much most of you know about editing papers. [laughter] prof. Galambos you do it day by day. You read what the subject, in this case, ike, wrote, then you read what was written to him. Then you read what happened as a result of what he wrote. You go day by day doing that. Then you produce volumes that are about that thick. Now, these are like the big biographies you may read. These are what i call chest crushers. [laughter] prof. Galambos you read them at night when you are going and to bed and he read a few pages, then boom. They come down on you. Thats part of the problem they produce. The other problem is they produce guilt, because i dont know how many americans, but i would guess many more than 100, 000, have never finished war and peace. They take it on vacation every year and it sits there. They put it back in the car when they go home because they did not read it. They went to the beach. They were on vacation. I decided to avoid that and write a slim book that could be read by a busy person in two or three nights. If it came down on you, it would not hurt you too much. [laughter] prof. Galambos so i had you in mind in writing the book. I drew heavily upon the library and their expert assistance in working on that. Now, most of you, i would say many in this audience, know a lot about president eisenhower. You know first he was president and you know roughly when that was. You will not make the mistake a friend of mine made in writing a textbook in which he had eisenhower taking office in 1952. No. You will never make a mistake about george washington. They always get elected in the even year and they always take office in all year. There is a book out there by a really good publisher that got it wrong. I will not tell you anymore about that. At any rate, i will not repeat some things i know you already know. He was born in 1890. That date is important. Im not going to give you a whole lot of dates to remember. I did not bring any blue books, so you do not have to worry about a test. He was born in 1890. That was just when the United States was becoming the states was becoming the leading Industrial Power in the world. The United States was making a transition. We had long been a laborpoor and capitalpoor country and we were drawing, all right, capital and labor from around the world. We needed it. We had great natural resources. Well, at this point, we started to be a capitalrich country. Labor had a different relationship to what we were doing. That was when ike was born. There were no cars. There were horses and wagons. Dirt streets. It was a different world. Particularly, a small town world. I associate with that. I was raised in a town that got to 7000 by counting some sheep. [laughter] prof. Galambos they wanted to be bigger than they actually were in southern indiana. It helped me understand ike. The United States then started to assert its power overseas. For the first time. We became some say we had created an empire. My students object to that. I asked them if they vacationed in puerto rico and noticed the people speak a different language. How did that happen . They look at me with that blank look. Every once in a while, i do ask for a date. I ask when the First World War took place. Some had it in the 19th century. Some had it in the time of the Second World War. It was a problem. Some of them were International Relations majors. I guess they did not have to do a lot of history. That was very important in america became a powerful country. Ikes career starts around the time of the First World War and reaches a very impressive climax in the Second World War. There is probably no professional of any sort i can think of for whom one event was a fulcrum for his whole career. That was d day and the decision he made. A powerful impact on his career. When i started to work on this book, the first thing i did was go back into his early life. We had edited from the Second World War on. I had done the chief of staff, columbia university, all of that. I did not know that much about eisenhower as a child, and as a young man. I did a lot of research on that. I used two ideas. One is identity. Everyone in this room, including me, has an identity. That is the story you tell about yourself. You tell your story every day to other people. Wife, husband, daughter, son. Some people have sons, i have four daughters. You tell that story to the people you work with and work for. So, your identity. Your personality does not change much over your lifetime, but your identity will change a lot. Ikes changed significantly over his career. Another idea i want to use his reputation. Reputation is the story other people tell about you. There may be a little incongruity between your story and their story. , that sometimes causes pain. I like the introduction today, but they did not tell you i once failed organic chemistry, did they . No. Some of you may have sons or daughters or grandchildren who fail organic chemistry. Take it easy. You can still earn a living in america after having failed organic chemistry. I started to look at his career thinking about identity and reputation. At first, he was a sort of indifferent soldier. He was an indifferent professional soldier. He was indifferent at west point. He is really smart. A terrific poker player. But he had a little problem about authority. I said, where did that come from . I associate ike, he is the master organizer. Why would he have a hangup about authority . Daddy. Daddy was the hangup, and his big brother. His big brother was called big ike. In high school he was called little ike. That is a burden to carry around for four years. And who was the captain of the Football Team . Not little ike. No. You have to suffer through that. Put those men together, one younger one older, and you get a real hangup about authority. Ike kind of rejected his father. He started to smoke cigarettes. At dday he was smoking four packs a day. Four packs. That means you are lighting a cigarette off a cigarette. I do not recommend that for anyone. I have a strong interest in public health, and believe me. I do not recommend that. He rejected his father. He learned to play poker. He learned to drink. His father hated that. He was turning away from his family in a significant way. And they were pacifists, and he went to the military academy. Well, ok. So he hang ups about authority. He got a lot of demerits. A lot of them for smoking. He would sneak around and do things. I wondered about that. I thought, well, here is a man who became a terrific professional soldier. He does not seem to care as much as some other soldiers who are already there at that same time. In the 1920s, however, he finally acquired a mentor. Whenever i talked to other groups who are professional military, i make a lot of this, because it is a tremendously interesting problem. How does a mentor know how was it general foxconn are met eisenhower and discerned he had that potential to go to the top . He took him on, educated him. He did not read these boring books once. He had to read them three times. He had to practice orders of the day every day. Fox connor converted him and inspired him to look forward to something more than being a retired lieutenant colonel. It is an amazing thing that he recognized it and that he would actually do it. And three, that he followed up. Now, why did he have to followup if he had already gone through this conversion experience . Well, there was a bureaucracy. The army had a fixed view of what eisenhower was capable of. While he was at west point, one of the things he did after he blew out his knee was coach. He was a terrific coach. He was an instinctive leader with small groups. He was good at that at the platoon level, he was always good. He did not need to be taught about that. He was respected by his peers and was a good leader, but the army bureaucracy said, he is a good coach and a good man to have around, but he is not going to go to the top. They resisted. Bureaucracies dont change their mind overnight. Any of you who have authority over other people, think about this. They were insensitive to what eisenhower was doing now that he had turned his career around. He had turned it around in a significant way and fox connor kept maneuvering him so that he could get ahead. It took some maneuvering. He got him into a position with the former chief of staff of the army and general douglas macarthur. Macarthur was on her was army chief of staff in 1930. Ike served as a staff officer and followed macarthur to the philippines. Now, their personalities clashed. As you might imagine. Ike was enormously bitter about certain things that happened certain things that happened. Macarthur cheated him. He sent him to the United States and in effect replaced him on his staff. When i came back to the United States, his job had been taken over by somebody else. He could not do anything. Now, macarthur was clever. He did not raise a stink with what was called the war department. He just did it very quietly. I call it a machiavellian moment. It is one of those moments in life, some of you may have had a machiavellian moment when somebody cheated that you respected, or at least that you are working with them, and he realized how the world operates. This for ike was a major machiavellian moment. He was tricked by macarthur. He was better. It was the first of two turning point in his career. He learned that sometimes he was going to have to do some things to achieve a major end that he found distasteful. The second came in north africa. In north africa, he had sought through his whole career to have command of combat troops. He was dedicated to getting to that point where he would have direct command of combat troops. That was his ambition. Major ambition. The british, however, maneuvered at the casablanca conference in 1943. They were really good, almost as good as the navy is. The navy is tremendous about achieving their political ends, as were some other people in ikes career. The british maneuvered and they inserted a brit between ike and combat forces. He had worked all this time to get to that point. He was Supreme Commander in africa. Now he did not have direct command. He had to go through a british officer. You probably already know this. There was a lot of strain within the alliance. The brits were contemptuous of american troops. The brits were absolutely certain they had won world war i, not us. The brits were absolutely convinced eisenhower was a dolt. They had no respect for ike, and they showed it in a lot of ways. One of the ways, he first met distinguished officer, monte. Ike spoke all the time, particularly when he was nervous. Anybody would be nervous meeting with general montgomery. General montgomery told him to put his cigarette out. He wasnt allowed to smoke. That hurt. When you are in the position ike was in, that hurt. It was an assertion of authority of somebody who thought that was important for the moment. The british had achieved their end and ike had to put up with it. Did not throw down the gauntlet he did not throw down the gauntlet. People sometimes get to a point where they will tell you, if you do not do it my way, i will leave. We are going to get to a point where ike did that, but not now. In north africa he continued to preserve the unity of the forces. Some of you might remember, he sent one officer home because he had called a british officer a british s. O. B. He said, you can call him an s. O. B. , but not a british s. O. B. He put up with monty all the way through sicily, africa, and italy. That brought him to the big decision, which was dday. This is phenomenal when you think back to the giant armada and what a narrow window they had. He made that decision to send those people and, and he hated the thought that a lot of them were going to die. He was touched by that. Some military officers are not. General patton in africa told his soldiers, the point of all this is to kill them before they kill you. He had a different attitude toward war. He was a terrific officer on the offense. Ike made that decision. He kept the allies together and he kept the British Working together with the americans through all of that time and the difficult time that followed the invasion. Now, by this time, he was committed to the concept of unity. Unity in war, unity in peace. He thought in a general sense that that is how you achieve things. That had an impact when he went to the chief of staff, went back to washington, became chief of staff of the army. He was upset. Enormously upset. This came out in his farewell address. He was upset by the fact they could not agree on strategy because you could not get the services to agree. For years, several years, we did not have a strategy. The services would not agree on what strategy was going to be. They each favored one idea. He looked on the services then as Interest Groups, and he hated Interest Groups. He never adjusted. Richard nixon loved Interest Groups, dealt with them, had no trouble at all. Eisenhower hated them, and you know why . Because after the decision was made, they kept on fighting. They did not accept the decision that was made. If they would lose in congress, they would go to the courts. They get paid for doing that relentlessly. That irritated ike all the time. When he became president , this is when he ran his cabinet. Everybody had a right to say something. Everybody can get in on the decisionmaking process, but after we make the decision, and he never left any doubt about who would make that decision, then we join hands and do it together. Unity was extremely important to him. He saw it in general terms, not just military, but also politically. In the post war period, he worked for unity as chief of staff, and that is what explains the militaryindustrial complex. Everybody remembers that. Everybody remembers the militaryindustrial complex. He said we must be strong. We must be strong. We have to have a powerful military. Ok, but he was worried about the militaryindustrial complex, and the way those Interest Groups worked in washington and in our government in general. He was worried about that when he was president of columbia university. He spent a great deal of time going back and forth between washington to try to implement that policy. It was difficult. He tried to implement that as commander of nato. He worked hard to instill unity, to get people to Work Together. People that had been bitter enemies. He wanted them to Work Together to achieve a major objective, which by this time was the cold war. The cold war had a great deal to do with his presidency. Again, he tried to unite americans and deal with the cold war. He said if we dont have peace, we dont have anything. For 1946 on, he was saying he said that if we have another major war, it will not be the great tank battles of the Second World War. It will not be the infantry, heroic as they were at the battle of the bulge. The war will be over in three days. The war may destroy much of civilization, but it will be over quickly. We have to realize that. That had a great deal to do with the way he exercised authority as commander of nato and the presidency. Some people think he had to be persuaded to be president of the United States. I disagree completely. He was afraid he might lose. He did not like to lose. He was very competitive. He did not like to lose in football, baseball, or in politics, even though he did not know a lot about it. He had to learn a lot. He took lessons. He had people prepare papers for him. He had to learn how to operate the presidency. When he got in there, he was ready for the job. He had his cabinet picked before he took office. The entire cabinet was ready to go. He was prepared like a brilliant staff officer would be. He was a brilliant staff officer when he was in the army, and it showed in his presidency and the way he handled his relationships. He sought peace and he knew he had to compromise. He compromised in korea. He was not going to nuke north korea. He wasnt going to nuke the chinese. He was going to get a compromise and live with it. We are still living with it today. You have to compromise. He recognized he was going to have to cut the budget. Compromise. He was going to have to cut the military, in fact. He developed a new strategy. Was that strategy important . No, it goes back to the decision about the war. If there is a major war, it will be over quickly. It is going to be a nuclear war. He said the military had to be reshaped along those lines. Thats true today. That is still true. We depend ultimately upon the threat of nuclear war. I somehow or was the major factor bring that about. We had to have not only a good strategy, but we had to have economic policies that support it. He said, this is a long run a battle. Ike as far as i know never predicted when the soviet union would collapse. There have been a few people who might have predicted that, but it was not like. He felt the cold war was going to go on 100 more years and he said we had to be ready for that. One of the things is we cannot spend our economy into the hole. He kept taxes high. This is their republican president. He kept taxes high until he balanced the budget. He had three balanced budgets in eight years. Stop and think about what it would take to get a balanced budget now. He had three. That was an incredible accomplishment. He recognized he was going to have to compromise in other ways. He did not cut where it was necessary. Finally, finally, he told his brother off. [laughter] [laughter] prof. Galambos all these years. Fermenting inside of ike. He kept giving him advice about this and that, he finally told him about social security, he said if anybody in america wants to get out of social security, you will never hear of them again. Meaning you. Hes talking directly. He wrote this to his brother in a famous letter. Those are the kind of letters they had. Those are great things to read. He said we are going to have certain programs. He had conducted a tour of the United States and said we need roads. Im going to be on i70 tomorrow. I used to go back and forth between graduate school through west virginia. Oh my god. [laughter] prof. Galambos if you have never followed a coal truck in the rain up a hill in a 1950s chevy, you do not understand what the roads really meant to people. These roads changed our lives in many ways, many important ways. He said he would have to compromise to do that. So he did that. He is it that sometimes he would stop and have a chat. He kept communication open with congress. Even though congress was dominated by the other party. This was extremely important. He felt that innovation, a particular interest of mine, one of the things that distinguishes capitalism from communism is its ability to innovate and produce new goods and services. That lasted for his policy until 1957. When sputnik came, he realized he could not wait. He had to do something politically. We got darpa. It produced the internet. Some of you may think that was terrible. I dont know. Some of the impacts on our children are probably negative, but the internet is extremely important to our society. If you remember, the transistor was produced in the 1940s. The integrated circuit, a key to the digital revolution we have gone through two revolutions in your lifetime. You have been through the second industrial revolution, which gave you those giant automobile companies, the giant steel companies, all of that. Now we are in a bio digital revolution. Biology has changed the way we live, stay alive. I am a walking testament to the good effects of biology. But digital. Its also digital. That has changed the way we do things. It has changed the way i do things on most every day. It has changed the way most of you do things. We have been through a bio digital revolution that followed sputnik. The results for ike, for his policy, was a low rate of inflation. Moderate growth approaching, but not reaching 3 per year. Many new people were brought into the workforce, including many women. Ike had sort of a blind spot. He understood men a lot more than he understood women. If you asked in his family who was the person who shaped his life in the end, his whole career, it was his mother. It was his mother and not his father. She was the one who preached compromise, the kind of professional effort that shaped that family. I do not know whether we could have the middle way now. I do not know. A lot has happened since then. Maybe we are past the middle way, but it looks pretty good for me. I think i would like to see a little more compromise, a little more communication, and a whole lot more unity. We need it. That is the important point about his presidency. Thank you. applause now we are going to havinge a q and a. If i dont get good questions out of this group, im going to be really disappointed. I want hard questions. [laughter] can you talk about how like with all of his knowledge and experience got misled at the cia . Prof. Galambos i can elaborate more on that and should. I do not think he was so much misled by his brother as he was looking for easy solutions. If he had a blind spot in foreign affairs, it was the revolutionary process. America has had a lot of trouble. We had our own revolution, but we forgot about that. We have a hard time dealing with other peoples revolutions. We had a hard time at that time recognizing that, for instance, the vietnamese and the chinese were different people and the russians were different people, and there were going to be differences. It was not just a big red blob. I think in handling revolution, iran was the weakest point for him. He would look for easy solutions. Given the pressure he was under, im sympathetic, but i think when we look at history, that was a mistake. That was a good question. The thing that has always amazed me about eisenhower, first that he was of german extraction. Galambos yes, i got my cardiovascular jeans from them. I am ever grateful. [laughter] we fought germany in world war i enrolled or two. There is a lot of prejudice against the enemy of your country. I have studied ike. Not as much as you have. I have never come across any situation where he faced antigerman prejudice, even world war i or world war ii where you think the brits might think, you want to put someone named eisenhower in charge . Did he run into any antigerman prejudice coming up through the ranks, becoming commanderinchief against germany because he is name is obviously ethnically german . Prof. Galambos he hated hitlers. He hated the holocaust. He wept at those camps. He wanted american soldiers to see those camps and see what happened. He hated that. I think that spills over. He had a soldiers respect for the german army. The germans fought well, even when they ran out of men area out of men. He admired their discipline, hated what the country had done. That is my answer. I do not see any of that in his early career. I cannot find that there. I know ultimately it was very important to him. Was his ethnicity something he ever talked about . Prof. Galambos he did not talk about that, no. It was not a big subject with him. Just going by the long written record, you go by what is there. You do not see it. Thank you. Prof. Galambos over here . Yes, i have such admiration for the range of ikes accomplishments, but i keep coming back to the question of iran and guatemala. An Interesting Data point of the First National security Conference Meeting with the cia where they proposed a coup against the iranian leaders, ikes first impulse was why cant we loan him money and help him stabilize his government. Which is from the declassified minutes of that meeting. By the end, he is steamrollered. The outcome is a nightmare for iran that continues today. The following year, guatemala, the former president said plainly, i want to make guatemala a capitalist country. A modern capitalist country. The cia stages a coup. Those poor people are still they are still reeling from the bloodbath. There is the initial moment of decency in ike. What happened to that guy . We hear him again in his farewell speech. I just think about half a dozen democracies in the emerging world that suffered horrifically from the wrong turn he took. Prof. Galambos i agree with you. I said i thought the revolutionary process was the hardest thing for him to understand. Particularly if it was on the left. He tended to emphasize the communist aspect rather than the National Aspect of things. I think that led him into what in hindsight being a historian, i am told repeatedly by people that hindsight is perfect. Actually it is not. Historians disagree like everybody else. I think that was one of the weak points. His response to that would be, i think, we had eight years of peace and prosperity. Thats how he would answer. He would say, yes, and i would agree with that. We are not saying he was a saint. He was a president. President , ok . He is like other men and women. They make mistakes. I see the iranian policy in the guatemalan policy as mistakes, myself. Looking back. But i have a tremendous advantage knowing how things turned out. You do, too. I agree with you. Yes . I am out of my element here. I want to ask several questions, if i may. Prof. Galambos lets go one at a time. I have a limited mind. I do things sequentially. My first one is, is dday the same as doomsday . Prof. Galambos it was for germany in the end. [laughter] in the balancedbudget, prof. Galambos the day before dday, and this is going to go in the eisenhower memorial, all the paratroopers he got with, he hated the thought they were going to die. He was acutely aware and knew that was the price of victory. He did not go to see the generals. He went to see the troops. Go ahead. Was this the era this is not my era. Was this the era of the north and the south, the Confederate Flag in the dixie . Galambos where is like on civil rights . Where is ike on civil rights . For his entire military career until 1945, he seems to not be bothered, because he did not write anything that suggested to me that he was bothered by segregation in the military, segregation in american society. I would say in 1945, he changed his mind, why . We were running out of men as well. The germans ran out of men and now america was running out of combat soldiers. He decided to give africanamericans the first opportunity to engage in combat equally. That was a turning point. When he returned to washington, he was more vigorous about civil rights. He worked with Lyndon Johnson to get a form of the civil rights law they could get through congress. It was a weak form of the Civil Rights Act of the 1950s. The tuskegee airmen, was that before or after him . Prof. Galambos that was the Second World War, yes. I will talk about the air force just for a moment. That was the only time in his career he said he would leave. He told churchill, if i do not get the Strategic Air force support at the day, i am not your man. Churchill recognized, that is an ultimatum. You dont do that more than once. He did that and he got the support he needed, but that is the only time in his career that i know that he actually did that. Industrial power versus the farmers of america . Prof. Galambos in 1870, agriculture and commerce produced more National Income than industry. By 1890, the sides were reversed. We were becoming an industrial urban society. Farmers were holding on politically, and they have been very good at that. At preserving their position. We worked through the 1920s to try to get some way to deal with agriculture it gave ike fits. We were in the midst of an agricultural revolution in the 1950s. All kinds of new techniques, new crops, new things were emerging that were extremely important. He thought we could be getting rid of some of the subsidies, but boy, by the end of eight years of fighting, they were right where they were when he started. He did not win that fight. He fought for eight years. He did not win. I was not born in that era, but i was wondering, your insight, take us back to when president ike versus president or Running Official stephenson. Prof. Galambos yes, yes. He ran against stevenson and one, he was a national hero. He was a national hero. He gave his first speech, it was awful. It went really bad. What he did was, which is typical of ike, he was flexible, he got instruction and help. Stephenson was moderate. He was in the middle of the democratic party. He was running uphill because of its personality. People trusted ike. That had been true from west point on. His colleagues trusted him. This is my last question. You mentioned something about and then is the baby boomer generation after ikes generation . Prof. Galambos the baby boomers come out in the postwar period. That is the first baby boom, yes. When the soldiers came home. They had more on their mind then education. [laughter] prof. Galambos that light is right behind you, thats why i keep sucking down. I was wondering if you could comment on indochina. Yes. Ikes policy toward china was set by the fact america had a strong sense, it never had we thought we had china. We never had china. We thought because of the Second World War that they would be our allies we were very disappointed when the revolution took place and when our side, chang kaishek, lost and the communists one. I think a lot of us were influenced by that, i think a lot of us were influenced to see communists everywhere as the same, as one thing. I think eisenhower was influenced by that. He was influenced in terms of dominoes. When one falls, the whole row falls. He was very worried about that. I would say his problem was he did not give the credit to nationalism that he should have. Not just ike, but also the people who gave him advice, should have looked deeper into those societies. A lot of them have changed now. You talked about ike and his brother. You might tell us more about ed. The brother we all remember was milton. You might have even known him. Prof. Galambos i remember milton very well. We were in a bunker down in the basement and i would walk home, and at that time, milton was leaving right on charles street. We would sit and chat. He would always make a martini. [laughter] prof. Galambos for me and for him. I want to tell you, that was back when i drank. I have not had a drink for 20 years, but i remember those. [laughter] prof. Galambos i had three and a half blocks yet to walk after i left there. It was not always easy. But i loved milton and talked a lot with him. What was eds claim to fame . Prof. Galambos he was superior intellectually, he was older. He was in ikes class. You have someone older, stronger, faster, smarter. That is hard to deal with. Right in your class. He was extremely good athlete, a great golf player and a great lawyer. He and ike disagreed about whether there should be a middle way or whether there should be eds way. That is where they parted ways. But ike was in the white house and ed was on the west coast. Good questions. You got an a plus today. I even grade the pilots when we land. We had a c plus landing. I have never had an f. U2 spy plane and gary powers, i consider that one of his worst mistakes. Reconnaissance. Prof. Galambos oh, yes. He got caught like a little boy. Like a little boy. Did you take those books out of the bookshelf when i told you not to . I told you to stop. That little boy gets caught, and he got caught. The important thing about u2s it was the measure at that time of our technological superiority. Ike knew that, so did the soviets. Why didnt they think of that before that happened . It showed their weakness. They were unable to do anything about it until that time. Ike, just as with the cia, he was dreadfully concerned about a surprise attack. Why . Pearl harbor. Ike was dreadfully concerned about a surprise attack, and the u2 was the best defense. It gave us incredible information. We were at the technological turning point where we could do the whole thing with spy satellites. Ike took a chance and he threw the dice, and that one, he lost. Did he consider that tarnished his reputation as he was leaving the presidency for several years after that . At the time . Prof. Galambos well, at that time i dont know whether you ever read these polls they put out in newspapers. The media, if they say its going to be great, i say its going to be half great. If they say we are going to lose the war tomorrow, i say about half that fast. Ike, when he left office, did not have a highranking among president s. Most academicians i know are left of center. Columbia, that new york intellectual group, really despised ike. They thought he was a military officer and so what . They did not appreciate that. His reputation was down here. We kept getting other president s, and every time we would have another president , his repetition goes up a little bit. Reputation goes up a little bit. Now he is in the top five. [laughter] prof. Galambos competing with george washington, Abraham Lincoln this is the man who was a football coach, remember . His reputation went up. He thought he would be the wise man, and in fact, i deal with that at the end of the book. He thought he would be the wise man for america. I still that from the title of a book by isaacson. Great writer. He thought he would be the wise man and he would give counsel, but they ignored him. They were doing their own things. They talked to him, but they did not do what he said. He did not turn out to be the wise man in retirement. Professor prof. Galambos this better be good. This is the army speaking now. I would like to ask you about the relationship between eisenhower and academics, which you were just speaking to. Particularly the book president ial power and how they cast ike as a prisoner of his staff system. I was curious about your opinion of what ike thought about the academics and the scholars he dealt with from the universities in the course of his presidency. Sen. Roberts prof. Galambos he got along at prof. Galambos he got along at columbia with a select group of academicians and he had interests that were academic. He was upset by the number of people who were unable to serve because of various health or mental aspects. He wanted some study of that, why the had been a problem the Second World War. He dealt with academics on those grounds in his personal life, he was inclined to like people who he thought made the kind of decisions that he made. And that showed columbia was sort of the nexus of it. Because he wanted to get the budget balanced, he wanted to do good things for the university, but he never and remember, he replaced a president who had tremendous ties to the department. So he never dipped down into the department. He really liked history. He liked to read history, study history, but i do not think he really had the kind of respect that some other president s have had. He did not have brains as fdr did. He recruited intellectuals to give advice about policy. I was not inclined in that direction, though he would listen and try to understand. In that regard, he would work with people, but generally, no. That was probably another one of those things that was not part of his personality. You are on. Getting back into the 1960s, president kennedy ended up taking the responsibility for the v of takes. The bay of pigs. Did that sort of disappoint ike . What is your understanding of ikes position in the bay of pigs, planning and getting it going . Prof. Galambos he never, i think, would have launched the bay of pigs in the way that it was launched. You remember dday was done with overwhelming power concentrated, to the point where you attack. I think he was skeptical of it as he was skeptical of the french in vietnam. He was skeptical of their ability and our ability to handle the situation at the bay of pigs. He didnt make he was not inclined to make the announcements of his reputation at that time, i think he thought it was intact. But, there is a question about it being an ill planned venture. Thank you. Prof. Galambos thank you. [applause] [indistinct chatter] and now to the lecture part of our program. Our speaker tonight is dr. William hitchcock, author of the age of Eisenhower America and and legacy of the nations 34th president. The White House Historical association hosted this event. Its an hour and 10 minutes. And now to the lecture part of our program. Our speaker tonight is dr. William hitchcock, author of the age of Eisenhower America and the world in the 1950s. Dr. Hitchcock is the william r. Corcoran professor of history at the university of virginia where we focuses on