EISENHOWER WAS twenty-eight years old when the war ended. His ambitions had been thwarted: now he was a member of an organization that was being practically dismantled. By January 1, 1920, the Army had only 130,000 men on active duty. Through the 1920s and 1930s it continued to shrink. By 1935, the Army did not have a single combat-ready unit of any size. It ranked sixteenth among the world’s armies. It was more a school than an army.
But, for Eisenhower, the schooling was excellent, and almost continuous. The first problem he studied was the role of the tank in the next war; his fellow student was George S. Patton, Jr. Eisenhower first met Patton in the fall of 1919, at Camp Meade, Maryland. It was an ideal assignment for Eisenhower, as he had Mamie and Icky with him and he was working with tanks. Best of all, he had some real tanks to work with, British heavies, French Renaults, German Marks, and even some American-built tanks.
Eisenhower and Patton immediately became and remained fast friends, despite their much different personalities and backgrounds. Patton came from a wealthy, aristocratic family. He was an avid polo player, well able to afford his own string of ponies. He was extreme in his mannerisms, his dress, and his talk. Eisenhower could swear as eloquently as most sergeants, but he went easy on the curse words in mixed company; Patton, who could outswear a mule skinner, swore at all times as if he were in a stag poker game. Eisenhower’s voice was deep and resonant, Patton’s high-pitched and squeaky. Eisenhower enjoyed being one of the gang, wanted to be well liked and popular. Patton was more of a loner, did not much care what his associates thought of him. Where Eisenhower tended to qualify all his observations and statements, Patton was dogmatic. Where Eisenhower had no particularly strong views on race and politics, Patton was viciously anti-Semitic and loudly right wing. Where Eisenhower was patient and let things happen to him, Patton was impatient and took charge of his own career. Patton had been in combat, with tanks, and Eisenhower had not. And to hear Patton tell it, as he loved to do, he had ridden into battle on one of his tanks as if it were a polo pony and then single-handedly (well, almost) breached the Hindenburg Line.1
But Eisenhower and Patton had enough in common to overcome these differences. Both were West Pointers (Patton graduated in 1909). Both had been athletes—Patton played football as well as polo for the Army—and remained interested in athletics. Both were married, and their wives got along well together. Both had a deep interest in military history, both were serious students of war. Most of all, both were enthusiastic about tanks, sharing a belief that the weapon would dominate the next war.
It was thanks to Patton that Eisenhower first met General Fox Conner, a man who was destined to play a critical role in his life, one that cannot be exaggerated.
In 1964, in his retirement, after a career that had put him in intimate working contact with scores of brilliant and talented men, including most of the great statesmen and military leaders of World War II and the Cold War, Eisenhower could still say, “Fox Conner was the ablest man I ever knew.”2
He met Conner at a Sunday-afternoon dinner in the fall of 1920 in Patton’s quarters at Camp Meade. Patton had known Conner in France; Eisenhower knew him by reputation as one of the smartest men in the Army. A wealthy Mississippian who had graduated from West Point in 1898, Conner had served as Pershing’s operations officer in France, where he was generally acknowledged to have been the brains of the AEF. He was currently Pershing’s chief of staff in Washington. Both the general and Mrs. Conner—herself an heiress—were charming, soft-spoken southerners, formal and polite in their manners, but genuinely interested in younger officers and their wives. Eisenhower and Mamie felt drawn to them at once. The Patton dinner was a great success, highlighted by wide-ranging conversations.
After dinner, Conner asked Patton and Eisenhower to show him their tanks and explain to him their ideas about the future of the weapon. This was the first—and was to be the only—encouragement they had from a superior officer, and they spent a long afternoon with him, showing him around Camp Meade, explaining to him their ideas. When the time came for him to return to Washington, Conner praised them for their work and encouraged them to keep at it.
• •
Eisenhower’s family life was a warm, happy one. He and Mamie thoroughly enjoyed each other and the Army social scene, but most of all they delighted in their son. Icky, three years old in the fall of 1920, was an active, energetic boy, his father’s delight and his mother’s joy. The soldiers adopted him as a mascot. They bought him a tank uniform, complete with overcoat and overseas cap, and took him along on field maneuvers. He was enthralled by his tank rides. His father took him in the afternoon to football practice, where he would stand on the sidelines, cheering madly at every play in the scrimmage. He would put on his uniform and stand at stiff attention as the band played and the colors passed during parades.
The Eisenhowers made plans for a glorious Christmas. Mamie went to Washington to buy presents; Eisenhower put up a tree in their quarters and bought a toy wagon for Icky. But, a week or so before Christmas, Icky contracted scarlet fever. He evidently got it from the maid, a young local girl who had, unknown to the Eisenhowers, just recovered from an attack of the disease. Eisenhower called in a specialist from Johns Hopkins; the doctor could only advise prayer. Icky had to go into quarantine; Eisenhower was not allowed to enter his room. He could only sit outside it and wave to his son through the window. Mamie was also ill and confined to bed. Eisenhower spent every free minute at the hospital, desperate with worry, remembering his younger brother Milton’s own struggle with the dreaded scourge of scarlet fever seventeen years earlier, hoping that Icky, like Milton, would somehow pull through.
He did not. On January 2, Icky died. “This was the greatest disappointment and disaster in my life,” Eisenhower wrote in his old age, “the one I have never been able to forget completely.”3 For the next half century, every year on Icky’s birthday he sent flowers to Mamie. The Eisenhowers arranged to have Icky’s remains laid beside them in their own burial plot.
Inevitably, they blamed themselves. If only they had not hired that maid, if only they had checked on her more carefully, if only . . . These feelings had to be suppressed if the marriage was to survive the disaster, but suppression did not eliminate the unwanted thoughts, only made them harder to live with. Both the inner-directed guilt and the projected feelings of blame placed a strain on their marriage. So did the equally inevitable sense of loss, the grief that could not be comforted, the feeling that all the joy had gone out of life. “For a long time, it was as if a shining light had gone out in Ike’s life,” Mamie said later. “Throughout all the years that followed, the memory of those bleak days was a deep inner pain that never seemed to diminish much.”4
• •
At the end of 1921, General Conner took command of the 20th Infantry Brigade in the Panama Canal Zone. He requested Eisenhower for his executive officer. Chief of Staff John J. Pershing granted the request.
The Eisenhowers arrived in January 1922. The accommodations were miserable. Mamie described their house as “a double-decked shanty, only twice as disreputable.” Built on stilts, it had been abandoned for a decade and stank of mildew. She had household help, which cost practically nothing in Panama and was worth about as much; she had to do the shopping herself and provide minute supervision of the cooking and housework.5
The Conners lived next door; Mamie and Mrs. Conner became close friends. Mamie called on her daily—Virginia Conner became her confidante and adviser. When Mamie complained about some of her difficulties with her husband, Mrs. Conner was forthright in her advice. She told Mamie to cut her hair, change her clothes, brighten herself up. “You mean I should vamp him?” Mamie asked. “That’s just what I mean,” Mrs. Conner replied. “Vamp him!”6
Eisenhower and General Conner, meanwhile, developed a teacher-student relationship. They both enjoyed riding horseback through the jungle, spreading their bedrolls on the ground at night, chatting around a campfire. On weekends, they went on fishing expeditions together.
Conner pulled Eisenhower out of the lethargy that had threatened to engulf him after Icky’s death. He insisted that Eisenhower read serious military literature and forced the younger man to think about what he was reading by asking probing questions. Eisenhower read memoirs of Civil War generals, then discussed with Conner the decisions Grant and Sherman and the others had made. What would have happened had they done this or that differently? Conner would ask. What were the alternatives? Eisenhower was anxious to please, so anxious that he read Clausewitz’ On War three times through—a difficult enough task to complete even once, made more difficult by Conner’s insistent questioning about the implications of Clausewitz’ ideas.
They also discussed the future. Conner insisted that there would be another war in twenty years or less, that it would be a world war, that America would fight with allies, and that Eisenhower had better prepare himself for it. He advised Eisenhower to try for an assignment under Colonel George C. Marshall, who had been with Conner on Pershing’s staff. Marshall, Conner insisted, “knows more about the techniques of arranging allied commands than any man I know. He is nothing short of a genius.” Indeed, Conner’s highest praise was “Eisenhower, you handled that just the way Marshall would have done.” Conner had witnessed at first hand the price the Allies had paid for divided leadership in war, knew the cost of not giving Marshal Foch sufficient powers to go with his grand title. He told Eisenhower that in the next war, “We must insist on individual and single responsibility—leaders will have to learn how to overcome nationalistic considerations in the conduct of campaigns . . .”7 Prophetic words for Foch’s successor.
Eisenhower almost worshiped Conner. His three years in Panama, he later said, were “a sort of graduate school in military affairs . . . In a lifetime of association with great and good men, he is the one figure to whom I owe an incalculable debt.” Virginia Conner noted, “I never saw two men more congenial than Ike Eisenhower and my husband.” Conner, in his 1924 efficiency report on Eisenhower, wrote that he was “one of the most capable, efficient, and loyal officers I have ever met.”8
• •
Adding to Eisenhower’s happiness in Panama was the birth of a second son. In the early summer of 1922, Mamie went to Denver to escape the heat and have her child in a modern hospital. In July, Eisenhower took a leave and was present on August 3 when John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower was born. John’s presence was a great help in getting over Icky’s death; as parents the Eisenhowers tended to be protective of him. Mamie, John later remarked, “was exceedingly affectionate, almost smothering me with concern,” and Mamie told an interviewer, “It took me years, many years, to get over my ‘smother love’—it wasn’t until Johnnie had children of his own that I finally stopped all worry.” His father, while stern (“Dad . . . was a terrifying figure”) and rigid in his discipline, was afraid enough of his own temper that he never laid a hand on his son.9 Instead, he gave John sharp verbal dressing downs for transgressions, which, given Eisenhower’s standards, were frequent. But overall they got on fine, and as soon as John was old enough, Eisenhower included his son in as many of his activities as possible, a practice that grew as the years went by and continued to the father’s death.
• •
In 1925, Conner used his influence with the War Department to get Major Eisenhower assigned to the Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth, Kansas. In the year that followed, Eisenhower worked as he never had before. He was in direct competition with 275 of the best officers in the Army. The work load, like the competition, was nearly overwhelming. The students looked on an assignment to C&GS as a reward as well as a challenge, but the Army regarded it as a test. The school was designed to discover not only who had brains, but who could take the strain.
The method was war gaming by case studies. Students were given problems. A hostile force of such-and-such strength was either attacking or defending a position. Students commanding the Blue Force had to decide what actions should be taken. After the student had handed in his answer, he was given the approved solution. He then had to work out the movements of the combat units and the supply services to support that solution—in short, the basic staff work that would be required in time of war.
C&GS was notorious for its pressure. Students would stay up half the night studying. The tension was such that nervous breakdowns were fairly common, and there was an occasional suicide. Eisenhower found this atmosphere “exhilarating.” 10 He decided that a fresh mind was more important than one crammed full of details, so he limited himself to two and one-half hours of study per night, always going to bed at nine-thirty. He got together with one old friend from Fort Sam, Leonard Gerow. They set up a command post on the third floor of Eisenhower’s quarters, covered the walls with maps, filled the shelves with reference works. No sound reached them there; it was off limits to his family.
One of John Eisenhower’s earliest memories was of the night he invaded this sanctuary. He saw his father and “Gee” bending over a large table, eyeshades protecting them from the glare of the lamp. “I was too small to see what was on the table but stared in wonderment at the huge maps tacked on the wall. The two young officers were going over the next day’s tactical problem. Dad and Gee welcomed me with a laugh and shoved me out the door in the course of perhaps half a minute.”11
The course brought out the best in Eisenhower, his ability to master detail without getting bogged down in it, his talent for translating ideas into action, his positive (almost eager) reaction to pressure, his mastery of his profession, and his sense of being a team player (the emphasis of the course was on the smooth functioning of the machine). When the final rankings were posted, he stood first in his class. Gerow was second, two-tenths of a point behind.
Eisenhower, elated, informed all his friends. Messages of congratulations poured in. Fox Conner was delighted with his protégé. Mrs. Doud wired, “Oh boy what a thrill hurrah I am broadcasting the news love and kisses Mother.”12 Patton wrote Eisenhower a letter of congratulations. “That certainly is fine. It shows that leavenworth is a good school if a HE man can come out one.” He added that Eisenhower’s record proved that “if a man thinks war long enough it is bound to effect [sic] him in a good way.”
Then Patton put in a cautionary note. “Good as leavenworth is,” he said, “it is still only a means not an end.” Since his own graduation two years earlier he had continued to work through all the C&GS problems, but he warned Eisenhower, “I don’t try for approved solutions any more but rather to do what I will do in war.” Warming to his subject, Patton added, “You know that we talk a hell of a lot about tactics and such and we never get to brass tacks. Namely what is it that makes the Poor S.O.B. who constitutes the casualty lists fight and in what formation is he going to fight. The answer to the first Leadership that to the second—I don’t know.” But he did know that any doctrine based on “super trained heroes is bull. The solitary son of a bitch alone with God is going to skulk as he always has and our advancing waves will not advance unless we have such superior artillery that all they have to do is to walk.”
Patton told Eisenhower that now that he had graduated from C&GS, he should stop thinking about drafting orders and moving supplies and start thinking about “some means of making the infantry move under fire.” He prophesied that “victory in the next war will depend on EXECUTION not PLANS.” 13
• •
Eisenhower’s next assignment was to the War Department, where General Pershing put him to work on preparing a history of the American Army in France. Fortunately, Eisenhower had his youngest brother, Milton, to help him. Milton was the number-two man in the Department of Agriculture, well known around Washington as a rising star. His special talent was journalism, and he helped his brother put the history together. The brothers, although nine years apart in age, were similar in many ways. Both loved a good game of bridge, as did their wives, and they frequently played together. They looked alike, with the same big grin and hearty laugh, although Dwight was leaner in the face, tougher in the body. Their voices were so similar that, practical jokers both, they would call the other man’s wife on the telephone and carry on a conversation, pretending to be each other. The wives never caught on.
Milton, who had married a wealthy girl, could afford to entertain frequently. Cabinet members, other bureaucrats, Washington lawyers, and the Washington press club were his usual guests. Dwight and Mamie joined in the fun; to Milton’s secret delight, Dwight became known in Washington as “Milton’s brother.” At one party, as a reporter was leaving, Milton stopped him and said, “Please don’t go until you’ve met my brother; he’s a major in the Army and I know he’s going places.” Shaking hands with thirty-seven-year-old Major Eisenhower, the reporter thought, “If he’s going far he had better start soon.” But the firm handshake, the lopsided grin, and the complete concentration of Eisenhower’s blue eyes on his all impressed the reporter. He decided Milton might be right.14
Pershing thought so too. He was delighted when Eisenhower handed in the work, on time, and sent a lavish letter of commendation: Eisenhower, he said, “has shown superior ability not only in visualizing his work as a whole but in executing its many details in an efficient and timely manner. What he has done was accomplished only by the exercise of unusual intelligence and constant devotion to duty.”15
Pershing was so pleased, in fact, that he sent Eisenhower to the Army War College for a year, then to Paris to study the ground and expand the history. Mamie found a furnished apartment at 68 Quai d’Auteuil, near Pont Mirabeau, on the Left Bank of the Seine, and a school for John. Eisenhower himself spent much of his time on the road, examining on the spot the American battlefields east of Paris. That was excellent preparation, in the event there would ever be another war and if he got involved and if it was fought in France.
In November 1929, Eisenhower returned to Washington, where he went to work as an aide to the new Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur. He was destined to spend a decade under MacArthur, who became, after Fox Conner, one of the two most important men in Eisenhower’s life. The other was George C. Marshall. It was Eisenhower’s luck to know and work for these outstanding generals, each one a powerful personality and a historic figure. They were vastly different in their leadership techniques.
MacArthur was bombastic, flamboyant in dress, egotistical, outrageous in his flattery, intensely partisan, keen to enter the political fray. Marshall was soft-spoken, reserved in dress, modest, slow to praise, staunchly nonpartisan, reluctant to enter the political fray. Both served Franklin Roosevelt as Chief of Staff, but their conceptions of the relationship of the head of the Army to the President were sharply different. MacArthur’s was one of antagonism, Marshall’s of complete support. They also differed on a fundamental strategic question, the relative importance of Europe and Asia to America. One result was to divide the U.S. Army and its General Staff into two groups, the “MacArthur clique” and the “Marshall clique,” or the “Asia-firsters” and the “Europe-firsters.”
Eisenhower spent fourteen of his thirty-seven years in the Army working directly under these two men, ten with MacArthur, four with Marshall. Each general liked and respected Eisenhower. They had good reason to do so. Eisenhower did his work brilliantly. It was always done on time. He loyally supported his chiefs decisions. He adjusted himself to his chiefs time schedule and to other whims. He was able to think from the point of view of his chief, a quality that both MacArthur and Marshall often singled out for praise. He had an instinctive sense of when to make a decision himself, when to pass it up to the boss.
MacArthur said of Eisenhower in a fitness report in the early 1930s, “This is the best officer in the Army. When the next war comes, he should go right to the top.”16 In 1942, Marshall showed that he agreed with that assessment by implementing the recommendation.
Because of his frequent disagreements with MacArthur, a conviction developed that Eisenhower hated working for MacArthur and tried desperately to obtain a transfer. Reportedly, too, MacArthur was bitter toward Eisenhower and deliberately held him back, which supposedly explains why Eisenhower was still lieutenant colonel in 1940, on his fiftieth birthday. But an account of the Eisenhower-MacArthur relationship that concentrates on bitterness, hatred, and jealousy, with the emphasis on their fights, is much too simple.
Their relationship was rich and complex, with many nuances, and was highly profitable to each man. Eisenhower later said that he had always been “deeply grateful for the administrative experience he had gained under General MacArthur,” without which he confessed he would not “have been ready for the great responsibilities of the war period.” Eisenhower also pointed out the obvious: “Hostility between us has been exaggerated. After all, there must be a strong tie for two men to work so closely for so many years.”17
In his memoirs, Eisenhower described MacArthur as “decisive, personable, amazingly comprehensive in his knowledge . . . possessed of a phenomenal memory.” MacArthur was a “peculiar fellow,” Eisenhower said, who had a habit of referring to himself in the third person. Of MacArthur’s well-known egotism, Eisenhower commented, “[He] could never see another sun . . . in the heavens.” But MacArthur’s idiosyncrasies, little and great, were not matters of substance. Eisenhower said of MacArthur “he did have a hell of an intellect! My God, but he was smart. He had a brain.”18 So did Marshall, of course, and Eisenhower too for that matter, although of the three, only MacArthur could read through a speech or a paper once, then repeat it verbatim.
Eisenhower was much closer to MacArthur personally than he ever was to Marshall. Eisenhower and MacArthur frequently exchanged jokes; Eisenhower and Marshall seldom did. Marshall, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, did not much care who won the Army-Navy game, while Eisenhower and MacArthur were fanatic followers of West Point’s football fortunes. Each fall they engaged in lively discussions about prospects for and the results of the Army-Navy game. Eisenhower and Mamie had almost no social contact with the Marshalls, while they frequently attended parties and dinners with MacArthur and his wife, Jean.
Eisenhower learned a great deal from MacArthur, far more than simply administrative skills. When he took a position on an issue, MacArthur was very stubborn in maintaining it, especially when the Army was concerned. He mastered the details of an issue and spoke with authority on them. He matched the persistence of his argument with a logical presentation of the facts. Whether consciously or not, during the war and as President, Eisenhower copied MacArthur in debate.
Nevertheless, many of the lessons Eisenhower learned from MacArthur were negative ones, a reflection of the markedly different styles of the two men. MacArthur did not attempt to teach or instruct, to make Eisenhower a protégé as Marshall tended to do; instead, Eisenhower learned from MacArthur by observing him in action.
MacArthur was certainly a fascinating man to observe. Reporters accompanied him wherever he went, and his pronouncements or activities often made headlines. He was deliberately outspoken on some of the most volatile emotional issues of the day. He lambasted the Communists, the New Dealers, the pacifists, the Socialists, any and all groups that did not meet his definition of 100 percent Americans. He never refused a challenge; he loved to charge into the battle.
MacArthur made no secret of his political ambitions; everyone knew that unlike Pershing he would welcome a presidential nomination. During the Roosevelt years and on into Truman’s Fair Deal, right-wing Republicans tried again and again to organize a MacArthur-for-President boom, even in 1944. Such activities always excited the general but never got far. One reason for the failure was obviously MacArthur’s extremism, but another was his inability to understand the American people. Eisenhower had a much better intuitive understanding of his fellow citizens’ political preferences.
During the 1936 presidential campaign, for example, when Eisenhower and MacArthur were in Manila, MacArthur convinced himself that Republican nominee Alf Landon was sure to win, probably by a landslide. Eisenhower protested that he was wrong. MacArthur insisted that he was correct, and cited a Literary Digest poll to prove it. He even bet several thousand pesos on Landon’s election and advised the Philippine government to prepare for a change in administrations in Washington. Eisenhower predicted that Landon could not even carry his home state, Kansas. MacArthur indulged himself in an “almost hysterical condemnation” of Eisenhower’s “stupidity.” When another of MacArthur’s aides, T. J. Davis, supported Eisenhower’s position, MacArthur loudly denounced them both as “fearful and small-minded people who are afraid to express judgments that are obvious from the evidence at hand.” Eisenhower’s comment in a diary that he was beginning to keep on a sporadic basis was “Oh hell.”
After the election, in which Landon carried only two states, MacArthur accused the Literary Digest of “crookedness,” but Eisenhower noted, “he’s never expressed to TJ or to me any regret for his awful bawling out . . .”19
In his first years of working for MacArthur, Eisenhower was often astonished at the way in which the Chief of Staff brushed aside the usual “clean-cut lines between the military and the political. If General MacArthur ever recognized the existence of that line, he usually chose to ignore it.” To Eisenhower’s dismay he found that “my duties were beginning to verge on the political, even to the edge of partisan politics.”20
The tradition in the Army was to deny that it was ever involved in any way in politics. The Army refused to see itself as a vast bureaucracy, even while it lobbied among congressmen for appropriations (a task on which Major Eisenhower spent much of his time). The Army and Army officers were supposed to be above politics. But, as Eisenhower confessed to Merriman Smith in a 1962 off-the-record interview, when Smith said it was his impression that Eisenhower did not like the role of politician, “What the hell are you talking about? I have been in politics, the most active sort of politics, most of my adult life. There’s no more active political organization in the world than the armed services of the U.S. As a matter of fact, I think I am a better politician than most so called politicians.”
When Smith asked why, Eisenhower explained, “Because I don’t get emotionally involved. I can accept a fact for what it is, and I can also accept the fact that when you’re hopelessly outgunned and out-manned, you don’t go out and pick a fight.”21
MacArthur embraced controversial issues; Eisenhower avoided them. When Eisenhower became President, the nation paid a price for his avoidance of controversy, as in the desegregation crisis or in dealing with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. But the avoidance clearly helped Eisenhower’s career, as he well knew. MacArthur was famous, but he was never popular enough to win a nomination, much less an election. Watching MacArthur in the thirties, and observing the results of his political activity, reinforced Eisenhower’s determination to keep himself above politics. That attitude was crucial to his success as a general and a politician.
MacArthur operated differently, and MacArthur never became President, although he wanted the job much more than Eisenhower ever did. There is an irony here. MacArthur, the most political of generals, never succeeded in politics, while three of the most apolitical generals in American history, Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower, did. They were the true American Caesars, the only American soldiers to hold both supreme military and political power.
• •
As a young officer, Eisenhower wanted to get some service with troops, as a line officer, away from Washington and the staff, but MacArthur would not let him go. In 1935, MacArthur’s tour as Chief of Staff came to an end (Roosevelt had extended it by one year already), and Eisenhower looked forward to a field assignment. But then MacArthur “lowered the boom on me.” Congress had voted “commonwealth” status for the Philippines, with complete independence to come in 1946. The new Philippine Commonwealth government, led by Manuel Quezon and the Nacionalista party, would need an army. Quezon asked MacArthur to come to Manila as his military adviser, to take charge of creating one. MacArthur accepted and insisted that Eisenhower accompany him as his assistant.22
In late September 1935, Eisenhower joined MacArthur on a train headed west for San Francisco, where they would board a ship for Manila. Eisenhower had been in Washington for six years. He had precious little to show for it. No promotions had come to him; neither he nor any other Army officer had been able to persuade the government to begin rebuilding the nation’s defenses; he had had no service with troops and seemed fated to be forever a staff officer.
He could, however, take pride in MacArthur’s assessment of his service and abilities. On September 30, 1935, the Chief of Staff wrote him a letter, praising him for his “success in performing difficult tasks whose accomplishment required a comprehensive grasp of the military profession in all its principal phases, as well as analytical thought and forceful expression.” MacArthur thanked Eisenhower for his “cheerful and efficient devotion . . . to confining, difficult, and often strenuous duties, in spite of the fact that your own personal desires involved a return to troops command and other physically active phases of Army life, for which your characteristics so well qualify you.” He assured Eisenhower that his experiences would be valuable to him as a commander in the future, “since all problems presented to you were necessarily solved from the viewpoint of the High Command.”
All that praise, so typical of MacArthur (and so well deserved), was welcome, but MacArthur’s concluding paragraph must have seemed to Eisenhower just a bit painful. MacArthur wrote, “The numbers of personal requests for your services brought to me by heads of many of the Army’s principal activities during the past few years furnish convincing proof of the reputation you have established as an outstanding soldier. I can say no more than that this reputation coincides exactly with my own judgment.”23 Eisenhower wished that MacArthur would meet one of those requests and let him go. But the chief did not, and now Eisenhower was off for Manila.
• •
In January 1939, shortly after his forty-eighth birthday, Eisenhower wrote his personal definition of happiness. His brother Milton had asked his advice about a job offer. Eisenhower wrote that “only a man that is happy in his work can be happy in his home and with his friends.” He continued, “Happiness in work means that its performer must know it to be worthwhile, suited to his temperament, and, finally, suited to his age, experience and capacity for performance of a high order.”24
Eisenhower served in the Philippines from late 1935 to the end of 1939. Nothing that he did there met any of the criteria he himself had set down for a happy life. His work was neither rewarding nor suited to his age or abilities. It was also terribly frustrating and, when the test came, proved to be worthless, as the Japanese in 1941 easily conquered the Philippine Army he had labored to help create. His close and warm relationship with MacArthur became distant and cold. His best friend died in an accident. Mamie was ill and bedridden much of the time. John was the only member of the family who enjoyed the Philippines and prospered there. The best that can be said for Eisenhower’s years with the Philippine Army was that he gained some experience in juggling and cutting national budgets.
That came about because MacArthur’s style was to leave all details to his subordinates, which in practice meant that Eisenhower met daily with Quezon on the problems of preparing and paying for the new army. He all but begged MacArthur to see Quezon at least once a week, but MacArthur refused. “He apparently thinks it would not be in keeping with his rank and position for him to do so.”25
As a result, Quezon gave Eisenhower a private office in the Malacañan Palace, next to the president’s office. Eisenhower spent two or three hours a day there, the rest of his time in his regular office, next to MacArthur’s, in the Manila Hotel. One day in 1936 MacArthur strode in, beaming. He said Quezon was going to make him a field marshal in the Philippine Army. At the same time, Quezon wanted to make Eisenhower and his assistant Major James B. Ord general officers. Eisenhower turned pale. He said he could never accept such an appointment. Ord agreed with Eisenhower, “though in somewhat less positive fashion.” Eisenhower explained in his diary that he felt that because “so many American officers [stationed in the Philippines] believe that the attempt to create a Philippine army is somewhat ridiculous, the acceptance by us of high rank in an army which is not yet formed would serve to belittle our effort.”26
To MacArthur directly, Eisenhower said, “General, you have been a four-star general [in the U.S. Army]. This is a proud thing. There’s only been a few who had it. Why in the hell do you want a banana country giving you a field-marshalship? This . . . this looks like you’re trying for some kind of . . .” MacArthur stopped him. “Oh, Jesus!” Eisenhower later remembered. “He just gave me hell!”27
MacArthur, obviously, did not share Eisenhower’s sensibilities. He believed, and often said, that Asians were peculiarly impressed by rank and title. Since that suited his own tastes, he accepted the field-marshal rank, explaining to Eisenhower that “he could not decline it without offense to the president.” Eisenhower noted that MacArthur “is tickled pink.”28
MacArthur designed his own uniform for the ceremony, which took place on August 24, 1936, at Malacañan Palace. Resplendent in a sharkskin uniform consisting of black trousers and a white coat covered with braid, stars, and unique lapel designs, MacArthur graciously accepted his gold baton from Mrs. Quezon. MacArthur gave a typically grandiloquent speech, which one of his officers, Captain Bonner Fellers, later a close associate, told him was “a Sermon on the Mount clothed in grim, present-day reality. I shall never forget it.”
To Eisenhower, however, the whole affair was “rather fantastic.” Five years later, in 1941, it became even more fantastic to him when Quezon told him “that he had not initiated the idea at all; rather, Quezon said that MacArthur himself came up with the high-sounding title.”29
In early January 1938, MacArthur conceived the idea, according to Eisenhower, that “the morale of the whole population would be enhanced if the people could see something of their emerging army in the capital city, Manila.” He ordered his assistants to arrange to bring units from all over the islands to a field near Manila, where they could camp for three or four days, winding up the whole affair with a big parade through the city. Eisenhower and Ord did a quick cost estimate, then protested to MacArthur “that it was impossible to do the thing within our budget.” MacArthur waved aside their objections and told them to do as ordered.
They did. Soon Quezon learned about the preparations. He called Eisenhower into his office to ask what was going on. Eisenhower was astonished—he had assumed that MacArthur had discussed the project with the President. When he learned that such was not the case, he told Quezon that they should discuss the matter no further until he had had a chance to confer with MacArthur. But when Eisenhower returned to his office in the Manila Hotel, he found a furious MacArthur. Quezon had called him on the telephone, said he was horrified at the thought of what the parade would cost, and wanted it canceled immediately.
MacArthur then told his staff that “he had never meant for us to proceed with preparations for the parade. He had only wanted us to investigate it quietly.” Eisenhower, “flabbergasted, didn’t know what to say. And finally I said to him, I said, ‘General, all you’re saying is that I’m a liar, and I am not a liar, and so I’d like to go back to the United States right away.’ Well, he came back . . . and he said, ‘Ike, it’s just fun to see that damn Dutch temper’—he put his arm right over my shoulder—he said, ‘It’s fun to see that Dutch temper take you over,’ and he was just sweetness and light. He said, ‘it’s just a misunderstanding, and let’s let it go at that.’ ”30
But Eisenhower could never let it go at that; thirty years later he still grew incensed when describing the scene. He commented, “Probably no one has had more, tougher fights with a senior than I had with MacArthur. I told him time and again, ‘Why in hell don’t you fire me?’ I said, ‘Goddammit, you do things I don’t agree with and you know damn well I don’t.’ ”31
MacArthur did not fire Eisenhower for the best of reasons—he needed him. Eisenhower was his liaison with Quezon, his “eyes and ears” for reports on developments in the various camps, the manager of his office, the man who drafted his speeches, letters, and reports. MacArthur knew that Eisenhower was close to indispensable, and as often as he shouted at his assistant, he found cause to praise him lavishly. In a typical handwritten note, praising Eisenhower for a policy paper, MacArthur said, “Ike—This is excellent in every respect. I do not see how it could be improved upon. It accomplishes the purpose in language so simple and direct as to preclude confusion and is flexible enough for complete administration.” Quezon too was grateful to Eisenhower for his efforts. When Eisenhower drafted a speech for Quezon, the president wrote him a note saying, “It is excellent. You have completely absorbed my thought and expressed it better than I ever could do it.”32
So, despite his own intense desire for service with American troops, despite his unhappy wife, despite his fights with his boss, Eisenhower had no chance of getting out of the Philippines. MacArthur would never consider his requests for a transfer, in fact would not even allow him to make such a request on a formal basis or enter it on his record.
There were compensations. The extra pay was welcome, the new apartment was luxurious, John was in a good school, and in July 1936 Eisenhower was finally promoted, along with the rest of his class, to lieutenant colonel.
• •
In September 1939, World War II began. To Eisenhower, although war would mean advancement in his own career and although he had dedicated his life to preparing for the challenge, the coming of the conflict was a disaster. On the day war was declared, he wrote Milton, “After months and months of feverish effort to appease and placate the mad man that is governing Germany, the British and French seem to be driven into a corner out of which they can work their way only by fighting. It’s a sad day for Europe and for the whole civilized world—though for a long time it has seemed ridiculous to refer to the world as civilized. If the war . . . is . . . long-drawn-out and . . . bloody . . . then I believe that the remnants of nations emerging from it will be scarcely recognizable as the ones that entered it.”
He feared that Communism, anarchy, crime and disorder, loss of personal liberties, and abject poverty “will curse the areas that witness any amount of fighting.” He said it scarcely seemed possible “that people that proudly refer to themselves as intelligent could let the situation come about.” He blamed Hitler, “a power-drunk egocentric . . . one of the criminally insane . . . the absolute ruler of eighty-nine million people.” And he made a prophecy: “Unless [Hitler] is successful in overcoming the whole world by brute force, the final result will be that Germany will have to be dismembered.”33
Eisenhower’s attitude contrasted sharply with that of his friend Patton, who signed off a 1940 letter to Eisenhower, “Again thanking you and hoping we are together in a long and BLOODY war.”34
After the Germans overran Poland, stagnation set in as the Wehrmacht and the Western Allies stared at each other across the Maginot Line. In October 1939, Eisenhower confessed to Leonard Gerow that “the war has me completely bewildered . . . It seems obvious that neither side desires to undertake attacks against heavily fortified lines. If fortification, with modern weapons, has given to the defensive form of combat such a terrific advantage over the offensive, we’ve swung back to the late middle ages, when any army in a fortified camp was perfectly safe from molestation. What,” Eisenhower wondered, “is the answer?”35
• •
By this time, Eisenhower had a fixed date for his return to the States—December 13, 1939. MacArthur had tried to talk him into staying, as had Quezon, who offered him a blank contract for his services and said, “We’ll tear up the old contract. I’ve already signed this one and it is filled in—except what you want as your emoluments for remaining. You will write that in.” Eisenhower thanked him but declined, explaining “no amount of money can make me change my mind. My entire life has been given to this one thing, my country . . . my profession. I want to be there if what I fear is going to come about actually happens.”36
The liner pulled out of its dock at noon. By Christmas, 1939, the Eisenhowers were in Hawaii; they celebrated New Year’s Eve in San Francisco. The ordeal of their four years in the Philippines was over.
During the voyage, and after they arrived in California, John talked to his father about his future. Then seventeen years old, he was considering going to West Point. Eisenhower had tried not to push him in that direction (although it was clear to John that his father would be delighted if he became a cadet), and before John committed himself, his father wanted to make certain that the young man was fully aware of what he was getting into.
In terms of a career, Eisenhower pointed out that if John became a lawyer, doctor, or businessman, “he could probably go just as far as his character, abilities, and honorable ambitions could carry him.” In a grand understatement, he added that “in the Army . . . things are ordered somewhat differently.” No matter how good an officer was, no matter how well he did his duty, his promotion was governed strictly by the rules of seniority.
Using himself as an example, Eisenhower pointed out that he had been in the Army since 1911. During the past twenty-nine years, he had consistently been praised by his superiors and classed in the top category for his age and rank. He had attended the Army’s leading postgraduate schools and graduated first at C&GS. But nothing that he had done had had the slightest influence in pushing him ahead. Seniority govered all promotions until a man became a colonel, when he was eligible for selection to a one-star rank, regardless of seniority. But Eisenhower’s class would not reach the grade of colonel until 1950, at which time he would be sixty years old, and the War Department would not promote colonels to general office grade when they had only a short time remaining before compulsory retirement. Thus, Eisenhower told his son, his own chances of ever obtaining a star in the Army “were nil.”
At this point in the discussion, Eisenhower wrote later, “John must have wondered why I stayed in the Army at all.” Indeed he must have. Eisenhower explained that he had found his life in the Army “wonderfully interesting . . . it had brought me into contact with men of ability, honor, and a sense of high dedication to their country.” He claimed that he had refused to bother himself about promotion. “I said the real satisfaction was for a man who did the best he could. My ambition in the Army was to make everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to other duty.”37
• •
In 1940 Eisenhower had the best year of his career to that date. He was regimental executive to the 15th Infantry Regiment of the 3d Division, and commander of the 1st Battalion of the 15th. He did not just enjoy being with troops, he relished it, reveled in it, filled his letters with enthusiasm. To Omar Bradley, for example, he wrote on July 1, 1940, “I’m having the time of my life. Like everyone else in the army, we’re up to our necks in work and in problems, big and little. But this work is fun! . . . I could not conceive of a better job.”38 The relatively leisurely life he had led in Manila gave way to one of constant physical activity, which suited him perfectly. After field maneuvers in Washington State in August—through country that he said “would have made a good stage setting for a play in Hades—Stumps, slashings, fallen logs, tangled brush, holes, and hills!”—he commented to Gerow: “I froze at night, never had, in any one stretch, more than 13/4 hours sleep, and at times was really fagged out—but I had a swell time.” His experience strengthened his conviction that “I belonged with troops; with them I was always happy.”39
At age fifty, he was in excellent physical condition. When he returned from the Philippines, a friend told him that he appeared to be thin and worn-out. Eisenhower insisted that he felt fine, that Mamie was the one who had been sick in the tropics, that although the heat had worn him down a bit, he expected to gain some weight and bounce back quickly.
He did. By the fall of 1940, he was robust again. Most people thought he looked ten years younger than his actual age. The outdoor life and service with troops restored him to his full strength. Broad of chest and shoulder, he still had the physical grace of the natural athlete. His whole body was animated. He walked with a bounce to his step, swinging his arms, eyes darting, missing nothing.
His voice was deep and resonant. When he talked, his hands flashed through the air as he enumerated his points on his fingers. His powers of concentration were greater than ever. He would fix his blue eyes on a listener, compelling attention and respect.
He was almost completely bald by now, with only a few strands of light-brown hair on the back and sides of his head, but the exposed pate somehow added to his good looks, perhaps because it balanced his broad, mobile mouth. He retained his infectious grin and hearty laugh.
He was mentally alert, ideas coming into his head so rapidly that his words tumbled out. Most of all, he exuded self-confidence. He was good at his job, he knew it, and he knew that his superiors realized it. He expected to be called to challenging posts, and to make a major contribution to the Army and to the nation.
He was at his post up to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week; he set up training schedules, made inspections, lectured his newly commissioned junior officers, supervised field exercises, studied the war in Europe and applied the lessons to his own unit. He was concerned with morale, did all he could to build it up and keep it high. He was convinced that “Americans either will not or cannot fight at maximum efficiency unless they understand the why and wherefore of their orders,” so wherever he went he talked, asked questions, listened, observed. He was patient, clear, and logical in his explanations to his officers and men about why things had to be done this way or that. He mingled with the men on an informal basis, got to know them, listened to their gripes, and, when appropriate, did something about them.
He believed that “morale is at one and the same time the strongest, and the most delicate of growths. It withstands shocks, even disasters of the battlefield, but can be destroyed utterly by favoritism, neglect, or injustice.” Eisenhower would not abide favoritism or neglect, and tried to be just in his dealings with his men. But he also knew that “the Army should not be coddled or babied, for that does not produce morale, it merely condones and encourages inefficiency.”40 Consequently, he drove his men hard, all day, every day, without letup, just as he did himself.
Eisenhower hated any sign of lassitude, most especially when a Regular Army officer displayed it. He would grow furious when he saw one of his Regulars scanning the training programs “carefully and fearfully to see whether they demand more hours; whether their execution is going to cause us some inconvenience!” He told his old friend Everett Hughes, “I was never more serious in my life than I am about the need for each of us, particularly in the Regular Army, to do his whole chore intelligently and energetically. If ever we are to prove that we’re worth the salaries the government has been paying us all these years—now is the time!”41
Eisenhower was delighted in September 1940 when Colonel Patton, commanding the 2d Armored Brigade in Fort Benning, wrote to say that two armored divisions would soon be formed, the first in the Army’s history and the fulfillment of their hopes as young officers back at Fort Meade in 1920. Patton said he expected to command one of the armored divisions. He wondered if Eisenhower would want to serve under him.
“That would be great,” Eisenhower responded immediately. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that I could have a regiment in your division, because I’m still almost three years away from my colonelcy, but I think I could do a damn good job of commanding a regiment.” Patton wrote back, “I shall ask for you either as Chief of Staff which I should prefer or as a regimental commander you can tell me which you want for no matter how we get together we will go PLACES.”42
Through the winter of 1940–1941, as the Army expanded, so did Fort Lewis. As at every other Army post, construction crews were everywhere, while recruits came in by the thousands. Eisenhower did his usual efficient job, and his responsibilities grew as a result. In March 1941, General Kenyon Joyce, commanding the IX Army Corps, which covered the entire Northwest, asked for Eisenhower as his chief of staff. That same month, on the eleventh, he was promoted to the rank of full colonel (temporary).
No promotion he ever received delighted him more. Being made a colonel fulfilled his highest ambitions. Mamie and John arranged a celebration. His fellow officers, congratulating him, said it would not be long before he had a star on each shoulder. “Damn it,” he complained to John, “as soon as you get a promotion they start talking about another one. Why can’t they let a guy be happy with what he has? They take all the joy out of it.”43
Three months later, he joined General Walter Krueger as chief of staff for the Third Army. In late June 1941, the Eisenhowers set off for Fort Sam Houston. They arrived on July 1, their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Mamie was pleased to be back at such a familiar place, with all its happy memories, especially since her husband was now a colonel, which entitled them to one of Fort Sam’s fine old brick houses, with shady verandas all around and a large lawn.
A colonel rated a striker and an executive officer. Mamie put up a notice on the bulletin board for a striker. A few days later, Pfc. Michael J. McKeogh volunteered. “Mickey,” whose parents had immigrated to the United States from Ireland, had been a bellhop at the Plaza Hotel in New York before he was drafted. He liked Eisenhower “straight off,” he later said, because the colonel was “absolutely straight” and “you always knew exactly where you stood with him.” He thought Mamie “a very gracious lady.” Mickey soon became Eisenhower’s most fervent admirer and remained with him for the next five years.44
As his executive, Eisenhower selected Lieutenant Ernest R. Lee (everyone called him “Tex”), a native of San Antonio, who had been an insurance and a car salesman. Bright, breezy, cheerful, anxious to please, Lee had all the qualities of a good salesman. Eisenhower enjoyed his company, came to rely on him to handle office details. Lee, like Mickey, stayed with Eisenhower to the end of the war. Together, they formed the nucleus of what would become Eisenhower’s “family,” a close-knit group of enlisted men and women and junior officers who were devoted to Eisenhower and who served him well.
The greatest experience of Eisenhower’s tour as chief of staff to the Third Army was the Louisiana maneuvers, held in August and September 1941. These were the largest maneuvers held by the U.S. Army before America entered the war. They pitted Krueger’s Third Army against General Ben Lear’s Second Army. Krueger, with 240,000 men, was “invading” Louisiana, while Lear, with 180,000 men, was “defending” the United States. Marshall had insisted on such a large-scale war game because he wanted to uncover deficiencies in training and equipment, and because he needed to uncover hidden talent in the officer corps.
Eisenhower got his first publicity almost immediately. Krueger’s Third Army, operating under plans Eisenhower had helped draw up, outflanked Lear’s Second Army, forcing it to retreat. “Had it been a real war,” young reporter Hanson Baldwin wrote for The New York Times, “Lear’s force would have been annihilated.”45 In their syndicated column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen reported that it was “Colonel Eisenhower . . . who conceived and directed the strategy that routed the Second Army.” They said that Eisenhower “has a steel-trap mind plus unusual physical vigor [and] to him the military profession is a science . . .”46
Eisenhower professed to be unaware of why he received the credit, which he said should have gone to General Krueger. His modesty was genuine and typical. It was also one of his most endearing traits, an essential part of his popularity with the press and the public. His “Aw shucks, who me?” look, his embarrassment at being singled out, his insistence that others, not he, really deserved the praise, became one of his best-known characteristics, something millions of people found irresistibly appealing. In late September, on Krueger’s recommendation, he was promoted to brigadier general (temporary). Congratulations came pouring in. Eisenhower responded by writing, “When they get clear down to my place on the list, they are passing out stars with considerable abandon.”47
Thanks to the promotion, Eisenhower’s photograph, stern-faced and saluting the flag, went out over the wire services. The American people—and press corps—began to discover something Mamie had always known, that Eisenhower was one of the most photogenic men in the country, even in the world.
A Denver friend, Aksel Nielsen, whom he had met through the Douds, wrote Eisenhower to ask for an autographed print of the photograph. Eisenhower replied, “I’m so tremendously flattered by the thought of anyone asking for my photo that I’m hurrying it off at once—it would be tragic to have you change your mind. Wouldn’t you like three or four???”48
• •
On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Eisenhower went to his office—over Mamie’s protests—to catch up on his paper work. About noon, he told Tex Lee that he was “dead tired” and said he “guessed he’d go home and take a nap.” He told Mamie he did not want to be “bothered by anyone wanting to play bridge” and went to sleep. An hour or so later, Lee called him with the news from Pearl Harbor.49
Five hectic days later he was at his desk with more of the inevitable paperwork when he got a call from the War Department. “Is that you, Ike?” Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, secretary of the General Staff, asked. “Yes,” Eisenhower replied. “The Chief says for you to hop a plane and get up here right away,” Smith ordered. “Tell your boss that formal orders will come through later.”50
Eisenhower assumed that Marshall wanted to talk to him about the state of the defenses in the Philippines, and that he would not be gone long. He told Mickey to pack only one bag for him, assured Mamie that he would be back soon, and got an afternoon plane leaving San Antonio for Washington.
Bad weather forced the aircraft down in Dallas. Eisenhower switched to a train. After the train passed Kansas City and headed east, Eisenhower was riding over the same tracks he had traveled on thirty years earlier, on his trip from Abilene to West Point. As he rode along, he tried to prepare himself for the conference with Marshall. He knew it was not only a great responsibility but also a great opportunity.
Perhaps his thoughts strayed, once or twice, to his parents’ injunction, which had been in his mind in 1911: “Opportunity is all about you. Reach out and take it.”
By most standards, he had failed to take the advice. Instead of taking opportunity, he had given his life and his talents to the Army. He was fifty-one years old; only the coming of war had saved him from a forced retirement and a life with no savings and but a small pension to live on. Although he had impressed every superior for whom he had worked, he had no accomplishments to his credit that he could point to with pride for his grandchildren. Had he died in 1941, at an age when most great men have their monumental achievements behind them, he would be completely unknown today.
As his train sped across the Midwest toward Washington, he may have dared to hope that the war would give him an opportunity to use his talents and skills, which were considerable, for the good of his country and perhaps even for the good of his own career.