Pennsylvania: About the Battle

For Old Soldier Dwight Eisenhower, no battle holds more lasting interest than a three-day conflict in which he never fought. Ike first visited Gettysburg as a West Point cadet assigned to traipse the fields and trace the engagement’s moves and countermoves. As a World War I lieutenant colonel, he was stationed there at a temporary Army post called Camp Colt. In 1950, as a retired general, he bought a farm on the battlefield’s edge. As President of the U.S., he entertained such guests as Viscount Montgomery. Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and even Nikita Khrushchev with fragmentary accounts of the battle. And last week, enjoying the uncluttered leisure of retirement, Ike, for the first time, hosted a full-length battlefield tour.

Women in Camp. The guests at the day-long outing were 38 freshmen Republican Congressmen. Gettysburg was hot, but their host was in cool good humor. Attempting to point out the wheatfields across which Pickett’s divi sion made its ruinous charge, Ike discovered the view blocked by a parked bus. When he asked that the bus be moved, one Congressman quipped, “Is that an executive order, Mr. President?” Chortled Ike, when the bus driver was slow in moving: “And obeyed just about as rapidly.” Climbing aboard one of the congressional buses, Ike handled a microphone like a veteran tour guide,* broadcast a military man’s running estimate of Civil War generals: “Never in the war did Lee establish good staff work . . . The two best men the Union had were McDowell and Pope, until they got Meade . . . One of the biggest problems was keeping women out of Hooker’s camp . . . Kilpatrick sent two brigades of Union cavalry to charge the southern flank, and they were butchered. That cavalry can’t charge has been true since Ney tried to win at Waterloo.”

A principal point pressed home by Ike was that Gettysburg was fought more for political than for military reasons. “The Confederacy needed recognition from European powers,” he said. “Recognition could not come about by winning defensive battles.” The explanation served as a timely backdrop to a discussion of more recent military-political battles. After lunch at the Gettysburg Hotel, Ike agreed to answer questions from the Congressmen. Immediately, he was asked whether it was true that Berlin’s troubles were born when he, as Commander of World War II Allied forces, failed to move on that city. Said Ike, recalling the late war period in which Churchill pushed for Allied occupation of Berlin and Roosevelt did not: “We were soldiers, not politicos … To say that any military decision would have saved this present difficulty with Berlin is just rewriting history.” From Berlin, the discussion moved to the invasion of Cuba. Ike denied that the invasion strategy had been planned by his Administration. Said he: “These Cuban refugees had a great desire to go back to Cuba, so we began organizing them and giving them weapons and training them. But beyond that we could not go, because at that time there was no recognized leader.”

“How Could They Do Better?” Ike’s luncheon talk was the only serious moment in a high-humored day. At tour’s close, the Congressmen lined up in the lee of Ike’s barn to be photographed, one by one, shaking hands with the G.O.P.’s most famous member. After all the pictures were taken, someone asked Ike if he contemplated running for the Senate. Replied he, flashing the old Eisenhower grin: “I suppose I should say ‘How could they do better?’ “

* Guide Eisenhower fluffed once: patting an old cannon, he cited Gettysburg as the first battle in which breech-loading artillery was used. It was not. The British used breechloaders in the Crimea and in the Opium War with China. In the U.S. Civil War, breech-loading guns were in action in 1862 at Seven Pines and during the siege of Vicksburg.