The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower ─ The Presidency-Keeping the Peace

Completing a monumental project that began with publication of The War Years in 1970, this final set of volumes of The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower contains 1,783 documents drawn from Eisenhower's second term as president from 20 January 1957 to 20 January 1961. In these years Eisenhower worked hard to hold the focus of American national politics on the two major objectives he had set for his presidency in 1952: to sustain the policy of containment without precipitating a war with the Soviet Union and to reduce the role of the federal government in U.S. domestic affairs. In both cases, events at home and abroad intruded—diverting attention to immediate problems, endangering the peace, and forcing the White House to devote most of its leadership to the crises of the day.

As president during this tense period, Eisenhower maintained an extensive and revealing correspondence with prominent individuals as well as with personal friends. These letters, together with the occasional entries made in his diary, shed considerable light upon the major national concerns of the 1950s. The volumes also include private and secret correspondence previously unavailable to scholars. Some of these items have been only recently declassified, and many appear here in print for the first time. Taken as a whole, the Eisenhower papers from 1957-61 provide firm documentary evidence of the manner in which Eisenhower dealt with the complex internal and external problems faced by all of our modern political leaders.

Louis Galambos is professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. His many books include The New American State: Bureaucracies and Policies since World War II and The Public Image of Big Business in America. He is co-editor (with Alfred D. Chandler Jr.) of volume VI of the Eisenhower Papers, editor of volumes VII-XIII, and co-editor (with Daun van Ee) of volumes XIV-XVII. All are available from Johns Hopkins. Daun van Ee, co-editor of the Eisenhower Papers and longtime lecturer in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of David Dudley Field and the Reconstruction of the Law. He now serves on the manuscripts staff at the Library of Congress.