To the Editor:

I was delighted to read “Liking Ike” by Andrew Roberts [January]. It is not often that one reads or hears anything except praise for the Eisenhower administration, and Roberts is almost certainly correct that siding with the USSR and Egypt against Israel, Britain, and France in 1956 “may have been Eisenhower’s greatest failure.”

While Eisenhower was supporting the Soviet Union in the Middle East, he was doing the same thing with his silence when the Hungarian uprising was crushed. Americans might have expected our country to support a democratic movement that was fighting Communist tyranny, but we did not. It was less surprising but also unfortunate when we ignored democracy to cooperate with Britain in overthrowing the legally elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. Mossadegh was something of a nut and was friendly with the Soviet Union, but replacing him with the Shah was clearly anti-democratic. Eisenhower couldn’t have predicted that the Shah would be overthrown and replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini; nevertheless, he should have understood that an imposed monarchy would be inherently unstable.

There were two other times when Eisenhower opposed democratic elections. He overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and he canceled general elections in Vietnam in 1956, as he tells us in the first edition—and only the first edition—of Mandate for Change. It is understandable that he feared the election of Communist leaders, but he was the same person who cooperated with the USSR in Hungary and during the Suez Crisis. And he was the same person who ended the Korean War in 1953, leading to the Kim Dynasty, which is still in power. It was the first time that America had cut and run. We can forgive Eisenhower for wanting to avoid a war with China, but it remains another example of his consistent lack of support for democracy.

George Jochnowitz
New York City