Free Republic

The snow had fallen in massive quantities the night before and the temperature had plummeted to single digits. And the man who had provided steady and unruffled guidance to the United States of America during a potentially turbulent time, likely found himself watching the weather every bit as much as his sense of duty drove him to keep an eye on the very world itself. He had a trip planned that day—one he had been looking forward to for a while. It was more than an excursion from one place to another; it was a journey from glory to glory....

On NOVEMBER 9, 1954, President Eisenhower addressed the National Conference on the Spiritual Foundation of American Democracy at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel, Washington D.C.: "Now Dr. Lowry said something about my having certain convictions as to a God in Heaven and an Almighty power. Well, I don't think anyone needs a great deal of credit for believing in what seems to me to be obvious... This relationship between a spiritual faith...and our form of government is...so obvious that we should really not need to identify a man as unusual because he recognizes it." Eisenhower continued: "Our whole theory of government finally...

This is sample footage of the earliest surviving colour videotape recording which is the Dwight Eisenhower inaugural address to WRC-TV on 22nd May 1958. The first 15 minutes of this event was shot in B&W which you see the president arriving to the building and the news reporter giving details of the event, then about nearly 15 minutes in Robert Sarnoff hits the colour switch and on comes the colour. For the remaining 15 minutes Robert Sarnoff, Dwight Eisenhower and David Sarnoff speak about the station and the colour television technology while being recorded in living colour!!! The whole program...

It’s tempting to say that Ronald Reagan was the best U.S. president of the past century, and I’ve certainly demonstrated my man-crush on the Gipper. But there is some real competition. I had the pleasure yesterday of hearing Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations make the case for Calvin Coolidge at the Mont Pelerin Society Meeting in Australia. I dug around online and found an article Amity wrote for Forbes that highlights some of the attributes of “Silent Cal” that she mentioned in her speech. As you can see, she makes a persuasive case. … the Coolidge style...

Conservative students opting out of campus battles in favor of national ones may want to refocus their efforts. To be sure, the local campaigns can be hazardous. Just ask Ruth Malhotra, who needed a police escort when she waged one at Georgia Tech. Nevertheless, they give students the opportunity to expound on that which they know best. Moreover, it gives them a chance to follow in a noble tradition, namely that of William F. Buckley, Jr. when at Yale. “For his valedictory in 1950 he convened a dinner to honor the retiring Yale president,” Rick Perlstein writes in Before The...

1962 the Soviets swapped a U.S. airman to the Americans in return for their spies, but they kept the pilot's plane. Here's what happened to it. By Joe Pappalardo It looks like Russia and the U.S. are negotiating the biggest spy swap since the Cold War ended, as accused and convicted spies in both nations are set to be bartered, and some being moved from prisons in America to Vienna in anticipation of a deal. The episode harkens to the 1960s, when spies were traded to maintain the brittle peace between nations. The most famous of these cases involved Francis...

Think about it. Back in the mid 1950s, President Eisenhower was faced with a mass influx of illegal aliens crossing over the Mexican border into the United States. People were complaining of the same thing back then like they are doing today. That the illegals were taking jobs for less pay compared to what the average American was making and that also they were dangerous to society. Ike proposed a plan and had one of his generals inpliment it. The plan was to round up and deport the illegals deep into Mexico by ships and once word got out that...

Eisenhower arrived in London with less than five months until D-day. That is one month less than I had as Finance Director of a private college to lead the management team in preparing the annual operating and capital budgets. His experience occurred in another world I can never adequately imagine. A popular historical portrayal describes General Dwight Eisenhower managing a political/military alliance, but reminds us he never lead troops in combat. However, his leadership sustained many unprecedented initiatives for successful Normandy landings. The air assault examples the frightful uncertainties of many critical hazards run on this “Day of Days”. The...

It seems Barack Obama has a new presidential role model, at least as far as national de fense is concerned: Dwight Eisenhower. But the Ike that Obama likes isn't the easy-going golfing geezer -- and certainly not the grim Cold Warrior who promised massive nuclear retaliation on the enemy if they started any serious trouble. No, this is the Ike who slashed America's defense budget by more than a quarter after the Korean War, and who, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, was willing to "make hard choices" about where American military might should be used, and where it shouldn't....

"General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America. . ."

...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...