Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  Discussions began in late October 1950. President Truman caught up with Eisenhower in Chicago—Ike was on a speaking tour to Columbia alumni groups in the Midwest—and in a brief telephone conversation asked him to come to Washington when the tour ended to discuss the possibility of his assuming command of the (still to be created) Atlantic Pact Defense Forces. “I arrived in Washington by military plane about midnight on Friday, the 27th,” Eisenhower recorded in his diary. “The situation seems to be about as follows:”

  The American Chiefs of Staff are convinced that the Commander-in-Chief for the Atlantic Pact Forces should be named immediately. Originally, it was the conception that the Commander should not be named until there were actually large forces to command.… The opinion finally prevailed that if a commander’s prestige was going to do any good, it would be best used … while we are trying to get each of the nations involved to put forth maximum effort. I am informed that they unanimously desire that the Commander should be an American and specifically myself.77

  Eisenhower and Truman sparred briefly over semantics. Ike wanted to be ordered back to active duty; the president wanted to make it a “request.” But that was not a sticking point. A more serious problem pertained to German rearmament. The United States and Britain wanted German forces included in NATO; the French were strongly opposed. Ike thought the matter could be gradually resolved with a bit of give-and-take on both sides, but that if it were not, he would have “great doubts” about the wisdom of accepting command. “As of this moment, I would estimate that the chances are about nine out of ten that I will be back in uniform in a short time.”78

  No public announcement was made. Throughout November the matter remained in abeyance, although the Columbia Spectator, the campus undergraduate newspaper, reported that Eisenhower’s presidential office would make no appointments for him after January 5, 1951.79 The technicalities were tricky. Truman could not name Ike as supreme commander until requested to do so by the North Atlantic Council, and the council did not meet until December 18. On the morning of the eighteenth in Brussels, they unanimously requested Truman to name Eisenhower, and as soon as he was informed, the president called Ike with the news.80

  Eisenhower was sitting in a Pullman car outside Tiffin, Ohio, when he was told that the president was trying to reach him. Ike had stopped at Tiffin to speak at Heidelberg College, which was celebrating its centennial year, and was en route to Denver for the Christmas holidays.

  “Where can I take the call?” Eisenhower asked.

  “Well, there is a little box down the line,” he was told. “Maybe an eighth of a mile. You can take the call right there.”81

  Eisenhower tromped down the tracks through a foot of snow and got a connection to the White House, and the president asked him to take the NATO command. As Ike recalled, Truman put it in the form of a request, and he met the president halfway. “I told him I had been a soldier all my life and I would report at any time he said.”82

  The Columbia trustees immediately granted Eisenhower an indefinite leave of absence and named Vice President Grayson Kirk as the university’s chief administrative officer in Ike’s absence. “It is understood,” said board chairman Coykendall, “that General Eisenhower will resume his duties as President of the University immediately upon his military release.”83

  The Columbia Spectator, which had been critical of Eisenhower in recent months, praised Ike for having restored Columbia’s reputation. “The University must strive to maintain the ideals which its President has been called upon to defend once again. With General Eisenhower go the hopes of the nation and free world.”84

  Eisenhower reports to President Truman on the parlous state of Western Europe’s defenses, January 31, 1951. (illustration credit 17.3)

  Eisenhower, in uniform again, departed for Paris on an exploratory visit on January 6, 1951. He returned to Washington on January 31 and was met by President Truman at National Airport. After briefing the president, he addressed a joint session of Congress and then delivered a radio and television broadcast to the nation. Time magazine, which put Ike on its cover for the sixth time, said that he had done what President Truman could not do. According to Time, Eisenhower had routed the “calamity-howlers and the super cautious. In the desolate winter of 1951, the Western world heard the first, heart-warming note of spring.”85

  Ike’s media blitz was an indication of how controversial the idea of a North Atlantic alliance had become. While Eisenhower and the Truman administration argued that America’s borders were no longer on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, but on the Elbe and the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea, the Republican Old Guard appeared determined to retreat to Fortress America. Former president Herbert Hoover, emerging from the long eclipse into which FDR had cast him, demanded the withdrawal of all American forces from Europe, and Senator Robert Taft, perhaps the most vocal Republican in the Senate, had not only voted against the NATO treaty but was actively trying to scuttle the plan to build up Western forces in Europe by arguing that the president had no authority to send troops overseas in peacetime without congressional authorization.

  Taft was making his fourth bid for the presidency, and with the internationalist wing of the Republican party in disarray following the successive defeats of Wendell Willkie in 1940, and Dewey in 1944 and 1948, was the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination in 1952. Eisenhower saw Taft as the key to obtaining a domestic consensus for the idea of collective security. On his own authority, and without discussing the matter with President Truman, Ike invited Taft to the Pentagon for a private chat. If Taft would support American participation in NATO on a bipartisan basis, Eisenhower was prepared to repudiate any efforts to make himself the GOP candidate in 1952. Since Ike was the only person who stood between Taft and the nomination, his refusal to run would cinch the nomination for Taft.

  Eisenhower was fully aware of the import of his commitment. As he had done the night before D-Day, he wrote out a note in longhand and put it in his coat pocket. If Taft would come on board and support collective security, Ike planned to issue the statement to the press that evening, dramatically taking himself out of the presidential race. “Having been called back to military duty,” he wrote, “I want to announce that my name may not be used by anyone as a candidate for president—and if they do I will repudiate such efforts.”86

  The meeting went poorly. Taft was whisked up to Ike’s office clandestinely for what Eisenhower later described as “a long talk.” Despite every argument Ike mounted, Taft remained unmoved. NATO, he thought, was more likely to provoke the Soviet Union rather than deter it. Membership in the alliance represented an “interventionist” policy that would involve the United States in the old quarrels of Europe. It would also require money, which would mean higher taxes and might possibly fuel inflation. “Our conversation was friendly,” Ike recalled, “but I had no success.” When Taft left, Eisenhower called in his aides and tore up the statement he had written.87 “My disappointment was acute,” said Ike. “I concluded that it might be more effective to keep some aura of mystery around my future plans. For the moment I decided to remain silent, not to declare myself out as a potential political factor.”88

  Ike had taken Taft’s measure. He did not disagree with the senator on domestic issues, but found his insularity appalling. “He is a very stupid man,” Eisenhower subsequently told Cyrus Sulzberger of The New York Times. “He has no intellectual ability, nor any comprehension of the world”—a surprisingly harsh assessment from someone who had finished well down in his class at West Point.89 Taft had been valedictorian at Yale and finished first in his class at Harvard Law, but whereas Ike had grown to assume global responsibility, Taft over the years had become painfully provincial.90

  On February 8, 1951, Eisenhower met with Columbia’s board of trustees. Ike said that after examining the situation in Europe, he could not estimate the length of his assignment. He suggested that his leave commence March 1, and that the president’s house be closed durin
g his absence. “You gentlemen cannot long afford to go on under the situation of having an ‘absentee’ president,” said Ike. He told the board they should feel free whenever they found it necessary “to take steps to find my successor. You may consider, accordingly, that you have my resignation before you, to be acted on at any time you desire.”91

  That evening, Ike and Mamie said farewell to three hundred trustees and faculty at a reception at the Faculty Club. “Dr. Butler would have had the reception at 60 Morningside,” noted Dean Carl Ackerman of the School of Journalism, “but Mrs. E. has not received any Univ. people in Pres. House.” Eisenhower, speaking to the guests assembled, said, “I will always have a warm spot in my heart for Columbia,” and that he “hoped to return some day.” After a brief vacation in Puerto Rico, he and Mamie departed for Paris on February 15.92

  University presidents come and go like ships passing in the night. They hope for clear sailing. Those who provide sustained academic leadership are few and far between: Charles Eliot at Harvard, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Robert Hutchins at Chicago are the most notable examples. Eisenhower was far from a failure. He gave Columbia enhanced international prestige, defended academic freedom in a time of uncertainty, broke the cycle of deficit spending, and put the university’s fiscal house in order. “He didn’t mess things up,” said Columbia historian Eric Foner. “That’s what one hopes for in a president.”93

  * * *

  a General Bradley lived down the street from Eisenhower at Fort Myer’s Quarters 7. Ike and Bradley worked together harmoniously but did not socialize. Evidently Mamie and Bradley’s wife, Mary, did not get along. Bradley and Blair, General’s Life 463.

  b Ulysses Grant was offered a similar lump sum arrangement by Mark Twain for his memoirs but turned it down in favor of royalties. If Twain did not make money on the book, Grant did not want any. “This was just like Grant,” said Twain. “It was absolutely impossible for him to entertain for a moment any proposition which might prosper him at the risk of any other man.” Samuel Clemens, 1 Mark Twain’s Autobiography 40 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924).

  c The Augusta National Golf Club, site of the annual Masters Tournament, is ranked by golfing aficionados as the finest course in the nation. Membership in the club is limited to three hundred and is by invitation only. One does not apply. Annual dues are low because of the television earnings from the Masters. Current members include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, and T. Boone Pickens.

  d Dorothy Draper, considered by many to be the doyenne of the design industry in the twentieth century, is best known as the inventor of “Modern Baroque”—a flamboyant style best suited for large public places where people might come and feel elevated in the presence of great beauty. Her works include New York’s Hotel Carlyle and Hampshire House; the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia; Washington’s Mayflower Hotel; the Drake Hotel in Chicago; and the Palácio Quitandinha in Petrópolis, an hour north of Rio de Janeiro. The restaurant at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was once nicknamed the “Dorotheum” because of her design. Carleton Varney, The Draper Touch: The High Life and High Style of Dorothy Draper (New York: Prentice Hall, 1988).

  e Butler himself had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, sharing it with Jane Addams, former president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and founder of Hull House in Chicago.

  f Pupin Hall, a National Historic Landmark, was built by McKim, Mead, and White in the late twenties, and is one of the major edifices on the Columbia campus. It was named for Michael I. Pupin, a Serbian American professor of electromechanics at Columbia from 1901 to 1935, and houses the physics and astronomy departments. The building is best known as the site where Enrico Fermi first split the atom on January 25, 1939. Its large seminar rooms were often used for public lectures, and at the time were easily accessible from 120th Street and Broadway.

  g Stephen Ambrose, citing an undated interview with John Eisenhower, alleges that November 2 “was the darkest night of Eisenhower’s life” because he would be thrust back into the political arena. The quotation does not ring true, given Eisenhower’s subsequent activity. As with many of Ambrose’s “interviews,” his assertion should be taken with a large grain of salt. See Richard Rayner, “Channeling Ike,” The New Yorker, April 26, 2010.

  h Congressman Carl Vinson, a powerful Democrat from Georgia who had chaired the House Naval Affairs Committee and who would chair the new Armed Services Committee, strongly opposed the creation of a post that would resemble a single chief of staff for the armed forces. To gain Vinson’s support for the bill when it was before the House, the Truman administration dropped the proposal for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  i Dr. Thomas Mattingly, a cardiologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, who treated Eisenhower following his heart attack in 1955, suggested that Ike may have suffered a previous attack in 1949, but that it had been covered up by Snyder’s “deceptive diagnosis.” Mattingly acknowledged, however, that he had no proof. See pages 80–82 of Mattingly’s unpublished “Life Health Record of Dwight D. Eisenhower” at the Eisenhower Library. Professor Clarence G. Lasby of the University of Texas examined Mattingly’s claim in detail and after ten pages of convincing evidence notes that it points to one conclusion: “Eisenhower did not have a heart attack in 1949.” Consider, for example, Ike’s letter to his former aide James Stack written on May 16, his first day back at Columbia, which belies the possibility of a heart attack. Ike told Stack that “I have frequently played eighteen holes of golf a day during the past month and on one or two occasions even twenty-seven holes. This did not seem to bother me in spite of the fact that I take a great many more strokes than the average person does in getting around the course.” DDE to James Stack, May 16, 1949, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 10, Columbia 581; Clarence G. Lasby, Eisenhower’s Heart Attack: How Ike Beat Heart Disease and Held On to the Presidency 47–50 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); compare, Robert H. Ferrell, Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust 63, 65 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992).

  j The fact that Ike and Mamie chose to dine with Lucius and Marjorie Clay and snub Omar and Mary Bradley not only suggests Eisenhower’s disdain for university responsibilities but also reflects the tension in the relationship between Mamie and Mary Bradley.

  k Eisenhower’s October 16, 1952, statement is reprinted in full below. Compare it to his statement on the eve of the Democratic convention, which is at page 477. Said Ike:

  Any American would be complimented by the knowledge that any other American considered him qualified to fill the most important post in our country. In this case the compliment comes from a man who is Governor of a great State and who has devoted many years of his life to public service. So, of course, I am grateful for Governor Dewey’s good opinion of me.

  As for myself, my convictions as to the place and methods through which I can best contribute something to the cause of freedom have been often expressed. They have not changed. Here at Columbia University I have a task that would excite the pride and challenge the qualifications and strength of any man—I still believe that it offers to such an individual as myself rich opportunities for serving America. The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 11, Columbia 1383.

  EIGHTEEN

  “I Like Ike”

  The fact remains, this was a very simple man in a lot of ways.

  —GENERAL LUCIUS D. CLAY

  Ike and Mamie arrived in Cherbourg on the Queen Elizabeth in the early morning hours of February 22, 1951. He found the Western Allies in disarray. At that point there were no forces under NATO control; no headquarters, no command structure, no staff, and no logistical support. The political situation was equally grim. De Gaulle had long since relinquished power in France to the Fourth Republic, and French political life had reverted to its prewar instability. René Pleven was the eighth premier since 1947; the French Communist Party (PCF) was the second largest party i
n the National Assembly; and there would be five more cabinet shuffles before Eisenhower returned to the United States the following year. Militarily the United States and Britain each had one division stationed in Germany, the bulk of the French Army was in Indochina, and the Germans had not yet begun to rearm. Against this puny force the Russians could deploy upwards of seventy-five full-strength divisions and an equal number of satellite formations.

  At no time did Eisenhower believe the Soviets would attack.1 Aside from the preponderant American nuclear arsenal, Russian losses in World War II had been so severe, and the damage so widespread, that the likelihood of renewed hostilities seemed to him remote. Far more serious was the danger of Communist political takeovers, and in Ike’s view a resolute Atlantic alliance would help deter it. His task, as he saw it, was to provide symbolic leadership and to encourage the eleven European members of NATO to raise the forces that would be necessary to convince the Soviets that Europe was prepared to defend itself. The primary purpose of NATO, in Eisenhower’s view, was “the preservation of peace.” Its secondary mission was to defend Western Europe should that fail.2

  In a very real sense, Ike was NATO and NATO was Ike. During his first year in Europe, Eisenhower traveled tirelessly from capital to capital assuring his listeners that the United States was their partner but that in the end Europe would have to be defended by Europeans. “We cannot be a modern Rome guarding the far frontiers of empire with our legions,” said Ike.3 When, shortly after announcing the “Truman Doctrine” of aid to Greece and Turkey, President Truman told Eisenhower that he would support any country against Communism, Ike suggested a more subtle shading. “We should promise support to any country prepared to defend itself. We should not embark on a straight anti-Communist campaign around the world. We must encourage independent nations to fight for their independence against aggression.”4