Eminentoes/We Liked Ike
Brookhiser, Richard
EMINENTOES WE LIKED IKE by Richard Brookhiser Publishers marked the centennial of P Dwight David Eisenhower's birth last year a little listlessly. Stephen E. Ambrose's standard biography appeared...
...Like Grant, Eisenhower brought to his military career a mind that was initially un-martial...
...His success was also based on a cool self-centeredness...
...Eisenhower: A Centennial Life, by Michael R. Beschloss, HarperCollins, $29.95...
...Eisenhower recognized that, if his running mate left the ticket in disgrace, "we can't possibly win," but was determined that Nixon save himself...
...Nixon's TV agon not only turned Eisenhower's flank by appealing over the hero's head to the GOP rank and file, but forced all the candidates, including Eisenhower, to disclose their finances...
...As his mother salved and bandaged his wounds, she told him, "He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city...
...He had "a rather naive wonder at attaining the high position in which he found himself," wrote an English admiral after World War II...
...Eisenhower grew up in Abilene, Kansas...
...What tan-gled webs we weave, when first we practice to . . . be modest...
...Yet his fiscal holding operation left the structure of the modern state intact...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 T he spring of his achievements 1 flowed from a rock of self-control...
...Reputation, which is the plaything of intellectuals, is more fickle...
...His main interest at West Point was football, until a knee injury sidelined him...
...The "secret of our marriage," she would later joke, was that she and Ike had "absolutely nothing in common...
...In a war such as this," he wrote, "when high command invariably involves a president, a prime minister, six chiefs of staff, and a horde of lesser planners, there has got to be a lot of patience . . ." He had a knack for keeping willful allies in harness and essential subordinates out of the doghouse...
...Eisenhower was as preoccupied with appearances as Douglas MacArthur, but had a much better sense than MacArthur of which appearances would influence the people he sought to lead...
...Wonder, possibly...
...He spent World War I stateside, training volunteers for the newly organized Tank Corps—a task he had to accomplish without any tanks...
...Like many successful American men, he switched out of his odd religion on the way up and married a girl from the better side of the tracks...
...opularity can be measured at the polls...
...President Eisenhower was indeed a caretaker...
...Given the relative position of the British and American armies along the western front, the racing would have had to be done by Field Marshal Montgomery, whom it is impossible to imagine racing anywhere...
...He had a clear and obvious task, imposed by reality and his political leaders, and he did everything he had to do to beat the Germans...
...When Patton committed his last indiscretion, post-VE Day, Ike let him swing...
...Stassen throws some interesting lights on the character of the man, mostly unwittingly, but his book is limited to Ike's years in the White House...
...The judgment most often made of it, sometimes admiringly, sometimes dismissively, is that his was a "caretaker presidency," and the goal he seemed to set the most store by—balancing the budget—was a caretaker's ideal...
...So two of the people that Eisenhower had slighted found themselves conspiring to ask him not to do something that one of them desperately needed, so potent was Ike's hold on them...
...Mamie Doud, the daughter of a successful Denver meat-packer, had grown tired of "lounge lizards with patent leather hair...
...Eisenhower made Nixon pay for his victory for the next eight years...
...Stephen E. Ambrose's standard biography appeared in a one-volume condensation, a publisher in Minnesota brought out a book of reminiscences by fellow moderate Republican Harold Stassen, and a third firm produced what is essentially a picture book, with text by the young historian Michael R. Beschloss.' 'Eisenhower: Soldier and President, by Stephen E. Ambrose, Simon and Schuster, $29.95...
...naive, never...
...The best of these is the picture book...
...Patton said it best: "Monty is a tired little fart...
...Paul Johnson's account of the Eisenhower years in Modem Times was rapturous...
...His parents were members of the River Brethren, a pacifist reformation sect...
...The only man who ever tied him at his own game (no one beat him) was Richard Nixon...
...Whether he led them effectively is another question...
...Some joke...
...Beschloss marks the turning points: a 1967 article in Esquire by Murray Kempton, which hailed him as the "great tortoise on whose back the world sat for eight years," and a 1982 book, The Hidden-Hand Presidency, by Princeton political scientist Fred Greenstein...
...His greatest service came in uniform...
...He left no will to resist the continuing expansion of the state at home, and no clear principles for foreign policy—none that the sixties followed, anyway...
...I'd like to know what's on the other side of the moon," he snapped after Sputnik, "but I won't pay to find out this year...
...The frequent illnesses that marked her married life and her habit of staying in bed till noon, ill or not, suggest a depressed spirit as much as a delicate constitution...
...In one notable tantrum, he beat his fists bloody against a tree-trunk after his parents forbade him to go out trick-or-treating...
...The occasion was the Checkers speech...
...But as the reputations of his successors tarnished, his brightened...
...He impressed a series of superior officers, including MacArthur, with his administrative abilities, and they kept him in administrative jobs, until the last of them, George Marshall, gave him his first battlefield assignment: command of Allied operations in North Africa...
...1hrning to foreign affairs, it is still hard to read about Eisenhower's response to Suez and his non-response to Hungary without grinding the molars...
...0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 23...
...Eisenhower had a wild temper as a boy...
...He saved George Pat-ton's neck on two occasions, not because of their old friendship but because he needed Patton's abilities as a warrior...
...Eisenhower resisted as best he could...
...Since Hungary became free in 1989 anyway, one may ask what was lost by not doing anything in 1956...
...Eisenhower's, during the first glow of Camelot and the Great Society, was quite dim...
...Richard Brookhiser's most recent book is The Way of the Wasp: How It Made America and How It Can Save It, So to Speak (The Free Press...
...Power was the goal of his mature years and his means of gaining it was the appearance of modesty...
...Besides, there are the pictures...
...Nothing, except thirty-three years in the life of half a continent...
...The anecdote about Ike, asked by a reporter to give an example of a "major idea" that the vice president had come up with, replying, "If you give me a week, I might think of one," has become folkloric...
...Liberals, it is amusing to recall, howled to have defense spending increased—not just hawks like Nelson Rockefeller and John F. Kennedy, but even doves like Adlai Stevenson...
...Let's hold the applause, at least forthe second of his two careers...
...After the debacle of deposit insurance, who makes the most sense...
...He conquered his soul, and he took cities...
...Eisenhower: Turning the World Toward Peace, by Harold Stassen and Marshall Houts, Merrill Magnus, $22.95...
...The Old Guard of the GOP, notes Stassen, wanted to "repeal . . . programs put in place by the New Deal," while "we wanted to keep the ones that made sense over the long haul...
...His 1952 correspondence with Truman, who was trying for the second time to persuade him to accept the Democratic nomination, is a grave comedy of disingenuousness, climaxing, on his part, with the wonderfully evasive line, "This answer is as full and frank as I am able to devise...
...Montgomery's competence waned as he went from Africa to Europe, even as that of the Americans waxed...
...I firmly determined," he wrote, "that my mannerisms and speech in public would always reflect the cheerful certainty of victory...
...He bungled the Falaise Pocket, he bungled the Battle of the Bulge, and he would have bungled a push to Berlin...
...Eisenhower's record as chief executive was more problematic...
...When the scandal of Nixon's secret trust fund blew up, Eisenhower's backers, who had let Nixon on the ticket only as a bridge to the Old Guard, wanted him lynched...
...But my favorite example of torture was the moment, in the home stretch of the 1960 election, when Mamie, via Pat Nixon, begged Richard to ask Ike not to go on an expanded campaign swing, for reasons of health...
...When history and FDR and Churchill told him what to do, he was superb...
...The next three years, which took him from Algeria to the Elbe, were his finest...
...He took in practically everybody...
...O ne conservative myth that we can junk is that, if Eisenhower had been more of a fire-eater, the Allies could have raced to Berlin ahead of the Soviets...
...Ambrose gives the most information of the three, but he also gives you prose like this: "Eisenhower and Patton immediately became and remained fast friends, despite their much different personalities . . . " Beschloss includes most of Ambrose's good anecdotes, highlights the important issues, and keeps things short and sharp...
...Eisenhower's temper stayed with him all his life, along with a tendency towards extreme depression, but he showed the first only when he wanted to, and the second not at all...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
