Dwight D Eisenhower Famous Quotes

Western Allied commanders didn’t want to destroy the abbey. Only weeks earlier, in one of his last acts before leaving Italy, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had issued an executive order stating that important artistic and historical sites were not to be bombed. Monte Cassino, one of the great achievements of early Italian and Christian culture, was clearly a protected site. Eisenhower’s order had provided exceptions. “If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men,” he wrote, “then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go.”2 But he had also drawn a line between military necessity and military convenience, and no commander wanted to be the first to test that line.

General Douglas MacArthur was the most brilliant, most important, and most valuable military leader in American history—at least that’s what Douglas MacArthur thought. When asked by a proper British gentlewoman if he had ever met the famous general, Dwight D. Eisenhower—himself about to march into history—supposedly replied, “Not only have I met him, ma’am; I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four years in the Philippines.

There are revolving doors of employment in what are now commonly called industrial complexes. Most famously, the term military-industrial complex was coined by Dwight Eisenhower, who devoted his Farewell Address in 1961 to its “grave implications.” There is also the “energy-industrial complex,” the “agriculture-industrial complex,” and—as many Americans recently discovered—the “financial-industrial complex,” with one of the most well-publicized door revolvers being George W. Bush’s last Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, who had previously been CEO of Goldman Sachs. However, this is not just a Republican thing. Prior to becoming President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers4 in 2008 received $5.2 million from hedge fund D. E. Shaw; and Obama’s number two man at Treasury, Neal Wolin,was previously an executive at the Hartford Financial Services Group.5 In 2010, Mother Jones magazine (“The Bankers on Obama’s Team”) listed nine other high-level members of the Obama administration who have been part of the corporate elite in the financial industry.