Eisenhower: Soldier and President: The Renowned One-Volume Life
I’m a day late this month for the president but I’m here now with this week’s book/president, Eisenhower: Soldier and President: The Renowned One-Volume Life by Stephen E. Ambrose.
Stephen Ambrose is arguably the best known of the WWII historians, with his book Band of Brothers about Easy Company of the 101st airborne and their movements through Europe in WWII being made into the 10 part HBO series…. his son Hugh wrote The Pacific, which was also adapted by HBO. Ambrose also wrote a two-volume biography on Eisenhower, which he condensed in 1990 to this one volume biography. And yes, I picked this biography because I read Band of Brothers and knew Ambrose to be highly readable.
Dwight David Eisenhower, nicknamed Ike by his family, was born October 14, 1890, in Denison, TX, the middle son of five boys born to David and Ida Eisenhower. In 1891 the family moved to Abilene, KS, which is where the family set down roots and would grow up. Eisenhower is another example of the American success story, since the family had a whole whopping $10 collectively when they landed in Abilene, which is todays currency is only $344.56. And from that they raised five boys, one of whom would lead the country to victory in the greatest war and then become president.
Eisenhower was a good student with a bad temper and after one such towering rage, his mother sat him down and said, “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city.” And lectured him on how futile and self-destructive anger was and how he needed to conquer it. Words of wisdom Eisenhower took to heart and actually rather quickly learned to master his temper.
History almost took a dramatically different course when Eisenhower was a freshman in high school and scraped his leg, which seemed like nothing, until it turned into a literally life-threatening infection and the doctor recommended amputation of the leg to stop the spread of the infection. Eisenhower heard the doctors talking about the plan to amputate and told his brother Edgar not to let them, that he would rather die than lose his leg. If they had amputated….or if he had in fact died….we would not have had Eisenhower for D-Day.
Lucky for us all, he did survive and when he was 19, he took a competitive examination for admission to the US Naval academy in Annapolis. He intended to go because his good and lifelong friend Everett “Swede” Hazlitt was enrolled and, on his exam, Eisenhower scored second among eight. However, the US Navy are PICKY m-fer’s and second place was not good enough for them. Again…. lucky for us all. Second was more than good enough score Eisenhower a place at West Point, and at 19 he headed off for college at West Point, where he was kind of a middle of the pack guy, a little bit of a rebel, not enough to get kicked out, but he did pick up smoking, a habit which would eventually grow to a four pack a day habit…Camels, if you’re interested.
While at West Point, he learned one of his more valuable skills, that of being a coach. It wasn’t a role he initially wanted but was basically the only way he could stay connected to sports after a football injury blew out his knee, requiring surgery, and forcing him off the field. He quickly learned that he was very adept as a coach.
He graduated in 1915 and before taking up his first duty station, he had a summer off, which he spent in Abilene visiting with family and with his first love, Gladys Harding. However, Harding’s father did not approve of the match, and at the end of Summer, he headed to Fort Sam Houston, TX for his first posting. It speaks something about the early integrity of both Eisenhower and Gladys that she kept the letters they wrote back and forth, and remained friendly enough that he wrote her a letter of condolence when her husband died in 1944. When he became president, she tied all his letters together and with a note for her son that they were not to be published or opened until after her, Ike and Mamie had all passed.
I do think it’s safe to say that while Gladys and Ike had fondness for each other, it likely was not true love, since in October 1915, so just a few months after things ended with Gladys, he met and fell in love with Mary Geneva Doud, better known as Mamie. He proposed on Valentines Day 1916 and they married July 1, 1916, a marriage which would last until Ike’s death in 1969, so 52 years.
Now, Eisenhower’s biggest disappointment was that he did not get to see combat in WW1. However, his experience during WWI did something else that contributed to his success during the next war: He was put in charge of troop training, first at San Antonio where he trained the 57th Infantry, then to Fort Oglethorpe, GA where he was put in charge of training officer candidates. On September 24, 1917, his first son, Doud Dwight, aka Icky, was born in San Antonio, TX. In February 1918 he was ordered to Camp Meade, MD to join the 65th Engineers, which was the group in charge of the 301st Tank Battalion. This was exciting because they fully intended to send the tanks to join the war and he was excited to get to war. Until his orders changed again and he was sent to Camp Colt, Gettysburg, PA, where he was put in charge of training the tank corps. On October 14, 1918, he was temporarily promoted to Lieutenant Colonel ahead of his planned deployment to Europe. Until, unfortunately for Eisenhower, peace broke out in Europe one month later.
While he never saw combat, his training efforts were well recognized and appreciated and in 1919 he was recommended for the Distinguished Service Medal, which was awarded to him in 1922.
And then Eisenhower spent the next 23 years as a staff officer for the US Army. No shame to that, truly, he worked his way through every training exercise he could and passed the Army’s Command and General Staff school with flying colors. And he learned at the right hand of some of the absolute best, spending 10 years under the tutelage of General Douglas MacArthur and I believe it was 4 years under George Marshall, and due to his work with them, they both enthusiastically endorsed Eisenhower for the command role over armed forces in Europe when the United States entered the war in 1941.
While bouncing around from base to base and command to command, he made good friends with basically all his contemporaries who would join him on the front in 1944. And during this time, he had both tragedy and happiness. Tragedy when his son Icky died of Scarlet Fever on January 2, 1921, happiness when their second son John was born on August 3, 1922. John would follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming a West Point graduate and joining his father on the European Front during WWII.
Eisenhower was initially sent to Africa to take over there and after basically making a clean sweep of it, including some time in Italy’s boot, he was rotated to England to take over and plan what would become D-Day and the battle of Normandy.
Now, one of Eisenhower’s absolute strengths is that he never just made a decision without hearing all sides and all opinions. This seems like it would take forever to make a decision, but it probably contributed to his effectiveness as a leader as everyone could contribute from different points of view. This was important to Eisenhower, as he knew that ultimately, any failures would come back to rest on his shoulders. So, he wanted to make sure he had all the information before deciding. This saw him in good stead throughout the war and obviously brought us victory, since those of us who speak German, do so entirely by choice.
When the war ended, he held the title General of the Army, and was one of like five men to hold the rank of five star general, a rank he held until he became a candidate for president and had to retire in order to run, and that was reinstated to him by act of Congress when he stepped down from the presidency.
Following the war, he had to figure out what to do with his life, and he had several options available to him. He most decidedly did NOT want to be president. Truman did offer to support him in that position, but Eisenhower was not really interested. He did write a book, for which he opted to take one large payment rather than royalties, which unfortunately cost him millions…literally millions…of dollars as the book remained on the best seller list for decades post publication. But the sale of it allowed him to buy a house on the edge of the Gettysburg battlefield, which he loved. But prior to president, he held four jobs: head of the American Occupation Zone in Germany, Chief of Staff, president of Columbia University, and Supreme Commander of NATO.
And they only one he didn’t actually excel at was President of Columbia University. He didn’t understand the academics…. not like the course material, but the teachers….and they didn’t really understand him. Everything else, his usual take charge demeanor led the way, and his ability to get along with most people, his willingness to listen to everything, he did his usual outstanding job.
And throughout all of it he kept insisting he had no interest in being President. And I don’t think he wanted to be president. Based on everything Ambrose presents in the book, he wasn’t angling for it. Verbally. But if you ascribe to the very real adage that actions speak louder than words, Eisenhower’s actions told a different story. He made numerous public appearances, always without renumeration, spoke candidly, had managed to make friends with the rich and powerful, his speeches were all calculated to garner public demand for his candidacy.
Truman famously stopped speaking to him when he came out as a Republican. And Eisenhower still did not put himself forward as a candidate, going with the old school belief that if he was pressed into service via accolade, then he would serve as demanded. But he would not run on his own initiative. And of course he was nominated in 1952, and won quite handily, becoming our 34th president, and overseeing the one decade in the 20th century that did not have war, increasing prosperity, two very minor recessions, and no inflation.
Which all sounds great. But part of his success was his absolute moderation. He was a middle of the road president. How did that work out for Eisenhower?
Well, he wanted to unify the Republican party, bring the extreme right of the republicans closer to the center. This he did not manage to. He disliked McCarthyism; however, his way of dealing with McCarthy was to ignore him. He seemed to believe if he gave no attention to McCarthy, then he would fade from the mainstream. This, unfortunately, gave McCarthy MORE publicity, as the media followed the House Unamerican Activities Commission quite closely, and McCarthy’s antics fueled the Red Scare in America. Ultimately, Eisenhower was able to see McCarthy flame out by taking an action no one really expected: he ordered members of the executive branch not to respond when subpoenaed. He made sure that was legal. But in the years McCarthy ran rampant, civil liberties suffered greatly in America.
One thing Eisenhower did quite well, although he didn’t seem to think so in later years, was appoint Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Most people don’t know who that is, but every American is aware of the effects of the Warren Court, since Warren oversaw Brown vs Board of Education (Topeka) which reversed Plessy v Ferguson rule of separate but equal education and demanded integration of the school systems, as well as overseeing Gideon v Wainwright which required public defenders for indigent suspects, and most famously Miranda v Arizona which gives us the famous Miranda Warnings….the one’s all officers are required to provide a person placed under arrest. The ones that begin You have the right to remain silent. We have that because of Eisenhower’s decision to appoint Warren as Chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Eisenhower, like a good chunk of people then, was casually racist. He did believe he was president of all American’s, regardless of color. But his sympathies tended toward his southern friends not wanting black kids to be sitting next to their white kids in school. So, until the state governor of Arkansas decided to stir up a mob against integration in Little Rock, Eisenhower did basically nothing to enforce integration. But when the mob happened, he did mobilize troops to ensure integration at the High School.
Now, he did end the war in Korea almost as soon as he was sworn in and kept America out of Vietnam for a decade before we actually joined that fight. He tried very hard to make peace with Kruschev, but the mistrust between America and Russia was too great.
During his presidency, he had two health scares that damn near knocked him out of office…both occurred after he quit smoking. When he was like 59, his doctors advised him to cut back to a single pack a day. He decided that counting cigarettes was pissing him off more than not smoking, so he went from four packs a day to quitting cold turkey. Then like five years later, he had a major heart attack in late September 1955. As far as timing goes, it could not have been better, as the country was between crises, and Nixon was able to oversee things while Eisenhower recuperated and was given the green light to run again in 1956 by his doctors. The second was a mild stroke which occurred November 25, 1957. He recovered from both of those and experienced relatively good health until the last year of his life.
During his tenure, the intelligence community basically ran amuck, and I don’t want to get too far into the weeds with the bashing, because one of the IC’s aphorisms is that our failures our televised, our successes never see the light of day. So we won’t know what they got right in the decade of the 1950’s, until the CIA decides to declassify all those documents. Which they’re working through. But some of their failures include Hungary in 1956, which was trying to break free from the Soviet block and the CIA failed to back them.
And the loss of a U-2 spy plane over Russia, which he tried to pass off as a training flight gone wrong over Turkey, until Kruschev said nope, we have the plane and the pilot Francis Gary Power. Cuba was a clusterfuck, the set up of which started under Eisenhower, although when things kicked off at Bay of Pigs, Kennedy called Eisenhower for a consultation.
He did manage to balance the budget and keep it balanced. Part of how he did that was by controlling defense spending and slashing DoD budgets, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not happy with. But he did seriously try to control the arms race and roll it back. Unfortunately, in the few short years between the end of WWII and Eisenhower’s ascension as president, the military industrial complex, a thing which had not existed prior to WWII, had obtained a firm grasp on both the legislature and the terrors stirred up by McCarthy and the Red Scare. It’s been a major power player in the 80 years since its inception, with names like Lockheed and Boeing influencing policy and law ever since.
This was a well enough known fact that in his farewell speech: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government…In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persists…The military-industrial complex should never be allowed to “endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”
Now, when Kennedy stepped up, Ambrose described in detail that Eisenhower disliked the Democrats in general, and their campaign promises of more defense budgets, but he seemed to like Kennedy personally. So when Kennedy called for advise on Bay of Pigs, Eisenhower responded, a perspective he was able to offer on two fronts. One, as he was stepping down from the presidency, Congress passed an act returning him to his pre-presidency status of Five Star General. So he was able to offer military advice. And he WAS the former president, whose oversight of the CIA led to the Bay of Pigs, so he was able to offer presidential advice as well.
And when Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson also leaned heavily on Eisenhower for advice, which he gave up until he suffered his second heart attack in November 1965. At this point, he began to wind up his affairs. He didn’t know WHEN, but he knew his mortality was coming soon, and he was comfortable with this. He had his third major heart attack in April of 1968 and after a month at the hospital in March Air Force Base, he was transferred to Walter Reed, where he would basically remain under doctors care for the rest of his life. From his hospital bed, he endorsed Nixon for president, suffered several more heart attacks, the last of which was March 24, 1969. He passed away March 28, 1969, with his wife and son in attendance.
This was an excellent book, it looked at Eisenhower as a whole person, it provided clear accolades on things he did well, like the absolutely brilliant campaign in Europe, and brutally honest about his failings, like his weak track record on civil rights and the black community. In his summation of Eisenhower’s years in the White House, Ambrose points out that judging Eisenhower through the lens of time tells you more about the people doing the assessment than it does about Eisenhower, that the only way to judge Eisenhower, is to view him through the time he lived in. Which is true of any of our presidents. Time changes things, political and world events change things. What was normal 80 years ago, hell what was normal THIRTY years ago, is no longer acceptable.
I think part of Eisenhower’s success is that he was a moderate. He went out of his way to include the middle ground, something no political candidate today has managed. One of his biggest contributions was his attempt to roll back the military industrial complex, and he tried very hard to convince America that there was no danger, and part of why he failed in that mission, at least from the perspective of 70 years later, is that he didn’t want to reveal just how solid our intelligence assets were. The U-2 flights were incredibly successful. Our embedded agents and personal assets were telling a very different story from what the media and McCarthy was reporting, and the real story is that by any metric you cared to use, the United States had the Soviets out gunned by like five to one. And I don’t mean the average American’s penchant for collecting and hoarding firearms. I mean our missile ramp up during the 1950s was off the charts. Eisenhower knew that, but saying so out loud would have been waving a red flag in front of the reds….pun intended.
So he tried to reign in the military industrial complex, but could not do so without destroying intelligence assets we might need, should the cold war heat up.
He did oversee a decade of peace and prosperity for America. Which is something that had not been done since Coolidge was in power. I think he the best possible president we could have had for the decade. The pressure that was put on him to heat up the cold war, to drop nukes because it was an option, was tremendous. And because he had the military experience to know what a true threat was and what wasn’t, he knew to steer us clear of more war.
