Dwight D. Eisenhower
First Inaugural Address
Tuesday, January 20, 1953

MY friends, before I begin the expression of those thoughts that I deem 
appropriate to this moment, would you permit me the privilege of 
uttering a little private prayer of my own. And I ask that you bow your 
heads:

Almighty God, as we stand here at this moment my future associates in 
the executive branch of government join me in beseeching that Thou will 
make full and complete our dedication to the service of the people in 
this throng, and their fellow citizens everywhere.

Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong, and 
allow all our words and actions to be governed thereby, and by the laws 
of this land. Especially we pray that our concern shall be for all the 
people regardless of station, race, or calling.

May cooperation be permitted and be the mutual aim of those who, under 
the concepts of our Constitution, hold to differing political faiths; 
so that all may work for the good of our beloved country and Thy glory. 
Amen.

My fellow citizens:

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.

Since this century's beginning, a time of tempest has seemed to come 
upon the continents of the earth. Masses of Asia have awakened to 
strike off shackles of the past. Great nations of Europe have fought 
their bloodiest wars. Thrones have toppled and their vast empires have 
disappeared. New nations have been born.

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.

In the swift rush of great events, we find ourselves groping to know 
the full sense and meaning of these times in which we live. In our 
quest of understanding, we beseech God's guidance. We summon all our 
knowledge of the past and we scan all signs of the future. We bring all 
our wit and all our will to meet the question:

How far have we come in man's long pilgrimage from darkness toward 
light? Are we nearing the light - a day of freedom and of peace for all 
mankind? Or are the shadows of another night closing in upon us?

Great as are the preoccupations absorbing us at home, concerned as we 
are with matters that deeply affect our livelihood today and our vision 
of the future, each of these domestic problems is dwarfed by, and often 
even created by, this question that involves all humankind.

This trial comes at a moment when man's power to achieve good or to 
inflict evil surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears of 
all ages. We can turn rivers in their courses, level mountains to the 
plains. Oceans and land and sky are avenues for our colossal commerce. 
Disease diminishes and life lengthens.

Yet the promise of this life is imperiled by the very genius that has 
made it possible. Nations amass wealth. Labor sweats to create - and 
turns out devices to level not only mountains but also cities. Science 
seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase 
human life from this planet.

At such a time in history, we who are free must proclaim anew our 
faith. This faith is the abiding creed of our fathers. It is our faith 
in the deathless dignity of man, governed by eternal moral and natural 
laws.

This faith defines our full view of life. It establishes, beyond 
debate, those gifts of the Creator that are man's inalienable rights, 
and that make all men equal in His sight.

In the light of this equality, we know that the virtues most cherished 
by free people - love of truth, pride of work, devotion to country - 
all are treasures equally precious in the lives of the most humble and 
of the most exalted. The men who mine coal and fire furnaces and 
balance ledgers and turn lathes and pick cotton and heal the sick and 
plant corn - all serve as proudly, and as profitably, for America as 
the statesmen who draft treaties and the legislators who enact laws.

This faith rules our whole way of life. It decrees that we, the people, 
elect leaders not to rule but to serve. It asserts that we have the 
right to choice of our own work and to the reward of our own toil. It 
inspires the initiative that makes our productivity the wonder of the 
world. And it warns that any man who seeks to deny equality among all 
his brothers betrays the spirit of the free and invites the mockery of 
the tyrant.

It is because we, all of us, hold to these principles that the 
political changes accomplished this day do not imply turbulence, 
upheaval or disorder. Rather this change expresses a purpose of 
strengthening our dedication and devotion to the precepts of our 
founding documents, a conscious renewal of faith in our country and in 
the watchfulness of a Divine Providence.

The enemies of this faith know no god but force, no devotion but its 
use. They tutor men in treason. They feed upon the hunger of others. 
Whatever defies them, they torture, especially the truth.

Here, then, is joined no argument between slightly differing 
philosophies. This conflict strikes directly at the faith of our 
fathers and the lives of our sons. No principle or treasure that we 
hold, from the spiritual knowledge of our free schools and churches to 
the creative magic of free labor and capital, nothing lies safely 
beyond the reach of this struggle.

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.

We know, beyond this, that we are linked to all free peoples not merely 
by a noble idea but by a simple need. No free people can for long cling 
to any privilege or enjoy any safety in economic solitude. For all our 
own material might, even we need markets in the world for the surpluses 
of our farms and our factories. Equally, we need for these same farms 
and factories vital materials and products of distant lands. This basic 
law of interdependence, so manifest in the commerce of peace, applies 
with thousand-fold intensity in the event of war.

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.

We feel this moral strength because we know that we are not helpless 
prisoners of history. We are free men. We shall remain free, never to 
be proven guilty of the one capital offense against freedom, a lack of 
stanch faith.

In pleading our just cause before the bar of history and in pressing 
our labor for world peace, we shall be guided by certain fixed 
principles.

These principles are:

(1) Abhorring war as a chosen way to balk the purposes of those who 
threaten us, we hold it to be the first task of statesmanship to 
develop the strength that will deter the forces of aggression and 
promote the conditions of peace. For, as it must be the supreme purpose 
of all free men, so it must be the dedication of their leaders, to save 
humanity from preying upon itself.

In the light of this principle, we stand ready to engage with any and 
all others in joint effort to remove the causes of mutual fear and 
distrust among nations, so as to make possible drastic reduction of 
armaments. The sole requisites for undertaking such effort are that - 
in their purpose - they be aimed logically and honestly toward secure 
peace for all; and that - in their result - they provide methods by 
which every participating nation will prove good faith in carrying out 
its pledge.

(2) Realizing that common sense and common decency alike dictate the 
futility of appeasement, we shall never try to placate an aggressor by 
the false and wicked bargain of trading honor for security. Americans, 
indeed all free men, remember that in the final choice a soldier's pack 
is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.

(3) Knowing that only a United States that is strong and immensely 
productive can help defend freedom in our world, we view our Nation's 
strength and security as a trust upon which rests the hope of free men 
everywhere. It is the firm duty of each of our free citizens and of 
every free citizen everywhere to place the cause of his country before 
the comfort, the convenience of himself.

(4) Honoring the identity and the special heritage of each nation in 
the world, we shall never use our strength to try to impress upon 
another people our own cherished political and economic institutions.

(5) Assessing realistically the needs and capacities of proven friends 
of freedom, we shall strive to help them to achieve their own security 
and well-being. Likewise, we shall count upon them to assume, within 
the limits of their resources, their full and just burdens in the 
common defense of freedom.

(6) Recognizing economic health as an indispensable basis of military 
strength and the free world's peace, we shall strive to foster 
everywhere, and to practice ourselves, policies that encourage 
productivity and profitable trade. For the impoverishment of any single 
people in the world means danger to the well-being of all other peoples.

(7) Appreciating that economic need, military security and political 
wisdom combine to suggest regional groupings of free peoples, we hope, 
within the framework of the United Nations, to help strengthen such 
special bonds the world over. The nature of these ties must vary with 
the different problems of different areas.

In the Western Hemisphere, we enthusiastically join with all our 
neighbors in the work of perfecting a community of fraternal trust and 
common purpose.

In Europe, we ask that enlightened and inspired leaders of the Western 
nations strive with renewed vigor to make the unity of their peoples a 
reality. Only as free Europe unitedly marshals its strength can it 
effectively safeguard, even with our help, its spiritual and cultural 
heritage.

(8) Conceiving the defense of freedom, like freedom itself, to be one 
and indivisible, we hold all continents and peoples in equal regard and 
honor. We reject any insinuation that one race or another, one people 
or another, is in any sense inferior or expendable.

(9) Respecting the United Nations as the living sign of all people's 
hope for peace, we shall strive to make it not merely an eloquent 
symbol but an effective force. And in our quest for an honorable peace, 
we shall neither compromise, nor tire, nor ever cease.

By these rules of conduct, we hope to be known to all peoples.

By their observance, an earth of peace may become not a vision but a 
fact.

This hope - this supreme aspiration - must rule the way we live.

We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long 
entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. We must acquire 
proficiency in defense and display stamina in purpose.

We must be willing, individually and as a Nation, to accept whatever 
sacrifices may be required of us. A people that values its privileges 
above its principles soon loses both.

These basic precepts are not lofty abstractions, far removed from 
matters of daily living. They are laws of spiritual strength that 
generate and define our material strength. Patriotism means equipped 
forces and a prepared citizenry. Moral stamina means more energy and 
more productivity, on the farm and in the factory. Love of liberty 
means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible - from 
the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius 
of our scientists.

And so each citizen plays an indispensable role. The productivity of 
our heads, our hands, and our hearts is the source of all the strength 
we can command, for both the enrichment of our lives and the winning of 
the peace.

No person, no home, no community can be beyond the reach of this call. 
We are summoned to act in wisdom and in conscience, to work with 
industry, to teach with persuasion, to preach with conviction, to weigh 
our every deed with care and with compassion. For this truth must be 
clear before us: whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world 
must first come to pass in the heart of America.

The peace we seek, then, is nothing less than the practice and 
fulfillment of our whole faith among ourselves and in our dealings with 
others. This signifies more than the stilling of guns, easing the 
sorrow of war. More than escape from death, it is a way of life. More 
than a haven for the weary, it is a hope for the brave.

This is the hope that beckons us onward in this century of trial. This 
is the work that awaits us all, to be done with bravery, with charity, 
and with prayer to Almighty God.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Second Inaugural Address
Monday, January 21, 1957

THE PRICE OF PEACEMr. Chairman, Mr. Vice President, Mr. Chief Justice, 
Mr. Speaker, members of my family and friends, my countrymen, and the 
friends of my country, wherever they may be, we meet again, as upon a 
like moment four years ago, and again you have witnessed my solemn oath 
of service to you.

I, too, am a witness, today testifying in your name to the principles 
and purposes to which we, as a people, are pledged.

Before all else, we seek, upon our common labor as a nation, the 
blessings of Almighty God. And the hopes in our hearts fashion the 
deepest prayers of our whole people.

May we pursue the right - without self-righteousness.

May we know unity - without conformity.

May we grow in strength - without pride in self.

May we, in our dealings with all peoples of the earth, ever speak truth 
and serve justice.

And so shall America - in the sight of all men of good will - prove 
true to the honorable purposes that bind and rule us as a people in all 
this time of trial through which we pass.

We live in a land of plenty, but rarely has this earth known such peril 
as today.

In our nation work and wealth abound. Our population grows. Commerce 
crowds our rivers and rails, our skies, harbors, and highways. Our soil 
is fertile, our agriculture productive. The air rings with the song of 
our industry - rolling mills and blast furnaces, dynamos, dams, and 
assembly lines - the chorus of America the bountiful.

This is our home - yet this is not the whole of our world. For our 
world is where our full destiny lies - with men, of all people, and all 
nations, who are or would be free. And for them - and so for us - this 
is no time of ease or of rest.

In too much of the earth there is want, discord, danger. New forces and 
new nations stir and strive across the earth, with power to bring, by 
their fate, great good or great evil to the free world's future. From 
the deserts of North Africa to the islands of the South Pacific one 
third of all mankind has entered upon an historic struggle for a new 
freedom; freedom from grinding poverty. Across all continents, nearly a 
billion people seek, sometimes almost in desperation, for the skills 
and knowledge and assistance by which they may satisfy from their own 
resources, the material wants common to all mankind.

No nation, however old or great, escapes this tempest of change and 
turmoil. Some, impoverished by the recent World War, seek to restore 
their means of livelihood. In the heart of Europe, Germany still stands 
tragically divided. So is the whole continent divided. And so, too, is 
all the world.

The divisive force is International Communism and the power that it 
controls.

The designs of that power, dark in purpose, are clear in practice. It 
strives to seal forever the fate of those it has enslaved. It strives 
to break the ties that unite the free. And it strives to capture - to 
exploit for its own greater power - all forces of change in the world, 
especially the needs of the hungry and the hopes of the oppressed.

Yet the world of International Communism has itself been shaken by a 
fierce and mighty force: the readiness of men who love freedom to 
pledge their lives to that love. Through the night of their bondage, 
the unconquerable will of heroes has struck with the swift, sharp 
thrust of lightning. Budapest is no longer merely the name of a city; 
henceforth it is a new and shining symbol of man's yearning to be free.

Thus across all the globe there harshly blow the winds of change. And, 
we - though fortunate be our lot - know that we can never turn our 
backs to them.

We look upon this shaken earth, and we declare our firm and fixed 
purpose - the building of a peace with justice in a world where moral 
law prevails.

The building of such a peace is a bold and solemn purpose. To proclaim 
it is easy. To serve it will be hard. And to attain it, we must be 
aware of its full meaning - and ready to pay its full price.

We know clearly what we seek, and why.

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom. And now, 
as in no other age, we seek it because we have been warned, by the 
power of modern weapons, that peace may be the only climate possible 
for human life itself.

Yet this peace we seek cannot be born of fear alone: it must be rooted 
in the lives of nations. There must be justice, sensed and shared by 
all peoples, for, without justice the world can know only a tense and 
unstable truce. There must be law, steadily invoked and respected by 
all nations, for without law, the world promises only such meager 
justice as the pity of the strong upon the weak. But the law of which 
we speak, comprehending the values of freedom, affirms the equality of 
all nations, great and small.

Splendid as can be the blessings of such a peace, high will be its 
cost: in toil patiently sustained, in help honorably given, in 
sacrifice calmly borne.

We are called to meet the price of this peace.

To counter the threat of those who seek to rule by force, we must pay 
the costs of our own needed military strength, and help to build the 
security of others.

We must use our skills and knowledge and, at times, our substance, to 
help others rise from misery, however far the scene of suffering may be 
from our shores. For wherever in the world a people knows desperate 
want, there must appear at least the spark of hope, the hope of 
progress - or there will surely rise at last the flames of conflict.

We recognize and accept our own deep involvement in the destiny of men 
everywhere. We are accordingly pledged to honor, and to strive to 
fortify, the authority of the United Nations. For in that body rests 
the best hope of our age for the assertion of that law by which all 
nations may live in dignity.

And, beyond this general resolve, we are called to act a responsible 
role in the world's great concerns or conflicts - whether they touch 
upon the affairs of a vast region, the fate of an island in the 
Pacific, or the use of a canal in the Middle East. Only in respecting 
the hopes and cultures of others will we practice the equality of all 
nations. Only as we show willingness and wisdom in giving counsel - in 
receiving counsel - and in sharing burdens, will we wisely perform the 
work of peace.

For one truth must rule all we think and all we do. No people can live 
to itself alone. The unity of all who dwell in freedom is their only 
sure defense. The economic need of all nations - in mutual dependence - 
makes isolation an impossibility; not even America's prosperity could 
long survive if other nations did not also prosper. No nation can 
longer be a fortress, lone and strong and safe. And any people, seeking 
such shelter for themselves, can now build only their own prison.

Our pledge to these principles is constant, because we believe in their 
rightness.

We do not fear this world of change. America is no stranger to much of 
its spirit. Everywhere we see the seeds of the same growth that America 
itself has known. The American experiment has, for generations, fired 
the passion and the courage of millions elsewhere seeking freedom, 
equality, and opportunity. And the American story of material progress 
has helped excite the longing of all needy peoples for some 
satisfaction of their human wants. These hopes that we have helped to 
inspire, we can help to fulfill.

In this confidence, we speak plainly to all peoples.

We cherish our friendship with all nations that are or would be free. 
We respect, no less, their independence. And when, in time of want or 
peril, they ask our help, they may honorably receive it; for we no more 
seek to buy their sovereignty than we would sell our own. Sovereignty 
is never bartered among freemen.

We honor the aspirations of those nations which, now captive, long for 
freedom. We seek neither their military alliance nor any artificial 
imitation of our society. And they can know the warmth of the welcome 
that awaits them when, as must be, they join again the ranks of freedom.

We honor, no less in this divided world than in a less tormented time, 
the people of Russia. We do not dread, rather do we welcome, their 
progress in education and industry. We wish them success in their 
demands for more intellectual freedom, greater security before their 
own laws, fuller enjoyment of the rewards of their own toil. For as 
such things come to pass, the more certain will be the coming of that 
day when our peoples may freely meet in friendship.

So we voice our hope and our belief that we can help to heal this 
divided world. Thus may the nations cease to live in trembling before 
the menace of force. Thus may the weight of fear and the weight of arms 
be taken from the burdened shoulders of mankind.

This, nothing less, is the labor to which we are called and our 
strength dedicated.

And so the prayer of our people carries far beyond our own frontiers, 
to the wide world of our duty and our destiny.

May the light of freedom, coming to all darkened lands, flame brightly 
- until at last the darkness is no more.

May the turbulence of our age yield to a true time of peace, when men 
and nations shall share a life that honors the dignity of each, the 
brotherhood of all.

