DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Nurture and nature played their respective roles in shaping Dwight Eisenhower. Physically, he inherited a strong, tough, big, athletic body and extremely good looks, with a quite fabulous grin, along with keen intelligence. He also inherited a strong competitive streak from his parents, plus a bad temper, along with unquestioning love, stern discipline, ambition, and religion. They made him study, read the Bible aloud, do chores. They instilled in him a series of controls over his emotions, his temper most of all. They gave him a solid Victorian outlook on the relations between the sexes and on proper conduct. All his life he would blush if he slipped and said a "hell" or a "damn" in front of a lady......
At West Point, and in his first twenty-five years in the Army, Eisenhower satisfied few of his ambitions-- he didn't get to war and he was still a lieutenant colonel-- but he learned his profession and demonstrated another characteristic trait, patience.
After Pearl Harbor his star rose, and soon he was in Washington, making war plans for Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, and then on to London, to take command of the American forces in England. This threw him into the middle of the great decision-making process of the Allies, at the highest level, dealing daily with Winston Churchill. He proved to be an outstanding diplomat and politician, not only with Churchill but with Free French leader Charles de Gaulle and other Frenchmen as well. He was successful because he was true to his character....
Indeed, whenever associates described Eisenhower, there was one word that almost all of them, superiors or subordinates, used. It was trust. People trusted him for the most obvious reason-- he was trustworthy. British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery didn't think much of Eisenhower as a soldier, but he appreciated other attributes. "His real strength lies in his human qualities," Montgomery said. "He has the power of drawing the hearts of men toward him as a magnet attracts the bit of metal. He merely has to smile at you, and you trust him at once." .......
By 1952, the year Eisenhower entered into politics at age sixty-two, his character, as formed by heredity and experience, was set in cement. It included qualities of love, honesty, faithfulness, responsibility, modesty, generosity, duty, and leadership, along with a hatred of war. These were bedrock.
Or were they? This paragon of virtue had lived in the shelter of the Army nearly all his life. Character-testing opportunities or temptations were almost unknown to him. It is easy to be virtuous when virtue is rewarded, as it was in the Army; not so easy when virtue is ignored and partisanship is rewarded, as in politics.....
On racial matters... Eisenhower seemed to come up short. He was a segregationist. He was an infant when Plessy v. Ferguson established the doctrine of separate but equal, making segregation the law of the land...
As President, segregation proved a...test of character. He appointed Governor Earl Warren of California to the post of Chief Justice, something he later regretted. His Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, and the Justice Department made the case for integration in 1954 in Brown v. Topeka before the Warren Court, something Eisenhower regretted but did not prevent. The Court ordered the integration of the public schools with all deliberate speed, which Eisenhower thought was a terrible mistake because the schools were the most sensitive place to proceed, by far. He preferred beginning with public parks, motels, cafes, and the like...
There is no doubt of Eisenhower's dislike for Brown. But there is also no doubt of his sense of duty and responsibility. Whatever one thought of Brown, he told (his childhood friend Swede) Hazlett, "I hold to the basic purpose. There must be respect for the Constitution-- which means the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution-- or we shall have chaos. We cannot possibly imagine a successful form of government in which every individual citizen would have the right to interpret the Constitution according to his own convictions, beliefs, and prejudices. Chaos would develop. This I believe with all my heart-- and shall always act accordingly."
On the other hand, he abhorred the thought of using force. He said in a press conference in the summer of 1957 that he could imagine no circumstances that would lead him to use the U.S. Army to enforce integration. So he wanted to uphold the Court, but not use force to do so.......
His willingness to listen, his known sympathy with white southerners, his failure to give his public support to Brown v. Topeka, and his general lack of leadership on the question of the day, gave one southern governor the notion that he could roll the President. Orval Faubus of Arkansas defied a court order to integrate Central High in Little Rock. He called out the Arkansas National Guard and placed it around the high school, with orders to prevent the entry into the school of about a dozen Negro pupils.
This was the great moral and character test of the Eisenhower presidency. He met it head-on. Despite his own feelings about the mistakes being made in implementing Brown, and his horror at the thought of using American troops in American cities, he called out the 101st Airborne and sent it to Little Rock. At Brownell's suggestion, he ordered the Arkansas National Guard into federal service, thus stealing Faubus's army out from under him and putting it to duty helping the 101st ensure an orderly and peaceful integration of Central High.
It was a brilliant stroke and the action of a man of principle. It settled forever the question of whether the federal government would use force to break down segregation.....
His special triumphs came in the field of foreign affairs and were directly related to his character. By making peace in Korea five months after taking office, and avoiding war thereafter, and by holding down the cost of the arms race, he achieved greatness. No one knows how much money he saved the United States, no one knows how many lives he saved, by ending the war in Korea and refusing to enter any others, despite a half-dozen and more virtually unanimous recommendations that he order a first strike.....
He was an inspiring and effective leader, indeed a model of leadership. The elements of his leadership were varied, deliberate, and learned. He exuded simplicity. He deliberately projected an image of the folksy farm boy from Kansas. But in fact he was capable of a detached, informed, and exhaustive examination of problems and personalities, based on wide and sophisticated knowledge and deep study. He projected a posture of being above politics, but he studied and understood and acted on political problems and considerations more rigorously than most lifelong politicians ever could.
His magnetic appeal to millions of his fellow citizens seemed to come about as a natural and effortless result of his sunny disposition. But he worked at his apparent artlessness. That big grin and bouncy step often masked depression, doubt and utter weariness, for he believed it was the critical duty of a leader to always exude optimism. He made it a habit to save all his doubts for his pillow.
Excerpted from an essay by Stephen Ambrose
My uncle had a cat named "Catfish" that use to sit up on the bank and watch you fish. When the cork went under, Catfish went in after the fish. Catfish lived a long life but had to make at least three trips to the vet to get hooks out of her.
Evening Victoria. Thanks.
You keep finding good graphics for us, thank you.
Thanks Snippy. Hope you're having a nice weekend.
The Eisenhower family in 1902. Back row--Dwight, Edgar, Earl, Aurthur, and Roy; front row--David, Milton, and Ida
General Fox Conner, Ike's mentor (Panama Canal Zone)
I find this immensely inspiring and characteristic of the man.
The division of Germany was decided at Yalta; why Churchhill should badger Ike to drive for Berlin is unfathomable.
As absurd as Montgomery's insistence--with Churchhill's support--of all the resources for a dash for solo glory.
Article references the "demagogic McCarthy". McCarthy's charge of Communists in the government has been borne out by the Venona transcripts. This partial decryption of Soviet cables proves McCarthy was right.
We Need Adlai Badly--or not. Stevenson defended the Soviet spy Alger Hiss.
I just read the Hungarian Revolution was betrayed by KGB moles in Radio Free Europe who broadcast the go codes three days premature. Ike is the perennial whipping boy for having raised hopes he could not or would not support.
Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, for eight years the liason between the Joint Chiefs and special operations, said the Powers U-2 was sabotaged to torpedo the summit, that the CIA or its upstream distrusted Ike's attempts at detente, peaceful coexistence, can't we all just get along.
Powers later concurred, stating in a television interview that he suspected sabotage. Then his news helicopter "ran out of gas" and he became a victim of sabotage--a second and final time.
We collected as many different buttons as we could and stood out on the street on election day waving signs.
They, with Daley, stole the '60 election, but Nixon had too much class to contest the results--class not preventing Gore from contesting the Florida count and excluding military ballots.
Kennedy refused Cabell's plea for the final strike on Castro's three T-33's and the invasion was slaughtered.
Khruschev smelled blood in the water and moved missiles into Cuba and built the Berlin Wall.
Kennedy [thought he] got the missiles out of Cuba by promising not to invade Cuba and by removing Pershing missiles from Turkey.
Kennedy issued NSAM 263 October 11, 1963 beginning the withdrawal of the 16,000 U.S. advisors in South Vietnam.
Kennedy had made it clear that a) he would run for re-election; b) without Johnson; and, c) would then not waive Hoover's mandatory retirement; having d) fired Dulles, Bissell, Cabell et al.
The disgruntled (including Marcello whom RFK had twice deported and Hoffa whom RFK had persistently pursued) arranged for a public display of their displeasure at Dealey Plaza.
[Johnson signed NSAM 273 reversing JFK's 263 the first business day after JFK's funeral, Tuesday, November 26, 1963.]
Col. L. Fletcher Prouty ascribed it to the military-industrial complex (which Churchhill called the Cabal) having to sell helicopters and other wares.
Military-Industrial Complex Speech
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
January 17, 1961
My fellow Americans:
Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.
This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.
Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.
Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation.
My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.
In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.
II.
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
III.
Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.
Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration.
To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
IV.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
V.
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
VI.
Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment.
As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.
Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.
VII.
So -- in this my last good night to you as your President -- I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.
You and I -- my fellow citizens -- need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.
To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration: We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
~~~
The Eisenhower Era gave us great domestic peace and productivity--which was earned by the great sacrifice of WWII and sustained by the great expenditure on national defense.
Kennedy began to squander all that, and Johnson finished: pandering with unprecedented expenditures on a so-called War on Poverty and the appalling Medicare, while callously discarding 58,000 lives for a defeat by freedom's worst foe.
Liberals don't like Ike because he didn't spend enough on worthless social programs and didn't get us involved in a quagmire.
Evening PhilDragoo.
McCarthy is still vilified by the Left. He was right about Communist infiltration. Anyone who doesn't think there are not still Communists in high places in government, media and entertainment is deluding themselves. They just don;t call themselves Communists anymore.
On the eve of D-Day June 6, 1944: The night before the invasion of France, the Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, wrote a note and tucked it into his pocket to release to the press the next day. He hoped that wouldn't be necessary.
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold, and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack [at Normandy] at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone."
General Eisenhower never had to read his contingency statement, of course. The D-Day landing at Normandy, which launched Operation Overlord to liberate France and Europe from the clutches of Nazi Germany, was a success. The note did, however, eventually reach the public as one of more than 6,700 letters, diary entries, and other written communications collected and published so far by the Eisenhower Papers Project, now in its 31st year at Hopkins.
You two have put so much information on this thread I feel like I've been in school all day!!
Thanks. I need it.
Wrong cat, never could teach her to hold the pole or even bait the hook. What a dumb cat.
Your welcome, SAM did a great job and all the added information from our posters had me reading all day long. LOL.
Abilene, don't know when I'd ever get out that way. Maybe a cross country drive some day. ;)
Abilene's on I-70 between Denver and K.C., so a cross-country drive is about the only occasion to stop in. Nice town - has a prosperous feel. Cattle and railroads must have been berry, berry goood to Abilene.
