In this comprehensive yet concise biography, Professor Pickett skillfully narrates Dwight David Eisenhower's remarkable odyssey from a small town amidst grain elevators on the golden plains of central Kansas to West Point, the deserts of North Africa, the beachheads of Normandy, the presidency of Columbia University, NATO's first military command, and, finally, to the Oval Office. In many ways Eisenhower's personal journey is as fantastic as the United States' meteoric rise during the first half of the twentieth century.