Tours on Demands

The presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower began on January 20, 1953, when he was inaugurated as the 34th President of the United States, and ended on January 20, 1961. Eisenhower, a Republican, took office as president following a landslide win over Democrat Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election. This victory upended the New Deal Coalition that had kept the presidency in the hands of the Democratic Party for 20 years. Four years later, in the 1956 presidential election, he defeated Stevenson in a landslide again, winning a second term in office. He was succeeded in office by Democrat John F. Kennedy after the 1960 election. Eisenhower called for progressive conservativism. That implied that traditional American values included change and progress. Jean Smith says, He looked to the future, not the past, and his presidency provided a buffered transition from FDR's New Deal and the Fair Deal of Harry Truman into the modern era. Eisenhower was able to secure several victories in Congress, even though Democrats held the majority in both the House and the Senate during all but the first two years of his presidency. Eisenhower continued New Deal programs and expanded Social Security. He took the lead in building the Interstate Highway System in 1956, and the establishment of NASA, with a distinctly civilian mandate. In the Suez Crisis of 1956, Eisenhower used American financial power to force Britain and France to end their occupation of the Suez Canal. Eisenhower signed the first significant civil rights bills of the 20th century, and he sent federal troops to Arkansas to enforce a court ruling mandating school desegregation. Six months into his first term, the U.S. agreed to an armistice that ended the Korean War. Yet even though at peace, defense spending remained high, as the administration made vigorous efforts to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He authorized covert Central Intelligence Agency actions to overthrow unfriendly governments or protect reliable anti-Communist ones, and he implemented a national security policy that relied on strategic nuclear weapons to deter potential threats, both conventional and nuclear, from Warsaw Pact nations. Eisenhower was the first U.S. president to be constitutionally limited to two terms under the 22nd Amendment. Voted Gallup's most admired man twelve times, he achieved widespread popular esteem both in and out of office. Since the late 20th century, consensus among Western scholars has consistently held Eisenhower as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents.
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