Posted October 14, 2017
Dwight D. Eisenhower is consistently ranked in the top half of presidents - almost always in the top quarter of presidents, from #5 to #10 - in rankings of effectiveness and leadership qualities.
And recently historians have upgraded him - it's the more recent rankings that are higher.
Before he was president, Eisenhower (aka "Ike") was a 5-star general in the U.S. Army. During World War II he served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe - in other words, he was the guy who planned and supervised the successful invasions of North Africa in 1942-43 and of France and Germany in 1944-45.
So Ike was a legitimate war hero.
It's perhaps not surprising that he won the presidency in landslide elections.
President Eisenhower earned his high rankings by showing crisis leadership. Here are a few of his accomplishments:
- He obtained a truce after years of war in Korea (it started before he was in office).
- He got China to agree to release POWs.
- He desegregated the armed forces.
- He sent federal troops to enforce a court order desegregating public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas.
- He continued New Deal programs and expanded Social Security.
- He opposed Joseph McCarthy's "witch hunt" of communists in the U.S.
- He created NASA.
- He warned about the "military industrial complex" with some specifics that have since proved spectacularly correct (even though his advice was largely ignored!).
- He formed the Interstate Highway System.
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