A Political Soldier

...Except for its proximity to their son John, she disliked the city "intensely...

...He could also be, and was, platitudinous and sanctimonious...

...Perret outlines Eisenhower's differences with Churchill over Operation Torch in North Africa— which he thought was pressed by the Prime Minister "less as a military operation than as a political move"—and Operation Anvil, the invasion of southern France...

...For other influences, notably that of his boyhood friend Swede Hazlett, we must turn elsewhere, especially to a 1984 volume of letters...

...It is not hard to "like Ike," Perret reminds us...

...Harder for them to understand was her being "proud to consider herself a good Army wife...

...These are not bad people," he said in a remark that has been quoted by Earl Warren...

...Perret, a seasoned military historian, is confident and surefooted about Ike the soldier...

...The faculty's scorn was based not so much on what it saw of Eisenhower as what it heard...

...He leaves no doubt about Eisenhower's deserved reputation, drawing contrasts between him and Britain's vain, impossible Field Marshal, Bernard Montgomery...

...Ironically, but typically, he wrote to his brother Edgar shortly after the War, "I'm at the top of any reputation I could hope to build...

...The denizens of Morningside Heights did not cotton to Ike either...

...A fortuitous meeting with Brigadier General Fox Conner "plugged him into the upper echelon of the Army...

...Traces of the "hayseed" remained late in his life, but Eisenhower was far more complicated than Robert Merton ever imagined...

...We get little of the development of the future President's political thinking...

...Here Perret is mostly positive but hardly laudatory...

...Mamie was even more out of place...

...As Army officers measured such matters, he had already compiled a record few majors could equal...

...Eisenhower is described as having "a powerful mind, an excellent memory and a gift for language...

...Still, his image is one of self-deprecatory piety of the sort that fills his published diaries...

...One answer might be Fox Conner, who guided Ike's reading...

...Perret's account approximates other recent ones...

...Faculty wives treated her with disdain...

...We are told of his youthful characterization of the Republican Party as "an organization devoted to securing the privileges of the well-off," but are left wondering why Ike and his liberal brother Milton—and, for that matter, his Right-wing brother Edgar— evolved so differently...

...He excoriates Ike for the Guatemalan intervention of 1954, attributing it not to the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz' Communist ties, but to his land-reform program, and to a preoccupation with the domino theory...

...It was Ida Stover Eisenhower who developed his early love for reading...

...Similarly, Perret maintains that in not signing the Geneva Accords of 1954, Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, "simply refused to accept the freely expressed will of the Vietnamese if it meant that they would choose a Communist government...

...Perret, following a diligent account of Eisenhower's rise from Abilene, Kansas, to General of the Army and one of the greatest of West Point's "greatest generation," offers up straight Ike's response to being paid $635,000 for his memoirs...

...Now, after three decades of scholarship, Eisenhower has finally earned respect as both a general and a President...

...Because of his writing and teaching abilities, he was relegated to a stateside post during World War I. "The view of most historians and biographers, that Eisenhower was plodding along in the 1920s, is mistaken," Perret assures us...

...Reviewed by Herbert Parmet Author, "Eisenhower and the American Crusades," "George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee" Ike was a "hayseed," Robert Merton told me in 1969...

...Despite her abhorrence of war, the boy's intellect was engaged by battles and military heroes...

...He] never really knew what was happening at Columbia, because only a handful of deans and administrators ever got a chance to talk to him...

...As readable as it is, Perret's biography does not go beyond several other equally revisionist and long available accounts of the General and Commander in Chief...

...He attributes Eisenhower's role in the execution of the "deserter" Private Eddie Slovik to poor timing, a decision made at a moment when all of Ike's "energies and anxieties were focused on the Battle of the Bulge...

...Once past the War he helped lead to a successful conclusion, Eisenhower anticipated the Cold War...

...He could be droll, commanding or reflective, as the occasion demanded...

...He had little contact with the faculty, said Merton, adding that this was just as well since they held him in contempt as a mere figurehead...

...Nor does Perret's overview reconcile Eisenhower's apparent naïveté with the man who rose so swiftly within the ranks, emerged so triumphantly from World War II, and gave Americans a significant Presidency...

...He was viewed as a political soldier, but alas, one who was out of his depth in Washington...

...What really made Ike tick is still unclear...

...After eight years in the White House," wrote historian Norman Graebner in 1960, "Dwight D. Eisenhower remains the most enigmatic phenomenon in the history of the American presidency...

...Vigilant about excessive spending on defense and effective when desegregating the military, a policy he opposed but inherited from Truman, he was attuned to Southern attitudes on race and often recalled that he had lived in the South...

...High school teachers discovered his gift for clear, effective prose, and so did the military...

...Little more than a quarter of the book covers the Eisenhower Presidency...

...Conner, widely regarded as the brains of General John Pershing's headquarters, also filled the void left in Eisenhower's life by his distant father...

...Promoted in 1952 as the man best qualified to deal with the Russians, he has resolved or mitigated none of the Cold War conflicts which existed when he took office...

...Geoffrey Perret's new biography agrees that the General's academic stint was not his shining hour...

...Heralded as a man of peace, he has entered his last months in office with the United States subjected to humiliating and unprecedented abuse in many areas of the free world...

...He was more absent than present, commuting to Washington in response to early Cold War crises...

...Inspired by Conner, Eisenhower finished first in his class at both the Command General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth and at the Army War College...

...his mother was devoted, pious and pacifistic...

...Pushing ahead over Churchill's objections, "Eisenhower stood up once again to poetry, personality and prime ministerial tears...

...All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negro bucks...

...and faintly ridiculous...

...Eisenhower is a useful read, but alas, skims along the surface...

...I'm just a Kansas farm boy," said the General—a whiff of the White House already discernible—'these numbers are making my head spin!'" This was the same man who assured crowds that he would never associate with people who went under such highfalutin' titles as "economist...

...They saw women like her as "dimwitted...

...Eisenhower was elusive, and the result is thin, but the substance is not counterfeit...

...Much to Perret's credit, however, he has managed to weave image and action into a credible whole based on printed sources and newly available archival materials, without artificial contrivances or spurious citations...

...Nor did his stock rise when he moved on to become President of the United States...

...If Europe is dominated by a single power, that would mean the postwar world will be divided between a superpowerful Europe, a weakened British Empire and the United States," he told the American Ambassador to France, Jefferson Caffrey...

...Her tastes and interests were far removed from their intellectual and artistic concerns...

...Douglas MacArthur employed his skills to write the Chief of Staff's annual report in 1931, praising him as a "brilliant officer" worthy of promotion to "general officer rank immediately...

...His father "managed to be absent even when he was present...

...He was "born in the wrong place, at a bad time, to the crashes and flashes of an earth-shaking storm...

...They deemed him a lightweight who owed his World War II reputation to a talent for soothing the contentious prima donnas among America's allies...

...One of the nation's most distinguished sociologists, Merton was recalling Eisenhower's brief stay on Morningside Heights as the president of Columbia University...