"Eisenhower: The President" is the eagerly awaited second and concluding volume of Stephen Ambrose's brilliantly received biography. This definitive, sympathetic, objective and sometimes critical work is the culmination of twenty years of research by one of the editors of the Eisenhower Papers. Drew Middleton in The New York Times praised the first volume as "the most complete and objective work yet on the general who became President."

This volume begins with Ike as President-elect and the whole new set of problems he has to deal with. Ambrose provides us with the first assessment of a Cold War President based on access to the entire record, and the result is full of surprises on a wide range of issues that faced the President over the next eight years. Many of the documents unearthed by Ambrose have never been seen by anyone else since Ike wrote or read them, and they cover a broad range of subjects. Eisenhower's rejection of the near-unanimous advice of the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and the State Department to use atomic weapons, the Eisenhower-Nixon relationship; civil rights and McCarthy; and Ike's most private views on and relationships with de Gaulle, Anthony Eden, Nixon, Kruschev, and Dulles among many others.

Ranking Eisenhower as a great President (Just below FDR and Wilson among those of the Twentieth Century), Professor Ambrose provides us with an extraordinary portrait of a good man who lived life to the fullest, and who made a real contribution to the Presidency.