Evan X. Merz

After The Second World War, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the most popular man in the world. He had been the Supreme Commander of the allied forces in Europe, and in that role he led the D-Day invasion that brought down Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

As such, he was immediately thronged with calls to run for President of the United States, but he didn't want to be president. He didn't like politics, he didn't like fundraising, and he didn't like public speaking. Here's how Stephen E. Ambrose described the situation.

Daily, in one form or another, he was asked, "Don't you want to be President?" He emphatically denied it, in his private conversations with his family, the gang, his other intimate friends; he denied it in his private diary; he denied it in his correspondence; he denied it in every public utterance he made on the subject. There is not a single item in the massive collection at the Eisenhower Library prior to late 1951 that even hints that he would seek the job or that he was secretly doing so.

That situation continued unabated from 1945 until 1952, when Dwight and Mamie were living in Paris as part of Eisenhower's work for NATO. While in Paris, all of Ike's friends flew in from the states to convince him to run, but none of them were successful.

Until Jacqueline Cochran stepped in.

His friends and the politicians kept telling him how much the American people yearned for his leadership, and on February 11, he got a dramatic demonstration of how right they were. Jacqueline Cochran, the famous aviator... flew to Paris with a two-hour film of an Eisenhower rally in Madison Square Garden, held at midnight following a boxing match... Some fifteen thousand people attended, despite - according to Cochran - a total lack of cooperation from the city officials... The film showed the crowd chanting in unison, "We want Ike! We want Ike!" while waving "I like Ike" banners and placards. Eisenhower and Mamie watched in their living room and were profoundly moved.

When the film was over, Eisenhower got Cochran a drink. As they raised their glasses, she blurted out a toast: "To the President." She later recalled, "I was the first person to ever say this to him and he burst into tears... Tears were just running out of his eyes, he was so overwhelmed...So then he started to talk about his mother, his father and his family, but mostly his mother, and he talked for an hour."

So who was this woman who changed history with a short film?

It turns out, she was a pretty incredible person. She came from a poor family in the Florida panhandle, and became the leader of the women's air force in the second world war. After the war, she became the first woman to break the sound barrier. When she died, she held more flight records than any other pilot.

You won't regret reading her wikipedia entry.