Dwight Eisenhower: Abilene's Gift to the World

Dwight David Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas, in eighteen ninety, but his family moved to Abilene, Kansas, when he was a toddler, and he always considered Abilene home. He grew up in a small white house on South Fourth Street, the third of seven sons, in a family that was devout in the River Brethren tradition, poor enough that the boys took turns keeping a vegetable garden and selling produce to neighbors, and deeply committed to education despite having no money to pay for it.

The house on South Fourth Street is still there. The Eisenhower Presidential Library and boyhood home complex in Abilene holds the house, his mother's original furnishings, and the building where he is buried alongside Mamie. He asked to be buried in Abilene, in the chapel on the library grounds, in a standard soldier's coffin.

Eisenhower left Abilene by train in nineteen ten, heading for a congressional appointment to West Point that had been arranged by a local politician. He graduated in nineteen fifteen, in the class that would be known as the class the stars fell on because of the number of generals it produced. He commanded the Allied invasion of North Africa in nineteen forty-two, the liberation of Sicily and Italy, and Operation Overlord, the Normandy invasion of June sixth, nineteen forty-four, which he considered the greatest gamble of his life. When weather reports on the night of June fourth, nineteen forty-four, gave him a narrow window of marginally acceptable conditions, he made the decision alone, standing in a tent at Southwick House in England, and said simply: OK, let's go.

He returned to Abilene at the end of the war. The town he came back to was the same town he had left, mostly. The country he had helped save was not the same country he had grown up in. He served two terms as president, from nineteen fifty-three to nineteen sixty-one, completing the Korean Armistice, building the Interstate Highway System, signing the Civil Rights Act of nineteen fifty-seven, and warning in his farewell address of January seventeenth, nineteen sixty-one, against what he named for the first time: the military-industrial complex. The phrase came from a Kansas farm boy who had spent his adult life at the center of it.