ABILENE — A retired Army officer and military historian will visit the Eisenhower Library Saturday to discuss Dwight Eisenhower’s “growing-up” years in Abilene and how they influenced his development as a leader.
Retired Lt. Col. Carlo D’Este, who wrote the biography “Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life,” will give the keynote speech in a presentation that will also feature two Abilene High School students, Haylee Steffen and Alex Campbell, presenting insights from their own research on Eisenhower’s early years.
The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at the Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, 200 S.E. 4th St., Abilene.
The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited to 250. To RSVP, call 785-263-6700 or 877-746-4453.
2 Comments
Let’s say, for example, the teenage Adolf Hitler, young Adolf Shickelgruber, had grown up in the middle American town of Abilene, Kansas. He would have been surrounded by 4-H’rs, agriculture, Boy Scouts, every small town church then in existence, Catholic Church youth meetings in young Hitler’s case … would he have grown up with the hallucination to attempt to lead an American “third Reich”?
I doubt it.
Perhaps he would have applied to attend an American military academy with the goal of using his admittedly remarkable mental powers to help save the American way of life and the free world as we then knew it.
I would like to think that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Winston Churchhill, Dwight Eisenhower and even Douglas MacArthur with a military upbringing became highly moral and principled leaders because of their background in the American way of life as we then knew it.
Marbles, jacks and little red wagons anyone?
There is no doubt but that Ike’s greatness was rooted in his Midwestern Christian values that he acquired in Abilene. It is those values which are under attack today by the leftists. One can only fear for the future of the Republic.