Others Have Greatness Thrust Upon Them 
The Washington Post looks eagerly ahead to the Frank Gehry’s one hundred million dollar Eisenhower memorial plaza, although somewhat concerned the task is not monumental enough for Frank:
“the new structure “will be a ‘plaza-type’ memorial,” with a canopy and a 2,500-square-foot support building. So it seems they’re hiring Gehry to design a bathroom, bookstore, small office and glorified sunshade.“
But the Post is fully with the program, swallowing the plaza’s rationale whole.
“the Eisenhower Memorial Commission wants to do more to honor the man who not only defeated Hitler, but who also built the Interstate Highway System, created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and helped pass and enforce critical civil-rights legislation. “
Where to start?
I believe the Soviets played a role in Hitler’s demise.
The Interstates devastated cities and fueled generations of white flight.
Health, Education & Welfare:Â what exactly did Ike do for any of the three?
All we got out of the ’57 Civil Rights Act was a commission, a job at the DOJ, and voting rights language so inadequate the real heavy lifting came with Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act.
Ike’s views are best summed up in his desegregation complaint to Earl Warren:
“All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.â€
Ike-Like? 
As the nation struggles to comprehend the prospect of George W. Bush’s Wal-Mart Super Center sized “Presidential Library,” perhaps the last of its kind, a new front opens in America’s epic struggle to spend millions memorializing old pharaohs.
An Eisenhower memorial plaza in Washington DC is expected to cost $90 to $120 million!
It’s to be located across from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, commemorating the President the Russians beat into space. 
Bush’s father’s Library only cost $83 million, and it has walls and the beloved dancing palominos. 
The Ike plaza to be designed by quirky starchitect Frank Geary, whose famed misshapen blobs scar landscapes worldwide.
It’s not like Washington is starved for Eisenhower-named things. He already has the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center, and the vast Executive Office Building is named for him.
Insufficiently Ike-ish? 
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Alien Encounters 
From Larry W. Bryant’s UFOview comes word of a snub to America’s Tinfoil-Hatted Community. The Eisenhower Presidential library has blown off a FOIA request based on an anonymous caller to a UFO radio show. The caller claimed to have seen film of Ike viewing alien bodies, sometime or another, someplace or another.
Rock solid!   
From Action to Proximity 
The Kansas City Star’s Brian Burnes is digging deep in the Eisenhower archives, and oh the treasures he’s found.
 The Kansas native who reluctantly sent federal troops to integrate Little Rock schools is held up as a civil rights pioneer. The evidence: Ike wrote letters, and location, location,location!
1. Eisenhower stormed the margins of polite opinion.
“Correspondence also indicated that Eisenhower wrote to Billy Graham and asked him to provide feedback about current and future race relations.”
And who better than Billy “Stranglehold” Graham to discuss prejudice?
2. As a child, Eisenhower was, once, sometime, somewhere near “minorities” of unknown derivation.
“A picture of Eisenhower from his 1909 graduating class shows two minorities, which Burnes said is an indication that Ike, even at an early age, did seem to have a feeling about other races.”
Feeling is healing!
 All Our Yesterdays 
The release of grand jury testimony in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg has strengthened the case that she was convicted on perjured testimony by her brother and sister-in-law, and allowed everyone with a piece of the hot Red Spy action to step forward.
Richard Nixon speaks from the grave to offer his [sort of] condolences for the federal government lying in order to whack only the second woman in US history.
“ If I had known–if we had known that at the time–if President Eisenhower had known it, he might have taken a different view with regard to her. In other words, tainted evidence, even though a person is totally guilty, is a reason to get him off.“
The late red-hunter’s consoling belief in Ethel’s guilt might have been undermined by knowledge the prosecution invented Rosenberg typing documents passed the Soviets.
Nixon stayed strong.
“ I understand why it was done. And let us understand–Mrs. Rosenberg was guilty. This wasn’t a case of somebody not guilty going to the chair.“
Phew!
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