Politics & Power Quote by Stephen Ambrose

Ambrose isn’t just praising Eisenhower; he’s staking a claim about what kind of greatness America should reward. Calling Ike “the American of the 20th Century” is deliberately expansive, an attempt to elevate a figure often filed away as a transitional president or “the general who didn’t rock the boat” into the era’s defining archetype. The superlatives do a lot of work: “my choice” signals the verdict is subjective, even taste-driven, but the next line tightens the screws by invoking professional authority. “Of all the men I’ve studied and written about” frames admiration as the output of disciplined comparison, not nostalgia.

The subtext is also a defense of Eisenhower against flashier rivals. In a century of ideological crusades, celebrity politicians, and catastrophic ego, Ambrose presents competence as moral achievement. “Brightest and the best” isn’t a policy brief; it’s a character argument: Eisenhower as the rare leader who could manage vast systems (war, alliances, domestic prosperity) without turning leadership into performance art. That’s a pointed move from a historian who helped popularize World War II memory and, in doing so, helped shape the late-20th-century hunger for reassuring narratives of national purpose.

Context matters: Ambrose wrote in an America increasingly cynical about government and increasingly sentimental about “the Greatest Generation.” Elevating Eisenhower is a way to reconcile those impulses. Ike becomes proof that power can be exercised with restraint and that steadiness, not spectacle, is what actually holds a century together.