Gently in Manner, Strongly in Deed

Author's Notes on Second Edition:

Before going to West Point, Dwight D. Eisenhower
took a job at a local creamery. This was also where his father
worked as a refrigeration engineer. A portion of his pay went
to funding his brother's college education, and Ike himself
was without concrete plans for his future. One day on the job,
Eisenhower accidentally fell into a large cooling tank filled with
cold salt water. After his coworkers pulled him out, he looked at
his saviors and said, "You should have pushed me under."
It's hard to imagine this man years later, pacing the
grounds of Greenham Common Airfield as the D-Day invasion
was in full swing. Before he became himself, he was a Kansan
who drove a battery-operated car designed for women and barely
managed entry into West Point on football scholarship. He spent
his time in training dreaming of moving to South America and
becoming a Cowboy (a fate that almost came to fruition). His
wife and her father refused to let him become a pilot, so he
settled for work that propelled him to victory of fascism, the
presidency, and world wide admiration.
Somewhere in there, he managed to prop up some pet
dictators in Latin America and seal us into a very long and cold
ideological war. He was a Republican who created federal jobs,
favored a 90 percent corporate tax rate, and expanded social
security. He was a unionist and a man of business. He was a
soldier who ended his presidency with a chilling speech that
accurately predicted our future reliance on the military industrial
complex and shunned war outright as impractical and outright evil.
Hypocrisy and complexity are two sides of something,
I'm sure. To be honest, I don't know where to draw the line, nor
can I guarantee that if one were to venture into the space between,
that there would be anything worth a second glance. However, I
am moved by the stories within, and have done my best to stay
true to my instinctual, though fickle inclinations.
This edition is not much different than the first. It
features far less commentary and a little more poetry. A few of
the poems have been edited. The original edition was the raw,
unvetted text of a Master's thesis. This is something else; this is
at the very least something new.

Timothy Tarkelly
March 2, 2023