NARRATOR: If Dwight D.
Eisenhower had died in 1941 at the age of 51,
he would be unknown. [music playing] Had he died in 1945, he would
have lived forever in history as the brilliant supreme
commander of the mightiest and most successful
military coalition the Earth has ever known. But fortunately
for a world poised to slide into atomic terror,
this legendary maker of war went on as the
American president to lead a dogged, immensely
effective fight for peace against cruel and aggressive
enemies who relished the use of deadly force. There weren't any rules. These were new weapons
and great dangers, greater an ideological clash as
basic as one can possibly be. And these two sides capable
of destroying each other. It was an awfully tough decade
that required great leadership. And I think that Ike
gave it to the world. I think that he prevented
the coming of World War III. He was a prairie boy,
really hard and so sincere. And his patriotism was
almost beyond belief. 20 years, he was center
stage, around the world, not just in the United States. He was a figure of consequence
comparable to Churchill, Stalin, Mao, Roosevelt. [music playing] NARRATOR: Dwight
David Eisenhower was born on October 14,
1890 in a small rented frame house next to the railroad
tracks in Denison, Texas. He was the third son of David
and Ida Stover Eisenhower. The Eisenhower's were stern,
fundamentalist, pacifist. David was doing
common labor at $40 a month having lost his
inheritance when the family's store failed in a
farm depression. It was just a year later that
an offer of work at a creamery that paid $10 a month more
brought the Eisenhower's to Abilene, Kansas. It was the place Dwight would
cherish as his true home forever. He was one of six Eisenhower
boys, with one really death. And they would
learn at a young age about the sweat of the brow. Eisenhower's youth was
dominated by one word and that was work. The family could
afford very little. Each boy was given a plot of
ground, planted vegetables, and, then, had to
sell those vegetables. And you pay your debts
and you don't borrow and you don't ever
accept charity and you bring the kids up in
a strong Christian religion. And by golly, the
Eisenhower's did that. They produced these great big
gangly boys, five of them, that were destined
for great success. Arthur made it as
a banker and big, and Edgar made it as a lawyer,
and Milton made it as a college president, and Ike made it, of
course, in the way that he did. [music playing] NARRATOR: At Lincoln
Elementary School, he was a good student, though
only military history excited him. His heroes were Hannibal
and George Washington. He loved sports and girls and
was a notably terrible dancer. The Eisenhower family didn't
have a surfeit of anything, but love for one another. Ike would one day say, "I
only found out in later years, we were very poor." In the tiny two-story house
of barely 800 square feet, they found learning, prayer,
security, self-reliance, and a good, healthy,
brotherly competition. Dwight wasn't the
biggest or strongest, but he got the maddest. ROD PASCHALL: As a
youngster, he was known to fly into terrible
rage and he was never very far away from a fistfight
with just about anybody. So he had this
quick, flash temper that would get him into fights. And throughout his
youth, he had to learn how to control that temper. NARRATOR: He that conquereth
his own soul is greater than he who taketh the city was
the advice given to the boy who would go on to take many cities. [music playing] From apple-picking and
wheat-harvesting jobs that paid a quarter or half dollar a
day, Ike graduated to work at the Abilene Creamery, where
84 hours earned him $3.00. Everybody had to
help out the oldest to go to the
University of Michigan. Ike's turn was going
to be next at college, but, fortunately, he landed
an appointment to West Point and so the family's funds were
not diminished by his college education. NARRATOR: In the stellar
West Point class of 1915, Ike proved an average
student in the early going, saving his best
efforts for football. He was good enough to get
written up in "The New York Times" as "one of the
most promising backs in eastern football." But when a knee injury took
him off the gridiron for good, his interest in West
Point dropped sharply. The young Eisenhower,
against all the rules, became a volcanic
smoker and a poker shark and soon ranked 125th in
the class in discipline. He would later
express astonishment when an old classmate was
promoted to general, saying, "He's always been afraid
to break a regulation." They gave him a commission in
the infantry, and he took it. But he wasn't reaching
out to be a great soldier. On a Sunday in October
1915 at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, dashing Lieutenant Dwight
Eisenhower met vivacious, saucy Mary Geneva Doud. She was 19 and known to
her friends as Mamie. He's a bruiser, she said,
just about the handsomest male I've ever seen. Ike was so taken with Mamie
that he temporarily cut back on his beloved cigarette so
he could afford to date her. He proposed on Valentine's Day. They were married
on July 1, 1916 at the Doud's spacious
home in Denver. STEPHEN AMBROSE: She was
a spoiled little rich girl from Denver, the
metropolis of the west. He was a very corny farm
boy from Adelaide, Kansas who had had some of the rough
edges taken off by West Point, but not a lot of them. But it was love. And they married and they slept
in the same bed for 50 years. NARRATOR: America entered
World War I in April 1917 and every American officer
understood that his one chance to distinguish himself
for an Army career lay in getting to the battle zone
and achieving recognition in combat. [cheers] Dwight Eisenhower, now a
captain, never got to France. To his raging
disappointment, he ended up at Camp Colt, Pennsylvania,
training soldiers for the fledgling
American Army tank corps. The brightest spot
in Eisenhower's life was his new son, Doud
Dwight, called Icky. He became the light
of his parents' life and a huge favorite of all
the troops who made him a treasured mascot. And there was new professional
excitement and friendship with an exciting young fellow
officer, Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton, Jr.
Both men were enthusiastic about the future
of the tank weapon and were forever experimenting
with equipment and tactics. [music playing] But Dwight Eisenhower's
world was about to shatter. [music] By 1920, the once
freewheeling Dwight Eisenhower had taken happily to
family responsibilities, doting on his
three-year-old son, Icky. Then, tragedy. Icky caught scarlet fever from
a maid and died within a week. It was a pain from which
Eisenhower never fully recovered. To the end of his life,
he sent Mamie flowers on the anniversary
of their son's death. Deeply depressed by his loss and
the glacial rate of promotion in the peacetime
army, he thought of quitting the service. But the Eisenhower luck
was due for a change. Assigned to Panama in
1922, Ike got three years of a first class
military education at the feet of Major General
Fox Conner, the officer who commanded the Panama
Canal defenses and was reputed to have
the best mind in the Army. Conner was deeply
impressed by Eisenhower and pushed his career. A second son, John, was born
to the Eisenhower's in 1922. John would soon become the
new light in Ike's life. Now, Fox Conner pulled strings
to have Eisenhower appointed to the all important
Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth, Kansas. Command and General
Staff College was-- you had to do it, if you were
going to get ahead in the Army and you had to do well there. And the pressure was intense. There were students
who committed suicide. ROD PASCHALL: He became
the best student, graduating first in his class. And from that moment on,
everybody in the Army, the officers, knew Eisenhower
because you would normally know the officer who
graduated first in his class. NARRATOR: In 1930, Army Chief
of Staff Douglas MacArthur required Ike as an
indispensable staff officer, saying of him, "This is the
best officer in the Army. When the next war comes, he
should go right to the top." The relationship
was often stormy, but Ike learned command, debate,
and politics from the master. When MacArthur went
to the Philippines in 1935 to create the American
Commonwealth's defenses, he took Ike with him. Eisenhower gained
critical experience, learning to build an
army from scratch. He returned to the States in
1939 as a Lieutenant Colonel. He was not slated to make
Colonel until 1950 when he would be 60 years old. He gaged his chances of
ever making general as nil. But raging warfare
in Asia and Europe suddenly unfroze
the bleak prospects of the best regular officers. America's rush to rearm was
highlighted by the Louisiana war games of 1941 where
Dwight Eisenhower's grasp of organization and
maneuver brought him to his first prominence in a
press he was born to charm. With his photogenic grin
and explosive charisma, he was promoted to
Brigadier General. [music playing] [explosion] Within days after the Japanese
surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Ike began
his quick road to the top with the best possible
man, George Marshall. ROD PASCHALL: Eisenhower was
ordered to the War Department by the Chief Staff of the
Army, General George Marshall. Marshall knew of Eisenhower
and knew his reputation as an excellent staff officer. Also, he knew that Eisenhower
was quite familiar with the war plans in the Philippines,
having helped design those underneath MacArthur. NARRATOR: Marshall was
observing Ike, testing him on the Philippines
defense plan, telling him, "I must have assistants who
will solve their own problems and tell me later
what they've done." He saw that Ike was upbeat,
positive, a conciliator, and no desk pounder
or buck passer. All the traits he insisted
on in his top commanders. [music playing] In June 1942, Marshall
appointed Eisenhower commander of the European
Theater of Operations. The command was a
thin, hollow shell that he would have to build
into an overpowering force. In England, Eisenhower
would be thrown together with a young driver,
Kay Summersby, a pretty and sparkling Irish divorcee. Although Ike would write
319 loving letters to Mamie during the war, rumors
of an affair with Kay would torment their marriage. He was promoted to three
star general in July of 1942. His dedication to the
Alliance and the confidence of both Britons and Americans
gave him the leadership of Operation Torch, an
invasion of North Africa meant to give Stalin and Churchill
their second front. Torch, launched on
November 8, 1942, was the largest amphibious
invasion in history to that point. But the campaign
was awkwardly done. Ike's lack of confidence
in his green forces, and, perhaps, himself, led
to missed opportunities. He failed to use his
amphibious reserve to cut of the German
retreat to Tunisia and greatly shorten
the fighting. [explosion] The Americans were
humiliated and ravaged at Tunisia's Kasserine Pass
by German Afrika Korps troops under Erwin Rommel. An embarrassed Eisenhower
grimly counted his shortcomings and made repairs. [gun fire] He sent for his old
friend, George S. Patton, to take tough
charge in the field. After five bloody months,
Germany's Afrika Korps collapsed and the North
African campaign ended. Ike received his fourth
star, but the English had lost much faith in
American fighting ability and leadership. General Eisenhower was
not a man to mince words. After the North African
campaign in December of 1942, he wrote to a friend
that "the operations had violated every
principle of war, had been in conflict with every
logistical and operational method, and would be
condemned in their entirety by the Leavenworth classes
for the next 25 years." But it was a good learning
experience for Eisenhower. He learned he had to be a
lot tougher with his field commanders after his experiences
at the Kasserine Pass. And you had to fire people, and
you had to bring in new people, and you had to toughen
up that training, and you had to
toughen up the Army. And he, himself, had to be a
lot tougher than he had been. [music playing] NARRATOR: Eisenhower's
lackluster invasions of Sicily and Italy
gave him a look at the unsettling inclination
of temperamental generals, such as Montgomery and
Patton, to squabble in the field at the cost
of fighting efficiency. He knew a supreme commander
would have to prevent that in the crucial and upcoming
invasion of Western Europe, now coded as Operation Overlord. He did not yet know that
he would be that commander. At the Tehran Conference
of November 1943, Joseph Stalin pressed for the
name of the Overlord chief, the most vital command in
the history of warfare. Roosevelt wanted to give
it to George Marshall. If you put Marshall
in command of Overlord, what are you going to
do with Eisenhower? And the solution
they came up with is we'll make him
chief of staff. Well, that was absurd that would
make him boss of both Marshall and MacArthur. The selection of General
Eisenhower to command Operation Overlord was the single
most important decision, in terms of personnel, that
President Roosevelt made during the course of the war. NARRATOR: Having earned the most
coveted command in the history of warfare, Eisenhower now began
the crushing task of planning the assault that
would decide the life or death of a half
million men in an invasion of unimaginable
scale and importance. [music playing] Across the channel
waiting for him, behind bristling defenses
with 60 divisions, was the same
terrifying Desert Fox, who had handily slaughtered
Eisenhower's forces at Kasserine Pass. Rommel expected to do it
again at the Atlantic wall. [music playing] Through the first half of 1944,
Eisenhower planned the invasion of Europe, slated to hit
the Normandy coast of France on June 5. The mission demanded of him
the most massive juggling of material and people
ever asked of a commander. Even the difficult General
Montgomery was in awe, saying, "His real strength lies
in his human qualities. He has the power of drawing
the hearts of men towards him." The proper conjunction
of weather and tides made the window of decision
to launch the D-day forces agonizingly small. An invasion hamstrung by low
visibility, adverse tides, and heavy seas could
bring annihilation to the five invading divisions. As the clock ticked down after
a previous weather turn back of the invasion fleet, the
pressure became crushing. One of Eisenhower's principles
was make no mistakes in a hurry and put off decision making
as long as you possibly can so that you keep as many
options open as you can. This is shown most vividly
in his D-day decision. He just kept it open right
to the last possible minute that a decision had to be made. But then, it had to be made,
and he was ready to make it. And he knew when
that moment came. [explosions] ANNOUNCER: People of
Western Europe, the landing was made this morning
on the coast of France by troops of the Allied
Expeditionary Force. ANNOUNCER: This landing
is but the opening phase of the campaign
in Western Europe. Great battles lie ahead. I call upon all who love
freedom to stand with us now. NARRATOR: The invasion
succeeded, sometimes bloodily, sometimes easily. On D-day, June 6, 1944,
156,000 Allied soldiers crashed through
the Atlantic wall to establish a bridgehead 8 to
12 miles deep and 60 miles wide into Normandy. [tank gunfire] It was young John Eisenhower's
graduation day from West Point. His father regretted
his inability to attend, cabling simply, [inaudible]. In late July, after a
distressing costly stalemate in the dense Normandy
hedgerows, American forces broke out into open
country at Saint-Lo. [music playing] The eastern retreat of the
Germans toward the Siegfried Line became frantic and chaotic. George S. Patton, whom
Eisenhower had rescued from sacking after the
tempestuous general had slapped a battle-fatigued soldier,
justified Ike's judgment by brilliantly leading his
Third Army's armored pursuit into Germany. But the cornered Germans
would spring one more vicious surprise on the
winter-locked Western Front. [explosions] On December 16, 1944, the day
Dwight Eisenhower was promoted to five star general, Hitler
threw 24 divisions and 2 Panzer Armies against a thinly-held
[inaudible] sector. The attack hurled reeling
American forces backward and drove a deep bulge
into the US lines. The German target was the
key supply port of Antwerp with an aim of starving
the Allied offensive and forcing a negotiated
end to the war. The danger of the Battle of the
Bulge was real and devastating. The Bulge was Ike's
greatest moment in the war. That sounds odd when you think
about the decision to go ahead on D-day, but the
Bulge was a challenge that he had not had to face
before, an overwhelming enemy counteroffensive
coming out of the blue. A lot of people went into panic. Eisenhower didn't. From the first, he said
this is an opportunity. They've come out from
behind the Siegfried Line. They're out in the open. We're going to make
them pay for this. We're going to punish them. He took full command of the
Allied Expeditionary Force and made a series of
very rapid decisions. Who to move into Bastogne? The 101st Airborne. Get the 82nd up
there at St. Vith. Bring Patton in from the south. Give Monty command of the 1st
Army to the north of the Bulge because Brad doesn't have
any communications with them anymore. NARRATOR: It took weeks
of terrible fighting before the original line was
regained in late January 1945. But Eisenhower's firm hand had
shattered the best, and almost the last, of the German
Army in the west. With the Germans
crushed in the Bulge, the end was close,
with the Nazi capital of Berlin as the final prize. To the dismay of
Churchill and others, an unimpressed Ike left the
supposed plum to the Red Army. In place of American soldiers,
Russian soldiers would die. [explosions] And they'd talk about that
blankety blank Stalin sending us in there, 100,000
of our best young kids who had been through
this whole god awful war. Then, they have to die in this
last battle for one man's ego because Stalin wanted
to see that flag rise up over the Reichstag. All he had to do
was wait two weeks and they would have surrendered. That was exactly Ike's attitude. [music playing] NARRATOR: Eisenhower rebuffed
the German offer to capitulate to the Americans alone and
an unconditional surrender was signed in a
school room in Reims. Ike's terse communique read,
"The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241
local time, May 7, 1945. Japan would surrender
just three months later. With FDR having died in
April, Dwight D. Eisenhower was now the most popular
and respected man on Earth. Marshall brought him home last,
knowing that his acclamation would make the other
homecomings anti climatic. His receptions in
Europe and at home were prolonged and tumultuous. He was called to further
service in a thousand ways, and he would answer
many of the calls. [cheering] He would serve well as the Head
of the American Occupation, Army Chief of Staff, builder
and Supreme Commander of NATO, and President of
Columbia University. Jobs for a giant, but not
a giant as colossal as Ike. Eisenhower for President
clubs had been appearing before the echoes of the last
bombs in Germany and Japan had died away. Eisenhower became financially
secure for the first time on the huge success of his
postwar memoir "Crusade in Europe." Though busy building the NATO
Defense Force and seeming aloof from politics through
Truman's term, Ike grew steadily more
interested in the presidency as the 1952
elections approached. He thought that this country
was headed dangerously close to a welfare state and that
four more years of the Democrats might very well bring a certain
kind of socialism to America. And he was very dead
set against that. The Republican Party,
under Bob Taft, was drifting dangerously close
to a pre-1940 isolationism. Senator Taft had
voted against NATO. That was unacceptable
to Eisenhower. Eisenhower really began to see
this as I've got a duty to run. NARRATOR: With Ike in
Europe, the radio personality and super promoter Tex McCreary
organized a monster I Like Ike rally in Madison Square Garden. And that is the rally that
Ike saw in Paris with Mamie, with Mamie, and that is
what really persuaded him to come home and
answer the call of America. [music playing] NARRATOR: The in fighting for
the Republican presidential nomination was bruising with
Robert Taft, the party's longtime, all-powerful
leader, fighting fiercely to hold his delegate lead. Ike heard rumors being spread
of Mamie's drinking, an affair with Kay Summersby, and
that he was secretly Jewish. But the Eisenhower
steamroller went forward and he was nominated to
run against Democrat Adlai Stevenson. But there were thorns
on the campaign trail. [music playing] Red-baiting Republican
Senator Joseph McCarthy was trumpeting 20 years of
red treason and sellouts in the US government. [music playing] And he had singled out Ike's
friend and mentor, George Marshall, as a trader for
his supposed loss of China to communism. When Eisenhower succumbed to
pressure and let his staff withdraw a paragraph supporting
Marshall from a campaign speech in McCarthy's
home state of Wisconsin, the deletion was found out. A deeply embarrassed Ike never
forgave himself or McCarthy. STEPHEN AMBROSE: In
the 1952 campaign, the sleeper was Korea. When he asked me to get
back into the campaign-- I'd left temporarily
to practice law-- he asked me to go into
the New York headquarters and we produced
the speech in which he said, "I shall go to Korea." He didn't say what he was
going to do when he got there. But the idea that the nation's
greatest war hero was going to go to Korea and give
it his personal attention was very reassuring to people. NARRATOR: Richard Nixon,
picked as Ike's running mate for his youth, his
strong western support, and anti-communist crusading,
proved a hard and effective campaigner. When Nixon's nomination was
put in peril by questions of a political slush fund,
Ike would not order him out of the campaign, but left
him to dig his own way out with an emotional appeal on TV. Their relations would
ever after be cool. Ike went against
advice and campaigned in the southern
democratic strongholds. His cracking of the
so-called Solid South helped a landslide
victory that brought him 442 electoral votes. He would lead America through
eight fascinating years, and he would get to
know Mamie again. [cheering] Mamie said, "I'd
like to reach over and pat Ike on his old, bald
head anytime I want to." [music playing] In his inaugural address,
Eisenhower sensed his grim challenges,
saying, "Science seems ready to confer upon us,
as its final gift, the power to erase human life
from this planet." [music playing] He was about to lead the
United States through the most perilous years of the new
age of the nuclear showdown. Eisenhower acted quickly
on his campaign promise to go to Korea. He flew to the battlefront
where both the Korean government and his military wanted to drive
the Reds back across the Yalu River. Ike had his own wily strategy
and kept his hand well hidden. ROD PASCHALL: Ike's plan
to end the war in Korea was to let the word go
out, by word of mouth, that the United States
would change the nature of the Korean War, if its
demands at the negotiation table in Panmunjom
were not acceded to. And the change would
take two forms. First, the war would
no longer be confined to the Korean peninsula. And second, the United
States would not feel obligated to keep the
weaponry in the Korean War to only conventional munitions. Within 30 days after
that word went out, we know now, that
Moscow, the presidium, decided to terminate
the war in Korea. NARRATOR: Dwight Eisenhower
now found the Cold War spilling over into domestic crisis. By 1954, Senator Joseph
McCarthy's red hunt was running amok. He was the center of
congressional committees launching 11 investigations
of the State Department alone. He was advocating burning
books, terrifying witnesses, and trampling basic rights
in a widely shared hysteria. When a left-leaning
Army dentist received an automatic promotion,
a furious McCarthy called to the stand
an Army officer who had been a wartime
buddy of Eisenhower and brutally humiliated him. Belatedly, but boldly, Ike
drafted an historic order. An executive order
which forbade anybody in the executive branch from
appearing before McCarthy's committee and testifying and
that cut off McCarthy's power. He couldn't call on anybody
in the executive branch of government as a witness. And it was the turning
point in his power. NARRATOR: McCarthy
would slowly fade away, but the doctrine of
executive privilege, appearing nowhere
in the Constitution, would rise ominously
in future presidencies. [explosion] In August of 1953, the
Earth-shattering blast that signaled the Soviets
had a hydrogen bomb began a depressing,
expensive nuclear race. Ike, the former general,
battled to hold a defense budget within reason against the Hawks. [music playing] To achieve what was called
more bang for a buck, bellicose Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles concentrated the
nation's defense forces on massive nuclear retaliation. There came to be a policy called
assured mutual destruction. The danger cooled. At Dien Bien Phu in Indochina
where France's Foreign Legion was making a last stand
against Viet Minh rebels, and at the tiny islands
of Quemoy and Matsu, off the China coast, where
the mainland Red Chinese were shelling Chiang
Kai-shek's Nationalists, there came demands on Ike
for massive, even nuclear, intervention against
the communist tide. [music playing] Eisenhower was too much the
brilliant soldier to commit troops where they could not win,
as did the French in Indochina and too much of a great poker
player to let blood, bombs, and shells do the work
of a well-backed bluff, as with the offshore islands. He went to Capitol Hill,
asked for, and got, an unprecedented power. He could act to hurl the
armed forces against an enemy without consulting Congress. But the principle was
established that the president can get this blank
check in advance. It could only happen
during the Cold War. It could only have happened
with Eisenhower as president. NARRATOR: As Eisenhower turned
aside the deadly confrontation with Red China,
most of the country saw nothing but an unprecedented
era of growth and prosperity. Ike, the old Kansan,
liked to see things grow. And he set the nation on a
happy binge of federally funded highways to accommodate
the new cars flooding off the booming assembly lines. [music playing] Budgets were balanced and
defense spending was down. The middle class became
America's happiest place to be, and they loved Ike. But suddenly, on
September 23, 1955, the Iron Leader was down, felled
by a coronary thrombosis while on vacation in Colorado. During Ike's
convalescence, Dulles managed to keep the government's
reins in his own hands and away from Vice
President Nixon. His heart attack in
1955 was probably soft pedaled by the medical
staff surrounding him. In fact, it was much more
serious than the public was led to believe. His strength, his
energy, his resiliency were greatly diminished. NARRATOR: With Ike's
doctor convincing Mamie that her husband would
die with inaction, she went along with his
agreement to run again. [music playing] Ike's next trial came fast. Egyptian leader
Gamal Abdel Nasser had been denied Western aid
for his great Aswan Dam project after recognizing Red China. He now responded by
nationalizing the crucial Suez Canal. Britain's Prime
Minister Anthony Eden declared that the West could
not countenance this threat on the Middle East oil supply
and launched military action with France and Israel. Ike vigorously
opposed their move. The United States sided
with a third-world country, against its NATO allies
and against Israel. He took-- sided with
Nasser on principle, that is, you can't have that kind
of Victorian gunboat diplomacy going on in the 20th century. NARRATOR: When Eisenhower
applied economic sanctions and an oil embargo,
the invading coalition backed off in a sullen fury. With the Soviets threatening
to support Egypt with force, Ike walked a tightrope to defuse
a world never closer to a blow up. Eisenhower swept again
to the presidency in 1956 in the first TV-powered
election campaign. His margin over
Adelaide Stevenson was twice what it
had been in 1952. But there was to be no respite
from crisis, this time, in America's own backyard. [music playing] As the Cold War raged across
the seas, the world at home changed wrenchingly. Through the middle '50s,
the Supreme Court's decision in Brown versus Topeka
was tearing apart Dwight Eisenhower's America. The decision, presided over
by Ike's own appointee, Earl Warren, overturned the old
Plessy versus Ferguson verdict that had sanctioned schools
that were separate but equal. Suddenly, whites
had been ordered to go to school with blacks. And some whites, and their
senators and congressmen, were having no part of it. Ike began to flounder. He was born six years
before Plessy versus Ferguson. He had grown up with
it all his life. He had lived in a
segregated Army. He had lived in the
segregated South. During all the time
that he was president, he never said that he was
for or against the decision in Brown against
Board of Education. This, of course, antagonized
people on both sides. STEPHEN AMBROSE: He
wanted to be our leader. He had run to be our leader. He had campaigned hard for it. But on this burning moral
issue of the day, segregation in the United States, he
just wished it would go away. He didn't want to
offer leadership on it. NARRATOR: Harrowing months
of turmoil came to a head at Central High
School in Little Rock, where Arkansas Governor
Orval Faubus openly defied the federal order to
integrate by using police and the National Guard to deny
entrance to nine black children amidst crowds of racist rioters. [rioting] Ike worked hard
behind the scenes to get Faubus to agree to
admit the black students and was pleased when he
thought he'd succeeded. But when Faubus went back
on his word, that was it. Ike exploded,
unprintably and acted. The first that Governor Faubus
knew about the president's decision was when the 101st
Airborne Division marched up the main street of
Little Rock with bayonets and escorted the black
children into the school without any loss of
life or casualties. [music playing] NARRATOR: But peace was
foremost on Eisenhower's mind as his final term wound down. During the visit to the United
States by the volatile Russian General Secretary
Nikita Khrushchev, Ike laid the groundwork
for a capstone agreement to end the arms race. Nearing 70, he
visited 18 nations to gain world support for
his vital peace initiatives. A May 16 date was fixed for
a Paris meeting between Ike and Khrushchev, which would
lead to the ultimate summit in Moscow. [music playing] On May 1, Ike nervously approved
one last flight over the Soviet Union by a high flying neutral
spy plane, piloted by Francis Gary Powers. It disappeared in flight, hit
by a Russian surface-to-air missile. [inaudible] with good reason. The CIA had assured the
president that they'll never get a pilot alive. They had assured him
that the U2 flew so high that Soviet anti-aircraft would
never, ever be able to reach it. Then, they gave
Powers a parachute, and he got shot down. Ike didn't know he was alive. Denial, denial, denial. And then, Khrushchev,
triumphantly, produces a live
Francis Gary Powers, singing like a canary
about all the flights that he'd taken over
the Soviet Union. Eisenhower looked very bad. And the United States
looked very bad. I think, in retrospect, that
Khrushchev was seeking an out from the Paris Summit. NARRATOR: Ike had lost the one
thing that set him above all the other leaders, trust. As Powers was tried, Khrushchev
demanded an apology from Ike, who growled, "I hope no one
is under the illusion I'm going to crawl on my
knees to Khrushchev." He declined to make a
scapegoat of the CIA and endured a humiliating
Khrushchev tirade and walkout in Paris, as his
cherished summit died. With his presidency
winding down, Eisenhower joined,
halfheartedly, in the presidential campaign
pitting Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy. Ike spent more time
defending himself than effectively stumping
for his vice president. [music playing] What he had seen
as failures were taken by the American
people as necessary losses in a different era, and they
stayed solidly behind him. Eisenhower's last shining
moment as president came on January 17, 1961
in his farewell address. The old soldier
warned, eloquently-- In the councils
of government, we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military
industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous
rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. NARRATOR: As Nixon
lost to Kennedy, Eisenhower felt repudiated
and fought depression as he left office. But almost to his surprise,
his popularity went on. STEPHEN AMBROSE: Had very
comfortable retirement. He was revered. He played a role in politics. He enjoyed life very much. He enjoyed having
time with Mamie, playing Scrabble with Mamie,
having tea with Mamie. He enjoyed his golf very much. He enjoyed being
an elder statesman. NARRATOR: In 1968, he
campaigned hard for Nixon and was pleased to
see him elected. But the tough years
had worn him down. He went through
five heart attacks. And by the end, he was really
down to almost less than 100 pounds. He went out with some
wonderful final words, "I have always loved my wife. I have always loved my children. I have always loved my country." NARRATOR: Dwight
David Eisenhower died on March 28, 1969 at Walter
Reed Hospital in Washington, DC. He was given a funeral
befitting the titan he had been. World leaders attended, along
with government dignitaries, and old Army buddies, not just
because it was the thing to do, but because they all genuinely
grieved the loss of an open, loving, and honest friend. [music playing] He lies with Mamie
and his beloved Icky on the grounds of the Eisenhower
Museum in Abilene, Kansas. This is where he wanted to be. This is where his best thoughts
are and his youth, here, on the plains in Abilene. You know, I still
get out my button and shine it up once in a while. I Like Ike. [music playing]
