Webmaster’s Personal Preface to the Electronic Edition

My job, although ‘high tech’ and continually evolving, is really the same as the scribe who recorded the words of his Pharaoh or the monk who spent his life in a garret meticulously copying the bible with a quill pen. All of us, then and now, engaged in preserving information for others to understand. Whether it was with stone tablets or high speed presses the essence of the art is to preserve and provide the best possible access to content.

When I started this project for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission it was just another assignment; more web pages to create and add to the scores of hundreds that I’d done over a period of many years. Neither an historian nor scholar, I simply began structuring the electronic architecture to put a few million more words online. To begin the process I lined up all of the eight volumes produced by Johns Hopkins University Press and began randomly looking at page after page to determine the patterns of the material and decide the best way to present it on the Internet. I was browsing the personal letters, memoranda, and diary entries President Eisenhower personally dictated or wrote almost every day for eight years. Before long I found myself actually reading some of the papers and was then inexorably drawn in by the relevance of Ike’s wisdom and experience to what’s happening today. I’ve never done academic research, but I found myself surprised and sometimes thrilled by the insights set out in the footnotes under each document that seemed to put me at the President’s desk while he was writing. This is not stuff written by White House staffers and signed by the president’s autopen. These papers are words Eisenhower himself wrote or dictated to his confidential secretary, Ann Whitman, for his personal signature. They are his letters, diary entries, and even some secret memoranda. There are chronologies that tell where the president was and whom he met with for every day of his presidency.

As a web professional I’m usually immune to the huge amount of new information flowing around or through me on its way to posting, but not this time. The more I read, the more I became an Eisenhower devotee. I’ve come to really embrace the old slogan, ‘I Like Ike.’ I’m spoiled by his high standards, quality of thought, tactics, and ethics. I have come to want the same from our contemporary public servants.

From the outset I knew this electronic publication would be an internet ground-breaker; the first online full compilation of the personal papers of any President of the United States. Actually reading so many of these smart, true and well crafted gems of thoughtful communication led me to begin understanding the tremendous legacy Eisenhower left to the American people. I knew that, in addition to being an internet ‘first,’ the digital reproduction would be a truly important undertaking.

The first design decision was fueled by the reasoning that the electronic version should not be created simply as a massive proprietary database. The information is much too valuable to have access limited only to a few scholastics skilled in computer usage. Everyone in the world should have simple immediate access and only commonly available navigation tools should employed to explore nearly 3,000,000 words on the 4,922 pages.

This thought process led to the decision to abandon the print notion of page numbers, which randomly broke within documents and instead present each electronic document (together with its footnotes and appropriate citation) as a separate free standing web page. In such a format the words on each original Eisenhower document are identifiable by all internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the others. Thus, every curious net user surfing online for information on an issue or person will have access to any Eisenhower personal presidential document that may be germane. In the print paradigm it is tantamount to being listed in every index of every relevant book in the world!

Faithful to the printed version, the electronic publication is divided into two parts; Eisenhower’s first presidential term (January, 1953 to 1957) and the second (January, 1957 to 1961). On the opening page of each section a common internal search engine is available as well as an advanced search feature.

Each presidential term opening page organizes the materials by Parts and Chapters. In order for the internet user to be more fully aware of the context being viewed at any given time, the Part and Chapter titles are presented at the top of each electronic document. The footnotes under each document frequently refer the reader to another document for additional information so there is a document locator box at the top and bottom of each electronic document for the users to immediately access the additional recommended information if they so desire. Of course, the documents can be read like a book because there is a Previous and Next clickable legend at both the top and bottom, left and right of each paper. The index prepared by the Johns Hopkins University scholars who produced the paper volumes is very comprehensive and, for those who prefer indexes to search engines, the electronic version presents the indexes in a format that brings up a selected entry immediately.

Now that the electronic version of the Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower is completed and ready to go online I am honored to have been selected by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission to make it available to every person in the world. Stephen Ambrose said that Eisenhower was a good and great man. This experience has confirmed that conclusion for me and I am sure those who now access this work will feel the power of that simple characterization.

Bernard C. Pobiak
New York City
January, 2005

Note: The Johns Hopkins University editorial team of scholars spent twelve years searching for and annotating the provenanced presidential papers and diary entries for inclusion in this eight volume work that contains 3,640 individual presidential papers within 4,922 printed pages.