Eisenhower Read online

  Patton, too, was admonished for his critique of the infantry, but his courageous service in France, his powerful friends in the army, and his image as an officer uniquely dedicated to combat shielded him from the worst effects of the incident.10 It did not hurt at that phase of his career to have a Distinguished Service Cross and a Distinguished Service Medal from the Great War. He, too, was vulnerable to attacks by the top echelons of the military bureaucracy, but he was tolerated as a unique variation on the traditional American officer: a man from the West (in his case) or the South and from one of those “better families” that provided backing for many a military career. Major Eisenhower lacked Patton’s background, his polo ponies, and his panache.11 Patton could get away with his article because he was Patton, and besides, he shortly returned to the cavalry.

  Eisenhower, by contrast, was vulnerable to Major General Farnsworth’s threat. Ike understood that the Chief of Infantry was not bluffing and decided to keep his mouth shut about tanks.12 He had been promoted to lieutenant colonel during the war (at the age of twenty-eight), reduced following the armistice of 1918 to his regular rank of captain, and then promoted to major. It was not at all clear in the early 1920s that he would ever make it beyond that rank.

  He was happy at Camp Meade, where he temporarily commanded a tank brigade. But he had barely cleared the crisis over his article in the Infantry Journal when he found himself threatened by another superior officer with a court-martial over a different matter. He had applied for a housing allowance that he was specifically not entitled to receive.13 He later said he made a mistake because he had not done his homework and did not understand the army’s intricate manual of regulations. He had never even bothered to read it, he said. That was a flimsy excuse that the army’s Inspector General was not about to accept. When the facts in the case became known to Brigadier General Charles G. Helmick, Eisenhower was caught in an embarrassing and threatening situation. Helmick was not inclined to brush aside an illegal payment of $250.67. Hard times made dollars and even pennies matter. Helmick wanted a court-martial that certainly would have ended the major’s military career. While Eisenhower managed to wiggle through this second career crisis, his army ratings in “tact” and “judgment” slid down.14

  These experiences leave us struggling to understand how and why Ike was having so much trouble with superior authority. Why did this young officer—at the time of this last incident Eisenhower was still only thirty—get into situations that pushed him to the brink of failure? These were not isolated incidents. There were others.15 The general pattern suggests that his efforts to become an effective military leader were seriously threatened by his failure to acquire a good sense of how his senior officers would respond to what he did, what the particular situation of the US Army was during the early 1920s, and what he needed to do to make a success of his career as a professional soldier.

  To that date, he had not displayed the kind of hard-driving ambition we usually see in young professionals tagged for successful careers. He did not have the tightly focused sense of purpose that puts a professional in any organization on the fast track. He seemed, in fact, to have on blinders that obscured much of the setting that would control his career and the development of the entire US military—all services—for the foreseeable future.

  To Major Eisenhower, of course, it looked different. From his perspective, it seemed as if the army was determined to thwart his career. Otherwise, he would have been sent to France during the war to lead men into combat. He had almost made it on one occasion, only to be stopped virtually at the dock. As a result, he acquired a great deal of experience in organizing and implementing training regimes during the war. The army tagged him as an officer with a special talent for training raw recruits and militias, and that tag locked him out of the combat command he coveted.

  Football also kept leading his career astray. He loved the game and had played it fairly well before a crippling injury knocked him off West Point’s team. He then became a talented coach and found that his reward was a series of assignments that somehow always involved coaching. Coaching was not likely to lead him to high command. In the early 1920s, Ike explained his troubled career by looking outside himself for the source of his problems. But that is what most of us do when things are not going too well.

  To some extent, he was right. He was being pigeonholed by the army bureaucracy, tucked into a category that suggested his career could be interesting and useful to the service and his country—even though it would certainly not lead to the top level of command, either battlefield command (his clear choice) or command in shaping strategy or the army’s all-important political context. The army bureaucrats had locked Ike in a dead-end organizational role. It was not at all clear in the early 1920s what he could do to break away from the path being charted for him.16 But it was very clear that he had the primary responsibility for finding a new path if he was going to get ahead. It was also clear that if he kept causing trouble for senior army officers, that would not happen.

  He had to change because the US Army’s hierarchy was digging in for peacetime service and years, maybe decades, of shrinking budgets and slow promotions. Ultimately Ike would need to understand that hierarchy better and learn to control his tendency to be an abrasive subordinate if he was going to be a successful leader. During the war, he had demonstrated what he was capable of doing. With limited resources, he had built up an exemplary training camp. He had done this under the pressure of a wartime schedule that left no room for mistakes, no room for delays. But in 1920 and 1921, it appeared that his good works might not save his career. He might have only two choices: either he would leave the army, junking a decade of military experience, or he would learn how to deal with superior authority in new ways and with new results.

  In order to understand the choices he made, the way they played out in his career, and his distinctive style of leadership, we need to look more closely at his personality, his identity, and the society that had shaped it. We need to start by looking further back, before the Great War, to his life in the small town of Abilene, Kansas, and to his interesting, rather unusual family.

  Two

  Young Ike (at front) camping with his Abilene buddies around 1904.

  Abilene

  Abilene, Kansas, was a small town with a big reputation. Although it was just a tiny speck in the vast plains of Middle America, it had earned a role in the nation’s history as the drop-off point for the western cattle drives. For a time that was where the horse gave way to the railroad, the crucial link to eastern markets. Saloons kept some of the cowboy money in Abilene, and prostitutes got some of what was left. The cowboy years were wild and lucrative, but the railroads pushed on and the cattle drives quickly dwindled. Then Abilene settled into a more sedate life as one of the thousands of tiny commercial centers that served local farmers out west.1

  For the first three centuries of American settlement and expansion, these little towns and their countryside played a leading role in the nation’s economy, social relations, politics, and culture. In many of these towns, you could walk a block or two and see fields full of corn, wheat, cotton, hay, cattle, or pigs. Relationships in that setting were very personal. When someone looked you in the eye, you said “Hello” or “Howdy.” Political campaigns turned on individuals, their agreements, and their reputations, and often on their willingness to negotiate and compromise. There was a sense of community, and cooperative values conditioned the individualism that was well grounded in rural and small-town capitalism. Of course, the flip side of community was insularity, a lack of interest in much that happened beyond the local setting. Although social classes were loosely defined, there was seldom any doubt about who was in charge. The leaders were white men who had some local claim on status. It was assumed that these relationships and their underlying values had always existed, had always guided the communities toward material success, and would always provide individuals, old and young, with a pathway to the good life. Normall
y in these communities organized religion affirmed the small-town ethos, as did prosperity.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, Kansas had plenty of experience with both good and bad times. Around Abilene, the soil was rich, and when there was enough rain, farmers could make a solid living, build up some savings, give their daughters a dowry, and maybe even send their sons to the state university at Lawrence. In the early 1900s, that kind of progress was taking place in farm country all over America.

  The “Executioner”

  Unfortunately, Kansas had a dry year in 1909, when Dwight Eisenhower was a senior in high school. So there were some hard times in Abilene and the rest of the state. The people grumbled about high taxes and wondered why the state government still could not pay all of its bills in cash.2 The hard times reached down into the south side of Abilene, near the railroad tracks. The north side of town was the good side, the middle-class side, where families had parties that were reported in the local newspaper. The Eisenhowers never had one of those parties. They were living on the poor side of Abilene, on South Fourth Street, right beside the railroad tracks. Six brothers, their parents, and a girl who helped with the housework were crammed into a small frame house. Fortunately for the Eisenhower family, the father, David, had steady work at the Belle Springs Creamery, a local cooperative. Since his brother-in-law, a foreman at the creamery, had given him the job, David’s position was safe.3

  Job security notwithstanding, David Eisenhower’s life was a study in serial disappointments. He was school-smart and had started with some advantages. His father was one of those successful farmers—the kind who had farmed well, invested wisely, and accumulated some capital. He cared about his family and was able to send David to Lane University, in Lecompton, Kansas. At Lane, a small school organized by the United Brethren in Christ, David took a hodgepodge of courses, including ancient Greek. He began to look forward to a career as an engineer. A cocky young fellow, he irritated some of his classmates but found at least one loyal admirer: a bright, determined young lady named Ida Elizabeth Stover. She quickly supplanted engineering in David’s heart and head. They were married in 1885.4

  Leaving school and engineering behind, David quickly found a new enthusiasm for business. He started fast. His father, well grounded in the middle class, was able to give David and Ida $2,000 and 160 acres of rich Kansas land as a wedding present. David, however, had no interest in working the land. He had already had a good taste of farm work as an extra hand during the harvest season, and he wanted no more of it. Spurning the hard life of a farmer, he used his stake to start a store in the nearby town of Hope, Kansas. That venture quickly failed. He had neither the personality nor the experience to run a business. Apparently David never caught on to the fact that people generally do business with people they like. He and his partner also seemed oblivious to the fact that farmers are unable to pay their debts in a bad year.

  David’s failure in business sent his family into a downward social and economic spiral. He and his wife had started their marriage from a firm position in the middle class of Middle America. They were relatively well educated. They owned some books, as well as a piano. They were part of an extended family that owned property and held responsible positions in the community. But David never recovered from the collapse of his venture into business. Bankruptcy was not a mortal sin in nineteenth-century America, but David, who was more concerned about the appearance than the reality of his failure, molded a fictional cover story. He created an appealing family myth about the evil partner who had done in the trusting David and the business. The family seemed to buy into this story. But one can assume that the small-town gossips ferreted out the truth.5

  Now the young man was left without a job or money or a skill, without a future, and with a growing family.6 At this crucial point in his life, he was limited to unskilled jobs that a college-educated man would not really want to hold. His search for a way out took him first to Denison, Texas, where he hired on as a lowly “engine wiper.” He brought Ida and the boys to Texas, where they lived in a shack by the railroad tracks. They were dirt poor, and the family was growing. Dwight was born in October 1890, into a household that was barely keeping its head above water. The Eisenhowers would not easily surrender their middle-class pretensions, but David’s failures had dumped them into the working class along with the millions of other Americans who worked with their hands and were paid by the hour.

  Ida was sustained through this grinding life by her deep religious faith and the kind of American optimism that seems to have no limits. David, however, soured on life. He had a mean streak that got broader and deeper as his dreams collapsed, forcing him to tum again and again to his family for support.

  David’s father visited them in Denison and was stunned to see how they were living. He persuaded them to return to Abilene, and David’s brother-in-law got him a job tending the machinery in the creamery. They still had a hardscrabble life, with David at first earning only $25 a month. Still dependent and grumpy, David was able to move the family into the house on South Fourth only because his brother Abraham left town and sold him the property on good terms.7

  David dealt with his disappointments and dependency by presenting an impeccably middle-class appearance to Abilene. Anxious for status, he made much of the fact that he could read ancient Greek and thus could read the Greek version of the Bible. One wonders how deep his knowledge of ancient Greek was and how often the language was useful in that farming community. But I imagine it was “useful” to David every waking moment.8 He dressed the part. When he was not working at the creamery, he wore the clothing associated with the middle class. He was clearly white-collar, not blue-collar, in his mind.9

  This was not an easy fit for a man who seemed frequently to be on the edge of a rage. David was withdrawn and distant most of the time when he was at home, but he was too involved when he was angry. He was quick to point out the moral failings of those around him, including his own family members and neighbors. On at least one occasion, he went too far. He gave a serious spanking to a neighbor’s child and was arrested after the parents filed a complaint. Jailed, he had to pay a fine to get released.10 The town gossips must have loved that story. More important to the family were the spankings and whippings David doled out to his own sons, using a leather belt when the boys misbehaved or when he felt his authority was challenged.11 Young Dwight had a temper, and he earned his share of these beatings. His father was a source of authority but certainly not of the balancing affection the boys needed when they were growing up.

  Disappointed in the material world that was of great importance in Abilene and the rest of America, David sought refuge outside of that world. He was a seeker. Raised in the intense culture of the United Brethren in Christ, a Mennonite sect, he and his wife, Ida, made Bible reading an everyday part of their family life. For David, however, neither the Brethren nor the Bible-reading sect that attracted Ida satisfied his longing for otherworldly explanations of life. Searching for meaning, he flirted with a thoroughly materialist philosophy and ran for the school board as a Socialist in 1903. Although the Socialist ticket got some votes, capitalism was solidly in the saddle in Abilene. The Republicans won the election and enabled Abilene smugly to “continue its progressive, yet conservative policy.”12 This was David’s last venture into politics, and apparently he quickly jettisoned the Socialists and bobbed to another philosophical extreme, dabbling in the occult. Concerned that he had not finished his education, he also took correspondence courses from a school that sold him a diploma in engineering in 1904.13 The degree did not get him a new job or raise his pay at the creamery, but it must have helped satisfy his longing to get a foothold on the bottom edge of Abilene’s middle class.

  As a symbol of authority or a role model for a youngster, Dwight’s father fell substantially short of what his sons needed. Young Ike had problems with authority, and the father he later labeled the family’s “Lord High Executioner” clearly had a great deal to do w
ith that outcome.14 It was not easy to have a father who was distant and irritable, a man who took out his anger on others. David’s insecurity and his search for status in Abilene put pressure on everyone around him. This included Dwight, who already had as much pressure as he could handle from his older brother Ed.

  Big Ike

  Ed was a little less than two years older than Dwight, but that was an enormous gulf when they were in their teens. Ed was bigger, stronger, and certainly more mature than the brother on whom he and their classmates laid the diminutive “Little Ike.” The brothers fought all the time, and “Big Ike” always won. This would not have been such a problem if the Eisenhowers had lived in one of the spacious houses on the north side of Abilene. But they were stuck on South Fourth Street. The two boys had to share a tiny bedroom and a single bed. When they cooperated—as they did occasionally—Ed always took the lead.

  Early on they worked together selling the family’s surplus vegetables. On South Fourth Street, they had enough land to plant gardens and to harvest a good bit of the food they ate. They had a barn and could raise chickens and pigs. They had some fruit trees. All of this helped to make David’s meager pay doable for a family that included six hungry boys. In the summer and fall months, they also had some extra food that could be sold.

  This introduced Ed and his brother Dwight to marketing, country style. It also introduced Ed to some of the negative aspects of a small-town class system that obtained despite popular belief that it did not exist. The two Ikes trundled their produce in a wagon up from the south side of town to the north side, where there were people with cash. They went door-to-door showing their produce. Some of their customers grumbled, picked over the produce, and made remarks that hurt Ed’s feelings. He later said, “In a boylike way I resented that. I developed then a feeling that the railroad tracks separated the classes in Abilene—those who lived north of the tracks thought that they were just better than those who lived south of the tracks. Being older than Dwight, I was probably more sensitive about this. I talked to him about it years later. He said he never had any such feeling.”15 Given Little Ike’s age, that may have been the case.