administration of President Richard Nixon, who had been his father's vice president, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium from 1969 to 1971. In 1972, President Nixon appointed Eisenhower Chairman of the Interagency Classification Review Committee. In 1975, he served President Gerald Ford as chairman of the President's Advisory Committee on Refugees. Later life and writing As a military historian, Eisenhower wrote several books, including The Bitter Woods, a study of the Battle of the Bulge, and So Far from God, a history of the Mexican–American War. In a New York Times review of the latter, historian Stephen W. Sears remarked that Eisenhower "writes briskly and authoritatively, and his judgments are worth reading." Eisenhower wrote Zachary Taylor: The American Presidents Series: The 12th President, 1849–1850 (2008). John Eisenhower also wrote the forewords to Borrowed Soldiers, by Mitchell Yockelson of the U.S. National Archives, and to Kenneth W. Rendell's Politics, War and Personality: 50 Iconic Documents of World War II. In later years, he had been an opponent of Frank Gehry's proposed design for the National Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, which he said was "too extravagant" and "attempts to do too much." Presidential elections A lifelong Republican, Eisenhower voted for Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election, citing dissatisfaction with Republican incumbent George W. Bush's management of U.S. foreign policy. During the 2008 presidential election, in which presidential candidate John McCain and vice presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Joe Biden all had children enlisted in the armed forces, he wrote about his wartime experience as the son of a sitting president in a cautionary opinion piece in The New York Times entitled "Presidential Children Don't Belong in Battle". Death Eisenhower died at Trappe, Maryland, on December 21, 2013. From the death of Elizabeth Ann Blaesing in 2005 until his own death, Eisenhower was the oldest living presidential child; on his death that distinction passed to Lynda Bird Johnson, who still holds it as of 2023. His burial was at West Point Cemetery on the grounds of the United States Military Academy. Marriage and children Eisenhower married Barbara Jean Thompson on June 10, 1947, only a few days before her twenty-first birthday. Barbara was born on June 15, 1926, in Fort Knox, Kentucky, into an Army family. She was the daughter of Col. Percy Walter Thompson (1898–1974) by his wife Beatrice (née Birchfield). Col. Thompson was commander of the Allied Expeditionary