Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the American general who commanded the Allied invasion of western Europe in the Second World War and later served two terms as the thirty-fourth president of the United States, from 1953 to 1961. A moderate Republican, he ended the Korean War, managed the early Cold War with a mix of nuclear deterrence and restraint, built the interstate highway system, and warned on leaving office against the influence of the "military-industrial complex".

Eisenhower was born on 14 October 1890 in Denison, Texas, the third of seven sons of a poor family, and grew up in Abilene, Kansas. Known all his life as Ike, he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1911, mainly because it offered a free education, and graduated in 1915. The following year he married Mamie Geneva Doud.

To his disappointment, Eisenhower spent the First World War training tank troops in the United States and never saw combat. Between the wars he rose through staff work, graduating first in his class at the Command and General Staff School in 1926. He served under General John J. Pershing and, from 1933 to 1939, under Douglas MacArthur, including four years in the Philippines. He earned a reputation as an organiser and planner who could get people to work together.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the army chief of staff, George C. Marshall, brought Eisenhower to the War Department's planning staff and in 1942 sent him to London to command American forces in Europe. That November he led Operation Torch, the Anglo-American landings in French North Africa, and went on to oversee the invasions of Sicily and mainland Italy in 1943.

In December 1943 he was named Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force for the invasion of northern France. He held together a coalition of strong-willed allies, including Winston Churchill, the British general Bernard Montgomery and Charles de Gaulle, and took the decision to launch the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 despite uncertain weather. He prepared a note accepting the blame in case the landings failed. After the liberation of France, his armies withstood the German offensive in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, in the winter of 1944–1945 and crossed the Rhine. Germany's unconditional surrender was signed at his headquarters in Reims on 7 May 1945. Visiting the newly liberated Ohrdruf camp in April, he ordered that the evidence of Nazi atrocities be documented so that no one could later deny it.

After the war Eisenhower served as army chief of staff from 1945 to 1948 and then as president of Columbia University in New York. In 1951 President Harry Truman recalled him to become the first Supreme Allied Commander of the new NATO alliance in Europe. Both parties had courted him as a presidential candidate. He chose the Republicans, beat the conservative Senator Robert Taft for the nomination in 1952, and defeated the Democrat Adlai Stevenson by a wide margin, with Richard Nixon as his vice-president. He beat Stevenson again in 1956.

Eisenhower called his approach "modern Republicanism". He accepted the New Deal programmes of Franklin D. Roosevelt, expanding Social Security, while trying to balance the budget, which he managed three times. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 funded the interstate highway network, inspired partly by his memory of a slow army convoy across the country in 1919 and by the German autobahns. He disliked Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist witch-hunts but avoided confronting him publicly, letting McCarthy discredit himself in the Army–McCarthy hearings of 1954.

He appointed Earl Warren as chief justice, whose court ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Eisenhower was cautious about civil rights and slow to endorse the ruling, but when the governor of Arkansas used the National Guard to block Black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock in 1957, he sent federal troops to enforce desegregation. He signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, the first such laws since Reconstruction, though both were weak.

Eisenhower secured an armistice in Korea in July 1953. His "New Look" defence policy relied on nuclear weapons and air power rather than large conventional forces, to deter the Soviet Union while holding down spending. He also made wide use of covert action: the CIA helped overthrow the elected governments of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954. He declined to intervene militarily to rescue the French in Vietnam in 1954.

In the Suez Crisis of 1956 he forced Britain, France and Israel to withdraw from Egypt, but did nothing to stop the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising the same year. The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 led him to create NASA and fund science education. A planned summit with Nikita Khrushchev collapsed in May 1960 after a U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. After Fidel Castro took power, Eisenhower approved CIA plans to train Cuban exiles for an invasion, carried out under John F. Kennedy as the Bay of Pigs, and broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961.

In his farewell address on 17 January 1961, Eisenhower warned that a permanent arms industry and a huge defence establishment could acquire unwarranted influence over American democracy. He retired to his farm at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and died in Washington, D.C., on 28 March 1969. He is buried in Abilene.

Contemporaries often saw him as a genial, golf-playing president who left the work to others. Since his papers were opened, historians have described a much more active leader who exercised power quietly, a "hidden hand" style, and he now generally ranks among the more successful presidents of the United States, though the coups his administration backed and his caution on civil rights remain points of criticism.