I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.

The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson

At the outset of his Presidency, Eisenhower was cautiously optimistic that he could rely on the Joint Chiefs to play a major role in national security affairs, from participating in crisis management to meeting the ' 'long haul" needs of the Cold War by developing a defense posture that would not cripple the economy. But by the end of his administration, he had practically given up using the JCS for those purposes. Increasingly, he turned elsewhere for politico-military advice and assistance that the JCS should have rendered. One side effect was to nudge the administration toward covert operations and the use of surrogates, recruited and organized by the CIA, in lieu of regular military forces and military planners. Though the chiefs had some notable successes (e.g., Lebanon), they were too few and far between to alter the overall picture. Far more typical were the fractious debates that accompanied the Joint Chiefs' deliberations on the guided missile program and related issues like nuclear targeting. The reforms of 1953 and 1958 notwithstanding, there was more dissatisfaction with the Joint Chiefs' performance by the end of the Eisenhower administration than at any time to that point in their history.

Council of War, Steven L. Rearden