Here’s a piece of trivia for you that we learned years ago while touring the boyhood home of Dwight D. Eisenhower in Abilene, Kansas:
He was born David Dwight Eisenhower. His father’s name was David, too, so his mother reversed the first two names to avoid having two Davids in the family.
At the end of World War II, President Truman told him, “General, there is nothing that you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.” Eisenhower called the idea “an astounding proposition” that he treated as a “splendid joke, which I hoped it was.” He laughed it off and told Truman that he would not run for president in ’48.
The incident is recounted in Eisenhower’s 1948 book, Crusade in Europe, his view of the European War. You might find his last few paragraphs something to reflect on in our current times:
Volumes have been, and more volumes will be, written on the collapse of world co-operation and the true significance of the events that accompanied the tragedy. For us, all their words will amplify one simple truth. Freedom from fear and injustice and oppression will be ours only in the measure that men who value such freedom are ready to sustain its possession—to defend it against every thrust from within or without.
Eisenhower warned against any signs of military weakness (as Churchill did in Fulton in 1946) but he felt “Military preparedness alone is an inadequate answer to the problem.” And nationalism isn’t either. In a time long before Russian hacking, Eisenhower wrote:
Communism inspires and enables its militant preachers to exploit injustices and inequity among men. This ideology appeals, not to the Italian or Frenchman or South Americans as such, but to men as human beings who become desperate in the attempt to satisfy common human needs. Therein it possesses a profound power for expansion. Wherever popular discontent is founded on group oppression or mass poverty or the hunger of children, there Communism may stage an offensive that arms cannot counter. Discontent can be fanned into revolution, and revolution into social chaos. The sequel is dictatorial rule. Against such tactics exclusive reliance on military might is vain.
The areas in which freedom flourishes will continue to shrink unless the supporters of democracy match Communist fanaticism with clear and common understanding that the freedom of men is at stake; meet Communist-regimented unity with the voluntary unity of common purpose, even though this may mean a sacrifice of some measure of nationalistic pretensions; and above all, annul Communist appeals to the hungry, the poor, the oppressed, with practical measures untiringly prosecuted for the elimination of social and economic evils that set men against men.
As a world force, democracy is supported by nations that too much and too often act alone, each for itself alone. Nowhere perfect, in many regions democracy is pitifully weak because the separation of national sovereignty uselessly prevents the logical pooling of resources, which would produce greater material prosperity within and multiplied strength for defense..
The democracies must learn that the world is too small for the rigid concepts of national sovereignty that developed in a time when the nations were self-sufficient and self-dependent for their own well-being and safety. None of them today can stand alone. No radical surrender of national sovereignty is required—only a firm agreement that in disputes between nations a central and joint agency, after examination of the facts, shall decide the justice of the case by majority decision. This is a slight restriction indeed on nationalism and a small price to pay if thereby the people who stand for human liberty are better fitted to settle dissension with their own ranks or to meeting attack from within.
We believe individual liberty, rooted in human dignity, is man’s greatest treasure. We believe that men, given free expression of their will, prefer freedom and self-dependence to dictatorship and collectivism. From the evidence, it would appear that the Communistic leaders also believe this; else why do they attack and attempt to destroy the practice of these concepts…
If the men and women of America face this issue as squarely and bravely as their soldiers faced the terrors of battle in World War II, we would have no fear of the outcome. If they will unite themselves as firmly as they did when they provided, with their Allies in Europe, the mightiest fighting force of all time, there is no temporal power that can dare challenge them. If they can retain the moral integrity, the clarity of comprehension, and the readiness to sacrifice that finally crushed the Axis, then the free world will live and prosper, and all peoples, eventually, will reach a level of culture, contentment, and security that has never before been achieved.
It might seem to some that Eisenhower’s seventy-year old message today would be “Make the WORLD great again.”