August 23, 2007
Eisenhower’s Reputation II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST Being a little older than Fredric Smoler, I can remember the Eisenhower era a little better. For some mysterious reason I remember quite clearly seeing a picture in the paper in January 1953 (when I was eight) showing a moving van outside the White House as the Trumans prepared to depart. Harry Truman as well, of course, left office with the cognoscenti sniggering and pronouncing him a national joke. He too has seen his reputation rise and rise. The most recent presidential poll (that I know of) of historians has Truman at No. 7 and Eisenhower at No. 9, both in the near-great category. This, I think, does not say much for the snap judgment of historians. Mr. Smoler writes, “Eisenhower’s verbal clumsiness was constantly mocked, and the mockery was tinged with a sense of bitter loss: They could have had someone they loved and passionately admired, and they got that dull clown instead.” Adlai Stevenson was certainly more witty than Eisenhower (I especially admire the opening of his 1952 concession statement: “A funny thing happened to me today on the way to the White House. . . .”). Wit and wisdom, however, are not synonyms, as Mr. Smoler points out. But regarding Eisenhower’s verbal clumsiness. One way this was mocked at the time was to publish uncleaned-up transcripts of his press conference remarks. They were, of course, a verbal and syntactical mess. But this was very unfair. Few of us speak spontaneously in Augustan prose, and transcripts do not convey the body language that is so important a part of verbal communication. So if Eisenhower was often unclear as to what he meant, I strongly suspect that that was because he wanted to be unclear, not because he was incapable of clarity. I remember my father, who did not have a political bone in his body (I don’t think he ever voted in his life), snorting with derision at the idea that Eisenhower couldn’t say what he meant. My father spent five years in the army during World War II, rising from private to lieutenant colonel, and he told me that at Officers Candidate School he spent a lot of time learning how to give orders. According to him, in class the students would, over and over and over, be given orders to carry out an operation and told to prepare the orders they would give in turn as a platoon leader. The officer candidates would then read out those orders, and if anyone in the class had a legitimate question as to what they meant, they flunked. Eisenhower went to the oldest and biggest officers candidate school of them all, and I’d be very surprised indeed—given how richly military history is endowed with stories of avoidable disaster because of faulty or ambiguous orders—if he didn’t have the same drill pounded into his head. So it seems to me that the idea that the man who organized and successfully executed the largest and most complex military operation in the history of warfare couldn’t be clear in expressing himself is an idea so stupid, to quote George Orwell’s ever apt phrase, that “only an intellectual could believe it.” Add in the fact that it was an operation involving the always mutually antagonistic air, sea, and land forces not just of one but two Great Powers and numerous smaller countries, each with its own notions about how to do things, and Eisenhower comes across as a very major-league politician indeed.
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