47 Fun Facts About Dwight D. Eisenhower

Who succeeded Eisenhower as president in January 1961?

John F. Kennedy. He inherited a CIA plan, begun on Eisenhower's orders in 1960, to land Cuban exiles in Cuba; launched three months into his term, it failed at the Bay of Pigs.

Eisenhower grew up in Kansas, but in which state was he born?

Texas. He was born in Denison, where his father had found work on the railroad, and the family went back to Kansas in 1892.

What were Eisenhower's first two names, in order, at birth?

David Dwight. The Dwight honoured the evangelist Dwight L. Moody, and with his father also a David, it was the name he went by all his life.

Which military school barred Eisenhower as too old?

The Naval Academy. A friend talked him into trying for Annapolis because it charged no tuition; he passed the exam but was over its age limit, so he went to West Point instead.

Which Kansas town did Eisenhower consider his hometown?

Abilene. He went back there in June 1952 to announce his run for president, and he is buried there in a chapel at his presidential library.

Which legendary athlete did Eisenhower try to tackle while playing halfback for West Point in 1912?

Jim Thorpe. The Olympic champion led Carlisle to a 27–6 win over Army, and a week later Eisenhower wrecked his knee against Tufts and never played football again.

What nickname did Eisenhower's West Point cohort of 1915 earn?

The class the stars fell on. Stars mark the Army's highest ranks, and 59 of its 164 graduates went on to wear them, more than in any other West Point class.

During World War I, what did Eisenhower do instead of being sent to Europe?

Trained tank crews. His unit finally got orders for France, but the armistice was signed a week before it was due to leave, and he never saw combat in that war.

Which 1919 Army expedition, in which Eisenhower took part, later shaped his belief in better highways?

The Transcontinental Motor Convoy. It took 62 days to crawl from Washington to San Francisco at about 6 mph, over dirt roads and wooden bridges too weak for its trucks.

Eisenhower called his mentor Fox Conner 'the ablest man I ever knew' after serving under him in the 1920s beside which waterway?

The Panama Canal. In the Canal Zone Conner drilled him in military history, then pulled strings to get him into the Army's elite command school, where Eisenhower finished first in a class of 245.

Under which general did Eisenhower serve as assistant military adviser in the Philippines from 1935?

Douglas MacArthur. Eisenhower spent seven stormy years as his aide, first in Washington and then in Manila, where the two clashed over how to build a Filipino army.

Which phrase was added to the Pledge of Allegiance by a bill Eisenhower signed on Flag Day in 1954?

Under God. That February Eisenhower had sat in Lincoln's old pew for a sermon arguing that the pledge needed the words, and he took up the cause the next day.

What was the code name of the November 1942 Allied campaign in North Africa that Eisenhower commanded?

Operation Torch. He ran the landings from tunnels inside the Rock of Gibraltar, and ended the fighting by striking a deal with the Vichy French admiral Darlan.

Whom did Roosevelt pass over in 1943 when he chose Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe?

George Marshall. As the Army's top officer he had spotted Eisenhower, promoted him fast and sent him to Europe in 1942, so the biggest command of the war went to his own protégé instead.

On what date did the D-Day landings in Normandy take place?

June 6, 1944. Bad weather had already forced a day's delay, and on the eve of the landings Eisenhower scribbled a note taking all the blame himself in case they failed.

To what five-star rank was Eisenhower promoted on December 20, 1944?

General of the Army. He had to resign the commission before he could take office as president, and Congress handed it back to him when he left the White House in 1961.

Which Ivy League university did Eisenhower serve as president from 1948?

Columbia. He never quite left: in 1950 he took leave for a military command in Europe, and he kept the title of university president until he moved into the White House in 1953.

What was the title of Eisenhower's 1948 war memoir?

Crusade in Europe. It was a major success, and in 1949 ABC aired it as a 26-part documentary series that won a Peabody Award.

Of which alliance was Eisenhower the first supreme commander, from 1951 to 1952?

NATO. Truman called him back into uniform for the job, and it was at his headquarters near Paris that Republican envoys talked him into running for president.

Which senator's presidential prospects did Eisenhower enter the 1952 race partly to block?

Robert A. Taft. The Ohio senator was the front-runner until a convention fight over contested delegates in a few key states went Eisenhower's way and gave him the nomination on the first ballot.

What was Eisenhower's simple 1952 campaign slogan?

I Like Ike. Irving Berlin had already put a song called 'They Like Ike' into his 1950 Broadway musical Call Me Madam, two years before Eisenhower agreed to run.

Whom did Eisenhower defeat in both the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections?

Adlai Stevenson II. Eisenhower's 1952 campaign all but ignored the Illinois governor and ran against the outgoing Truman administration instead, winning 442 electoral votes to 89.

Who was Eisenhower's vice president for both terms?

Richard Nixon. His place on the 1952 ticket was in doubt over a private expense fund until he defended himself on television in the 'Checkers' speech and the public rallied to him.

Which war ended in an armistice in July 1953, months into Eisenhower's first term?

The Korean War. 'I shall go to Korea,' he had promised late in the 1952 campaign, and he made the trip after winning the election, before he was even sworn in.

To which body did Eisenhower deliver his "Atoms for Peace" speech in December 1953?

The United Nations General Assembly. He proposed an international agency to put atomic material to peaceful use, and four years later the International Atomic Energy Agency was born.

Which 1956 law, signed by Eisenhower, authorised the Interstate System?

The Federal Aid Highway Act. Congress had voted his first plan down in 1955; the version that passed paid 90 percent of the cost from a trust fund fed by the federal gasoline tax.

Which division did Eisenhower send to Little Rock in 1957 to protect nine Black students at Central High?

The 101st Airborne. The paratroopers Eisenhower had sent into Normandy on D-Day were now ordered to walk nine teenagers into school past a mob.

Which Arkansas governor's defiance prompted Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock?

Orval Faubus. He had posted the Arkansas National Guard to keep the nine students out, so Eisenhower took the Guard away from him by putting it under federal orders.

Which Soviet achievement in 1957 prompted Eisenhower to create NASA?

The launch of Sputnik. The shock also produced the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which offered college students federal loans to draw more of them into science and teaching.

Whom did Eisenhower appoint Chief Justice of the United States in 1953?

Earl Warren. The California governor took his seat that October, and within months his court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional.

Which two states joined the Union during Eisenhower's presidency in 1959?

Alaska and Hawaii. Each forced Eisenhower to order a new flag, so the 49-star version flew for just one year before the 50-star flag replaced it on July 4, 1960.

During which 1956 confrontation did Eisenhower force Israel, Britain and France to withdraw from Egypt?

The Suez Crisis. His allies had not even told him what they planned, and an outraged Eisenhower used American diplomatic and economic pressure to make all three pull their troops out.

Which American aircraft's downing over the USSR wrecked a 1960 summit with Khrushchev?

A U-2 spy plane. Washington first claimed it was a weather research aircraft that had strayed, until Khrushchev revealed that the Soviets held both the wreckage and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

What phrase did Eisenhower use in his farewell address to warn of undue influence?

The military–industrial complex. Until the Second World War, the old soldier told viewers, America had no arms industry at all, and its new permanent one must never gain 'unwarranted influence' in government.

Where did Eisenhower suffer the heart attack of September 1955?

Denver, Colorado. He was on holiday in Mamie's home city, spent weeks in hospital, and left the country unsure for months whether he would run for a second term.

Which obstacle at Augusta National did Eisenhower ask the club to remove because his shots kept finding it?

A pine tree. The club's chairman ruled the president out of order and adjourned the meeting, and the 'Eisenhower Tree' stood on the 17th hole until an ice storm ruined it in 2014.

Eisenhower is remembered for bridge, but which card game did he quit because he kept taking fellow officers' money?

Poker. A woodsman named Bob Davis taught him as a boy, drilling the odds into him beside the campfire, and he was still winning at it as a West Point cadet.

Where did Eisenhower live in retirement after leaving the White House?

A farm at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He raised prize Angus cattle there beside the Civil War battlefield, on a run-down property he and Mamie had bought in 1950.

Where did Eisenhower die on March 28, 1969?

Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was buried, as he had asked, in the same $80 government-issue casket the Army gave any soldier, wearing his wartime jacket.

Which colour became First Lady Mamie Eisenhower's trademark in the 1950s?

Pink. She wore it to the 1953 inaugural ball, and her favourite shade, nicknamed 'Mamie pink', set off a national craze for pink clothes, housewares and bathrooms.

Which coin bore Eisenhower's likeness from 1971 to 1978?

The dollar. Its reverse copies the Apollo 11 mission patch, an eagle landing on the Moon, so that a single coin honoured both the late president and the first Moon landing.

In which church was Eisenhower baptised in 1953, soon after taking office?

Presbyterian. His parents had been River Brethren, a pacifist sect, and his mother, who thought war 'rather wicked', was saddened when he left home for West Point.

Eisenhower was the first president to allow what at his press conferences?

Television cameras. The modern broadcast press conference dates from his presidency, though none went out live: his press secretary, James Hagerty, edited the film before it aired.

Which of these did Eisenhower call his own political philosophy?

The Middle Way. In a 1949 speech to America's lawyers he granted that the middle of the road was 'derided by all of the right and the left', yet called it the truly creative ground.

Which agency, created by Eisenhower in 1958, funded the network that grew into the internet?

ARPA. The Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded so that America would never again be caught out by a rival's technology; it later added 'Defense' to its name, becoming DARPA.

Which general, touring a Nazi camp with Eisenhower, refused to enter one room?

George Patton. He said he would be sick, while Eisenhower made the visit on purpose, he wrote days later, so that he could give first-hand evidence if anyone ever dismissed the reports as propaganda.

Which of these grew out of the People-to-People diplomacy drive Eisenhower launched in 1956?

The sister cities programme. The task, he told the 1956 conference, was for people 'to get together and to leap governments', so American towns began pairing up with communities abroad.