Eisenhower was elected president in 1952 after having declared for a long time that he never sought the office. Yet it was one for which he had long been prepared: “My first day at the president's desk,” he noted some months later, “plenty of worries and difficult problems. But such has been my portion for a long time—the result is that this just seems (today) like a continuation of all I've been doing since July 1941—even before that.”

In a retrospective written in 1959, Eisenhower noted that the idea of running for office was first raised in 1943, and that his “reaction was of course completely negative.” It came up again in 1945, and the reaction from Eisenhower was the same. And again in 1947, when it “had many times intensified.” Eventually, so the story goes, the pressure became too much to withstand and so Eisenhower entered party politics reluctantly. It is not possible to know how reluctant he really was or for how long he had considered the presidency. We have noted already Eisenhower's ability to project all the best or most politically appealing and self- deprecating reasons for eventual actions taken. “When the balloting was all done, I was the Republican candidate for the presidency,” he later recalled. “But I still was not completely confident that my decision to allow this effort to go forward was a wise one.”

The verdict of his contemporaries, especially his liberal contemporaries, was fairly consistent throughout his two terms as president. They viewed Eisenhower as a genial but withdrawn ex- soldier, who spent much of his time in office being out of the office. That impression was summed up well by the historian Norman Graebner: