Eisenhower

Soldier and President

Stephen E. Ambrose

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476745855
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Stephen E. Ambrose draws upon extensive sources, an unprecedented degree of scholarship, and numerous interviews with Eisenhower himself to offer the fullest, richest, most objective rendering yet of the soldier who became president. He gives us a masterly account of the European war theater and Eisenhower's magnificent leadership as Allied Supreme Commander. Ambrose's recounting of Eisenhower's presidency, the first of the Cold War, brings to life a man and a country struggling with issues as diverse as civil rights, atomic weapons, communism, and a new global role.Along the way, Ambrose follows the 34th President's relations with the people closest to him, most of all Mamie, his son John, and Kay Summersby, as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Harry Truman, Nixon, Dulles, Khrushchev, Joe McCarthy, and indeed, all the American and world leaders of his time. This superb interpretation of Eisenhower's life confirms Stephen Ambrose's position as one of our finest historians.

CHAPTER ONE

Abilene, West Point, World War I

HE WAS BORN on October 14, 1890, in a small rented frame house, not much more than a shack, beside the railroad tracks in Denison, Texas. He was the third son of David and Ida Stover Eisenhower. They were members of the Mennonites, fundamentalists in their religion, and pacifists. David was a common laborer—he had once owned a general store in Hope, Kansas, purchased with an inheritance from his father, but it had failed. In 1891 he moved to Abilene, Kansas, where a relative had found him a job as a mechanic at the Belle Springs Creamery. When the Eisenhowers stepped onto the train platform in Abilene, David had in his pocket the sum total of his capital, $10.

In a small two-story white frame house at 201 South East Fourth Street, set on a three-acre plot, David and Ida raised six strong, healthy boys—Arthur (born 1886), Edgar (1889), Dwight, Roy (1892), Earl (1898), and Milton (1899). The Eisenhowers were respected around town, but the family was in no way prominent. David held no elective office, provided no community leadership. Still the Eisenhowers were content. The parents were frugal out of necessity, but they were proud and ambitious, if not for themselves, then for their sons.

“I have found out in later years we were very poor,” Dwight said on June 4, 1952, on the occasion of laying the cornerstone of the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene, across the street from his boyhood home, “but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then. 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.’ ”¹

By most standards, David and Ida never reached out to take that opportunity themselves. Instead they invested in their sons the hopes they once had for themselves. They taught the simple virtues of honesty, self-reliance, integrity, fear of God, and ambition. They wanted their sons to succeed in a wider setting than Abilene, or even Kansas. They gave the boys the feeling, as one of them later put it, that “if you stay home you will always be looked upon as a boy.”²

Eisenhower’s home life revolved around worship. Every day, morning and night, the family members got down on their knees to pray. David read from the Bible before meals, then asked for a blessing. After the meals the boys washed the dishes, then gathered around David for Bible reading. “Finally there was bedtime,” Earl recalled, “when Dad got up and wound the clock on the wall. You could hear the ticking no matter where you were. When Dad started winding, you might as well get ready for bed, for that was the bedtime signal.”³

During the day, the boys saw little of their father, who worked in the creamery from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. “Mother was by far the greatest personal influence in our lives,” Dwight remembered.⁴ She supervised their chores, made their meals, selected and mended their clothes, soothed their hurts, praised their accomplishments, and lightened the atmosphere. Milton, the youngest, said that “Father and Mother complemented one another. Mother had the personality. She had the joy. She had a song in her heart. Dad had the authority.”⁵

In a family of six boys, competition was the natural order of things. Who could do the best job at this or that task? Who could run the fastest? Jump the highest? Lift the heaviest weight? Read the Bible aloud most accurately? Daily, in countless ways, the boys tested themselves against one another. David and Ida encouraged this competition, encouraged them to be ambitious to do the best. Most of all, each of the boys wanted to be the toughest, and they fought among themselves to find out who was the best scrapper.

One day Ida was baking in the kitchen. Dwight and Edgar began a fight on the kitchen floor. Soon the older and heavier Edgar was sitting astride the prostrate Dwight, giving him a pounding. “Give up?” Edgar shouted. “No!” Dwight gasped. Edgar grabbed Dwight’s hair and began to thump his head against the floor. Earl rushed in to help Dwight. Ida, without turning away from the stove, said sharply to Earl, “Let them alone.”⁶

David encouraged his sons to stand up for themselves, with one another and in their relations with boys outside the family. Dwight recalled that his father never wanted to see his sons beaten by their playmates in anything, least of all in a fight. One evening David returned from work to see Dwight being chased by a boy about his own size. “Why do you let that boy run you around like that?” he demanded.

“Because if I fight him,” Dwight replied, “you’ll give me a whipping, whether I win or lose!” Instantly, David replied, “Chase that boy out of here.” Dwight did.⁷

• •

The chief characteristic of Abilene in the 1890s was that it was typical of small-town midwestern America, which meant, for young Dwight, that it reinforced everything he learned from his parents. There was, first of all, the emphasis on self-sufficiency. Contact with the outside world was minimal. There were few taxes to pay to, and almost no services provided by, the government, save on the local level. The city paid for and ran the school system. Families took care of their own sick, insane, crippled, elderly, or just down-on-their-luck members. There was no police force because in a town small enough (less than four thousand population) for everyone to know, and trust, everyone else, there was no need for one.

There was a strong emphasis on hard work, on getting things done. Little or no time was wasted on reflection or introspection. Everyone in Abilene worked, most of them at hard physical labor. Unemployment was virtually unknown, even among children. The youngest worked around the house; eight- to twelve-year-olds held odd jobs; teen-agers found regular employment.

Abilene was cautious and conservative in its social outlook, religion, and politics. Everyone was Christian, of European descent, and nearly all voted Republican. There was a strong sense of community, a feeling that the world was divided into “us” (the residents of Abilene, Dickinson County, and to some extent the state of Kansas) and “them” (the rest of the world). Abilene was like a large extended family, giving to its residents a feeling of security. Threats to that security came not from within but from without, primarily in the form of adverse weather or falling commodity prices.

A man was judged by how hard he worked and whether he paid his bills on time, a woman by how well she ran her household. It was assumed that a man’s success depended solely upon his output and that the unsuccessful had no one to blame but themselves. “The isolation was political and economic,” Milton recalled, “as well as just a prevailing state of mind. Self-sufficiency was the watchword; personal initiative and responsibility were prized; radicalism was unheard of.”⁸

To the Eisenhower boys, Abilene seemed an ideal place. It provided more than sufficient scope for a growing boy to discover himself and develop his physical capacity in an atmosphere of security, friendliness, and tolerance of boyish pranks. In 1947, Dwight Eisenhower spoke from his heart about the town that he loved. He said that Abilene “provided both a healthy outdoor existence and a need to work. These same conditions were responsible for the existence of a society which, more nearly than any other I have encountered, eliminated prejudices based upon wealth, race or creed, and maintained a standard of values that placed a premium upon integrity, decency, and consideration for others. Any youngster who has the opportunity to spend his early youth in an enlightened rural area has been favored by fortune.”⁹

Just as Dwight loved Abilene, so did Abilene love him. He was a popular boy, well known for his curiosity, his fun-loving ways, his big smile, and his energy. He had a catchy nickname, “Little Ike” (his older brother Edgar was called “Big Ike”).

But Little Ike had a terrible temper. Anger would possess him, take complete control, make him oblivious to anything else. The adrenalin rushed through his body, raising the hair on the back of his neck, turning his face a bright beet-red. On Halloween night, 1900, his parents gave Arthur and Edgar permission to go “trick or treating.” Little Ike begged, pleaded, and argued to be allowed to go along, but his parents insisted that he was too young. Anger overwhelmed him. He rushed outside and began pounding the trunk of an apple tree with his bare fists. He sobbed and pounded until his fists were a raw bleeding mass of torn flesh. Finally his father grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him until he gained some control over himself.

Dwight went to his bed and cried into his pillow for an hour, out of resentment and rage. His mother came into the room and sat beside him. She took up his hands, putting salve on them and then bandages. After what seemed to him to be a long time, she said, “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city.” She went on to tell him how futile and self-destructive anger was, and how he, of all her boys, had much the worst temper and the farthest to go in conquering it. When he was seventy-six years old, Eisenhower wrote, “I have always looked back on that conversation as one of the most valuable moments of my life.” ¹⁰

Getting control of his temper, however, did not come easily or quickly. Two years after the apple-tree incident, when Dwight was twelve and Arthur sixteen, Arthur incurred his little brother’s wrath over some trifling matter. Raging, but frustrated because Arthur was much too big for him to attack with his fists, Dwight looked around. Seeing a brick at his feet, he grabbed it and flung it with all his might at Arthur’s head. Arthur just managed to duck out of the way—Dwight had fully intended to hit him.

Dwight attended Lincoln elementary school, directly across the street from his home. The curriculum emphasized rote learning. “The darkness of the classrooms on a winter day and the monotonous hum of recitations,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, “. . . are my sole surviving memories. I was either a lackluster student or involved in a lackluster program.”¹¹ He came to life for the spelling bee and arithmetic. Spelling contests aroused in him his competitive drive and his hatred of careless mistakes—he became a self-confessed martinet on the subject of orthography. Arithmetic appealed to him because it was logical and straightforward—an answer was either right or wrong.

The subject that really excited him, however, was one that he pursued on his own, military history. He became so engrossed in it, in fact, that he neglected his chores and his schoolwork. His first hero was Hannibal. Then he became a student of the American Revolution, and George Washington excited his admiration. He talked history to his classmates so frequently that his senior yearbook predicted that he would become a professor of history at Yale (it also predicted that Edgar would become a two-term President of the United States).

During Dwight’s high school years his interests were, in order of importance, sports, work, studies, and girls. He was shy around the girls and in any case wanted to impress his male classmates as a regular fellow, just one of the gang. Paying too much attention to the girls was considered somewhat sissy. He was careless of his dress, his hair was usually uncombed, and he was a terrible dancer on the few occasions he tried the dance floor.

Studies came easily to him and he made good to excellent grades without extending himself. He got all Bs in his freshman year, when the subjects were English, physical geography, algebra, and German. He did a bit better the next year, and as a junior and senior he was an A or A-plus student in English, history, and geometry. His sole B was in Latin.

Sports, especially football and baseball, were the center of his life. He expended far more energy on sports than he put into his studies. He was a good, but not outstanding, athlete. He was well coordinated, but slow of foot. He weighed only 150 pounds. His chief asset was his will to win. He loved the challenge of the games themselves, enjoyed the competition with older and bigger boys, bubbled over with pleasure at hitting a single to drive in the winning run or at throwing the other team’s star halfback for a loss.

It was in sports that he first discovered his talents as a leader and an organizer. As a boy, he provided the energy and leadership that led to a Saturday-afternoon game of football or baseball. Later, he was the one who organized the Abilene High School Athletic Association, which operated independently of the school system. Little Ike wrote to schools in the area to make up a schedule, and solved the problem of transportation by hustling his team onto freight trains for a free ride from Abilene to the site of the contest.

He also organized camping and hunting trips. He got the boys together, collected the money, hired the livery rig to take them to the camping site, bought the food, and did the cooking.

The central importance of sports, hunting, and fishing to Little Ike cannot be overemphasized. He literally could not imagine life without them, as was shown by the most dramatic incident of his childhood.

During his freshman year in high school, he fell and scraped his knee. This was a common enough experience, and his only thought was for his ruined brand-new pants, which he had bought with his own earnings. Since there was no bleeding, he went to school the next day. Infection set in, however, and that evening he fell into a delirium on the sofa in the front room. His parents called in Dr. Conklin, but despite his treatment, the infection began spreading. For the next two weeks, Dwight slipped into and out of a coma. Conklin called two or three times a day; Ida stayed at his bedside; they painted a belt of carbolic acid around his leg; still the poison spread and crept up his leg toward his abdomen. Conklin called in a specialist from Topeka. The two doctors agreed that only amputation would save his life.

During one of his conscious moments, Dwight heard his parents discussing amputation. They distrusted surgery, but the doctors insisted on it. Fourteen-year-old Dwight listened, then said, quietly but firmly, “You are never going to cut that leg off.” When his parents told Conklin of his decision, the doctor warned, “If the poisoning ever hits his stomach he will die.”

By this time the infection had reached his groin and his periods of consciousness were few and short. He called in Edgar and said, “Look, Ed, they are talking about taking my leg off. I want you to see that they do not do it, because I would rather die than to lose my leg.” Edgar understood. He made the promise, and from then on stayed at his brother’s bedside to make certain that no amputation took place. Conklin grew angry, began mumbling about “murder,” but he could not persuade Edgar, or David and Ida, to allow him to amputate. Edgar even slept at night on the floor across the threshold of the door, so that Conklin could not get into the room while Edgar was sleeping.¹²

At the end of the second week, the poison began to recede, the fever left Dwight’s body, consciousness returned. After a two-month convalescence, which caused him to have to repeat his freshman year, Dwight recovered completely. It was miraculous enough, but became much embellished decades later. Sunday School tracts and inspirational literature described the whole family as down on its knees, night and day, praying for recovery.

The Eisenhower boys hated such talk, with its implication that their parents believed in faith healing. They insisted that they prayed no more, and no less, than at other times. “We always prayed,” Edgar recalled. “It was just as natural for us to pray, to ...