EISENHOWER: In war or politics, a kinship with millions

WHEREVER the President went, with his leathery grin, his vigorous talk, he was met by friendly people. “Well hi … Why, hello there . . . Yes thanks, I’m feeling fine.” He kept up a constant chatter as he waved to big crowds in city streets and small crowds at country crossroads, changing pace to drop his upraised hands and bow gently from the waist to a group of nuns, or stopping solemnly to salute the colors of a high-school band. Nowhere was there a hail-the-conquering-hero quality to the welcome; everywhere the setting was warm, relaxed, assured, befitting the national mood that the President, more than anyone else, has created. “I am often asked,” he said in Pittsburgh, “what is the difference between this country now and in 1952? . . . It is this . . . We are just happier. We are just a happier nation.”

By last week the magic kinship between Ike and the campaign crowds was hardly news, for the story could only be reported in round numbers, and the numbers rolled on from Peoria to Pittsburgh, from St. Paul to Portland. They rolled on just as they had in other years when the kinship was military, the numbers were millions, and the place names were London, Bizerte, Palermo, Salerno, Normandy and Bastogne. Probably no man in public life today has touched so many people in so many different ways as Dwight David Eisenhower. Yet, strangely, it is the sum total of Dwight Eisenhower’s 66 years that is still news in election year 1956, for in his role of President-Candidate he is so completely absorbed and absorbing that the thousands who see and cheer him tend to forget that he ever really played any other.

The Boy in Wild Bill’s Town

Whatever Ike is and whatever Ike may yet become derives from his boyhood in the Abilene, Kans, of the 1890s. Ike and his brothers were taught to be mindful of their parents and their Bibles (“there was nothing sad about their religion”). The youngsters played tag on the barn roof and dared one another to lean over the edge, fished lazily for catfish in Mud Creek and the Smoky Hill River, fanned imaginary six-shooters in the style of Abilene’s old Marshal Wild Bill Hickok, who had journeyed away to his death in Deadwood not 30 years before. One October evening after school Ike nobly bore the honor of Abilene’s South Side through a classic two-hour fistfight against Wesley Merrifield, champion of the more prosperous North Side. The fight ended in a draw. “Ike,” gasped Wes, “I can’t lick you.” “Well, Wes,” said Ike grimly, “I haven’t licked you.”

In Abilene, Ike made his first money selling homegrown vegetables (tomatoes were 5¢ a pound). And when he got his first job pulling ice, loading wagons and firing furnaces in the Belle Springs Creamery (working his way up to night foreman), his friends made their headquarters there, drawn to Ike by qualities they still describe as “horse sense” and “keen sense of humor.” In 1910, suddenly conscious of his own aimlessness, Ike heeded a friend’s advice and took an examination for Annapolis and West Point. (The Navy lost a future admiral because he was eight months too old for the Naval Academy.) In June 1911 he reported for duty, “Eisenhower from Kansas, sir,” thus consigning his frontier exuberance to the stern mold of discipline of the Point.

There, so said one of his instructors, Ike was “a not uncommon type.” He moved through four years from 57th out of 212 to 61st out of 164, accumulating demerits for such offenses as “using profanity at supper” and “violation of orders with reference to dancing,” e.g., doing the turkey trot. On the football field, Ike became a star halfback who once downed Jim Thorpe (“We really stopped him-hard”) and might have made All-America had he not wrenched his knee.

On Graduation Day, June 12, 1915, Ike was no less inspired than any of his comrades as he sang the West Point hymn:

The Corps! Bareheaded salute it, With eyes up, thanking our God . . .

When Ike moved on to his first infantry posts and training schools during World War I he began to pick up a reputation as a disciplinarian. Around the age when he courted and married Mamie Geneva Doud, a slender girl with violet eyes (the Douds’ maid was provoked one day when “Mr. I-Something” kept calling every 15 minutes), he was finding a new confidence that led him on to command, at 27, the tank training center at Camp Colt, Pa. But soon after Christmas 1920 their first child, Doud Dwight (“Icky”), died of scarlet fever when he was only three. Ike stumbled out of the hospital room blind with grief, and Mamie, close to a breakdown, lost something of her vitality which she did not recover for years.

Tne Siege or Fort Leavenwortn

With a new zeal that bordered on perfectionism, Ike threw himself anew into soldiering. Serving nearly three years (1922-24) in Panama with a little-known man of fire, Brigadier General Fox Conner, Ike did such a stringent job as executive officer that many of his juniors have neither forgotten nor forgiven. In his spare hours he buried himself in extracurricular study of maps, charts and treatises of the great historical campaigns prescribed by his mentor Fox Conner. Night after night (Mamie went home to Denver to have another child-son John) the intense young major and the spark-eyed general debated and deliberated about command in wartime. “When we go into [the next] war,” said Conner to Ike, “it will be in company with allies. Leaders will have to learn how to overcome nationalistic considerations. Systems of single command will have to be worked out.”

History lay on Major Eisenhower as he packed his bags and moved on to the Army’s famed Command and General Staff school at Fort Leavenworth. Never before had he slogged so hard, and in the summer of 1926 Ike graduated at the top of the class of 275 of the most promising officers of the U.S. Army. Two years later he graduated at the top of the Army War College, too. After the siege of Fort Leavenworth was won, there was a grand celebration at the Hotel Muehlebach in Kansas City, with Ike roaring out Casey Jones and Abdul the Bulbul Ameer and receiving a note of congratulation from another officer upon whom the hand of history lay. The Command and General Staff school must be good, opined Major George Smith Patton Jr., if “A he-man can come out No.1.”

Through the next 13 years, history moved on through hypernormalcy, depression and isolation while Hitler rose, taunting, to turn Europe into a horror of fear. Eisenhower, born one year after Hitler, remained a major through the Army’s lean, hungry years. Much of this time Ike was a staff officer in the War Department learning the beginning of statecraft-interservice and interclique. For four years (1935-39) he served in the Philippines as senior aide to Douglas MacArthur, and there he learned something of Filipino politics and a lot about how to control his frustration when MacArthur (whom Ike admired for his military thinking, disliked for his dramatics) pigeonholed his repeated requests to serve with troops. Throughout, Ike kept at his studying. Finally he was posted to Fort Lewis, Wash, as executive officer of the 15th Infantry Regiment, was promoted to chief of staff of the IX Corps with the temporary rank of full colonel.

Pegged as a comer, Ike was yanked away to serve as chief of staff to General Walter Krueger’s Third Army in the big Louisiana Maneuvers in the fall of 1941. There he handled the movements of 270,000 men so brilliantly that the rival Second Army was “annihilated” (except George Patton, who turned up with a force of Second Army tanks in Eisenhower’s rear). This stunning victory opened the eyes of Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall, and soon Ike began moving surefootedly upward through the stars of generalship. Right after Pearl Harbor, Marshall made him assistant chief of war plans, then chief, then ordered Ike to draw up an organization plan for the European Theater. So well was it drawn that, on Marshall’s urging, Franklin Roosevelt reached far down through the ranks to appoint Ike the ETO’s Commander in Chief.

On the eve of North Africa, the soldier with iron in his soul showed something of the gee-whiz of Abilene. “I have operational command of Gibraltar,” he wrote, “the symbol of the solidity of the British Empire-the hallmark of safety and security at home … I simply must have a grandchild or I’ll never have the fun of telling this when I’m fishing, grey-bearded, on the bank of a quiet bayou in the deep south.”

Tne Calm Before Normandy

During the 30 famous months that followed, Eisenhower led the armies, navies and air forces of the allied nations to victory over Germany. Around him there gathered an amazing array of talent, e.g., Montgomery in his beret and sweater, heir to Wellington; Patton with his pearl-handled pistols, heir to Sheridan. Ike was their adjudicator, their catalyst, their guide. Around Ike, too, there hung the thundercloud pronunciamentos and tangled hunches of Roosevelt and Churchill; Ike was their simplifies their interpolator, their acknowledged authority on the spot. “I have not devised any plan on the basis of what individual or what nation gets the glory,” the Supreme Commander rasped among allies one day, “for there is no glory in war worth the blood it costs.”

Spreading outward from Ike across sandscapes in North Africa, across olive groves in Italy and hedgerows in Normandy, 3,000,000 Americans advanced according to Ike’s plans (Glenn Miller records on beat-up phonographs; hands and toes frozen cold in open vehicles; letters from home in the snow and the sun), always learning-like Ike-how to do better next time. Humiliated at Kasserine Pass, Ike shouldered full personal responsibility, insisting to the doubtful and the critical that the green would learn but that the duds must go. “For God’s sake,” he wrote furiously to a comrade, “don’t keep anybody around of whom you say to yourself ‘He may get by.’ He won’t! Throw him out!”

As the big outfit shook down, Ike learned how to take his tremendous decisions with calm. On the night of D-minus-one, Sicily, he went for a walk along a lonely beach in Malta lighted by the moon and whipped by the wind, fingering three good-luck coins. In June 1944, Ike heeded the dour warnings of the meteorologists and held back the Normandy invasion for 24 hours; at 0400 on D-minus-one the meteorologists reported “a gleam of hope”-24 to 36 hours of fair weather to be followed by high winds and rough seas. Quietly, Ike sat there, forbearing to pace up and down, his face tense and drawn in the silence. At last he looked up, the tension gone. “Well,” he said briskly, “we’ll go.”

That day Ike moved quietly among the paratroopers of the 82nd and101st Airborne Divisions as they mustered about their C-475, blackfaced, ready to go. There were those on Ike’s staff who had used the word “murder” about Ike’s decision to drop the airborne into uncertain weather, but now Ike was there: “Where are you from, son? What did you do back home? Anyone here from Kansas?” One Texan paratrooper perked up his morale by offering the Supreme Commander a job on a ranch after the war; Ike perked up his own morale by kidding with another paratrooper about the blackface camouflage of cocoa and linseed oil-“Taste good?” “Damn good!” Only when the laden men boarded the C-475 and headed into the night did Ike lose his composure, blinking his eyes fast, swallowing hard, but still waving and shouting, “Good luck-Godspeed!”

And that evening with the paratroopers irretrievably bound for triumph or murder or both, Ike lay on his bed reading a western until word came through that most of landings were “unbelievably successful.”

When the campaign was over (short of Berlin, not in it) it was Ike who best expressed the meanings in his Guildhall speech in London. “To preserve his freedom … a Londoner will fight. So will a citizen of Abilene.” And as he looked one way across the rubble at the Soviets and the other way to Mamie and home, Ike finished World War II as he had fought it, in total tune with his men. “Aside from disappointment in being unable to solve in clean-cut fashion some of the nagging problems,” he wrote, “I just plain miss my family.”

While Harry Truman was in Germany for the Potsdam Conference, he offered to help Ike win “the presidency in 1948.” But Ike firmly declined. He came home to become Army chief of staff and to get an acrid noseful of the seamier side of statecraft when he fought for interservice unification. He did not want any political post, he snapped angrily to a reporter in 1946, “from dogcatcher to Grand High Supreme King of the Universe.” But the following year he wrote to his old chief of staff Bedell Smith more thoughtfully: “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 . . . Nathan Hale accepted the order to serve as a spy with extreme reluctance and distaste. Nevertheless he did so serve.”

But” the process took time and it was well for the bogged-down U.S. that Ike was working out his own political philosophy and amassing some more civilian and diplomatic qualifications. From his job as president of Columbia University (1948-50) President Truman recalled him to command and to fuse the forces of NATO, the heart of U.S. and Western European foreign policy. There Ike began to hear the mounting summons of Republicans and independents (“What a mess our blessed nation is in,” the dying Senator Vandenberg had cried, adding hopefully, “Thank God for Eisenhower”) urging him to come home and run.

Tke Urge to Complete

The next step came in January 1952 when Ike let it be known that he was available for a draft. Then he had to learn the hard way that his duty lay within the democratic procedure of competing and campaigning; he also had to suffer the election campaign doubts of those who feared that he might be, after all, a gladhander, a straddler, a man who could be led around, or swayed by the plaudits of the crowd. But when, after nomination and election, the prospective Eisenhower Cabinet approved the draft of his inaugural speech somewhat unctuously, Ike said sharply: “I read it far more for your blue pencils than for your applause.”

Increasingly and almost imperceptibly Ike has become and is becoming less the briefed and more the briefer; always he is developing new interests, new knowledge, about the kaleidoscopic facets of his job. As of now, for example, he is fascinated by the electoral mechanism of democracy at the precinct level; as of now, Ike, aware that his party is as short on expounding its theory as it is long on pragmatic accomplishment, is prodding and stimulating the thinkers of dynamic conservatism, specifically including himself. “It is what I do,” he says of all his energies and activities. “I always put everything I have got into what I do.”

One night last week Ike paced the living room of his eleventh-floor suite in the Olympic Hotel in Seattle; outside the skies were dark; the rain was beating against the windows. It had been a long and tiring day-33 miles motor-cading through the boom and bustle of Minneapolis and St. Paul, both arms waving in the wind and the sun; then 1,400 miles by plane across sweeping prairies and snowcapped mountains to the slate-grey shores of Puget Sound-but he was still vibrantly awake as he talked to a visitor about what he had seen and felt that day.

Suddenly Dwight Eisenhower, a man who has come hard and come far and is still coming on, summed up the past and the promise. “Why do I want a second term?” he asked. “I . want it for one real reason. I want to finish what I’ve started.’^