Before Patton left for Fort Myer, he and Beatrice hosted a Sunday dinner party for Brigadier General Fox Conner, to which Ike and Mamie were invited. Conner was already a gray eminence—a military thinker and strategist who wielded vast power under a cloak of general staff anonymity. Many considered him the most influential officer in the Army. During the war he served as Pershing’s chief of operations (Lieutenant Colonel George Marshall was one of his assistants), and had masterminded the first American offensive at Saint-Mihiel, and then the sudden northwestward thrust in the Meuse-Argonne.41 Currently he was Pershing’s chief of staff in Washington while “Black Jack” marked time until he would succeed March at the Army’s head.c
General Fox Conner, Ike’s mentor and deputy chief of staff. (illustration credit 3.3)
Fox Conner was understatement personified: self-possessed, soft-spoken, eminently formal, and polite—a general who loved reading, a profound student of history, and a keen judge of military talent. Born to a wealthy planter family in the flatwoods of Calhoun County, Mississippi (his nephew Martin Sennet Conner served as governor of Mississippi from 1932 to 1936), he graduated from West Point in 1898, spoke fluent French (acquired during a tour of duty with the French Army in 1911–12), served with Pershing during the punitive expedition against Pancho Villa (where he met George Patton), and married the daughter of a millionaire father who had made a fortune manufacturing patent medicine. In 1930, he was on a short list of two to become Army chief of staff. Pershing backed Conner, but Hoover chose Douglas MacArthur instead. When MacArthur’s term expired in 1935, FDR offered the post to Conner (who was then commanding the I Corps Area), but Conner declined. Eisenhower told biographer Stephen Ambrose that “Fox Conner was the ablest man I ever knew.… In a lifetime of association with great and good men, he is the one to whom I owe an incalculable debt.”42
Conner had come to Meade that Sunday purposely to meet Eisenhower, whom Patton had recommended effusively.43 After a midday dinner, he asked Patton and Eisenhower to show him their tank park and explain their ideas about the future of the weapon. Patton and Ike were tickled. Conner was the most senior officer thus far to show an interest in armored warfare. (It had been Conner, at AEF headquarters, who originally urged Patton to go into the tank corps.)44 As Eisenhower remembered, “General Conner went down to the shops with us, found a chair to sit in, and then began to ask questions. Some could be answered briefly, while others required long explanations. By the time he had finished, it was almost dark and he was ready to go home. He said little except that it was interesting. He thanked us, and that was that.”45
It was shortly after the dinner with Conner that Ike ran afoul of Army Regulations and the inspector general. Eisenhower was charged with improperly drawing a quarters allowance for Ikey during the period he was residing in Boone, Iowa, with Mamie’s aunt. The 1921 Army was an army that looked after the nickels and dimes, and Ike had received $250.76 to which he was not entitled.d Even more important, he had signed a false official statement—a hanging offense in the Regular Army. Eisenhower claimed he was unfamiliar with the regulations and offered to repay the money, but the War Department was adamant. “The Certificate which this officer filed with his pay vouchers for the months of May to August 1920 were on their face false and untrue.… And the result of this investigation leads me to the conclusion that Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, Inf., be brought to trial upon charges based on the facts as developed,” wrote the Army’s adjutant general on June 21, 1921.46
The matter was turned over to the inspector general, Brigadier General Eli A. Helmick (USMA, 1888), for further action. Colonel Rockenbach and the III Corps Area commander, Brigadier General H. F. Hodges, attempted to head off the proceedings by delivering oral reprimands to Ike (the money had been repaid), but Helmick was not dissuaded. On November 1, 1921, he wrote the adjutant general: “Major Eisenhower is a graduate of the Military Academy, of six years’ commissioned service. That he should have knowingly attempted to defraud the government in this matter, or, as he contends, that he was ignorant of the laws governing commutation for dependents, are alike inexplicable.”47
Helmick had Ike squarely in his sights and was about to pull the trigger. Once again, fortuna intervened. John J. Pershing had succeeded Peyton March as Army chief of staff; Fox Conner was given command of the 20th Infantry Brigade in the Panama Canal Zone, and Conner wanted Ike to be his executive officer. Eisenhower does not mention the pending court-martial in his memoirs (nor did the first generation of biographers), and simply notes that orders came “out of the blue” transferring him to the Canal Zone. “The red tape was torn to pieces.”48
What happened was that Helmick was reined in. No one was closer to Pershing than Fox Conner.e When Conner told Pershing that he wanted Ike in Panama,49 Pershing made it happen. Helmick, a classmate of Peyton March’s, recognized the new alignment of forces in the War Department and gave way. On December 14, 1921, he wrote the adjutant general that while Eisenhower’s offenses were “of the gravest character for which he might not only be dismissed from the service but imprisoned,” he did not recommend that Ike be brought to trial, and suggested a formal reprimand be placed in his 201 file instead. The reprimand was administered by Brigadier General J. H. McRae, the assistant chief of staff (and a close friend of Conner’s), and became part of Eisenhower’s permanent Army record.50 The bottom line is that Ike avoided trial and was off to the Canal Zone.
Eisenhower served at Camp Meade for almost three years. His efficiency reports were consistently above average, and occasionally superior. Rockenbach called him “a most excellent officer and a valuable assistant.” His final report, dated January 6, 1922, enclosed a copy of General McRae’s reprimand and noted somewhat critically that “having had independence of command for so long a time, his personal views influence his cooperation.” Nevertheless, Ike was described as “an enthusiastic young officer of greatest value to tank organizations.”51
After a rough passage on the Army troopship St. Mihiel, Eisenhower and Mamie arrived in Panama on January 7, 1922. The 20th Infantry Brigade was stationed at Camp Gaillard, near the famous Culebra Cut, toward the Pacific end of the canal. The Eisenhowers were assigned quarters adjacent to the Conners’, among a row of elaborate frame dwellings put up by the French for upper-echelon engineers during Ferdinand de Lesseps’s ill-fated efforts to construct a canal thirty years earlier. Built on stilts with screened verandas on all four sides, the squarish houses resembled substantial seaside cottages on the Carolina coast that had fallen into serious disrepair. The Conners had restored their house (including a tennis court and a swimming pool) to its earlier splendor, and Ike took the dilapidated houses in stride. But Mamie was appalled. “She made no bones about how mad she was that they had been ordered to such a post,” Virginia Conner recalled.52
From the beginning, Mamie, who was in the early stages of pregnancy, hated their ramshackle quarters, Ike’s duty with the brigade, and Panama itself. “The marriage was clearly in danger,” said Mrs. Conner. “They were two young people who were drifting apart. Ike was spending less and less time with Mamie, and there was no warmth between them. They seemed like two people moving in different directions.”53
For his part, Eisenhower considered his service in Panama the “most interesting and constructive of my life.”
The main reason was the presence of one man, General Fox Conner. [He] was a practical officer, down to earth, equally at home in the company of the most important people in the region and with any of the men in the regiment. He never put on airs of any kind, and he was as open and honest as any man I have ever known.… I served as his brigadier exec for three years in Panama and never enjoyed any other three year period as much. He has held a place in my affections for many years that no other, not even a relative, could obtain.54
Under Conner’s tutelage Eisenhower became a student of military history. Conner had an extraordinary library (the Conners loved books; his nephew Sennet was reputed to possess th
e finest legal library in Mississippi), which he made available to Eisenhower. Starting with historical novels, he drew Ike in to more serious works of history. Eisenhower studied the Civil War, followed Napoléon’s campaigns, and familiarized himself with Frederick the Great’s victories. From there he moved to the classics: Tacitus, Plato, and Shakespeare. At Conner’s direction, Ike read Clausewitz’s On War three times. “Those German sentences. I tell you, it’s trouble. He’d quiz me. You know Clausewitz has those maxims. He’d make me tell what each one meant.”55
Reflecting his experience at Pershing’s AEF headquarters, Conner taught Ike about coalition warfare.
He laid great stress in his instruction to me on what he called “the art of persuasion.” Since no foreigner could be given outright administrative command of troops of another nation, they would have to be coordinated very closely and this needed persuasion. He would get out a book of applied psychology and we would talk it over. How do you get allies of different nations to march and think as a nation? There is no question of his molding my thinking on this from the time I was thirty-one. I would not say that his views had any specific influence on my conduct of SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force], but his forcing me to think about these things gave me a preparation that was unusual in the Army at that time.56
Eisenhower considered Conner a storehouse of axiomatic advice.
He was the man who first remarked to me, “Always take your job seriously, never yourself.” He was the man who taught me that splendid line from the French, “All generalities are false, including this one.” He often quoted Shakespeare at length and he could relate his works to wars under discussion. Our conversations continued throughout the three years I served with him at Camp Gaillard. It is clear now that life with General Conner was a sort of graduate school in military affairs and the humanities, leavened by the comments and discourses of a man who was experienced in his knowledge of men and their conduct.57
In the meantime, Mamie became increasingly depressed and dissatisfied. Aside from the occasional afternoon of bridge, or Saturday night dances at the officers’ club, there was little social life at Gaillard, and Mamie resisted the usual round of tennis, swimming, and horseback riding that filled the days of most military dependents. She spoke no Spanish, was too timid to venture into nearby Panama City, and confined her shopping excursions to the post exchange and commissary. The Douds visited in June 1922 and were shocked by the situation they found. They insisted that Mamie return to Denver with them for the birth of her baby. At Camp Meade, when Mamie found conditions not to her liking, she had retreated to the comfort of her parents’ home, and once again she readily agreed.
This time Ike and Mamie stayed in touch by writing frequently, and when the baby was born on August 3, 1922, Eisenhower was present, having obtained three weeks’ leave from a sympathetic General Conner. Christened John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower in honor of Mamie’s father, the baby brought momentary joy to the Eisenhowers. “John did much to fill the gap that we felt so poignantly and so deeply every day of our lives since the death of our first son,” Ike later recalled. “While his arrival did not, of course, eliminate the grief we still felt, he was precious in his own right and he did much to take our minds off the tragedy. Living in the present with a healthy, bouncing baby boy can take parents’ minds off almost anything.”58
Eisenhower remained in Denver briefly and then returned to Panama. Mamie stayed another several months. When she returned to Gaillard in the autumn of 1922, she brought a nurse, Katherine Herrick, from Denver General Hospital, to take care of the baby. John Doud paid Ms. Herrick’s salary and expenses, and she remained with the family for the next four years. That autumn, Virginia Conner observed a difference in the Eisenhowers. “After Johnny was born and Mamie felt better, she began to change. I had the delight of seeing a rather callow young woman turn into the person to whom everyone turned. I have seen her, with her gay laugh and personality, smooth out Ike’s occasional irritability.”59
But the reconciliation between Ike and Mamie was soon tested. Eisenhower’s round-the-clock commitment to Conner and the 20th Infantry Brigade began to take its toll. Mamie became despondent, and her health deteriorated. “I was down to skin and bones and hollow-eyed,” she later recalled. “My health and vitality seemed to ebb away. I don’t know how I existed.”60
Once again Mamie fled to Denver, taking the baby and Katherine Herrick with her. Ike begged her to stay, but she refused. According to their granddaughter Susan, Mamie’s return to Denver was a defining moment in her life. “From the vantage of 750 Lafayette Street she was able to take stock of her marriage and the life she had led for nearly eight years.”
Under the watchful eye of her parents, Mamie’s health improved and she started to see old friends and classmates again. She could not help but notice how her girlfriends were living: theirs were lives she could understand. These women had husbands who quit working at dinnertime and spent the evenings with their families. They were bankers, lawyers, and doctors who led predictable lives in clean, safe places.
But as Mamie began to feel better, she was able to take a harder look at the men themselves. As secure and stable as their lives seemed to be, Mamie realized she would not want to be married to any of them—she missed Ike. And she had also finally outgrown home.61
Mamie made peace with the Army, and with Ike’s career. The first great crisis of their married life had been weathered. Mamie returned to Panama and committed herself to tough it out. “I knew almost from the day I married Ike that he would be a great soldier,” she said. “Nothing came before his duty. I was forced to match his spirit of personal sacrifice as best I could.”62
Eisenhower’s efficiency reports in Panama were consistently superior. Conner called him “one of the most capable, efficient, and loyal officers I have ever met,” and recommended that he be sent to the Command and General Staff School (CGSS) at Fort Leavenworth.63 Mrs. Conner said, “I never saw two men more congenial than Ike Eisenhower and my husband.”64 Fox Conner was truly Eisenhower’s guardian angel. He had saved him from possible court-martial in 1922 when he asked for Ike in Panama. Now, in the summer of 1924, as Conner prepared to leave the Canal Zone (he would become the Army’s assistant chief of staff for logistics, G-4), Conner arranged for Eisenhower to be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for which he had been recommended at Camp Colt, but that had been twice denied. On the parade ground at Gaillard, with the 20th Infantry Brigade drawn up to pass in review, Fox Conner presented Ike with the Army’s DSM “for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services” at Camp Colt in 1918. Conner had recommended to Pershing that the award be conferred, and Pershing habitually accepted Conner’s advice.
Eisenhower’s tour in Panama ended in September 1924. With General Conner’s encouragement he had requested assignment to the CGSS at Fort Leavenworth. Instead, he was ordered back to Camp Meade as an assistant coach of the III Corps Area football team. “Why, three months ahead of schedule I was moved thousands of miles from Panama to Chesapeake Bay to join three other officers in a football coaching assignment is still a cosmic top-secret wonder to me,” wrote Eisenhower some forty years later.65 War Department brass evidently thought a successful season for the local football team would provide valuable publicity for the Army, and they assembled a top-flight coaching staff at Meade. But the coaches did not have the players to work with. Eisenhower’s team won only one game that season and lost the final to the Marines 20–0.
Before the season ended Eisenhower received orders for a permanent change of station to Fort Benning, where he was to command the 15th Light Tank Battalion—“the same old tanks I had commanded several years earlier.”66 As Ike saw it, his career had stalled. Without attendance at Leavenworth, there was little prospect of high command. Dismayed at the prospect, Eisenhower went to the War Department to plead his case to the chief of infantry, a post still occupied by Major General Charles S. Farnsworth. Ike should have known bett
er. “Carry out your orders,” said Farnsworth, without listening to Eisenhower’s reclama. That was Army tradition. Junior officers, even field-grade officers, had no business questioning their assignments.
The chances are that Eisenhower would have been selected by the infantry to attend Leavenworth, if not in the next class, then in the one thereafter. Three years of superior efficiency ratings in Panama placed him in the top 10 percent of all majors on active duty, and his assignment to command a battalion at Benning (a rarity in the Army of 1924) scarcely suggested he was in official disfavor. But Eisenhower was impatient. Contrary to Fox Conner’s dictum, he appears to have taken himself too seriously. On his way out of the old State, War, and Navy Building on Pennsylvania Avenue he stopped by to see General Conner, whose office was down the hall from Farnsworth’s. There is no record of their conversation, but several days later Ike received a cryptic telegram:
Eisenhower family reunion on the front porch in Abilene, 1925. From left, Roy, Arthur, Earl, Edgar, David, Ike, Milton, and Ida. (illustration credit 3.4)
NO MATTER WHAT ORDERS YOU RECEIVE FROM THE WAR DEPARTMENT, MAKE NO PROTEST. ACCEPT THEM WITHOUT QUESTION. SIGNED CONNER.67
Conner was sympathetic to Ike’s plight, and used his influence to circumvent the chief of infantry. Eisenhower was abruptly transferred to the adjutant general corps and assigned to Fort Logan, Colorado, on recruiting duty—normally a tombstone appointment for officers who had been passed over for promotion. “Had anyone else suggested [such a move] I would have been outraged,” said Ike, “but with my solid belief in Fox Conner I kept my temper.”68 For Mamie, the move to Fort Logan could not have been more welcome—a fact that Conner had also considered. Fort Logan is on the outskirts of Denver, roughly seven miles from the Doud home on Lafayette Street, and for the first time in years she and Ike and baby John were able to spend time with her family. Eisenhower went through the motions of a peacetime Army recruiter, and in April 1925, more or less on schedule, orders arrived notifying him that he had been selected by the adjutant general to attend the Command and General Staff School with the class entering in August 1925. “I was ready to fly,” said Eisenhower. “And I needed no airplane.”69 f
Eisenhower in War and Peace Page 8