Biography

Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower (October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was a five-star general in the United States Army and the 34th President of the United States, from 1953 until 1961. During the Second World War, he served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, with responsibility for planning and supervising the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45. In 1951, he became the first supreme commander of NATO.

As President, he oversaw the cease-fire of the Korean War, maintained pressure on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, made nuclear weapons a higher defense priority, launched the Space Race, enlarged the Social Security program, and began the Interstate Highway System. He was the last World War I veteran to serve as U.S. president, and the last president born in the 19th century. Eisenhower ranks highly among former U.S. presidents in terms of approval rating. He was also the first term-limited president in accordance with the 22nd amendment.

Quotes:

 Dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems--freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions. But while this responsibility is a taxing one to a free people it is their great strength as well--from millions of individual free minds come new ideas, new adjustments to emerging problems, and tremendous vigor, vitality and progress.

One of my own major aims and efforts has been to assist in every way open to me in giving our people a better understanding of the great issues that face our country today--some of them indeed issues of life and death. Through being better informed, they can best gain greater assurance regarding our nation’s situation and participate in establishing policies and programs which they think to be sound and right. The quest for certainty is at best, however, a long and arduous one. While complete success will always elude us, still it is a quest which is vital to self-government and to our way of life as free men.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower (10/02/1959)


When you are in any contest you should work as if there were - to the very last minute - a chance to lose it.


We are descended in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children . . . Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower (16/04/1953)


A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.


From this day forward, the millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty.


I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem - and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?


History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

Last updated 603 days ago by StayFree