The President during the '50s ...

... “Eisenhower in War and Peace” by Jean Edward Smith.

In 1953, when he took office, the United States was in the midst of the Korean War, a conflict the American public loathed. “Ike believed the country wanted peace,” Smith writes, “and he was determined to provide it. War was neither a board game nor a seminar exercise for armchair intellectuals.” So he got the country out of Korea, refused to rescue France from the folly of Dien Bien Phu (thus keeping the United States out of Vietnam) and declined to go along with France and England in their subsequent folly at Suez.