The book was dictated by Eisenhower to Kenneth McCormick of Doubleday and Joseph Fels Barnes, former foreign editor of the New York Herald Tribune.

[1][2] Eisenhower's profit on the book was substantially aided by an unprecedented ruling by the Treasury Department that Eisenhower was not a professional writer, but rather, was marketing the lifetime asset of his experiences, and thus only had to pay capital gains tax on his $635,000 advance rather than the much higher personal income tax rate.

[3] In 1948, Twentieth Century Fox obtained the exclusive rights to create a television series called Crusade in Europe, based on the newly published book.

Produced as part of The March of Time, the 26-episode TV series showed World War II film footage from the US military and other sources, with a voice soundtrack based on a narration of the book.

On appeal, in Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on a narrow issue involving the applicability of the Lanham Act to works in the public domain.