CT Law, I was born during FDR’s Presidency but the first President I actually remember was Truman who turned out to be a pretty good President. thought Eisenhower was a good President as well. He was active and decisive when he needed to be and he followed Lord Northcote’s dictum,” When it is not necessary to do something, it is necessary NOT to do something”. I recall, at the time, the Democrats made light of Ike’s supposed intellectual limitations. They must have missed the part where he led the larges army of western allies ever assembled, to victory over Nazi Germany while holding that alliance of rivals together long enough to do it. F rom 1952 to 1960, Eisenhower presided over eight years of peace and prosperity (of course the fact that the U.S. had the only industrial plant that hadn’t been bombed to rubble may have had something to do wit that). We may recall it as folly now but the threat of attack by the Soviet Union, particularly while Stalin was alive, was quite real and terrifying. Ike’s actions at the time have to be viewed with his very real concern in avoiding nuclear holocaust.
Eisenhower achieved an armistice if the Korean war. Your statement attributing the beginning of the Vietnam involvement to Ike is absurd. Under the terms of the negotiated peace treaty between France and the Viet Minh (yes it was abrogated by the US) Ike sent some 430 military advisors to South Vietnam. The same number of advisors were there when Kennedy became President in 1961.
Kennedy and his SECDEF, McNamara, are the true authors of the debacle in Vietnam (N.B. McNamara continued to serve in that capacity under Johnson). It took another Republican, Richard Nixon, to end that war. P.S. If Kennedy hadn’t stolen the election in 1960 we probably would never have gone to war Vietnam
The First President I voted for was LBJ who rewarded me by sending me to aforementioned South East Asia war games. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a dirtbag, Nixon was a pretty good (albeit liberal) President. Besides extracting the U.S. from the disaster in Vietnam, he also signed off on the major environmental laws in force to this day as well as, wait for it…Affirmative Action!