Free Republic

...his recent campaign to wheat-paste an anti-war quote from President Eisenhower across American cities to promote his touring revival of the Floyd staple “The Wall” unexpectedly proved his point, after his employees pasted the quote over the storefront of Solutions speaker repair in Silver Lake. The wall has served as an impromptu fan memorial to the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith for nearly a decade. Smith passed away in Los Angeles in 2003, and fans have left personal messages and quoted lyrics on the wall, the backdrop to the cover art of his album “Figure 8,” ever since. But as of...

MOSCOW — Fifty years ago Saturday, U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down while flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, a dramatic episode of the Cold War that pushed the rival superpowers closer to confrontation. Now his son has come to Moscow on a mission of his own: By telling his late father's story, he hopes to help preserve Cold War history and prevent future generations of Russians and Americans from ever again facing the threat of nuclear war. On May 1, 1960, Powers was in the cockpit of the world's highest-flying plane, concentrated on keeping...

WASHINGTON – A U.S. military official says the Navy had a close encounter with an Iranian surveillance jet last week in the Gulf of Oman. The official says the jet buzzed a Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Eisenhower, coming within about 1,000 yards of the ship. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said the April 21 incident occurred in international waters.The jet was described as a maritime patrol aircraft generally used for surveillance. The official says "there was nothing threatening about the aircraft itself or how it...

An Iranian navy plane that approached a U.S. aircraft carrier last week was flying as low as 300 feet as it neared the USS Eisenhower, U.S. military officials said Wednesday. The incident, first reported by CNN on Tuesday, came as Iran was beginning a series of military exercises last week meant to show off their military prowess. The Eisenhower was on duty in the Gulf of Oman in the northern Arabian Sea, in support of the Afghanistan war efforts, when the Iranian maritime patrol aircraft flew within 1,000 yards of the vessel, according to military officials. While the encounter was...

Was one of America's most revered popular historians fabricating his own material? That's the explosive charge now levied at Stephen Ambrose, author of numerous bestselling military and presidential histories. The author of "D-Day" and "Band of Brothers" died in 2002, but several authorities have recently questioned the writer's accounts of his research for "Supreme Commander," a massive two-volume biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower. At a minimum, Ambrose's critics say, he had vastly exaggerated the amount of time he spent interviewing the former president; and at worst, they suggest, he simply made up long stretches of the book. The U.K. Guardian...

His book Band of Brothers – which chronicled the exploits of one company of US airborne troops in second world war Europe – was turned into a highly praised TV series. But now American historian Professor Stephen Ambrose, who was President Dwight D Eisenhower's official biographer and wrote or edited more than a dozen books about him, is embroiled in a posthumous controversy. It is alleged that he invented many meetings he claimed to have had with Eisenhower, and even fabricated entire interviews with him. The revelations have sent shock waves through the scholarly community in the United States. The...

Holocaust Remembrance Day, Very Little Has Changed On the morning of April 12th, 1945 General Eisenhower met Generals Bradley and Patton at Ohrdruf Concentration Camp. Afterward Eisenhower also ordered every American soldier in the area who was not on the front lines to visit Ohrdruf and Buchenwald. He wanted them to see for themselves what they were fighting against. Sixty-five years later we are still fighting against this horror. On this Yom HaShoah their words are much more moving then anything I could say:

Of the many unflattering caricatures of Sarah Palin that litter the political landscape, the notion that she is a dummy or a puppet -- a mere figure for manipulation by a superior brain -- is probably the most prevalent. She has even been given a mock "endorsement," bestowed in a YouTube video by the so-called Ventriloquist Dummies of America Association, for her supposed likeness to an inert object of play. So let's just say this at the top: Palin is not anyone's puppet. It is not true for her, just as it was not true for George W. Bush, Ronald...

WASHINGTON — A national memorial to former president and World War II general Dwight D. Eisenhower would include eight-story columns and metal "tapestries" of photos, according to plans announced Thursday in Washington.

THE ISSUE: Whether presidential candidates today have character, as their predecessors did. In looking for a president with the character of Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, Ralph Peters asks, "Will we ever again have a president who didn't go to an Ivy League school, who knows what it's like to struggle -- as so many Americans struggle every day -- and who's tasted defeat, but got back in the ring with his dukes up?" ("Why Our 'Post-Modern Presidents' Fail,"). The answer is "yes." Her name is Sarah Palin. etc...

The director and two stars of the Oscar-nominated "Avatar" flew to the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower last week for a visit and a special screening of the movie in the ship's hangar bay. Actors Michelle Rodriguez and Stephen Lang signed autographs and posed for photos with the crew, according to a Navy news release. They also toured the guided-missile cruiser Hue City. They were accompanied by director James Cameron, producer Jon Landau and Cameron's brother John, a former Marine and the movie's military consultant. The Eisenhower left Norfolk on Jan. 2 for a six-month deployment to the Middle East....

[Archibald Carey, a black preacher from Chicago, was a friend of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower had Mr. Carey speak at the 1952 Republican Convention in Chicago. The text below is from the speech Mr. Carey gave at that convention. Next to it the link is text from MLK Jr.'s speech.]

The Brown-Coakley Senate race has echoes of another time, another era when a Mass. Senate race generated extraordinary enthusiasm and created a seismic shift in voter attitudes that came to define a lasting political realignment. In 1952, a young Irish Catholic Democratic Congressman named John F. Kennedy took on sitting Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who had previously defeated three similar Irish Catholic candidates. Lodge, of course, was from one of the "first families" of Massachusetts, and with his WASP pedigree and Republican heritage, typified New England political structure of the time. However, solidifying the trends of the previous decades, New...

At a time when there seems to be a lack of heroes, especially in the Presidency during the last decades, the biography of Dwight D. (Ike) Eisenhower is a reminder of the pride Americans felt for the General, the man and the country.

George W. Bush's State of the Union address must have baffled anyone who voted for him based on his pledge to cut the size of government. That speech has been properly and efficiently pilloried by Joseph Stromberg, Alan Bock, and others. The speech was both Wilsonian and Clintonian, which is to say that it proposed a political solution for all human problems and backed this idea with a promise of massive increases in federal spending on just about everything. But should we really be so surprised? Contrary to popular myth, every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased...

Most of us know that President Eisenhower, in his farewell speech, warned of the danger of the "military-industrial complex". Regardless of your particular stand on military spending, there is no doubt that he was substantially right about the enormous abuse of power and fraud in the defense industry. Less known is the Eisenhower's second warning in the speech. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in...

CBS News Early Show

SIXTY-FIVE years ago, in November 1944, the war in Europe was at a stalemate. A resurgent Wehrmacht had halted the Allied armies along Germany’s borders after its headlong retreat across northern France following D-Day. From Holland to France, the front was static — yet thousands of Allied soldiers continued to die in futile battles to reach the Rhine River. One Allied army, however, was still on the move. The Sixth Army Group reached the Rhine at Strasbourg, France, on Nov. 24, and its commander, Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers, looked across its muddy waters into Germany. His force, made up...

ABOARD USS RONALD REAGAN AT SEA, July 6, 2009 – The Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group relieved the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group today in command of Task Force 50 and launched its first sorties in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. An F/A-18F Super Hornet assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron 22 launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, July 6, 2009. Ronald Reagan relieved USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in command of Task Force 50 and launched its first sorties into Afghanistan to support Operation Enduring Freedom. U.S. Navy photo by Seaman Apprentice Oliver Cole  (Click...

It is in this arena that Eisenhower excelled and that, I believe, Obama will fail us. As Barack Obama spends his precious time talking about the challenges of the day by noting the shortcomings of the past administration, Eisenhower went to work. As Obama rubs shoulders with Hollywood elites and runs the late night talk show circuit, Eisenhower addressed the bottom line needs of the country. As Obama triples the country’s debt and nationalizes the free market system, Eisenhower gave us economic prosperity after the bloodiest of wars.