TV Reviews : Eisenhower Image Brings No Peace to ‘Dangerous Years’

While Lt. Col. Oliver North uttered the obvious during the Iran-Contra hearings when he said, “The world is a dangerous place,” he was also justifying more than 30 years of U.S. covert action--proxy wars sponsored by the CIA and a Cold War that nearly sent the globe into a nuclear Ice Age.

It’s probably no accident, then, that an hour-long overview of the foreign policy of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency is titled “Dangerous Years: President Eisenhower and the Cold War” (Sunday at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. on cable’s Discovery Channel).

It was during the Eisenhower years from 1953 to 1961 that North’s view of a world locked in a deadly game of chicken between the forces of good and evil was crystallized. The fledgling CIA developed into a vast global network--not only spying, but also carrying out low-level warfare against popularly elected governments leaning to the left of U.S. policy.

In the increasingly feverish Cold War thinking, this meant that such countries as Iran or Guatemala were to be depicted as Soviet clients--and therefore, the enemy--even though they were usually nationalist regimes trying to enter the 20th Century.

“Dangerous Years” doesn’t shy from reporting this part of the story, but it never convincingly reconciles it with the image it projects of Eisenhower as a champion of peace.

It tries to distance the president from his virulently anti-Communist secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, whose “brinkmanship” policy toward the Soviet Union drove U.S. foreign policy. Dulles, we’re told, was the “bad cop” to Eisenhower’s “good cop,” as if to diminish Dulles’ extraordinary influence over superpower relations--an influence that led logically to the Vietnam War and beyond.

Eisenhower--in this rosy portrait narrated by John Chancellor, he’s known by his friendly moniker, “Ike”--did refuse to send troops into Vietnam, did pull troops out of Korea and didn’t get the United States into an entrenched war. But he was also propelled by the McCarthy era’s politics of paranoia.

At its best, “Dangerous Years” shows a president working hard and failing to come to a human understanding with an enemy. At its worst, this bite-sized portrait doesn’t even make time to include Eisenhower’s swan-song warning against the military-industrial establishment, which he knew all too well.