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Dwight David Eisenhower's expansion of Social Security was proof positive for many mid‐century political observers that basic elements of the New Deal had achieved a durable place in postwar America, and evidence of a rough consensus that the federal government had some sort of obligation to insure against economic insecurity. The admixture of liberalism and conservatism that characterized Eisenhower‐era social welfare policy can be ascribed to several factors: the combination of these two values in Eisenhower's own thinking about social welfare; the influence of the relatively liberal group of advisors whom Eisenhower charged with policy leadership, as well as the role played by bureaucratic advocates of Social Security; the growing political popularity of economic security programs in general and Social Security in particular; and the continuing conservative counterweight against programs such as public health insurance provided by lobbying groups such as the American Medical Association.

Writing in the late 1980s, the eminent economist Herbert Stein observed that the economic record of the Eisenhower era 'was probably superior to that of any other eight‐year period in this century'. Eisenhower economics offers a model of economic policy that eschewed the ideological extremes of the policy debate over how to strengthen recovery from the Great Recession of 2007‐2009. In its consideration of the somewhat fragmentary historiography of the Eisenhower administration's economic management, this chapter reviews scholarly consideration of: the nature of Eisenhower prosperity; the president's philosophy of political economy; the organization of his administration's economic policymaking processes; the use of fiscal policy to achieve the administration's economic goals of high employment and low inflation; the growing significance of monetary policy; and the so‐called gold drain of the final Eisenhower years.

There is an increasingly robust literature on cultural interaction broadly construed, including a substantial sub‐literature on the relationship of political and psychological warfare to US–West European relation. In order to address these varied strands of historiography, this chapter briefly reviews some major works on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It surveys US relations with France and West Germany, including German rearmament and the European Defense Community (EDC); the debate over the application of the 'New Look' to NATO in 1954; the 'chance for peace' phase from Stalin's death in 1953 to the Geneva Summit of 1955; the challenges to alliance relations from Suez to Sputnik; and the final dilemmas of the Eisenhower era in Europe: Berlin and Charles de Gaulle. The chapter then reviews the literature on NATO's medium powers and Europe's neutral states. It concludes with an assessment of the state of the field and suggestions for future research.

Following World War II, Americans drastically changed how they built cities and how they used urban space for work, home, and play. Suburban growth and central city decline comprised two of the most pressing domestic challenges during Eisenhower's presidency. When Eisenhower took office, the nation was recovering from a severe postwar housing shortage. As middle‐class Americans created new communities on the urban rim, most turned their backs on the nation's declining city centers. During the Eisenhower era, the West epitomized the promises and perils of postwar suburban growth and metropolitan decentralization. By the mid‐1950s, cities had become the proving grounds for a national mass movement for African American civil rights. The simultaneous urbanization and politicization of Native Americans in the post‐ World War II period provides another striking example of how urban transformations sparked social movements that propelled the nation into the rights revolution of the 1960s.

\"Edward Kaplan's To Kill Nations is a fascinating work that packs a thermonuclear punch of ideas and arguments... The work is suitable for anyone from advanced undergraduates to experts in the field.\" ― Strategy Bridge In To Kill Nations , Edward Kaplan traces the evolution of American strategic airpower and preparation for nuclear war from this early air-atomic era to a later period (1950-1965) in which the Soviet Union's atomic capability, accelerated by thermonuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, made American strategic assets vulnerable and gradually undermined air-atomic strategy. Kaplan throws into question both the inevitability and preferability of the strategic doctrine of MAD. He looks at the process by which cultural, institutional, and strategic ideas about MAD took shape and makes insightful use of the comparison between generals who thought they could win a nuclear war and the cold institutional logic of the suicide pact that was MAD. Kaplan also offers a reappraisal of Eisenhower's nuclear strategy and diplomacy to make a case for the marginal viability of air-atomic military power even in an era of ballistic missiles.

Political capitalism is an economic and political system in which the economic and political elite cooperate for their mutual benefit. Political capitalism as an economic system was explicitly implemented in the fascist and corporatist economies of Germany and Italy between the World Wars, and as he was leaving office, President Eisenhower warned, in 1961, of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, a manifestation of political capitalism. Economics tends to use individuals as the unit of analysis, so is oriented toward recognizing that different individuals have different interests, rather than that groups of people might work together to further their interests, and that group boundaries might be determined by social divisions. However, an examination of the academic literature in economics shows that the building blocks for a theory of political capitalism are already in place. This article draws together several strands in the academic literature to show how they can be woven together to understand political capitalism as a distinct economic system. Adapted from the source document.

When we were boys and gas was nineteen cents a gallon we boys knew the men, the veterans: a navy pilot turned hard-hearing haberdasher with impeccable suits and deeply sad smile; a puffy-eyed ex-infantry used-car salesman whose blood flowed .08 Jim Beam; a rumpled scoutmaster Marine whose feet still rotted decades after Guadalcanal; a slight former ordnance trucker with a passion for Nazi memorabilia, crew cuts, and racial purity; a smoking one-legged tank driver with a small pension and morphine pet monkey; and a khaki-clad counterman former sailor, whose hatred festered like the body parts he'd fished from the water at Pearl Harbor.

This engrossing and meticulously researched volume reexamines the decisions made by Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff in the crucial months leading up to the Battle of the Bulge. In late August 1944 defeat of the Wehrmacht seemed assured. On December 16, however, the Germans counterattacked. Received wisdom says that Eisenhower's Broad Front strategy caused his armies to stall in early September, and his subsequent failure to concentrate his forces brought about deadlock and opened the way for the German attack. Arguing to the contrary, John A. Adams demonstrates that Eisenhower and his staff at SHAEF had a good campaign strategy, refined to reflect developments on the ground, which had an excellent chance of destroying the Germans west of the Rhine.