Presidential Leadership and Ideological Consistency: Were there “Two Eisenhowers” in Economic Policy?
M. Stephen Weatherford a1 a1 University of California, Santa Barbara
In his influential 1968 biography, Arthur Larson suggested that President Eisenhower's beliefs and commitments underwent a far-reaching transformation as his experience at managing the economy matured. The “modern Republican” of the 1952 campaign had, by 1958, abandoned the aspiration toward an enlightened but restrained liberalism, and set his course by the sort of inflexible conservative policies associated with the Republican Old Guard:
