Dwight D. Eisenhower

Born October 14, 1890
Denison, Texas
Died March 28, 1969
Washington, D.C.

U.S. president and army general

T hough highly respected for his key military role in guiding the U.S. armed forces to victory in Europe in World War II (1939–45), as president Dwight D. Eisenhower also skillfully guided the nation through eight years of the Cold War (1945–91), from 1953 to 1961. After reaching a truce in the Korean War (1950–53) during the early months of his first term in office, he succeeded in not sending U.S. troops into combat for the next seven and one-half years of his presidency. In his farewell speech as president in 1961 as the Cold War continued, the fabled war hero warned the nation of giving too much power and influence to the military services and the war industries that support them.

A pacifist background

Dwight David Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas, on October 14, 1890; he was the third of seven sons born to David J. Eisenhower and Ida Stover. When Dwight was a year old, the family moved to Abilene, Kansas, where ancestral Eisenhowers had earlier lived as part of a Mennonite community. (Mennonites are members of various Protestant groups noted for their opposition to war.) Having failed financially as a shopkeeper, Dwight's father worked at a creamery. Dwight was raised in an atmosphere of hard work and strong religious tradition. The family would read from the Bible together every night.

Eisenhower had well-rounded skills. He was athletic, bright, an above-average student, and ambitious. After graduating from Abilene High School in 1909, he worked for two years at the creamery to help pay for an older brother's college education. In 1911, Eisenhower, known as "Ike," received a scholarship to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. While at West Point, Eisenhower became a football star in his first years, but then he suffered a serious knee injury that forced him to quit sports. In 1915, he graduated and was commissioned second lieutenant in the infantry at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. There, he met Marie "Mamie" Doud, daughter of a wealthy Denver, Colorado, meat packer. They married in 1916 and would have two sons, one of whom died in infancy of scarlet fever.

During World War I (1914–18), Eisenhower was in charge of tank training camps in the United States and was about to go overseas when the war ended. Following the war, he served in several assignments and, encouraged by one of his commanders, decided to become a student of military science. In the 1920s, he attended the Army Command and General Staff School in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, graduating first in his class, and the Army War College in Washington, D.C.

World War II supreme commander

In 1933, Eisenhower became an aide to the flamboyant General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964; see entry). He accompanied MacArthur to the Philippines for several years to build up the Filipino armed forces. After the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, Eisenhower returned to Washington, D.C. He was promoted to full colonel in March 1941 and given an army command position. Gaining a strong reputation among his superiors in the army, he was promoted to brigadier general in September 1941. On December 12, 1941, five days after the Japanese surprise attack on U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, he was summoned to the War Department in Washington, D.C. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45) put Eisenhower in charge of the army War Plans Division. Eisenhower energetically tackled the daunting task of developing a strategy for the Allied response to Germany. He promoted the "Europe first" strategy, that is, combating the Germans first, then dealing with the Japanese in the Pacific.

Eisenhower was promoted to major general in March 1942 so he could implement his "Europe first" strategy. In May, he was placed in command of U.S. forces in Great Britain. The strategy was to first defeat the German forces occupying North Africa and then invade Europe. By July, Eisenhower was promoted again, to lieutenant general, and took command of the joint U.S.-British forces gathered for the invasion of North Africa. In February 1943, Eisenhower became a four-star general. By May 1943, Eisenhower had forced the surrender of enemy forces in Tunisia. He then led amphibious (water) invasions in July 1943, landing first in Sicily and then in Italy in September.

The time had finally come to retake Western Europe from the Germans. In December 1943, President Roosevelt made Eisenhower supreme commander of the Allied forces. Eisenhower was to lead a massive European invasion, crossing the English Channel and landing on the shores of France at Normandy. On this mission, Eisenhower would demonstrate his exceptional ability to plan complex strategies and to keep the commanders under him working together toward a common objective. In June 1944, Eisenhower launched the Normandy invasion, the largest amphibious attack in history. He orchestrated the campaign of U.S. and British forces that slowly fought their way through Western Europe toward Germany. By December 1944, after liberating France from German occupation and pressing toward Germany's border, Eisenhower was promoted to a five-star general. At that time, the German army mounted a major counteroffensive. The resulting Battle of the Bulge was the largest single battle in U.S. Army history. By the end of March 1945, the Allied forces had again gained the upper hand and were pushing into Germany.

During the final war months in Germany, Eisenhower made controversial decisions regarding the advance of Soviet

troops from the east; these decisions played a role in shaping the Cold War. Eisenhower decided to leave the capture of Berlin to the Soviet troops while he focused his forces elsewhere. He believed this would foster good relations with the Soviets and encourage postwar cooperation. His decision was also motivated by a desire to avoid some difficult fighting for his own troops. Many of Eisenhower's commanders were highly critical of his decision. They thought that the U.S. and British forces should push hard to Berlin. Instead, the Soviets took Berlin in April while Eisenhower's troops swept through southern Germany and Czechoslovakia. On May 7, Germany surrendered to the Allies. It was a crowning moment in Eisenhower's military career.

Postwar life

Following the German surrender, Eisenhower briefly returned to the United States, where he received a hero's welcome

complete with a ticker tape parade in New York City. Eisenhower also gave what amounted to a victory speech before an exuberant joint session of Congress. Roosevelt appointed Eisenhower head of the German zone occupied by the United States. (Immediately upon Germany's surrender, an Allied plan divided Germany into four zones. Each zone was occupied by troops from one of the Big Four countries of Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union. Within a few years, the democratic U.S., British, and French zones became one, referred to as West Germany; the Soviet zone became known as East Germany.) Back in Germany, Eisenhower tried to carry out postwar Allied policies in cooperation with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (1879–1953; see entry). However, this turned out to be a frustrating job, because Stalin ignored key policies as well as promises the Soviets had made, including the promise to allow free elections in Eastern Europe.

In November 1945, Eisenhower returned to Washington, D.C., to replace General George C. Marshall (1880–1959; see entry) as army chief of staff. Eisenhower served in that position for two years. During that period, U.S. forces were downsized from their high wartime levels, and U.S. relations with the Soviet Union continued to deteriorate. In February 1948, Eisenhower, considered the most popular World War II general, retired from the army.

Struggling financially upon his retirement, Eisenhower wrote his memoirs of World War II, titled Crusade in Europe. Published in 1948, the book became an instant best-seller and made Eisenhower a wealthy man. Also in 1948, Eisenhower was named president of Columbia University, where he would stay for the next two years. During this postwar period, both the Republican and Democratic parties tried to recruit him to be their candidate for president. As revealed in diaries uncovered in 2003, President Harry S. Truman (1884–1972; served 1945–53; see entry), a Democrat, even offered to run in the 1948 election as the vice presidential candidate if Eisenhower ran for president. However, Eisenhower declined to run.

As Cold War tensions continued to build, Western Europe increasingly felt the threat of Soviet expansion. In response to this potential threat, the United States and Western Europe established a new military alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In 1950, President Truman reinstated Eisenhower as supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, with the job of organizing NATO forces to contain possible communist aggression. Eisenhower was hugely popular in Europe, so Truman hoped Eisenhower's presence would give some degree of comfort to the region, which was still recovering from the war.

White House years

In 1952, Republican leaders were finally able to convince Eisenhower to be their candidate for president in the fall election. Eisenhower's running mate, Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994; see entry), was a young California congressman with a strong anticommunist record. Eisenhower and Nixon took a hard-line anticommunist position in their campaign, claiming that Truman was responsible for the communist takeover of China in 1949 and the failure to secure victory in the ongoing, increasingly unpopular Korean War. At one point during the campaign, Eisenhower made the bold proposal to liberate Eastern Europe from communism.

Eisenhower easily defeated the Democratic candidate, Illinois governor Adlai E. Stevenson (1900–1965). The new president's first priority was to end the stalemate in Korea. After difficult negotiations, a cease-fire was signed in July 1953. Not another soldier was killed in combat throughout the remainder of Eisenhower's presidency. Another one of Eisenhower's goals was to balance the federal budget, which required reductions in military spending. To help achieve this goal, Eisenhower decided to emphasize the role of nuclear weapons as a deterrent to Soviet aggression rather than maintaining a large traditional force and costly conventional weapons.

In the years immediately following the end of World War II, fear of the Soviets and communism began to run high in the United States. Before Eisenhower became president, U.S. senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908–1957; see entry) of Wisconsin had begun a witch-hunt for alleged communist sympathizers in the United States. McCarthy had gone so far as to accuse President Truman of harboring communists in his administration. McCarthy persisted with similar claims when Eisenhower took office. At first, Eisenhower avoided confrontation with McCarthy; however, when the senator began attacking the U.S. Army with similar communist accusations, the president responded decisively. Working behind the scenes, Eisenhower put an end to McCarthy's radical anti-communist campaign by arranging public hearings that exposed the lack of supporting evidence for McCarthy's charges against the army.

Though some Republicans wanted him to take the offensive, Eisenhower chose not to confront communism in Korea and Eastern Europe. He selected a moderate course to combat communist expansion without committing armed forces. In April 1953, shortly after the death of Stalin, the Soviet leader, Eisenhower made several attempts to ease relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. He sought to restrict the arms race and offered an "open skies" plan, which would have allowed each of the two superpowers to do over-flight inspections of the other to alleviate fears of surprise attacks. Eisenhower also proposed that nations around the world pool their atomic research information and materials, putting all of it under the control of the United Nations; this was referred to as the "Atoms for Peace" program. New Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971; see entry) and other top Soviet officials were not receptive to Eisenhower's ideas.

Eisenhower took more aggressive action against revolutionaries in Third World countries, poor underdeveloped or economically developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Believing that the revolutions in these countries were communist-inspired, Eisenhower authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to intervene with covert, or secret, operations. In 1953, the CIA overthrew the elected government of Iran, which was thought to be procommunist, and in 1954 the same thing occurred in Guatemala.

However, in 1954, when the French appealed for assistance in Vietnam, a country where communism had already taken hold, Eisenhower chose not to respond. He did not think that the American public would support commitment of U.S. troops in Asia so soon after the Korean War. The British also refused to assist France in the conflict. The French were ultimately defeated, and an agreement was reached to divide Vietnam. North Vietnam would be communist-controlled, and South Vietnam would have a pro-Western government.

Eisenhower had participated in the conference that decided Vietnam's fate, but he refused to sign the agreement that surrendered northern Vietnam to the communists. Instead, he increased U.S. support to South Vietnam. In September 1954, Eisenhower created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a military alliance composed of the United States, France, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan. The purpose of SEATO was to contain further communist expansion in the region. Eisenhower also signed a 1954 treaty with the noncommunist Republic of China (ROC), located on the island of Taiwan. The treaty offered the ROC protection from communist Mainland China and included a guarantee from ROC leaders that they would make no attempt to invade the mainland.

Unexpectedly, Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in September 1955, but he was able to fully recover and resume his presidential duties in a short time. He ran for reelection in 1956 and again handily won—again over the Democratic loser in the 1952 election, Adlai Stevenson. The economy was booming, and the United States was not at war in any region of the world. However, just before the U.S. presidential election, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to put down an uprising against the communist government. Eisenhower again refused to militarily confront the Soviets. At the same time, Egypt had seized the Suez Canal, which connects the Red Sea with the Mediterranean Sea. The canal had been under British and French control. With Israel's cooperation, the British and French launched a surprise attack on Egypt to regain control of the canal, but they failed to advise Eisenhower of their plan beforehand.

The United States and the Soviet Union were both un-happy about the attack on Egypt, because any crisis in the oil-rich Middle East was a potential threat to their economies. In a rare instance of Cold War cooperation, the two superpowers worked together to obtain a United Nations resolution condemning the attack. Britain and France were humiliated, but the Arab nations were impressed that Eisenhower would go against longtime European friends to protect an Arab nation. However, they were also somewhat confused: First, the United States had failed to respond to Soviet aggression in Hungary; now it seemed that America was actually siding with the Soviets. To reaffirm the United States' anticommunist policy, the president announced the Eisenhower Doctrine. The doctrine stated that the United States would offer assistance to any Middle East government threatened by communist expansion. After the Hungary and Suez crises, the general public held Eisenhower in even greater esteem.

The next Cold War crisis for Eisenhower came in October 1957, when the Soviets successfully launched the first man-made satellite into orbit. (A satellite is a constructed object that orbits, in this case, the Earth.) The American public was stunned. They assumed that the Soviets had overtaken the United States in technological achievements. Through spy plane information, Eisenhower knew that was not the case, but he could not reveal this information, because the spy planes were flown in violation of international law. Under intense pressure, Congress formed committees to determine how the United States could catch up with the Soviets' technology. Much more funding was committed to science and the military. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed in July 1958 to guide future space research.

The next threat of communist expansion came closer to the shores of the United States. On New Year's Day 1959, revolutionary Fidel Castro (1926–; see entry) captured Havana, the capital of Cuba, and overthrew the U.S.-supported government there. Before long, Eisenhower suspected that Castro was procommunist. Eisenhower put the CIA in charge of a top-secret plan to invade Cuba. The CIA would train a group of Cuban exiles (people who had fled Cuba) living in Florida and then provide some air support while the exiles carried out the invasion. The landing point for the small invading force was to be at the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast of Cuba. As it turned out, Eisenhower never launched this invasion. That task would fall to his successor, President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963; served 1961–63; see entry). The invasion would prove a major failure.

The new Eisenhower

During his last year in office, President Eisenhower seemed to take on a new persona. He used a new four-engine jet, Air Force One, to travel the world lobbying for peace. He traveled over three hundred thousand miles and visited twenty-seven countries. Large crowds greeted him at every stop. Eisenhower invited Soviet leader Khrushchev to visit the United States in September 1959 and then proposed a summit meeting in May 1960 in Paris to discuss a nuclear test-ban treaty. Optimism was high, and Eisenhower hoped to finish his presidency on a grand note. However, on May 1, the Soviets shot down a U.S. spy plane over the Soviet Union and captured the pilot. Khrushchev, angry that the United States was spying during a period when the superpowers were working on the easing of relations, asked for an apology. Eisenhower angrily resisted giving in to a Khrushchev demand and refused to apologize. Khrushchev refused to participate in the May summit.

After a memorable farewell address, in which he urged Americans to be responsible with their economic, military, and technological power, Eisenhower retired to a farm near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He was reinstated as a general in the army, though he only served in an advisory capacity. In his retirement, Eisenhower wrote a two-volume set of political memoirs titled The White House Years (1963–65). He also did oil paintings and watercolors and played golf. He died in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., in March 1969, shortly after his former vice president, Richard Nixon, entered the White House as president. Eisenhower was buried in a small chapel next to his boyhood home in Abilene, Kansas.

For More Information

Books

Ambrose, Stephen F. Eisenhower. 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983–84.

Brands, H. W., Jr. Cold Warriors: Eisenhower's Generation and American Foreign Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Brendon, Piers. Ike: His Life and Times. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

Burk, Robert F. Dwight D. Eisenhower: Hero and Politician. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.

Divine, Robert A. Eisenhower and the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. Crusade in Europe. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948. Reprint, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. The White House Years. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963–65.

Pach, Chester J., Jr., and Elmo Richardson. The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Web Site

The Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and Museum.http://www.eisenhower.utexas.edu (accessed on September 3, 2003).

"I Like Ike"

The most popular presidential campaign slogan for Dwight D. Eisenhower was simply "I Like Ike." Eisenhower was an unusually popular American leader, first as an army general and then as president. During his eight years as president, his average monthly approval rating was a remarkable 64 percent. He was intelligent and exuded warmth and sincerity with a wide friendly grin. He showed a strong love for life and people. He was described as quick to anger and quicker to forgive.

At a time when the U.S. middle class was rapidly growing, he exhibited middle-class interests, including golf, bridge, and American Western literature. For years after his presidency, he was judged more on what did not happen during his presidency than on what did. But what he did achieve was a cease-fire agreement in the unpopular Korean War only six months after taking office. He then successfully avoided military conflict for the remainder of his two terms, despite the escalating rivalry with the Soviet Union.

On the domestic front, the United States enjoyed a period of economic growth and prosperity during his presidency. Eisenhower added to his popularity during his last two years in office by making many public appearances worldwide; while touring in motorcades, Ike would stand up

in an open car despite his advancing age, waving to cheering crowds and showing his broad grin. He also enhanced his image through televised news conferences, a new media phenomenon at that time.

Interestingly, while Americans derived great comfort from the very personable "Ike" Eisenhower, the Soviets considered Eisenhower a threatening figure. In their minds, the fact that the American public had elected a military general as president meant the United States was preparing to go to war.