Politics & Power Quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower

Eisenhower’s genius here is the way he smuggles a complicated presidency into a single, homespun tool. A “yardstick” sounds modest, even apolitical: not ideology, not party, not theory, just measurement. It’s the language of a general and an administrator - the man who ran D-Day and then tried to run a sprawling postwar superpower without letting it run him. By framing judgment as a test, he performs steadiness. He’s not improvising; he’s calibrating.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to every other yardstick competing for control of Washington: corporate profit, regional interest, partisan loyalty, moral crusade, Cold War panic. “Every major problem” implies a world in which crises arrive nonstop, demanding triage. Eisenhower answers with discipline, not drama. The line is also a rhetorical shield: if the only legitimate question is “good for America,” then dissent can be painted as narrower, pettier, or suspect. It’s inclusive in sound and exclusive in function.

Context matters. In the 1950s, “America” wasn’t just a country; it was a brand in a global contest. Naming it as the metric collapses domestic policy and foreign policy into the same moral accounting: highways, budgets, alliances, nuclear posture. The phrase’s power comes from its vagueness. “Good for America” invites near-universal assent while leaving Eisenhower room to define “good” pragmatically - a centrist ethic with a nationalist halo.