Eisenhower, Dwight D.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1890–1969), World War II general and thirty‐fourth president of the United States.Dwight David Eisenhower was born to David and Ida Stover Eisenhower in Denison, Texas, 14 October 1890. The following year, he, his parents, and two brothers moved to Abilene, Kansas, his father's childhood home. After graduating from high school, Eisenhower received appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and in 1915, he was commissioned second lieutenant. Following U.S. entry into World War I, he commanded the U.S. army tank corps training center at Camp Colt near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In the postwar years, Eisenhower held staff positions under the most accomplished and influential officers in the U.S. Army, including Generals John J. Pershing, Fox Conner, and Douglas MacArthur. In the process, he became a military strategist, rising slowly through the ranks from major to brigadier general. In World War II, Gen. George C. Marshall, army chief of staff, appointed Eisenhower to command of the War Plans Division (later the Operations Division) of the Army General Staff; then to supreme command sequentially of the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, and of Normandy, France, as well as being Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

Eisenhower accepted the German unconditional surrender for the Western Allies on 8 May 1945. Returning to the United States as a five‐star general (general of the army), he accepted appointment as army chief of staff. After overseeing the demobilization of the army and writing a best‐selling war memoir, Crusade in Europe, in 1948, Eisenhower retired from the army and became president of Columbia University.

Not long after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, President Harry S. Truman called him back to active duty as the first supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a position Eisenhower retained until May 1952, when he announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. He was elected thirty‐fourth president of the United States and served two terms. His health became a problem beginning in the mid‐1960s, and he died on 28 March 1969.

A man with two distinguished careers—one as a professional soldier and the other as political leader and statesman—Eisenhower was the subject of more than the usual amount of controversy, much of which was unnecessary. The first area of controversy concerned his performance as Supreme Allied Commander. American critics observed his swift rise through the ranks after the outbreak of World War II despite a lack of combat experience and erroneously attributed it mainly to “Ike's” genial manner. The British, especially Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery, whose army had defeated the Germans and Italians at El Alamein in 1942, questioned Eisenhower's strategy for the Battle for Germany. Instead of Eisenhower's planned broad advance, aimed at surrounding the Ruhr industrial heartland and destroying the German Army, Montgomery advocated a narrow (“pencil thrust”) aimed across the northern European plain at Berlin. Eisenhower had read military history, including the works of the Prussian military intellectual Carl von Clausewitz, and had studied the art of war under the supervision of the leading American strategists. Accordingly, he stayed with his objective and methods of attaining it. The British High Command later admitted—and American historians agree—that Eisenhower's approach was correct. Like most commanders, he had some setbacks, but his achievements were large. They included the movements that turned back the unforeseen German attacks at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in February 1943, and at the Ardennes—the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. That month, Congress bestowed on him a fifth star and the rank of general of the army.

The Eisenhower presidency, in retrospect one of the most successful of the modern era, also involved controversy, reflected by the fact that not long after he left office, historians ranked him only twenty‐second in polls of presidential effectiveness. Many contemporary critics focus on his frequent relaxations, golf and trout fishing. And after his heart attack in 1955 and a slight stroke in 1957, pundits doubted his stamina. They condemned his failure publicly to repudiate the anti‐Communist demagogue, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. Civil rights advocates criticized the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 for not going far enough. Other critics incorrectly said Eisenhower turned over U.S. foreign policy to John Foster Dulles, his secretary of state. The Soviet launching of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, testing of intercontinental missiles, and shooting down of an American U‐2 reconnaissance airplane (1960) brought charges that Eisenhower had weakened American defenses, allowing an alleged “missile gap” to develop with the Soviet Union. The president, they also charged, used the Central Intelligence Agency to put the United States on the side of right‐wing dictators in Third World nations such as Iran and Guatemala.

More recently, history has been kinder to the Eisenhower presidency. Eisenhower retained many of the approaches to social, economic, and foreign policy that the American people had come to accept during the Great Depression and World War II, while at the same time altering those laws and policies that discouraged economic growth and stifled initiative. Congress, with administration prodding, strengthened and expanded Social Security, authorized the national system of interstate highways and the St. Lawrence Seaway, and brought Alaska and Hawaii into the Union. The economy flourished, the gross national product growing 70 percent to $520 billion from $365 billion. As a Republican and a conservative, Eisenhower received criticism from the liberals. But since he refused to roll back the social policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he also irritated the right wing of the GOP. To the dismay of both, he refused to confront McCarthy, working instead to bring “McCarthyism” to an end by terminating executive branch cooperation with the senator's scattershot investigations. And though Eisenhower doubted the capacity of federal legislation to bring racial justice, his appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 encouraged some hope for blacks against discrimination. In his national security policies, Eisenhower obtained a negotiated armistice in Korea, increased U.S. military readiness, especially in airpower, and completed his predecessor's policy of containing Communist expansion by establishing a worldwide system of treaties and alliances. He increased U.S. assistance to South Vietnam but refused to authorize the use of U.S. combat forces there. The archival record shows that Eisenhower, not Dulles, was in active charge of U.S. foreign policy. The CIA did assist undemocratic forces in the Third World, but the allegations about a “missile gap” were without merit. The United States had a commanding lead in missile development when Eisenhower left office. By the 1980s, he had moved to ninth place in the ranking of presidential performance.
[See also Cold War; Commander in Chief, President as; D‐Day Landing; Eisenhower Doctrine; V‐2 Incident; World War I: Military and Diplomatic Course; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course.]

Bibliography

Martin Blumenson and and James L. Stokesbury , Masters of the Art of Command, 1975.
Freed I. Greenstein , The Hidden‐Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader, 1982.
Stephen E. Ambrose , Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President‐Elect, 1983.
Stephen E. Ambrose , Eisenhower: The President, 1984.
R. Alton Lee , Dwight D. Eisenhower: A Bibliography of His Times and Presidency, 1991.
William B. Pickett , Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power, 1995.

William B. Pickett