Ike's Bluff - Evan Thomas

History does not often remember the successful gambles of presidents. Rather, we endlessly analyze Watergate, Vietnam, and the Bay of Pigs disaster. In Ike’s Bluff (Little, Brown, $29.99), an in-depth look at the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower written by Evan Thomas, we are shown how this often overlooked commander-inchief wagered everything and won. Confronted by the horrors of thermonuclear war and a bloody stalemate in Korea, Ike brandished his greatest weapon in creating foreign policy: the poker face. Hiding his true intentions from even his closest friends and family, Ike maintained peace, in a time when, “the only thing worse than losing a global war is winning one.”