Dwight David Eisenhower

Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (1890-1969) was President of the United States from 1953 until 1961 and a five-star general in the United States Army. During the Second World War, he served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, with responsibility for planning and supervising the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45. In 1951, he became the first supreme commander of NATO.

As President, he oversaw the cease-fire of the Korean War, kept up the pressure on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, made nuclear weapons a higher defense priority, launched the Space Race, enlarged the Social Security program, and began the Interstate Highway System. Here are few notable things he said:

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy.

Only strength can cooperate. Weakness can only beg.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.

Wanda's comments about Ike on my yard sign post brought back my earliest memory of political campaigns when a "Vote for Ike" car drove by my house in New York complete with a loudspeaker system that shouted out "Vote for Ike".. it must have been 1956 and I was 7.. campaigns were diffrent back then.

I am also reminded of when Ann and I visited the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. I came away from that visit so impressed with a man who seemed to possess a such quiet strength of leadership and honor.