Easton Press books:
Dwight Eisenhower - 2 volumes - Stephen Ambrose - 1987
Vol. 1 - Soldier, General of the Army, President Elect 1890 - 1952
Vol. 2 - The President 1952 - 1960
Crusade in Europe - Dwight D. Eisenhower - 1989
The Eisenhower Diaries - Robert H. Ferrell - 1989
General Ike - John S. D. Eisenhower - Signed First Edition - 2003
President Dwight D. Eisenhower biography
Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), American soldier and 34th President of the Untied States, born in Denison, Texas, and educated at the U.S. Military Academy. His baptismal names were "David Dwight"; his mother called him "Dwight", however, and thus the names were transposed.
When Dwight D. Eisenhower was two years old his parents, of Swiss descent, settled in Abilene, Kansas, where he attended the public schools. On his graduation (June, 1915) from military academy Dwight Eisenhower was assigned to the infantry. He married Mamie Doud, the daughter of a prosperous Denver, Colorado, family, on July 1, 1916. On the same day he was promoted to the rank of 1st lieutenant. After the United States entered World War one, he specialized in the newly developed science of tank warfare made commander of Camp Colt, Pennsylvania, a tank training center. There he won a temporary lieutenant colonelcy, which he held until 1920. In that year he received his permanent majority.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was advanced with extraordinary speed following the entry of the United States into World War Two. The months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he was promoted chief of the War Plans Division of the War Department. In April, 1942he became head of the Operations Division with the temporary rank of major general. Dwight D. Eisenhower was designated commanding general of United States Forces in the European Theater of Operations in June. Dwight Eisenhower's first campaign, initiated on November 7, 1942, with the invasion of North Africa, was marked by repeated successes over the German armed forces, and in January, 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill selected him to lead the projected invasion of Sicily and Italy, He attained the temporary rank of general the same month.
Dwight D. Eisenhower's genius for planning and organization and his ability to win the co-operation of other allied commanders were particularly apparent in his leadership of the early phases of the Sicilian- Italian campaign, which started on May 12, 1943. On December 24, 1943, the Roosevelt and Churchill named him commanding general of the Allied forces in the European Theater of Operations, with the responsibility of organizing the invasion of Western Europe. This operation, named Overlord, was the greatest amphibious undertaking in military history, and began on June 5, 1944, with Dwight Eisenhower as supreme commander. He retained supreme command until the surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945. In the meantime he had been promoted to the temporary rank of General of the Army (Dec. 20, 1944). His five-star status was made permanent in April 1946.
After serving as supreme commander of the United States occupation zone in Germany and on the Allied Control Commission, Dwight D. Eisenhower was recalled to Washington, D.C., in November, 1945, to succeed General of the Army Marshall as chief of staff. In this post he was an outspoken advocate of universal military training and of unification of the armed forces. Having accepted an invitation to head Columbia University, he retired from the army on May 2, 1948, and on June 7 became the 13th President of Columbia University. At the request of President Harry S. Truman he obtained an informal leave of absence from Columbia in February, 1949, in order to serve as temporary chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This assignment, essentially to help accelerate unification of the armed services, terminated in August, 1949.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was recalled again to military service on December 19, 1950, by President Truman at the request of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Council, a body consisting of the foreign and defense ministers of the signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty. Early in January, 1951, in Paris, he assumed his new duties as supreme commander of the integrated European Defense Force, which the council authorized for the purpose of meeting the threat of Soviet aggression in Europe. Three months later he completed organization of Supreme Headquarters, Allied powers of Europe (S.H.A.P.E). By the close of 1951 forces of the multinational army under his command included about twenty combat ready divisions.
Meanwhile, beginning in the autumn of 1951, Governor Thomas Edmund Dewey, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and other leaders of the Republican Party had engendered a vigorous Eisenhower for President Boom. Dwight Eisenhower, who had rebuffed attempts by Republicans and Democrats to make him a candidate in 1948, tacitly approved the movement in a statement (January 7, 1952) indicating his willingness to become the Republican nominee if he received a "clear cut call to political duty". The pro-Eisenhower Republicans thereupon intensified their activities, entering a long series of State-primary and State-convention contests for delegates to the Republican National Convention. In April Dwight Eisenhower requested relief from his duties in Europe. He arrived in Washington, D.C., on June 1, resigned from the army on June 2, and on June 4, in a speech at Abilene, launched his campaign for the nomination. Spurred by his participation, the pro-Eisenhower movement gained irresistible momentum in subsequent weeks. He won the nomination of the first ballot of the Convention, receiving 845 votes to 280 for Senator Robert Alphonso Taft, the other leading candidate.
In the election held on November 4, Dwight D. Eisenhower carried 39 States, including 4 States in the South, winning 442 electoral votes to 89 for his Democratic opponent, Governor Adlai Ewing Stevenson of Illinois. The Republican candidate's popular vote totaled almost 34,000,000, more than 6,500,000 greater than Stevenson's and the largest ever received by a Presidential nominee.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower visited Korea in December, and during the first half of 1953 the problem of securing a cessation of hostilities was his primary concern. Korean armistice negotiations, which had been suspended late in April, 1953. A truce agreement was signed in July. Concurrently President Eisenhower carried through a basic reappraisal of the international situation. On the basis of indications that the Soviet Union was not likely to start a major war in the foreseeable future, he cut the defense budget prepared by President Truman's administration by $5.2 billion.
In a dramatic move to halt the growing atomic armaments race President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed that the Soviet Union and other nations participate with the Unites States in the creation of an international bank of fissionable materials for peacetime uses.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered an attack of coronary thrombosis on September 24, 1955. His response to treatment was rapid and satisfactory and by January, 1956, he was able to resume most of his duties. On February 27, he announced his availability for a second term.
The Republican National Convention, held in San Francisco in August, unanimously re-nominated President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Re-elected President in the national election, of November 6, he received about 58 percent of the popular vote and carried 41 States with a total electoral vote of 457 against 73 electoral votes for the Democratic opponent Adlai E. Stevenson. However, the Republican Party failed to win a majority in either house of Congress.
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower made his farewell address to the nation. In March Congress restored to Dwight D. Eisenhower his rank of General of the Army.
Eisenhower, Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952
Dwight Eisenhower was not exactly born into poverty, but the family's circumstances were at least austere. He was one of seven children; his father, a railway worker. But the family was strong and unified, the youngsters energetic and ambitious.
Ike made it to West Point, where he excelled in sports. He was a natural leader. But it was at Leavenworth years later, as a student at the war college, that his intellectual talent showed itself. He graduated first in his class.
The author draws in a wealth of previously unpublished information to give us this beautiful portrait. As a result Eisenhower emerges as complex, one who as the author states, "was a good and great man."
Eisenhower, The President
In his second instalment of the life of Eisenhower, Ambrose paints a man, both decent and complex, whose presidency is increasingly regarded as one of this century's most successful.
Wide-ranging and inclusive, the book covers Eisenhower's rejection of advice to use nuclear weapons, his thinking on defense policy and the Cold War, his actions on civil rights and his views on Communism. We also see Eisenhower in action with Nixon, Truman, Churchill, Khrushchev, de Gaulle and other world leaders.
Crusade in Europe
Five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower was arguably the single most important military figure of World War II. For many historians, his memoirs of this eventful period of U.S. history have become the single most important record of the war. Crusade in Europe tells the complete story of the war as Eisenhower planned and lived it.
The Eisenhower Diaries
In his books the memoir of the Second World War, the two large volumes on the presidency, the incomplete autobiography written near the end of his life Eisenhower related the course of events over the years, with descriptive detail and frequently with humor, but he usually stayed away from analysis. In his many private letters to friends and acquaintances, some of which have been published, he was more frank, but he still held back. And the public record of his military career and of his presidency does not reflect many open, frank statements, proofs that the soldier-president thought long and deeply about issues, personal or public; it has given substance to the speculation by many of his contemporaries and by some later students of Eisenhower that he was essentially a public relations man and that his life was all outward an expression of assent and agreement or at least of forebearance, of a man who never had an idea or, if he did, would quickly chase it out of sight.
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