Inauguration Invitation for President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon.

The political partnership of Dwight David Eisenhower and Richard Milhous Nixon spanning two terms in the White House from 1953 to 1961 was one of the most consequential and privately complicated vice presidential relationships in the history of the American executive, uniting the most celebrated military commander of the Second World War with one of the most ambitious and tactically gifted politicians of the postwar generation. Eisenhower, the five-star Supreme Allied Commander who had overseen the liberation of Western Europe before serving as NATO's first Supreme Commander, selected the thirty-nine-year-old California Senator as his running mate in 1952 partly to balance the ticket generationally and geographically, and partly for Nixon's aggressive anti-communist credentials — an asset in the early years of the Cold War that Eisenhower, above partisan controversy in a way few politicians ever achieve, found useful to have at arm's length. The relationship between the two men was never personally warm: Eisenhower's famous hesitation when asked in 1960 to name a major idea of Nixon's that he had adopted his reply that if given a week he might think of one was damaging enough to Nixon's presidential campaign that it became one of the more celebrated gaffes in modern American political history, and reflected a genuine ambivalence about his Vice President that Nixon felt deeply. Yet Eisenhower was also the president who stood by Nixon during the 1952 Checkers speech crisis, when Nixon's political survival hung on a televised address responding to allegations of a secret political fund, and who deployed Nixon extensively as a diplomatic emissary and political surrogate across eight years — sending him to confront Nikita Khrushchev in the famous Kitchen Debate of 1959 and to represent the administration in fifty-four countries. The Eisenhower years gave Nixon the foreign policy credibility and national profile that eventually carried him to the presidency, and whatever its personal limitations, the partnership produced one of the most stable and prosperous decades in modern American history.