Madeleine comments on President Eisenhower

By Madeleine Dewar SDEC26

I sent the following response to Joe Solis, Editor of the South Texas Republican Newsletter in response to an article he wrote about Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I appreciated the insert from Ike. Dwight Eisenhower was and is one of my heroes. The first political campaign I ever participated in was in 1952 when at 11 years of age I was honored with the job of presenting Mamie Eisenhower a bouquet of roses at the train station when Ike and Mamie came through Buffalo, NY on their whistle stop campaign tour.

In January 1957 I attended Ike’s second inaugural with my mother and father. My mother was a very active member of the Republican Party in Erie County, New York and served on Eisenhower’s staff during WWII in Europe as a WAAC and a WAC.

I look at his picture on your newsletter and can only think that, like myself, there is no way this man could have continued to associate himself with the Republican Party today. In my day, and in Eisenhower’s day, the Republican Party was fiscally conservative and socially responsible.

The Republican Party today is neither. It is the party of big government for the sake of cronies and large corporations. It is spending our grandchildren’s futures with the deficit they will have to pay, environmental destruction, lack of educational achievement, world opinion and class disparity. It is a nation that is not compassionately conservative, but mercilessly malicious about those who might be less fortunate or even totally helpless.

I will leave you with this quote from President Eisenhower:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1952