The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  Like any boy who has grown up in the country, he always felt cooped up inside, and as president he yearned to get into the open air, whether on the golf course or on occasional fishing and hunting trips with friends. Eisenhower never tried to hide his humble country origins behind the accumulated honors of his stunningly successful career. “The life we had together,” he wrote, “had been complete, stimulating, and informative, with opportunity available to us for the asking. We had been poor, but one of the glories of America, at the time, was that we didn’t know it. It was a good, secure small-town life, and that we wanted for luxuries didn’t occur to any of us.”7

  After he finished high school, Eisenhower went to work in the creamery alongside his father, a job he held for nearly two years. But this was not a fulfilling life for a smart, quietly ambitious young man. He wanted to go to college, inspired by his brother Edgar, who matriculated at the University of Michigan in 1909. Edgar’s tuition was paid for in part by Eisenhower’s wages at the creamery. The boys agreed that after a year they would switch places, with the older boy working to put the younger through a year at Ann Arbor. But Eisenhower was too impatient to wait for this long-term plan to unfold. In his 20th year, urged on by his friend Edward Everett “Swede” Hazlett Jr., who was planning to attend the Naval Academy, Eisenhower sought and gained admission to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; he enrolled in June 1911, age 20 years and eight months. Here was his ticket out and up, into a world he could never have glimpsed from Abilene.8

  III

  He could not have known it at the time, but Eisenhower entered West Point at a propitious moment. In the coming three decades his class of 1915 provided many of the general officers for a rapidly expanding U.S. Army that would wage two world wars and grow into the most powerful military the world had ever seen. Of the 164 men who graduated in his class, 59 would rise to the rank of brigadier general or higher. Eisenhower and his friend and classmate Omar Bradley both attained the exalted rank of general of the army, a five-star general. In time their class was aptly named “the class the stars fell on.”

  This rise to stardom, however, took a long time. For all his later glory, Eisenhower did not distinguish himself at West Point. He struggled with the Academy’s obsessive attitude toward discipline and rules, though he persevered. His years of manual labor in Abilene prepared him for the rigors of cadet training. Life at West Point, Eisenhower thought, “was hardest on those who were not used to exercise or who had been overindulged.” But he confessed to “a lack of motivation in almost everything other than athletics.” His one true passion, football, occupied most of his time. “It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance that I attached to participation in sports,” he later wrote, and yet this was a pleasure denied to him after suffering a knee injury in 1912, his second year at the Academy.

  Though his playing days were over, he became a cheerleader for the football team, then the coach of the junior varsity squad. He showed great talent as a motivator and student of the game. He was inclined later in life to see football as a great school for leadership: “Perhaps more than any other sport, [football] tends to instill in men the feeling that victory comes through hard—almost slavish—work, team play, self-confidence.” His knee injury nearly cost him a commission in the army, but he had gained a reputation as a natural leader, despite his average academic performance. He graduated 61st in his class in June 1915 and in September received a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, along with three months’ back pay and orders to report to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.9

  The fates now conspired to deny Eisenhower the one thing that every officer silently yearns for to spur his advancement up the ranks: war. When he left West Point, his timing seemed perfect for a combat command. In 1915, the year Eisenhower received his commission, a German submarine sank the British passenger liner Lusitania, killing 128 Americans and putting America and Germany on course toward war. After further provocations from Germany, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war in April 1917—the start of America’s 30-year confrontation with German militarism.

  For Eisenhower, the outbreak of war promised action, combat, and promotion. But when war came, he did not go to France; he went to Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia, to train officer candidates. He yearned for orders that would get him into the war, and they seemed in the offing when he was posted to Camp Meade in Maryland, there to train an engineering battalion. But Eisenhower’s organizational abilities had been noted, and instead of being shipped to Europe he went to Camp Colt in Gettysburg in the spring of 1918, where he was tasked with building a new Tank Corps. Rather than face the trials of the battlefield, he confronted the arduous duty of transforming a derelict outpost in the Pennsylvania countryside into a major training ground for men destined to be shipped to France.

  “Now I really began to learn about responsibility,” he recalled. He had to find tents for his men; equip these rudimentary quarters with stoves, fuel, bedding, and food; and develop a training regimen for a Tank Corps that as yet did not even have tanks. In midsummer the camp received its first shipment of the new wonder weapons: three French-built Renaults, about seven tons in weight, without guns. To train the men, Eisenhower laconically wrote, “we improvised.” He became known as a rigid disciplinarian, but one who was fair and consistent. When he caught an officer cheating at cards, he had no doubts about what to do: the man was given a choice of immediate resignation or court-martial. More serious challenges came in September 1918, when Spanish influenza swept through the camp, leaving 175 men dead in just a week. Eisenhower now had to organize isolation tents, a hospital, a rotation of doctors, and a morgue.

  On his 28th birthday Eisenhower was promoted to temporary lieutenant colonel, but his real present came the following month, in orders to ship out to France. Too late: the German Army was close to collapse, and on November 11 the war came to an end. It was a bitter disappointment to him. “I had missed the boat in the war we had been told would end all wars. . . . I was mad, disappointed, and resented the fact that the war had passed me by.”10

  What was to become of an army major, the rank to which he now reverted, without combat experience, in a peacetime army? His prospects were limited, but it is a testament to Eisenhower’s talents that he rose even in these circumstances to a position of influence. Two factors worked for him: his own hard work and the support of some powerful patrons. His posting to Camp Meade led to an introduction made by a dashing, aristocratic officer named George S. Patton, whom Eisenhower had befriended, to one of the most influential and respected men in the interwar army, Brig. Gen. Fox Conner. As operations officer for the American Expeditionary Force during the war, Conner had won a reputation as one of the army’s finest minds and most respected senior officers. Eisenhower and Conner developed a strong relationship based on mutual admiration, and Conner adopted Eisenhower as a protégé. When Conner was sent to the Panama Canal Zone to command the 20th Infantry Brigade at Camp Gaillard and oversee the U.S. military presence in this new vital waterway, he got Eisenhower assigned to him as his executive officer.

  From January 1922 to September 1924, under Conner’s command, Eisenhower burnished his reputation as a hard-driving, exacting officer who brooked no slouching from the men. When he was not working or shooing bats and insects out of his vine-covered quarters at Camp Gaillard, Eisenhower read texts assigned to him by the deep-thinking Conner. Under the general’s guidance Eisenhower sweated out the tropical evenings in his tin-roof barracks devouring the classics of strategy, including Carl von Clausewitz’s complex treatise On War, the memoirs of Napoleon, and campaign histories of the American Civil War. He even dove into Plato and Nietzsche, borrowing books from Conner’s splendid personal library. After their daily duties were complete, the two spent many hours exchanging ideas and provocations about history, philosophy, and leadership. These sessions were invaluable to Eisenhower, and he later acknowledged Conner’s enormous impact on his int
ellectual development. He was therefore supremely well-prepared for the yearlong course in strategic studies he took at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth in 1925–26. At the end of the year Eisenhower graduated first in his class.11

  In July 1926 Eisenhower marked an important milestone: the 10th anniversary of his marriage to a slender blue-eyed beauty named Mamie Geneva Doud. He had fallen for her when he was just a year out of West Point and she just 18. They met in San Antonio, where Mamie’s well-to-do family spent part of the year; her father had made a prosperous living in the meat-processing industry and also owned a large home in Denver. Mamie and Eisenhower were married in the Doud home in July 1916.

  It proved a wonderful match. Though they had few resources—Eisenhower’s pay was paltry, and despite small subventions from Mamie’s father, they lived in cramped officers’ quarters for years—they were both outgoing and warm, a pair that collected friends and hosted parties with eager, unfeigned pleasure. “She was not technically beautiful,” one portraitist wrote. “Her nose was a millimeter too long, her mouth too generous, and her shining brown hair swirled down her high forehead in a curious untamed style of her own. On the other hand, her long-lashed eyes were the dark blue of a piece of sky reflected in a well, and her skin actually seemed translucent.” Though fragile-looking, she possessed “the warm earthiness of the people of the western plains and mountains. She was restful to be with, yet her enthusiasm for life was expressed in constant movement, so that she rippled in the breeze of her own excitement.” In Mamie, Eisenhower had found a vital partner, a woman of energy, charm, and sociability who devoted herself to his career.12

  Their happiness was touched by tragedy in the late winter of 1920, when their three-year-old son, Doud Dwight, whom they had nicknamed Icky, contracted scarlet fever. The young couple had been amassing armfuls of Christmas presents and putting them under a spindly Christmas tree in their cramped Camp Meade quarters. But the gifts were to remain unwrapped, for by Christmas Day Icky’s condition had worsened, his fever soared, and he drifted in and out of consciousness. In the early hours of January 2, 1921, he died. Eisenhower’s own words, written almost a half century later, capture his despair: “I do not know how others have felt when facing the same situation, but I have never known such a blow. Within a week he was gone. I didn’t know what to do. . . . This was the greatest disappointment and disaster in my life, the one I have never been able to forget completely. Today when I think of it, even now as I write of it, the keenness of our loss comes back to me as fresh and as terrible as it was in that long dark day soon after Christmas, 1920.”13

  “For a long time,” Mamie would reveal many years later, “it was as if a shining light had gone out in Ike’s life.” She too was shattered, as a plaintive letter to her parents, written three weeks after Icky’s death, reveals: “I find the hardest time is when I go to bed and I can’t tuck him in—and the many times I think I hear him in the night.” Not until August 1922, with the birth of their son John, did the Eisenhower family begin to feel whole again. But every year on Icky’s birthday, Eisenhower sent Mamie a bouquet of roses.14

  The Conner connection that had taken Eisenhower to Panama continued to open doors. Conner secured for Eisenhower a position working for Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander of American forces in the First World War, who by 1927 was directing the American Battle Monuments Commission. This organization erected cemeteries and monuments across Western Europe to memorialize and honor America’s fallen servicemen, and Pershing asked Eisenhower to prepare its official guidebook. This job gave him the opportunity to work with the army’s most senior officer and to earn a glowing commendation letter from Pershing that referred to Eisenhower’s “superior ability” and “unusual intelligence.” He also made the acquaintance of a man whose name he had often heard praised by General Conner: Col. George C. Marshall, whose star was on the rise.

  After further academic training at the Army War College in Washington, D.C.—from whose yearlong course he graduated first in his class in 1928—Eisenhower went to Paris to continue his work for Pershing’s Battle Monuments Commission. It was a heavenly 14 months for Eisenhower, Mamie, and young John. They lived in an apartment on the rue d’Auteuil, in the western part of the city, near the Bois de Boulogne. Eisenhower and Mamie entertained often, drawing on the large American community in Paris for social company. They half-heartedly studied a little French and spent a good deal of time on the road visiting military cemeteries and monuments on behalf of the commission. One memorable holiday junket with Maj. William Gruber and his wife, Helen, in late summer of 1929 took them through Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. Traveling in a rented Buick, drinking plenty of wine along the way, staying in country hotels, and picnicking on the roadside, they especially enjoyed the Rhine Valley. Eisenhower found the countryside of Bonn, Coblenz, Heidelberg, and Konstanz “gorgeous,” with its vistas of pine woods, hills, and castles. The couple was entranced, he noted in his journal of the trip, by “the people as well as beautiful landscapes.” Everywhere they went, they were met with courtesy and kindness. “We like Germany!” he gushed.15

  Eisenhower could not know it then, but he would return to these same lovely landscapes 15 years later as the commander of a gigantic armed force set upon destruction and conquest.

  IV

  If Fox Conner, in his dank quarters in Panama, had given Eisenhower a graduate seminar in strategy, the 1930s would immerse this talented but unfulfilled officer—now nearing 40 years old, he’d been a major for ten years—in another kind of learning: the bureaucratic and institutional politics of Washington, D.C. In the fall of 1929, Eisenhower was assigned as an aide to Brig. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley, then serving as executive assistant to Frederick Payne, assistant secretary of war. After a delightful but marginal assignment in France, Eisenhower was able to observe and participate in the making of national defense policy. “Except for the fact that I do not like to live in a city,” he confided to his diary, “I am particularly pleased with this detail. The General is alert and energetic and certainly enjoys a fine reputation for accomplishment in the Army. I am also looking forward to the opportunity of learning something about the economic and industrial conditions that will prevail in this country in the event of a major war.”16

  For two years Ike studied the problems of industrial mobilization in wartime, the start of a lifelong concern with the problem of America’s military preparedness. In the late 1920s the U.S. Army was in dreadful shape, with barely 120,000 men. (By comparison, Eisenhower would have three million men under his command in Europe at the close of World War II.) Congress had slashed the army’s budget, and as a consequence the links between industry and the military procurement process had withered. All this would have to be restarted from scratch in the event of war. Ike labored valiantly in studying America’s industrial capabilities and the need for close government-industry cooperation in wartime. After months of inspection tours of factories, workshops, and rubber plantations, Eisenhower declared in a journal article published under the name of the assistant secretary that the most important lesson of the First World War was this: “When great nations resort to armed conflict today, the readiness of each to meet promptly the needs of its armed forces in munitions, and of its civilian population in the necessities of life, may well prove to be a decisive factor in the contest.” As early as 1930 he grasped the need for modern states to build a standing “military-industrial complex.”17

  Eisenhower had a way of being noticed by senior officers, and by 1931 the new chief of staff of the U.S. Army, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, had come to see in Major Eisenhower a valuable talent. MacArthur was America’s leading soldier. He’d had a legendary career at West Point, graduating first in his class in 1903. Fighting on the Western Front in World War I, he rose to the rank of brigadier general, won the Distinguished Service Cross twice, and earned the Silver Star for valor in action seven times. He had served as superintendent of West Point, d
id a tour of duty in the Philippines, and in 1930, though the youngest major general in the army, became chief of staff. MacArthur was an impressive figure, but he was also egotistic, vainglorious, and somewhat operatic, besotted with his own self-made legend and sensitive to the least slight. Eisenhower found him “forceful” and “blessed with a fast and facile mind.” But he disdained MacArthur’s obsession with politics. Most officers tried hard to respect the line drawn by tradition between politics and the military, while MacArthur “chose to ignore it.” As a result Eisenhower’s duties under the chief of staff began “to verge on the political, even to the edge of partisan politics.” Over time, close association with MacArthur provided Eisenhower with a role model of the kind of military leader he did not want to be.18

  In 1931 MacArthur gave Eisenhower the job of writing the army’s annual report, then rewarded him with a commendation for his work and roped him into his entourage. Ike was now ensconced in the higher reaches of the military, but he paid a price for his proximity to the ostentatious chief of staff. In the summer of 1932 MacArthur brazenly led the army into the streets of southeast Washington to evict 20,000 destitute war veterans who were demanding payment of back wages for their war service. Eisenhower counseled him against using army troops as policemen. “By this time,” he recalled, “our relationship was fairly close, close enough that I felt free to object. I told him that the matter could easily become a riot and I thought it highly inappropriate for the Chief of Staff of the Army to become involved.” MacArthur ignored this wise advice and ordered Eisenhower to don his uniform, mount up, and ride along with him to conduct the operation.