The new president was born third of seven boys in Abilene Kansas, to a rigorously religious family, especially the pacifist mother.  From her, Eisenhower learned the love of history (though personally, military history in particular).  After graduation from high school he worked two years to help finance a brother’s college education, then applied to (with sponsorship by Kansas's U.S. Senator Bristow) and – to the grand disappointment of his mother – was accepted to the West Point Military Academy, which offered a free education.  He played on the Academy’s football team, until a knee injury ended his football playing.  But he continued to engage in other sports and eventually served as a junior varsity football coach at the Academy.  In 1915 he graduated in the middle ranks academically of his class, a class however that would go on (because of the Great War) to provide the nation a large number of active officers.

Stationed in Texas after graduation, the following year (1916) he met and married Mamie Doud, moving to do so quickly in anticipation of American involvement in the Great War.  But as things turned out he would see no action in the war, and instead was assigned to various American camps to lead in soldier training.  Here he developed excellent organizational skills, ones that would be called on later to serve the country.  Understandably, he found himself deeply frustrated when just as he was finally about to be mobilized for action in France, the Armistice was signed and the fighting in Europe came to a close.

With the long period of peace that followed, he took up both further military study and service as a staff officer in a variety of commands, before being sent to the Philippines in 1935 to serve under General MacArthur, and the following year receive the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He returned to the States at the end of 1939 where he again served as a staff officer to various generals, finally attaining the rank of brigadier general in 1941, just prior to America's involvement in World War Two.  Thus far, however, there was nothing notable about his service that suggested he would one day find himself commanding the most important and final phase of a war in Europe.

With America’s entry into that war, he was first assigned duties with the General Staff in Washington helping in the planning of American operations in the Pacific. This brought him to the notice of Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, who was greatly impressed by Eisenhower’s strategic mind and his ability to move things forward in the midst of personality clashes among some of the Allies’ major military commanders.  In mid-1942, Eisenhower was sent to London to take command of the European Theater of Operations, and there as Lieutenant General, was given the command of the Allied Expeditionary Force operating in North Africa (Operation Torch).  He then led Allied operations in Sicily, and after that in Italy itself, gaining considerable experience in combat command.

By 1944 the Allies were ready to undertake the attack against Germany, across the English Channel to France and into Germany itself.  Commanding such a massive operation, and finding success in this last phase of the European war, was destined to make whoever commanded the operation a major war hero, the kind whom Americans might look to someday to become the nation’s president.  As we have already noted, Marshall put forward Eisenhower’s name rather than his own. So it was that Eisenhower received the appointment, and thus the fame that would follow.

It was also a correct decision because Eisenhower, amidst a field of military prima donnas (especially Montgomery, Patton and De Gaulle) was able to keep his attention focused on winning the war – and keeping these often antagonistic prima donnas working together – and not just securing a place for himself in the history books as a battlefield hero.  Also, he was quite able to work easily with General Zhukov, commanding the Soviet Army coming at Germany from the Russian East.
After the war Eisenhower was named Truman's Army Chief of Staff in replacement of Marshall, who had been sent to China to try to bring a reconciliation between the Chinese leaders Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-Tung (as they were spelled at the time).  At first Eisenhower took a more optimistic view about post-war cooperation with the Soviets than did his boss, Truman.  But by 1947 he too understood the importance of the policy of containment of Communism.

In 1948 efforts were made by many (both Democrats and Republicans) to run him as their party's presidential candidate, but Eisenhower refused. Anyway, given the post-war mood of the country, it was expected that New York Governor Dewey, running as a Republican, would win the presidency.  In any case, that same year Eisenhower was hired by Columbia University in New York City to serve as university president, a strange relationship considering the vast difference in mentalities that existed between the scholarly and quite idealistic professors and the quite pragmatic – and deeply religious – Eisenhower.  Tensions would result.

But Eisenhower was much more the scholar – or at least man of well-thought- through ideals – than the country understood about him at the time.  He was very active on the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations and a founder of the American Assembly, an organization designed to bring together leaders from all walks of American life to go over a broad range of political, economic and social issues facing the country.  Here Eisenhower developed from a starting point of deep knowledge of military strategy and organization a quite sophisticated understanding of the broader world of business, economics, and social-cultural matters.  Actually, Eisenhower was vastly much brighter than his Columbia University professors (many of whom disliked Eisenhower intensely) portrayed him before the public, and was learning to cultivate excellent working relations with American business leaders (whom liberal professors also tended to distrust).

In 1950 he was appointed Supreme Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nonetheless retaining his position at Columbia until sworn in as U.S. president in January of 1953).  This was an important appointment because Eisenhower could generate stronger support in Congress for this peacetime organization and its operations than could Truman, and at the same time could leverage America's European allies to make a deeper material commitment (men and money) so as not to make NATO a strictly American operation.

As a Christian, Eisenhower would prove to be one of the most active of all individuals to occupy the White House in support of the Christian faith and its central role in the life of the nation.  He did not come to the White House with much of a Christian testimony and was not even baptized until once in office. However, as president he took up regular Sunday attendance at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.  And also as president, Eisenhower constantly reaffirmed the importance of all Americans taking up their particular Christian responsibilities (including prayer and regular church attendance) as the nation faced social problems at home and political and economic problems abroad.  To Eisenhower’s understanding of things, God himself expected no less of America. And Americans seemed glad to take up this very challenge.

Indeed, it would be during his presidency that the words "under God" would be added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and "In God We Trust" would be confirmed as the nation’s motto in 1956.³

³The motto had actually appeared on American coinage since the mid-1800s, although it would not appear on paper money until the 1950s.

The matter of Senator McCarthy's stirring of the fires of the classic Red Scare continued to gnaw away at American morale.  Eisenhower himself did what he could to distance himself from the McCarthy matter, something that would earn Eisenhower increasing resentment from the intelligentsia class that McCarthy was fond of attacking.

Not so fearful of McCarthy was CBS television reporter Edward R. Murrow, who in his series See It Now presented episodes in March of 1954 reporting on (carefully chosen) unflattering statements and actions of McCarthy, concluding the episodes with a personal comment reflecting on the danger to American freedom posed by the type of behavior that McCarthy exemplified. McCarthy, sensing a decline in his popularity, answered back, but only making his case appear all the worse to the American public.  His national popularity was beginning to slide downward.

But it would eventually be an Army lawyer who would bring down the demagogic McCarthy by actually challenging the senator in the course of Senate committee hearings that McCarthy was conducting in an assault on the U.S. Army itself.  The event that turned matters was the way in June (1954) Army lawyer Welch challenged – with TV cameras covering the action – McCarthy's doctoring of evidence and the charlatan behavior of the senator in the way he went around falsely accusing people of unsubstantiated crimes.  McCarthy was not the person of steel will able to be challenged ... and melted in front of the TV cameras.  This was the signal for fellow senators to come out of hiding and go after the rogue senator (a two-month hearing over the summer of 1954 scrutinizing McCarthy's senatorial behavior), and finally in early December vote a motion of censure against McCarthy – rarely done in Senate history.

And that would be the political end of McCarthy – who (already something of a heroin addict), although he would continue to serve (now in isolation) in the Senate, would fall into alcoholism, and die in mid-1957.

McCarthy's political collapse in 1954 would also ease greatly the American Red Scare.  It would not end America's concern about Communist aggression, but at least it would direct it more abroad, and lift some of the cloud of suspicion that had been too long tearing at the American nation itself.

But the experience would leave one matter behind as a cultural legacy, a matter that would explode into a major cultural upheaval in the following decade (the 1960s).

Because of the depth of the Red Scare in America, a fateful decision in the early 1950s was made by Vet parents, concerned about the possible susceptibilities of their Boomer children to the subtle appeals of totalitarian Communism.  Vet parents were terrified by the stories of how easily Hitler had brainwashed German youth with his Nazi propaganda, and likewise stories of how Stalin had easily brainwashed Russian youth into turning their parents over to Soviet authorities whenever the parents were caught engaging in anti-state crimes (not just merely criticizing Stalin but even just merely continuing to honor their Christian heritage). The book 1984 also had made it very clear how the new world of technology had made it easy for those in authority to break into the private world of the common citizenry and take over even their personal thought processes.  Thus something needed to be done to ensure that no such capture of the minds of Americas youth by (Communist) ideologues should ever come to America.  The Red Scare made this matter a huge educational priority in America.

Thus, as an antidote to the appeals of (Communist) authoritarianism, the Vet parents were determined to train their Boomer youth in the art of careful challenge of all voices posing as authority.  "Think for yourself and thereby remain free" was the general theme.  This theme was stressed not only at home but also importantly at school, complete with essay contests in which students wrote on the subject "I speak for freedom" and "what America means to me," in which freedom, freedom, freedom – that is personal freedom, freedom, freedom – was stressed as the goal of all life, above all other considerations.

Little did the parents know that they themselves were brainwashing their own children in a way that would work to counter the very strong social instincts (serving each other and the nation under any and all circumstances) characteristic of the Vet generation.  The Vets were creating in the Boomer youth a generation that would find it very hard to give over the self to anything larger than that self in jobs, in marriages, in social (and church) affiliations – and certainly also in the idea of patriotism.  Boomers would grow up to see such affiliations not only compromising their personal freedom but even being aspects of backward, even evil loyalties.  The day would come when even American flags would burn in Boomer protest against dangerous patriotism.

Tragically, the Vets were very careful during the Boomers' growing up years of the 1950s not to impose on their children any difficult or self-sacrificing social values of their own (that would itself have constituted a form of the very authoritarianism that they were teaching the youth instinctively to challenge) – supposing that their own well-disciplined middle-class values would develop naturally, of their own, within the free-thinking minds of their Boomer children.  Little did the Vets understand how their own very strong values did not originate naturally from birth onwards, but were the results of very hard lessons learned from the life that they themselves were put through in growing up and taking their place as responsible adults.

Tragically none of those lessons, nor the social discipline they generated, would register with the Boomer youth.

This new anti-authoritarian approach to educating a new generation of Americans was combined with the great prosperity that greeted America after the war.  It must be remembered that as youth during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Vet generation had to work hard alongside their parents, and then in the 1940s serve the nation heroically in World War Two.  The Vets thus were never really privileged to develop a youth culture and had little understanding of what that was all about.  Now with the great wealth they possessed during the 1950s, the Vets were intent that their Boomer children should never suffer the loss of the experience of youth such as the Vets had been deprived of in their own growing up years.  The Vets consequently showered the Boomers with plenty.

But this tended to have the unexpected effect of creating a very distinct and very strong youth culture, one with its own music, its own social code, its own lifestyle. This in itself was enough to cause eventually inter-generational tensions ("their hair is too long, they dance to this horrible jungle music, they drive too fast, " etc.). But with an independently wealthy youth culture combined with the Cold War effort to create a generation that took nothing on authority – that was taught to evaluate everything from the perspective of what seemed true or good to the individual alone – a socially lethal generation was gradually being created.  By the beginning of the 1960s, as the first of the Boomers entered their teens, this explosive force was ready to be set loose in America.

The Vets did not realize that their own Christian, free market, patriotic, hard- working, self-sacrificing, democratic American Middle-Class values had come to themselves through much trial and tribulation – and were not simply the natural inclinations of any and all free peoples anywhere.  Tragically this would blind them not only in the raising of their own children, it would also blind them in their approach to their responsibilities abroad.  Here too, the Vets tended to believe (as an article of some kind of civic religion) that democracy such as was practiced in the United States was the natural inclination of people everywhere … provided that such people were freed from their own local authoritarian tyrannies (dictators) so as to be allowed to freely take up democratic ways.

This was not a new idea in America, for it had been the directing idea of America’s ill-fated involvement in World War One.  It was now once again a persistent idea in America, making its appearance after World War Two when Americans assessed the great achievement they themselves had secured with their own civil program of Middle American democracy.  It was natural that America would want the rest of the world to share in this glory.

All that seem to be needed was for America to help the world dump dictators, tyrants, indeed anything that seemed to govern a people through dominating power from above.  This would even include a move against their British and French allies, who held together their own multi-ethnic global empires, directed not from local power centers but from London and Paris.  This same instinct was indeed why the Americans had taken such a strong stance against their Dutch allies – when America supported so strongly the local independence movement in Indonesia (which interestingly soon resulted in the Indonesian dictatorship of Sukarno).

Sadly, the Vets would not be easily shaken from this civic religion, and would pass this on to their Boomer children, who would pass this on in turn to their children, the Gen-Xers, and so forth.  It is an article of unexamined Humanist faith that still afflicts America today.

Another key feature of the strong Vet Middle-Class culture was the deep trust that the Vet generation placed in corporate life – to the point of agreeing that all of life would function better using rational or scientific corporate-style processes (programs ... and more programs as the way to go at life).  Although the Vets presumed themselves to be highly Christian (church attendance was at an all-time high), the Vet approach to God and Christ tended to run along the idea that God helps those who help themselves.  Though Vets held a deep personal trust in God's love and grace, when it came to social trust, Vets were great believers in their own rational organizing and management of life.

The Vets sincerely believed that although Americas wartime victory was undoubtedly the result of God's great help, the Vets saw that help as having been transacted through the massive military-industrial complex which organized millions of Americans into an effective fighting machine.  The Vets' loyalties to such organizational logic were virtually unshakeable.

The Vet tendency toward corporatism showed up in the way they were great joiners: Masons, Lions Club, Kiwanis, church fellowship groups, bridge clubs, country clubs, etc.  They also tended to go to work for companies and corporations with the intention of remaining at that job until they went into retirement at a late age.  They also stayed married to their spouses … for a lifetime – in plenty and in want.  Their highly structured world was safe, stable and even unshakeable.

That would not be the case for their Boomer children.  And thus the Vets would be greatly perplexed (even greatly upset) when they could not figure out why their Boomer children did not just naturally take up the social habits the Boomers had grown up with under Vet parenting.  A quite different Boomer social dynamic would reveal itself to the eyes of the uncomprehending Vets when the Boomers began finally to enter their first years of adulthood in the mid-1960s. It seemed at that point that the Boomers stood against almost every social value that the Vets stood for!