Introduction to
Quotations from Eisenhower's Speeches and Writings

To those who have done extensive research on the 1940s and 1950s, and to all of those who have read Dwight Eisenhower’s speeches and his meticulously edited action papers, it is obvious that Ike had a fine command of the English language and was a superb writer.  Reading his careful, hand-written corrections on staff-drafted materials will quickly convince you that Eisenhower cared about how things were said as well as what, exactly, was being said.  And yet, he has come down in many historical and contemporary media accounts  as a bumbling, less-than-articulate presidential leader.  Certainly, in his press conferences, he frequently stumbled and occasionally wandered into a tortuous syntax that left his listeners either smiling or confused.

So which one is the true Eisenhower?  The man who  communicated with clarity, avoided the nuance, and used straightforward common vocabulary?  Or the President who tried his best  never to use the phrase “no comment” when talking to the press, and who may have stumbled when he was trying to discuss  complicated national issues  without disclosing classified information or constraining the Administration?

To help you decide how to characterize the man and his leadership,  The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission has provided two major communications  on our website, http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org.  The first is the presentation of his personal writings during the presidency, all of which appear in the last eight volumes of The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, as compiled and annotated by scholars at the Johns Hopkins University. The online three and a half million words of private correspondence published by the Johns Hopkins University Press provides a full display of Eisenhower’s written communications, both public and private.  A comparison of the private and public documents should be helpful.

Your  second major source of information on this issue  is our online textual presentation of his speeches and addresses from 1939 through 1966.  This compilation of some one and a half million words also should help you understand what Eisenhower had to say as well as how he wanted to say it.

He wrote many of these speeches himself and carefully directed and edited the others.  He  spent many hours rewriting and personalizing the texts, at times through four or five consecutive drafts. His confidential secretary, Anne Cook Whitman, supervised twelve typists in her White House office in order to keep up with Eisenhower’s constant rewriting and editing of  any letter that would have his personal signature or any speech that he would deliver. 

In 1967 Droke House Publishers of Anderson, South Carolina, published a book edited by Elsie Gollagher entitled The Quotable Dwight D. Eisenhower.  This 242-page presentation of nearly 900 quotations is useful to anyone studying or writing about Eisenhower. Nearly all of the quotations in the book are displayed in full paragraphs containing several sentences.

The following compilation of Eisenhower Quotations has been assembled with a view toward displaying some of Ike’s written and spoken thoughts set out in a single sentence or short phrase. Eisenhower was very often a man of few words.

- JT Dykman, Compiler