The Eisenhower Diaries

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, c1981. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. very good/good. 24 cm, 445, illus., notes, sources, index, DJ in plastic sleeve. Robert Hugh Ferrell (born May 8, 1921, in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American historian and author of several books on Harry S. Truman and the diplomatic history of the United States. He served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during the Second World War and was an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. He received a B.S. in Education from Bowling Green State University in 1946 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1951, where he worked under the direction of Samuel Flagg Bemis and his dissertation won the John Addison Porter Prize. He went on to win the 1952 Beer Prize for his first book, Peace In Their Time, a study of the making of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Ferrell taught for many years at Indiana University in Bloomington, starting as an Assistant Professor in 1953 and rising to Distinguished Professor of History in 1974. He has held several notable visiting professorships, including Yale University in 1955 and the Naval War College in 1974. He supervised thirty-five Ph.D.. students from 1961 to 1988. The diaries of the late Dwight D. Eisenhower are unique documents, in that they alone, in the mass of Ike's prose, reveal the innermost thoughts of the soldier-statesman.In his books the memoir of the Second World War, the two large volumes on the presidency, the incomplete autobiography written near the end of his life Eisenhower related the course of events over the years, with descriptive detail and frequently with humor, but he usually stayed away from analysis. In his many private letters to friends and acquaintances, some of which have been published, he was more frank, but he still held back. And the public record of his military career and of his presidency does not reflect many open, frank statements, proofs that the soldier-president thought long and deeply about issues, personal or public; it has given substance to the speculation by many of his contemporaries and by some later students of Eisenhower that he was essentially a public relations man and that his life was all outward an expression of assent and agreement or at least of forbearance, of a man who never had an idea or, if he did, would quickly chase it out of sight.