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Notes -
Hard agree that one of the highlights of his legacy was avoiding war, and that this was probably in large due to his close personal experience with its horrors. There's a poignant section of the book about him and his newlywed wife vacationing in Germany in their youth and loving it, only for him to return later at the helm of the Allied Forces laying waste to that same area.
It's true he didn't have a lot of choice with Nixon being his Vice President, absent firing him, since Nixon refused to step down on his own despite Eisenhower not personally liking him a great deal (for, as far as I can tell, no particular reason). Still, Eisenhower could have actively cultivated other Republicans to be the next leader if he had a strong preference. If he didn't, he still could have actually thrown his incredible popularity behind Nixon given that it would have made a big difference in the tightest election of the century thus far, and that despite Eisenhower's less-than-sterling impression of his VP, Nixon was running on a very similar platform and would have likely done a good job preserving and building on Eisenhower's legacy.
I think it's interesting to imagine a world where Nixon had won the next election. On foreign policy he shared much with Eisenhower, in terms of preferring to avoid direct wars and achieve things through diplomacy as well as covert operations and third world coups. The trends towards escalating in Vietnam seems almost inexorable from Eisenhower through JFK and LBJ so hard to say if that would be different. Presumably Nixon, in many ways at most a center right New Dealer, who had already promised to pursue “big government” initiatives like healthcare and housing, would have continued to expand the federal government (as he did when he actually came to power) but likely in ways very different than Johnson’s Great Society. He may well have passed his own Civil Rights Bill, given that the Civil Rights Act of 1957 had been partially his idea to continue Eisenhower’s trend of poaching black voters disaffected by the Dixiecrats - but without Johnson’s parliamentary stratagems and ruthlessness perhaps it would have been weaker, or not made it through at all.
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