Eisenhower Read online

  By the time Eisenhower met him, General Conner had become the army’s “Grey Eminence”—“grey” because he operated behind the postwar army’s public face, “eminence” because his close links to the army’s top leaders and his exquisite sense of how to manipulate the service’s organization gave him power that exceeded his position.10 He was the master Machiavellian whose continuing support could accelerate a career and, as it turned out, even foster in others a powerful sense of professional ambition.

  Ike’s Mentor

  Conner was thus not new to mentoring officers whose potential he recognized, and he was inclined to emphasize the younger man’s capabilities rather than the problems Ike encountered in 1920 and 1921. The fact that Eisenhower had published an article that upset a stodgy Chief of Infantry did not faze Conner, who had been pushing tank warfare for several years. More serious was the threat of a court-martial over the illegal $250.67 housing payment. But to Conner that was a mere bump in the road that deserved nothing more than some smoothing out: the repayment Eisenhower made and the reprimand he received from his commanding officer should do it. With Conner’s support, they sufficed.

  Agreeing with Patton’s positive evaluation of Ike, Conner set out to give Major Eisenhower a new attitude about his army career—that is, a new identity that would enable him to make full use of his potential for top-level military leadership. Conner could be satisfied that he had already had a positive influence on the careers of Patton and Marshall, so he had some reason to be confident he could guide Major Eisenhower’s career out of the hole Ike was digging for himself in the postwar army. In reality, however, neither Patton nor Marshall had needed any serious mentoring to cultivate their military identities. While they had sharply different backgrounds and personalities, they were both intense and determined about their professional careers. They had, as well, established their reputations in wartime service. All they needed were nudges. Ike, by contrast, was a thirty-two-year-old officer in need of substantial guidance and support.

  The odds did not favor Conner and Eisenhower. The US Army in 1922 was not a friendly organization for anyone who was—as Ike was—contemptuous of regulations, at odds with the army’s hierarchy, and uneasy with the infantry’s status quo. Conner and Eisenhower would be fighting uphill against a military bureaucracy that was clearly determined to keep this major in the lower levels of service as a coach and trainer of recruits.

  At first the odds seemed to be confirmed. Conner launched his new mentoring venture by asking Ike to join him as his executive officer in Panama. There was, however, no football team in Central America, and Major Eisenhower’s institutional image was so well planted that even a request from the Grey Eminence could be turned down. It was. The army’s first response to Conner’s request was a harsh no. Ike’s commanding officer at Camp Meade needed him to remain in his current position, where, among other things, he could continue coaching the post’s football team. Ike’s temper rose at this latest rebuff, but there was nothing he could do about the situation.

  It was not easy to thwart Conner, however, and he continued to press for Ike’s appointment. Challenged, Conner used his friendship with the army’s new Chief of Staff, General Pershing, to get the man he wanted as his executive officer in Panama. Shortly thereafter Ike received orders to report for duty under Conner. This episode offered a startling lesson in how the upper reaches of the United States Army actually operated. Bureaucratic authority was dominant from the middle of the institution down to the lowly recruit. Personal authority, reputation, and friendships were potent forces at the top. Eisenhower would not forget this lesson. Happy to be relieved of duty as a coach, Ike, with Mamie, quickly got ready for a voyage to Central America and for their first experience with military duty outside of the continental United States.

  Reeducation in Practice

  Soon after Ike arrived at Panama’s Camp Gaillard in 1922, Conner started his campaign to reorient his new executive officer. Ike’s new boss was a determined, smart, and very well-organized teacher. For the first time in Ike’s life, he had a male authority figure he respected, understood, and liked. It was no small task to wipe out the anti-authoritarianism rooted in Ike’s Abilene years, and the job would never be 100 percent finished. But Eisenhower, in his thirties, started the process under Conner’s tutelage and soon began to acquire a new and intense focus on the intellectual and organizational aspects of his career as a professional officer. If he and Conner succeeded, they might also succeed in transforming the army’s image and evaluation of Ike. That would be an entirely different task, but first they had to get Major Eisenhower thinking in a different way.

  While Camp Gaillard was a wonderful post for Ike, it was a wretched place for Mamie, who was pregnant. A marriage that had taken a stiff blow when their son Ikky died began to fray even more. Ike burrowed deeper and deeper into his career, leaving Mamie further and further behind. Unable to cope with conditions in Panama, she returned to Colorado and the protective shelter of her family.11 When their son John was born in August 1922, there was an opening—an opportunity for the mother and father to draw back together. But they never really recovered the emotional bond that had been at the heart of their marriage.

  Meanwhile, Conner devoted his full attention to the task of reconstructing Eisenhower’s military career. How exactly did this happen? We know a good bit about what Conner asked Eisenhower to do, and maybe we can mesh that with what we already know about Ike’s identity to this point in his life. For one thing, Conner guided his new student deeply into military history and taught it using a Socratic method of analysis: What, in brief, did the text mean? What were the alternatives to what the leaders did? What, then, likely would have been the outcome? Early in his life in Abilene, Eisenhower had been interested in the great battles and careers of the past, especially in ancient history. He had developed a romantic fascination with heroic accomplishments, but not with the type of counterfactual analysis Conner emphasized.12 This type of history enabled Ike to build on his bent toward mathematical reasoning. Conner’s method was the antithesis of the rote learning found in history courses at West Point, and it enabled Eisenhower to see the relevance of history to a successful military career.

  Conner was teaching Eisenhower two other things. One would have an almost immediate and extremely important payout. By requiring Ike to write a field order for the Canal Zone every day, Conner made this type of systematic procedure a habit instead of an imposition. Looking ahead, Conner insisted that his pupil use the language and categories of the army’s Command and General Staff School. This was a drill, and as such, it was repeated over and over. Conner thus taught Eisenhower how to deal effectively with the army’s brand of bureaucracy—something that Ike had been resisting and resenting. Conner wanted him to be completely socialized into army routine so he could move up with ease and encounter more sophisticated problems of strategy and organization.

  The other lesson was more subtle: Conner was instilling in Ike the confidence that he could actually achieve great success when he focused his mind completely on an army career. This is one of the most important aspects of mentoring, but it is hard to nail down and almost impossible to analyze in any systematic way. When Ike left Abilene, years before, he lacked the kind of driving ambition that would take him to the top in any profession, including a career as a professional soldier. Conner understood that aspect of Ike because he too had left West Point with a similar attitude toward his military career. Now he convinced Ike that by concentrating his considerable mental resources on professional accomplishments, he could advance far beyond the limited horizons of Abilene or Fort Meade. He could break out of the army’s typecasting, the deeply planted image of a talented trainer and football coach who perhaps had the capacity to lead a regiment or brigade, but nothing more.13 Confidence was the ingredient that had to be added to the special skills and the capabilities for military leadership that Conner was assiduously grooming.

  Many accomplished leade
rs cannot mentor their subordinates. Why? Not because they cannot teach technique and improve their subordinates’ capabilities. The limit to their mentoring is their inability to instill confidence in another person. The drive and concentration that got them into a leadership position make it difficult for them to foster confidence. Conner did not struggle with this problem and was thus the perfect mentor. His own ego did not get in the way, much to Ike’s advantage. The long hours engaged in intense discussions about history, leadership, and the lessons to be learned from Carl von Clausewitz’s On War gave Eisenhower the knowledge base he needed to become a senior officer. The experience writing field orders prepared him for advanced training (and testing). The confidence he began to acquire in Panama in his own intelligence, goals, and education would be the essential stepping-stone to success as a professional officer. Conner calculated that Ike was the kind of person who would make full use of the lessons he was learning—to the advantage of his career, the US Army, and ultimately the United States.

  Conner was an inspirational teacher, and he quickly began to bring out the best in his new trainee. For Eisenhower, this was the first authority figure in his life since leaving Abilene who had a sustained, forceful, and positive impact on him. It helped that Ike had once been interested in history and was not contemptuous of past leaders and their military campaigns. He had lost his interest in history at West Point, but he quickly regained it in Panama and was able with tutoring to begin thinking historically and analytically about the rich, deep military lore of the past. He was not so oriented to action that he could not engage in extended reflection on both military principles and tactics.

  His two-year stint in Panama was essentially a practical graduate program in how to be an effective leader in the upper reaches of the US Army. Not an ideal army. No, Conner and Eisenhower were thinking about the army that existed in the 1920s and would probably be needed in the future, if Conner’s calculations were correct. By the time Ike left Panama, he was eager to get ahead with his career. He had every reason to believe that his army reputation would quickly change and would become congruent with his new identity. He would then no longer be labeled as an adequate but less than exemplary officer with an unusual knack for training recruits and coaching amateur football players.

  Ike’s Sponsor

  The long months of intense education with Fox Conner built up Ike’s expectations as well as his confidence. While in Panama, he received General Pershing’s Order 43 (October 23, 1922), which awarded Ike the Distinguished Service Medal for his efforts in training troops at Camp Colt in 1918. This was the recognition that had been denied earlier. But that was before Major Eisenhower had friends in high places. Looking forward to an opportunity to build on what he had learned, he applied for the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Years earlier, Conner had aced the school, which was then in an intensely “competitive period.” Some of its student-officers were reported to have committed suicide or to have suffered nervous breakdowns.14 The program had since become less cutthroat, but the school was still a demanding and crucial step on the way to a senior position in the army.15

  Alas, the army’s image of Ike was not changing as quickly as he was. The only service school he had been to was the infantry’s tank school, a program that was neither demanding nor prestigious enough for an officer looking to give his career a kick start. That worked to his disadvantage, as did the army’s skepticism about Conner’s high evaluation of Eisenhower.16 Conner said Ike was “one of the most capable, efficient and loyal officers I have ever met. On account of his natural and professional abilities he is exceptionally fitted for General Staff Training.”17 This, however, was the first such ecstatic evaluation the thirty-three-year-old Eisenhower had received. That prompted suspicion in Washington.

  The army was quick to point out that his organizational profile—established with a variety of superior officers between 1915 and 1924—had not, in fact, changed. As a result, he was sent back to Fort Meade, where he could help his friend Vernon Pritchard coach the post’s football team. This was another crushing blow to Eisenhower. Then the Chief of Infantry compounded the disappointment by turning down Ike’s application to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was beginning to appear that his second-rate reputation was not going to change and would continue to define his military career—Fox Conner’s support notwithstanding. No longer satisfied to be considered second-rate, Major Eisenhower fought back. He requested and received an interview with the Chief of Infantry and asked point-blank to go to the Infantry School. The answer once again was no. Instead, he was sent to Fort Benning to command a light tank battalion—a command he had already held briefly in 1917 before he was denied an opportunity to serve in Europe.18

  By the fall of 1924, Eisenhower’s career appeared to be set in the same bureaucratic cement that was holding together the army’s organizational culture. Chief of Staff Pershing retired that year, and apparently Conner’s efforts had been in vain. The best that Ike could expect was to stay in the army, advance in rank slowly—very slowly—and perhaps retire as a lieutenant colonel to Abilene or a town with an army post. This was not an unusual career for an officer in America’s army in the 1920s and 1930s.

  But this time his erstwhile mentor became his sponsor and cleverly broke the army bureaucracy’s lock on Ike’s career.19 Fox Conner was in Washington, serving as deputy chief of staff of the army, and he had not lost his confidence in Eisenhower’s ability as an officer. Whether because of Conner’s influence or a sudden, unpredictable stroke of intelligence on the part of the Chief of Infantry, Eisenhower was suddenly rescued from coaching and from career stasis. He learned that he had indeed been appointed to attend the Command and General Staff School as part of the 1925–1926 class. Here at last he would get an opportunity to make full use of his ability to focus on a problem, develop an appropriate policy solution, and explain how it could be put into effect.20 Here at last he would get a chance to create a new image of Major Dwight David Eisenhower.

  Right at that crucial point in his career, however, Ike’s confidence wavered. It was still thin despite Conner’s guiding influence and months of intense, informal postgraduate instruction in Panama. After all, Eisenhower had been reminded over and over again, directly and indirectly, that the army officers sitting in judgment on his career were—Conner excepted—convinced he did not have the ability to become a general officer. He had been told repeatedly that he was an excellent football coach and a good trainer of infantry at the regimental level. It would have been hard not to have self-doubts at this point. The doubts that were pushing forward in his mind were reinforced by a message he apparently received from an aide to the Chief of Infantry, who said that Eisenhower would probably fail the tough course at the Command and General Staff School. Conner tried to pump up Ike’s confidence. But the outlook was not at all favorable as the Eisenhowers headed to Fort Leavenworth and this new challenge.

  Luckily for Ike, the school was now using a one-year curriculum that stressed strong offensive actions designed to avoid the trench warfare of the world war and the horrific losses associated with “concentrated brute force.” Here, built into the program, was a direct critique of the British approach to infantry in the Great War, an approach to strategy and tactics that had emphasized neither air nor mobile tank warfare.21 This was the type of critique that Ike and Patton had been working toward with the articles they published in the Infantry Journal in 1920.22 The challenge for Eisenhower was to follow the logic of that analysis without drifting out of the boundaries set by the school’s concepts of correct answers to each of the problems presented to the officers. Fortunately, that was what Conner had trained him to do, day after day after day.

  Opening the Door

  The intellectual exercises that Eisenhower performed in Panama embodied an important element of wisdom about getting ahead in any modern institution. Every participant in a bureaucratic organization who plans to move up the hierar
chy and get greater authority faces the same problem Ike encountered. In business, in government, in nonprofit organizations, the rewards go to those who achieve a high degree of efficiency within a paradigm set by the top leadership. Those who show the leadership how to make the organization and the existing paradigm more successful are likely to move ahead. Those who question the entire paradigm are seldom successful—except in fictional accounts. On those rare occasions when challengers are successful, they later get opportunities to set or recast the paradigm. Then the process starts over again. In this regard, the US Army and its Command and General Staff School were just a particular military variant on the common model of the modern organization.

  Problem-solving in the military was thus rank-appropriate. And the one-year program that Ike entered was designed to be appropriate for ranks above his, that is, above major. Later, the school’s two-year program would deal more effectively with the differences in capabilities required for successful leadership at different ranks. But the program Eisenhower was taking was focused on only three main aspects of the performance of a general officer: tactics and technique, tactical principles, and command staff and logistics.23

  As the intensive program got under way, Ike at first had some problems accommodating to the rigid curriculum. But rather quickly Conner’s training and Ike’s determination, analytical ability, and self-discipline paid off. In the early running he ranked fourteenth in the class of 248. After the first month, he pushed up into the top ten. And stayed there. Partnering with his friend Leonard T. Gerow, Ike sprinted as the class approached the finish line: fourth in the class in March, he was third in April and May. He won a tight race at the end and finished in first place.24 His efficiency report rated him superior in “attention to duty, initiative, intelligence, energy and resolution, judgment and common sense, and leadership.”25 Conner’s ecstatic evaluation had been confirmed. In the most challenging test the peacetime army could impose, Eisenhower had demonstrated that he clearly had the intellectual ability and professional skill needed for high command. The officers at the War Department in Washington, DC, could not possibly ignore these results.