Democracy Dies in DarknessOpinionHistorians rate Eisenhower more highly decades after his presidency. Churchill did too.Today at 6:30 a.m. EDTWinston Churchill and President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the Eisenhower farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1959. (AP)By Evan ThomasEvan Thomas is the author of “Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.” A year after Dwight D. Eisenhower left the presidency in 1961, he was rated 22nd out of 31 past presidents in a poll of presidential scholars. In recent years, similar polls have ranked him in the top five of the 45 American presidents.