Dwight D. Eisenhower: 1944, 1959
As a four-star general, Eisenhower led the Allied Forces to victory in World War II. Returning to the U.S. as a war hero, he was president of Columbia University and supreme commander of NATO before being elected president of the U.S. in 1952 and in 1956. Eisenhower was a moderate conservative and a committed internationalist who believed in a balanced budget and refused to employ deficit spending to revive the economy.
He ended the Korean War in 1953, and opened negotiations with Nikita Khrushchev. Eisenhower signed significant civil rights legislation in 1957 and in 1960, and ordered federal troops to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. He was TIME's Man of the Year for 1959, and later became the first president to be limited by the Constitution's 22nd Amendment of two terms. In his farewell address in January 1961 he famously warned of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex."
Researched by Joan Levinstein, the Time Inc. Research Center