Dwight D. Eisenhower is recalled today as a man of war — the consummate military politician, commander of D-Day, liberator of Nazi Europe. In memory, his presidency is but a bland afterthought, a time when little was questioned and little accomplished.

But in recent years a new burst of scholarship has emerged, challenging the conventional notion that the 34th president was a pleasant placeholder between the transformative administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and the Harry Truman coda that followed) and John F. Kennedy (and the Lyndon B. Johnson epilogue).