Vietnam: An American Ordeal Sixth Edition George

Vietnam: An American Ordeal Sixth Edition George Donelson Moss© 2010. You book. Given emerging role United States mid-20th century world affairs online textbook, evaluation made leadership styles Presidents Dwight Eisenhower John Kennedy made effective inhibited effectiveness? Why United States direct leadership President important.

When assessing the effectiveness of Eisenhower's and Kennedy's leaderships, it is important to place their presidencies in the historical context. Both served in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Soviet Union and the United States were the world's two superpowers. However, this was not enough to define the political context in the international arena of the 1950s and 1960s. There were also regional powers, including the United Kingdom, France, China and Israel, which had to be considered whenever making regional decisions, such as the case was with the Suez Crisis, in 1956, during Eisenhower's presidency.

So, taking this brief description into account, one needs to set several elements or thresholds by which the effectiveness can be evaluated. These can be given by objectives that the presidents have proposed for the duration of their tenure and analyze whether they were successful or not in reaching these. One primary objective was the containment of the Soviet Union. Although some have argued that Eisenhower analyzed the alternative strategy of rollback (Borhi, 1999), this was clearly not the case: he did not support the Hungarian uprising and most of his other policies point to the idea that his primary interest was to contain the Soviet Union rather than destroy its power and allies.

John F. Kennedy was an even stronger supporter of containment, his actions, particularly during the Cuban Missile Crisis, were aimed to preventing the spread of Soviet influence in other countries rather than to move into regions where the Soviet Union was already firmly based, such as Eastern Europe. Both he and Eisenhower also had to balance the policy of containment with the continuous threat that the Soviet Union and the U.S. could, together or separately, destroy the world.

This was particularly true during the Kennedy's presidency, when, one can remember, the world came very close to its end. It was because of Kennedy's leadership (as well as that of the Soviet leader, Khrushchev, for that matter) that this did not happen. Nevertheless, these decades were dominated by a very real fear that the two superpowers could ultimately start a Third and final World War.

So, judging against these benchmarks (containing the Soviet Union, doing this while not destroying the planet), both Eisenhower and Kennedy showed tremendous leadership. In challenging circumstances, they managed to find the ways in which the Soviets could be contained (such as in the Korean War, for example), but doing so without destroying everything. At the moment of Kennedy's assassination, little had changed politically in the international arena since the Second World War: the Soviet Union still held under its influence the same regions.