Obama Channels His Inner Eisenhower

Conspicuous in their absence from Barack Obama's speech on Afghanistan this week was any direct mention of Democratic presidential lions like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman and John F. Kennedy.

But Obama did reference a Republican presidential stalwart, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and therein lies a beautifully told tale by my friend Robert Stein about one of the toughest decisions that Ike ever had to make not in war or the Oval Office, but in retirement.