Pages

Monday, March 28, 2016

THE WORLD'S MOST ADMIRED & RESPECTED MAN

JFK+50:  Volume 6, No. 1902

EISENHOWER DIED 47 YEARS AGO TODAY 

Washington, D.C. (JFK+50) On March 28 1969, Dwight David Eisenhower*, the 34th President of the United States, passed away at Walter Reed Army Hospital here in the Nation's Capital.  

Mr. Eisenhower, who had suffered four heart attacks over a period of years, died of congestive heart failure.  He had been seriously ill for most of the last year of his life.

The former president's body would lie in repose at the National Cathedral and in state in the Capitol Rotunda.  The General was buried in an $80 standard soldier's casket at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene.

President Richard M. Nixon, who served as Eisenhower's vice-president from 1953-1961, eulogized the General by saying...

"For eight years now, Dwight Eisenhower has neither commanded an army nor led a nation and yet he remain(s) the world's most admired and respected man..."

Mr. Eisenhower, elected President of the United States in 1952, and re-elected in 1956, retired to his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania as one of the most popular chief executives in our history.  The Republican campaign slogan, "We Like Ike," was true for the majority of Americans during the 1950s.

President John F. Kennedy conferred with former President Eisenhower several times during his tenure in the White House.  JFK visited personally with Ike at his Gettysburg farm in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs and called him during the Cuban Missile Crisis.


*Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) was born in Denison, TX and  grew up in Abilene, KS.  Known as Ike,  he graduated from West Point in 1915 and served in both world wars.  DDE married Mamie Geneva Doud of Boone, Iowa.

DDE was Supreme Allied Commander in Operation Overlord in WWII & led allied armies in landing at Normandy in France.  After the war, Ike served as president of Columbia University and was appointed Supreme Commander of NATO forces by President Harry S Truman in 1951.  

SOURCE

"Dwight D. Eisenhower, former president and decorated general, dies at 78 in 1969," by William Twaddell and James Wieghart, New York Daily News, March 27, 2016 (March 29, 1969), www.nydailynews.com/



JFK and Eisenhower
Camp David, Maryland
April 22, 1961
Photo by Robert Knudsen
NARA Image