THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT THE IKE VISIT
Just Don't Rush the Stands
The Eisenhower Commencement was die first to be held in front of Baker Library. This year the ceremony will take place in Memorial Stadium.
The beginning of a new tradition? President James O. Freedman reportedly hopes not. He has told Dartmouth administrators that he greatly prefers the library site.
A Clear-Cut Issue
A 40-year tradition has it that a group of trees in front of Baker were planted for Secret Service agents to lurk behind during the last Presidential visit. People liked to call them (the trees, not the agents) the Eisenhower Forest.
Not true, say officials who were around during the fifties. The: trees were planted just to look nice. They had nothing to do with Eisenhower or security.
Any dispute over the trees' history was cut short last year; they were removed when the roots snaked into the library's foundation.
At Least He Wasn't Burning Books
Dartmouth historian Alex Laing was the only person arrested during Eisenhower's 1953 visit after he revealed a dismantled old pistol in his desk drawer during a preliminary security sweep of Baker Library. Unfortunately tor him, his office window would have afforded a good line of fir e onto the lawn.
What Eisenhower Actually Said (In Part)
"Look at your country. Here is a country of which we are proud, as you are proud of Dartmouth and all about you and the family to which you belong.
"But this country is a long way from perfection—a long way. We have the disgrace of racial discrimination. We have prejudice against people because of their religion. We have crime on the docks. We have not had the courage to uproot these things although we know they are wrong. And we, with our standards the standards given us at places like Dartmouth we know they are wrong.
"Now that courage is not going to be satisfied, our sense of satisfaction is not going to be satisfied, if you haven't the courage to look at these things and do your best to help correct them because that is, the contribution you shall make to this beloved country in your time....
censorship.
"How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, what it teaches? Why does it have such an appeal for men? Why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It's almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.
"We have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America, am even if they think ideas that are; contrary to ours, their right to have them in places where they are accessible to other is unquestioned, or it is no America."
Hailing to the Chiefs
What to say at,Dartmouth?Ike wasn'tstumped.
