Eisenhower's Abilene

Abilene, Kansas, was already past its moment as a cattle town when the Eisenhower family arrived there from Texas in eighteen ninety two. Dwight had been born two years earlier in Denison, Texas, before the family made the move. The longhorn drives from Texas that had made Abilene briefly famous in the eighteen seventies had moved on, replaced by farming and small commerce. The Eisenhowers settled into a modest house on South East Fourth Street with no indoor plumbing. Dwight was the third of seven sons.

He left Abilene in nineteen eleven for West Point. He spent the next six decades mostly elsewhere, in military postings across the country and Europe, commanding the Allied forces in the Second World War, serving as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, running for president in nineteen fifty-two, winning by a landslide. He occupied the Oval Office from nineteen fifty-three to nineteen sixty-one. He left office warning the country about the military-industrial complex, a phrase his speechwriters helped him coin, that has echoed across American politics ever since.

When he died in March of nineteen sixty-nine, he was buried in Abilene, in the small chapel behind the presidential library complex, in the plain uniform of a five-star general. His wife Mamie was buried beside him after her death in nineteen seventy-nine.

The Abilene that looks back at you through the library windows is recognizable as the town he grew up in: wide streets, modest houses, the flat Kansas horizon that he described in interviews as something that stayed with him through forty years of other landscapes. His boyhood home is preserved across the street from the library complex, the furniture approximately as it would have been when he was twelve, the kitchen where his mother Ida kept the house running.

He came from here. He came back here. That is, for a Kansas story, enough.