Dwight David Eisenhower died on March 28th, 1969, at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC. He was seventy-eight years old. The news reached a nation that had already begun mourning him for months, ever since his health had failed for the final time the previous August. What followed the funeral was not the end of a story but the beginning of another, one that would unfold across decades and across the world.
Eisenhower left behind his wife Mamie, their son John, and four grandchildren. The family he had built would scatter, reunite, marry into another presidential dynasty, and eventually carry his name into fields he could never have imagined. But before any of that could happen, the Eisenhowers first had to confront a question that faced them in May 1945, when victory in Europe finally came after five years of war. What came next?
To understand what the Eisenhower family became, one must first understand what shaped them. Dwight David Eisenhower was born on October 14th, 1890, in Denison, Texas, the third of seven sons born to David Jacob and Ida Elizabeth Stover Eisenhower. The family moved to Abilene, Kansas, when Dwight was still an infant, and it was in that small prairie town that the future Supreme Commander learned the values of hard work, discipline, and family loyalty that would define his life. All six surviving Eisenhower brothers carried the nickname Ike as children, though only Dwight would keep it into adulthood.
After graduating from West Point in 1915, Dwight met Mamie Geneva Doud while stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. Mamie was the daughter of a prosperous Denver family, accustomed to comfort and stability. She was nineteen years old, petite, with sparkling blue eyes and a vivacious personality that immediately caught Dwight’s attention. They were engaged on Valentine’s Day, 1916, and married on July 1st of that same year, the same day Dwight received his first army promotion, to first lieutenant.
It was the beginning of a partnership that would span fifty-two years, thirty-seven different homes, and every major military posting the United States had to offer. The early years of their marriage brought both joy and devastating sorrow. Their first son, Doud Dwight Eisenhower, known affectionately as Icky, was born on September 24th, 1917, at Fort Sam Houston. By all accounts, the boy became the center of his parents’ world.
Dwight later described the time with Icky as among the happiest of his life. The family moved to Camp Colt at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1918, where Dwight commanded a tank training unit during World War I. It was there that little Icky celebrated his first birthday, surrounded by soldiers who adored him as much as his parents did. But tragedy struck in December 1920.
While the family was stationed at Camp Meade in Maryland, Icky contracted scarlet fever, apparently from the family’s maid, whose medical history had not been properly checked. Despite desperate efforts to save him, including Mamie calling a specialist from Johns Hopkins Hospital, Icky died on January 2nd, 1921, at just three years old. Dwight held his son in his arms as he passed. He would later call it the greatest disappointment and disaster of his life, the one I have never been able to forget completely.
The grief nearly destroyed the marriage. Both parents blamed themselves, and the weight of that guilt and loss created a strain that took years to overcome. Every year thereafter, Dwight and Mamie marked Icky’s birthday in solemn remembrance. It was on September 24th, 1955, that President Eisenhower suffered his first major heart attack.
A coincidence that seemed impossibly cruel. Their second son, John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower, was born on August 3rd, 1922, in Denver, Colorado. John’s arrival brought comfort but could never fully heal the wound left by Icky’s death. Throughout his childhood, John lived in the shadow of a lost brother and a father whose career demanded constant relocation.
The Eisenhowers moved more than thirty times during their first thirty-five years of marriage. From Panama to Paris, from the Philippines to Washington, DC, Mamie developed remarkable skills at creating a home wherever they landed, hanging a small plaque that read, “This is our home,” in each new residence. But the instability left its mark on young John, who learned early that duty often came before family comfort. When World War II erupted, Dwight Eisenhower’s career accelerated with astonishing speed.
From a colonel in 1941, he rose to become Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force by 1944, orchestrating both Operation Torch in North Africa and the D-Day invasion of Normandy. For Mamie, the war years were lonely and difficult. She remained in Washington, DC, at the Wardman Park Hotel, refusing to attend parties or engage in the social world while her husband was overseas. Instead, she volunteered at servicemen’s canteens and worked with the Red Cross.
The couple saw each other only briefly during the entire conflict: two weeks in January 1944 and a few days in June 1945. When Eisenhower asked General George C. Marshall if Mamie could join him in Europe after Germany’s surrender, Marshall declined, noting it would not be fair to other army couples separated by duty. The rumors that arose during this period would haunt the family for decades.
Kay Summersby, a British woman assigned as Eisenhower’s driver in 1942, remained on his staff throughout the war. She was attractive and engaging, and photographs of her with Eisenhower appeared in newspapers that Mamie would see back in Washington. Eisenhower wrote frequently to his wife, insisting he wanted nothing more than to be together again. Summersby initially published a book after the war, claiming her relationship with her boss had been strong but platonic.
However, in a second book written decades later as she was dying of cancer, titled Past Forgetting, she claimed they had conducted a love affair. No other member of Eisenhower’s wartime staff ever confirmed these assertions, and the truth remains debated by historians to this day. When the war ended in May 1945, Dwight Eisenhower was the most celebrated American soldier since Ulysses S. Grant.
The question of what came next consumed the nation. On November 19th, 1945, he was designated Chief of Staff of the United States Army, a position he held until 1948. During these years, the Eisenhowers lived at Quarters 1 at Fort Myer in Virginia, finally together again after the long wartime separation. It was during this period that they began dreaming of owning their first real home, something they had never possessed in three decades of military life.
Meanwhile, their son John had followed his father into the army. He entered West Point in 1941, just months before Pearl Harbor thrust America into the war. His class of 1944 graduated a year early due to wartime needs. And by cruel irony, their graduation date was set for June 6th, 1944, the very day of the Normandy invasion.
John learned that his father was commanding the largest amphibious assault in history on the same day he received his commission as a second lieutenant. The young officer hoped to serve as an infantry platoon commander in Europe, but concerns about what would happen to the Supreme Commander if his only surviving son were captured or killed kept John away from the front lines. He spent the remainder of World War II in intelligence and administrative duties in England and Germany, visiting Buchenwald concentration camp shortly after its liberation. After the war, in 1947, John married Barbara Jean Thompson, the daughter of Colonel Percy Walter Thompson.
Barbara came from an army family herself and understood the demands of military life. The couple would have four children: Dwight David Eisenhower II, born March 31st, 1948; Barbara Anne, born May 30th, 1949; Susan Elaine, born December 31st, 1951; and Mary Jean, born December 21st, 1955. These four grandchildren would become central figures in the Eisenhower story, each pursuing remarkably different paths that reflected both the privileges and pressures of their famous lineage. In 1948, Dwight Eisenhower retired from active military duty and accepted the presidency of Columbia University in New York City.
Both Republicans and Democrats had courted him as a potential presidential candidate, but Eisenhower initially resisted, believing that military professionals should not involve themselves in politics. The Columbia years were challenging. Eisenhower was better suited to command than academic administration, and he found university politics frustrating. But it was during this period that he and Mamie finally achieved their long-held dream of home ownership.
While visiting their longtime friends George and Mary Allen in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the Eisenhowers confided their desire to purchase a farm. The Allens, who had recently bought property in the area, encouraged them to look nearby. In 1950, the couple found a run-down farm on the outskirts of Gettysburg and purchased it for $40,000. The property held deep personal significance.
Gettysburg had been where Dwight commanded Camp Colt in 1918, where he and Mamie had lived as newlyweds, and where little Icky had celebrated his first birthday. The 189-acre farm came with 600 chickens, 25 cows, and several dilapidated buildings dating back to the 18th century. It would need extensive renovation, but it represented something the Eisenhowers had never possessed: a permanent home. That renovation was delayed when, in December 1950, Eisenhower was called back to active duty as the first Supreme Commander of NATO forces in Europe.
He and Mamie moved to Paris, living in a chateau near the city, while Eisenhower worked to build the military alliance that would define Western defense for generations. The Gettysburg farm sat waiting, its renovation postponed, but not forgotten. The call to politics finally proved irresistible. In 1952, Eisenhower agreed to seek the Republican presidential nomination.
He won it, then defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson in a landslide that November. On January 20th, 1953, Dwight David Eisenhower became the 34th President of the United States. For the first time in their lives, Dwight and Mamie would spend eight consecutive years in one residence: the White House. Mamie embraced her role as First Lady with enthusiasm and competence.
She managed the White House staff with the same efficiency she had developed running military households around the world. Her frugality was legendary; she clipped coupons even for White House purchases. Her love of pink became famous, leading Americans to call the color “Mamie pink. ” She appeared on the Gallup poll’s list of the ten most admired women in America every year from 1952 through 1961.
The White House became a warm family gathering place, especially when the grandchildren visited. The Eisenhowers hosted birthday parties, holiday meals, and family events, including Mary Jean’s christening in the Blue Room in April 1956. During the presidency, the Gettysburg farm was finally completed in 1955. The total renovation cost $250,000, partly because Mamie employed union workers who commuted daily from Washington, seventy-five miles away.
The farmhouse became a retreat from the pressures of the capital, a miniature White House where the president could entertain family, friends, and even foreign dignitaries in a more relaxed setting. Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, the Shah of Iran, and Nikita Khrushchev all visited the Gettysburg farm, walking the grounds where Confederate divisions had once assembled to attack the Round Tops during the Civil War. Eisenhower spent a total of 365 days at Gettysburg during his presidency, including 38 days of recovery after his September 1955 heart attack. One of the most significant and enduring changes Eisenhower made was to the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland.
Franklin Roosevelt had called it Shangri-La. After the farmhouse was complete, Eisenhower renamed it Camp David, after his grandson. That name remains to this day, a permanent reminder of the family bonds that shaped Eisenhower’s presidency. John Eisenhower’s career continued during his father’s time in office.
He served in combat during the Korean War, something he had been denied during World War II. After fighting with an infantry battalion, he was reassigned to the Third Division headquarters. A frank conversation between father and son during this period revealed the extraordinary pressures of being the president’s child in a war zone. John accepted that he could never be captured alive.
He would have to take his own life rather than become an instrument of blackmail against his father. This understanding led John to later express strong opinions that children of sitting presidents should not serve in combat zones. After Korea, John worked in his father’s presidential administration, serving as assistant staff secretary in the White House, on the Army’s general staff, and as an assistant to General Andrew Goodpaster. In 1958, he purchased a small property near his parents’ Gettysburg farm so his children could be close to their grandparents after the family left the White House.
During his father’s retirement, John acted as an aide while the former president wrote his presidential memoirs. When the Eisenhowers finally retired to Gettysburg in January 1961, the town came out in the snow to welcome them home. For the next eight years, Dwight divided his time between Gettysburg and Palm Springs, California, where they also maintained a winter residence. He kept an office at Gettysburg College, wrote his memoirs, played golf obsessively, painted, and received a steady stream of visitors seeking the counsel of an elder statesman.
Mamie enjoyed having her husband home at last, entertaining friends with bridge games and welcoming grandchildren for holidays. The four Eisenhower grandchildren were coming of age during this period, and their lives would take remarkably different trajectories. David Eisenhower, the only grandson and eldest grandchild, grew up with the unusual distinction of having the presidential retreat named after him. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and then Amherst College, where he began dating Julie Nixon, the daughter of Richard Nixon, his grandfather’s former vice president.
The young couple had first met as children at the 1956 Republican National Convention and reconnected as college students at nearby schools in Massachusetts. On December 22nd, 1968, just a month before Richard Nixon’s inauguration as President, David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon were married in a private ceremony at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, officiated. The wedding united two presidential families in a way unprecedented in American history.
As a touching detail, Julie wore as her something borrowed, something blue, the garter that Mamie Eisenhower had worn when she married Dwight in 1916. David served as chairman of Youth for Nixon-Agnew during the 1968 campaign, and the young couple became visible symbols of Republican optimism at a time of national turmoil over Vietnam and civil unrest. John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival later cited David Eisenhower as one inspiration for the song “Fortunate Son,” released in 1969. The song criticized the privileges that protected certain young Americans from the draft while others fought and died in Vietnam.
Dwight Eisenhower lived to see his grandson’s wedding and Richard Nixon’s election, but not much longer. His health had been declining for years. He suffered another serious heart attack in August 1968 and was taken to Walter Reed Medical Center, where he remained in an apartment under constant medical care until his death. Visitors came to pay their respects, including the newly elected President Nixon.
The Reverend Billy Graham prayed with the dying general. According to his grandson David, Eisenhower greeted Graham with questions about heaven and conversations they had had fourteen years earlier at Gettysburg. On March 28th, 1969, General of the Army and former President Dwight David Eisenhower died at age seventy-eight. His two surviving brothers, Edgar and Milton, attended the Washington funeral and served as honorary pallbearers.
He was buried on April 2nd in the Place of Meditation at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, returning in death to the small prairie town where he had grown up. For Mamie, widowhood brought both grief and a quiet determination to continue. She traveled to Belgium shortly after Ike’s death, where their son John was serving as US ambassador. Upon returning to the United States, she continued living full-time at the Gettysburg farm, spending winters in California and Georgia.
She remained a frequent guest at the Nixon White House, her connection to that administration now reinforced by her grandson’s marriage. Mamie continued answering the many letters she received from the public and assisted in fundraising activities for the Eisenhower Memorial Hospital in Palm Springs. As the 1970s progressed, her health began to decline. She suffered from Meniere’s disease, a condition affecting balance that had plagued her for decades and had given rise to unfounded rumors about her drinking.
John Eisenhower’s career after his father’s presidency was distinguished in its own right. He served as US ambassador to Belgium from 1969 to 1971 during the Nixon administration, a position that allowed him to be near his mother after his father’s death. President Nixon later appointed him chairman of the Interagency Classification Review Committee in 1972. In 1975, he served President Gerald Ford as chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Refugees.
He retired from the Army Reserve in 1974 with the rank of brigadier general. After leaving government service, John turned to a second career as a military historian. He had earned a master’s degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University after World War II and had taught in the English department at West Point. Now he applied those skills to a series of well-received books on military history.
The Bitter Woods, his study of the Battle of the Bulge, became a bestseller in 1969. He went on to write Strictly Personal in 1974, a memoir; Allies: Pearl Harbor to D-Day in 1982; So Far from God, a history of the Mexican-American War; and Zachary Taylor in the American Presidents series in 2008. His first book about his grandfather, Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1987. In later years, John became more willing to discuss his father’s legacy.
He helped his father write his presidential memoirs, and later, with his wife Julie, co-authored Going Home to Glory, a memoir of life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961–1969, published in 2010. The book offered an intimate portrait of Ike and Mamie’s retirement years from the perspective of a grandson who had lived nearby and observed them closely. John’s first marriage to Barbara Thompson ended in divorce in 1986 after thirty-nine years.
Barbara remarried in 1988, wedding widower Edwin J. Foltz, a former vice president at the Campbell Soup Company. She died on September 19th, 2014, in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. John also remarried in 1988, to Joanne Thompson.
He lived in Trappe, Maryland, for his final years, continuing to write and offer commentary on current events. A lifelong Republican, he made headlines in 2004 by voting for Democrat John Kerry, citing dissatisfaction with the policies of George W. Bush. John Eisenhower died on December 21st, 2013, at age ninety-one.
From 2005 until his death, he held the distinction of being the oldest living presidential child. He is buried at West Point Cemetery on the grounds of the United States Military Academy. The four Eisenhower grandchildren carved out diverse and accomplished lives. David Eisenhower, after his marriage to Julie Nixon, sought to live as private a life as his famous heritage would permit.
The couple declined opportunities to run for public office. “Whenever push came to shove,” Julie later explained, “we always thought about the children. ” They have three children: actress Jennie Elizabeth Eisenhower, born in 1978; Alexander Richard, born in 1980; and Melanie Catherine, born in 1984. David became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he directed the Institute for Public Service and taught courses on the presidency and its rhetorical influence.
His book Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He and Julie continued to reside in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. Julie Nixon Eisenhower became a stalwart defender of both the Eisenhower and Nixon legacies. She was one of Richard Nixon’s most visible supporters during the Watergate scandal and his 1974 resignation.
Her biography of her mother, Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, published in 1986, sought to rehabilitate the former First Lady’s image. She has expressed peace with her father’s legacy, pointing to his accomplishments while acknowledging that Watergate will always be part of his historical record. The Eisenhower-Nixon family connection remains unique in American political history, binding two presidents through marriage and creating descendants who carry both names. Barbara Anne Eisenhower, known as Anne, pursued a career as an interior designer in New York City.
She was presented as a debutante at the International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1967. Her first marriage in 1968 was to Fernando Echavarria Uribe, an insurance executive from Bogotá, Colombia, whom she had met while vacationing in South America. Their daughter Adriana, born on May 29th, 1969, was the first great-grandchild of President Eisenhower, born just two months after his death. In the 1980s, Anne married Wolfgang Flöttl, a billionaire hedge fund manager who once owned an art collection with pieces by Van Gogh, Picasso, and Cézanne.
She filed for divorce from Flöttl in 2018, sold the historic Southampton mansion Clearview for $35 million in 2010, and lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in her final years. She died on July 30th, 2022. Susan Eisenhower took perhaps the most unexpected path of all the grandchildren. Born on December 31st, 1951, she was presented as a debutante at the International Debutante Ball in 1970.
She became an expert on international security, space policy, energy, and relations between the United States and Russia. A founding director and first president of the Eisenhower Institute, she traveled extensively to the former Soviet Union for more than twenty years on matters related to US national security. She served on multiple Department of Energy commissions and held an eight-year term on the National Academy of Sciences Standing Committee on International Security and Arms Control. In 2010, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu appointed her to serve on the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.
Susan’s personal life reflected her professional interest in US-Soviet relations in a dramatic way. She has been married three times. Her first husband was Alexander H. Bradshaw, a London barrister with whom she had two daughters.
Her second husband was John Mann, an American lawyer with whom she had a daughter. Her third marriage, in February 1990, was to Roald Sagdeev, a Russian physicist who had served as director of the Space Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences and as a science adviser to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Sagdeev was the highest-ranking Soviet official ever to contemplate marrying an American. The romance between Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of the D-Day commander who became president as the Cold War hardened, and Roald Sagdeev, a Communist Party member and leading nuclear physicist, began in 1987 at a USSR forum in New York City.
Sagdeev’s first words to her were reportedly, “You look just like your grandfather. ” Their courtship involved exchanges of letters with coded words such as “bilateral relations,” as both American and Soviet intelligence services monitored their relationship. They married in a civil ceremony in Moscow, followed by a religious ceremony at the US embassy, in what Sagdeev called a very important symbol and indicator of how far relations between the two superpowers had evolved. Susan and Sagdeev co-authored The Making of a Soviet Scientist, his memoir, and she wrote Breaking Free, a memoir of love and revolution about their relationship.
They divorced in 2008 but remained friends and business partners. Susan also authored Mrs. Ike: Memories and Reflections on the Life of Mamie Eisenhower in 1996, Partners in Space: US-Russian Cooperation After the Cold War in 2004, and How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower’s Biggest Decisions in 2020. In 2008, she made headlines by changing her voter registration from Republican to independent and endorsing Barack Obama for president, citing concerns about partisanship in both major parties.
She endorsed Obama again in 2012. Mary Jean Eisenhower, the youngest grandchild, was born on December 21st, 1955, in Washington, DC. She grew up near Gettysburg before her father’s appointment as ambassador to Belgium relocated the family abroad. Mary Jean dedicated herself to continuing her grandfather’s vision of international understanding through People to People International, the organization Dwight Eisenhower had founded on September 11th, 1956, with the backing of prominent Americans including Joyce Hall of Hallmark Cards, Walt Disney, and Bob Hope.
Walt Disney later drew inspiration from the initiative to create the “It’s a Small World” attraction in 1964. Mary Jean became CEO of People to People International in January 2000 and its president in 2003. Under her leadership, the organization expanded its mission of promoting peace through personal diplomacy and grassroots interactions. After the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, she became intensely focused on bringing young people from around the globe together.
Her vision resulted in Peace Camp 2003, an evolution of thought and action, and the Global Peace Initiative efforts that brought participants from more than thirty nationalities together in Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey to discuss issues and gain understanding of diverse cultures. Suzanne Mubarak, then First Lady of Egypt, co-hosted these events. Mary Jean traveled to more than seventy-five countries in her work, visiting downtown teams, peace camps, and cultural exchange programs. She met with first families and distributed foodstuffs in developing countries.
She represented her family in Morocco on the fiftieth anniversary of the Casablanca Conference and traveled to the beaches of Normandy to meet veterans who had served with her grandfather during D-Day. Among her many honors, she received the Knight of Peace Award from the International University in Assisi, Italy, the Medal of Honor from the Slovak Republic, and the Friendship Ambassador designation from the People’s Republic of China. The COVID-19 pandemic devastated People to People International financially, and the organization filed for bankruptcy on March 22nd, 2022. The extended Eisenhower family beyond the direct line also left significant marks on American life.
Milton Eisenhower, Dwight’s youngest brother and closest confidant, served as president of three major American universities: Kansas State University from 1943 to 1950, Pennsylvania State University from 1950 to 1956, and Johns Hopkins University from 1956 to 1967 and again briefly from 1971 to 1972. He served presidents from Franklin Roosevelt through Richard Nixon in various advisory capacities. Dwight Eisenhower’s final message to the nation, delivered in his farewell address on January 17th, 1961, warned against the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Written with help from his brother Milton, the speech reflected his conviction that wars must be made obsolete and that America should guard against allowing military and industrial interests to dominate national policy.
It remains one of the most cited presidential speeches in American history, its warnings echoing across decades of subsequent conflicts. In many ways, the Eisenhower family’s story mirrors America’s own journey through the twentieth century and beyond. From the prairie towns of Kansas to the corridors of world power, from devastating personal losses to extraordinary public triumphs, from the battlefields of Europe to the careful diplomacy of the Cold War, they navigated changes that reshaped the nation and the world.
Their legacy lives on in institutions, in scholarship, in policy, and in the memories of those who knew them.
