Eisenhower did his best to develop a good working relationship with Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the commander of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany. If they could cooperate inside the Allied Control Council, which was set up in Berlin and acted as the four-power joint headquarters for the running of the occupation, then all the subsequent problems would resolve themselves much more easily. “Berlin, we were convinced, was an experimental laboratory for the development of international accord,” Eisenhower wrote. Success in Berlin could be translated into a “world partnership” with the USSR. He liked Zhukov, a true soldier and not a Communist Party hack, and he felt he understood the Soviet outlook: they had sacrificed more than any other nation to defeat Hitler’s armies and wanted to be sure the job of breaking Germany was done once and for all. All that was needed was “a friendly acceptance of each other as individuals striving peacefully to attain a common understanding.” It was a characteristically optimistic, even naïve view of world affairs.9
To cultivate the friendship, he agreed to visit Moscow in August. It was an eye-opening trip. “When we flew into Russia in 1945,” he recalled, “I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow—a distance of over 500 miles.” Arriving on August 12 from Berlin in the company of Zhukov, as well as his son John, Eisenhower was welcomed by an honor guard at the airport and the American ambassador, Averell Harriman. According to John, the people of Moscow looked very shabby, and “the houses were dingy, crowded and miserable looking.”
But the following day, in the presence of the sinister warlord Stalin, Eisenhower observed the astonishing spectacle of the Physical Culture Parade in Red Square. Thousands upon thousands of athletes, dancers, musicians, acrobats, and members of youth organizations, all resplendent in gleaming native costumes, marched or danced jubilantly past the reviewing stand where the Soviet leadership stood. Early in the proceedings, Eisenhower received an invitation from Stalin to join the Generalissimo on Lenin’s Tomb, an extraordinary honor for a foreigner. Stalin beamed as the endless parade unfolded over the course of five hours. “This develops war spirit,” he remarked. “Your country ought to do more of this.” And then, as an afterthought, he added coldly, “We will never allow Germany to do this.”10
The visit lasted three days, during which Eisenhower toured the Moscow subway, a collective farm, a fighter aircraft factory, and the Kremlin itself. On August 13 Stalin hosted a banquet at the Kremlin; John recalled, “All the Soviet officers wore white tunics; and this, combined with the glistening tablecloth and gigantic crystal chandeliers, gave an aura of brilliance that I have never seen elsewhere.” At the American Embassy the next night, in an atmosphere of growing cordiality, American and Soviet generals drank rivers of vodka and champagne, locking arms and breaking into a hearty chorus of “Song of the Volga Boatmen.” The evening was topped off when Ambassador Harriman arrived with joyful news: the Japanese had surrendered. The war was truly over. It is not without reason that Eisenhower could look back at this moment and conclude, “The late summer and early autumn of 1945 represents the peak of postwar cordiality and cooperation that we were ever able to achieve with the Soviet officials.”11
Soon after his return to Berlin, Eisenhower received a letter from General Marshall. The chief of staff wrote that he planned to retire and that he had urged Truman to appoint Eisenhower as his successor. Eisenhower had suspected this was coming, and dreaded it. To be sure, this was the top job in the American military, and he told Marshall that he was “willing to attempt anything that my superiors may direct.” But he knew it was going to be a terribly hard assignment, overseeing the dismantling of the huge military apparatus that the United States had assembled at such great cost. Nor did he wish to go back to Washington. “It all leaves me very cold,” he wrote Mamie. “If the President wants me to take the job at any given time it is, of course, my duty to do so. But you are certainly in no doubt as to what the effect on me will be. That city really bears down on me!”12
Still, staying in Germany was no better. He had been in Europe for over three years, missed his wife terribly, and was ready to go home. In November 1945, while on a visit to the States to testify before Congress and speak at the American Legion conference, he fell ill with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized for two weeks at the Greenbrier Hotel (which had been converted during the war to an army rest facility) in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. When he emerged at the end of the month, rested and healed, he went directly to work in Washington as chief of staff of the U.S. Army. “No personal enthusiasm marked my promotion to Chief of Staff,” Ike later admitted.
Almost immediately, Eisenhower faced trouble. In January 1946 a serious crisis broke out over the demobilization of U.S. soldiers. They wanted to get home fast, but getting eight million soldiers back to the States would take some time. Congress, under siege by voters and “Bring Daddy Home” clubs that had sprouted up across the country, was pressing the army to move faster. By the end of 1945 four million soldiers had already been discharged; the aim was to get another two million home by June 30.
But on January 4, 1946, the army disclosed a new policy: in order to maintain occupation troops overseas sufficient to keep order, demobilization would have to be slowed. Within days thousands of GIs in Manila, Seoul, Guam, Hawaii, Le Havre, and Paris staged loud protests, marching with picket signs reading “Bring the GIs Home” and “No Boats, No Votes.” The commander of the U.S. Eighth Army in Yokohama declared a “general breakdown in morale and discipline.” In Frankfurt a loud group of soldiers marched to the doors of the American military headquarters and were met by a barricade of military police, bayonets fixed. The New York Times called it “the worst administrative and morale crisis that the Army has faced.”13
Eisenhower moved decisively to grapple with the problem. He delivered detailed and comprehensive testimony to a joint session of Congress on January 15, then issued a radio broadcast explaining his plans. He promised that all three million soldiers eligible for discharge would be out of uniform by the first of July. But he reminded Congress and the country that the army still had a job to do in occupied lands and needed manpower to do it. As long as the policy of the government was to help stabilize the postwar world, the United States would need to keep some soldiers overseas. Those who had seen combat would have priority for returning home, while those newly entering the army through the Selective Service System would now have to do their part. Eisenhower seemed to have doused the flames of the crisis, but in a private letter to MacArthur, he seethed: “No amount of persuasive argument, based on logic, reason, and National duty, has had material effect in combating hysteria generated by pressure groups.” This was to become a common refrain as he labored through his new assignment at the Pentagon.14
While Americans were ready to be done with the war, Eisenhower preached a sermon of preparedness. He did not want to dismantle the armed forces so completely as to leave America unprepared, as it had been on the eve of World War II. He called for the continuation of the draft into peacetime and strongly supported Truman’s proposal, made in October 1945, for some kind of mandatory military service for all 18-year-old males. “If we are to retain any semblance of military power,” he wrote to an old wartime colleague, the American financier Bernard Baruch, “we can only do so by establishing a ready reserve of trained manpower to support our regular military establishments.”15
But Congress refused to consider it: the war was over and the public’s appetite for sacrifice had waned. Ike found it no easier to impose order over the services. His effort to unify the command of the three branches, in hopes of limiting interservice rivalry, streamlining command decisions, and reducing cost, was opposed strongly by the navy, and all of his appeals to common effort and selflessness did little to overcome their ingrained mutual suspicions. Eisenhower discovered that the unrivaled power and influence he exercised during the war had shrunk; he was now just another bureaucrat, going to Congress hat in hand.
And Congress was in no mood to spend on military appropriations. Too often, he wrote, “my recommendations were ignored.” It was a cruel fate: the massive fighting force Eisenhower had led in wartime withered away on his watch.16
Though Eisenhower usually refrained from criticism of political leaders, his exasperation occasionally spilled out into public. In a speech he delivered in April 1946 to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, he decried an American tendency “to ignore, in time of peace, the basic military problems of the country.” Following a two-week tour of military installations across the United States, he concluded that because of the pell-mell demobilization, it would take a year of hard work just to get the U.S. military back to its 1940 state of readiness—a low threshold indeed. “In the shadow of the most costly conflict of all time,” he boldly declared, the country was ignoring the chief lesson of war: that peace can be assured only through military strength. The speech received a warm reception, but all his sincerity and frankness could not sway Congress, which barely passed an extension of the Selective Service Act—and then only by allowing a nine-month “holiday” and exempting 18-year-olds from service. As for universal military training, that idea died.17
No wonder Eisenhower grew annoyed with life in Washington. Replying to a letter from his old Abilene friend Swede Hazlett about a rumor that he might become a candidate for the presidency, Eisenhower squashed the idea: “When trying to express my sentiments myself I merely get so vehement that I grow speechless, if not hysterical. I cannot conceive of any set of circumstances that could ever drag out of me permission to consider me for any political post from Dog Catcher to ‘Grand High Supreme King of the Universe.’ ” He often expressed his wish to retire altogether. And yet to his son, who was still in Germany, he fretted about the absence of strong leadership in the country: “The most noticeable thing here at home is the great confusion, doubt and haziness that seem to prevail in all circles, high and low, both in governmental and private life. I talked to many civilians during my recent trip and find that all of them are puzzled as to what to do about management and labor, about taxes, about investments, about foreign policy and about the strength and character of our Army and Navy. No one seems to have a complete program on which he is ready to stand or fall.” Just possibly Eisenhower could provide such a program. The idea began to germinate.18
III
The year 1946 was a tough one for Harry Truman, still struggling to find his footing in the White House. The end of the war led to dramatic layoffs across the country as demand for war-related industrial products declined. A wave of strikes by workers anxious about loss of pay reached a peak in 1946, when almost five million workers downed tools and took up pickets. It turned out to be the worst year of labor strife in the nation’s history. Truman, a New Dealer, had plenty of sympathy for the workers and their unions, but when coal miners and railroad workers went on strike, halting the nation’s economy, he exploded and threatened to draft striking rail workers into the military. The conflict created an uproar across the country, jeopardizing the coalition that underpinned the Democratic Party.19
In November 1946, in the midterm congressional elections, the Democrats took a beating, their worst since the 1920s. They lost 55 seats in the House of Representatives and 12 in the Senate and, for the first time since 1930, surrendered majority control of both chambers. (Two legislators of later significance for Eisenhower came to Washington in the 1946 freshman class. Richard M. Nixon of California was elected to the House of Representatives, and Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin won a Senate seat.) The newspapers began to write Truman’s political obituary, while Republicans sensed that “the presidency [was] a ripening plum” well within reach.20
With Truman embattled, speculation swirled around Eisenhower. In late September 1946 Arthur Krock of the New York Times predicted that in 1948 both parties would be looking to soldiers as possible presidential candidates. In a time of domestic turmoil, seasoned military leaders like Marshall, MacArthur, and Eisenhower might draw a great deal of national support. Eisenhower seemed especially attractive, thought Krock. “His is the one military name that crops up in both Republican and Democratic groups when they surround and peer into the crystal ball.”21
Eisenhower repeatedly poured cold water on this kind of talk. “There is no possibility of my ever being connected with any political office,” he told reporters in late September. Eisenhower found that people did not believe his denials. On the eve of a much-needed vacation in December, he confided to his diary, “[Reporters] don’t want to believe a man that insists he will have nothing to do with politics and politicians.”22
But just what did he want to do, once his army career came to an end? “From time to time,” he wrote to his father-in-law in January 1947, “prominent people in the commercial and financial world approach me with offers” of future employment, and the offers came with large salaries. Eisenhower was tempted by these, though he was afraid of being used as a corporate figurehead. He mulled over the prospect of retiring with Mamie to Denver or San Antonio, but he was still only 56 years old. He confessed that he was “definitely puzzled as to the future.”23
By the spring of 1947 he had reached his breaking point. He told his friend Walter Bedell Smith, now ambassador in Moscow, that the army chief of staff job was “even more irritating and wearing than I had anticipated. We are still in the latter stages of destroying the greatest machine that the United States ever put together.” He was confounded on every hand by “prejudice, lack of understanding, and outright self-seeking. . . . So many things seem to be placed above the welfare of the country.” This was a swipe at Congress but also at Truman, who had not taken Eisenhower into his confidence nor made him a key player in mapping out his global military strategy. Eisenhower was on the outside looking in, and he was tired of it.24
In late May 1947 Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM and a member of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University, offered Eisenhower the position of president of the university. In fact it was the second time he had made the offer: the first was in April 1946, and Eisenhower had declined. But now Eisenhower was searching for a way out of Washington, although he doubted his own ability to succeed “in an enterprise so different from all my own experience.” He discussed the offer with Truman, who encouraged him to take the job. Eisenhower worried that Mamie would be burdened with a busy social schedule at Columbia, and living in bustling New York City was a fearful prospect to the man from Abilene. Once he was reassured that his social obligations would be light and that he could easily secure a getaway house in the nearby countryside for relaxation, he was willing to take the plunge. “The finger of duty seems to point in the direction of Columbia,” he told the chairman of the Board of Trustees on June 23, 1947.25
Moving to Columbia did nothing to curtail speculation about his entering politics. Without the army to shield him from overtures by political factions that wanted him to enter the presidential sweepstakes, he found himself the target of renewed speculation. Supporters across the country immediately set up a “Draft Eisenhower for President” headquarters in Washington to get him on the Republican ticket in 1948. Eisenhower, who still had many months to go to complete his tour as chief of staff, decried the draft campaign. “Frankly, I deplore the organization,” he said publicly in early September 1947 in an effort to stop the momentum. “It is a mistaken idea.” On a visit to New York City to meet with officials at Columbia, he said he thought soldiers should stay out of politics. In any case, he wasn’t interested. Yet still the draft talk continued. By mid-October there were draft organizations in 13 states, and “I Like Ike” buttons began to pop up on the streets of major cities.26
Eisenhower bore some responsibility for the draft movement because he wouldn’t issue a definitive refusal to run. “I haven’t the effrontery to say I wouldn’t be president,” he had said in July 1947, in words that poured fuel on the fires of speculation. In private letters to two men he deeply trusted, Beetle Smith and
his brother Milton, he tried to explain his reasoning. “I do not believe that you or I or anyone else has the right to state, categorically, that he will not perform any duty that his country might demand of him,” he wrote Smith. If a political “miracle” happened and he was genuinely drafted by a national outpouring of acclaim, a refusal would be tantamount to betrayal: “It would be almost the same thing as a soldier refusing to go forward with his unit.”27
The pressure on him continued to mount. In January 1948 the Draft Eisenhower group announced that it had filed a complete slate of delegates to run in the New Hampshire primary in March. If elected, the delegates would go to the Republican National Convention pledged to Ike. Just as the movement seemed to be reaching critical mass, Eisenhower definitively squashed it. On January 22, in a carefully phrased public letter to Leonard V. Finder, the publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader, who had endorsed Eisenhower for president and egged on the New Hampshire draft movement, Eisenhower stated his desire to be left out of the political sweepstakes. He repeated his view that “lifelong professional soldiers, in the absence of some obvious and over-riding reason, [should] abstain from seeking high political office.” If he had been slow to withdraw from contention it was only because he did not wish to seem presumptuous. His decision to stay out of politics was, he stated, “definite and positive.” He was off to New York, to Columbia University, to enjoy the freedom of a civilian for the first time in nearly four decades.28
IV
With his arrival in New York City in May 1948 as America’s most famous college president, Eisenhower now had a platform from which to speak openly and a position of rank and status at the center of American public life. It was an exciting time. Free from the strictures of the army, he could imagine a new role for himself as a wise man, a leader in the field of ideas, and a source of guidance for the nation as it faced growing troubles on the world stage. From mid-1948 on, Eisenhower began to shape his public persona as a man to whom the country could turn for vigorous, competent, disinterested leadership. He might not have been running openly for president, but he did everything to prepare himself for a call he felt certain would come. While denying any interest in the presidency, he made himself appear to be the only—the inevitable, the indispensable—man for the job.
The Age of Eisenhower Page 6