Contributor

Dwight D. Eisenhower

(1890 - 1969)

Born in Denison, Texas, the third of seven sons, Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1911, a decision that left his pacifist mother in tears. He went on to become one of the most decorated generals in U.S. military history, serving as supreme commander of the Allied forces in Western Europe during World War II. After retiring from the army in 1952, Eisenhower decided to run for president, serving two terms from 1953 to 1961 with future president Richard Nixon as his vice president. In 1969, at the age of seventy-eight, Eisenhower died in Washington, DC, of congestive heart failure at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

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Miscellany

“If people would think more of fairies, they would soon forget the atom bomb,” Walt Disney quipped in 1948. President Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed: public fear of the atom bomb was growing, and in 1953 he assured Americans in his “Atoms for Peace” speech that war was not imminent and that nuclear technology had enormous potential for peacetime activity as well. Eisenhower then recruited Disney to produce a television program promoting the “peaceful atom.” In 1957, “Our Friend the Atom” aired on ABC, featuring animated cartoons and narration by Heinz Haber, a scientist who had worked in Nazi Germany and later became a technical consultant for Disney’s Tomorrowland theme park.

Voices In Time

1953 | Washington

“Humanity Hanging from a Cross of Iron”

Dwight D. Eisenhower explains the exchange rate for war.More

The true mission of American sports is to prepare young men for war.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, c. 1952

Miscellany

“Six days, six weeks. I doubt six months,” said Donald Rumsfeld, on February 7, 2003, about the duration of the Iraq war. “Whatever happens in Vietnam, I can conceive of nothing except military victory,” Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1967. Four years before that, Robert McNamara asserted, “The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.”