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Dwight D. Eisenhower
Ike’s son, historian John Eisenhower, recalls attending meetings with the British wartime leader and reflects on his character and accomplishments.
As president, Dwight D. Eisenhower took a moderate position on many issues, believing that “good judgment seeks balance and progress.”
To the Editors:
I am an Eisenhower-Reagan historian and offer a different perspective on Susan Eisenhower's characterization in your recent October 2020 issue of American Heritage of Eisenhower as a "moderate."
The senior British general in the invasion of Europe recalls his friendship with Ike during their service together.
Viscount Montgomery of Alamein commanded the British Eighth Army in North Africa in 1942 and led Allied land forces in the invasion of Europe. He served with Eisenhower until the end of the war and again in 1951 as Eisenhower's Deputy Supreme Commander at SHAPE.
"The four years we spent together are still one of my most treasured memories.”
Paul A.
The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and classmate of Eisenhower's recalls his years with Ike.
Editor's Note: In a conversation with the editors of American Heritage recapitulated here, General Omar N. Bradley spoke about the years of his closest association with Eisenhower, from 1943 through 1945.
A leading World War II commander watched Eisenhower grow from West Point cadet to victorious Supreme Allied Commander.
Editor's Note: General Mark W. Clark was Commander in Chief of U.S. Ground Forces in Europe in 1942. After the war he became chief of U.S. forces in Austria, and from 1952 to 1953 he commanded the United Nations forces in Korea.
The former President of Johns Hopkins University and youngest Eisenhower brother remembers life in Kansas at the turn of the century.
Editor's Note: The following account is from a conversation the editors of American Heritage had with Milton S. Eisenhower in 1969. Dr. Eisenhower was a lawyer and educator and the youngest of the three Eisenhower brothers.
The second-oldest of Ike's brothers compares and contrasts each man's achievements while recalling their childhoods in Kansas.
Editor's Note: The following account is from a conversation the editors of American Heritage had with Edgar Eisenhower in 1969. Eisenhower, aka "Big Ike," was a lawyer and businessman and the second-oldest of the Eisenhower brothers.
In five appointments to the Supreme Court, Eisenhower added conservatives, moderates, and a liberal, believing the president and courts should represent all the American people.
Editor's Note: Susan Eisenhower, a consultant and expert on international policy and security, has recently published
In five appointments to the Supreme Court, Eisenhower added conservatives, moderates, and a liberal, believing the president and courts should represent all the American people.
Editor's Note: Susan Eisenhower, a consultant and expert on international policy and security, has recently published
We can learn much from how Dwight Eisenhower organized and led three million men in the assault on Nazi Europe, and then governed the nation for eight years as a moderate conservative.
Ike was not a leader in the way we customarily “teach” leadership in our country. He was a strategic rather than an operational one.
What the future president learned during a coast-to-coast military motor expedition would later transform America.
I
The April 1969 issue was typical of classic issues of American Heritage, with dramatic and substantive essays on George Washington, Ike and Patton, the Transcontinental Railroad, the "ship that wouldn't die," and many other fascinating subjects from our nation's past
Our April 1969 issue was typical of classic issues of American Heritage, with dramatic and substantive essays on George Washington, Ike and Patton, the Transcontinental Railroad, the "ship that wouldn't die," and m
In the early 1950s, top-secret efforts led to the first submarine trips to the North Pole by USS Nautilus and USS Skate in 1957 – dramatic successes that rivaled the Soviet Union's Sputnik that year – and shifted the balance of strategic power.
Eisenhower's call to proceed with D-Day was anything but inevitable.
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.
More than a million children participated in the Salk poliomyelitis vaccine trials of 1954, the largest public-health experiment in American history.
On April 26, 1954, six-year-old Randy Kerr stood first in line at his elementary school gymnasium in McLean, Virginia, sporting a crew cut and a smile.
The book that taught GI’s how to behave in England
Ike gets tough on China during the Korean War.
On February 2, 1953, in his first State of the Union address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced that the U.S. Navy would no longer shield the Chinese mainland against attack from Taiwan.
BLAMING POWELL—AND EISENHOWER—FOR NOT HAVING PUSHED THROUGH
EMBATTLED, SCRUTINIZED, POWELL SOLDIERS ON, ran the headline on the front page of The New York Times, as if the writer was astonished to find Colin Powell still at the State Department despite his disagreements with some of th
The United States Military Academy turns 200 this year. West Point has grown with the nation—and, more than once, saved it.
The dog that saved Eisenhower
On September 23, 1953, Senator Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate for vice president, took to the airwaves in an attempt to save his political career. The Californian had been a rising star ever since he exposed the Communist spy Alger Hiss in 1948.
In his last speech as president, he inaugurated the spirit of the 1960s.
Whatever the calendars say, in some figurative sense, America’s 1950s ended, and the 1960s began, on January 17, 1961, when President Dwight D.
When I was in college in the late 1960s, my disaffected classmates and I spent a good deal of time decrying the “military-industrial complex.”
Nikita Khrushchev’s son remembers a great turning point of the Cold War, as seen from behind the Iron Curtain
On May 1, 1960, a Soviet V-750 surface-to-air missile (known in America as the SA-Z “Guideline”) shot down a U-2, one of the “invulnerable” American spy planes. The plane was a phantom—of all the secret projects of those years, perhaps the most secret.
Nikita Khrushchev’s son recalls a world in which the United States was the Evil Empire, and the Soviet superpower was a carefully maintained illusion.
Sixty years ago this month, the Soviet Union orbited a “man-made moon” whose derisive chirp persuaded Americans that they’d already lost a race that had barely begun.
Truman was Commander in Chief of the American armed forces, and he had a duty to the men under his command that simply was not shared by those sitting in moral judgment decades later.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, Bock’s Car, released one over Nagasaki.
America looked good to a high school senior then, and that year looks wonderfully safe to us now, but it was a time of tumult, and there were plenty of shadows, along with the sunshine.
It was a very good year. Certainly it was if you were 17. I was a senior in high school in 1954, a member of the class of January 1955, at Lincoln High School in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Jack Kennedy came into the White House determined to dismantle his Republican predecessor’s rigid, formal staff organization, in favor of a spontaneous, flexible, hands-on management style. Thirty years later, Bill Clinton seems determined to do the same thing. He would do well to remember that what it got JFK was the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War.
In early October of 1963, Representative Clement Zablocki, a Wisconsin Democrat, led a House Foreign Affairs Committee fact-finding delegation to South Vietnam. Invited to the White House when he returned, Zablocki told President John F.
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