[applause] this occasion [inaudible] a tradition which began with president theodore roosevelt. The great and the new great have addressed this audience, but tonight we welcome a man whom history will record as renowned among World Leaders in the hour of greatest need. [applause] i had in mind the rapid secession communist aggression as millions of people were involved behind the farreaching iron curtain. Ivan mine the stalemate of korea, the rampaging inflation in our homeland which was eating up the savings, and traveling our Free Enterprise economy. Here then is the man trained in war, who will be unclaimed by future generations as the man who laid the foundations of peace. [applause] and more, he is our president whom we love with a deep and abiding affection. [applause] welcome to t common with clifford on george hammond, chair of the communities from ich put together todays program, along with the staff at theommonwealth club, the staff is helping to putogether all these online programs. Didnt dozens and dozens of th since the covid crisis begin. Its my great pleasure to inoduce susan eisenhor whos you with us today. Shes the gnddaughter of president eisenhower and shes written a great book, how ike led. Like i used to spy overvw of his whole, the principles elevate his presidencyut with little young girls point ofiew on the man himself and actually que a combination. Its a nice commissionecause its also a combination that you lived your life, susan, because you are political analyst, you lived your life this week but in addition he can personally for many, many years. He didnt pass away until you were already in college around that age, right . Yes. Welcome everybody and we are going to get started to talk about president eisenhower. For those of you who were not through with the dates he was president from 1953 until 1961. Jfk was a. Jfk was a present right afterwards, and he was the supreme allied commander during world war ii. Susan, first of all thank you very much for joining us from afar in our online world we all recognize couldnt happen much were easily than w thought. But tell us a little bit about what insred you to write the book. You have been working in this field for a long time as a political consultant, et cetera, and advisor, and you decide to write about your own granathers worked. It mustve been interesting to to try to be objective and subjective at the se time. You did it successfully it couldnt have been easy. George kentirst of all let me thank you so much for the opportunity back at the commonweal club. I have a wonderful opportunity of presenting to make a bit of the books of the club i years past so its great to be back in to talk about this. Guess i think the question is aa very interesting one. Maybe as part of the disclaimer for our discussion i should say that as a kid i was really raise to compartmentalize what i knew about his politics, about the period in which he governed, about the issues that he dealt with. On the other side our relationship was as a grandparent. This book is a marriage of those two things as you said and it was quite an experience for me to put in one place. I was continually struck by h we were doing certain things as a family as he was dealing with some of these crises. That was interesting the impetus for why to do it now revolved around three event i guess. One is the 75th anniversary of the end of world war ii just, well, certainly vj day is about to occur but we had of course the 75th annersary of the end of the war in europeack in may of this year. Secondly, the eisenhower memorial in washington, d. C. Will be dedicated on September September 17 in a much more scaledback version of its original self, but it will nevertheless, the open to the public after thadate. And finally we are goingnto an electionear, and theres always a lot of thinking about the presidency ashe most important for your election occurs. Four years i thought i cant something t say to tuesdy and against thatuess that the reason i put it together. He really did and i found that, you tookt from that angle but the summary different elements that were so interesting today. As applible to one of them a thought, its a small aside, tangen but there were people who sit in 1956 that were against him being reelected ying you are going to be electing Richard Nixon. You will not be electing eisenhower because eisenhower is sick. He justad these heart attacks and so on. Pretty soon Richard Nixon be the president. Same thing gng on today in the democratic party. People are sayin biden will never be president for more than a month or two so yre really electing kamala harris. I found it interesting that keeps getting thrown out at people. Of course im not going to speculaten wheer theres a difference in approach but eisenhower was very conscious of what it would be to be a diminished president. Remember that president wilson was really almost a scandal that people in the country did know how ill that president was. Ike was determined not to find itself in the situation for the good of the country. After he had three illnesses during his presidency and after each one of them he would give himself a very arduous test, like around the world trip or a trip to europe that required lots of meetings and lots of stress. He always tells advisors, if i dont perform at top level, you have to tell me because then i will resign. In any case the never happened. He became actually rather adroit and managing his time, managing his stress and generally positioned himself take it through his second term. It was interesting also, a small tangent, but doctors lied to them about the heliu thing so we didnt think it was as serious, and the kind of thought he might have made a different decision and 56 if they had warned him about it. I thought that was interesting. One of the biggest decisions about running for second term is he had a heart attack in 1955. 1955. He had a doctor named general Howard Snyder, and although they were devoted friends and they had been together in one form or another since the war, Howard Snyder actually drove granddad up a wall. First of all he hovered. He came up with all sorts of things eisenhower wasnt about to do including watching the Army Navy Football game in real time because Howard Snyder decided it would raise the president s Blood Pressure. Ike really did care about the outcome of that game. Howard snyder was part of the team that come wasnt actually very direct with the president about his ileitis situation. Again back to your earlier question, ike was not going to be a diminished president , and so he might well have decided a different way but i think at the end of the day my grandmother intervene for the first time i think since the early part of their marriage and encouraged him to run again because she thought that he would probably die of another heart attack watching everything from the sidelines. Thats a top speed is watch out for thatigh Blood Pressure pressure. I find it interesting the way your grandmoths decision was much more easy to understand. The doctor decision was this as a guide making all these decisions about the war in korea and about this, all these big decisions, and you were worried about them watching a football game. Even if he tes it too seriously it seemed a littl bit ludicrous. I td the story in the book in the context of how an extraordinary amount of power, how that often warps the relationship you have with other ople. It doesnt mean it makes them terrible but it does change things. The doctors for some reason, i love this expression, actually tried to handle this man which would only make him more wound up im sure but he was theuy used to making the decision was perfectly capable of facing any difficult news. As a matter fact in his last years of his life i saw this so often how brave he was and how great he was to take whatever was coming. As a matteract, even volunteered for some ratr exotic treatments for his conditio because he thought it might help peoe after he was gone. This was anybody you were straightforward with. I just want to say that for the record. Thats a good transition because before we get to the big issues he faced, i think its good to talk about his personal relationships that he had. The friendships he had come the pele who kept him around, his family and your own relationship with you. Your pictures to show which include some pictures of yourself with them when you were younger. We will get those u on the screen. Theres the picture we have been showing. This is him right around the end of world war ii, right . Yes. This picture was taken making 45. By that time he had his fifth star. A lovely picture. I think he looks tired. I dont know if you would agree but it looks content. The picture were fulllength you would see hes wearing only a single bar of ribbons and five stars on his shoulders. He was not one toalk around like a soviet general with metals all the w down to the waste. I like this picture because i think he looks approachable, though i was a tired. Thats got to be a fairly accurate assessment since its impossible to know how you could be working when hundredours a week or 130 hours a week sometimesome upon might come up in middle of the night and not come out every three year stint like that really deeply tired. In 45 come how old was he . He was born he was born in 1890. He was given 55. If youook at pictures when he was predent of Columbia University he looks younger than he does in that picture even though it was another five years later. He gave a lot of energy. Th next picture is a picture of you. Oh. As a team did with him and a horse, right . Yes. Is there a horse and that picture . Iant get fromere. The back of a horse may be. Perfect. Ike became an amateur photographer, and we have in our family collectn all sorts of these homemade thgs. What i like about t picture is somebody else took a picture of ike taking a picture of me. I dont know, every time i see this picture it makes me smile becae of this bal head o his that my grandmother always sd sh loved to roll over at night in bed a pat his little bald head. If there is a a horse in the picture, fm this standpoint i cant quite see it, but i was the family horseback rider. This is the bon we had because he loved horses. They were the only amals on his farm that he iulged in any way, shape, o form. He had cattle and he didnt like barnyard cats but he loved these horses. I think its a rather sweet picture. You have a short story in your book about when you were around 11 and a horses got and he just put in a putting green. His special fighting green. Do you want to tell that story . It shows relationship nicely. Well, i think the story says a lot about ikes passion in my lifetime till. He put the putting green him becae he wanted to haveome privacy while the practice is hiding. Otherwise he wouldve had to ha gone to the country club which which you enjoy doing and saying people but theasnt actually y privacy in those events. People came out to watch him golf and the rest of i when eating i was how blogging when evening was how blogging a date and five forces pushed against the gate sort of almo knocked me over and then went running all around the lawn inront of my parents, grandparents sitting area where the we s in the evening. All five ofhese horses are running around likerazy and circling here in going there and the made a huge sweep across his golf green. I was more tha in a statef panic. Everybody came out of the field field hands, secret service, everybody, and were trying to round u these animals. We finally did and then had t go in and face the music. I dont have a ruined his golf green but i was late for dinner. This was one of those moments in childhood you don forget. I walked in. He always that in this wiltshire any swiveled around and you loo at me he said, you know what i said to your grandmoth . I have seen horses would like that since i was a kid in abilene, kansas. Of course apologize after that but but i never heard of it again and it was a very smart move on his part. Beuse the guilt would be lingering. I would never missed it make a mistake with that again but he was very nice that do bring it up or hold it against me or hold of my head becau i think he knew ias devastated, and wodnt do it again. That the classic experience thats in a disney cartoon for children that if a child makes a mistake of irresponsibility, and then in the ones where the parents are good they do with ike did, and when theyre bad to look like a witch. George, i would add one more thing. I had the great good sense to apologize profusely to take full responsibility. I think that were done very well. Well. I fear i wouldve had a significant ongoing lecture about personal accountability had i not done so. But you already learned that lesson i bet. I learned that one already. Qt is taking a picture i assume you are in that picture. Yes. Actually you can see from the postcard he is painting from, its a photograph that it is my mother and three of my four siblings. My youngest sister was born in 1955 after that portrait was painted. It was taken at camp david and i guess one of the helpers at camp david came and took a picture of him doing that. He took up painting after the war. He followed Winston Churchills example. He was intrigued by how much painting the Prime Minister did while he was trying to get his head together. Also his own portrait painter taken some oil paints as a present and ike to get up then and then became really very attached to this pastime because he found it centered him. While he was concentrating on the painting he was allowing his mind to work through some very difficult problems. You have a short story in the book about how he had and exhibited art museum and he told somebody, theres only one reason they are being shown here and thats because i was president. They would never give a guy like me and exhibit for paintings that looked like this. Exactly come he was very modest. Unlike churchill who really took his painting so seriously that he wanted to be regarded almost as a professional. Ike did to give away as gifts. He gave his cabinet members paintings of them picky painted all this wartime colleagues. Actually it invaded Prince Charles and princess for the queen of england and was full apologies about the execution but actually he had some talent i think. We have picture here of what he did with churchill, the picture of churchill. Thats the next picture. Thats quite talented. Its not amateur. Not bad. The other charming thing about this painting is that he actually was able to present it to Prime Minister churchill when churchill, he just stepped down but he was visiting in the United States and theres a wonderful picture of churchill sort of looking it over, like churchill the painter would. [laughing] actually ike also painted field Marshal Bernard law montgomery was one of his, one of the big personalities he worked with during world war ii, and it is a lovely, lovely painting that hangs today in the British Embassy in washington, d. C. You said its one of the interesting processes, sort of a frenemy as they would call them now. Something like that. They got along but they were enemies. The next picture when he gave to you, the next painting. Theres a story with this one. Theres a story about this one. I often stood behind him when he was at the easel. He had in addition to his retirement years he always insisted on having a studio somewhere nearby. In the white house it was on the second floor overlooking lafayette park, and it was around that time that i was standing behind him admiring his work. This is a landscape, i dont know what the scene is but as a said before he painted usually from postcards. These landscapes he did were always serene. Its been noted it something ironic about it because probably every brush stroke is full of some kind of turbulence he is trying to make sense of. This painting at the bottom is dated 1957. In 1957 many things happened but i was intrigued when i look at the back of it that it says to susan 1958. That means its likely a painting that was done first of all during the little rock crisis when eisenhower sent 101st Airborne Division to desegregate Little Rock High School and to escort nine africanamericans to start school that september. Right after that of course was sputnik,oviet union launched its first aificial satellite or should say the worlds fst artificial satelli into space i look at this pain and i think wow, those brush strokes must have provided some relief during those times of great controversy and crisis. Were going to go back to that. People talk about october surprises. In 1956 your grandfather certainly get two really huge ones. Lets in the pictures and then we will go by the way, or the audience, if you have any questions just send them into the chat room and we will ask them. We got yours, and well get to the korean conflict a little later. Next picture is, yes, and that is you, right . Thats me. Well, i look like im terribly thoughtful turkey looks very kind and i like that picture because i have always wanted people to know that he had some very, very tough decisions and some very dark times during our history, when you think about what he saw and what he had to order during the war. But you know, he never became hard or cynical. I think is both a Family Member is as an analyst i think its remarkable, says a lot about his character. It seems to be one of the hardest things to do to make those decisions, we would get to dday later, to know at the best so many people will die and at the worst you to succeed of what youre trying to accomplish and even more people will die. The people who have made those decisions for us i think is why they get admired for decades and even centuries to come because its so crucial. Your grandfather is one of those. Next picture. A couple pictures of him. Heres a picture of him as a young man on a Baseball Team am just so you can see him before he is bald, right . Thats right. I was looking its always fun to see ike with a full head of hair. He is maybe you can discard which when he is because im not sure that i think this is him right here. Thats exactly right. This is the Abilene High School and is on the Baseball Team. He was a very good baseball player but his real passion with football. He lo