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General

Legacy ID
21

The Governors' Special Highway Committee Summary and Recommendations

After Vice President Richard M. Nixon, speaking on President Eisenhower's behalf, invited the Governors to suggest ways of improving the Nation's highway network, the Governors Conference appointed a Special Highway Committee headed by Governor Walter Kohler, Jr., of Wisconsin. The Committee...

General Lucius D. Clay's Testimony

Senator Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1938. In 1952, he challenged Senator Kenneth McKellar, who had been a Senator for 35 years, in the Democratic primary. McKellar was seen as an entrenched "shoo-in" who would easily defeat his 44-year...

General Lucius D. Clay - The President's Man

by Richard F. Weingroff

On July 12, 1954, Vice President Richard M. Nixon informed the Governors Conference at Lake George, New York, of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Grand Plan-a $101 billion program to create an articulated highway system, one in which the Federal,...

President-Elect Dwight D. Eisenhower on Good Roads

The President-elect issued the following statement to the Hearst Newspapers, then in the midst of an extensive highway improvement campaign:

The obsolescence of the nation's highways presents an appalling problem of waste, death and danger.

Next to the manufacture of...

GM's Better Highways Award

The increasing need for highway improvement prompted the General Motors (GM) Corporation to announce, on November 20, 1952, a Better Highway Award for the best essay on "How to plan and pay for the safe and adequate highways we need." Prize money totaled $194,000 for 161 awards, with the grand...

The Reichsautobahnen

(Expanded)

The following is an expanded version of material in "The Man Who Changed America."

Although the 1919 convoy shaped Eisenhower's views, his perspective would be supplemented years later by his observations of the German autobahn network of freeways.

...