Dwight D. Eisenhower

President of the United States (1953–1961)

• Born: October 14, 1890
• Birthplace: Denison, Texas
• Died: March 28, 1969
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

During World War II, Eisenhower served with distinction as Allied commander for the invasions of North Africa, Italy, and France. He won the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 and guided the United States through eight years of relative peace and prosperity.

Early Life

Although born in Texas, where his parents lived briefly, Dwight D. Eisenhower grew up in the small town of Abilene, Kansas. The Eisenhowers were a close-knit family and belonged to the Brethren Church, part of the heritage of ancestors who had immigrated to Pennsylvania from Germany during the eighteenth century. The third of seven sons (one of whom died as an infant), Dwight enjoyed a secure childhood, completed high school, and worked in a creamery for two years before entering West Point on the basis of a competitive examination. West Point appealed to him because it offered a free college education.

As a cadet, Eisenhower excelled at football until a knee injury ended that career. He proved a conscientious but not exceptional student and was graduated sixty-first in a class of 164. At graduation in 1915, he stood five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 170 pounds. His classmates remembered and respected “Ike,” as did his boyhood friends, as likable, honest, and confident, a person with a quick temper but a quicker infectious grin. He had an expressive face, blue eyes, and light brown hair that thinned and receded when he was a young man.

Eisenhower’s early military years were uneventful except for his marriage in 1916 to Mamie Geneva Doud of Denver, Colorado. The two had met in Texas during his first assignment at Fort Sam Houston. They became parents of two sons, the first of whom died as a child.

Life’s Work

During the 1920s and 1930s, Eisenhower demonstrated exceptional organizational skill and an ability to work with others. In 1926, Eisenhower, who had been merely an average student at West Point, finished first among 275 in his class at the Army’s elite Command and General Staff School. When General Douglas MacArthur served as the Army’s chief of staff, Eisenhower assisted him, and then served as his senior assistant in the Philippines. MacArthur once evaluated Eisenhower as the most capable officer in the Army.

Eisenhower’s personality and his performance during maneuvers in the summer of 1941 impressed the Army’s chief of staff, General George C. Marshall. Both in 1941 and in 1942, Eisenhower won two promotions, jumping from lieutenant colonel to lieutenant general. In June 1942, Marshall appointed Eisenhower European Theater Commander. The next year, as general, Eisenhower became Supreme Allied Commander and won fame as the leader of the multinational invasion of Europe in June 1944.

After accepting Germany’s surrender, Eisenhower served as the Army’s chief of staff. He retired from the Army in 1948 and became president of Columbia University. His book Crusade in Europe, published the same year, sold millions of copies and gave him financial security. Two years later, President Harry S. Truman recalled Eisenhower to active duty as Supreme Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces.

In May 1952, Eisenhower again retired from the Army to seek the Republican Party’s nomination for president, an office that leaders in both parties had urged on him for years. With his decisive victory in the November election, Eisenhower embarked on a second career, one even more important than the first.

As president, Eisenhower set his primary foreign policy objective as maintaining the international role the United States had assumed during the previous decade. More specifically, he intended to end the fighting in Korea, reduce military spending, and lessen the intensity of the Cold War while still adhering to the policy of containment. Militarily, Eisenhower pursued a policy of strategic sufficiency rather than superiority. This policy, as well as a reduction of the capacity to fight limited wars, made possible cuts in the defense budget.

In 1953, Eisenhower approved an armistice in Korea and the next year rejected the advice of his secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others, and refused to intervene in the French war in Indochina. The United States took the lead, however, in establishing the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization as an attempt to accomplish in a region of Asia what NATO had accomplished in Europe. During this same period, Eisenhower also approved Central Intelligence Agency covert activity that helped overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala and thereby contributed to the growing acceptance of undemocratic action in the name of US interests.

In 1955, he helped terminate the post-World War II occupation of Austria and then, at Geneva, Switzerland, became the first president in a decade to meet with Soviet leaders. That same year and again in 1956, Eisenhower reacted to crises in the coastal waters of the People’s Republic of China, in Hungary, and in Suez in a manner that helped prevent these crises from escalating into greater violence.

On the domestic side, Eisenhower followed a moderate path. He accepted the New Deal programs and even expanded those covering labor, Social Security, and agriculture. Although he cut the budget of the Tennessee Valley Authority and reduced federal activity and regulations regarding natural resources, Eisenhower championed the nation’s largest road-building project (the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956) and federal development of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. He also approved spending increases in health care. Fiscally, Eisenhower cut taxes and controls, and each year balanced or nearly balanced the budget. The nation’s gross national product, personal income, and house purchases all climbed. Inflation proved negligible, averaging 1.5 percent per year. Fundamental to Eisenhower’s public philosophy was his belief that only a sound economy could sustain a credible, effective foreign policy.

In the presidential election of 1956, Americans gave Eisenhower a second, even greater, landslide victory over his Democratic opponent Adlai E. Stevenson, despite Eisenhower’s major heart attack in 1955 and his operation for ileitis in 1956. Voters approved his moderate policies and, like the friends of his youth and the military personnel with whom he worked, responded positively to his famous grin. His dislike of politics and his lifelong refusal to discuss personalities in public also struck responsive chords. Even his hobbies of golf, fishing and hunting, bridge and poker, and cookouts embodied widespread American values.

Eisenhower’s second term continued the basic policies and themes of the first. He steadfastly resisted demands from Democrats and from conservative Republicans to increase defense spending, although he expanded the ballistic missile program after the Soviets launched the world’s first human-made earth-orbiting satellite (Sputnik) in 1957. In 1958 (in Quemoy) and in 1958–1959 (in Berlin), Eisenhower again handled crises with deliberation. After he hosted the visit of Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, Eisenhower looked forward to a Paris summit meeting in May 1960, and to a visit to the Soviet Union as his final contribution to promoting peace. On the eve of the conference, the Soviets shot down an American spy plane over Soviet territory. The U-2 incident , named for the plane, ruined the conference, canceled Eisenhower’s planned visit to the Soviet Union, and dashed his hopes to improve relations between the two superpowers.

Domestic highlights of Eisenhower’s second term included his ordering troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to maintain order while the city’s high school racially integrated its classes. In the same year, 1957, Eisenhower signed the first civil rights act in eighty-two years. Important symbolically, the act produced little change in the lives of Black Americans. The same proved true of another civil rights act in 1960. In response to Sputnik, Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and approved the National Defense Education Act, providing the first substantial federal aid to higher education in almost a century.

Criticism of Eisenhower dealt mostly with three subjects. First, he refused to exercise any public leadership in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s excessive and unsubstantiated accusations of disloyalty directed against numerous Americans, including General Marshall. Second, after the US Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that separate-but-equal facilities were unconstitutional, Eisenhower refrained from lending his moral or political support for implementation of the ruling or for promotion of civil rights in general. The third area of criticism concerned his sparse defense budget and the limited range of responses it permitted in time of crisis. Eisenhower’s confidence and public support, however, kept him from altering his positions because of such criticism.

In his presidential farewell address, Eisenhower warned the nation of the threat to democracy from the influence of the military-industrial complex, which benefited from massive military budgets. He retired to his Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, farm and wrote his memoirs. Most contemporary observers agreed that, had the Constitution permitted and had he been willing to run, Eisenhower easily would have won a third term.

Significance

Eisenhower, the career military officer, curtailed defense spending, pursued a foreign policy that emphasized conciliation rather than conflict, and presided over eight years of peace. An advocate of gradual domestic change, Eisenhower watched his most prominent appointee, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, use his position and influence to bring sweeping changes to society. As a Republican president, Eisenhower, who disliked politics and favored limitations on the terms of senators and representatives, proved the most able politician of his generation. He adhered to definite policies, faced a Democratic Congress for six of his eight years in the White House, and suffered domestic and foreign setbacks, yet he gave the country eight years of economic growth and prosperity and left office with undiminished popularity.

Eisenhower was a capable, complex man, but the key to his success seems to have been his ability to radiate straightforward honesty and uncomplicated common sense. The events of the decades following his presidency the international arms race, war, riots, Watergate, inflation, declining standard of living, and uncontrollable budget deficits have greatly enhanced respect for Eisenhower’s accomplishments. Indeed, according to many, he joined the ranks of the nation’s ten greatest presidents.

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