Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come

On page 172 of Jean Edward Smith’s biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ike is almost 52 years old, an age at which many a man feels his life has largely run its course.

Yet there are 600 pages left to go; the book is less than a third of the way through.

Up until that point, Eisenhower had had an accomplished, well-regarded, but fairly unremarkable militar…