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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."
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
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.
We owe the greatest infrastructure project in the history of the world to the fact that, in 1919, a young U.S. Army captain named Eisenhower was bored.
As every historian knows, great events are often determined by trivial ones. Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack, noted that, for want of a single horseshoe nail, an entire war could be lost.
They’ve all had things to say about their fellow chief executives. Once in a great while, one was even flattering.
John Adams said that Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S.
The American army that beat Hitler was thoroughly professional, but it didn’t start out that way. North Africa was where it learned the hard lessons, and none were harder than the disaster at Kasserine. This was the campaign that taught us how to fight a war.
There was no light. Most of the soldiers in the boats couldn’t see anything, but they knew they must be close because the wind offshore brought the smell of charcoal smoke and dry grass. The first assault troops landed sometime after eight bells.
Only those of us who were there know what Ike was really saying when the famous photograph was taken.
Seven days into his presidency, George Bush held a quick, almost spur-of-the-moment news conference in the White House press room, something like a student voluntarily subjecting himself to what once upon a time was known as a snap quiz.
Within the city’s best-known landmarks and down its least-visited lanes stand surprisingly vivid mementos of our own national history
On a recent pilgrimage to Abilene—that epic little town on the Kansas plains that briefly marked the uttermost frontier of the Western world —I stepped into the old timber-frame homestead of the Eisenhowers and felt that part of my life had completed a circle
To one who lived through the Eisenhower era and worked close to certain large issues in the nation’s capital, Steve Neal’s apologia for this President is pretty weak. He raised more questions than he answered.
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