Some presidents spend their entire careers waiting for their big moment, because, frankly, they never amount to much else. Woodrow Wilson was a good example: A bigoted college professor who managed to back into politics, and won the presidency mostly because the opposition was divided, but still felt that he had the right to be a moral example to the world. For such a man, a biography that is mostly about his presidency is probably in order.

But Eisenhower?

Remember, this is the man who organized the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy in World War II. One can debate how well he did so, but he managed to win the war in Europe. That's why he became President, for pity's sake.

And you'd never know it from this book. It spends only about ten pages on Eisenhower's life before the Presidency, and about one sentence on what came after. It is not a presidential biography; it's a history of a presidency.

Admittedly the books in the American Presidents series operate under strict limits: They have to compress their whole contents into about a hundred and fifty pages. It's often a tight squeeze. Something does have to give. So the volume about James A. Garfield, for instance, gives inordinate space to his slow and agonizing death; that's fair, because it's what people remembered. But even that volume had more about the rest of Garfield's life than this book has about Eisenhower's, and again, Eisenhower was only president because he had been a general, and his career as a general informed his career as a president. You can't understand the one without the other. Yet this book asks you to try -- and, frankly, gets rather bogged down as a result. Too much cold war rivalry with Khrushchev mixed with too many loose ends (for example, the book never even tells us what eventually happened to Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who was lost over the Soviet Union, resulting in an end to nuclear negotiations).

This is a short, readable book that is a useful reminder of a period few now remember. But I just don't think it's the whole story. ( )