Timothy’s
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(group member since Nov 26, 2017)
Timothy’s
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Mar 20, 2018 05:35PM
"“NO PRESIDENT HAD EVER HAD so little experience of politics and so little firsthand experience of American life” as Dwight D. Eisenhower, asserted the veteran political journalist Marquis Childs in his 1958 book, The Captive Hero. And many critics echoed this claim: after a long career in the protective, isolated world of the American military, including lengthy postings overseas in Panama, the Philippines, and Europe, Eisenhower, upon taking office as president, knew little about the basic rhythms of ordinary American life and was unschooled in the ways of politics. True, Eisenhower had spent his adult life in the hierarchical, rule-bound world of the army, and he’d never been elected to anything in his life.
But Childs was doubly wrong. Eisenhower was intimately familiar with the nature of rural American life, having been raised by God-fearing, dutiful, and frugal parents in the Kansas farmlands, and he left Kansas at the age of 20 to enter upon a career in the most political of institutions, the U.S. Army, in which he rose, over many years of patient labor, to a position of preeminence. His humble origins and his extensive leadership experience were the twin sources of Eisenhower’s popular appeal and his political success. He had deep roots in Middle America, of which he remained proud and by which he set his moral compass. At the same time he learned how to operate in, and finally dominate, a massive bureaucracy filled with ambitious egos hungry for glory.
As Garry Wills memorably wrote, Eisenhower made his ascent to power by climbing “a slippery ladder of bayonets.” Not only did he achieve greatness in the American armed services; during the Second World War he asserted control over the British Army as well, forging its fractious, skeptical generals into a cohesive fighting force alongside the Americans. Together—and under his command—they defeated the Germans. His leadership of the combined Allied armies in Western Europe required vision, patience, compromise, goodwill, and inexhaustible persistence: precisely the skills that prepared him for the White House."
"Hitler had sacked Hoepner in January and dismissed him from the army in disgrace for retreating in disobedience to his ‘Halt Order’. Hoepner had then instituted a law-suit against the Reich over the loss of his pension rights – and won. With Hitler’s new powers, this could never happen again."- From "Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis" by Ian Kershaw (2001)
Mar 19, 2018 08:06AM
In a 2017 survey, presidential historians ranked Dwight D. Eisenhower fifth on the list of great presidents, behind the perennial top four: Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Teddy Roosevelt. Historian William Hitchcock shows that this high ranking is justified. Eisenhower’s accomplishments were enormous, and loom ever larger from the vantage point of our own tumultuous times.A former general, Ike kept the peace: he ended the Korean War, avoided a war in Vietnam, adroitly managed a potential confrontation with China, and soothed relations with the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. He guided the Republican Party to embrace central aspects of the New Deal like Social Security. He thwarted the demagoguery of McCarthy and he advanced the agenda of civil rights for African Americans. As part of his strategy to wage, and win, the Cold War, Eisenhower expanded American military power, built a fearsome nuclear arsenal and launched the space race. In his famous Farewell Address, he acknowledged that Americans needed such weapons in order to keep global peace—but he also admonished his citizens to remain alert to the potentially harmful influence of the “military-industrial complex.”
From 1953 to 1961, no one dominated the world stage as did President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Age of Eisenhower is the definitive account of this presidency, drawing extensively on declassified material from the Eisenhower Library, the CIA and Defense Department, and troves of unpublished documents. In his masterful account, Hitchcock shows how Ike shaped modern America, and he astutely assesses Eisenhower’s close confidants, from Attorney General Brownell to Secretary of State Dulles. The result is an eye-opening reevaluation that explains why this “do-nothing” president is rightly regarded as one of the best leaders our country has ever had.
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#History #AmericanHistory
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Mar 16, 2018 10:16PM
From a speech made by Vadim Orlov, chief of the special signals intelligence detachment on the B-59 (a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean during the Cuban Missile Crisis). at the Havana conference in 2002. Not many people could get things back into control under these environmental and psychological circumstances.From The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg - Chapter 13
"At the Havana conference on the fortieth anniversary of the crisis in 2002—before an audience that included Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and naval officers from the Soviet Alfa group of hunter-killer submarines—Vadim Orlov, chief of the special signals intelligence detachment on the B-59, described conditions underwater that Saturday afternoon from the point of view of men in a barrel, or rabbits in a cage.
For some time we were able to avoid them quite successfully. However, the Americans were not dilettantes either.… [Starting at 4:59 P.M. on Saturday, October 27] they surrounded us and started to tighten the circle, practicing attacks and dropping depth charges. They exploded right next to the hull. It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.…
The temperature in the compartments was 45-50 C, up to 60C [113–122 degrees Fahrenheit, up to 140] in the engine compartment. The level of CO2 in the air reached a critical mark, practically deadly for people. One of the duty officers fainted and fell down. Then another one followed, then the third one.… They were falling like dominoes. But we were still holding on, trying to escape. We were suffering like this for about four hours. The Americans hit us with something stronger than the grenades [depth charges]—apparently with a practical depth bomb. We thought—that’s it—the end.
After this attack, the totally exhausted Savitsky, who, in addition to everything, was not able to establish connection with the General Staff, became furious. He summoned the officer who was assigned to the nuclear torpedo and ordered him to assemble it to battle readiness. “Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing somersaults here”—screamed emotional Valentin Grigorievich, trying to justify his order.
“We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not disgrace our Navy!” Orlov’s account continues: But we did not fire the nuclear torpedo—Savitsky was able to rein in his wrath. After consulting with Second Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov and his deputy political officer Ivan Semenovich Maslennikov, he made the decision to come to the surface."
#History #ColdWar
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"The power of imagination, according to my assumptions, freed human cultures to respond with extraordinary elasticity and diversity to the environments they confronted."The Cambridge World History: Volume 1, Introducing World History, to 10,000 BCE
Chapter 13: Before The Farmers: Culture And Climate, From The Emergence Of Homo Sapiens To About Ten Thousand Years Ago
by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
#history #globalhistory
http://amzn.to/2GuwzBa
Mar 13, 2018 02:06AM
"Don’t comfort yourself with the fact that the present age is at fault. That it is in the wrong does not yet mean that we are in the right; its barbarity does not imply that we already behave as human beings, just because we do not agree with it." — Boris Pasternak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erCtu...Support Public Television and encourage quality adult education
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Hi I do have some ideas, two that I would start as surveys are General US History: Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore by James T. Patterson Internation Relations: The American Century and Beyond: U.S. Foreign Relations, 1893-2014 by George C. Herring
This one cover more time than you're looking for but it shows the relationship between pre and post Vietnam well. Lou Cannon's bio of Reagan is good.
Post 2000 history I couldn't make a good recommendation because all the works I know of are so politically biased as to fall out of the history category.
Mar 07, 2018 01:57PM
As you are reading the book, think about how each of the quotes below relates to the material.https://www.thehistoryclub.net/wp?p=2584
Mar 07, 2018 12:01AM
View Chapter Response Quotes, Thought Questions, Articles and Resources, Primary Sources and Further reading for this chapter at:https://www.thehistoryclub.net/wp?p=2582
Mar 06, 2018 06:36PM
