Understanding Ike

An engrossing new biography reaffirms his greatness.

Douglas MacArthur called him the “best clerk I ever had.” Insofar as a clerk performs essential logistical tasks and organizes the affairs of larger groups of people, this may not be the worst label that could be applied to Dwight Eisenhower. Elected President in 1952 after a military career in which he supervised the D-day invasion and led the Allied forces to victory in Europe, Eisenhower was nonetheless not a very colorful leader. His greatest accomplishments were not grand gestures but elaborate operations with many moving parts, planned with intense attention to detail. Yet as Michael Korda argues in his new biography, Ike: An American Hero (Harper, 780 pages, $34.95), there is ample reason to consider him at least as great and emotionally complex an American as any general ever.

Eisenhower’s reputation has been on the rebound in recent years, following the discovery of recorded conversations from his Presidency that surprised his detractors with the sophistication and political savvy they revealed. Ike will help continue his rise in American national memory, mostly through its close depiction of him as a military man. Korda portrays him as a temperate, dedicated officer who advanced from post to post by quiet hard work.

Sent to the Philippines in the 1930s, Eisenhower might have allowed resentment about his second-rate posting to overcome him. His presence there could have doomed him to the same obscurity that President Franklin Roosevelt hoped would claim Douglas MacArthur. But as an aide to MacArthur, Eisenhower revitalized the link between the United States and its Pacific possession by winning over the Filipino president, Manuel Quezon, and becoming his trusted adviser even on non-military issues. As he tried to help the Philippines bolster its meager defenses against a possible Japanese invasion, Eisenhower also got a preview of the approaching war, which would define his career.

When that war came, the same qualities that had allowed him to flourish in the Pacific made him a natural choice to supervise American operations in Africa and Europe. As in the Philippines, he oversaw expansive logistical challenges while working with colleagues less modest than himself. Whatever difficulty he may have had working with someone as arrogant as Douglas MacArthur, it can’t have been as bad as negotiating joint operations with Gen. Bernard Montgomery, of the British army, and his inflated ego. Monty, as he is called, resented Eisenhower’s power in shaping Allied war strategy, and he scarcely tried to hide it. Toward the end of the war, Montgomery once openly insulted Eisenhower by hanging up on him during a telephone conversation, a serious breach of military etiquette.

Eisenhower, on the other hand, distinguished himself as an exceptionally patient political operator. He fumed and cursed in private, but he refused to endanger his working relationships with men like Montgomery by taking their rudeness personally. Korda sketches this aspect of his personality particularly closely, and the reader cannot avoid concluding that there was a close connection between Ike’s supremely balanced temperament and his clear-sighted strategic thinking.

These traits of the thirty-fourth President are well known; what Korda adds is the notion that the man may not have been entirely content with his restrained, workhorse persona. Just after leaving West Point, stationed at “dull Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, less than 750 miles from home,” Eisenhower grew annoyed at the plodding, unglamorous assignment. “By contrast, the flamboyant young cavalryman George S. Patton would shortly be making a name for himself chasing Villistas south of the Rio Grande under the command of Brigadier General John J. Pershing,” Korda writes, “. . . exactly the kind of action which Ike had hoped for, and which would elude him throughout his career.” If Ike exalts Eisenhower’s patience, judgment, and managerial ability, it also recognizes other qualities of his. Reading about Eisenhower tearfully sending hundreds of thousands of men into battle at Normandy, you wonder whether part of the 53-year-old general didn’t wish he were young enough to join them in the landing.

There are a few weaknesses in Korda’s assessment of Eisenhower. The author includes plenty of information about Eisenhower’s family life, his rocky relationship with his wife, Mamie, and his alleged affair with Kay Summersby, his driver. But when he writes that “nobody knows” whether Eisenhower and Summersby really had an affair, he also argues that “whether the relationship was consummated is . . . surely nobody’s business.” That is a strange assertion for a biographer who wants to paint a full portrait of his subject’s life and character. In a book as focused on personality and personal interactions as this one, it is hard to see why the author would so sharply dismiss the notion that Ike’s sex life is a relevant matter to investigate.

He takes a similar tone in dealing with Eisenhower’s record on civil rights as President. He acknowledges that Eisenhower “underestimated the strength and anger of segregationists in the South, and perhaps also the determination of blacks to have a showdown on the subject of schools.” But this may make Ike into too much a victim of politics beyond his control. When it came to civil rights, Eisenhower’s customary method of leadership failed, and his biographer doesn’t say so very directly.

Ike: An American Hero is really not, however, a book about a President. It is a sympathetic study of a talented soldier who happened to occupy the White House late in life. If you want an impartial take on the Eisenhower Presidency, this is not the place to find it. If you want a skillful portrayal of perhaps the greatest of modern generals, look no further.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com and is editor-in-chief of The Harvard Political Review.