Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower commanded the invasion of Europe and then spent eight years as president warning about the industry that had produced it. Born in Texas in 1890 and raised in Kansas in a pacifist Mennonite family, he went to West Point largely because it was free, graduated in the middle of his class in 1915, and spent the First World War training tank crews in Pennsylvania — a posting he resented and which turned out to matter. He was a major for sixteen years. Marshall pulled him out of obscurity in 1941, and he went from colonel to five-star general in about three years without commanding troops in combat. He was chosen for the supreme command because he could hold an alliance together — a job that consisted largely of managing Montgomery, Patton, de Gaulle and Churchill without any of them walking out. He wrote a note before D-Day taking sole responsibility if it failed, and put it in his wallet. He was elected president in 1952 and governed from the centre in a way that infuriated his own right. He ended the Korean War, refused to intervene at Dien Bien Phu, refused to use nuclear weapons on several occasions his advisers proposed them, and stopped Britain, France and Israel at Suez in 1956. He also authorised coups in Iran and Guatemala and the U-2 flights. He sent troops to Little Rock in 1957 to enforce desegregation. His farewell address in January 1961 warned against the acquired influence of the military-industrial complex, a phrase he coined.
- Lived: 1890 CE – 1969 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: general, commander_in_chief, president
