Dwight D Eisenhower’s memoirs came out while I was in graduate school in the 1960s, and one of my professors commented – not entirely facetiously – that he’d been surprised to see print on the pages. My fellow students and I were being taught that despite Eisenhower’s victories in World War II, the presidency had been beyond his capabilities. Like Ulysses S Grant, the last general to make it to the White House, Ike won elections easily, but did not rise to the responsibilities these thrust upon him.
Jean Edward Smith challenged that argument about Grant in a well-received biography published a decade ago: Grant had been a better president than contemporaries or previous biographers realised, Smith maintained. In Eisenhower in War and Peace, Smith, now a senior scholar at Columbia after many years at the University of Toronto and Marshall University, makes a more startling claim. Apart from Franklin D Roosevelt, Ike was “the most successful president of the 20th century”.
Historians long ago abandoned the view that Eisenhower’s was a failed presidency. He did, after all, end the Korean War without getting into any others. He stabilised the Soviet-American rivalry. He strengthened European alliances while withdrawing support from European colonialism. He rescued the Republican Party from isolationism and McCarthyism. He maintained prosperity, balanced the budget, promoted technological innovation, facilitated (if reluctantly) the civil rights movement and warned, in the most memorable farewell address since Washington’s, of a “military-industrial complex” that could endanger the nation’s liberties.
But does Eisenhower merit a place in the pantheon just behind Franklin Roosevelt? Smith’s case would be stronger if he had specified standards for presidential success. What allowances should one make for unexpected incumbencies, like those of the first Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman, Johnson and Ford? Or for holding office in wartime? Or for “black swan” events — economic crashes, natural disasters, protest movements, self-inflicted scandals, terrorist attacks?
Smith doesn’t say. But he does carefully trace Eisenhower’s preparation for the presidency, and that’s what this biography is really about.
Exhaustion was the problem in World War I, in which the costs on all sides allowed no decisive outcome. As a young (and disappointed) Army captain, Eisenhower was kept stateside during the hostilities, training troops in the use of the recently invented tank. After peace returned, he and his fellow officers assumed there would be another war, but they had to plan for it under conditions wholly different from the profligacy with which the last one had been fought. With cuts in military spending that left ranks reduced, Eisenhower’s generation took limited means as their default position.
Doing as much as possible with as little as possible required setting priorities, so Eisenhower made himself an expert, during the 1920s and 1930s, on the theory and practice of limited means. The theory came from the 19th-century Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, whose difficult classic, On War, Eisenhower mastered, as almost no one else in the Army at the time did.
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Eisenhower’s skills were not those required to command armies on battlefields. But in his ability to weigh costs against benefits, to delegate authority, to communicate clearly, to co-operate with allies, to maintain morale and especially to see how all the parts of a picture related to the whole (it was not just for fun that he later took up painting), Eisenhower’s preparation for leadership proved invaluable. Roosevelt found in Eisenhower, with Marshall’s help, the only general he needed to run the European war.
There were setbacks: the North African and Italian campaigns, the Battle of the Bulge after the triumph of D-Day. But because Eisenhower showed himself to have learned from these crises, Roosevelt and Marshall never lost confidence in him. At the same time, Ike was perfecting the art of leading while leaving no trace — the “hidden hand” for which he would be known while in the White House.
Politics beckoned, after his victories, but the situations they inherited upon becoming president could hardly have been more different. Facing no credible external enemy, the US in 1869 was as inward-looking as it ever had been. But by 1953, its interests were global and threats seemed to be too. Eisenhower’s greatest accomplishment may well have been to make his presidency look bland and boring: in this sense, he was very different from the flamboyant Roosevelt, and that’s why historians at first underestimated him. Jean Edward Smith is among the many who no longer do. The greatest virtue of his biography is to show how well Eisenhower’s military training prepared him for this task: like Grant, he made what he did seem easy. It never was, though, and Smith stresses the toll it took on Eisenhower’s health, on his marriage and ultimately in the loneliness he could never escape. Perhaps Ike earned his place in the pantheon after all.
EISENHOWER IN WAR AND PEACE
Jean Edward Smith
Random House; 950 pages; $40
©2012 The New York Times News Service