Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World Audiobook

Quotes

• “With grace, insight, and originality, Evan Thomas has written a brilliant and engaging book about the most important of subjects: how close we came to Armageddon in the seemingly placid 1950s. Thomas’ Eisenhower is a canny savior, a president who kept the peace through feint and bluff. No one writes more astutely or more honestly than Evan Thomas. This is the work of a master of storytelling at his best.”

  — Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

• “Evan Thomas’ profoundly important book shows how the card-playing general who did as much as anyone to win World War II became the president most adroit at preserving peace. Behind his open smile, Eisenhower was a secretive and subtle leader with quiet moral courage. By projecting confidence while keeping his intentions concealed, he became the model of a nuclear-age peacekeeper. Thomas has produced a fascinating history that is also a brilliant guide to great leadership.”

  — Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Steve Jobs

• “Dwight Eisenhower was a great general and president because he was a great leader, and Ike’s Bluff uncracks the code. Evan Thomas’ original and fascinating book is an immersion in the Eisenhower School of Leadership, with lessons not only for presidents and military officers but leaders in other arenas of American life operating in moments of both tranquility and rapid change. Especially in these times, Thomas’ book is an essential reminder that strong leadership can be exercised with kindness, morality and respect for opponents.”

  — Michael Beschloss New York Times bestselling author of The Conquerors

• “A bustling, anecdotal book with a high-concept premise. [Thomas] approaches the ever more changeable Eisenhower legacy with new and intriguing questions.”

  — New York Times

• “Evan Thomas has written an insightful and penetrating study of my father, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dad was a hard man to know; he played it close to the chest. So despite my extensive exposure to him throughout forty six years, I still found myself learning new aspects, some of which, I must admit, are a bit painful. But the balance that Thomas achieves between Eisenhower the public servant and Eisenhower the man is, in my opinion, as close to the mark as we are likely to see.”

  — John Eisenhower

• “A thoroughly researched, tightly organized, and briskly written biography…Thomas is especially skilled at bringing characters of the era to life.”

  — Washington Post

• “An enjoyable book, fast-moving and packed with anecdotes.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “An imaginative, approachable volume that may well accelerate Eisenhower’s slow but seemingly inexorable movement toward presidential greatness. Evan Thomas is right. The greatest victories of the man who helped win World War II were the wars he did not fight.”

  — Boston Globe

• “Well-researched and highly readable…Thomas’ account is sure to appeal to older readers who can recall the mandatory duck-and-cover drills in the classroom and to others with an interest in a fascinating and pivotal period when the nation was in better hands than many at the time probably realized.”

  — Associated Press

• “[Thomas is] a five-star biographer who blows apart that image [of Ike as a bumbling old man] with devastating detail.”

  — Vanity Fair

• “Highly absorbing.”

  — Huffington Post

• “Thomas has written a book that elucidates Eisenhower’s wisdom for general readers.”

  — Richmond Times-Dispatch

• No biographer at work today has a surer feel for the human dimension of history than Evan Thomas...The War Lovers is as good as popular history gets.

  — Jon Meacham, author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

• In his absorbing narrative of men who found duty or fulfillment or personal meaning in a war for empire-and of other men, like William James, who feared that such a quest would rot the nation's soul-Thomas has illuminated, in a compulsively readable style, a critical moment in American history. This is a book that, with its style and panache, is hard to forget and hard to put down.

  — Ronald Steel, New York Times Book Review

• Thomas has delivered an innovative, frequently entertaining and valuable retelling of an episode that set the pattern for more than a century of foreign military adventurism. This timely book is a cautionary tale about how the psyche of powerful and ambitious leaders may matter more than fact-or even truth-when the question of war arises.

  — James McGrath Morris, The Washington Post

• Thomas takes some risks in his biography of Theodore Roosevelt and his cohorts, trying to get not just inside their actions, but inside their heads. The result is an intriguing examination of the pull that war has on men.

  — Steve Weinberg, Minneapolis Star Tribune