Eisenhower Volume I

Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952

Stephen E. Ambrose

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476745862
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Biographien

Stephen E. Ambrose draws upon extensive sources, an unprecedented degree of scholarship, and numerous interviews with Dwight D. Eisenhower himself to offer the fullest, richest, and most objective rendering yet of the soldier who became president. At various times in his life, Eisenhower was a soldier at wartime, the Chief of Staff, patron to the North American Treaty Organization, president of Columbia University, and the Supreme Commander of the United States. However, he was also a father, son, husband, and friend. This deeply personal biography concerns itself less with the "life and times" of Eisenhower and more on the man himself, his achievements and triumphs, failures and concerns, as well as his relationships with those closest to him. A charismatic leader with a high degree of intelligence, integrity, tremendous energy and a commitment to basic principles that drew soldiers, civilians, and foreigners alike to him, Eisenhower was also ambitious, sensitive to criticism, and avid sportsman who was terribly loyal to his friends and family. Ultimately, Ambrose presents a masterful portrait of Eisenhower that finely delves into his personal life during his presidency, the onset of the Cold war, and as the leader of a rapidly evolving nation struggling with issues as diverse as civil rights, atomic weapons, and a new global role. Ambrose shows what an extraordinary person Eisenhower was and the extent to which many who live in freedom today owe to him. This superb interpretation of Eisenhower's life confirms Stephen Ambrose's position as one of the nation's finest historians.

CHAPTER ONE

Pennsylvania, Texas, Kansas

1741–1900

HIS HERITAGE was ordinary, his parents were humble folk, his childhood was typical of thousands of other youngsters growing up around the turn of the century, and most of his career was humdrum and unrewarded. On the surface, everything about him appeared to be average. Had he died in 1941, on the verge of retirement on his fifty-first birthday, he would not today be even a footnote to history.

Yet Dwight Eisenhower was born to command and became one of the great captains of military history. He was also born to lead, and although he was sixty-one years old before he stood for public office, he became one of the most successful Presidents of the twentieth century.

Eisenhower was born in the year the American frontier came to an end. He died in the year that man walked on the moon. In his lifetime, the pace of technological change was breathtaking, but hardly more so than the changes in American and world politics. Only a handful of men—Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Churchill, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and perhaps one or two more—had a greater role than he did in shaping the world of the mid-twentieth century. For the two decades from 1941 to 1961, Eisenhower played a central and crucial role in world events. He was the victorious general who, after the greatest war in history, led his people on the path of peace.

During his period of preparation, however, he showed little evidence of those qualities that would make him one of the most famous and popular men of the century. Yet the qualities of greatness were there, in the boy, in the young man, in the junior officer, and in the major (a rank he held for sixteen years) serving as an obscure staff officer. A discerning few among his friends, his contemporaries, and his superiors saw those qualities. Eisenhower himself made certain that when his opportunity came, an opportunity his parents had told him was his heritage, he was ready to reach out and seize it.

• •

Eisenhower’s ancestors were Pennsylvania Dutch. They came from the Rhineland, where the name was originally spelled Eisenhauer—literally iron hewer. They were religious dissenters, followers of Menno Simons, founder of the Mennonites, a persecuted sect in their German homeland. During the Thirty Years’ War, the Eisenhauers fled to Switzerland. In 1741 Hans Nicol Eisenhauer, together with his wife, their three sons, and a brother, sailed from Rotterdam on the Europa, bound for Philadelphia. The bare genealogical record says nothing about motivation, but the assumption is that Hans left the Old World for the New for the same reasons so many others did, economic opportunity and freedom of worship.

Hans acquired a farm of 120 acres and built a home in Lancaster County, west of Philadelphia. After the Revolutionary War, Hans’s grandson Frederick moved some fifty miles west, to Elizabethville, north of Harrisburg. There his son Jacob built a large two-story, nine-room red-brick home that still stands, much the most substantial and impressive house any Eisenhower lived in until well into the twentieth century.

In the early nineteenth century, the Eisenhowers (as the name was now spelled) joined the Brethren in Christ sect of the Mennonites, known as the River Brethren because they held river baptisms. Frederick’s son Jacob, born in 1826, became the minister of the Lykens Valley River Brethren. Jacob was an orator, organizer, and leader. He attracted large audiences to his sermons, which he delivered in German, still the only language of the River Brethren. He wore a full beard, which emphasized his stern countenance and flashing eyes. Jacob was in his late thirties when the Civil War was fought; he did not join the Union cause because like most Mennonites he was an uncompromising pacifist. His wife, Rebecca Matter, was pregnant during the tense summer of 1863, when Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia passed within twenty miles of the Eisenhower home, on its way to Gettysburg. Just twelve weeks after the great battle, Rebecca gave birth to a son, David, who would become Dwight’s father. Jacob named his next son, born in 1865, after Abraham Lincoln. Altogether, Jacob and Rebecca had fourteen children.¹

After the Civil War, as the railroads pushed onto the Great Plains, the West beckoned. The River Brethren, with their large families and their commitment to farming as a way of life, were looking for a location where land for their children was cheaper than in Pennsylvania. They responded enthusiastically to the inducements of the railroad promoters, who in their pamphlets described Kansas as another Eden.² Jacob organized the move, in which some three hundred River Brethren participated. They took the train from Harrisburg, filling fifteen carloads with their freight. Jacob sold his farm and home for $8,500 to pay for the journey and to buy a new place in Kansas. The colony, according to an early history of Kansas, was “one of the most complete and perfectly organized . . . that ever entered a new country.”³

They settled in Dickinson County, just north of the Smoky Hill River, almost exactly in the middle of Kansas, twenty miles east of the geographic center of the lower forty-eight states, at the point where the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas give way to the flat, arid, treeless Great Plains of western Kansas. Jacob purchased a 160-acre farm, built a house, a barn, and a windmill. He prospered in Kansas; to each of his children, daughters as well as sons, he was able to give as a wedding present a 160-acre farm and $2,000 cash.

One of his sons, David, was fourteen years old when the family moved to Kansas. He had to work from dawn to dusk to make the farm a success, but he hated the endless hours of following the plow or gathering in the hay. The only part of farm life David enjoyed was tinkering with the machinery; he was, according to neighbors, a “natural-born” mechanic.⁴ He decided to escape the farm by becoming a full-time engineer. To do so, he told his father, he wanted to go to college. Jacob protested. Farming was God’s work, he said, and he put considerable pressure on David to stay on the farm.⁵

Eventually, Jacob yielded. He agreed to finance David’s education at a small River Brethren school, then known rather grandly as Lane University, now defunct, in Lecompton, Kansas. It provided a mixture of classical and vocational training. In the fall of 1883, when he was twenty years old, David enrolled in Lane. There he studied mechanics, mathematics, Greek, rhetoric, and penmanship. He became proficient in basic mathematics, excellent in Greek (for the remainder of his life his nighttime reading was his Greek Bible), and got a start on engineering.⁶

• •

At the beginning of the next school year, 1884, twenty-two-year-old Ida Stover enrolled at Lane. Her background was similar to David’s. She was a member of the River Brethren and her people had come to America from the Rhineland in 1730. They had settled on the Pennsylvania frontier, then moved south down the Shenandoah Valley to Mount Sidney, Virginia, where Ida had been born in 1862. Ida’s father, Simon P. Stover, was a farmer; her mother, Elizabeth Link Stover, died when Ida was very young. Although she had no personal memory of the ravages of the Civil War, Ida grew up listening to numerous stories about the horrors of war, which reinforced the pacifism that went with her religion. Her father died when she was twelve years old; for the next nine years she lived with her uncle, Billy Link. Highly intelligent and religious, she spent hours reading and memorizing the Bible. According to family tradition, she once won a prize in Mount Sidney for memorizing 1,325 Biblical verses. All her life she prided herself on never having to look up a reference in the Bible.⁷

When Ida was twenty-one years old, Link handed over to her a small inheritance from her father. She used some of the money to pay for a train trip to Kansas, where two of her older brothers had already joined a River Brethren colony. “Kansas was still wild and wooly when Mother went out there,” one of Ida’s sons later explained. “They didn’t care if a woman went to college or not.”⁸ So Ida used most of the remainder of her inheritance to pay her tuition at Lane. There she met David Eisenhower and fell in love. Youthful passion overrode youthful ambition. On September 23, 1885, in the chapel at Lane, they married. “Maybe the tragedy, as far as Mother’s part is concerned,” one of her sons later commented, “is that she met Dad before she finished school, got married and started raising a family.”⁹

They made a good-looking couple. David was tall, muscular, broad-shouldered. He had a thin, hard-set mouth, thick black hair, dark eyebrows, deep-set, penetrating eyes, and a large, rounded chin. His legs were long, his hands large and powerful. For all his size and strength, however, he was quiet, shy, and retiring. Ida was much more outgoing. She had a beautiful head of brown hair, full lips, a ready grin that spread across her whole face, a grin as big as the Kansas prairie and as bright as Kansas sunshine, a hearty laugh, and a gay disposition. Music and religion were her great outlets; shortly after her marriage she spent the last of her inheritance on an ebony piano, which she kept for the rest of her life. She loved playing the piano and singing hymns.¹⁰ Her most notable physical feature, after her grin, was the twinkle in her eyes, a twinkle that was nearly always there and signified a spontaneity and a liveliness that complemented David’s quietness and seriousness. All her sons inherited Ida’s twinkle and her ever-ready grin.

As a wedding present, Jacob gave David his standard gift, a 160-acre farm and $2,000 in cash. David mortgaged the farm to Chris Musser, who had married his sister Amanda. With the capital, David bought a general store in Hope, Kansas, a tiny village twenty-eight miles south of Abilene that the young couple believed had a future befitting its name. With no business experience himself, David took in a partner, Milton Good, who had been a salesman in a clothing store in Abilene and who thus knew something about the retail trade. The Eisenhowers and the Goods had adjoining apartments on the second floor above the store, where they frequently entertained and, in that strict River Brethren community, gained a reputation for living above their means. In November 1886, Ida gave birth to her first son, named Arthur.

Two years later, in 1888, financial disaster struck. David awoke one morning to discover Good gone, most of the inventory with him, and a stack of unpaid bills left behind. According to family tradition, Good had absconded, leaving the innocent David to face the creditors.¹¹ For a number of years after Good left “for parts unknown,” Ida studied law textbooks, hoping someday to bring Good to court, but no suit was ever pressed, for the truth seems to be that the business just collapsed. Kansas was in the midst of the worst agricultural depression in its history. With wheat down to fifteen cents a bushel, the farmers could not pay their bills. David and Good had been carrying them on credit, in the time-honored manner of American general stores. Their failure was a consequence of economic conditions beyond their control.¹²

The failure was total. David turned everything over to a local lawyer, telling the attorney to collect all the outstanding bills owed, pay the debts, and give what money was left to him. The lawyer sold the store; the mortgage on the farm was foreclosed; David’s remaining assets, save only for Ida’s piano, were converted into cash that was used to pay off the creditors. The lawyer kept the small amount of money that remained as his fee.¹³ David never trusted a lawyer again and was most unhappy when his second son, Edgar, decided to enter the legal profession.

Ida too was furious. “Throughout the years that her sons continued to live under the same roof,” Dwight Eisenhower recalled years later, “this warm, pleasant, mild-mannered woman never ceased to warn them against thieves, embezzlers, chiselers, and all kinds of crooks.”¹⁴

At the time the business collapsed, Ida was pregnant again. She stayed with friends in Hope as her husband sought employment. He found it in Texas, at $10 a week, working for a railroad. Shortly after Edgar’s birth, in January 1889, Ida and her two sons joined David in Denison, Texas, where they lived in a small rented frame house, not much more than a shack, set beside the railroad tracks. There, on October 14, 1890, Ida gave birth to her third son, named David Dwight Eisenhower. Later, she reversed the names, partly because she did not like nicknames and thought that Dwight could never be shortened, partly because it was confusing to have two Davids in the family.

At the time of his birth, Dwight Eisenhower’s parents owned their clothes, a few household possessions, and one ebony piano, which Ida had been forced to leave behind in Hope. They had squandered a substantial inheritance. They had three sons and precious few prospects. But they had their health, strong family ties, and determination.

The family rallied around the young couple to give David and Ida a fresh start. Chris Musser had become the foreman at the Belle Springs Creamery, at the company’s new plant in Abilene. The River Brethren owned the plant. Musser offered David a job as a mechanic in the creamery, at $50 per month. David quickly accepted. In 1891, when Dwight was not yet one year old, the family returned to Abilene. When the Eisenhowers stepped onto the train platform in Abilene, David had in his pocket the sum total of his capital—$24.¹⁵

The Eisenhowers rented a frame house on South East Second Street. The house and the yard were small, much too small to contain the energies of growing boys. Ida complained that she spent too much of her time keeping her sons out of other people’s yards, which put a severe strain on both the boys and on Ida. Her problems multiplied as she continued to have children: Roy, born in 1892, Paul in 1894 (he died in infancy), and Earl in 1898. Five healthy boys in one tiny house made life difficult and, as they grew, nearly impossible. Again, the family came to the rescue. David’s brother Abraham owned a two-story white frame house at 201 South East Fourth Street, set on a three-acre plot. Abraham was moving west. His father, Jacob, had been living with him and needed someone to care for him; his older brother David needed a larger home. Abraham offered to rent the house, at a minimal price, with an option to buy, to David, if David would agree to keep Jacob on in his own room and take care of the old man. David and Ida readily agreed, and in 1898 they moved into the more spacious quarters.¹⁶

To seven-year-old Dwight, and his brothers and parents, the new house must have seemed palatial. It had a basement, two stories, and an attic. The front parlor provided room for Ida’s piano, which finally found a permanent home. There was a large barn behind the house, with a hayloft and stalls for animals. The Eisenhowers acquired a horse for plowing and drawing the buggy, two cows to provide milk, chickens, ducks, pigs, and rabbits to provide eggs and meat, and a smokehouse for curing the meat. The three acres provided land to grow forage for the stock, with enough left over for a large vegetable garden. There was an orchard of cherries, apples, and pears, and a grapevine. Each boy, including the youngest, Milton, born ...