Eisenhower

by Louis Galambos

  His decision to seek an advanced education that neither he nor his family could afford was a crucial part of the answer to our guiding question. Along with the education he received at West Point, he entered a profession—a step that would enable millions of Americans and several Eisenhowers to climb the social mobility ladder in the twentieth century.2 At the US Military Academy and in his early career as a junior officer, Eisenhower demonstrated a substantial capacity for leadership in teams, in small units, and finally in a wartime position that substantially extended his reach and responsibilities. In his new identity as the professional soldier, he was trusted and respected by those who served with him and under his authority. He overcame his profound disappointment about not being sent to France during World War I and performed admirably and resiliently when he was responsible for leading thousands of men training for tank warfare.

  There were, however, problems. He was not unusually ambitious and was still somewhat ambivalent about his chosen career. The tensions in his personality were unresolved, and in the immediate postwar era, his anti-authoritarian streak surfaced and threatened for a time to end his professional career. These episodes and his failure to adapt successfully to a postwar army that was particularly conservative indicated that he might never escape his bureaucratic typecasting: a good coach, a good trainer of recruits, but not a candidate for the top ranks of the military service.

  Luckily for Eisenhower—and for the United States—General Fox Conner adopted him as a personal and professional project, mentored him, and supported him for years. With Conner’s encouragement he became something of a striver, a man determined to get to the top, a candidate for leadership as a general officer. Eisenhower absorbed Conner’s lessons, recognized what was at stake, and demonstrated an unusual capacity to turn his career and his life around in order to fit the model that Conner was advocating. Having taught Ike how to be successful in the US Army, Conner steadily used his friendships and his knowledge of the army bureaucracy to advance Eisenhower’s career. Conner’s continued support was necessary because the US Army changed more slowly than Eisenhower did.

  In brief, Ike’s reputation substantially lagged behind his capabilities. The army was slow to acknowledge that Major Eisenhower could be much more than a good football coach, much more than a skillful trainer of recruits. Despite Eisenhower’s outstanding performance in the Command and General Staff School, the army behaved in a manner that would not surprise those who admire Franz Kafka and the anti-bureaucratic school of thought. Conner, however, was a master Machiavellian. He outmaneuvered the bureaucrats, pushed Eisenhower ahead, and gave his protégée the entrée and the confidence he needed to enter higher office.

  There are, then, major elements of contingency in Eisenhower’s ascent. Had he not been able to serve with General Conner in the 1920s, Eisenhower probably would never have emerged from the shadows of a mediocre career in his chosen profession. To his credit, Ike proved to be unusually receptive to Conner’s mentoring. He was throughout his career flexible about doctrine, the ordinary stuff of life, while remaining tightly locked down on dogma, his basic values, including his concept of how he should treat those who worked for him and with him.3 He was deeply committed to being approachable and fair-minded, willing to a fault to cut some slack for the officers and enlisted men and women with whom he served.

  There were, as well, larger elements of contingency that influenced Ike’s career. In his lifetime, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial power and began to express that power overseas. Two world wars bracketed the middle phase of Ike’s military career and provided him with unusual opportunities to advance in the US Army. Thwarted in World War I, he and Conner were able in the 1920s and 1930s to position him for rapid advancement when America’s national security was again threatened.

  In the interwar era, he made full use of Conner’s guidance, protection, and power. In those years, Eisenhower became an aspiring perfectionist: the perfect staff officer. In that new identity, he found himself attached to the army’s leading officer, General Douglas MacArthur, who was pleased to have Ike on his team. As his years with the powerful, quixotic MacArthur demonstrated, Eisenhower had almost completely suppressed the anti-authoritarian streak that had stymied his early career. As the leading member of MacArthur’s team in the War Department and then in the Philippines, he mastered conciliation under constant stress.

  When war threatened in Europe and commenced in Asia, Major Eisenhower looked forward to a new career as a line officer, leading men at war, finally leading men in the field in combat. All he needed at this point in his career was a successful conclusion to his service with MacArthur and an opportunity to break out of the organizational stasis that had characterized the army since the end of World War I. At this crucial divide, he almost lost MacArthur’s support, however, and had his first major experience with a Machiavellian leader who sandbagged Ike and taught him a lesson in cunning and duplicity.4

  Escaping MacArthur without further damage to his career, Eisenhower was soon in a demanding wartime setting that forced him to develop new political and military capabilities, to perform at last as a line officer in combat, and to deal with a complex, rapidly changing context in Africa, then in Sicily and Italy. He was now becoming the commander, and in that identity he again demonstrated substantial ability to learn by doing. He became tougher and more demanding of his subordinates; indeed, there was a touch of MacArthur’s cunning in the way he handled his two favorite officers, George Patton and Omar Bradley.

  In his role as commander, his performance was uneven but ultimately successful in the most challenging American military action since the Civil War. Along the way, he was once again sandbagged—this time by the British at the Casablanca conference. In effect, Churchill and FDR took away his direct command of the troops and left him isolated at the top of his army and somewhat bitter. He swallowed those feelings, however, and continued to learn and to promote Allied unity. He achieved success where it counted, on the battlefields of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. After the successful D-Day invasion in France, his reputation at home and abroad matched his identity perfectly, and he soon regained his direct command of the men in battle. While he suffered a defeat with Market Garden and a costly near defeat in the Battle of the Bulge, he eventually led the Allies to success on the Western Front. He was now in both identity and reputation the supreme commander.

  Throughout, he dealt with a long, stressful experience handling General Montgomery, whose contempt for Ike took the supreme commander to the absolute limits of his capacity for conciliation. As the final act in his relationship with Montgomery illustrated, Ike had developed a streak of Machiavellian cunning that would serve him well in the years ahead. After finishing the end game of the war with success, Eisenhower emerged in 1945 with a well-tooled sense of his capabilities as a leader and a well-established reputation as America’s most outstanding military officer.

  His next challenge was the Cold War between totalitarian communism and democratic capitalism—a titanic, all-consuming struggle that provided the central theme for the remainder of Ike’s exceptionally active career. By the time he had served as army Chief of Staff, president of Columbia University, informal chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, he was America’s premier military professional in a new global age. He had through his career demonstrated an unusual capacity to deal with technological, organizational, and political change. He was comfortable with his new identity as the statesman. To an important extent, this identity and reputation placed him above some (but not all) of the short-term anxieties of service struggles, party affairs, and even national politics. It enabled him to take a long-term perspective on America’s role in the world and the important links between its domestic and foreign policies.

  Elected president of the United States in 1952 and reelected in 1956, Eisenhower was totally dedicated to leading through conciliation and cooperation at home a
nd through an alliance-based, carefully delineated resistance to communist expansion abroad. At times, he found cunning as useful as compromise, especially in his dealings with Senator McCarthy and with some of the problems he encountered in foreign relations. Since he was convinced that time was on the side of democratic capitalism, he was able to implement and defend his strategic version of the containment policy. Constantly challenged by the aggressive, expanding communist empires and by revolutions in the collapsing British and French empires, Eisenhower was able to provide the leadership that kept America’s alliances intact for eight difficult, tumultuous years. His covert efforts were sometimes successful in the short term but frequently unsuccessful in the long run. Overall, though, he was able to achieve his major objectives in foreign policy.

  As late as 1952, he still had very little experience with domestic politics and thus was forced once again to learn on the job. These experiences were not always successful and were frequently painful to a leader who was never completely comfortable with interest group and partisan struggles. He was, however, able to work easily with the Democratic opposition in Congress and to maintain his hold on a Republican Party that was deeply divided between an ultra-conservative wing and those who supported Ike’s policy of the middle way. An ardent believer in democracy, he worked incessantly, skillfully, and to a considerable extent successfully to achieve his two major goals: prosperity for America and a tenuous Cold War peace for the world. By the time he left the presidency, he was indeed the preeminent leader of the free world.

  As a widely admired statesman and military leader, he had every reason to expect that in the 1960s, his voice would continue to command respect after he left office. It was not to be. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations used the Eisenhower policies as a foil as they devised more active programs. This was certainly the case in the two areas of policy—the pursuit of prosperity and the pursuit of peace—that Ike had made the centerpieces of his White House years. Both of the Democratic administrations looked to a more powerful and positive federal government to lead, not to follow, the private sector. Both sought to close the gap between what the economy was capable of doing and what it had been doing by following the middle way. They sought as well to give the United States military new capabilities that would enable America to deal more aggressively with the various wars and revolutions taking place on the frontiers of the American empire.

  In a less precise but equally forceful way, both new administrations turned away from the Eisenhower leadership style. The Eisenhower people wore hats; the Kennedy/Johnson people wore baseball caps, if they wore anything at all on their heads. The Eisenhower people played golf; the Kennedy people played golf, too, but were better known for their games of touch football. It was a new social order presided over by leaders determined to be more active, more progressive, and more successful than Ike had been. Eisenhower had attempted to strengthen the Republican Party’s center by recruiting a new cadre of young leaders. He had, however, failed to remake or to rebuild the GOP as the party of middle-way leadership.

  The fruits of Kennedy/Johnson leadership included a mixed bag of fundamental, lasting reforms and painful problems, some of which are still with us today. The breakthroughs in civil rights and in welfare policies were tremendously important to an American society that had never made a comfortable, thoroughgoing adjustment to the security and equity challenges of urban, industrial life. On the opposite side of the ledger were a debilitating war in Southeast Asia and the great inflation that Ike had feared and sought to prevent throughout the 1950s. Readers can balance the books on the fifties and the sixties as they see fit. One can only hope that they give due credit to Ike’s special style of leadership and to the prosperity and peace that he believed would ensure a successful future for America’s democratic society.

  Acknowledgments

  Research, writing, and publishing are all social activities. Some authors may see themselves as valiant individuals, struggling against the resistance of a bureaucratic society, a university, even a family. In reality, all authors who manage to get their work published benefit from the support of hundreds of individuals and organizations, many of whom seem to be far in the background, almost out of sight. I am no exception to that rule. All of my work—this book included—has benefited from being at Johns Hopkins University, an institution intensely dedicated to serious scholarship. That is certainly true in the History Department, where my colleagues argue in vigorous seminars over ideas and words, over the philosophy of history as well as numbers and sources and ideologies.

  The university supported—and successive editors brought to a successful conclusion—the project editing The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower (in 21 volumes). I was an editor or co-editor on many of those volumes, and that experience prompted my interest in Eisenhower, his career, and his distinctive style of leadership. The papers project also left me indebted to all those who, over many years, pushed that effort ahead and along the way gave me the benefit of their ideas about Eisenhower and his times. Particularly important in that regard were co-editor Daun van Ee, Associate Editor Joseph P. Hobbs, and Senior Associate Editor Elizabeth Hughes. I have drawn heavily upon their work in this book. At Hopkins numerous presidents, provosts, deans, and chairs helped me push ahead with the papers and my own research, including the present study of Ike’s identity, reputation, and leadership.

  Many others helped bring this book to print. A number of colleagues read parts or all of the manuscript and provided me with excellent advice. They included William Becker, Stephens Broening, Robert Brugger, Christy Chapin, Daun van Ee, Steve Hanke, Robert Hogan, Alan Matusow, Charles Neu, Carl Reddel, and Jeffrey Sturchio. My research assistants and part-time editors were Jessica Ziparo, Laura Veldhuis, and Patrick Gallagher. Morgan Shahan did much to straighten out my endnotes and tighten my prose. In the History Department, I received special assistance from Megan Zeller, Lisa Enders, Jennifer Stanfield, and Rachel La Bozetta.

  At the Eisenhower Memorial Library in Abilene, Kansas, I was helped by Karl Weissenbach, Herb Pankratz, James Leyerzapf, Chalsea Millner, and Kim Barbieri. Audiovisual Archivist Kathy Struss researched and helped me find the photographs I needed to provide a visual sense of Eisenhower’s progress from Abilene to the White House and then to retirement at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. James Gillispie, Curator of Maps at the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins, produced the map that appears in Chapter 9. Thanks to the Eisenhower Memorial Library, to the Library of Congress, to Getty Images, and to the Associated Press for the photographs in this book.

  In addition to the backing at Hopkins, I received financial assistance from two other generous donors. The Eisenhower Legacy Council (Ann C. Whitman Committee and Thomas A. Pappas Committee) helped fund my research trips and other expenses. Chairman Eugene Rossides and Executive Director Jeffrey Blavatt kept this project churning ahead from the beginning through publication. The Hogan Family Foundation made it possible for me to have a sabbatical year that was vital to my research and writing. For many years, I have followed and benefited from Robert Hogan’s path-breaking research in personality psychology, and I was particularly pleased to exchange ideas with him about leadership and identity.

  Johns Hopkins University Press made it happen—on a tight schedule. With Greg Britton, Catherine Goldstead, Julie McCarthy, and William Krause leading the way, the Press did an outstanding job of converting my manuscript into a book. Sue Warga copyedited the text and notes; the notes in particular presented problems that she handled with great skill. Angela Piliouras helped move that process ahead. Tricia Gesner of the Associated Press helped us clear some of our pictures, the final impediment to publication.

  The “foundation” that was most important to this venture was my own extended family. My young daughters Katherine and Emma Galambos helped me reorganize my office and push forward with my writing and editing. They had backup from Jennifer and Denise Galambos, my older daughters, and from Haley Connor, my granddaughter. We we
re, and miraculously still are, a family firm working on an innovation, for which the author bears full responsibility for any mistakes, infelicities, and inappropriate conclusions that survived this long, social enterprise.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. My apologies to my colleague John G. A. Pocock, whose magnificent intellectual history The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; orig. 1975) persuaded me to use his title in the study of leadership. Pocock’s reference, like mine, is to Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), the diplomat and intellectual who wrote The Prince (1532). I am, however, using the expression “Machiavellian moment” to describe personal encounters, not the grand intellectual epoch that Pocock studied.

  2. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Machiavellianism.”

  3. The first agricultural revolution, which involved mechanical innovations such as the harvester, took place in the middle of the nineteenth century. The second agricultural revolution, the so-called Green Revolution, occurred in the middle years of the twentieth century and was driven by breakthroughs in agricultural sciences and practices.