David A. Nichols recently described the state of Eisenhower revisionism as “mid-stream.”Footnote ¹ Certainly the thirty-fourth US President's reputation has improved very significantly since a poll for the New York Times Magazine in 1962 ranked him at twenty-two out of thirty-one, bracketed between Chester Arthur and Andrew Johnson. More recent polls have seen Eisenhower climb to the top ten, where he now rubs shoulders with Harry Truman and Bill Clinton.

The first wave of Eisenhower revisionism, challenging the liberal presumption that Ike the President was a mere shadow of Ike the soldier, enjoying his golf and his bridge but taking a back seat in the White House, was led by Fred Greenstein's work: The Hidden Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (1982). But, with the GOP's lurch to the right with Reagan and beyond, Eisenhower's moderate Republicanism was firmly out of fashion for two decades until a slew of new biographies, interwoven with some rather more forensic texts, began to hit the desks of historians in the wake of two lacklustre Republican presidential campaigns. With the GOP questioning what it will take to get a Republican back into the White House, Eisenhower's middle-ground policies, and conviction politics around fiscal conservatism and national security, are distinctly more appealing. Major biographical works from Evan Thomas, Jean Edward Smith and Jim Newton, together with detailed studies of Eisenhower's action around civil rights and Suez from David Nichols, have stoked the fires of the discourse and, for the first time in a generation, Eisenhower is once again the subject of serious study.

Yanek Mieczkowski's work fits within the forensic element of this study. He renegotiates the path first set by Robert Divine's The Sputnik Challenge (1993), and takes a rather more scholarly approach than Paul Dickson's later Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (2001). Mieczkowski's study reflects on Eisenhower's cool, low-key reaction to the orbiting of the first Soviet satellites in 1957. And unlike previous chroniclers of the space age who have downplayed Eisenhower's role in getting America into space, he recasts Eisenhower's actions. He focusses on his strengths – in particular his resistance to agree to crash programmes for missiles, civil defence and the weaponization of space – while also acknowledging his failings: particularly his blind spot with regard to the prestige of being the first nation in space.

Eisenhower's Sputnik Moment recognizes the President's strength of leadership in the supposed furore immediately after the first Sputnik launch. Indeed, the author cleverly uses the Sputnik lens to provide a critique of Eisenhower's overall leadership style. While the book is built around reaction to the Soviet launch, with sections titled “Sputnik,” “Setbacks” and “Space,” the study goes some way beyond the specifics of Eisenhower's space-policy development to discuss the wider context of particularly the President's second term in office. Sections deal with the economy and Eisenhower's principles, and a particularly insightful chapter deals with “Eisenhower's Rival” Lyndon Johnson and the way the “Master of the Senate” used the post-Sputnik period to enhance his own standing as a credible challenger for the White House. Mieczkowski also goes beyond a study of Eisenhower by discussing the 1960 presidential race, and John F. Kennedy's very different valuing of the new US space programme as a tool of national and international prestige creation.

Mieczkowski is particularly strong in playing down the received wisdom that Sputnik induced panic across the United States. Instead, he draws a sound distinction between the popular reaction and “panic” manufactured by elite voices among the military and political classes who had much to gain, either as exponents of the “military–industrial complex” or through Eisenhower's political discomfort.

Overall, his review of Eisenhower's performance is mixed. On one hand, he credits the President for his calm reaction in the wake of the “elite panic.” He also acknowledges that key post-Sputnik actions, such as the creation of NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the approval of the National Defense Education Act (1958) and the reformulation of the President's Science Advisory Committee, were all Eisenhower-inspired and transcended his presidential term. But he gives equal weight to the fact that Eisenhower never grasped the concept of prestige as a Cold War weapon (and the space race is regarded as a Cold War battle), and that his natural leaning to extreme economic conservatism placed a narrow restriction on his ability to use the opportunity offered by space exploration to enhance US standing internationally.

Mieczkowski's work is highly readable and attractive to historians beyond those simply interested in space. He acknowledges that it has been a long time in the making, but its lengthy gestation allows him to use voices not often heard in this discourse: Eisenhower's speechwriters William Ewald and Arthur Larson, and even Gerald Ford, subject of the author's previous title (Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s (2005)).

Eisenhower revisionism is finally moving forward beyond Greenstein. This work is another important building block in helping historians understand the thirty-fourth President as a rather more nuanced leader.