Dwight D. Eisenhower

October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969

Supreme Allied Commander in WWII who planned D-Day and later served as the 34th President.

presidentmilitary leaderworld war 2

Dwight David Eisenhower, known warmly as 'Ike,' was born in 1890 and raised in Abilene, Kansas, in a large, hardworking family of modest means. He won a place at the West Point military academy, less out of grand ambition than for the free education, and began a steady army career. For decades he was a gifted staff officer and organizer rather than a battlefield hero, but that talent for planning, logistics, and getting strong-willed people to cooperate would turn out to be exactly what a world war demanded. When the United States entered World War II, Eisenhower rose with remarkable speed to become Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe. His defining achievement was planning and launching Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the largest seaborne invasion in history. Coordinating American, British, Canadian, and other forces across land, sea, and air, Eisenhower had to weigh the weather, the tides, and enormous risk; he even wrote a note taking personal blame in case the landings failed. They succeeded, opening the way to liberate Western Europe and, with the Soviet advance from the east, to defeat Nazi Germany in 1945. His genius was less in dramatic battlefield moves than in holding a fractious coalition together and making it work. After the war Eisenhower was among the most admired men in America, and in 1952 he was elected the 34th President of the United States, serving two terms from 1953 to 1961. As president during the early Cold War, he ended the fighting in Korea, worked to manage tensions and the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and launched NASA after the shock of the Soviet Sputnik satellite. At home he built the Interstate Highway System, still one of the largest public works projects in American history, and he reluctantly sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce school desegregation. Eisenhower's legacy is that of a steady, unifying leader in dangerous times, though his record was not without hard compromises, including his caution on civil rights and Cold War interventions abroad. Perhaps his most prophetic moment came at the very end. In his 1961 farewell address, this old general warned Americans to guard against the growing power of what he called the 'military-industrial complex,' the vast web of defense industries and armed forces whose influence, he cautioned, could threaten democratic life. It remains one of the most quoted warnings ever given by a departing president.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Further reading