Dwight D.

Dwight D. Eisenhower. I INTRODUCTION Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), American military leader and 34th president of the United States (1953-1961). He was the supreme commander of the Allies in Europe during World War II (1939-1945) and the first Supreme Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces. As a soldier he commanded the invasion of Normandy (Normandie) and, in the Battle of the Bulge, defeated Germany's last offensive. As president he ended the Korean War in 1953, launched the Interstate Highway System, built up America's nuclear arsenal, and kept peace while pursuing a policy of containing Communism throughout the world. II EARLY LIFE Eisenhower was the third son of David and Ida Stover Eisenhower. He was born on October 14, 1890, in Denison, Texas, and named David Dwight Eisenhower, although he was known as Dwight David. In 1891 the family moved to Abilene, Kansas, where three more sons were born. It was a typical small town, located on the prairie in the middle of the nation. Eisenhower later said, "I come from the very heart of America." Eisenhower and his older brothers were all called "Ike" by their family: Eisenhower was "Little Ike." David Eisenhower was a mechanic at the local creamery, where he earned barely enough to support his large family. The boys raised much of the family's food in a large garden. They had regular chores such as feeding the chickens or starting the morning fire in the wood stove and, when they were old enough, they had regular jobs. Little Ike could not remember a time when he did not work. Eisenhower's father was stern, but his mother was warm and loving. They were both deeply religious. The family read the Bible and prayed each night; Sundays were devoted to church services. They planted in their sons a lifelong commitment to duty, responsibility, and honesty. Eisenhower had a terrible temper and got into many fistfights. Once, when he was not allowed to go trick-or-treating with his older brothers on Halloween, he furiously pounded his fists against an apple tree until they were bloody. His mother bandaged his hands and told him he had to learn to control that temper, adding "He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city." He later called this the most valuable moment of his life. In high school he was an athletic star, excelling as an outfielder in baseball and a tackle in football. Sports were his obsession, to the exclusion of any other diversion. He was only an average student except in his favorite subject, which was history. A Education Both Eisenhower and his older brother Edgar wanted to attend college, but the family could not afford the tuition. The brothers agreed to work alternate years, with the brother who was working paying the fees of the one attending school. In the fall of 1909 Eisenhower went to work at the creamery where his father worked and was able to send Edgar more than $200. In 1910 Eisenhower learned that he could get a free college education if he could get an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. He had no particular desire to be a soldier, but studied hard for the competitive West Point entrance exam and won the appointment in 1911. At West Point Eisenhower was an average student. He was active in sports but had to quit the football team when he injured his knee. He almost resigned, but his roommate convinced him to finish his education. He graduated in 1915, ranked 61st in a class of 164 men. B Marriage Eisenhower's first assignment as a new army officer was at Fort Sam Houston, near San Antonio, Texas. Shortly after he arrived he met 18-year-old Mamie Geneva Doud. They dated against the wishes of her father, who did not want his daughter to marry a soldier. On July 1, 1916, they were married. They had two sons: Doud Dwight, who died in childhood, and John. III EARLY MILITARY CAREER When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Eisenhower was promoted to captain and assigned to training duty. He applied for an overseas assignment that would get him into combat, but his superiors valued his work as an organizer and trainer and put him in command of Camp Colt at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. One of the army's first tank corps was being formed there, and Eisenhower trained the fighting unit. In October 1918 he finally got orders to take the tanks to France, but the war ended before his outfit could sail. Eisenhower had done an outstanding job, for which he won the Distinguished Service Medal, but he was bitterly disappointed at missing combat. Eisenhower continued working with tanks at Camp Meade, Maryland, in 1919. There he met Colonel George S. Patton, Jr., one of the army's foremost tank tacticians, who became a lifelong friend. In 1922, by now a major, he went to the Panama Canal Zone, where he served under Brigadier General Fox Conner. Conner, an outstanding soldier and teacher, was an expert on military history, which he taught to Eisenhower. They talked for hours about military and international issues. Late in his life, Eisenhower declared, "Fox Conner was the ablest man I ever knew." Conner arranged for Eisenhower to attend the army's Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. It was extremely competitive, but thanks to what he had learned from Conner and to his own diligent study, Eisenhower graduated in 1926 as the top student in a class of nearly 300. Eisenhower's performance got him an appointment as an aide to General John J. Pershing, former chief of staff of the army and currently head of a commission supervising U.S. war memorials in France. Eisenhower interrupted that service to attend the Army War College, where he graduated first in his class in 1928. Then he went to France to prepare a guidebook of European battlefields of World War I. In 1932 the then chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, made Eisenhower his aide. In 1935 MacArthur stepped down as chief of staff to go to the Philippines as chief military advisor to that nation's government. At that time the Philippines was being prepared for independence from the United States, and many U.S. soldiers were helping to organize a Philippines defense force. MacArthur brought Major Eisenhower along as his chief of staff. Eisenhower stayed in that post until 1939, when he returned to the United States Army to take another staff position. He was 49 years old and a lieutenant colonel. Although he had impressed all his superiors--MacArthur said he was the best officer in the army--opportunities for promotion were few because the army was relatively small. Promotion was based largely on seniority, not ability, and the higher ranks were held by those who had been in the army longer than he had. IV WORLD WAR II World War II began in Europe in 1939 and, although the United States was not involved, there was concern that it soon would be. The Congress of the United States responded by ordering a military draft that began in 1940. Suddenly the army was expanding, and Eisenhower's abilities were in demand. When the army held maneuvers in Louisiana in 1941, he played a leading role as a staff officer, adding to his reputation and securing him a promotion to brigadier general. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the next day the United States entered World War II against the Axis Powers (Japan, Germany, and Italy). A week later, the army's new chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, called Eisenhower to Washington, D.C., and put him in charge of the War Plans Division. Opinions differed on how to fight the war. The United States had been attacked in the Pacific Ocean, but it was also threatened by Germany from the Atlantic side. As chief American war planner, Eisenhower favored the strategy of "Europe first," meaning the United States would make its major effort against Germany. He felt that a major attack should not be launched in the Pacific until the Allies--consisting of the United States, Canada, Britain, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and their partners in the war--defeated Germany. Marshall and President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed. A North Africa Eisenhower's performance so impressed Marshall that in March 1942 he promoted Eisenhower to major general and made him head of the Operations Division. In June Marshall put him in command of the U.S. Army's European Theater of Operations, with headquarters in London, promoting him to lieutenant general. He would be leading U.S. forces in the offensive against Germany. Eisenhower wanted to start the invasion in the spring of 1943, but the British felt that was too soon because the U.S. Army was still being built and had no combat experience. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill argued successfully for an invasion of North Africa instead. Marshall reluctantly agreed, and Eisenhower was put in charge of Allied forces for the North African campaign, called Operation Torch. In November 1942 Eisenhower launched his first invasion, landing British and U.S. troops in Algeria and Morocco. The assault was a success, but the drive toward the city of Tunis, where the Allies wanted to trap the Afrika Korps of German General Erwin Rommel, quickly bogged down in winter rain and mud. Eisenhower meanwhile spent much of his time negotiating with the puppet regime the Germans had set up in Algeria. The regime offered its help against Rommel if Eisenhower would leave it in control of Algeria for the time being. Eisenhower agreed and was criticized for doing so, but he weathered the controversy and was promoted to the rank of general. In February 1943 Rommel counterattacked at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia. This was the first real battle in Eisenhower's career, and he did poorly. His troops were caught off guard and badly defeated in the first days of the fighting. But he recovered, stopped Rommel, and went on the offensive. By early May, the Allies under his command had cleared the Germans out of North Africa. In July 1943 Eisenhower launched the invasion of the Italian island of Sicily, again with British and American troops going ashore side by side. It took more than a month to liberate the island. In September, Eisenhower commanded the invasion of the German-occupied Italian mainland. His troops got ashore but were then held up in their drive toward Rome by a skillful German defense. B The Normandy Invasion The Italian campaign was still progressing, although slowly, when in December 1943 the combined chiefs of staff of the Allies selected Eisenhower to head Operation Overlord (see D-Day Invasion). This was the code name for the most coveted command in the war: the invasion force that was to cross the English Channel, land in France, and push on into Germany. The invasion was set for the spring of 1944. British and American troops, already gathering in England for the invasion, numbered more than 50 divisions (more than 150,000 troops), with thousands of bombers, fighter planes, and ships. Eisenhower was named Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. Eisenhower returned to London impressed with the gravity of the task. He told the combined chiefs of staff, "Every obstacle must be overcome, every inconvenience suffered, and every risk run to ensure that our blow is decisive. We cannot afford to fail." In that spirit Eisenhower drove himself and his troops relentlessly. He worked 20 hours a day; the men trained with live ammunition. His biggest problem was that he had only enough landing craft to open the attack to bring in 8 divisions at a time, while Rommel, now commanding the German forces in France, had more than 50 divisions. The Allies needed surprise to succeed. To achieve surprise, Eisenhower decided to attack south into Normandy rather than east toward Calais, where the German fortifications and troop concentrations were strongest. This was a gamble because success required that the Germans not shift more troops to Normandy before the invasion. Eisenhower also needed to isolate the battlefield so that the Germans could not use the French railway system to rush in reinforcements. He insisted on using the Allied bomber fleet to destroy the railways, over the objections of the bomber commanders, who wanted to bomb factories and cities inside Germany. Eisenhower felt so strongly about this that he threatened to resign his command unless his approach, called the Transportation Plan, was adopted. Throughout the months of April and May, Allied bombers attacked railroad targets. By June, northern France had been isolated. It was necessary to isolate a large area so that the Germans would not guess that Normandy was the selected landing site. Two-thirds of the bombs were dropped outside the invasion area to mislead the Germans and keep them from shifting their troops. The invasion day, called D-Day by the military, was set for June 5. On the 4th, however, a storm swept into the English Channel and Eisenhower had to postpone the invasion. In the early morning hours of June 5 he met with his officers. Despite heavy rain and wind, the storm was expected to end by afternoon and the weather on June 6 was supposed to be acceptable for an amphibious (air and sea) assault (see Amphibious Warfare). Nearly 175,000 soldiers were waiting for their orders. Either they would go out that night, or they would have to disembark and wait for June 19, the earliest date when the tides would again be right for a landing. "The mighty host," in Eisenhower's words, "was tense as a coiled spring, ready to vault its energy across the Channel." Eisenhower asked his subordinates for their opinions. The army generals, British commander Sir Bernard L. Montgomery and U.S. General Omar N. Bradley, wanted to go. The air force generals and naval admirals advised postponement. Only Eisenhower could decide. After pacing for a few moments, Eisenhower stopped, stuck out his chin, and said, "O.K., let's go!" Beginning shortly after midnight, the airborne troops began dropping into Normandy, with the infantry coming in by landing craft at first light. By nightfall on June 6, the Allies had most of their troops on the Normandy coast. The greatest invasion in the history of war had worked. In the seven weeks that followed, the Allies gradually expanded their beachhead but did not break through the German coastal defenses. The British held the left side of the Allied front, the Americans the right. Montgomery's style of warfare led to frustration and argument because the American commanders believed he was too cautious. Many American and some British leaders urged Eisenhower to fire him, but Eisenhower, knowing how popular he was with the British people, refused. Finally, at the end of July, Bradley's First Army broke through at Saint-Lô, and the U.S. Third Army--commanded by Eisenhower's old friend, Lieutenant General Patton--went into action. Patton's tanks rolled through France. In late August, Paris was liberated; by September, the Germans had been driven from France. But the Allies had outrun their supplies. There was not enough gasoline to keep both Patton's and Montgomery's armies advancing at a rapid rate. Each general asked Eisenhower to give his army all the gasoline and stop the other general where he was. Instead, Eisenhower insisted on a broad-front offensive, with the British in the north and Patton in the south, moving forward side by side. The advance was slow, especially when the Allies reached the fortifications at the German border. C The Battle of the Bulge On December 15, Eisenhower was promoted to the U.S. Army's highest rank, general of the army. The next day Germany began its last offensive, in the Ardennes highlands of Belgium. The attack caught the Allies by surprise. Badly outnumbered U.S. troops were forced to retreat. The Allied air force, which had won control of the skies, was grounded by bad weather and could not help. The Allies were close to panic. The deep German penetration created a bulge in the Allied lines, giving the battle its name. When Eisenhower called a conference of his senior generals on December 19, they showed up glum and discouraged. He took one look at them and gave an order: "The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table." He said that the Germans had come out from behind their fortifications and exposed themselves; now was the time to start a counterattack and catch them in the open. He identified Bastogne, a crossroads in the Ardennes, as the key point to hold and ordered the United States 101st Airborne Division to that town. The Germans surrounded it on all sides with superior forces, but the Americans resisted stubbornly. When the Germans delivered an ultimatum to surrender, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, in command of the town, sent back the famous one-word reply, "Nuts!" The 101st held out until Patton's Third Army, sent by Eisenhower, fought through and relieved Bastogne on December 26. Eisenhower wanted Montgomery to counterattack from the north, but again Montgomery was too cautious and failed to respond. As a result, the German offensive in the Bulge was stopped, but most of the German forces escaped. By early March 1945 the Allies resumed their broad-front offensive. The plan called for the British to cross the Rhine River into Germany in the north and Patton to cross in the south; but the Germans foiled the plan by blowing up the bridges across the Rhine as they retreated. However, on March 7, the United States First Army found one bridge still intact, at Remagen, and captured it before it could be destroyed. Eisenhower poured reinforcements into Remagen and expanded the bridgehead. German resistance everywhere began to crack. Now began the last great British-American controversy of the war. Montgomery demanded that American forces and supplies be given to him for a last offensive into Berlin, the German capital. But Eisenhower was more concerned with what remained of the German Army. He feared that the Germans would retreat into the Alps and carry out a fanatical resistance in the mountains. To take that region before the Germans could get there, he sent Patton through Bavaria. The disagreement was more political than military. Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviets had agreed to partition Germany into eastern and western sectors. The city of Berlin was to be partitioned the same way. The British wanted to reach Berlin ahead of the Soviets to ensure that the city would be within the western sector. Eisenhower did not believe his forces could get there in time without overcoming fierce resistance and was not willing to risk American lives for a purely political objective. He let the Soviets take Berlin, an action that cost them at least 100,000 men. On May 7, 1945, the Germans surrendered unconditionally to Eisenhower at his headquarters in Reims, France. General Marshall sent him a cable of congratulations that perfectly summed up Eisenhower's generalship: "You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare. You have commanded with outstanding success the most powerful military force that has ever been assembled. You have met and successfully disposed of every conceivable difficulty. You have been selfless in your actions, always sound and tolerant in your judgments and altogether admirable in the courage and wisdom of your military decisions." V AFTER THE WAR Eisenhower stayed in Europe through 1945 as commander of the American occupation forces in western Germany. He encouraged democratic practices that were unheard of under the previous regime in Germany, such as inviting news reporters to criticize him and urging schoolteachers to teach differing points of view. From 1945 to 1948 Eisenhower served as chief of staff of the army. It was an unhappy time for him because he had to preside over demobilization, which shrank the army from more than 8 million men and women to less than 1 million. After retirement as a five-star general in 1948 he wrote his memoirs, Crusade in Europe. In the United States, Eisenhower was extraordinarily popular, both for what he had done in the war and for his personality, which was open and friendly. He was so appealing that both political parties wanted to nominate him for the presidency in 1948. He turned them down, saying that a lifetime soldier ought not to go into politics. Instead he became president of Columbia University in New York City, a post he held for two years, from 1948 to 1950. A NATO Commander After the war the Soviets had occupied not only East Germany but also several other countries in Eastern Europe. They imposed Communist governments on these nations and appeared to be threatening Western Europe. As a response, the United States, Canada, and ten European nations created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a defense alliance. In 1950 President Harry S. Truman named Eisenhower to command the NATO forces. His task was to build a NATO army that could stop a Communist advance into Western Europe. He had limited success for two reasons. First, the Europeans were still recovering from the destruction of the war and were unable to raise new armies. Secondly, American troops were diverted to South Korea when Communist North Korea invaded it, starting the Korean War in June 1950. VI PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN OF 1952 As another presidential election approached, Republican Party leaders who supported NATO came to Eisenhower to ask him to run. The party had lost five presidential elections in a row and was now dominated by conservative Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, an isolationist who had voted against NATO. They feared that Taft would get the nomination and lose the election to President Truman--or, if he won, take the United States out of NATO. Truman strongly supported NATO, but his domestic policies were much too liberal for Eisenhower. Eisenhower became convinced that he had a duty to serve. In April 1952 Eisenhower announced that he would seek the Republican nomination. A bitter fight for the votes of delegates to the party's national convention ensued between moderates who supported Eisenhower and conservatives who wanted Taft. Although Eisenhower easily won a majority in state primary elections, the party in most states still selected convention delegates in meetings called caucuses. Taft supporters controlled the caucuses, and it seemed he would get a majority of the delegates. At the convention in Chicago, it appeared that 35 of California's 70 delegates would go to Taft. However, Richard M. Nixon, that state's junior senator, prevented that and thereby ensured Eisenhower's nomination. Nixon's reward was a spot on the ticket as candidate for vice president. When Eisenhower became a candidate, President Truman decided not to run for reelection. The Democrats nominated Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. Eisenhower charged the Democrats with corruption, with allowing Communists to infiltrate the government, and with gross mismanagement of the Korean War. He promised to clean up the "mess in Washington" and pledged that if elected, "I shall go to Korea." He did not say what he would do when he got there. This allowed those who wanted a wider war to believe he would go on the offensive into Communist China (North Korea's ally), while those who wanted peace believed he would find a way out of the war. Another major pledge was to abandon Truman's doctrine of containment, designed to keep the Soviets in Eastern Europe, in favor of a policy of liberating the Communist-controlled peoples of the area. The issues did not get as much attention as the personalities. Eisenhower had a catchy campaign slogan, "I Like Ike." He made an impressive public image with his clear blue eyes, lopsided grin, plain speaking, and soldierly posture. Eisenhower received 34 million votes to Stevenson's 27 million (55 percent to 44 percent) and carried 39 of the 48 states. The Republicans won both houses of Congress. It was a resounding victory for a party that had lost the last five elections. VII PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES A Foreign Affairs After the inauguration, it soon became clear that Eisenhower's policy was not to go on the offensive in the Korean War, but to end it. He warned the Communist Chinese that unless they signed an armistice, he would "not be constrained" in the weapons he would use, a reference to the possibility of using nuclear weapons. In July 1953 the Chinese signed the armistice. South Korea was preserved, and the two Koreas went back to their prewar boundary. The following year, Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and Vice President Nixon urged him to intervene in Vietnam. The French colonial forces in Vietnam were trapped at Ðien Biên by the Communist Viet Minh Army. Eisenhower refused, explaining that "The jungles of Indochina would swallow up division after division of U.S. troops. Furthermore, the presence of ever more numbers of white men in uniform would aggravate rather than assuage Asiatic resentments." The French surrendered at Ðien Biên, and Vietnam was divided into two states: the Communist North and the anti-Communist South. Eisenhower then began a policy of containment. In September 1954 he extended U.S. protection to South Vietnam under the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and also provided economic aid. Asked to explain the importance of South Vietnam, he used the falling domino image: "You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly." If the Communists overran South Vietnam, he reasoned, Communism would then take over in other countries of Southeast Asia. When the National Liberation Front, a Communist-led organization, began to challenge the government in South Vietnam, Eisenhower sent military equipment and U.S. advisers. About 600 advisers were there by the time he left office in 1961. During the campaign Eisenhower had called for liberation of the Communist-dominated countries in Eastern Europe. Once in office, however, Eisenhower and Dulles accepted Truman's containment policy. They made no offensives against the Soviets, even in 1956 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent Soviet tanks into Hungary to crush an uprising. Eisenhower's refusal to intervene in Hungary was based on his most profound insight--that nuclear war was unthinkable. He believed that Communism was a bad system that would someday collapse on its own. "This will take a long time," he predicted, "but our most realistic policy is holding the line until the Soviets manage to educate their people. By doing so, they will sow the seeds of their own destruction." Because Eisenhower wanted peace, on a number of occasions he turned down recommendations by members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he launch a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviets while the United States still had more atomic bombs. He called his defense policy the New Look. It relied on nuclear weapons to deter the Soviets, but he refused to spend even half as much as most politicians demanded for those weapons, and he was reluctant to spend money on rocket development. As a result, he was embarrassed in 1957 when the Soviets demonstrated their advances in rocketry by launching the first manmade satellite, Sputnik 1, into space. Eisenhower was the first president to involve the United States in Middle Eastern politics. In 1956 the French, Israelis, and British invaded Egypt to take back the Suez Canal, which Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized (see Nationalization). They expected American support. Eisenhower, however, came to Nasser's rescue, using a ban on trade, or embargo, to force the invaders to withdraw. It came as a shock to the invaders that the United States would help an unaligned country--one that would not take sides with either NATO or the Communists--against its closest allies. Eisenhower, however, consistently denounced such "gunboat diplomacy," explaining "We cannot subscribe to one law for the weak, another law for the strong; one law for those opposing us, another for those allied with us. There can be only one law--or there shall be no peace." Eisenhower supported other countries in Africa and Asia as they struggled to win their independence. When Nixon advised him to support the French in their war to keep their colony of Algeria on the grounds that the Algerians were not ready for independence, Eisenhower replied, "The United States cannot possibly maintain that freedom--independence--liberty--are necessary to us, but not to others." B Domestic Policies Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative who put balancing the federal budget first and refused to lower taxes until that was done. He managed to balance three of his eight budgets. Conservative Republicans wanted him to reverse Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs and return to a less active government. He disappointed them. He continued most of the New Deal programs, such as Social Security. In fact, he greatly expanded Social Security in 1954 to include about 7 million self-employed farmers and added a provision for federal disability insurance. His public works programs were bigger than Roosevelt's had been. They included the St. Lawrence Seaway (1954) and the Interstate Highway System (1956), the largest construction project in history. He also encouraged the building of nuclear power plants and government-sponsored research into other peaceful uses for nuclear energy. The conservatives' biggest fight with Eisenhower, however, concerned Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who made a career of exposing alleged Communists and Communist sympathizers in government. McCarthy demanded access to government files that he said would prove that Communists in the State Department were shaping American foreign policy to benefit the Soviets. Eisenhower refused, insisting that his administration had found and dismissed all the Communists. Despite provocative public statements by McCarthy, Eisenhower ignored rather than denounced him. This policy was widely criticized, but it worked. When McCarthy escalated his demands for access to files, Eisenhower used the doctrine of executive privilege to withhold them. Under that doctrine, which got its name from Eisenhower but was first used by President George Washington, advice given to the president by a government official is protected from congressional inquiry. Without the documents, McCarthy soon lost his momentum. A second major controversy was over civil rights. In 1954 Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom Eisenhower had appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, wrote the court's unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation by race in public schools was unconstitutional. The court ordered the South to integrate its schools "with all deliberate speed." Eisenhower's Justice Department did little to enforce the order, and he never gave the decision a public endorsement. He was hesitant to use federal power to force social change. Nevertheless Eisenhower in 1956 sponsored the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. Its major goal was to give blacks in the South the right to vote. The bill passed in 1957 but was badly weakened by a provision that officials charged with violating the law would be tried by a jury. Only registered voters could serve on juries; in the South, almost no blacks were registered, so the juries were all white; and few Southern white jurors would convict an official who kept blacks from voting. Eisenhower wanted nonjury trials but was defeated on this issue by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. In 1955 Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. He recovered fairly quickly, and his doctors assured him he had at least ten more years to live and would be physically able to serve another term, but he wanted to retire. The Republicans, however, fearing that without the popular "Ike" they would lose the 1956 election, once again convinced him that he had a duty to serve. He was nominated without opposition. The Democrats again nominated Stevenson. Eisenhower won by 9.5 million votes (57 percent to 42 percent), nearly twice the margin of 1952. VIII SECOND TERM A Domestic Affairs Eisenhower had severe problems in his second term. His chief of staff, Sherman Adams, was accused of corruption for accepting gifts from a businessman who had problems with the Internal Revenue Service. Eisenhower reluctantly asked for Adams's resignation. A crisis in civil rights came in 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state's national guard and ordered it to block the court-ordered integration of Little Rock Central High School. The integration had been ordered on the basis of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and this was the first severe test of the use of federal power to enforce that decision. To Eisenhower it was unthinkable for a state governor to defy a federal court order. "There must be respect for the Constitution," he explained, "--which means the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution--or we shall have chaos." He ordered the Arkansas National Guard into federal service, which put it under his orders rather than those of Faubus, and sent the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock to enforce integration. B Foreign Affairs In January 1959 Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba. Although Castro initially denied that he was a Communist, Eisenhower soon concluded that he was and imposed an economic blockade on the island nation. He also created a Cuban counterrevolutionary force and ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to plan an invasion of Cuba (which President John F. Kennedy carried out unsuccessfully in 1961). Communism for the first time had come to power in the Americas, only 145 km (90 mi) off the southern tip of Florida. One of Eisenhower's deepest disappointments in foreign relations came in 1960. A summit meeting of the Big Four powers (the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviets) was scheduled to be held in Paris. Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev were to attend. Eisenhower had hopes that he could get Khrushchev's agreement on a nuclear test ban treaty, as a first step toward arms control, and on the status of divided Berlin. But on May 1, shortly before the summit was to convene, the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane over their territory. Khrushchev demanded an apology for the spying, which Eisenhower refused to give. He pointed out that Soviet secrecy had forced the United States to overfly in order to be assured that the Soviets were not preparing a first-strike nuclear attack. The summit never got started, and the chance for peace faded. Eisenhower faced other challenges during his presidency, including clashes with Communist China over Taiwan in 1955 and again in 1958, and with the Soviets over Berlin in 1959. He managed each one without overreacting, without going to war, without increasing defense spending, and without frightening the American people. He downplayed each crisis, insisted that a solution could be found, and then found one. His proudest accomplishment as president was making and keeping the peace. What he did best was managing crises, many of which threatened to lead to nuclear war. As a political leader, Eisenhower rejected extremes. He instinctively sought the middle ground on every political problem. He believed that the extremes to the right and to the left in any political dispute are always wrong. IX LEAVING OFFICE The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which limited presidents to two terms, prevented Eisenhower from running again in 1960. He gave his support to his vice president, Richard Nixon. The Democrats nominated Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. Kennedy's narrow victory was a bitter blow to Eisenhower, who felt that he personally had been rejected. If not for the two-term limit, however, he could have been the candidate and almost certainly would have won by a wide margin. Despite the problems of his second term, he remained remarkably popular. In his farewell address to the American people on January 17, 1961, he spoke of his deepest beliefs. He had held the line on defense spending despite tremendous pressure to build more rockets and bombs, but even so the American military services and defense industry had expanded enormously in the 1950s. Eisenhower believed this expansion was necessary to deter the Soviets, but still it worried him. "The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience," he said. "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." X RETIREMENT Eisenhower retired to a small farm he owned outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, an area he had loved ever since he was stationed there in World War I. He raised cattle on his farm and spent the winter months in Palm Desert, California, where he played golf. He wrote a two-volume history of his presidential years, entitled Mandate for Change (1963) and Waging Peace (1965), and a personal memoir called At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (1967). He was still involved in politics, conferring with President Kennedy at the time of the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba and later advising President Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War (1959-1975). In 1964 he endorsed Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who lost, and in 1968 he supported his former Vice President Richard Nixon, who won. In that same year his grandson David Eisenhower married Nixon's daughter Julie. Eisenhower's health began to fail. Beginning in 1965 he suffered three more heart attacks, and he spent his last few months in Walter Reed Army Hospital. On his deathbed on March 28, 1969, he summed up his life: "I've always loved my wife. I've always loved my children. I've always loved my grandchildren. And I have always loved my country." His last words were, "I want to go. God take me." Eisenhower seldom boasted, but he once summed up his presidency in these words: "The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened--by God, it didn't just happen, I'll tell you that." Contributed By: Stephen E. Ambrose Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.