Did the US ever come close to nuclear war during the Eisenhower years. You alway hear about the Truman's other close calls and Kennedy's but Eisenhower's years seem quiet is this because we had a general president that was used to dealing with the likes of de Gaulle and Stalin and churchill and really understood the military situation on the ground. Truman was famous for getting into with his generals and Kennedy.
Yes, several times. The US notably threatened to use nuclear weapons in the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis (Taiwan Strait), and probably would have used them in the Korean War had the Chinese played things somewhat differently. Eisenhower was not particularly averse to using said weapons and apparently even flirted with the idea of preventative war (attacking the Soviet Union while they had a disadvantage, to wipe them out before they became really dangerous to the US).
In general, the biggest "close call" of the Eisenhower years was his policy of massive predelegation (starting in 1956), in which weapons with no locks or codes were put on the front lines of the Cold War, including in foreign countries, and the commanders were told that under certain circumstances, notably at times if they lost communication with their home bases (which happened routinely), they were expected to begin a nuclear assault. In some ways it is quite fortunate that the wrong set of circumstances did not occur, e.g., a nuclear accident that was misinterpreted as the opening salvo of an attack, or some other kind of miscommunication that could have led one or several groups of attackers to begin their assault.
Whether one can attribute close calls to the Presidents or not (sometimes you can, sometimes you can't — it's not a simple issue of "leadership"), it should be clear that there is nothing that made Eisenhower's Presidency less prone to them than the others'. Kennedy's biggest close call (Cuba) was in part the result of an Eisenhower decision to deploy Jupiter missiles in Turkey, as a note. And Eisenhower's deployment of "nuclear blackmail" against China is known to have definitively sparked the Chinese nuclear program.
Nina Tannenwald's The Nuclear Taboo covers the history of Presidents not using nuclear weapons. Daniel Ellsberg's recent The Doomsday Machine gives a lot of detail as to the dangers of the late-Eisenhower predelegation policy, from his first-hand experience looking at it as a RAND Corporation analyst sent to diagnose command and control problems in the Pacific in 1958. On the Chinese nuclear program, see Lewis and Xu, China Builds the Bomb.