Buried: Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and Museum, Abilene, Kansas
Thirty-fourth President - 1953-1961
Born: October 14, 1890, in Denison, Texas
Died: 12:35 p.m. on March 28, 1969, in Washington, D.C.
Age at death: 78
Cause of death: Congestive heart failure
Last words: “I want to go. God take me.”
Admission to Dwight D. Eisenhower Library
and Museum: $8.00
Dwight Eisenhower’s childhood fascination with military history led him to West Point. He worked his way up through the army ranks to become a five-star general—one of only five in history. A hero of World War II, Eisenhower held the lofty title of Supreme Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization when he won the Republican presidential nomination in 1952. In both the ’52 and ’56 elections he ran successfully against Democrat Adlai Stevenson.
In his two terms as president, the lifelong military man saw the end of the Korean War. He also presided over the admission of the forty-ninth and fiftieth states—Alaska and Hawaii.
It was not until they left the White House in 1961 that Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower settled into their first permanent home, a farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The seventy-year-old former president wrote his memoirs in between rounds of golf. Despite the relaxed schedule, the general’s health began to suffer. He’d survived one heart attack as president and had several more after he retired.
These pylon plaques on the Eisenhower Center grounds describe the contributions of the Eisenhower family
On May 14, 1968, Eisenhower traveled to Washington. Weakened by each successive heart attack, he was admitted to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where he lived out the last ten months of his life. His wife stayed in a suite down the hall. Finally, on March 28, 1969, the old warrior’s heart gave out.
Three years earlier, Eisenhower had approved a funeral plan carefully crafted by the Military District of Washington, which has oversight of modern presidential funerals. Each moment of the ceremony was outlined with military precision in a fifty-four-page document, including the timing of the gun salutes and the pace at which the procession would travel down Constitution Avenue. Many of those elements, including the riderless horse preceding the caisson, had been seen just a few years before at the funeral of John Kennedy.
Eisenhower’s body was taken to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda. Citizens waited to pay their respects in a line that stretched six city blocks. In twenty-four hours, fifty-five thousand people passed by the catafalque. President Richard Nixon, who had served as Eisenhower’s vice president, gave a eulogy. Government offices closed and flags flew at half mast.
The funeral was held at Washington National Cathedral. Two thousand invited guests filled the church to capacity. Representatives from more than seventy-eight countries attended, including French President Charles De Gaulle. Lyndon Johnson was also there on his first trip to Washington, D.C., since leaving the White House. Thousands more gathered on the lawn in freezing weather to listen to the service over a public address system. Reverend L.R. Elson quoted scripture and the congregation sang “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” and “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
After the funeral, Eisenhower’s body was taken by train to his hometown, Abilene, Kansas, the site of Eisenhower’s presidential library. In Abilene, the hearse passed slowly by Eisenhower’s modest boyhood cottage on its way to the library. Thousands lined the route. Three hundred invited guests gathered at the library steps. A minister read Psalms 23 and 121 before the military guard fired its twenty-one-gun salute and the bugler sounded taps. The former president’s widow was given the flag that covered his casket.
The walls of the crypt are inscribed with quotes from several of Dwight Eisenhower’s speeches
Eisenhower was buried as he wished in his army uniform and in an eighty-dollar standard-issue military coffin. He was laid to rest in the Place of Meditation, one of five buildings in the Eisenhower complex. Later that afternoon, a grieving Mamie Eisenhower returned to the gravesite. She placed a gladiola on her husband’s grave and chrysanthemums on her son’s. When she died ten years later, she was buried alongside them.
Touring the Tomb at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and Museum
The Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and Museum is located in Abilene, Kansas, approximately 150 miles west of Kansas City and 90 miles north of Wichita.
The complex is open daily from 7:45 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. from Memorial Day until mid-August. The rest of the year the opening hours are 9:00 a.m. until 4:45 p.m. The chapel is open year-round from dawn until dusk. All buildings are closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. A fee is charged for the museum only. Admission is $8.00 for adults aged sixteen to sixty-one. The fee for senior citizens is $6.00. Children ages eight to fifteen are admitted for $1.00. Children under eight are admitted free.
To reach the Library and Museum: Take Interstate 70 to exit 275. The Library and Museum are located about two miles south of I-70 on KS-15.
For additional information
The Dwight D. Eisenhower
Library and Museum
200 SE 4th Street
Abilene, KS 67410
Phone: (785) 263-6700
Fax: (785) 263-6715
www.eisenhower.archives.gov
Eisenhower was eight years old when his family moved into this Abilene, Kansas home
“On the morning of March 28, 1969, the old soldier issued his final command.”
—Richard Norton Smith
In 1967 amidst stringent secrecy, the former president traveled to Denver to exhume the remains of his first son, Doud Dwight, known to his doting parents as Icky, who had died of scarlet fever in 1921 at the age of four. The former president, his grief still fresh after four decades, accompanied the small casket to Abilene, Kansas. There he personally supervised Icky’s interment near the crypts reserved for himself and Mamie in a plain sandstone chapel across the street from his boyhood home and presidential library.
Thereafter Eisenhower’s health deteriorated rapidly. By the spring of 1968, a series of heart attacks led to his hospitalization at Walter Reed. Mamie took up residence in a tiny room next to his suite. One early visitor was the Reverend Billy Graham, whose help Ike sought in patching up an occasionally strained relationship with Richard Nixon. The upshot was Eisenhower’s public endorsement of his former vice president before Republican delegates met in Miami Beach that August to choose their presidential candidate. Pleased as he was by Nixon’s victory at the polls that fall, he was made even happier by the December nuptials of his grandson David to Nixon’s daughter Julie.
As Eisenhower’s condition worsened, Billy Graham returned to Walter Reed for a visit. After half an hour of conversation, Ike asked his doctor and nurses to leave the room. Taking the evangelist’s hand, he said, “Billy, you’ve told me how to be sure my sins are forgiven and that I’m going to Heaven. Would you tell me again?”
Graham reached for his copy of the New Testament. He read the old, familiar verses promising eternal life, before adding a short prayer of his own.
“Thank you,” said Eisenhower. “I’m ready.” On the morning of March 28, 1969, the old soldier issued his final command. After ordering his son and grandson to prop him up in his hospital bed, Ike told John Eisenhower, “I want to go. God take me.”
—RNS