It has been 65 years since D-Day—the early June day when the United States and its allies launched a massive attack on the shores of Normandy in a bid to liberate western Europe from the Nazis. It's been long enough for most people who still remember the date to have come to think of its success as natural and foreordained. But of course it was neither of these things. Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower himself gave it no better than a 50-50 chance of success, even if the weather was good and everything went right.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
October 2024
Critics charged that Ike was spineless in his refusal to openly fight Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Early in 1952, Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower confided to a friendly Republican politician why he was reluctant to seek the Presidency: “I think I pretty well hit my peak in history when I accepted the German surrender.”
Emerging from World War II as the organizer of the Allied victory, Eisenhower was America’s most celebrated hero. Both major political parties sought to nominate him for the Presidency. And when Ike decided to risk his historical reputation, he captured the 1952 Republican presidential nomination and ended twenty years of Democratic rule. Ronald Reagan was among the millions of Democrats who crossed party lines to support the Republican general. Afterward, the badly beaten Democratic candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson, asked his friend Alistair Cooke: “Who did I think I was, running against George Washington?”
Whatever the calendars say, in some figurative sense, America’s 1950s ended, and the 1960s began, on January 17, 1961, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered the most memorable farewell address by a Chief Executive since another old soldier, George Washington, warned his new nation back in 1796 to stick together always in the cause of its founding principles. Ike, of course, had led the Allied forces in Europe to the triumph of democracy in World War II, a century and a half after General Washington had won America’s freedom in the Revolutionary War. What remains striking about the very similar public good-byes the two generals made upon leaving the Presidency 165 years apart is the depth of thought in their enduring appeals to humanity’s better nature.