Eisenhower Read online

  But it was also true that the Eisenhower family was not headed to the north side of Abilene when David was still only earning $65 a month.16 Money was so tight that Ed had to drop out of school for a time to work at the creamery with his father. Little Ike was also unable to finish his freshman year in high school, but this was because of a serious leg injury. Unfortunately, that meant he had to repeat the first year and was thrown into the same class with his older brother Ed.17 In high school, the unequal competition continued.18 Ed quickly found his way into the one dimension of small-town life in which money, hand-me-down clothing, and social class did not matter: sports. He made the football team that year as a fullback and stayed on the team through the next three years. When he was a senior, the yearbook proudly proclaimed that Ed was “the greatest football player of the class.”19

  This was tough competition for Little Ike, who did not go out for football until his junior year. As one of his classmates noted, Dwight “was too awkward for the backfield so we put him in the line.”20 Those who have had experience with small-town football will recognize that both Ikes were caught up in an athletic status system. The linemen worked hard to make heroes of the backfield players who scored the points for their team. Since the football players were of course not paid, the boys in the backfield had to be satisfied with other rewards—local attention, honor, and, for some of them, the prettiest girlfriends in the school. Little Ike did better in baseball. Ed held down first base, while Dwight played center field. But when the team elected a captain in 1908, it was of course Big Ike.21 Sports continued to be extremely important to both Ed and Dwight, and the older brother’s dominance continued through four years of high school and beyond.

  An early life in the shadow of his older, more accomplished brother did nothing to improve Dwight’s already skewed relationship to authority.22 If anything, it reinforced the attitudes stemming from his daily dealings with the family’s ultimate power, David. In both cases, Dwight had ample reason to resent authority, to look for ways to get out from under it, sometimes to scorn authority, and to anticipate eventually besting those who were making his young life difficult. In a few years, he would be in a position to challenge Ed, but for the immediate future, that would have to wait.

  When they both graduated from high school, Ed raced off to the University of Michigan, where he would graduate a few years later with a law degree. Dwight stayed in Abilene, working for two years to help pay for Ed’s college expenses and ending up where all of the Eisenhower males seemed fated to work: the creamery. By the spring of 1910, he was already earning $55 a month, not too short of David’s pay of $76.23 At that point, though, Little Ike’s future looked rather bleak. He had a high school diploma, but he was doing the same kind of low-skilled, manual labor that his father had done as an engine wiper in Texas. Meanwhile, Big Ike was headed toward a professional career and the income and respect that all of the Eisenhower boys craved.

  Saint Ida

  This was a family that deserved a savior. Unlike most such families, the Eisenhowers got one. What they got was certainly what young Dwight needed. Ida Stover Eisenhower was a mirror image of her husband. Where the father was almost always gruff and grumpy, Ida was indefatigably cheerful and patient. Despite having six boys in the house, Ida was calm, fair-minded about their fights, and decisive about the important things in life. She was tolerant of their shortcomings (and those of her husband), supportive, and above all dedicated to her religion. She seems never to have complained about their hardships, even when they were living in poverty in Texas. Marrying Ida took David out of college, but it was the single best decision he ever made.

  Ida was like David in one important regard: they both were restless seekers in search of a true faith. In Ida’s case this took her away from the River Brethren and brought her to the Bible Students. This sect suited her emphasis throughout her life on direct knowledge of the Bible without the intervention of a formal church or pastor. In the centuries since the Reformation, the Protestant religion had continued to fracture into sects, many of which emphasized either individual revelations or direct knowledge of the Bible. The Bible Students did not stress a decisive religious experience. Instead, they sought through knowledge to deepen and broaden their faith in an incremental, rational fashion. This suited Ida’s personality, and it provided her with an emotional anchor through the difficult years when she was running a large family on a meager income.24

  She organized their household like a talented master sergeant training a company of raw recruits. Her recruits were the boys, and she mustered them almost every day, assigning each one his chores. The boys took care of the family’s animals, weeded the garden, helped can fruits at harvest time, assisted with dinner, and cleaned up afterward. The worst chore was starting the fire on a cold morning. One of the boys had to get out of a warm bed and build the fire. The house had to be heated, and they needed the fire for cooking.

  When the boys misbehaved and chores did not get done, Ida reasoned with them instead of exploding. In brief, she taught Dwight and his brothers how to exercise authority without beating them with a leather strap. She was always there for them when they needed help or reminders about their responsibilities. One of the most important of those responsibilities was education.

  Ida’s dedication to learning was interwoven with her approach to religion and her own family background. After her mother died, her father was unable to work and cope with his large family, so Ida was sent to live with one of her grandfathers. Undeterred, she pushed forward with her education. At a time when most Americans did not attend high school and when many of those who did were unable to finish before starting to work or getting married, Ida completed her high school education.25 Determined then to attend college, she followed her brothers, who had moved halfway across the country to Kansas, and enrolled at Lane University. She used the small inheritance she had received and finished her second year at school before she and David were married. This, too, was unusual in a nation in which very few men and even fewer women had any form of college or university education.26

  Ida oversaw the boys’ education with the same quiet, positive determination she demonstrated every day in dealing with their chores. Her voice was the voice of wholesome reason, stressing application, looking always to personal progress toward a better life. She worked patiently to help young Dwight learn to control his temper. He did not get rid of the anger that had apparently been planted in his genes and nurtured by his father and brother. But with Ida’s help, he learned to bottle it up most of the time.27

  Ida’s involved, consistent guidance explains why six boys from a poor Kansas family were able to finish high school. This was a significant accomplishment in those years. The dropout rate was high in Abilene’s schools, starting in the seventh and eighth grades and continuing through the high school years.28 The farm called for young men and housework called for young women, especially those who lived on the south side of town or in the countryside.

  For Little Ike, Ida’s support for education became particularly important because he was enamored of sports and seldom enthusiastic about his schoolwork. Fortunately, he was smart and had a penchant for mathematics. His grades had sagged badly in his first year of high school, when he had to withdraw because of a serious injury.29 But when he started over, most of his grades were in the 90s. He did well in Latin, German, English, algebra, and rhetoricals.30 He kept his grades high through the next three years, and in his senior year he received an A+ in American history. This was a commendable accomplishment for a young man who was at that time far more dedicated to playing football and baseball than he was to compiling a sterling academic record. Neither he nor Big Ike was elected to leadership positions in their class—those plums went to north-side kids such as Herbert Sommers. But in his senior year, Dwight was elected president of the Athletic Association. The yearbook said he was also the “best historian and mathematician” in the class.31 Ida had good cause to be proud of what she had ac
complished by keeping Dwight focused and pointed in the right direction—toward a useful career.

  Little Ike’s Assets

  While he had not displayed any great penchant for leadership by the time he graduated from Abilene High School in 1909, Dwight had logged some important experiences and developed some significant capabilities. Like all of his brothers, he was inured to hard physical work—and was relatively pleased to be doing it.32 He had worked during the summers at the creamery, pulling around big blocks of ice. He had sprouted up a couple of inches. Although he was still only around five-eight, he was strong and ready to put in a “normal” eighty-four-hour week at the creamery.

  He ended up there after graduating, working alongside his father and earning that extra $55 a month the family needed.33 The money was necessary in part to support Ed, who was taking his first big step toward a professional life in one of the leading law programs in the Midwest. Dwight contributed with the understanding that Ed would return the favor after he had launched his legal career. True to his dominant role, Ed never bothered to pay “Little Ike” back.

  At the creamery, Dwight did everything from firing the boilers to pulling the blocks of ice around and working for a time as a night operator, seven days a week, twelve hours a day. When he was on the night shift, he was in charge of two other employees. Dwight was responsible, bright, and as yet uncertain about his future beyond a vague expectation that he would follow Ed’s path into some kind of higher education. He had no idea of what that might involve or where it might take place. The University of Michigan looked interesting in a vague sort of way, but Dwight had no desire to follow Big Ike into a legal career. Arthur, the oldest brother, had gone off to a job as a bank messenger in the big city—in this case Kansas City, about 150 miles to the east—where he was serving an apprenticeship that would gradually take him up to positions with more and more responsibility. Ida’s influence could be seen woven into his career as well as Ed’s. Arthur liked his work, the bank, and Kansas City, but the business world did not appeal to Dwight. Perhaps because he lived on the south side of town, he did not have any direct experience with commerce or finance other than the cooperative creamery, and that work was far too close to what his father, David, was doing twelve hours a day, six days a week, for very little pay.34

  Education seemed to be the best way to do better than David had done and to move up, away from a life near the railroad tracks. Lacking the money he needed, Dwight decided to take the advice of a young friend, Edward E. “Swede” Hazlett. While Dwight was working nights at the creamery, they managed to spend a good bit of time together, and Swede convinced him that they should both try to get into the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Dwight knew nothing about ships, the ocean, the US Navy, or the Naval Academy, but a free education was appealing.35 The history he had read had given him a bent toward the romantic aspects of military leadership, and he had already learned from a neighbor how to shoot a pistol, a weapon that really was useful only for hunting human animals. This probably helped him veer sharply away from his mother’s dedication to pacifism.

  He also drifted away from the family’s attachment to fundamentalism. He was not a seeker after some fundamental truth, either in this world or outside of it. Even David’s opposition to drinking, smoking, and card-playing was thrown overboard by young Dwight. In cards, he was guided instead by a local hunter and fisherman, Bob Davis, who taught him all of the intricacies of winning at poker.36

  Dwight absorbed these lessons like a dry sponge picking up water. Poker appealed to his facility with mathematical reasoning and his willingness to work within the logic circumscribed by the fifty-two-card deck. Poker also tapped into his growing knowledge of other men and why they behaved as they did. He understood men much better than he understood women, but in those years, poker was a securely masculine hobby, entertainment, or occupation. Seven-card stud poker rewarded shrewdness as well as skill in understanding the odds. It also rewarded awareness of personal weaknesses and strengths. As Dwight mastered this game, he was moving forward with what would be a lifelong effort to master himself and shape his personality. Like Ida’s lessons in self-control, poker gave him an edge in life as he began to think about what he might do when he left the creamery, the family, and Abilene.

  Little Ike’s Liabilities

  As that new part of his life started to open before him, he had some personal baggage that would make it difficult for him to follow the paths toward a better life that Arthur and Ed were marking. He had problems dealing with formal authority, problems that stemmed from his difficult life with his father and his seemingly endless, losing competition with Ed. Wherever he went and whatever he did, this would follow him. He would not be able to leave it behind, shucking it off as he did the River Brethren, his mother’s pacifism, and his father’s bitter opposition to smoking tobacco. But like most young men, Dwight was less mindful of that weakness than he was of his strengths.

  That aspect of his personality threatened, however, to become ever more important as he explored the possibilities of getting an appointment at the Naval Academy. The political process for appointment was—and still is—closely controlled by Congress. Candidates had to pass a written examination and a physical exam and then be appointed by a congressman or senator from their home state.37 Obviously, young men from the south side of Abilene were far less likely to have the political influence that might be required to get that appointment. So Dwight initially had more to worry about than did Swede Hazlett, whose well-to-do family could swing some political weight.

  Crucial at this point was the examination, a test that Hazlett had failed the first time around. He crammed with Dwight, and both took and passed the test. Little Ike did quite well, finishing second among the Kansas applicants. Having passed the exam, Swede headed off to Annapolis and a career as a naval officer. But it turned out that in one regard at least, they had not done their homework: Dwight was too old to matriculate at the Naval Academy. Quickly flipping to a new page in the application process, Dwight targeted West Point. Since he knew as little about the US Army as he did about the navy, he found it easy to change course. After the leading candidate for the West Point position failed his physical examination, Dwight scored. Senator Joseph L. Bristow gave him what he wanted: a pass for a free education at the United States Military Academy.

  That education would not be entirely free, of course. West Point would throw Dwight into a setting that would impose a type of discipline that he had never experienced. It would bring to the surface the anti-authoritarian streak that his father and older brother had nurtured in Little Ike. The temper his mother had taught him to suppress would not always remain beneath the surface, hidden from others. For the next four years, the military academy would impinge on his life, day after day, in a manner alien to Abilene’s small-town culture and challenging to a young man who remained uncertain about who he was and what he wanted to become.

  Had he been able to go to a state university in 1911 instead of West Point, he would have found a setting that created less social pressure and offered more intellectual opportunities. This was the path three of his brothers—Ed, Earl, and Milton—took when they left Abilene.38 Most of the state schools also had remedial programs for those who either had not attended or finished high school or had gone to one of the many weak high schools. The state universities had the advantage of offering a variety of career lines for a young person undecided about the future, as certainly was the case with Dwight. Instead, he was locked in financially to a program designed to produce a single type of graduate for a single type of professional career. He did not have four years to decide on which professional career he wanted to follow. Trained from the first day to be a soldier, he would find occasions to question that profession, its authority figures, and values.

  He was on a course dictated primarily by negatives—that is, by the things he did not want to do. Above all, he did not want to remain in the creamery in Abilene, Kansas.39 He want
ed to get a jump start that would take him away from his parents’ hardscrabble life and intense religion. Like Ed, he saw education as the path away from the life he wanted to leave, even though Dwight had no real idea of where that path led. He simply put that question on hold when he boarded the train that took him to another world along the Hudson River in New York.

  If you had met him on the long train ride in 1911 and asked him in a friendly way to tell you about himself, Ike probably would have dwelled on the things he did well. Some of them were physical accomplishments: center field on the baseball team, a tough linesman in football, and a hard, serious worker—a night boss—at the creamery. He could have mentioned that he was honest and trustworthy and that he had plenty of friends, including various girlfriends from time to time. Then he might have mentioned the academic part of his life, the intellectual accomplishments that were manifestly less important to Abilene and Ike than being manly and well liked. There would have been no references to the tug-of-war going on between his anti-authoritarianism and the conciliatory approach to life that his mother, Ida, had encouraged him to embrace. Pressed to look to his future, he would have been intensely optimistic. He would have made it clear that he was looking forward to success, even though he would not have been able to tell you exactly how that part of his story would unfold.