(2 of 9)
The ceremony in the center of the field was only a preliminary to the big political speech scheduled for later in the afternoon. Ike and three of his brothers—Milton, the president of Penn State College, Arthur, the Kansas City banker, and Edgar, the Tacoma, Wash, lawyer—were there to trowel the cornerstone of the $100,000 Eisenhower Museum set up by the citizens of Kansas. The television cameras and the radio networks stayed away, and Ike had no prepared speech. But as he sat pensively, waiting for his turn to talk, his eyes drifted toward the small white clapboard house across the field, half hidden by poplars. There, on the wrong side of the tracks, David and Ida Eisenhower had raised their six boys.* When Kansas' Governor Edward F. Arn introduced him, Ike stood up at the rostrum with an intent and distant look across his face.
"Inevitably, on such an occasion as this, memory is bound to turn backward," he began. "In fact, this day eight years ago, I made the most agonizing decision of my life. I had to decide to postpone by at least 24 hours the most formidable array of fighting ships and of fighting men that was ever launched across the sea against a hostile shore. The consequences of that decision at that moment could not have been foreseen by anyone. If there were nothing else in my life to prove the existence of an almighty and merciful God, the events of the next 24 hours did it. . . . The greatest break in a terrible outlay of weather occurred the next day and allowed that great invasion to proceed, with losses far below those we had anticipated . . ."
Before Ike began talking, the people in the audience had drifted back & forth to shake hands with friends, to visit and titter while the preliminaries droned on. Now they were silent and attentive in the intimacy of great events.
"But that is not really where my memory wants to land today as it travels back over the years. It is to the days of my boyhood . . . I want to call attention to the virtues of the times, to—at least as my brothers and I devoutly believe—the extraordinary virtues of our parents. First of all, they believed the admonition, 'The fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom.' Their Bibles were a live and lusty influence in their lives. There was nothing sad about their religion. They believed in it with a happiness and a contentment that all would be well if a man would take the cards that he had been dealt in this world and play them to the best of his ability . . ."
"What Are You Afraid Of?" By now the audience had caught both Ike's mood and his memories. There were scowls when a baby squawled in the damp afternoon heat, and the baby was quickly hushed. When two photographic planes sputtered low over the crowd, the people glanced up at the heedless intrusion, then turned back to listening.