Eisenhower Read online

  Eisenhower

  Louis Galambos

  EISENHOWER

  Becoming the Leader of the Free World

  Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore

  © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

  All rights reserved. Published 2018

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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  Johns Hopkins University Press

  2715 North Charles Street

  Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

  www.press.jhu.edu

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Galambos, Louis.

  Title: Eisenhower : becoming the leader of the free world / Louis Galambos.

  Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017030371| ISBN 9781421425047 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421425054 (electronic) | ISBN 1421425041 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 142142505X (electronic)

  Subjects: LCSH: Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Dwight David), 1890–1969. | Presidents—United States—Biography. | United States—Politics and government—1953–1961. | Generals—United States—Biography. | World War, 1939–1945—Biography.

  Classification: LCC E836 .G35 2018 | DDC 973.921092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030371

  A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Frontispiece: The Eisenhower family. From left to right: Dwight, father David, Arthur, Earl, Milton with long hair, Edgar, mother Ida, and Roy.

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  Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

  To all of my students, graduate and undergraduate, over the years

  Contents

  Preface

  Part I: Getting a Grip on Ike

  ONE   Trouble

  TWO   Abilene

  THREE   Locked In

  FOUR   Epiphany

  FIVE   Tested

  Part II: Becoming Supreme

  SIX   Combat

  SEVEN   The Decision

  EIGHT   Tested Again

  Part III: Becoming the Leader of the Free World

  NINE   Duty, Honor, Party

  TEN   Pursuing Prosperity

  ELEVEN   Pursuing Peace

  TWELVE   The Wise Man

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Preface

  We all have a story to tell. It’s the story we tell about ourselves and our lives. We tell it to ourselves over and over again, and we tell parts of the story to those who are closest to us—our girlfriends or boyfriends, our husbands or wives, our colleagues, our bosses, and those who work for us. We seldom try to tell the whole story because it is very long and terribly detailed. The details may or may not be true. But the stories are nevertheless important because they explain what we do and are crucial to understanding our lives. Our story keeps growing and changing as our lives unwind. Then the story begins to work toward an inevitable conclusion most of us would rather not acknowledge.

  Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower had a story to tell about his life, a story that changed several times over his long and remarkable career as a military and political leader. His personal story about Ike—that is, his identity—changed decisively seven times as his career unfolded. His status changed, as did his responsibilities, challenges, and reputation. Each change made him a somewhat different person and a different leader, and the major goal of this book is to get at what was changing him, how he was changing, and how it impacted his ability to lead.

  Some of the changes in Ike’s career were “Machiavellian moments.”1 Some of these involved his encounters with the “employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct” by others.2 In the two most memorable occasions, he was surprised to find himself the target of this conduct. As he and his leadership style matured, he would find a few occasions to deploy his own cunning and even a touch of duplicity in an effort to achieve his objectives. He of course masked these changes in his leadership behind a sunny, down-home persona and a justly famous smile.

  The smile alone, however, was not going to carry him through the dramatic transformations that took place in America and much of the world between the 1890s, when he was a child, and 1961, when he retired from the presidency. His early life played out in the sort of small-town, bucolic setting that was a central characteristic of America for three centuries. Mark Twain’s wonderful stories captured the spirit and some of the contradictions of that society and the people who lived in the surrounding farm country. By the late nineteenth century, small-town, agrarian values were deeply planted in the national psyche, but the second agricultural revolution and rapid urbanization in the twentieth century steadily ground away at the demographic, economic, and social base of that culture.3 By 1960, more than 60 percent of the population lived in the suburbs or the central city in one of the country’s sprawling metropolitan areas.4 Great corporate farms dominated the markets for agricultural commodities. Businesses such as General Motors were larger, economically speaking, than most of the world’s nations. Technological and scientific developments drove some of these important transformations. Mechanical, electrical, and chemical innovations changed the way Americans got from one place to another, heated and lighted their homes, prevented and treated their illnesses, produced and distributed their essential goods and services, and enjoyed their leisure time.

  All of these developments were accelerated by the rise of the professions, which became centers of expertise and important pathways to social mobility. This made access to education even more important than it had been in the nineteenth century. In 1890, the three leading American professions were still law, medicine, and the clergy, but by 1960, more than 11 percent of the workforce had some claim to professional status. From chemical engineers to biological scientists, from statisticians and psychologists to nutritionists, physicists, and accountants, the professions had changed American life and were continuing to splinter into increasingly specialized occupations.

  One of the professions that changed significantly was the military—the profession for which young Ike was trained. It had been a widely disrespected and stunted source of careers in the 1890s, but by the 1960s it was a formidable presence in American life, an institution of central importance to US public policy and to those millions of Americans deeply concerned about Cold War national security. Throughout the twentieth century, the professional soldier worked in and was controlled by a formidable bureaucracy. The military officer was thus more like a clergyman than a private-practice lawyer, more like a professional business manager than a doctor or dentist. Whatever his rank, the soldier was obliged to adjust to awesome technological changes in the weapons of war—the machine gun, the tank, the truck, the jeep, the airplane, radar, sonar, the missile, and finally atomic and nuclear bombs. All decisively altered the way soldiers fought or prepared to fight. Little wonder that a successful officer might by 1961 have an advanced degree in engineering or another discipline. The warrior model was not entirely outdated, but it was increasingly the exception, not the rule. When a leading officer could become secretary of state, something dramatic had changed in the US Army’s role at home and America’s role in the world.

  Indeed, the global balance of power had shifted in decisive ways five times between the late ninet
eenth century and Ike’s retirement. The rise of Germany and its fall in World War I were followed by the reassertion of German power and the rise of Japan in the 1930s. Another defeat in World War II brought down both Germany and Japan and left the Soviet Union and the United States facing each other in a global struggle for supremacy. By that time, an America that had faced inward for more than a century had moved out into the world, exercising its power and influence in foreign wars and several major revolutions. The United States—like all of the nations that experienced industrial revolutions—acquired the new possessions and client states that were customary features of an emerging empire. During the Cold War, America and its allies were arrayed against the Soviet Empire and its communist dominions. By the 1950s, the mainland United States was threatened for the first time since 1815 with a direct and destructive attack by hostile nations. America’s leaders were, with ample justification, fearful of a surprise assault with missiles and nuclear weapons.

  At home, the United States was experiencing a series of decisive internal political changes. Like all capitalist nations, America had to cope with an economy that was never at rest. Waves of growth were followed every two decades or so by serious depressions. The worst collapse, the Great Depression of the 1930s, prompted the nation to extend the power and reach of its national administrative state. The foundation for the welfare and regulatory programs of the New Deal had been laid in the Progressive Era, prior to World War I. But the political innovations of the thirties were more dramatic and far-reaching than anything the country had experienced since the adoption in 1787 of the Constitution.

  Following the stock market crash in 1929, many Americans sought through their local, state, and federal governments to provide security and equity for those citizens who did not share equally in the opportunities, prosperity, and power associated with the nation’s expansion. During the post–World War II decades, major changes also took place in the roles of women and people of color. Like all of the world’s capitalist countries, the United States created and then had to learn how to manage a bureaucratic administrative state to implement its new policies. Between 1890 and 1961, the nation added formidable welfare and regulatory institutions to its existing array of promotional and security bureaucracies.

  In the following pages, I probe the impact these major forces of historical change had on Ike’s career. I consider how he attempted to respond to and influence these developments to the advantage of his own career and that of the United States, its allies, and, to a considerable extent, the entire world.

  You are probably thinking that some things don’t change as we mature and encounter new challenges. You are right on target. And that was as true of Eisenhower as it is in all of our lives. I will pull some of those threads out of the fabric of his life story and try to understand them as well as the dramatic changes that took place as a small-town boy from tiny Abilene, Kansas, became a five-star general, a national hero, a president of the most powerful nation in the world, and the premier international leader in the 1950s. While we are studying this unusual career, I will try—with two significant exceptions—to avoid looking forward to the Eisenhower presidency, that is, to the end game in the White House. All of that was still far in the future when we start this exploration of his leadership.

  My own study of Eisenhower’s career began in earnest in the 1970s when I became a co-editor and then editor of The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Alfred D. Chandler Jr. had edited the first five volumes of the Papers before leaving Hopkins to take an appointment at Harvard Business School. Chandler and I overlapped on volumes 6 and 7, and then I took over the leadership of this formidable editorial project.5 In the course of tracing Ike’s career through military service, his presidency of a great institution of higher education, his leadership of the military forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and his eight years as president of the United States, I became fascinated by his leadership style and the manner in which his distinctive personality shaped his interactions with other foreign and domestic elites and with the American people. Before we finished the Papers in 2001, I decided that I would try someday to capture in print the development over a long career of his identity, his reputation, and his leadership.

  Now we should get on with our story. We start by turning back to 1920, a troubled year for the United States Army and a troubling time for Ike.

  Part I

  Getting a Grip on Ike

  One

  Eisenhower standing with a tank at Camp Meade, Maryland, in 1919.

  Trouble

  Major Eisenhower was in trouble. It was not the first time he had challenged his superior officers and the authority of the US Army. But this was a career-threatening incident. It was a challenge that could not be laughed off as a spirited cadet’s kick at the merciless discipline of West Point or even a young officer’s failure to stay in uniform and maintain precise army decorum. Eisenhower was thirty years old in 1920. Married, with a young son, the major had recently been the commanding officer of more than 10,000 soldiers getting ready for battle in Europe. But the world war was over now. The army’s leadership was frantically trying to hold its own as Congress chopped the military budgets. Eisenhower’s criticism of the army’s leadership and tactics was not welcomed.

  As Ike quickly discovered, it is risky for a professional soldier to challenge higher authority.1 It is risky in any organization, large or small, public or private, if you wish to have a successful career. Any senior officer, corporate executive, or university president inclined to be honest can explain just when and how it is possible to swim against the current of established organizational dogma and doctrine. If that person happens to be insightful and exceptionally open, he or she will also tell you how dangerous it is to short-circuit the hierarchy or criticize an organization’s values and established ideas—especially in print.

  In the years immediately following the Great War, it was particularly dangerous to ignore the US Army’s hierarchy and promote heretical ideas. The nation’s military was shrinking. Congress in the early 1920s did not cheer the American contribution to victory in Europe. The majority in Congress was unwilling to honor the army’s achievement by spending more tax dollars on national defense. While American veterans had good cause for pride in what they had accomplished “over there,” most Americans were in a big hurry to get the experience behind them. They placidly accepted the US Senate’s rejection of the peace treaty, the Versailles settlement in which President Woodrow Wilson had invested so much of his reputation.2 Republican Warren G. Harding’s campaign slogan in 1920 was “Normalcy,” and voters found that brand of politics appealing.

  After the United States opted out of the League of Nations and President Harding took office, there seemed to be little need for an expensive military force. To most Americans there appeared to be no obvious threats to US security on the horizon. A surly Congress cut the army’s proposed strength from half a million to 300,000, and chopped it again the following year to 12,000 officers and 125,000 enlisted men—a skeletal force at best.3

  The shrinking army was an especially unpleasant organization for professionals, whether they were enlisted men or officers. Squeezed down in rank following the war, officers—even the most promising individuals—had little to look forward to in their military careers. That was true above all for those men who had new ideas about their service. Shrinking organizations encourage everyone on the inside to defend their turf and avoid risk.4 That is precisely what the Chief of Infantry did when he read Eisenhower’s article in the Infantry Journal calling for changes in accepted tactics—the same tactics that had just won the war in Europe.5 Major General Charles S. Farnsworth had commanded an infantry division in France, and he was understandably unhappy to read an essay that was critical of the army’s tactics and the attitudes of its officers.6

  The article proposed a different kind of infantry division, one in which a relatively new weapon, the tank
, would play a decisive role in combat. The author, who had not been to France and had never experienced war firsthand, challenged the wisdom of his superiors in the chain of command. “A great many officers,” he wrote, “are prone to denounce the tank as a freak development of trench warfare which has already outlived its usefulness.” Other officers, the article said, had never been in action with the tanks and apparently based their views “on hearsay.” Having little experience with tank warfare, “they simply ignore it in their calculations and mental pictures of future battles.” As a result, Eisenhower said, many officers fell “into a grievous error” and needed to be rescued by “facts” and “by sane and sound reasoning.”7

  The article had a sharp edge. It cut with particular force his superior officers, the ones who apparently needed to be instructed in proper infantry tactics. We will probably never know if Major General Farnsworth placed himself among those who based their decisions on “hearsay” or those who were given to “grievous error” by grounding their professional judgments on a slim or nonexistent base of information. What we do know is that the Chief of Infantry took hold of the issue at once. He called in the audacious major and told him his ideas were wrong, even “dangerous.” Calling for changes in the organization of the infantry at that time, in that tenuous political and budgetary environment, was a mistake, and he told Major Eisenhower to keep his ideas to himself. If he persisted, he would be court-martialed. The Chief of Infantry harshly stifled this critique of the existing structure and established tactics of his forces. The army was circling its wagons.8

  Ike had been encouraged to write on tank warfare by his good friend and fellow officer at Fort Meade, Maryland, George S. Patton, who wrote and published his own article on the great potential of the tank. Patton’s article, which was even more aggressive than Ike’s, called for radical changes in army strategy and tactics.9 Patton had returned from the war in Europe as a confirmed devotee of tank warfare. Never given to understatement, he recommended making the tanks into an entirely separate force that would be freed from the slow-moving infantry and allowed to operate as a relatively autonomous battle force.