Eisenhower Quotes

We’ve flown the president since Eisenhower, and we’re going to continue to fly the president for generations to come. This is something we’re very proud of.

War is party-blind. It doesn’t care who is in the Oval Office. The forces that drive us to war don’t care whether it’s Republican, Democrat, or other. The fact is, these parties are prey to special interests. That is something Eisenhower was afraid of.

Well, one of the things a lot of Americans don’t know, when Mitt Romney is nominated a few days from now, he will be the most experienced executive to be nominated for the presidency since Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, who had run a university and had run the allied war effort. That’s actually a big deal.

As son of a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was.

Surprisingly, the Eisenhower Memorial design contains almost none of the known Gehry-box of tricks. His giant etched chain-link curtain, first applied in 1979 to hide an ungracious parking garage at Santa Monica Place, is resurrected for Eisenhower to screen the equally graceless facade of the Department of Education.

It’s a big and growing problem, the amount of power possessed by Google and Facebook. President Eisenhower said it about the military-industrial complex. They pose a grave threat to our democracy.

Peking welcomed me with tremendous parades and gun salutes. The people with me are proud of me, proud that our downtrodden country has taken its place among the great nations. And now, people of America, I ask you, why didn’t Eisenhower accord me the same respect?

There used to be this feeling under Eisenhower and Kennedy and Roosevelt and Truman that government was a solution. Trust in the presidency fell precipitously under Johnson – real lows. And it’s never come back. It’s a trend that, if you’re liberal, is really discouraging.

If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.

Once Dwight Eisenhower makes up his mind, he’s full of indecision.

The ur-conservatives of the 1950s – William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the rest – were revolting not against a liberal administration but against the moderate conservatism of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Arnold Palmer has what I call an ‘Eisenhower smile’. Those two men, they’d smile and their whole faces would look so pleasant; it was like they were smiling all over.

You can call me an Eisenhower Republican. There is a gigantic gulf between an Eisenhower Republican and the kind of fringe brand of Republicanism that is being so vocally promoted today.

Eisenhower was my war hero and the President I admire and respect most.

Tobias Wolff is a hell of a writer, but you knew that already. His first memoir, ‘This Boy’s Life,’ was a Huck Finn story set in the Eisenhower era – a story so rich and wounding that not even Hollywood could make a bad movie out of it.

In the Eisenhower era, when earnings over $400,000 were subject to 91 percent taxes and the world was a smaller place, you could count the truly wealthy on one hand: Getty, Dupont, Mellon, Rockefeller, though even those fortunes were being dispersed to children as the old robber barons died off.

So the reason that the Bay of Pigs failed was that the original promise made by Eisenhower was not kept by the subsequent Administration. It allowed hostile air to wipe out the approaching invasion force.

I’ve always tried to be fair to my subjects. That’s easy when they are as likable and admirable as Lewis and Clark, or Eisenhower.

In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the ‘Feminine Mystique.’

Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee in 1952, made a strong public commitment to ending the war in Korea, where fighting had reached a stalemate.

Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on ‘Laugh In’ in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.

Eventually, my highbrow parents, who so hated the Eisenhower suburban culture of the 1950s that the only magazines they subscribed to were ‘The Atlantic’ and ‘The New Yorker,’ broke down and got ‘Life’ magazine.

In the budget, the president will call for a five-year freeze on discretionary spending other than for national security. This will reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade and bring this category of spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president.

I was born in 1953, so that’s the Eisenhower administration.

If you want to put golf back on the front pages again, and you don’t have a Bobby Jones or a Francis Ouimet handy, here’s what you do: You send an aging Jack Nicklaus out in the last round of the Masters and let him kill more foreigners than a general named Eisenhower.

Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.

In the last 100 years, three presidents suffered big defeats in Congress in their first term and then won reelection: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and the most recent example, Bill Clinton.

On rare occasions, Dad used to reminisce about when he met Eisenhower and how Churchill would pop in, in the late hours of the evening or night, carrying a cigar, when he’d obviously had a good dinner.

I met Gerald Ford. I met Richard Nixon. I met Jimmy Carter. I met Dwight Eisenhower when he was a general. George Bush senior. I haven’t met Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, although I got a letter from him.

I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21 because he promised to get us out of the Korean War.

The first person who contacted us was the assistant to President Eisenhower… in the White House.

I think I can do more inside the Republican Party to keep it in the center of the road. That’s where Eisenhower was. And I’m an unabashed Eisenhower Republican.

The Eisenhower Building – the furniture is mismatched; everything is just bad decor and bad quality. Everybody’s looking down at their Blackberry. It’s a really frantic, mismatched environment. But on the exterior, it’s this whitewashed, gorgeous building. It’s a fascinating contrast.

In my lifetime, we’ve gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We’ve gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in twelve years, we’ll be voting for plants.

I was chef to the French Presidents between ’56 and ’59, finished with de Gaulle, and during de Gaulle I remember serving Eisenhower, Nehru, Tito, Macmillan; those were the heads of state at the time. I never saw anyone. No one would ever, ever, ever come to the kitchen. You couldn’t even see them.

George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower all rode their wartime heroics into the White House.

There were no jobs created in America from 1945, when the war ended, through 2003. How could there be? Taxes were too high. Preposterously so under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan (who left office with a 28 percent rate on long-term capital gains) and Bush the Elder.

I have worked with Presidents since Eisenhower. We serve together.

Napoleon might have understood Dwight D. Eisenhower, who fought not even a hundred and fifty years after Waterloo. But I don’t think Eisenhower could even begin to wrap his mind around drone warfare, spy satellites, or any of the technology that now defines the security of our world.

Dwight Eisenhower warned American citizens at the end of his presidency about the implications of the military-industrial complex and its influence over government. We have now gone well beyond any of the wildest imaginations that could have entered Eisenhower’s mind.

Why should the Eisenhower memorial be over twice the size of WWII Memorial? Why should it be so vast as to comfortably house two Lincoln Memorials, two Washington Monuments, and two Jefferson Memorials – all six at once?

The Eisenhower Memorial competition and project have stirred a remarkable polemic, the center of which is not President Eisenhower or Washington, D.C. but Mr. Gehry and the values he promulgates.

I could never turn to a guy and a girl and ask, ‘Are you going steady?’ That was absolutely a no-no – it was the Eisenhower period, and no parent wanted their kid going steady, so it wasn’t a thing that you could endorse as proper behavior on the air.

I caddied for Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley long before they became generals or president, for that matter. Just between you and me, Bradley tipped better than Eisenhower did.

A lot of our family was undocumented. My mom and dad were both super conservative. My dad had a green card; my mom was an Eisenhower Republican who did not approve of all the ‘illegal people.’

Eisenhower was less deferential to the military than he seemed likely to be, Kennedy was not at all beholden to the pope, George W. Bush was smarter than portrayed and Barack Obama has not led a charge from the left – least of all on behalf of the civil liberties that have eroded since September 11, 2001.

I guess I was the most unbohemian of all bohemians. My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with – … namely America… Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.

Eisenhower had the clearest blue eyes. He would fix them on you. In my every interview with him, he would lock his eyes on to mine and keep them there.

I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.

I’m not that much of a socialist compared to Eisenhower.