Upon assuming the presidency in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower came to be seen by many as a doddering lightweight. Yet behind the bland smile and apparent simplemindedness was a brilliant, intellectual tactician. As Evan Thomas reveals in his provocative examination of Ike's White House years, Eisenhower was a master of calculated duplicity. As with his bridge and poker games he was eventually forced to stop playing after leaving too many fellow army officers...

Contains essays in which the authors examine the reasons why the United States invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, why the invasion failed, and how the incident has affected U.S. foreign policy and U.S.-Cuban relations.

From the publisher. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker confronts the coldest period of the cold war -- the moment in which personality, American political culture, public opinion, and high politics came together to define the Eisenhower Administration's policy toward China. A sophisticated, multidimensional account based on prodigious, cutting edge research, this volume convincingly portrays Eisenhower's private belief that close relations between the United States...