Jim Newton: Today's Politicians Could Learn from Eisenhower

Jim Newton is The Times' editor-at-large and the author of "Eisenhower: The White House Years," to be published in October.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, he came to office convinced that among the obligations he assumed was that of calming the nation. His predecessors, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, had governed through a series of crises and calamities — World War II, the Berlin Crisis, the Soviet atomic bomb, the Korean War, the 1952 steel strike — and Ike believed that Washington's fixation with crisis was unsettling to the American people and destabilizing to the economy.

With that in mind, he set out to project an aura of calm command, and consistently sought a place between the anti-communist Republicans who anchored the right wing of his party and the New Deal Democrats who pulled that party to its left. It was, Eisenhower liked to say, his "Middle Way," a "practical working basis between extremists" arrived at through patient and temperate negotiation.

Few lessons of Eisenhower's era have been more lost on the heirs to his political legacy. The events of the past two weeks have included many political sins, but among the most striking is the rush of America's leaders to court crisis rather than exhibit sober, sound leadership. For weeks, Republican House members risked economic calamity by their refusal to raise the debt ceiling — an act that dozens of Congresses have routinely approved in the decades since Eisenhower's presidency. Some seemed to enjoy it. As Rep. Michele Bachmann said glibly: "Someone has to say no. I will." And House Speaker John Boehner fairly shouted when he proclaimed, "I stuck my neck out a mile."...