Dwight David Eisenhower

General Dwight Eisenhower, who had been supreme commander of the Allied forces in western Europe during World War II, was nominated candidate for the presidency at the Republican convention in July 1952. His running mate was Sen. Richard M. Nixon of California. The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won handily, carrying 39 states, winning the electoral vote, 442 to 89, and collecting more than 33,000,000 popular votes.

The administration's domestic program, which came to be labeled "modern Republicanism," called for reduced taxes, balanced budgets, a decrease in government control over the economy, and the return of certain federal responsibilities to the states.

Foreign affairs drew much of Eisenhower's attention; he and his secretary of state John Foster Dulles worked hard at achieving peace and constructing collective defense agreements designed to check the spread of Communism. The President was able to negotiate a truce for the Korean War in July 1953. In September 1954, Eisenhower and Dulles succeeded in creating the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to prevent further Communist expansion in that part of the world.

Eisenhower's great personal popularity turned the election in 1956 into a landslide victory, the most one-sided race since 1936. The election campaign, however, had been complicated by a crisis in the Middle East over Egypt's seizure of the Suez Canal. Egypt's support by the Soviet Union prompted the President to urge adoption in January 1957 of what came to be called the Eisenhower Doctrine, a pledge to send U.S. armed forces to any Middle Eastern country requesting assistance against Communist aggression.

When the U.S. Supreme Court, on May 17, 1954, declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, controversy and violence broke out, especially in the South. In September 1957 Eisenhower dispatched 1,000 federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to halt an attempt to obstruct a federal court order integrating a high school. This action was the most serious challenge of his presidency. In January 1961, during the last weeks of the Eisenhower administration, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Cuba, which for two years had been under the control of Fidel Castro.