Dwight D. Eisenhower – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

Memo to Elizabeth and Bernie: You’ve been scooped by roughly 130 years

A collection of First Lady Frances Folsom Cleveland’s family and personally owned artifacts went to auction in September 2020.

By Jim O’Neal

March 4, 1893, marked the second time Stephen Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as president of the United States. He was greeted at the Executive Mansion by President Benjamin Harrison, the Republican he had defeated three months earlier. It was a mildly awkward meeting, the only time in history the transfer of presidential power involved outgoing and incoming presidents who had run against each other twice (each one winning once and losing once).

Benjamin “Little Ben” Harrison (he was 5-feet-6) was notoriously cold and aloof and President-elect Cleveland was stubbornly independent, with an aura of self-righteousness. Historian Henry Adams observed that “one of them had no friends and the other only enemies.” Robert G. Ingersoll, nicknamed “The Great Agnostic,” went a step further: “Each side would have been glad to defeat the other, if it could do so without electing its own candidate.” Strangely, I felt the same way in both 2016 and 2020.

Inauguration Day was bitterly cold and many recalled that Harrison’s grandfather, William Henry Harrison (the ninth president) had died 31 days after his inauguration. Following a very long acceptance speech, he caught pneumonia and it was fatal. He was 68 and at the time the oldest person to assume the presidency, a distinction he held until 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn in at age 69.

In 1893, President-elect Cleveland’s vice president, Adlai E. Stevenson, took the oath of office first. Sixty years later, his grandson (and namesake) would make two futile runs for the presidency (1952 and 1956). He had the bad luck of having one of America’s greatest heroes, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as an opponent. War heroes are difficult to defeat and, in this case, it’s generally acknowledged that Ike could have beaten anyone and run on either party’s ticket. Outgoing President Harry Truman had even tried to broker such a deal in 1948 when he offered to step down to vice president.

Sadly, the 1892 election was vexed by Harrison’s wife contracting tuberculosis and dying two weeks before the election of Cleveland. But, after the inauguration and traditional transition, the ex-president seemed more than ready to return to his home in Indianapolis. Surprisingly, four years later, some of Harrison’s friends tried to convince him to seek the presidency again. He declined, but did agree to travel extensively making speeches in support of William McKinley’s successful candidacy. Little Ben died in February 1901 from pneumonia and a short six months later, President McKinley would become the third president to be assassinated.

But today belonged to President Cleveland and his wife Frances. They had been married during the first term in office on June 2, 1886, in the Blue Room at the White House. Cleveland was 49 years old at the time, Frances a mere 21. Frances Folsom Cleveland was the youngest First Lady in history and became very popular, primarily due to her youthful personality. They would have five children with the first one named Ruth. No, she was definitely not associated with Baby Ruth. That candy bar was renamed 30 years after her birth and 17 years after her death. After a warm welcome at the White House, President Cleveland’s troubles started almost right away.

In May, barely two months back in the White House, Cleveland discovered a growth on his palate, the soft tissue in the roof of the mouth that separates the oral and nasal cavities. It turned out to be a malignant tumor that required surgical removal. Fearful of panic in the already shaky financial markets, a clever plan was devised to perform a secret operation on a yacht in the East River. The surgery was successful and the president recuperated while sailing innocently on Long Island. The press was surprisingly gullible and accepted a story about two teeth that needed removal.

However, on dry land, economic forces were forming a dark storm that would usher in the worst financial crisis in the nation’s history. The pending depression would become known as the Panic of ’93. The 19th century had weathered many boom-bust economic cycles, but this powerful downturn would persist until the 20th century. Even as the president was organizing his cabinet, banks, factories and farms were tumbling into bankruptcy. Virtually everywhere, workers were struggling with layoffs and payouts as companies were swept away.

In his inaugural speech, Cleveland had warned about the dangers of business monopolies and inflation, however, his response to the economic chaos was austere in the extreme. He did not believe government should intervene for fear of eroding self-reliance and over-reliance on government. This was a common belief and it would take another generation for a new consensus to shape American politics. To fully grasp the significant schism that was silently evolving, one only has to read Thomas Sherman’s 1889 essay titled “The Owners of the United States.”

Using census data and promises of anonymity, he developed the thesis that 1/30th of the people in England owned 2/3 of the wealth. In America, he listed 70 individuals worth $2.7 billion and asserted no other country had such a concentration of millionaires. By contrast, 80% of Americans earned less than $500 annually, and 50,000 families owned half of the nation’s wealth. Further, wealthy men and corporations escaped taxation, with the burden falling “exclusively upon the working class.”

Memo to Elizabeth and Bernie: You’ve been scooped by roughly 130 years. Somehow, we managed to have a decent 20th century, save the world several times and develop a technological cornucopia for 330 million people vs. any other time in the history of the world. Go Bezos, Jobs/Allen, the Google guys, Walmart, Henry Ford, FDR and my man T.R.!

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Here’s why Dwight D. Eisenhower admired Germany’s autobahn

A baseball signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower circa 1960 sold for $9,588 at a December 2017 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Tempus fugit!

When I think about President Dwight D. Eisenhower, my mind associates him with America in the 1950s. Images of sunny Southern California suburbs, rock music, languid days of surfing, backyard BBQs and my first car (1953), a 1932 Ford Victoria 4 banger. Long gone are any memories of ducking under a desk, the potential darkness of a nuclear war or concerns that communists were lurking in hidden corners.

It was a time of social confidence and military men taking advantage of the G.I. Bill by returning to college or starting families in the tract homes that were proliferating. Good factory jobs were plentiful, with auto-assembly plants gradually replacing shuttered aircraft shells. My posse knew the year and model of every Ford, Chevrolet, Buick or Oldsmobile that went whizzing by. Soon, I was a senior working in a General Motors plant assembling Buicks, Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles from 3 to 11 in South Gate. Shoddy quality, but the emphasis was on quantity and the pay was staggering: $2.55 an hour with daily overtime + Saturday. My cup runneth over.

In reality, Dwight David Eisenhower was a 19^th-century man. Born in 1890 in Dennison, Texas, he moved a year later to Abilene, Kan., and a small, two-story frame house. He recalled the 1896 election when William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan, the golden-throated “Boy Orator of the Prairie.” This was the first of Bryan’s three defeats; he joined Henry Clay as the only losing candidates who received electoral votes in three separate presidential elections.

A good athlete, “Little Ike” yearned to attend the University of Michigan – the home of Coach Fielding Yost and his “point a minute” Wolverine football teams. He was encouraged to take the service academy exam and he failed to qualify for the vaunted Naval Academy. However, he squeaked into West Point and then married Mamie Geneva Doud in 1916. Although eager to join the war in Europe, he ended up in San Antonio training in the 57th Army Infantry, followed by a stint in Gettysburg, Pa., with a crack tank crew. A military legend was gradually taking shape.

When the U.S. Army returned from Europe at the end of WWI, they sponsored the 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy. Ike joined 300 other soldiers to drive a group of 81 motorized vehicles from Gettysburg to San Francisco. The convoy wound along the Lincoln Highway for 3,251 miles. Because of the rudimentary, haphazard web of paved roads, it took an almost unbelievable 62 days. Lieutenant Eisenhower would long remember the impassable roads and tortoise-like pace, never realizing he would later have an opportunity to rectify the issue.

For perspective, at the end of the 19th century, there had only been one motorized vehicle for every 18,000 people (today, we have about 300 million cars and trucks, or almost one per person). Also, the “roads” in 1900 were not asphalt or concrete; instead, they were too often packed dirt or mud, depending on the time of year. Even worse, outside cities and towns, there were few gas stations; rest stops would be a convenience in the future. In 1910, The Boston Eagle newspaper observed that automobiling was not an easy way to get anywhere … “it is an adventure … the last call of the wild.”

With Henry Ford’s help, that was about to change … dramatically. When Ford introduced the 1908 Model T, Americans finally had a dependable, affordable car. Over the next 20 years, 15 million “Tin Lizzies” rolled off the Ford assembly lines. Along with all the other car manufacturers, automobiles evolved from a luxury to a necessity. With this transition to a “nation of drivers” came the inevitable questions of who would pay for indirect costs involved. The powerful automobile industry ultimately prevailed, with governments at all levels agreeing to pay for streets, signage, highways, bridges and all the other things we now take for granted. Taxing gas was an easy target, but there were major infrastructure projects that are still difficult to fund.

Fortunately, during WWII, Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of U.S. troops in Europe. He witnessed firsthand the genius of the German autobahn, a highly sophisticated and strategic network of highways. The Germans had used it to launch its Blitzkrieg attacks; waves of lightning fast, motorized armored infantry that quickly subdued most of Europe in a matter of days or weeks. When he became president in 1953, Ike remembered the fiasco of the transcontinental convoy and the devastation unleashed courtesy of the autobahn.

Voila! In 1954, he announced a plan to build a transcontinental interstate highway system for the United States. Naturally, this was not a new idea; Congress had passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1944, which authorized the construction of a 40,000-mile National System of Interstate Highways. The only thing lacking was the funding to pay for it. What President Eisenhower did was cleverly bundle the “critical need for speed” in case of atomic attack on our key cities (a national defense imperative) with a terrific rationale for a highway system that would benefit common citizens. Fresh produce from Florida to New England overnight or year-round fresh fruit and vegetables from California to anywhere.

On June 29, 1956, President Eisenhower signed the bill creating a National System of Interstate and Defense Highways with a major economic stimulus via construction jobs followed by booms in numerous industries: trucking, petroleum, automotive, motels, restaurants. The list was endless. The nation’s interstate program stands as the largest public work project in world history. This time, there was funding and vastly improved state and local highways. The complaints would come later as planners used eminent domain to seize lands for roads. Thousands of farms were bifurcated by four-lane highways and scores of cities leveled or divided, with poor and minority communities destroyed.

Just another chapter in our history, but without the EPA or federal court injunctions.

‘Peace, commerce, honest friendship with all nations … entangling alliances with none!’

This haunting World War I recruitment poster (Boston Public Safety Committee, 1915), featuring art by Fred Spear, sold for $14,400 at a November 2018 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

World War I officially erupted in Europe on July 28, 1914. The following month, British commentator and author H.G. Wells wrote a series of articles that blamed the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire) for starting the war. Wells also argued that eliminating militarism in Germany was essential to avoiding future wars. Subsequently, the articles appeared in a small book titled The War That Will End War. The book’s title was far too optimistic, but Mr. Well’s thesis about Germany’s military would prove to be eerily prophetic.

As the war inexorably spread throughout Europe, conventional wisdom dictated that the United States would never become directly involved due to long-standing political policies dating to its founding. George Washington’s famous Farewell Address in 1789 had warned us to “steer clear of permanent alliances” and Thomas Jefferson echoed these sentiments: “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations … entangling alliances with none!”

The Germans were confident America would remain on the sidelines. Their surprisingly broad network of spies in the United States kept reassuring them of the strong sentiment to avoid foreign wars and misinterpreted pacificism as a sign of weakness. It had only been 49 years since the end of hostilities in the Civil War and the ashes were still warm. Furthur, the American army was small (ranking 17th in the world), had not been involved in any major operations, and lacked the modern equipment of the 20th century.

President Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected in 1916 under the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War” and the promise of four more years of peace was comforting. It further emboldened the Germans and they became even more provocative by implementing an “unrestricted” policy for their fleet of U-boat submarines in the Atlantic. They pledged to attack any ship irrespective of cargo or innocent civilians to buy enough time to conquer Great Britain. However, the sinking of the Lusitania proved to be one step too far.

On April 2, 1917 at precisely 8:30 p.m., President Wilson assembled both Houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and his Cabinet. In a 36-minute speech, he outlined the vicious attacks by Germany on our ships and the innocent lives lost. Finally, he concluded by formally requesting Congress to declare war on Germany (only). The final words were lost or unheard amid the boisterous cheering and flag-waving. Later, back at the White House, he expressed his feelings of wonderment and commented to his aides: “Just stop and think about what they were applauding…” Finally alone, he wept almost silently.

On April 6, Congress declared war on Germany and by June 25, the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) arrived in France, led by General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing. On July 4, Independence Day, elements of Pershing’s force paraded in Paris. Pershing holds the distinction of being the first living general to be promoted to general of the Armies and allowed to select his own insignia. He chose four gold stars to distinguish his rank from generals who wore four silver stars. There is no record of any familial relationship to either of the Pattons.

Throughout the months that followed, fresh units continued to be added and World War I would end on the memorable point of time of 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. President Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize, but was unable to convince the U.S. Congress to join the League of Nations. Absent the United States, there was not much hope in helping Europe avoid another war. It was time to bring the boys home. Among them was a young lieutenant who would rise to prominence as the supreme commander of U.S. forces when we returned 20-plus years for the second round of fighting.

In comparison to the choices of today, I REALLY like Ike!

Truman Well Aware that Presidency was a Most Terribly Responsible Job

A Harry Truman signed and inscribed photograph, dated Jan. 17, 1953, sold for nearly $3,885 at a February 2006 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

The news broke shortly before 6 p.m. on April 12, 1945. President Franklin Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Ga. Within minutes, the bulletin had reached every part of the country. It was almost midnight in London, but in Berlin, it was already the next day, where it was (ominously) Friday the 13th. However, Joseph Goebbels interpreted it as a lucky turning point when he telephoned Adolf Hitler. He was already devising ways to turn this to Germany’s advantage, even as enemy troops closed in on the Third Reich.

By 7 p.m., Harry Truman, his Cabinet and Bess and Margaret were assembled in the Cabinet Room along with Chief Justice Harlan Stone to administer the oath of office. Within hours of Roosevelt’s death, the country had a new president.

Then the family and the Cabinet were dismissed. Secretary of War Henry Stimson lingered to brief the new president on a matter of extreme urgency. He explained that a new weapon of almost inconceivable power had been developed, but offered no details. Truman had just learned about the existence of the atomic bomb. He canceled a date to play poker and went to bed. It had been a long day.

It was also a long day for America’s top generals: Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. The shock of losing their trusted commander-in-chief was compounded by genuine concern over Truman’s lack of experience. To make matters worse, they had just seen their first Nazi death camp. All were depressed, but Patton was especially emphatic about his concerns for the future.

The next morning, President Truman arrived at the White House promptly at 9 a.m. It was now April 13, 1945 – 27 years to the day since he had landed at Brest, France (Brittany), as a lowly 1st Lieutenant in the Allied Expeditionary Forces in WWI. Now he was the United States’ commander in chief in the century’s second world war. Everything in the Oval Office was eerily just as FDR had left it. He sat in the chair behind the desk and quietly pondered the challenges he had inherited. Downstairs, the White House staff was frantically coping with the press, the jangle of telephones, and wondering what to do next.

After a routine update on the status of the war, Truman surprised everyone by announcing he was going to the Capitol to “have lunch with some of the boys” … 17 congressmen to be exact. After a few drinks and lunch, he told the group he felt overwhelmed and emphasized he would need their help. Then he stepped out to meet the assembled press and made his now famous remarks: “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.”

Less than four months later, in August 1945, the man from Independence, Mo., now confident and in control, dropped his own bombshell when he broadcast to the nation:

“Sixteen hours ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima,” the president said, adding, “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive and enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy Japan’s power to make war. … If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

The buck DID stop here, just as the little sign on his desk promised.

Life, History Have Not Been Fair to Pat Nixon

As the wife of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president, Pat Nixon, above at her husband’s 1973 inauguration, was trained at the knee of Mamie Eisenhower, the quintessential 1950s political wife.

By Jim O’Neal

As the nation seems transfixed again on the White House and there is a special counsel investigating “everything,” it is nostalgic to see old faces popping up on CNN as the “I” word is faintly heard.

John Dean has returned with his colorful Richard Nixon anecdotes and even Richard Ben-Veniste is back. Ben-Veniste was a special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal and chief counsel for the Democrats in the less-famous, but much longer and tedious Senate Whitewater Committee, which was investigating the Clintons (especially the first lady) over their curious relationships before they left Arkansas.

Rarely does anyone mention earlier first lady Pat Nixon. She grew up on a small truck farm in Artesia, Calif., about 20 miles from my high school (Compton). She lost her mother to cancer when she was 12 and was forced to take over the family household chores, including the laborious task of doing the laundry, which involved building a fire in an outdoor brick fireplace and lifting the clothes with long sticks from cauldrons of boiling water into cold water and then hanging them out to dry.

She also took care of two older brothers and her father for five years until he died from silicosis (miner’s disease). She was an orphan at 17 and determined to get a college degree. She worked her way through the University of Southern California, graduating cum laude in 1937. She met Richard Nixon when they were auditioning for parts in a local production of the mystery drama The Dark Tower. She was teaching shorthand and typing at a high school and he was a young lawyer from Duke University Law School. (He had been accepted into the FBI, but never received the notice.)

They married in June 1940, and then he was off to the Navy for several years. He ran for Congress with Pat as his office manager. She basically devoted the rest of her life supporting his political ambitions. She was crushed when he lost the 1960 presidential race to John F. Kennedy and never understood why reporters never investigated the speculation that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had stolen Illinois’ 27 electoral votes or why her husband had not demanded a recount.

Nixon promised Pat that he was finished with politics after he lost his 1962 comeback campaign for governor of California, famously blasting the deeply hated press with his parting message, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Pat was relieved and her happiest days were after that defeat, when the family moved to New York and Nixon retreated to private life as a lawyer.

By the time they did get to the White House in January 1969, the Vietnam War was raging and the feminist movement was in full swing. As the wife of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president, Pat was trained at the knee of Mamie Eisenhower, the quintessential 1950s political wife.

Although she never publicly crumbled, Watergate took a terrible toll on Pat Nixon’s health. She lost sleep, lost weight and rumors of her drinking started.

Her loyal aides fought back, saying she enjoyed an occasional highball and a cigarette at the end of a long day. However, Pat told her daughter Julie, “Watergate is the only crisis that got me down. It is just constant and I know I will never live to see the vindication.”

She was right about that. Life and history have not been fair to Pat Nixon … period.

Eisenhower Crucial to ‘Greatest Engineering Project in World History’

eisenhower-inaugural-photograph-signed-by-four-presidents — A photograph of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1953 – autographed by Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover – realized $8,365 at an October 2006 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

As federal war-game planners considered their objectives in mobilizing a West Coast battle response, railroads were quickly ruled out because they could not carry the amount of equipment involved and some of the weapons, especially tanks, were too heavy for trains and tracks.

Since the Army already had plenty of wheeled and tracked vehicles, dispatching a test expedition by road and having a Motor Transport Corps drive the convoy could prove, once and for all, the superiority of wheels over hoofs or railways. Inexplicably, they failed to include any assumptions about the condition of the roads en route.

At the appointed time in 1919, the convoy gathered at a monument by the South Lawn of the White House. The column was three miles long and consisted of 79 vehicles, including 34 heavy trucks, oil and water pumpers, a mobile blacksmith shop, a tractor, staff observation cars, searchlight carriers, a mobile hospital and other wheeled necessities to support the actual war machines.

Nine vehicles were wrecked en route and 21 men injured – leaving 237 soldiers, 24 officers and 15 observers – including then-Brevet Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower (who kept a concise daily diary). When they arrived in Lincoln Park in San Francisco 62 days later, it was undisputed that the conditions of the roads – essentially non-existent west of the Missouri River – would preclude any timely defense of the West Coast and that any Asian enemy would have been victorious in any battles along the way.

The journey left an indelible impression on the young officer from West Point, who would later be Commander-in-Chief of the nation. The Army and Eisenhower had indisputably proved what many in the capital had suspected. The American West had few, if any, roads that were even remotely usable for military or civilian use.

Only when they reached California and beyond the state capital of Sacramento did the roads become great – with macadamized surfaces, proper drainage, road rules, gas stations and tire-repair depots … all in sufficient quantity to service existing needs.

But this did not appease Eisenhower in the slightest. This great convoy, called into action to deal with a hypothetical threat to the country’s vital West Coast, had crossed 3,251 miles of the country at an average speed of 5.6 mph, making any potential response virtually useless. The vehicles were in fine shape and the men brave and intelligent, but the roads were deplorable. If nothing else, Eisenhower wrote, the experience of this expedition should spur the building – as a national effort – of a fast, safe and properly designed system of transcontinental highways.

This led to the creation of America’s Interstate Highway System – the greatest engineering project in world history … an intrinsic network of high-speed roads built with the sole purpose of uniting the corners, edges and center of this vast nation.

Fittingly, “The Dwight D. Eisenhower National Interstate and Defense Highways Act” was authorized by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 during the second term of the 34th president of the United States. “I LIKE IKE!”

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is President and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Americans’ Love of Travel Ran Into Dreadful Road System

new-mexico-and-arizona — This Union Pacific poster, circa 1925, promotes travel by train to New Mexico and Arizona – “Land of History and Mystery.” It sold for $2,031 at a November 2014 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

In 1919, America, now rapidly becoming mechanized, seemed to be filled with people inclined to travel. There was an abundance of money, and new transportation technologies were eager to provide alternatives to existing modes of travel. World War I was over and soldiers had returned home flush with cash and eager to join the social changes under way. A Model T Ford or Chevrolet 490 cost less than $400 … little more than three months’ pay.

Four million cars were already in use and Ford was selling 600,000 more each year. One in eight Americans owned a car and this would increase to one in six in the 1920s. Farmers were buying small trucks – 250,000 in use by 1916 – to haul produce to market and fertilizer back to their farms.

The stagecoach had all but vanished, but there were still 20 million horses conveying people or goods. Bus services were popping up to serve the less affluent. The joy ride was a hot, new leisure concept and the invention of the taximeter enabled motorcar taxi service in most cities. The roar of the Roaring Twenties was a combination of the internal combustion engine combined with the jazz bands on dance-hall floors and the din from speakeasies.

Amidst all this frenetic energy was a national disgrace: America’s roads.

There were plenty of them – some 3 million miles in total, but only 369,000 in 1919 were paved with any kind of durable, lasting surface. The rest were mostly dirt roads that were too often simply chassis-deep mud. They were plagued with hundreds of broken bridges or faint trails of blowing desert sands that quietly vanished, leaving travelers utterly lost.

Bad roads were a perpetual hindrance to trade, an abiding nuisance to agriculture and a profound inconvenience to the traveling public. One congressional report noted it cost more to move a peach from a Georgia orchard 20 miles to Atlanta by road than 3,000 miles by rail from California to New York.

Lobbying groups of drivers and car manufacturers were proliferating in Washington, D.C., primarily to get the federal government to assume national responsibility and eliminate the pervasive cronyism and corruption that existed in state legislatures. Most of this was ineffective since lobbyists hadn’t perfected their skills ($$$). However, help arrived from a totally unexpected source.

The War Department was developing plans to protect the West Coast from attacks from unspecified Asian enemies, a thinly veiled euphemism for Japan. Specifically, the war-gamers needed to know how quickly fully equipped soldiers could travel from the big Army bases on the East Coast to a hypothetical battlefield in the West.

A top-level decision was made to perform a real-life test to verify the time and feasibility involved. Fortunately, a quiet major volunteered to accompany the expedition strictly as an observer. His name was Dwight David Eisenhower.

Tomorrow: The creation of America’s Interstate Highway System – the greatest engineering project in world history.