TOPEKA — The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission said Tuesday that the former president’s library and museum in his Kansas hometown is playing a major role in the “electronic memorialization” of his military and political career that will accompany a memorial being built in Washington.

The challenge has been to develop an online memorial that adequately tells the story of a man who struggled to balance freedom and security throughout his life, said Carl Reddel, a historian and retired Air Force general who heads the commission.

“He was extremely complex. He had more depth and breadth than most people realized,” Reddel said, adding that Eisenhower was “piercingly intelligent.”

Reddel said greater understanding has come in the past few decades as more research and writing has been done by historians and journalists about the nation’s 34th president. Eisenhower was a five-star general who commanded the Allied campaign in Europe during World War II and as president lead the U.S. though the early years of the Cold War and civil rights movement.

The commission’s staff is working with curators and archivists at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, where Eisenhower grew up. Together, they will develop an online memorial that will link to millions of pages of data archived in Kansas to help explain Eisenhower’s legacy.

“His relevance today is huge,” Reddel said, noting that Eisenhower was deeply interested in science and technology, including developing peaceful uses for nuclear energy. “We hope that the electronic memorialization will lead to that understanding.”

Eisenhower, the last president born in the 19th century, also reviewed reconnaissance photos taken from satellites that he was responsible for launching.

Reddel said part of the electronic memorialization will be to create a means for telling Eisenhower’s story for future generations. Using technology and the Internet to do so is fitting, since it was during his administration that the institutions were founded that led to the creation of what is now known as the Internet, Reddel said.

Reddel said work on the physical memorial in the nation’s capital is progressing.