Most Americans, at the time and later, took a very different view of the 34th president. From 1944, when he led the allied forces to victory in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower was an international hero. Both Democrats and Republicans wanted him as their presidential candidate and courted him unrelentingly. In the White House, Ike’s favorability ratings hovered above 60 percent and sometimes approached 80 percent. Afraid to buck this popularity, mostly Democratic Congresses bowed to his will through two full terms. As late as 1968, according to Gallup, he was still the most admired man in America. And the familiar figure the public loved was far from cold or self-centered. On the contrary, he was seen as jovial, grinning, decent, avuncular and, if anything, a little too nice to be president.

So who exactly was Eisenhower–and why does he matter? A new flurry of public attention is posing both questions with fresh force.

Historians and biographers discovered long ago that Ike was not who he seemed. Beginning in the early 1980s, as the president’s diaries and archives became available, a generation of revisionist scholars painted a startling new picture of the iconic president. The new reading overlapped slightly with that of JFK–writers like Stephen Ambrose and Fred Greenstein found a new steeliness beneath the warm and fuzzy presidential persona–but all in all, it elevated Eisenhower.

In the revisionist telling, Eisenhower was much more capable and commanding than he had previously been understood to be. Yes, he had played a lot of golf and bridge. Yes, he garbled his syntax at press conferences. But, in reality, Ike had worked tirelessly to make running the country look easy. He was far from out of touch. When he delegated to subordinates, it was often a ploy to disguise his own involvement. Beneath the bland exterior, he was a cunning politician.

Greenstein’s metaphor was the “hidden hand.” Eisenhower’s M.O., at home and abroad, was to make things happen without leaving fingerprints. Among many telling examples was the way he dispatched his vice president, Richard Nixon, to rage about Communist subversion, bait Soviet leaders, kiss up to GOP regulars, distance the administration from Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and undertake countless other thankless errands that Ike himself would never be caught doing. Meanwhile, he and his administration delivered the peace and prosperity that many thought came automatically.

Fast forward to 2012. We’re in the middle of another wave of Eisenhower revisionism. Two new biographies have come out this year. A proposed monument on the Mall in Washington has prompted a burst of renewed interest. And, as in the 1980s, many readers are surprised by the Eisenhower they’re discovering.

What’s odd is that there’s been no revision of the revisionism. Both of this year’s biographies–one by Los Angeles Times journalist Jim Newton, the other from University of Toronto professor emeritus Jean Edward Smith–are largely admiring portraits that resurrect much of what was said by earlier scholars. Both books are thoroughly researched, compelling narratives. But neither departs in any meaningful way from the Ambrose-Greenstein revisionist line.

Even odder is that people seem to be surprised all over again. The revisionist understanding of the Eisenhower presidency has been conventional wisdom among scholars for 30 years. Apparently, though, most readers hadn’t bought it. The myth of the nice-guy, everybody’s-uncle, running-the-country-was-easy president was so strong that the truth never sank in.

For me, this raises two questions. First, I wonder if the true story will take this time or the myth will prevail again. Second, and maybe more important, I wonder why we as a nation can’t seem to get a true read on Eisenhower. Is there something about our politics–or our understanding of politics–that’s just too different?

For both Newton and Smith, the most important thing about Eisenhower was his moderation. Newton’s central theme is a phrase he borrows from Eisenhower’s own writings: Ike often said his goal was to find a “middle way” through the political thickets of his era. For Newton, “middle way” is a loose term–the best synonym is “balanced,” or the golden mean. And generally–civil rights is the exception–Newton finds favor with Eisenhower’s positions, often presented as so balanced that they come out sounding progressive.

So too with Smith’s account. If you blink, you might forget you’re reading about a Republican. Ike hated war and the military industrial complex. He spent liberally on infrastructure, expanded Social Security, and raised the minimum wage. Whatever his own view of desegregation, he appointed crusading judges and Supreme Court justices. He even–most delicious for a bien pensant biographer–had deeply mixed feelings about Richard Nixon.

This emphasis on moderation isn’t wrong. By today’s standards, Eisenhower was an exceedingly liberal Republican. He was a balancer by nature, suspicious of extremes. He saw America as a centrist nation, wanted to govern from the center, and fought bitterly throughout his presidency with the right wing of his party–Old Guard Republicans who wanted to roll back the New Deal and withdraw America from the world.

Still, I don’t think Newton or Smith get Ike quite right-neither where he was on the political spectrum nor the truly radical nature of his nonpartisanship.

Eisenhower was very precise in his writings about the middle way. For him, it wasn’t just somewhere in the hazy center between left and right. He rejected both Old Guard Republicanism and what he dismissed as “New Deal-Fair Deal” Democrats–but still stood firmly on the center right, with no uncertainty about what he thought best for the country.

Ike never considered running as a Democrat–he believed too much in the power of free enterprise. “As between the so-called … welfare state and the operation of … competitive enterprise, there is no doubt where I stand,” he wrote in his diary. “I am not on any fence.” He believed staunchly in limited government, abhorred what he called the “handout state,” was unwaveringly anti-Communist and determined to project American power in the world, albeit peacefully. To see him simply as a balancer–straddling the golden mean, wherever that was, and ultimately closer to liberal than conservative–is going too far.

At the same time, both Newton and Smith miss what’s most distinctive about Eisenhower and hard to understand today: a public persona that was not just “moderate” or “centrist,” but deliberately nonpartisan. However strong his partisan leanings, Ike thought he should hide them from the American people.

As Fred Greenstein noted in his earlier revisionist study, Ike wanted to be head of state, not head of a partisan government. He loathed having to identify with either party: he felt it was a betrayal of half the voters. Partisan appeals and attacks were for subordinates. The stance he sought wasn’t between the parties–it was genuinely beyond them.

Today, of course, this would be unimaginable. Presidents today see heading up their parties as an essential part of the job. As voters, we approach and understand politics through the twin prisms of tribe and ideology. We expect our presidents to be both party leader and commander-in-chief.

In the ’50s, Ike’s way was exactly what voters wanted. Reeling from the Depression, war (in Europe and Korea), a bitter postwar period of partisanship, labor strife, and wrenching McCarthyism, most Americans wanted not just a balancer but someone who could put politics to rest.

Eisenhower played to this hunger for calm and consensus, even while deploying a team of not-so-neutered subordinates to accomplish his ambitious goals–from avoiding war with the Soviets (after the Korean War, which he ended quickly, not a single American serviceman or woman died on Eisenhower’s watch) to fiscal discipline and historic economic growth.

In the long run, of course, it couldn’t last. In 1960, JFK was still competing with Ike to claim the political center. But eventually the blandness of the ’50s gave way to the tumult of the ’60s, and Eisenhower’s nonpartisan non-politics helped produce the ultra-partisanship of the conservative movement that emerged during his years in the White House. As National Review publisher William Rusher later wrote to editor-in-chief William F. Buckley, Jr., “Modern American conservatism largely organized itself during, and in explicit opposition to, the Eisenhower administration.”

What happened next is history, and we can’t go back to the ’50s–too much has changed. But hard as it is for us to understand him, Eisenhower stands out as a lodestar. Middle way hardly captures it. It’s the difference between politics and leadership.

Tamar Jacoby, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University, is writing a book about what worked in the 1950s.

*Photo courtesy of U.S. Embassy Montevideo.

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I couldn’t have been more wrong – about the escape.

Europe and the U.S. are certainly different. Germany, where I spent two months this winter, is an economic powerhouse. But its stratified social structure feels left over from another era: rigid high-school tracking, pervasive credentialism and workplace seniority systems sharply limit personal opportunity. Denmark, where I also visited, is even more different: a tiny, homogeneous country (population 5.5 million), with the world’s most developed welfare state. What, I asked, could it possibly have in common with the giant, hyper-diverse U.S., the world’s most developed free-market economy?

In both Germany and Denmark, unlike in the U.S., the immigration debate is less about how many foreigners to admit than it is about those already living in the country. In the 1960s, both nations imported guest workers from Southern Europe and Turkey – foreigners later allowed to stay and be joined by families from home. But for one reason or another – some economic, some cultural, some rooted in government shortsightedness – many of these workers and families failed to integrate into their new societies. And over the past decade, both German and Danish publics have become increasingly alarmed, calling for sometimes helpful, sometimes punitive and coercive integration policies – from government language courses to much-resented restrictions on visas for foreign spouses.

Still, for all the differences, when you scratch the surface, Europe and the U.S. turn out to be more similar than they first appear. All three countries, it turns out, need foreign workers – both highly skilled and less skilled workers. But voters in all three nations are anxious about the cultural differences the immigrants bring. As a result, policymakers in all three places are paralyzed: caught between rationality and emotion – between their country’s economic interests and voters’ spiraling fear and resentment.

Germany, the world’s second largest exporter, just behind China, has a voracious need for foreign workers to do jobs Germans are either too educated or not educated enough to do. Every summer, 300,000 Eastern Europeans and others come to Germany to fill seasonal agricultural jobs. That’s a huge number: translated to the U.S., it would amount to 1.2 million agricultural workers every year. In fact, we admit fewer than 70,000, relying instead largely on illegal immigrants. But the bottom line is the same in both countries: the domestic workforce, hardly growing and increasingly educated, has less and less interest in outdoor, physical work. Neither nation can sustain its agricultural sector without immigrants. And in both countries, even in the downturn, the same is true in an array of other industries – hospitality, the personal service sector and, most urgently in Germany, home health care for the elderly.

Europe’s generous welfare states complicate the picture somewhat. In the U.S., the labor market self-corrects to synchronize with the business cycle. Thanks to cell phones and the internet, even unskilled workers know about job opportunities a continent away. And when there is less work available, fewer migrants make the trip – so much so that during the downturn, fewer than half as many Mexicans entered the U.S. each year than were coming a decade ago when the economy was booming. It doesn’t work that way in Germany or Denmark, where many immigrants and their children find it cheaper to live on the dole than hold a job. Still, in either case, what drives most migration is an economic calculus – individuals’ calculus about their opportunities in a global labor market. And receiving countries need to manage this dynamic to their advantage.

So too at the skilled end of the job ladder. The twenty-first century is posing the same challenge in all developed countries. Innovation is our era’s key to business success, not just in IT and communications, but also in traditional sectors from banking to manufacturing. No nation produces enough scientists, engineers, inventors or high-end business managers to drive its knowledge economy. And all of our countries are scrambling to attract highly skilled immigrants. This is the global race of our era: not for new, advanced weaponry – or colonies or natural resources – but for international brainpower.

In 2005, Germany created a new visa to attract highly skilled immigrants. It’s an appealing package: the visa is permanent, not temporary; you can bring your spouse, who can also work legally. And there’s no test to determine if you’re taking a job that could be filled by a German worker – tests of a kind that often lead to red tape and delay. Still, even these favorable terms attracted fewer than 200 applications for the new visa last year. In the U.S., in contrast, we admit some 250,000 highly skilled immigrants a year, some temporary, some permanent, plus roughly five times as many foreign students as Germany. Yet in the U.S. too, employers – from universities to government labs to cutting-edge IT companies – complain about a shortage of high-end workers.

It’s no mystery why policymakers in Germany, Denmark and the U.S. have proven unable or unwilling to satisfy their economies’ demand for foreign workers. Voters in all three countries are skeptical of immigrants, if not hostile, blind to the economic benefits they bring and worried about whether they will integrate. Last summer, Thilo Sarrazin, an establishment politician and former central banker, shocked Germany with an incendiary, best-selling book claiming that immigration was destroying the country, more than likely because of foreigners’ defective genes. In Denmark, the Danish People’s Party is fixated on origins, calling for a halt to all immigration from non-Western countries. And though Denmark’s mainstream parties have hesitated to go that far, in government both left and right have followed the DPP’s lead, slowly making their tiny country less and less hospitable to foreigners.

In America, we still pride ourselves on being a nation of immigrants, and we frown on talk of genetic inferiority. But coming home from Europe this spring, I began to feel this was perhaps a distinction without as much difference as I once thought. Rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Arizona and elsewhere doesn’t feel that far removed from the xenophobia surfacing in Germany. And new claims, from House Republicans and others, that every immigrant we deport will open a job for an unemployed American, are just as misleading and ultimately self-defeating as the counterfactual anti-immigrant arguments I heard in Europe. Once again, in all three countries, the bottom line seems much the same: rising public anxiety, mainly about unskilled immigrants, is driving out all rational discussion and preventing policymakers from acting effectively to meet national economic needs.

The fact that many of the immigrants in Germany and Denmark are Muslims only raises the stakes, adding to concerns about what their failure to integrate would mean for the host country – for its cultural mores and national security. Muslim populations are growing; native-born families are having fewer children. And it’s easy for many Danes and Germans to imagine the worst – to fear that every headscarf and every mosque is a sign of surging fundamentalism.

Thoughtful people in both Denmark and Germany recognize that radical Islam is a reality in their country, but many feel the threat is exaggerated. According to Naser Khader, a Danish member of parliament of Syrian-Palestinian descent who has been an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalism, perhaps 10 percent of Muslims in Denmark are anti-Western Islamists. An equal share, he says, are unequivocally supportive of Western values. The problem is that the majority in the middle is often hesitant to repudiate the radicals, and no one, newcomer or native born, draws a sharp enough distinction between “religious Islam” and “political Islam.” This dynamic, and the need to reverse it, helps put our American situation in some perspective – whatever problems we’re facing, they look small in comparison to Europe’s.

Still, standing back, I found myself struck by a final haunting parallel. We Americans tend to think we have perfected the art of immigrant integration. We argue bitterly about border issues and enforcement, and how many foreign workers to admit, but we take it for granted that immigrants are succeeding in America. We count on the traditions of generations past – that mysterious alchemy we once called “the melting pot.” And unlike in Europe, we make virtually no effort to help newcomers make their way in the new country.

But what if, like Europe a generation ago, we too are sowing the seeds of a long-term failure? True, immigrants in the U.S. are still integrating more successfully than in Europe: labor force participation is higher, unemployment lower, language acquisition and educational outcomes significantly better. But what kinds of results can we expect over the long haul from 11 million unauthorized immigrants and their children – newcomers blocked by law from full participation in society? Workers stuck in black-market jobs with little opportunity for advancement; families discouraged from putting down roots; parents afraid to send their children to school; talented students denied college scholarships – it’s not exactly a recipe for successful assimilation. Add our angry debate – the unrelenting anti-immigrant rhetoric now a staple across the country – and it’s hard not to fear for the future. Legal and illegal, Latino young people are getting the message – and it is breeding alienation that will create problems for decades to come.

Yes, the U.S. and Europe are different. But thanks to the global economy, we are all what Germans call “immigration countries” – and the challenges we’re facing are surprisingly similar. Instead of a needed respite, in the end my time in Europe felt like a wake-up call. America has a glorious record as a nation of immigrants, but that heritage may be more fragile than we think.

Tamar Jacoby is president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a national federation of small business owners advocating immigration reform. In fall 2010, she was a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

*Photo courtesy of Ramon Schack.

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