Eisenhower Read online

  Three

  First Lieutenant Dwight D. Eisenhower and Mary Geneva “Mamie” Doud were married in Denver on July 1, 1916.

  Locked In

  Ike’s path in 1911 was full of promise. He had assimilated his mother’s confidence that education was the best route for a young man from Abilene to follow. That optimistic idea had become part of his identity.1 But he knew how poor his family was and he understood that in 1911 there were three other Eisenhower brothers approaching that crucial turning point in their lives. They would need any extra money the family might be able to scrape together. So he headed to West Point even though he had yet to discover any specific career or intellectual byway that was more deserving of his enthusiasm than sports.

  While he leaned toward history and was good at math, neither was more important to him than football, baseball, and the vague but compelling American challenge to get ahead in life. He was certain he would become something better than he was and better than his father was. He sought certification as a college graduate more than education.2 That desire had a specific family content provided by his father’s failure to graduate from college and achieve the social standing his intelligence warranted. So Dwight went off to West Point to build his future, just as Ed had gone off to seek his fortune in Michigan.

  Ed’s pull on Little Ike’s personality was still powerful. During Dwight’s trip to New York, he made two stops: one to see Ruby Norman, an Abilene girlfriend living in Chicago, and then a jaunt over to Ann Arbor to see Ed. Ruby bolstered his rather thin layer of confidence. He felt he could be open with her, and he later confided in a wonderfully guileless way that one of the advantages of West Point, New York, was that it “looks awfully nice as an address on an envelope.”3 With Ed, the visit was entertaining and friendly—they didn’t renew their wrestling matches. But it unfortunately brought to the surface the kind of anxiety that had been nurtured by years of putting up with a brother who excelled in sports. Now Ed was excelling in education, romance, and the kind of sophistication that was admired from afar by kids growing up on the south side of Abilene. Little Ike was still contending with Ed as he headed toward New York.

  West Point

  Arriving at West Point, Ike and his fellow members of the class of 1915 were quickly immersed in a program that demanded more obedience to senseless authority than he had ever experienced. West Point hazing seemed immature to Dwight, who was a few years older than his peers. He bristled at authority in an institution in which obedience trumped brilliance.4 He had by this time become addicted to smoking cigarettes, and that too created problems for him. Because he needed a smoke when he was not supposed to have one, he simply broke the rules—and got caught. There were other infractions as well. Dwight piled up demerits and bobbed about in rank. On one telling occasion, he challenged with juvenile humor an instructor in military engineering—a man known as a martinet, with an inflexible approach to every aspect of the course he was teaching. Dwight survived that episode, but he kept pushing at the edges of what West Point would tolerate.5

  The classwork was demanding and the schedule rigorous. The academic element of West Point played to Dwight’s weakness in part because it was time-consuming and in part because it involved rote learning—the program was heavily weighted toward memorization instead of the kind of analysis that appealed to him. Even the history courses bored him, and he was a relatively indifferent student who constantly flirted with academic problems. It was a tribute to his native intelligence and to his long experience with Ida’s rigor about homework that he was able to finish sixty-first in a class of 164.6

  While he was troubled by the discipline and emphasis on memorization, young Dwight was successful in two regards at West Point. He was well liked, even admired, by his fellow cadets. Groaning under a system of discipline that often seemed totally irrational, they found Dwight’s disrespect for authority appealing. He had other things working in his favor, too. Having come to manhood in Abilene, he had the advantage of having learned important lessons about work—hard physical work. Long before he finished high school he knew that relentless work was the norm for adults. He was strong enough and disciplined enough to pull his own weight on any job, inside or outside, whether it was digging a ditch, mowing, or helping with the canning in harvest season. He had a sense for the rhythm of farm work, as did almost anyone who lived on the south side of Abilene, only a few yards from the fields.

  He was not a city boy. He was a country boy. So the physical aspects of soldiering and training at West Point played to his strengths. All of his brothers had acquired the same lessons and had also learned in the family something special about sharing, teamwork, and human nature. While Ike’s instructors at West Point frequently had good cause to ignore these aspects of his personality, his peers appreciated and respected them.

  Having played sports during and after high school, he should have encountered no difficulties with the physical requirements at West Point. But, alas, he was still relatively clumsy and was placed on the “Awkward Squad” with the other plebes who had difficulty learning to march.7 Despite this embarrassing start, he continued to pursue his intense interest in football. He was small and had to start out on the scrub team. On entrance he was slightly over five feet eight inches tall and weighed only 150 pounds.8 This was long before the current age of football behemoths, but Ike was small even for his time. He was, however, very determined. No longer having Big Ike to contend with, he finally made it into the backfield. Bulking up and training hard, he started to blossom as a running and blocking back under coach Ernest Graves. On defense, he tackled hard and impressed the coach.

  He made the varsity team in 1912 and began to attract some attention from sportswriters, even though he was still second string to the regular halfback. In a game that depended more on grit than on finesse, he was a fierce linebacker and the type of halfback who moved the pile forward. Football at that time was a brutal cousin of rugby. The players were relatively unprotected and the sport regularly produced a full array of injuries. Ike’s dream of becoming West Point’s football hero ended abruptly when he injured his knee and then reinjured it in a horse-riding exercise.9

  The injury left him off the football team and depressed.10 “When I was broken up,” he later said, “I was not able to play actively in athletics again at West Point, so I started to resign a couple of times, but my classmates talked me out of it. Once I put in my papers and my classmates held them up. They got the company captain to hold them up while they talked me out of it. I stayed.”11

  Ike worked very hard to get his knee back in shape, but he had to accept alternatives to playing football. Instead of sulking, he focused on supporting the team and was elected cheerleader. Then he became a cadet coach. He began to guide the junior varsity football team and very quickly became a first-class instructor.12 He understood the game, and he was able to get the most out of players who loved football but were not big enough or good enough to make the varsity. Word got around that the junior varsity was playing well against the teams from secondary schools in the area, and Ike established a reputation as a talented coach.

  His label as an excellent football coach would follow him after he graduated from West Point in 1915. The US Army, like any bureaucracy, handled the infinite variety of its individuals—officers as well as enlisted men—by categorizing them in terms of their usefulness and potential for further advancement. In the years since the nation’s war against Spain, the army had experienced a phase of “modernization,” which consisted largely of centralization under the authority of a general staff headed by the chief of staff.13 In the new army that emerged from this process, an officer’s profile in the general staff’s bureaucracy exerted a powerful influence on his opportunities to advance his career. In Ike’s case, the capability that distinguished him from his peers as he left West Point was his ability to coach football. Soon he would also exhibit an equal skill at training recruits, an activity closely related to coaching. For better and
worse, this would become his profile, his pigeonhole in the new army system. Getting into that pigeonhole was natural and easy. Getting out of it would be painfully difficult and would, in fact, be impossible without some serious, sustained assistance. When his class graduated in 1915, however, Ike was not nervous about being typecast in the army. There were far more important things to occupy the mind of a freshly minted second lieutenant.

  For the first time there was reason for Eisenhower to begin looking somewhat differently at a military career and even to become enthusiastic about it. A war had started in Europe, with the Central Powers arrayed against the British, Russians, and French. In France, the conflict had settled into a slow-moving, brutal campaign of trench warfare, with heavy losses on both sides. New weapons, including poison gas, the airplane, and the tank, failed to break the stalemate. As Dwight graduated and accepted his commission, the possibility that America would be involved in the war began to be considered on both sides of the Atlantic.

  If the nation honored tradition and the guidance of its first president, George Washington, it would remain neutral and leave the fighting to the European belligerents. But America had already turned outward as it became the world’s leading industrial power in the late nineteenth century. After defeating Spain in 1898, the country had acquired an expanded overseas empire. As it pushed further into the Caribbean and into Asia, America and its powerful fleet of battleships and cruisers seemed to be preparing the nation for another giant step toward full involvement in the international struggles of the great powers.

  This momentous transition helped Second Lieutenant Eisenhower shelve many of his doubts about his career. He reacted positively to the immediate challenge of becoming a leader of infantrymen should the nation enter the war. In the previous year he had qualified as a sharpshooter on the rifle range, and at this point he acquired some enthusiasm and maybe even a touch of romanticism about his military service.14 The enthusiasm was tightly interwoven with threads of careful calculation—as was always the case with Ike—but he had yet to display the kind of determination or instinct for networking so important to professional success. He had acquired the certification he wanted from an educational institution familiar, at least in name, to most Americans. Now he owed the army two years of service for this “free” education. He was not drawn to any other profession and had no contacts outside of his family that would give him entry to a business career. As a junior officer, he would have all of the status and eventually some of the income that had long eluded his father. Add a sliver of patriotism, and you have an explanation of his new dedication to the US Army. His story about himself, his identity, was now shifting decisively toward the profession that he had joined while he was still diffident about military life and especially military discipline.

  His football injury almost blocked his appointment. But a lenient colonel let him be commissioned so long as he agreed never to seek duty in the cavalry, where his bad knee would be an impediment. That sent him into the infantry, one of the less desirable parts of the army, generally reserved at that time for officers graduating in the lower two-thirds of the class. But Ike was happy to accept his new role and assignment in September 1915 to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.

  The Lone Star State was a diplomatic and military hot spot for America in 1915. While there was growing concern in Washington, DC, over Germany’s submarine warfare, there was also tension over the border with Mexico. The Mexican Revolution had been in full swing since 1910, and President Wilson was concerned to prevent armed attacks on American cities along the border. In 1914, US forces had occupied Veracruz, Mexico, for several months, and there was reason to believe that armed revolutionaries under Pancho Villa might mount attacks across the US-Mexico border.

  Close to what might soon become a war zone, Eisenhower got his first opportunity in command with Company F of the 19th Infantry Regiment. It quickly became apparent to his superiors that he had substantial ability both to train and to lead infantrymen. He could be firm, but in a way that commanded respect rather than anger. By army standards, his proficiency was being demonstrated only with small units. But this was still a significant accomplishment for a junior officer who had been sent into the field with a caveat to the effect that he would need strong guidance in his army career. The commandant of cadets at West Point had noted that his judgment, originality, energy, efficiency, and character were all “very good.” But, taking note of Ike’s frequent abrasive encounters with authority, the commandant added that Ike would need a “strict commanding officer.”15

  That soon became evident in Texas when his commanding officer caught Eisenhower out of uniform on the base. Ike was attempting to win a bet with his colleagues by climbing a cable holding the flagpole. This was the same sort of boyish behavior that had piled up demerits for him at West Point. But now he was twenty-five and an officer in the division. He was thoroughly reamed out, and apparently that sufficed to prevent any similar incidents in the rest of his time at Fort Sam Houston.16

  Major Conklin and Captain Helms, commanding Company F in 1915, were concerned about Eisenhower’s lack of attention to detail and noted his need for further experience. Nevertheless, Helms said that Ike had already established his ability to shape up a company of enlisted men. His “attention to duty and professional zeal” were excellent, and in war, Helms said, Ike would be “best suited for duty … with troops.” He was still a bit short of being “an excellent officer,” and more experience might improve his performance. After hedging his evaluation, Helms added some light praise: Eisenhower was, he said, an “energetic” officer who “takes an interest in his work.”17

  His work as a second lieutenant continued to mold Ike’s new identity. Threatening war clouds were gathering to the east and south, and Ike concentrated on the challenge of being an effective leader in a venture far more demanding and dangerous than football. The fighting in Europe had to be on the mind of every military officer in America. So, too, with developments next door in Mexico, where General John J. Pershing was leading an American force in pursuit of Pancho Villa. Mexico’s revolutionary renegade had recently attacked across the border and killed eighteen Americans in Columbus, New Mexico.

  With deadly combat looming and Ike more intense about his military career, he had another reason to become more serious about his professional and personal life: he had acquired a new status and a partner who would now share his life in the US Army.18 Mamie Doud and Ike were married in July 1916, shortly after he was promoted to first lieutenant. The bride was young, attractive, and accustomed to more luxury than a lieutenant’s pay could provide.19 Support from her well-to-do father would help. But the marriage frequently left Lieutenant Eisenhower struggling with cash flow problems—a situation many professionals encounter early in their careers. In Ike’s case, as we saw in Chapter One, it would at one point get him into serious trouble over an apparently trivial housing allowance.

  While married life doubtless pumped up Ike’s dedication to his career, the promise and challenges of impending war appear to have been the most significant factors reshaping his approach to his professional life. The martial spirit, I believe, trumped matrimony, just as football had trumped military science at West Point. Following his promotion, Ike had every reason to be optimistic about his immediate future. He had established his ability to lead infantrymen, a basic job in the US Army. In 1917, Lieutenant Eisenhower was even more certain than Captain Helms that in the event of war, he was “best suited for duty with troops.”

  As with any profession, however, there are two central aspects of getting ahead. One involves the development of the capabilities called for by the profession. This was what Eisenhower was doing very well in this early phase of his army service. Once he accepted the fact that he was for the immediate future likely to continue his service, his talent as a leader began to emerge. As yet, however, it was not at all clear that he would do particularly well in coping with the second major challenge all aspiring l
eaders face: getting chosen to lead. Here Eisenhower still had a serious problem. Both his sense of identity as a military officer and his reputation among his superiors were changing, sliding toward closer agreement. Helms’s evaluation reflected that change. But without any formal recognition of that fact, the army bureaucracy in Washington had locked Ike in as a talented trainer and coach. To their mind, he was a good candidate for only secondary positions in the service.

  High command seemed out of sight for an officer with Ike’s personality and experience. His reputation as a football coach had spread, and while he was in Texas his superior officer had pressured him into leading the team of a local military academy. Then he was recruited to coach the football team of a Catholic college in San Antonio.20 Each success made it less likely that he would ever manage to escape being typecast as an officer who had a special knack for coaching but had not established that he could provide the kind of leadership demanded at the army’s upper levels.

  Whether he was coaching players or training troops, Ike’s personality gave him an advantage. He was comfortable with his men and treated them firmly and fairly. His package of small-town values and his instincts about leadership served him well. It was no coincidence that he exercised authority much the way his mother, Ida, had run their household in Abilene.

  But there was a second lesson embodied in Ida’s life, a lesson that Lieutenant Ike was still having some trouble learning. Ida knew how to bend to authority without sacrificing her values and individuality. This proved a hard lesson for Ike to learn. He seemed still to be rebelling unconsciously against a father and older brother who had saddled him with a deep streak of discontent about authority. As war clouds drifted closer to the United States, Eisenhower found it especially difficult to accept the authority of the army bureaucrats who were deciding his future.21