President Dwight Eisenhower

On a raw January morning in 1953, as a cold wind cut across the National Mall, a former five-star general stood on the podium of the Capitol, hand on a Bible, about to become president of the United States. Dwight David Eisenhower—“Ike” to practically everyone—was sixty-two years old, broad-shouldered, with the square, reassuring face that had stared out from war posters and newsreels throughout the 1940s. The crowds that lined Pennsylvania Avenue did not see a politician in the usual sense. They saw the man who had commanded Allied armies in Europe, the soldier who had overseen D-Day and watched Nazi Germany fall. To many Americans, his election felt less like a partisan victory than an act of national common sense: the country, weary of Korea and anxious about the Cold War, had turned to the general who had alr ...