This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show.

And our favorite subject, history. And all of our history stories and we tell stories about everything here on this show and our favorite subject

history and all of our history stories are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College

where you can go to study all the things that are beautiful in life all the things that matter in life

and if you can't get to Hillsdale Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online

courses go to Hillsdale.edu Stephen Am come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to

Hillsdale.edu. Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading historians. Stephen Ambrose passed

in 2002, but his storytelling accounts can now be heard here at Our American Stories, thanks to

those who run his estate. Ambrose wrote the definitive biography of Dwight Eisenhower.

Ike was born in 1890 in a rented shack near the railroad tracks in Denison, Texas.

He was raised in a family of Mennonites, fundamentalists in their Christian faith, who were also pacifists.

Here's Stephen Ambrose with the story of Dwight D.

Eisenhower. Dwight David Eisenhower was a great and a good man. These two qualities

don't always or even often go together, but they did with him.

Obviously, that is an assertion that needs proof. Let me begin with some definitions.

In 1954, President Eisenhower wrote his childhood friend, Sweet Hazelot,

on the subject of greatness.

He thought greatness depended either on achieving preeminence

in some broad field of human thought or endeavor, or on assuming some position of great responsibility,

and then so discharging his duties as to have left a marked and favorable imprint upon the future.

The qualities of goodness in a man, I believe, include a broad sympathy for the human condition.

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