Dwight D. Eisenhower

Their life

The Kansas farm boy who organized the largest amphibious invasion in history, held a fractious alliance together by sheer temperament, then as president built the interstates and warned, on his way out, about the military-industrial complex.

Known for

• Supreme Allied Commander, D-Day and Operation Overlord
• Holding the WWII Allied command together
• NATO's first Supreme Allied Commander
• Interstate Highway System
• Ending the Korean War
• Farewell warning on the military-industrial complex

The road they walked

Eisenhower grew up poor in Abilene, Kansas, one of six brothers raised on discipline, scripture, and the family's insistence that ability mattered more than money. He got to West Point almost by accident — it offered a free education his parents couldn't provide — and graduated in 1915 with the class later called 'the class the stars fell on,' though his own rise was slow. He missed combat in the First World War, training tank crews stateside instead, a source of quiet frustration for years. What saved his career was mentorship: under Fox Conner in Panama in the early 1920s, he read deeply in military history and strategy, and under Douglas MacArthur in Washington and the Philippines through the 1930s, he learned the political terrain of high command, even when he found MacArthur insufferable.

The war that made him was one he'd never fought a battle in personally. Marshall picked him in 1942 not for battlefield brilliance but for his gift at getting prickly, proud men — Montgomery, Patton, de Gaulle, Churchill's generals and Roosevelt's — to row in the same direction. He commanded the North Africa and Sicily campaigns, then as Supreme Allied Commander oversaw Operation Overlord: the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944, followed by the grinding push through France, the shock of the Ardennes counteroffensive, and the German surrender in May 1945. He returned home the most trusted man in America, served as Army Chief of Staff and briefly as president of Columbia University, then took the job of organizing NATO's first integrated military command before both parties came courting him for the presidency.

He ran in 1952 as a Republican mainly to keep the isolationist wing of his own party from taking over foreign policy, and won easily. His two terms (1953–1961) were quieter than his war years but consequential: he ended the Korean War with an armistice, kept the country out of deeper entanglements in Indochina and Suez despite pressure to intervene, and used the CIA for covert operations in Iran and Guatemala that stayed hidden from the public for decades. At home he sent federal troops to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, expanded Social Security, and signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which built the interstate system he'd first appreciated watching German autobahns and a slow 1919 Army convoy across America. He left office in January 1961 with a nationally televised farewell address warning that the fusion of a permanent arms industry and a permanent military establishment posed a threat to democratic government — a phrase, 'military-industrial complex,' that outlived nearly everything else he said.

How their story ended

Eisenhower died on March 28, 1969, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., after years of declining health that included several heart attacks dating back to 1955 and repeated hospitalizations for heart failure in his final months. He spent his last years at his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania — the only home he and Mamie ever owned — writing, painting, and receiving visits from old friends and sitting presidents. He was buried in a simple GI-issue casket in Abilene, Kansas, the town he'd left as a boy.

In their words

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Tables where Dwight sits

The Presidents’ Table

For decisions where the buck stops with you.

The War Room

For strategy under pressure, when the plan meets reality.

From the Journal