Friday, October 03, 2008

Where's Ike?



Here's my candidate for 2008. Ike Eisenhower WHY?
  • Commanded the Allied Forces in WWII
  • First commander of NATO
  • Passed the Civil Rights act 1957 and 1960
  • Created the Interstate Highway System
  • Ordered the National Guard to force integration in the south
  • Opposed putting ground forces in Vietnam
  • Entered Hawaii and Alaska into the Union
  • Created the "Eisenhower Doctrine" for the Middle East
  • Gave the "atoms for peace" speech to the UN warning of the dangers of a nuclear arms race.
  • Warned of the dangers of the Military-Industrial-Complex (he actually invented the term.)


Here's some Great Speeches by Ike:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
-April 16, 1953