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President at Columbia University and NATO Supreme Commander
Eisenhower lighting the Columbia University Yule Log, 1949
Eisenhower posing in front of Alma Mater at Columbia in 1953
As president of Columbia, Eisenhower presents an honorary degree to Jawaharlal Nehru.
In 1948, Eisenhower became President of Columbia University, an Ivy League university in New York City, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.[114] The choice was subsequently characterized as not having been a good fit for either party.[115] During that year, Eisenhower's memoir, Crusade in Europe, was published.[116] Critics regarded it as one of the finest U.S. military memoirs,[citation needed] and it was a major financial success as well.[117] Eisenhower sought the advice of Augusta National's Roberts about the tax implications of this,[117] and in due course Eisenhower's profit on the book was substantially aided by what author David Pietrusza calls "a ruling without precedent" by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.  It held that Eisenhower was not a professional writer, but rather, marketing the lifetime asset of his experiences, and thus he had to pay only capital gains tax on his $635,000 advance instead of the much higher personal tax rate. 