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In this warm and happy memoir there is a shadow, not over Ike's time or his achievements but over the U.S. of today. Jackson talks about it from his corner of Kansas above the Smoky Hill River, the same one that nurtured Ike. Was the unspoiled land and Abilene and the Eisenhower family -- and so many others like them in that era -- a one-time event in our history, now swept away by excessive wealth, greed, waste, softness and self-pity? Jackson confesses he has no certain answer. But he is worried by what he sees throughout the nation. When he talks about it, he sounds like Ike might sound were he alive.
"The farms, the ranches and the small towns were our sources of decency," says Jackson. "They seeded the cities in Ike's time. Now they are vanishing. Our cultural seed stock came from church, school and the community baseball team. We must now confront the Jeffersonian idea about living in harmony with the land. Is it mere nostalgia, or is it a practical necessity?"
Not long ago, Jackson went to Harvard to lecture, and he asked his audience if the university was educating people "to go home, not necessarily where they came from, but to some place where they can dig in and support meaningful things, not just upward mobility." Jackson got no firm answer, nor did he expect one. He carries the question with him wherever he travels to make people think again about what they may have lost and what they really treasure. He seeks a new generation that can find and grasp the "great and priceless privilege" that Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps the most beloved and respected American of this century, found in Abilene.