John Henrik Clarke Quotes

I like Ike

If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.

On rare occasions, Dad used to reminisce about when he met Eisenhower and how Churchill would pop in, in the late hours of the evening or night, carrying a cigar, when he'd obviously had a good dinner.

'What if?' history is a tricky game, but there is no doubt that the senior planners of D-Day - including Eisenhower and the British general Bernard Montgomery - believed that the Double Cross operation had played a pivotal role in the victory.

Out of the heartland of America, out of this small house in Abilene, Kansas, came a man: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Through the crucial hour of D-Day he brought us the triumphant peace of VE-Day. Now, in another crucial hour in our history…

I was a biographer of MacArthur and Eisenhower. Eisenhower was smarter. MacArthur was more glib. When MacArthur had a problem, he turned it over to Eisenhower.

Jimmy Gault, now English aide to General Eisenhower, invited me to dine last night at the Muhammad Ali Club to meet the General and his staff. Being the only outside guest I was placed at dinner next to the General. There were about sixteen people there – all Americans except for Jimmy, Kay Somersby, the General’s very nice English secretary [and mistress] who sat on his right, and myself.

I don’t see how our country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J Pershing, Eisenhower and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.

No doubt history will say that Eisenhower was a soldier. For my part, I will remember, above all, his goodness. He was a fundamentally good man who knew how to be loved by the Americans.

George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower all rode their wartime heroics into the White House.

Eisenhower was quite supportive of Kennedy and Johnson in terms of foreign policy.

Of course, Dwight D. Eisenhower gets credit for doing more for golf than any other White House resident, a mid- to high-handicapper though he was.

Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.

There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they're great fun to write about.

If you want to put golf back on the front pages again, and you don't have a Bobby Jones or a Francis Ouimet handy, here's what you do: You send an aging Jack Nicklaus out in the last round of the Masters and let him kill more foreigners than a general named Eisenhower.

Eisenhower was my war hero and the President I admire and respect most.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign.

Eisenhower is my choice as the American of the 20th Century. Of all the men I've studied and written about, he is the brightest and the best.

He has the best political mind of all the generals I have.

Why, this fellow [Dwight D. Eisenhower] don't know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday.

Ike must have carried it through the Pentagon on a motorcycle

Every time we seem to have a scandal in Washington, the discussion of Kay Summersby [his English female driver] and Dwight Eisenhower always comes up.

I like Ike. But I like his running mate, Nixon, even better.

Several weeks before the Russians launched Sputnik, our team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory asked permission to place a rocket in orbit around the Earth. We could to it with two days of preparation. We had been doing experiments with 2 stage rockets to test materials and designs for nose-cones returning from space. We launched rockets straight up. At the maximum height we turned it around and fired the second stage to drive it straight back to Earth so it could achieve the speed of an object returning from space. We were developing more and more powerful second stage rockets. We had just calculated that our newest second stage had more than enough thrust to, after the ascent, turn the rocket at right angles to the perpendicular, and fire the rocket into orbit around the earth. We could do this easily. The military were initially very enthusiastic. America could be the first nation that put a satellite in orbit. However, the authorities in Washington, not only refused us permission to try, but postponed a number of our regular launches and forbade us from talking to anyone about our capability or request for our experiment.. When Sputnik was launched into orbit a few weeks later, we were really puzzled. No one ever explained why Washington had refused us permission, but we came up with a theory: The issue of the legality under international law of one country having its satellite in orbit over another country’s airspace was not at all settled. If we did satellite reconnaissance in the future over the Soviet Union, the Russians could claim that was an act of war. And we had extensive plans to create such satellites and launch them when we solved all the technical problems in the future. We believe that the authorities knew that the Russians were about to launch Sputnik. By allowing them to be the first to launch, it would be they—not us—who would be setting the precedent of sending satellites over other nation’s airspace and claiming this was not aggression or an act of war as they thought they were way ahead of us. In addition, after WWII, President Eisenhower was having difficulty getting Congress to spend money on rocketry and satellites as well as science and technology including science and mathematics education which was then terrible in America. So allowing the Russians to “beat us” the administration had the issue that they needed, and they allowed the Russians to set the legal precedents that they would have opposed if we were ahead of them and orbited a satellite first. Either President Eisenhower and his team were brilliantly shrewd or they were pretty dumb because we easily could have put our rockets in orbit then.

[President Dwight D.] Eisenhower had been around generals enough to know how unbelievably dumb the lot of them are.