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General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London to command Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) for the last five months of planning for D-Day. During that time he achieved much more than the oft repeated portrayal of someone managing a political/military alliance. Though he never led troops in combat, his leadership sustained many unprecedented initiatives for the successful Normandy landings. The air assault exemplifies the frightful uncertainties plaguing this “Day of Days”. The night before D-Day, 20,400 American and British paratroopers dropped behind the Normandy beaches from 1,250 C-47 aircraft plus gliders. This massive assault was attempted just 17 years...

General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London to command Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) for the last five months of planning for D-Day. During that time he achieved much more than the oft repeated portrayal of someone managing a political/military alliance. Though he never led troops in combat, his leadership sustained many unprecedented initiatives for the successful Normandy landings. The air assault exemplifies the frightful uncertainties plaguing this “Day of Days”. The night before D-Day, 20,400 American and British paratroopers dropped behind the Normandy beaches from 1,250 C-47 aircraft plus gliders. This massive assault was attempted just 17 years...

For much of the past century, America has embodied, both in word and in deed, a commitment to freedom and democracy that has improved the lives of billions of people all over the world. Leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan saw the importance of a foreign policy based on American values and grounded in American leadership. They understood that smart, strategic engagement was the only way to ensure our security, champion our values and advance our interests. One of the most unstable and dangerous areas of the world today is the Middle East. Events that take place there...

As we approach the seventieth anniversary of the German surrender to the Allies on May 7, 1945, it’s time we take a few moments to reflect on the superhuman efforts our great American military force expended to assure that victory. General of the Army and Supreme Allied Commander Dwight David Eisenhower brought about the cooperation of quarrelsome and oppositional Allies who gained reputations for fighting among themselves, America’s Joint Chief of Staff, George Marshall and Eisenhower himself nearly as much as they did the enemy! When Eisenhower cabled Marshall that Germany had surrendered at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945,...

My Fellow Americans--here in Washington, in your homes across the Nation and abroad--and in our country's service around the world: This evening's ceremony, here at the White House, is one of many thousands in America's traditional celebration of the birth, almost 2,000 years ago, of the Prince of Peace. For us, this Christmas is truly a season of good will--and our first peaceful one since 1949. Our national and individual blessings are manifold. Our hopes are bright even though the world still stands divided in two antagonistic parts. More precisely than in any other way, prayer places freedom and communism...

This page has links to city scans from the "Yellow Book", which was a book from 1955 detailing the then-proposed Interstate Highway system. Besides the main Interstate system connecting the metropolitan areas of the country, the Yellow Book also included maps of the proposed urban Interstates within many of those metropolitan areas. The following links, grouped by state, show those proposed urban Interstates from 1955: The national system: •Toll roads suggested in 1938 •A Master Plan for Free Highway Development, dated 1939 •Interregional Highways, dated ca. 1943 •Proposed National System of Interstate Highways, August 2, 1947 •Existing and then-proposed toll...

What did Presidents Hoover , Truman, and Eisenhower have in common? This is something that should be of great interest for you to pass around. I didn't know of this until it was pointed out to me. Back during the great depression, Herbert Hoover ordered the deportation of ALL illegal aliens in order to make jobs available to American citizens that desperately needed work. Harry Truman deported over two million illegal aliens after WWII to create jobs for Returning veterans. In 1954 Dwight Eisenhower deported 13 million Mexicans. The program was called Operation Wetback. It was done so WWII and...

The long-running debacle over the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., is a textbook case of corruption. A great deal of money sloshes around without any accountability, pocketed by those with connections and without scruples, in the name of doing good. It's a sucker's game, at which taxpayers always lose. The Eisenhower Memorial travesty is more offensive than the usual palm greasing, because the greatness of an American hero is being lost. "You like Ike. I like Ike. Everybody likes Ike for president." So ran the campaign ditty from 1952. It was pretty well true. The former 5-star general won 39...

. August 21, 2014 Newt Gingrich : President Obama's Golf: The Real Problem ===================================================== A lot of people have commented on and made fun of the frequency of President Obama’s golfing. The more I watched President Obama, however, the more I concluded the problem was what was not happening between golf rounds. Two earlier presidents, Eisenhower and Reagan, golfed frequently but their presidencies were stunningly successful. The difference seemed to be that Eisenhower and Reagan were really effective when they weren't golfing. President Eisenhower was a very serious golfer who had been a varsity football player at West Point. Eisenhower...

House report could doom Frank Gehry design After more than a decade of planning and $44 million spent, a proposed memorial for President Dwight D. Eisenhower may never be built. A House Committee on Natural Resources report published last week revealed the extent of the money wasted on the already controversial project. Construction for the Eisenhower memorial has not begun and the proposed design has not been approved, but the Eisenhower Commission, which was established as a staff of 12 in 1999, has already spent tens of millions of dollars on the project. Much of that money has gone to...

Christopher Hitchens got a chance to analyze the Tea Party in 2011, the same year cancer took his life. In a Vanity Fair article titled "Tea'd Off," the great polemicist explains that populist movements like the Tea Party are a reaction to social and political change. Hitchens writes that before the Revolutionary War costumes, America had seen a somewhat similar phenomenon with the John Birch Society: The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message--the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States--that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It...

General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London to command Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) for the last five months of planning for D-Day. During that time he achieved much more than the oft repeated portrayal of managing a political/military alliance. Though he never led troops in combat, his leadership sustained many unprecedented initiatives for the successful Normandy landings. The air assault exemplifies the frightful uncertainties plaguing this “Day of Days”. The night before D-Day, 20,400 American and British paratroopers dropped behind the Normandy beaches from 1,250 C-47 aircraft plus gliders. This massive assault was attempted just 17 years after...

The report on Fox News that Sergeant Bergdahl at one point during his captivity declared himself a “mujahid,” or warrior for Islam, and may even have been allowed to carry a weapon puts at a premium an understanding of treason. Sergeant Bergdahl hasn’t been accused of treason and would be considered innocent until proven otherwise. The burden is always and only on the accusers. But all the more reason to understand what treason is and why it is so special under American law. Treason is the only crime the Constitution pre-empts Congress from defining. It’s also the only crime to...

... What is needed from Washington is not a heroic exertion of American military power but rather a sustained effort to engage with allies, isolate enemies, support free markets and democratic values and push these positive trends forward. The Obama administration is, in fact, deeply internationalist — building on alliances in Europe and Asia, working with institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, isolating adversaries and strengthening the global order that has proved so beneficial to the United States and the world since 1945. ... A Democratic Advisory Council committee headed by Acheson called Eisenhower’s foreign...

President Eisenhower on Stupid Republicans Laurence M. Vance April 27, 2014 Regardless of what Republicans say about cutting entitlements, welfare, spending, etc., they will never do it. And they will certainly never end them completely. Indeed, they have not only accepted their existence; they are now big supporters of the welfare state just like the Democrats. I have often mentioned in my articles on Republicans how that the Republican majority in Congress for two years under President Eisenhower could have repealed the New Deal. Because they failed to do so, it was no surprise that the next Republican majority in...

A federal planning group has delivered what could be a fatal blow to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission's controversial design for honoring the former president and World War II hero.Nine full-time, taxpayer-funded employees and a board of aging political leaders have spent the better part of a decade planning the memorial to President Eisenhower, but the National Capital Planning Commission rejected their proposal nearly two weeks ago.Other national memorial planners held open design competitions, but the EMC quickly settled on Frank Gehry -- the distinctive, modernist designer of Los Angeles' theme park-esque Walt Disney Concert Hall and an old...

The Eisenhower Memorial is dead. Not the memorial itself, but the wildly unpopular design by Frank Gehry. The decisive blow is Congress’ 2014 budget, which denied the $49 million in construction funds requested by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, the body charged with building the memorial. Instead, Congress allotted $1 million for operations, thereby halving the Commission’s previous annual budget. Congress also reinstated the requirement that the Commission possess 100% of construction funding before it can break ground. This sets an impossibly high bar. The Commission’s 2014 budget request estimated that it would need an additional $25 million in construction funds...

Golf’s most famous pine tree is no longer guarding the 17th hole at Augusta National Golf Club. The Eisenhower Tree suffered major damage in an ice storm and was removed over the weekend, the club confirmed Sunday. Photos showed major limb damage, particularly on the left side and top of the tree. “The loss of the Eisen­hower Tree is difficult news to accept,” Augusta National and Masters Chairman Billy Payne said in a prepared statement. “We obtained opinions from the best arborists available and, unfortunately, were advised that no recovery was possible.” The Masters landmark, also known as Ike’s Tree,...

Despite the Cold War rhetoric of his campaign, JFK's greatest ambition as president was to break the militaristic ideology that has dominated our country since World War II. In the autumn of 1961, as retired Gen. Lucius Clay, who had taken a civilian post in Berlin, launched a series of unauthorized provocations against the Soviets, Khrushchev began an extraordinary secret correspondence with JFK. With the Berlin crisis moving toward nuclear Armageddon, Khrushchev turned to KGB agent Georgi Bolshakov, a top Soviet spy in Washington, to communicate directly with JFK. Bolshakov, to the horror of the U.S. State Department, was a...

<p>On the morning of December 19, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower strode into the gloomy school building in Verdun that housed the main headquarters of General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group. He had called a meeting of all the senior commanders under Bradley. More than just the building was gloomy; the weather outside was a dark gray, and the tactical situation facing the American Army in Europe was also dark. Adolf Hitler’s gigantic Ardennes counteroffensive had been launched three days before, and German Gen. Hasso von Manteuffels’s Fifth Panzer Army was about to surround the all-important road junction at Bastogne. The news had reached the United States, and near panic reigned from across the ocean.</p>