Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (October 14, 1890 - March 28, 1969) was the thirty-fourth President of the United States (1953 - 1961). As Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force he directed the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, and accepted Germany's surrender less than a year later; as president he gave the 1950s their steady, grandfatherly face while quietly wielding as much power as any occupant of the office. His farewell address is on this site.
From Abilene to Supreme Commander
Raised in Abilene, Kansas, in a poor and pious family, Eisenhower graduated from West Point in 1915 and spent a quarter century as a staff officer without seeing combat. Marshall plucked him from obscurity after Pearl Harbor; within three years he commanded the largest invasion force ever assembled. His gift was not battlefield genius but the harder art of holding an alliance of prima donnas, Patton, Montgomery, de Gaulle, together long enough to win.
After the war he served as Army chief of staff, president of Columbia University, and the first commander of NATO. Both parties tried to draft him in 1948; the Republicans succeeded in 1952, and he won two of the century's biggest landslides against Adlai Stevenson.
The Eisenhower presidency
Eisenhower ended the Korean War within six months of taking office and kept the country out of shooting wars for the rest of his two terms, relying on nuclear deterrence, alliances, and, more troublingly, covert CIA action in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). At home he governed as a self-described modern Republican: he preserved and expanded Social Security, created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and in 1956 signed the Interstate Highway Act, the largest public works program in American history, 41,000 miles of roads that reshaped the country.
When Arkansas defied court-ordered school integration in 1957, Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne into Little Rock to escort nine Black students into Central High School, the first use of federal troops to enforce civil rights since Reconstruction. He signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, the first since 1875. After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, he created NASA and DARPA, seeding the space race and, eventually, the internet.
The farewell warning
His January 1961 farewell address gave the language a lasting phrase, warning against the "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." He retired to his farm at Gettysburg and died in 1969, having lived to see the lunar program he started approach the moon.
Highlights of the Eisenhower presidency
- Peace in Korea (1953) and eight years without a war.
- The Interstate Highway System (1956).
- Little Rock (1957): federal troops enforce school integration.
- NASA and DARPA (1958), the answer to Sputnik.
- Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union in 1959, completing the fifty states.
- The military-industrial complex warning (1961).