David Kennedy is the Donald J. Mclachlan Professor of History, Emeritus, and founding director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. He is the author of several books on American history, including Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize. He received the OAH Distinguished Service Award in 2007.
Kennedy uses the example of Dwight Eisenhower as soldier and president as a platform for some observations drawn from social pscyhology about the components and contexts of leadership of various sorts.