And despite a library’s worth of books, letters, papers and oral histories documenting this president’s life and times, Eisenhower’s importance is only beginning to be widely noticed. The impression of a bland man overwhelmed by the demands of the Oval Office has been so easily embraced that it refuses to go away.  Even this year, when new books and reprints about the 34th president abound and Eisenhower revisionism is on the rise, the subject remains below the radar, or at least without wide readership. Evan Thomas’s “Ike’s Bluff,” a bustling, anecdotal book with a high-concept premise, aims to change all that.  Unlike Jean Edward Smith’s heftier “Eisenhower in War and Peace,” a major biography that arrived this year, Mr. Thomas’s account does not span the full Eisenhower story. It focuses on the presidential years (1953-61) and concentrates on a matter of strategy. “Having done as much as any man to win World War II, Ike devoted the rest of his public service to keeping America and the world out of World War III,” Mr. Thomas asserts.  As he explains it: “His ability to save the world from nuclear Armageddon entirely depended on his ability to convince America’s enemies — and his own followers — that he was willing to use nuclear weapons. This was a bluff of epic proportions.”  At first Mr. Thomas hammers the bluff conceit so hard that he risks sounding forced and facile. But he winds up making a substantive case for the way that Eisenhower, the World War II Allied forces’ supreme commander and one of the greatest shoo-ins in American electoral history, brought his military instincts from the battlefield to the White House.  That background did not make him hawkish; anything but. His first secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, took care of the saber rattling, while Eisenhower denounced what he named “the military-industrial complex.” But Eisenhower, according to Mr. Thomas, adopted a tough, all-or-nothing attitude toward armed conflict. As the first president to serve two full four-year terms in the age of nuclear weapons, Eisenhower scorned what he sarcastically called “a nice, sweet, World War II type of war” and implied a capacity for something worse. America’s new cold war enemies had no reason not to believe him.  Mr. Thomas supports this claim by drawing on sources recently declassified or largely overlooked. Some of his most valuable information comes from minor-seeming figures who knew this president best.  Two books have been written about Eisenhower’s secretary, Ann Whitman; they are out of print and barely figure in Mr. Smith’s biography. But her writings, described by Mr. Thomas, show her to be an astute observer of presidential mood swings. And who knows what else? Mr. Thomas does say, without further explanation, that she left her husband to be with her boss.  Eisenhower’s doctor, Howard McCrum Snyder, knew better than anyone that the commander in chief paid a heavy physical toll for the blandness he projected in public — and once had a presidential golf club thrown at him. Eisenhower’s son, retired Brig. Gen. John Eisenhower, worked for (and was once told to drop dead by) his own father. As for aides, Mr. Thomas says: “Television viewers saw a genial grandfather. His aides sat at the foot of Vesuvius.”  “Ike’s Bluff” admires its subject so raptly that it attempts difficult contortions on his behalf. About civil rights, Mr. Thomas plays apologist for Eisenhower’s failure to be more outspoken. “He was probably shrewd to operate behind the scenes on civil rights legislation, although his invisible hand was often taken for detachment,” the books says.  And it cites other instances of the vagueness, opacity or silence that dim the Eisenhower legacy. But by and large, the “Ike’s Bluff” theory effectively explains his behavior in the Korean War, the Suez Canal crisis, the showdowns with China over the islands Quemoy and Matsu and the downing of an American U-2 spy plane in the Soviet Union.  The U-2 incident stands out with special clarity because Mr. Thomas evokes the president’s dealings with the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev so well. Although the book’s main focus is on a string of international standoffs, the little details often have more freshness and insight than its towering ones do. So an account of Khrushchev’s highly colorful 1959 visit to the United States — which draws on Peter Carlson’s hilarious-sounding book “K Blows Top” — is a standout episode here (though the trip is glossed over or aridly summarized in other Eisenhower books). In this telling, Khrushchev’s interpreter began to draw little mushroom clouds in his notes because the subject came up so often.  Mr. Thomas’s earlier book on the Central Intelligence Agency, “The Very Best Men” (not to be confused with “The Wise Men,” written with Walter Isaacson), gives him excellent preparation for describing the culture of condescension created by Eisenhower’s self-styled superiors in Washington. (Their criticism was often aired by the well-connected columnist Joseph Alsop, a particularly vituperative enemy.)  Yet Eisenhower, deliberately if mysteriously, did much to diminish his own image. Imagine a more recent president saying, “That’s just too complicated for a dumb bunny like me” and not catching hell for it. Then imagine a man who quit smoking by ordering himself to do so.  Eisenhower’s combination of courage, petulance and cunning are hard qualities to reconcile. And Mr. Thomas sometimes has no answers. But he approaches the ever more changeable Eisenhower legacy with new and intriguing questions.
In âIkeâs Bluff: President Eisenhowerâs Secret Battle to Save the Worldâ Evan Thomas examines the contradictions of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president.