A Signed Copy of Eisenhower’s First Inaugural Address

In 1952, the Republicans nominated Eisenhower, the popular general who won the war in Europe, based largely on the perception that he was a sure winner. Ike campaigned by attacking the failures of the outgoing Truman Administration and promising to go to Korea and resolve the war there. He won easily. At the Inauguration, the oath of office was administered by Chief Justice Frederick Vinson on two Bibles—the one used by George Washington at the first inauguration, and the one Eisenhower received from his mother upon his graduation from the Military Academy at West Point. Ike broke with custom by reciting his own improvised prayer instead of kissing the Bible. Printed Document Signed, his first Inaugural Address, delivered in Washington, January 20, 1953, 5 pages, apparently removed from a book, with an engraved portrait of Eisenhower on the front page.

Eisenhower was mainly concerned with the Cold War and Communist menace. “The world and we have passed the midway point of a century of continuing challenge. We sense with all our faculties that forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. This fact defines the meaning of this day. We are summoned by this honored and historic ceremony to witness more than the act of one citizen swearing his oath of service, in the presence of God. We are called as a people to give testimony in the sight of the world to our faith that the future shall belong to the free…For our own country, it has been a time of recurring trial. We have grown in power and in responsibility. We have passed through the anxieties of depression and of war to a summit unmatched in man’s history. Seeking to secure peace in the world, we have had to fight through the forests of the Argonne, to the shores of Iwo Jima, and to the cold mountains of Korea…Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark. The faith we hold belongs not to us alone but to the free of all the world. This common bond binds the grower of rice in Burma and the planter of wheat in Iowa, the shepherd in southern Italy and the mountaineer in the Andes. It confers a common dignity upon the French soldier who dies in Indo-China, the British soldier killed in Malaya, the American life given in Korea…So we are persuaded by necessity and by belief that the strength of all free peoples lies in unity; their danger, in discord. To produce this unity, to meet the challenge of our time, destiny has laid upon our country the responsibility of the free world’s leadership. So it is proper that we assure our friends once again that, in the discharge of this responsibility, we Americans know and we observe the difference between world leadership and imperialism; between firmness and truculence; between a thoughtfully calculated goal and spasmodic reaction to the stimulus of emergencies. We wish our friends the world over to know this above all: we face the threat—not with dread and confusion—but with confidence and conviction…” From the Forbes Collection.