Lecture Date: April 14, 2016
The Parrish Snead Franklin Simpson, PLC Lecture
President Dwight Eisenhower is remembered as a grandfatherly figure who presided benignly over the prosperous but dull 1950s. In fact, the 1950s were a dangerous decade as the two great superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union amassed huge nuclear arsenals and came close to using them. In his biography Ike's Bluff, Thomas shows how Eisenhower, the hero of World War Two, avoided a far deadlier World War Three. Ike was hardly the genial, slightly dim figure he appeared to be, but rather a crafty, calculating commander in chief who used all his wiles and his profound experience with a terrible war to avoid a worse one.
Speaker: Evan Thomas
Evan Thomas is the author of nine books, including several New York Times best sellers. His books include Ike's Bluff, Robert Kennedy, The Wise Men (with Walter Isaacson), Sea of Thunder, and most recently, Being Nixon. For 33 years, he was a reporter, writer and editor at Time and Newsweek. For ten years he was Washington Bureau Chief for Newsweek. He has won numerous awards, including a National Magazine Award for reporting in 1999. A graduate of Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School, he taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton for ten years.