Three Days in January

Dwight Eisenhower's Final Mission

Bret Baier, Catherine Whitney

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780062569035
• eBook ISBN: 9780062569066
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The blockbuster #1 national bestseller

Bret Baier, the Chief Political Anchor for Fox News Channel and the Anchor and Executive Editor of Special Report with Bret Baier, illuminates the extraordinary yet underappreciated presidency of Dwight Eisenhower by taking readers into Ike’s last days in power.

“Magnificently rendered. … Destined to take its place as not only one of the masterworks on Eisenhower, but as one of the classics of presidential history. … Impeccably researched, the book is nothing short of extraordinary. What a triumph!”—JAY WINIK, New York Times bestselling author of April 1865 and 1944

In Three Days in January, Bret Baier masterfully casts the period between Eisenhower’s now-prophetic farewell address on the evening of January 17, 1961, and Kennedy’s inauguration on the afternoon of January 20 as the closing act of one of modern America’s greatest leaders—during which Eisenhower urgently sought to prepare both the country and the next president for the challenges ahead.

Those three days in January 1961, Baier shows, were the culmination of a lifetime of service that took Ike from rural Kansas to West Point, to the battlefields of World War II, and finally to the Oval Office. When he left the White House, Dwight Eisenhower had done more than perhaps any other modern American to set the nation, in his words, “on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.”

On January 17, Eisenhower spoke to the nation in one of the most remarkable farewell speeches in U.S. history. Ike looked to the future, warning Americans against the dangers of elevating partisanship above national interest, excessive government budgets (particularly deficit spending), the expansion of the military-industrial complex, and the creeping political power of special interests. Seeking to ready a new generation for power, Eisenhower intensely advised the forty-three-year-old Kennedy before the inauguration.

Baier also reveals how Eisenhower’s two terms changed America forever for the better, and demonstrates how today Ike offers us the model of principled leadership that polls say is so missing in politics. Three Days in January forever makes clear that Eisenhower, an often forgotten giant of U.S. history, still offers vital lessons for our own time and stands as a lasting example of political leadership at its most effective and honorable.

 

PART ONE

THE SETTING

CHAPTER 1

THE MEASURE OF IKE

It is a striking fact that the nation’s most famous soldier was born to parents whose religion preached ardent conscientious objection to all mortal wars. But the truth of a life is never contained in its summarizing labels; the influences that shaped our thirty-fourth president were deeper, wider, and more idiosyncratic. As Ike himself acknowledged, he wasn’t an exceptional student or a particularly promising military candidate. He once told his wife, Mamie, “If I’m lucky, I’ll be a colonel.” His ambitions didn’t reach farther than that. Yet he went on to become Supreme Allied Commander, assemble the greatest fighting force in the history of mankind, defeat Adolf Hitler’s war machine, save Western civilization from fascism, and manage to get elected president twice by decisive majorities. He had never dreamed of being a general, much less president of the United States, but that’s where life took him.

As a boy he was taught to be honest, humble, and hardworking—in the telling his upbringing can take on the reflective glow of a Lincolnesque story. Many have rushed to make direct links between Ike’s heartland childhood, grounded in faith and work ethic, and the measure of the man he ultimately became. And that’s a piece of the story. The rest—Ike’s exceptional intuition, savant-like strategic intellect, and warm and open personality—were part nature and part nurture, a mysterious brew that set him apart from his brothers in significant ways.

With Ike it can be hard to differentiate the man from the myth. His achievements are monumental, his personality seemingly so transparently expressed in the blazing ear-to-ear smile, that the underlying truth goes unexamined. A White House aide once described how his friends would say, “Well, wasn’t it wonderful? I bet he slapped you on the back and he had that big grin.” Not so. “He didn’t slap people on the back. He didn’t congratulate people particularly,” the aide said. “What he did was to make people feel that what he was doing had some transcendent significance.” The grinning visage stamped on American minds glossed over Ike’s more substantive quality—the ability to inspire and elevate those who worked under his leadership.

Dwight David Eisenhower—who would become “little Ike” and then “Ike” in childhood—was born in Denison, Texas, on October 14, 1890, to David and Ida Stover Eisenhower. He was the third of seven brothers (the fifth dying of diphtheria as an infant). Oddly, all of the boys would carry the nickname “Ike,” derived from their last name, at one point or another, although Dwight was the only one for whom it became permanent.

David and Ida had met while students at a religious school, Lane University in Lecompton, Kansas, run by the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. Being a college student set Ida apart in an era when few women sought higher education, but it had always been her dream. Although she dropped out of school to marry, her lifetime love of learning was passed on to her sons, and their home was full of books. Ida was bright, forceful, and high-spirited—“a pistol in a petticoat,” as her great-granddaughter Mary Jean would put it.

As newlyweds David and Ida received a gift of farmland from David’s parents, but David did not want to be a farmer. Mortgaging the land to his brother-in-law, he opened a retail store in Hope, Kansas, with the proceeds. Unfortunately, the business was plagued by misfortune as his farmer customers fell on hard times and could not pay down their credit. When David’s partner stole their last remaining funds, the venture collapsed. David never got over his disappointment, but by then he had two additional mouths to feed and he needed a job. He found one four hundred miles south in the railroad town of Denison. Ike and his brother Roy were born there before the family returned to Kansas, settling in Abilene, where David got a job as an engineer at the Belle Springs Creamery. They would never leave. Abilene became the source of Ike’s most folksy anecdotes. Later, it was chosen as the site of his presidential library, and the location of his burial plot.

The Eisenhower household was a striving mixture of religious fundamentalism and the all-American ethos of individualism and work ethic. Religious faith and practice was baked into the Eisenhower family life. Both the Eisenhowers and the Stovers first came to the United States from Germany in the 1740s, settling in Pennsylvania and Virginia, respectively. David’s family was affiliated with the River Brethren, an offshoot of the Mennonites, while Ida was raised Lutheran and later joined David’s religion. Eisenhowers were among the pioneering families to move to Kansas in 1878. Some within the group banded together to form the Belle Springs Creamery in Abilene, where Ike’s father worked as a mechanical engineer, putting in twelve-hour days, six days a week.

When Ike was five, his parents became involved in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They joined the religion in the wake of their son Paul’s death, comforted by the belief that death was only a state of sleeping, and they would be reunited with him soon, as the end of the world was upon them. David and Ida weren’t flashy about their religion, but at home they were deeply devout, studying the Bible and abiding by the simple principles of the faith.

The Eisenhowers’ religion isn’t always clearly identified in historical writings, which sometimes identify them as River Brethren. When Ike’s life became public he mostly avoided talking about his parents’ faith, perhaps because it was unconventional, or maybe because it was opposed not only to war but also to politics and government. Followers did not believe in saluting the flag. Most people at the time viewed Jehovah’s Witnesses as a proselytizing religion. There is no indication Ike’s parents did any proselytizing, but they did practice a prayerful life, grounded in the Bible. Ida used the Bible as a primary source of instruction—she’d won a competition as a girl by memorizing 1,365 verses in six months. Ike’s greatest speeches included passages from the Bible, and he often spoke of the power of faith in the matters of man. Uncomfortable with institutional religion as an adult, his faith was not always front and center in discussions, yet it was ever present. During Eisenhower’s administration “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, and he signed the law making “In God We Trust” the national motto. He initiated the White House Prayer Breakfast and the National Day of Prayer—although he spent the first Day of Prayer fishing, golfing, and playing bridge. However, he was baptized only after being elected president, joining the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. It was supposed to be a secret baptism, but the minister had prepared handouts for the press describing the scene. Ike was so peeved he threatened to choose another church.

As important as religion, Ike’s small-town roots had a lasting influence on him and cemented his image as a child of the heartland. (His 1952 presidential campaign depicted him as “the man from Abilene,” in the same way that Truman was “the man from Independence” and later campaigns would promote Carter as “the man from Plains,” and Clinton as “the man from Hope.”)

Abilene in the late 1800s was known primarily as the end of the road—the final destination for cattle drives moving north from Texas on the celebrated Chisholm Trail. An honest-to-goodness rough-and-tumble western town of Wild West legend, Abilene was also known for its flamboyant characters, such as Wild Bill Hickok, who served for a time as the city’s marshal, and for the gunfights that erupted when heavily lubricated cowboys blew off steam after months on the trail. Living right across the street from the Eisenhowers was a man named Dudley, who boasted he had served as a deputy of Wild Bill, and he regaled Ike and his brothers with stories of Hickok’s dexterity with a gun. Although Abilene was no longer the wild cow town of that era, it was easy for young boys like Ike, born in 1890, to imagine it and be proud of the way such a famous gunman once tamed their town. When the popular television series Gunsmoke first aired in the 1950s—dramatizing the adventures of Marshal Dillon, Chester, and Miss Kitty, who fended off the coarse interlopers in Dodge City, Kansas, in the 1870s—it isn’t surprising that Ike watched right along with the rest of the country when he was home in Gettysburg, eating dinner on a TV tray as he enjoyed the depiction of a world that felt emotionally familiar.

“I was raised in a little town of which most of you have never heard,” Ike said in a speech in 1953. “But in the West it is a famous place. It is called Abilene, Kansas. We had as our marshal for a long time a man named Wild Bill Hickok. If you don’t know anything about him, read your Westerns more. Now that town had a code, and I was raised as a boy to prize that code. It was: meet anyone face to face with whom you disagree. You could not sneak up on him from behind, or do any damage to him, without suffering the penalty of an outraged citizenry. If you met him face to face and took the same risks he did, you could get away with almost anything, as long as the bullet was in the front.” That Ike followed this model of behavior is evidenced throughout his life. It’s one reason he despised politics. He hated underhandedness and fakery, and his leadership style, whether in war or in peace, was based on a rare frankness, an effort to impart “what you see is what you get.”

Ike relished the rural life, and between the ages of eight and sixteen he often accompanied another family friend, Bob Davis, on hunting and fishing trips. Weekends on the river also involved lessons in poker, played with “a greasy pack of nicked cards” that had seen better days. In Davis, Ike learned to value other forms of intelligence than just book smarts, seeing that it was possible to be both functionally illiterate (Davis couldn’t read or write) and still be razor sharp, competent, and a damn good poker player. River sojourns with Davis were rugged, nurturing confidence and self-sufficiency. (The trips also left Ike with a lifelong love of fresh-caught fish cooked over a campfire. In later years Ike was famous in the family for his facility at the barbecue pit—his specialty being the thick western beef steaks that he loved.)

Ike’s first encounter with politics came when he was six years old. In 1896, William McKinley, the Republican presidential candidate, visited Abilene. There was much excitement among the children when the town officials decided to throw McKinley a torchlight parade. Unfortunately, not enough adults gathered to carry the torches. The Eisenhower boys, Arthur, Edgar, and little Ike, standing at the origin point, were handed torches, and Ike serendipitously ended up leading the parade. The torches were homemade affairs—just a stick with a can of flammable liquid and a wick at the top—and when lit they gave off a smoky flame. Ike was delighted to march in the parade and relieved to get through it without singeing his hair. He later wrote about the incident, noting that it was one of his “few brushes with political life” until he ran for president in 1952.

The character of Ike’s family, and the division of parental responsibility, was very clear: “Father was the breadwinner, Supreme Court and Lord High Executioner,” he recalled. “The application of stick to skin was a routine affair. Mother was tutor and manager of our household. She was by far the greatest personal influence in our lives.” That gentle influence created a foundation from which he built a life of substance. But inner discipline was developed over time and hard to come by.

Ike always admitted he was something of a scamp as a kid—and he had a temper. A favorite story involved an incident on Halloween when he was ten. Arthur and Edgar were allowed to go trick-or-treating, but his parents decided Ike was too young to go. Ike thought it was terribly unfair, especially since Edgar was only a year and nine months older. He was furious, and argued fiercely for permission to go. When his pleas failed and his brothers happily headed off into the night without him, he lost his temper. Rushing into the yard, he smashed his fists repeatedly into the trunk of an apple tree until they bled, stopping only when his father dragged him back into the house, giving him a few extra whacks with a hickory stick in the process. He was sent to bed, where he lay sobbing, full of humiliation, disappointment, and frustration.

After about an hour, Ike’s mother entered his room quietly and sat beside his bed. She knew how easily little boys could be crushed by feelings of helplessness, and how the outlet of rage could seem the only way for them to assert themselves in a world where they had no control. As she ministered to his bleeding hands, she spoke softly to Ike about this very fact, telling him how mastering his temper was the task of growing up. Referring to a biblical passage, she said, “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city.”

Half a century later, Ike recalled her advice, noting that it marked a change in his life. “Hating was a futile sort of thing, she said, because hating anyone or anything meant that there was little to be gained. The person who had incurred my displeasure probably didn’t care, possibly didn’t even know, and the only person injured was myself. . . . I have always looked back on that conversation as one of the most valuable moments of my life.” And indeed, in his life and career, although Ike could display a blistering temper on rare occasions, he became far better known for his calm strength under pressure. He developed a simple method for handling rage, an “anger drawer” in his desk into which he dropped slips of paper with the names of people he was angry at. Once in the drawer, the grievance was banished from thought.

THE EISENHOWER HOMESTEAD ON Fourth Street, purchased in 1898 when Ike was eight for $3,500, was literally on the “wrong” side of the tracks, with the train tracks running both in front of and behind the house. The hissing sound of the steam engine and the clanging of the bell were the audible backdrop to Ike’s childhood. The house was humble, but included a large orchard, a robust vegetable garden, and an alfalfa field. There were chickens, a cow, and a horse. When the chores were divvied up among the six boys, their least favorite was working inside the house, with so much going on outdoors. And the best chore of all—which all of the brothers vied for—was being allowed to go to the store and bring the groceries home. What attracted the boys was a “dill pickle jar that you could dive into, sometimes arm deep almost, and try to get one,” making the trip worthwhile.

“In retrospect,” Ike once said, “I realize that we might have been classified as being poor, but we didn’t know it.” He added this willful ignorance was part of the glory of America. “All that we knew was that our parents—of great courage—could say to us, ‘Opportunity is all about you. Reach out and take it.’”

Sometimes the duties involved watching the baby if there was one in the house, which there often was. When Ike had the chore of watching baby Milton in his carriage, he’d lie on his back reading a book, while rocking the carriage with his foot until the baby fell asleep.

Ike was easily distracted from daily life by reading. Inspired by his mother, he was a voracious consumer of histories—to the point where he neglected his homework and chores. The worst punishment his mother could inflict was to take away his books, which she did when she saw Ike was not studying his lessons or completing his chores. She placed them in a cabinet under lock and key. Ike dutifully hunkered down, but one day he found the key and was filled with a sense of victory. Whenever his mother went shopping or was out working in the vegetable garden, he’d open the cabinet and liberate his precious books.

His heroes were Hannibal, Caesar, Pericles, and Socrates—the ancient stories spoke to him even more deeply than the more recent western heroes. He also idolized George Washington; his study of Washington’s speeches would be instrumental when he wrote his own.

He loved reading about the Civil War—not long in the past—but he never saw his reading as anything more than pure enjoyment. He was unconscious of building a foundation or of gaining any lessons for the future. Had anyone suggested he would one day visit the battlefield at Gettysburg, much less build a home on its edges, he would have responded skeptically. Lofty aspirations were far from his mind, and as a boy his restless nature was reined in, he later said, by a sense that “life was a flat plateau of assigned tasks, unchanging in monotony and injustice.” This surprisingly grim view was born out of the Eisenhowers’ hardscrabble existence on the central Great Plains.

Hard work, study, faith, and discipline were taken for granted: you did your chores, prepared your lessons for school, and took responsibility. But lest anyone would assume in a hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction: Finding Ike
• Prologue: The Visit
• Part One: The Setting
• Part Two: The Speech
• Part Three: Three The Final Mission
• The Last Word: 2017
• Postscript
• Acknowledgments
• An Excerpt from Three Days in Moscow
• Appendix: Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation
• Notes
• Index
• Photos Section
• About the Authors
• Praise
• Also by Bret Baier
• Credits
• Back Ad
• Copyright
• About the Publisher