Mamie Doud Eisenhower: The General's First Lady

It was fitting for a soldier’s wife to make curtains out of military-surplus parachutes. That they would hang in the White House made little difference.

Mamie Doud Eisenhower was a president’s wife who seemed to most Americans like the friend next door. She gave us “Mamie pink” and “Mamie bangs” but has stood in the shadows of first ladies who followed. Yet she accomplished more than even her own contemporaries noticed, and her popularity not only enhanced her husband’s presidency but also ...