Background

Susan Eisenhower was born on December 31, 1951, in Fort Knox, Kentucky, United States into a famous family. She is the daughter of John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower and Barbara Jean (Thompson) Eisenhower. Her paternal grandfather Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the United States, and as a small girl, Eisenhower played at the White House.

Education

Eisenhower graduated from the American University of Paris.

Career

Eisenhower began writing magazine articles during the early 1980s; later in that decade, she served as interim president of the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute. While she attended conferences on relations with the Soviet Union in this capacity, events took place that would become the subject for Eisenhower’s first book-length publication, 1995’s Breaking Free: A Memoir of Love and Revolution. Breaking Free met with friendly responses from critics.

For her next writing project, Eisenhower chose the subject not of her famous grandfather, but of his wife, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. In 1996’s Mrs. Ike: Memories and Reflections on the Life of Mamie Eisenhower, Eisenhower recounts her grandparents’ courtship and life together—the couple began in relative poverty, he buying her wedding rings with money won at poker, and furnishing their first living space with abandoned orange crates.

In 2000, she was appointed by United States Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson to the Baker-Cutler Commission, a blue-ribbon task force, to evaluate American funded nonproliferation programs in Russia. Since that time, she has also worked as an advisor on two other United States Department of Energy studies - the first on the threat of nuclear terrorism and the second - a blue-ribbon panel on the future of nuclear energy.

In 2001, after serving on the NASA Advisory Council for two terms, Eisenhower moved to the International Space Station Management and Cost Evaluation Task Force.

Currently she works on the Nuclear Threat Initiative board, co-chaired by Senator Sam Nunn and Ted Turner, the Energy Future Coalition, the United States Chamber of Commerce's New Institute for 21st Century Energy, and the Air Force Academy's Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies.

In the academia, she is an External Advisory Board Member of the MIT Energy Initiative. Eisenhower is also an Academic Fellow of the International Peace and Security program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, she holds the position of a director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as of an advisor to Johns Hopkins' Nitze School of Advance International Studies.

Eisenhower serves as president of the Eisenhower Group, Inc., which provides strategic counsel on political and business projects. Now she is the Eisenhower Institute’s chairman of leadership and public policy programs. She also provides consultations for major corporations and has served on many government task forces, such as the NASA Advisory Council, the Department of Energy’s Baker-Cutler Commission on American-funded nuclear nonproliferation programs in Russia, and the National Academy of Sciences' standing Committee on International Security and Arms Control.

She serves as a regular commentator on television and has provided analysis for CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, PBS, the BBC and all three network morning programs.

Achievements

• Eisenhower has extensive experience counseling Fortune 500 companies on public relations strategies and communications, including on doing business in Russia and Central Asia. She is a nationally-recognized expert on Russia and energy issues, having spent two decades working on American-Russian economic and political cooperation.
  
  She has worked for major multinational corporations such as IBM, American Express, Black and Veatch and AES.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Mrs. Ike: Memories and Reflections on the Life of Mamie Eisenhower

    (A portrait of a beloved First Lady and an account of a co...)

    1996
  • Breaking Free: A Memoir of Love and Revolution

    (Offers the story of the romance and marriage of an Americ...)

    1995
  • Partners in Space: US-Russian Cooperation After the Cold War

    (Partners in Space explores the lessons learned by the Uni...)

    2004

Politics

As a lifelong member of the Republican Party, Eisenhower declared on August 21, 2008 that she was leaving the Republican Party to become an Independent.

Eisenhower endorsed Barack Obama for president of the United States in 2008. On October 29, 2012, she re-endorsed Barack Obama for a second term in the 2012 presidential election.

Connections

Alexander Bradshaw was Eisenhower's first husband. She has two children from that marriage. Then she was married to John Mahon, with whom she had a daughter - Amelia Eisenhower Mahon.

At what reviewer Carolyn See described in the Los Angeles Times Book Review as a “Soviet-American town meeting” in Chatauqua, New York, Eisenhower met Roald Z. Sagdeev, a Soviet space scientist. The two first became friends, and then lovers, meeting each other at international conferences all over the world. Despite negative predictions from friends and family in both of their respective countries, being spied on by the Soviet intelligence agency and possibly the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as well, and Sagdeev’s need to divorce, the couple eventually married—after first witnessing the Soviet Union’s transformation into a freer, non-communist Russia. Before recounting these adventures in Breaking Free, however, Eisenhower helped her husband Sagdeev by editing his biography, The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space from Stalin to Star Wars.

Father:

John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower

Mother:

Barbara Jean (Thompson) Eisenhower

Daughter:

Amelia Eisenhower Mahon

Grandfather:

Dwight Eisenhower

3-rd husband:

Roald Sagdeev

2-nd husband:

John Mahon

1-st husband:

Alexander Bradshaw