US president Donald Trump wanted a gift for King Charles.
Ahead of his state visit to Britain last month, the administration began looking for an artefact relating to former US president Dwight D Eisenhower that the president could give the British monarch – a sword perhaps, or something else that spoke to Mr Eisenhower’s role as the supreme commander of the Allied forces in the second World War.
Through a personal email address, an administration official approached the Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home in Abilene, Kansas, which has at least one Eisenhower sword in its collection, given to him in 1947 by queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands.
But the library declined to release it or any other original artefact in its collection, on the grounds that they are the property of the US government, which the library is obligated by law to preserve for the American public.
RM Block
Instead, Mr Trump wound up giving King Charles a replica sword. And this week, the director of the Eisenhower library, Todd Arrington, was forced out of his job.
It was not immediately clear what led to his ouster, or what role his refusal to hand over the sword might have played.
Mr Arrington, reached by telephone Thursday, confirmed that he had been pressured to resign. He said that he had been told that he “could no longer be trusted with confidential information”.
No other explanation was provided, he said, and he added that he had not received any noticeable pushback after his refusal to provide a sword.
In an interview, Mr Arrington expressed dismay that his refusal to provide an Eisenhower sword could have been a factor that led to his forced resignation.
“I never imagined that I would be fired from almost 30 years of government service for this,” he said. “I would absolutely come back in a heartbeat.”
Three other people with knowledge of the situation described the conflict over the sword.
Two said that Mr Arrington had also angered officials at the National Archives and Records Administration, which oversees the presidential library system, by sharing information with his staff about changes to long-standing plans for a new education centre, which may have contributed to his removal.
The National Archives did not respond to requests for comment; their facilities are closed because of the shutdown of the federal government. The White House declined to comment.
Mr Arrington’s departure was earlier reported by The Last Campaign, a Substack newsletter, and by CBS News.
The affair of the sword is the latest tussle between Mr Trump and those who run the nation’s non-partisan cultural and historical institutions, a number of whom he has fired or sought to bring to heel, starting with the National Archives.
In early February, Mr Trump, who had tangled with the archives over his reluctance to return classified documents after leaving office in 2021, abruptly fired the archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio was named acting archivist.
Jim Byron, the CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation, a private group connected with the Nixon presidential library in California, was named senior adviser, charged with managing the archives “on a day-to-day basis” until a permanent archivist could be appointed.
The request for a gift for Charles came from a US State Department liaison who used the email address “giftgirl2025” and initially told the museum that they were looking for “like a sword or something”, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
As it happens, shortly before the Trump administration’s failed efforts to secure a sword from the Eisenhower library, two other Eisenhower swords went on view in a temporary display at the Nixon library. According to a news release, they are on loan from Julie Nixon Eisenhower, a daughter of Nixon, who married the grandson of Mr Eisenhower.
They include a “Sword of Honor” given to him in 1947 by the City of London to honour his role as the Allied supreme commander during the second World War, described by the Nixon library as being “treasured as a family heirloom”.
The 22-acre campus of the Eisenhower library includes a museum, research archives, the former president’s restored childhood home and his gravesite.
Mr Arrington, a scholar of the Civil War and the early Republican Party, took the helm in August 2024, after 25 years at the National Park Service, where he had most recently overseen the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Ohio.
At the Garfield site, he was credited with creating one of the best social media feeds in the parks system, which drove interest in the somewhat obscure president with a cheeky but respectful mix of posts.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
