Dwight D. Eisenhower - The Dog in the Fight

"What counts is not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog." Dwight Eisenhower said it in a speech reported on the front page of the New York Times on February 1, 1958, as he told his party not to count itself out in that fall's congressional elections. The version on this poster adds the word "necessarily," a common variant; the Times report does not include it.

He did not coin it. The earliest version found so far ran in April 1911 in the Book of the Royal Blue, a magazine for passengers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, in a column by Arthur G. Lewis. The line is often credited to Mark Twain, but no evidence has turned up that Twain ever said it, and he had died the year before that magazine printed it.

By 1958 Eisenhower was in his sixth year as president and fourteen years past commanding the Allied invasion of Europe.

The picture is a three-quarter portrait: a man in an olive-drab uniform and garrison cap, arms folded across his chest, gaze level, standing against a gray, smoky sky with faint figures in the haze behind him. The quote is set in cream serif type across his lower half, his name in capitals beneath.