Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes
The Christian world was in a great struggle with Islam. The Sultans were trying to take over Constantinople—the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Western Catholic Church in Rome also yearned for unification but under the Pope and his Cardinals. Notaraus feared them more than the Ottomans. Howeer, it was the latter who conquered Constantinople (Byzantium) in 1453 and executed the “first family” when Notaras would not deliver his children to Sultan Mehmet as hostages for assuring “good behavior” by the Greek community.
In the late 1930's Dwight Eisenhower served as an aide to MacArthur in the Philippines when President Quezon offered to make MacArthur "Grand Marshall of the Philippines" and Eisenhower thought it inappropriate for an American general officer to have such a grandiose title:
Tito did a marvelous job of keeping the lid on the ethnic hatred that was always present. Where he failed however was that as soon as Tito died, the ethnic groups were literally at each others’ throats.
Alsop, a political hawk was convinced, as many other right wingers were at the time that the Russians had forged ahead of us in offensive missiles. When he asked President Eisenhower, the President never denied it, but never went to Congress to ask for more money to close the “missile gap”. Alsop made this shocking accusation which offended many Americans, but pleased the ultra-hawks and anti-communists. Most of the nation however then believed that there was a missile gap, with varying explanations of Eisenhower’s silence on the matter. Two years later John F. Kennedy, used the “missile gap” when running in 1960 against Nixon by attacking Nixon and Eisenhower for allowing us to fall behind the Russians at have a missile gap. When Kennedy became President, he was very surprised that there was no missile gap favoring the Russians—it was favoring the United States. Eisenhower did not want the Russians to know that he knew exactly what they were producing and deploying in missiles through great espionage sources. By not saying anything in the face of the accusations, the Russians assumed that the Americans really thought that they had more capacity than they did. And Eisenhower wanted that so that they would be secure that the United States had no real knowledge of their missile capacity. If Eisenhower had actually told the nation that the Russians were really behind us, the Russians would suspect a security leak and our sources could be compromised.
Even the President was not spared during the McCarthy era. The red scare was so pervasive, that a lunatic fringe ultra right wing organization could call the President a “communist dupe” and be taken seriously be much of the media who were themselves intimidated and might be accused of being communists at any moment. It was a very low point in America’s history.
Prior to this, television had only been used politically to air candidates’ speeches. After, this political campaigning was forever changed.
He was referring to the famous Eisenhower quotation of 1961. See {641114}.
For a number of years Eisenhower worked for MacArthur as a key aide.
MacArthur was astounded that the country turned to Eisenhower rather than him. He actually did not think much of Eisenhower. Eisenhower, was very critical of MacArthur. See
The CIA has never denied this, and it seems to be corroborated in that none of the CIA reports to the Presidents ever mentioned the failures and there is no CIA official who ever claimed that they informed either of the Presidents. In particular, when Kennedy initially went along with the ill-fated CIA Bay of Pigs invasion plan not realizing that the CIA had a dismal record of major misjudgments and failures of covert operations.
