Boot’s conclusions about Eisenhower

Re “Who likes Ike?” Opinion, Nov. 1

Having entered the Army during the Eisenhower administration, I disagree with Max Boot’s conclusion that President Eisenhower should not be celebrated as a “near-great” president.

In 1954, preventive war with the Soviet Union was seriously presented as a policy option to Eisenhower; Ike replied that this was contrary to every principle upon which our nation was founded and which it continues to profess. Perhaps if the present occupant of the White House had followed this advice, this nation would not be in a mess in Iraq.

Eisenhower also anticipated what would happen if a president, such as George W. Bush, lacked the necessary military training required to lead this country: “Someday there is going to be a man sitting in my present chair who has not been raised in the military services and who will have little understanding of where slashes in their estimates can be made with little or no damage. If that should happen while we still have the state of tension that now exists in the world, I shudder to think of what could happen in this country.”

NORMAN G. AXE

Santa Monica

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For four years, Boot has advocated the invasion of Iraq. Last month, he wrote that the U.S. should fund ethnic insurgents in Iran as a way of promoting greater stability in the Middle East. Then he writes that Eisenhower’s decision to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, was justified on the grounds that Mossadegh was a leftist. Is there any failed, disastrous policy in the Middle East that Boot won’t support?

JEFFREY C. BLUTINGER

Long Beach

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Boot calls for a “more nuanced” assessment of Eisenhower with writing that is anything but nuanced. Referring to Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser as an “odious thug” is far from nuanced. And casually dismissing Eisenhower’s warnings about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, and the people who credit Eisenhower for his prescient warning, is also singularly obtuse -- especially if one considers the entrenched nexus of self-serving interest groups who control the current geopolitical environment.

LINDA MAMOUN

Boulder, Colo.

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Boot illustrates how far defenders of flawed U.S. foreign policies will go to distort history. He asserts that the “CIA’s overthrow of leftist leaders Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala” was, in a Cold War context, “justified in blocking rising communist influence in these two countries.” The actual reason those leaders were overthrown was to defend American corporate interests there: oil in Iran and United Fruit Co. land in Guatemala.

Boot conveniently overlooks a good reason to dislike Ike. It was his administration that sabotaged the 1954 Geneva Accords, which called for a national election in 1956 to re-unify Vietnam. When a CIA study concluded that Ho Chi Minh would win the national vote, the U.S. introduced weapons there to support our client dictator. The U.S. soon plunged itself and Vietnam into war. Now there’s a real reason to dislike Ike.

EDWARD POPE

Irvine