CHAPTER 14

From the Heartland—Trumans and Eisenhowers

Mattie and John Truman

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight David Eisenhower, when honored by the British after World War II, spoke equally for President Harry S Truman when he said, “I come from the very heart of America.” Their mothers put it plainly. When a reporter ventured into that heartland to the modest Kansas home of eighty-three-year-old Ida Stover Eisenhower and asked if she were proud of her son, she replied, “Which one?” Arriving at the White House from Missouri on Mother’s Day, after her first airplane ride, ninety-three-year-old Martha Ellen Young Truman deplored the fuss over her visit, insisting, “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known all these people were going to be here.” Feisty or gentle, both mothers voiced the same unpretentious values. Take your work seriously, not yourself. Keep your word. These values were imparted to all their children, not only the ones history would honor.

Speaking for his brothers as well as himself, Eisenhower said, “Mother was by far the greatest influence on our lives.” Of his own upbringing, Truman recalled, “She was always a mother who did the right thing, and she taught us, my brother and sister and I, that too.” Both fathers, from similar towns in similar states, although denied the success they had sought for themselves, made their own contributions. Pugnacious John Truman inspired Harry’s interest in politics. Stubborn David Eisenhower toughened his sons to fear failure even more than they feared their father.

When his father died, Eisenhower expressed regret about how difficult it had been “to let him know the great depth of my affection for him…. I’m proud he was my father.” There is a similar sense of defensiveness in Truman’s insistence that both his parents were “sentimentalists” who encouraged his ambitions, insisting to Merle Miller that his father had exercised “every bit as much influence” on him as had his mother. It wasn’t true, but the desire that John Anderson Truman not be overlooked was genuine enough.

Truman’s daughter, Margaret, his only child, stressed the “extraordinarily strong intellectual-emotional bond” between Harry Truman and his mother, encouraging an appreciation of history, literature, and music. Widowed for thirty-three years, Martha Ellen Truman became her son’s closest confidant—indeed, his best friend until his marriage. The great contribution of his father was to share his enthusiasm for politics, ultimately leading to his first son’s professional career. Harry Truman also relished a desired similarity in persona. His father, he proudly proclaimed, “would fight like a buzzsaw,” sometimes even physically, for what he believed in. Harry, who never had a fistfight in his life, would contest issues with equal vehemence, only with words. How John Truman would have relished his son’s “Give ’em Hell!” campaign of 1948.

John Anderson Truman’s whole life was a struggle for stature. He couldn’t do much to heighten his physical size, five-four and perhaps 140 pounds, although no one dared call him “Peanut” to his face. But size alone need not inhibit success. The Trumans were “yeoman gentry” in the New World as in the Old. Their English roots mingled with Germanic and French origins. The lure of abundant land brought them west from Virginia to Kentucky to Missouri. John’s congenial parents, Anderson Shippe (or Shipp) and Mary Jane Holmes Truman (related to President John Tyler), were a hardworking, soft-spoken, pious, respectable, and respected couple. They loved their fertile, modest, but prosperous Jackson County farmland and never saw reason to leave it. The third of their five children, John Anderson, was born on December 5, 1851. Although he loved his gentle parents, his role model for life was the less easily contented Solomon Young, his future father-in-law.

Perhaps being orphaned early fired the ambition of both Solomon and his equally formidable wife, Harriet Louisa Gregg Young. While Louisa oversaw farms that grew to thousands of acres, risk-taking stock-dealer Solomon led cattle drives and wagon trains all the way to the West Coast. He is reputed to have owned much of Sacramento, California. He was as much at ease on the Santa Fe Trail as at home in Missouri, where the clouds of conflict were already gathering in the 1850s.

The Civil War came early to Missouri. John was only five when the first “bushwhackers” and “redlegs” came over from “bleeding Kansas” to terrorize any who dissented from their views. Both Anderson Truman and Solomon Young owned slaves, but their Southern sympathies were more by heritage than conviction. Taking oaths of loyalty to the Union didn’t help. The Young homestead was particularly devastated by the boys in blue and their partisans. Until her dying day, Harriet Louisa Young viewed the Republican Party as the embodiment of evil. Her unreconstructed sentiments were imparted to her children, and to their children. Eighty years later her daughter would refuse to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House. The Trumans would always be Democrats.

After the war, the Youngs’ prosperity returned, and they moved to a larger farm around Grandview. Their daughter, Martha Ellen, next to the last of their nine children, was born on November 25, 1852. Called “Mattie” by everyone, she would turn into a lively, self-confident, accomplished young woman. David McCullough describes her as about five-foot-six, striking and slender, “with dark hair, a round bright face, and a way of looking directly at people with her clever gray-blue eyes.” One of those she looked directly at (or down on, since she was two inches taller) at the frequent socials for young people in the area was John Anderson Truman. In this company he was unfailingly polite, if somewhat somber, and took great care with his appearance. He combed his thick dark hair over to one side. His shoes were brightly polished, his clothes immaculate. Although he was generally sunburned from all those hours helping his father in the fields, his facial features were delicate, almost feminine. He had a long, thin nose and mouth and heavy-lidded eyes. He was always clean shaven.

Both the Trumans and Youngs had come from the same part of Kentucky and had become neighbors in Missouri, the Youngs having contributed the land for the Blue Ridge Baptist Church, which both families attended. Unlike John Truman, Mattie Young never did farm chores, was attended by servants, and learned outdoor as well as indoor skills—to ride, shoot, play the piano, crochet, and cook—gaining an appreciation of art and literature at the Ladies’ Baptist College. Although she invariably rose early and worked hard, helping her mother supervise some twenty hired hands, she was indulged by both her parents. Mattie particularly loved to dance, describing herself as “what you might call a lightfoot Baptist,” and had no intention of marrying until she was good and ready.

She also enjoyed playing the piano, and soon she was accompanying John, who had a fine singing voice, at their community socials. Although concealing his truculence in such settings, John was tenacious in going after what he wanted, and it was trim, captivating Mattie Young he wanted now. It didn’t matter that she was twenty-nine and taller than he (as who was not?). John had proved to be a very competent farmer and a great help to his parents, but he had far bigger plans, and a role model before him—Solomon Young, the father of his intended. He, too, would be an entrepreneur, succeeding by instinct, grit, and determination, trading and investing until he also became rich.

To the surprise of many, his first campaign bore fruit. Mattie Young and John Truman were married in the Youngs’ spacious parlor near the end of 1881. Truman wasted no time, setting out in a carriage borrowed from Solomon Young, to the town of Lamar, some ninety miles away, to start accumulating his fortune by trading in horses and mules. He would move his family many times in pursuit of his elusive goal of prosperity.

Their first child was stillborn, but on May 8, 1884, in their tiny cottage, Mattie gave birth to a healthy son. They named him Harry after Martha Ellen’s favorite brother, Harrison. “Don’t call him Harrison,” John insisted, “They’ll call him Harry anyway.” For a middle name they wanted to honor both their fathers. Unable to decide between Shippe and Solomon, they settled on just the letter “S” (with no period).

Two years later, when the Trumans’ second son was born, named John Vivian for his father and a Confederate cavalry officer, the family had moved to Harrisonville. By the time their third child and only girl, Mary Jane, arrived three years later, the entire family was back on the Grandview farm of the Youngs. John Truman had reluctantly temporarily returned to the calling he was actually suited for. Solomon Young’s vast holdings, once over 5,000 acres, were down to a manageable 600. Still, he needed help to run it. Harry Truman remembered his mother’s father as a “gentle … great big man with a beard” who took him riding to county fairs and gave him gifts and candy, “the best time a kid ever had.” His appreciation of both grandfathers would only grow with the years. Early in 1892, Solomon Young quietly died at the home from which he had so often departed in the past. Young Harry pulled on his beard, imagining he must recover. Solomon’s restless son-in-law, after setting things in order, moved his family again.

Mattie taught Harry to read before he was five. She could see his potential, but she discerned that something was not quite right. Harry could readily read the large print of the family Bible but not the small print of a newspaper. At a Fourth of July celebration, as the fireworks exploded above Grandview, she learned what was wrong—his eyesight. Harry responded only to the noise, not the dazzling display overhead. He really couldn’t quite see it. As soon as she could, Martha Ellen put her son in the family buggy and rode straight to an eye specialist in Kansas City. The diagnosis was that Harry had a serious affliction called “flat eyeballs.” If he were to see clearly, he needed to wear very thick, very expensive glasses and keep them on whenever he was awake. He could not roughhouse or play competitive games with other boys for fear of damaging his glasses or himself. Mattie Truman was not about to have her promising son ridiculed as “four eyes” by rustic ruffians, and the local school was not all that exceptional, anyway. They would move to the county seat of Independence, with its superior schools and at least a veneer of cultivation.

Harry’s father, who had always viewed farming as a temporary expedient, was all for the move. His prudent father had left him an inheritance of a few thousand dollars, and he was anxious to explore business ventures again. Perhaps he would return to livestock trading or invest in real estate or speculate in grain futures. Somehow, something had to succeed. Moreover, both parents looked forward to the amenities of life in Independence and to a more fulfilling life for themselves as well as for their children.

Although Independence was viewed as a sophisticated metropolis by many of its residents, it had a colorful, eventful past. Both the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails had started in Independence, and it had witnessed raucous days as a jumping-off place for the 1849 California gold rush. It had been the Mormons’ original Zion, although they were obliged to depart, and the James Boys had robbed banks in the vicinity, with somewhat greater success. Now it was an incorporated city of six thousand, settled and prosperous. Families who had arrived from places like Kentucky only a generation earlier than the Trumans viewed themselves as the local gentry and were none too hospitable to newcomers. At the top were the Wallaces, presided over by a haughty widow, whose daughter, Elizabeth Virginia, was called “Bess” by her friends. From the time Harry shyly spied her at the local Sunday school, he longed to be among them. Bess Wallace would be the love of his life.

John Truman was at his most productive during this period, even showing an inventive bent, designing labor-saving devices. John had met a notably successful investor from Kansas City named William Kemper and was busily engaged in emulating his example. Through Kemper he also became acquainted with the emerging Pendergast political machine that was being developed by three ambitious brothers. Business and politics went hand in hand. Jackson County, Missouri, at the center of the United States, was a microcosm of the evolving nation, its diverse western end anchored by burgeoning Kansas City, its homogeneous eastern end rural and settled. To the Pendergasts, Truman looked like an ideal representative for that region, seemingly related by birth or marriage to half the electorate out in the boondocks. The whole of Jackson County could be pivotal statewide to many elections. It was primarily Democratic, but factions were emerging that would affect both Trumans, father and son.

Encouraged by his mother, Harry was doing well in school. He particularly loved history and was reputed to have read every book in the Independence public library. Truman always insisted that he had enjoyed the happiest possible childhood. To his no-nonsense father, however, his bespectacled older son might seem a less natural companion than his tough younger son, Vivian, who wanted nothing more than to be a good farmer. Except for politics. Like his father, Harry was fascinated by the compelling entertainment of all-day picnics, rallies, and parades, of seemingly endless campaigning. Politics was their shared enthusiasm, their bond. John was particularly thrilled with Grover Cleveland’s return to the White House in 1892. Harry recalled his father riding “a beautiful gray horse in the torchlight parade” and decorating a weathervane on the roof of their home with a flag and bunting. At the Democratic National Convention in Kansas City in 1900, while his father sat proudly in Kemper’s private box, Harry served as a page, overwhelmed by the dramatic oratory of William Jennings Bryan.

But even with his emerging relationship with the Pendergasts, for himself, John Truman viewed political activity more as an avocation than a profession. He remained intent on investing, and for a time he was actually doing it profitably. His run of good luck enabled him to buy a spacious home on Crysler Street on a large lot. Although the family was still not quite among the social elite of Independence, as Harry recalled, “Our house soon became headquarters for all the boys and girls around.” The property not only contained an extraordinary menagerie of cows, ponies, goats, chickens, and all manner of household pets, but also a barn and hayloft, ideal for children’s adventures. Whatever the neighbors may have thought, Truman never forgot those “wonderful times.”

By sheer effort, the shy bookworm won over his classmates. If he could not participate in their sports and games, he would become their impartial arbiter. Harry Truman couldn’t recall ever having had a bad teacher. No one considered him brilliant, except perhaps his mother, but everyone was impressed by his conscientiousness. Martha Ellen Truman widened Harry’s world. As Margaret Truman writes, “His life revolved around her.” All that reading, especially of history, was at her behest. His relationship with his mother was so close that sometimes it seemed to her other two offspring as if Harry were an only child.

By the time Harry was in high school, such acquaintances as Charlie Ross, the brightest student in his class, had become lifelong friends. They were each contemplating college. Popular Bess Wallace, also a classmate, would represent Harry’s lengthiest campaign. He had worked part-time since the age of fourteen at a local drugstore, but his parents had agreed to terminate that employment so that he could focus on continuing his education. In particular, he was contemplating taking entrance examinations for the service academies until he realized that his eyesight precluded any such possibilities.

Then, late in 1902, the blow fell. John Truman took his largest risk, and his luck turned once again. He lost everything in grain futures trading—all his inheritance, even the small farm given to his wife by her parents. Now college of any kind for Harry was out of the question. First, the family moved to a more modest house, then to Kansas City, where, after trying a number of other alternatives, John endured the indignity of working for wages as a night watchman. Alonzo Hamby writes, “Still a tough, feisty man, he seems never to have recovered.”

Harry held a succession of jobs, ultimately working as a clerk and bookkeeper at major banks, where his industry and demeanor were highly praised. Kansas City became his college. On his own for the first time, he lived in a lively boardinghouse. Another resident was named Arthur Eisenhower. The bright lights of the city held an immense attraction for young Harry, especially its music halls and theaters. He overcame his shyness by playing the piano at parties, although it was not quite the Chopin his mother would have preferred. With his friends he joined a newly formed National Guard unit, one not overly concerned with his poor eyesight. A lifetime later, at his presidential library, Truman would tell surprised groups of students that the three best preparations for a career in public service were farming, business, and the military, corresponding to his own path.

It must have been a great disappointment when the call came in 1905 to return to Grandview, but Harry complied. John had heeded the request of his aging mother-in-law and her bachelor brother Harrison to return to Grandview and again take over management of their farm. To the surprise of his Kansas City friends, Harry joined him, and the Grandview farm truly became “J. A. Truman and Son.” In his twenties, Harry grew stronger physically, five inches taller and twenty muscular pounds heavier than John Truman. The two became closer and, as Robert H. Ferrell writes, father and son debated politics with even more fervor than before. Harry also renewed his acquaintance with Bess Wallace.

Somehow Harry managed to spend so much time off the farm it is almost as if he were already running for office. Richard Lawrence Miller observes that Harry’s extra activities during this period already made him “a community leader with connections throughout the business and political circles of western Missouri.” One of these key contacts was Mike Pendergast, the brother consigned to this region.

Although he viewed politics as secondary to investing, John Truman had held a number of part-time posts at the behest of the Pendergasts. In 1912, he agreed to become the local road overseer. The condition of rural roads in Missouri was critical to the prosperity of local farmers. Many overseers used these coveted political appointments to line their own pockets. Not John Truman. He became renowned for demanding as much from his road crews as from himself. As Harry later wrote, he learned from his father that “the expenditure of public money is a public trust…. Grandview had the best roads in the county.”

Characteristically, it was John’s stubbornness that led to his death. Impatient with a workman’s hesitation to remove a large boulder, John did it himself. The strain caused an intestinal blockage. After months, he finally agreed to an operation, but he never really recovered. On the morning of November 2, 1914, his family by his side, John Anderson Truman died, shortly before his sixty-third birthday. The Independence Examiner eulogized him under the headline, “An Upright Citizen Whose Death Will Be a Blow to His Community,” but a few days earlier, to visiting friends, John had pronounced his life a failure.

His son disagreed. John Truman “worked from daylight to dark all the time,” Harry recalled, “and his code was honesty and integrity. His word was always good … and he raised my brother and myself to put honor above profit. He was quite a man, my dad was … a doer, not a talker.” Harry Truman would do more talking, but he viewed himself, as would others, as a plain talker, and as straight a shooter as his father.

Emulating him, he invested everything he could scrape together in a series of entrepreneurial ventures. Remarkably, the last of these, an oil-drilling enterprise, would have made him a millionaire, had he been able to stay around and retain his shares. By then, however, Truman was in France. When the United States entered World War I, Harry, at the age of thirty-three, was under no obligation to serve, but there was no way he could stay on the sidelines. According to his brother, Vivian, he managed to memorize the eye chart at the recruiting office.

Entering as a lieutenant but promoted to captain within a year, Truman was put in charge of the unruly Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery. He came of age in the regular army, making the astonishing discovery that he could actually lead other men, even into combat. The veterans of Battery D would be with him in every future political campaign. He later wrote, “My whole political career is based on my war service and my war associates.”

Mustered out as a major in 1919, a newly confident Harry Truman sold his share of the farm and finally married Bess Wallace on June 28, despite the opposition of her snobbish mother who had always insisted that the Trumans were no more than dirt farmers. Harry had been courting Bess, in a manner of speaking, since she was five and he was six. After a haberdashery that Truman launched with an army buddy, initially a success, failed in the postwar recession, he was induced to run for a judgeship in 1922. Through many highs and lows, politics became his profession.

Martha Ellen Young Truman never lost her intimate interest in her children, especially her first son’s career. At eighty-two she campaigned for Harry’s first Senate race, claiming as one qualification that he had “plowed the straightest furrow in Jackson County.” She even chaired a meeting of women campaign workers in 1944 when Harry became Franklin Roosevelt’s running mate. He wrote her constantly, his “Dear Mama” letters a testament to his continuing regard for her counsel.

She died on July 26, 1947, at the age of ninety-four, undoubtedly looking forward to Harry running for the presidency on his own in 1948. For, as Margaret Truman Daniel recalls, it was to his mother, more than anyone else, that Harry Truman “turned again and again for the emotional support he needed.”

Ida and Jacob Eisenhower

Hadn’t he been right all along? Here were all six of his sons, reunited back in Abilene, Kansas, every one a success. Arthur, the oldest, who had lived in that lively Kansas City boardinghouse with a young Harry Truman, was now vice president of a major bank. Edgar, despite his parents’ antipathy to lawyers, had persevered to become a prominent attorney. Roy’s pharmacy was flourishing. Earl was an engineer. Milton, the youngest, who would go on to become president of three major universities, held an important position in the Department of Agriculture.

Dwight, a major in the United States Army, made less money than any of his brothers, and his prospects in the glacial peacetime military seemed the least promising. Yet he had recently graduated at the top of his class at the elite Leavenworth Command and General Staff School. At thirty-six he was noticeably more tanned and fit than the others, who ranged from twenty-seven to forty, and his natural optimism hadn’t diminished. He admired but didn’t really envy any of his brothers.

It was June 1926. Their proud father, David Jacob Eisenhower, still the picture of Teutonic stolidity at sixty-three, had to smile for once. Here were the living results of his harsh patrimony. He had beaten even the possibility of failure out of his sons. None would be denied the career of his choice, as he had been.

Why hadn’t David’s father, that good, generous, pious Dutchman, Jacob Eisenhower, understood his children as David did? He was never cut out to be a farmer like his forebears or brothers, but an engineer. Even though the family was originally named “Eisenhauer” for “iron hewer,” their vocation had been tilling the soil, generation after generation.

General Dwight David Eisenhower may have “come from the very heart of America,” but his family had emigrated from a different heartland, the “Heimat” of the land their martial descendant would one day be called upon to subjugate. Although related to respectable Lutherans, they were Mennonites, religious dissenters from the Rhineland. They had fled to Switzerland and then to Holland, finally embarking for America in the 1740s. Settling in the rich agricultural region around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, they joined those who had come before, establishing their community of Brethren in Christ. Known as “River Brethren” for their practice of freshwater baptisms, these Pennsylvania Dutch, like their successors, were devout pacifists who feared only God and were renowned for their self-supporting industriousness and the productivity of their farms. As journalist Marquis Childs writes, they believed in “hard work, temperance, self-denial, simple living, and ordered, almost Biblical simplicity.” Their disdain for the worldly trappings of materialism, however, did not deter their own prosperity. Their families were as fertile as their farms. Jacob Eisenhower, both their temporal and their religious leader, expected his young son, David, to follow in that tradition. Born on September 23, 1863, he was one of the fourteen children of Jacob and Rebecca Eisenhower.

The Civil War had come much closer to a community of similarly Germanic origins in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. It destroyed the farm of the Stover (originally Stoever) family. In its aftermath, Ida Stover, the only daughter amidst seven sons, became an even more fervent pacifist. She was born on May 1, 1862, in the midst of the conflict, and blamed the early deaths of her parents on the stress of the war. At the age of sixteen, Ida decided to move west on her own.

Jacob Eisenhower had induced his whole community of River Brethren to move with him to Kansas, with its cheap, abundant land—an extraordinary migration. His sturdy, thrifty folk adapted well, duplicating their prior abundance. Perhaps such success encouraged Jacob to indulge his son. In Kansas as in Pennsylvania, David hated the dawn-to-dusk monotonous drudgery of farming. The only thing he enjoyed about it was working with its primitive machinery and trying to improve it. As Stephen Ambrose writes, “He was, according to neighbors, a ‘natural-born’ mechanic,” but he wanted to become more, a professional engineer. His father permitted David to attend the nearby Brethren college in Lecompton. Although it mixed mechanics with classics, the modest establishment was hardly the school of engineering David had desired. By his sophomore year, however, his attentions had been diverted to another student, vivacious, enterprising Ida Stover, who had come all the way from Virginia in search of higher education.

Ida had a longing for learning, wanting to use the English she had been taught for reading more than only the Bible. She also loved music of all kinds. She wound up in Staunton, the Virginia town that would be identified with Woodrow Wilson, finding a family willing to provide room and board in exchange for cooking and cleaning. Finally able to attend high school, Ida did so well that soon she was teaching children herself. At twenty-one, she invested the first $600 of a modest inheritance in a piano she would prize for the rest of her life. Then she joined an aunt heading west with another group of Brethren. Ida had heard that the sect had established a small college in Kansas and that—wonder of wonders—it accepted female students.

There was a similar streak of nonconformity in Ida Stover and David Eisenhower. They made an attractive, if contrasting, couple. Ambrose describes David, still clean-shaven, as darkly handsome, “tall, muscular, broad-shouldered … [with] a thin, hard-set mouth, thick black hair, dark eyebrows, deep set, penetrating eyes, and a large rounded chin. His legs were long, his hands large and powerful.” He was stocky, stolid, and silent, even more so as his dreams diminished. Ida was slender, fair, with lustrous brown hair, cheerful and outgoing, not so much beautiful as glowing, with a ready smile that her sons, one in particular, would inherit. She was sixteen months David’s senior. Neither would graduate, but they were married in the Lane University chapel on September 23, 1885, David’s twenty-second birthday. In their wedding picture, unlike the John Trumans’, both were standing, David at least a bit taller than his wife.

Ida may have regretted not receiving her degree, but she truly loved learning for its own sake. She exuded joy and was anxious to fulfill it in motherhood. But she couldn’t quite contain her husband’s violent temper, never overtly directed toward her but later more vigorously on their sons. Perhaps it was a manifestation, at least in part, of his own bitterness at being denied the opportunity to pursue the engineering career he had sought. Austere David Eisenhower may have been the undisputed head of his household, but Ida was its heart. She must have understood, as would her children, the unspoken truth that she was not only the more compassionate but also the stronger of their parents.

Perpetually hopeful, David’s father gave the couple $2,000 and a 160-acre farm of their own, his customary wedding gift to each of his sons. David promptly mortgaged the farm to his brother-in-law and opened a general store in the town of Hope, south of Abilene. Anything was better than agriculture. The couple lived above the store. Arthur, the first of their six sons (a seventh died in infancy), arrived in 1886. David demonstrated little talent for retailing, and enjoyed less luck. He took on a more experienced partner named Milton Good, who turned out to be a swindler. As Brendon observes, Hope did David “no good, and neither did Good.” Moreover, a rural depression in 1888 severely hurt retail businesses of all kinds, and the venture was a disaster. A lawyer hired to clean up the mess took everything but Ida’s piano, motivating the couple’s antipathy to the legal profession.

David was obliged to move four hundred miles away, to Denison, Texas, where he had been able to find work at ten dollars a week as a railway mechanic. After giving birth to their second son, Edgar, Ida joined him. They lived in a tiny frame house, little more than a shack, near the railroad tracks. Here, on October 14, 1890, she gave birth to their third son. He was named David Dwight, but his parents soon decided to reverse the order to avoid confusion. By now it must have been clear even to Jacob Eisenhower that this son simply wasn’t cut out to be a farmer, but the Brethren looked after their own. They needed a plant engineer to take charge of the machinery at their creamery back in Abilene, an ideal job for a man with David’s skills. The pay was modest and the hours long, but he was happy to bring his family home from Texas after two trying years. Dwight Eisenhower would always view himself as a Kansan.

The Abilene he knew was not unlike the Independence, Missouri, that Truman called home. It was a comfortable, rather placid town of some four thousand residents, surrounded by wheat fields, but it had a lurid past. Railroads and cattle drives had brought every variety of frontier roughneck and adventurer to this terminus—to drink, fight, consort with loose women, and raise hell generally, all under the watchful eye of Sheriff “Wild Bill” Hickok. By the 1890s, however, respectable folk already preferred to view Abilene’s embarrassingly recent heyday as colorful mythology. The more affluent lived on the north side of town, separated by railroad tracks from the equally proud families of working men on the south side. That is where the Eisenhowers resided, in a tiny cottage. During Ida’s first seven years in Abilene, her logistical talents emerged. Somehow, despite too many people jammed into too little space and supported by too little money, she managed to create a harmonious family life, leavened with her own good cheer.

Ida’s unquenchable optimism was finally rewarded when a relative offered an alternative of palatial proportions. The family could reside in a much larger house on a three-acre lot for a modest rental, with an option to buy, if they would care for David’s father. They accepted with alacrity. Ida’s goal was virtual self-sufficiency. To the barn and apple orchard she added a vegetable garden, a cow, chickens, ducks, pigs, and anything else that might contribute to the family larder. Daily chores, indoors and out, were rotated to give every son equal experience at everything. Among Dwight Eisenhower’s earliest memories was his avoidance of the most onerous tasks, to his parents’ consternation. They were still poor, but as he would recall, “We didn’t know it then. All we knew is that our parents—of great courage—could say to us: ‘Opportunity is all around you. Reach out and take it.’”

Ambrose describes Dwight at nine or ten as normal-sized, wearing clean but hand-me-down clothes, generally barefoot, “with a shock of light-brown hair, blue eyes, a friendly disposition, and his mother’s grin.” The most striking quality was his restless energy. He was never still, always on the go. He already loved sports and had inherited something of his father’s temper. He would fight readily, no matter what the size of his opponent, seemingly as much to burn off energy as for any specific reason. In the growing solidarity of the brothers, by twelve he was already showing signs of a sort of instinctive leadership. As a teenager he would be called “president of the roughnecks.” He would be “Little Ike”—his older brother Edgar was “Big Ike.” At school, Dwight liked arithmetic, spelling, and history—especially military history, which didn’t sit particularly well with his mother.

It must be said to the credit of both parents that they encouraged their children to think for themselves, more independently as they grew older. Their future lives, their ultimate professions, would be based on their own preferences, not the well-intentioned coercion their father had faced. Although dissimilar in personalities, David and Ida were of one accord in this regard. Still, all six sons were frightened to death of their father. As an adult, Dwight still recalled this singular difference between his parents. His sullen father, who communicated with his strap or a switch, “had quick judicial instincts.” His sensitive mother, “had, like a psychologist, insight into the fact that each son was a unique personality and she adapted to the methods of each.” Dwight’s youngest brother, Milton, the future college president, put it this way, “Father and Mother complemented each other. Mother had the personality. She had the joy. Dad had the authority.” Ambrose adds, “David hardly ever smiled; Ida smiled as easily as she breathed. She was quick to laugh; quick to give sympathy. Like David, she demanded much of her sons; unlike him, she gave much.”

There is no doubt that by high school Dwight was one of the most popular young men in Abilene. Possessing his mother’s outgoing personality and overcoming the combative inheritance from his father, he made friends easily. He still loved roaming, hunting, and fishing, but sports were at the center of his life and helped establish him as a student leader. Despite weighing only 150 pounds, he excelled in football and baseball. His average grades seemed to have improved without excessive effort, but he still enjoyed reading history and biography by the hour. He had also discovered girls, although he was extremely shy around them. It didn’t hurt that the young lady he would marry in 1916, Marie “Mamie” Geneva Doud, considered Dwight “the handsomest man” she had ever seen.

Dwight’s most traumatic experience came when he was a fourteen-year-old high school freshman. He had scraped his knee, it became infected, and the infection spread to the extent that doctors wanted to amputate his leg. Dwight insisted that he would rather die. In an illustration of the kind of loyalty their parents had instilled, Edgar stood guard at his bedside in case he lost consciousness. While his parents prayed and specialists were called in, the leg was saved, but it was a close thing. Having to repeat a year gave Dwight time to think things over. His high school yearbook predicted that Edgar would be president of the United States one day and Dwight would eventually teach history at Yale. When Edgar, “Big Ike,” went off to study law at the University of Michigan with the aid of an uncle’s loan, the ultimate validation of his parents’ vow that each son follow his own path, Dwight became simply “Ike.” His friends noticed a heightened seriousness and self-confidence. He had also bulked up physically.

In rural towns at the turn of the century, only the brightest, most affluent, or most motivated young people finished high school, let alone college. Ike understood the financial realities, and he took a cram course to apply for the Naval Academy. It provided a first-class education, it was free, and he could continue playing football. At twenty, however, he was too old, and the local appointments had already been made. Instead, he arranged to take the test for West Point. Coming in second in the exam, he won a cherished appointment. The train trip east would be by far the longest he had yet experienced, but only the prelude to an unimaginable journey.

His brothers were excited. His father revealed little emotion. His mother said only, “It is your choice.” When he took his suitcase and walked the few blocks to the Union Pacific depot, she waved to her departing boy from the front porch. Then, Milton recalled, she could no longer restrain her tears. It was the first time he had ever seen her cry. She ran to her room and did not leave it that day. Lawyers only cheated people; soldiers may have to kill them. Yet in time Ida Eisenhower, whom Ike viewed as the most sincere pacifist he had ever known, learned to accept her son’s career and even take pride in it. But, of course, she was proud of all her sons.

As adulthood approached for each son, their father loosened the bonds of discipline and their mother the restraints of tradition. Bible readings and prayer sessions became less frequent. As Doris Faber writes, “Cards made their appearance and in time cigarettes were allowed; music, secular as well as devotional, tinkled from Ida’s still prized piano in the parlor.” All this was in preparation for the environment that each son might face in his future. When Ike went off to West Point, although his aim was most of all to play football, an opportunity later precluded by injury, his parents’ acceptance of his decision was still a confirmation of their constancy.

Dwight managed to come home at least once a year, even as his army career took him to foreign postings. A highlight was in 1935, as the Eisenhower boys returned again, this time with their wives and families, to celebrate David and Ida’s golden wedding anniversary. David had taken a better paying job at the local utility company, and even in the midst of a national depression, times for his family were better than they had ever been. When David Jacob Eisenhower died at the age of seventy-eight on March 10, 1942, after recurrent illnesses, General Dwight David Eisenhower, immersed in the War Plans Division in Washington, was unable to attend his father’s funeral. All Ike could do was reflect in his diary, “I have felt terribly. I should so like to be with my mother…. But we’re at war! And war is not soft…. I loved my dad.” The following day, as the burial was taking place, he eulogized his father, “I’ve shut off all business and visitors for thirty minutes—to have that much time by myself, to think of him. He had a full life…. He was a just man, well liked, well educated, a thinker. He was undemonstrative, quiet, modest, and of exemplary habits…. His finest monument is his reputation…. His pride in his independence earned for him a reputation that has profited all of us boys.” It was not the occasion to reflect on his father’s complexity.

As she aged, Ida’s memory began to lapse, and she needed help getting about, but she readily recognized her soldier son when he paid her a surprise visit on a brief leave home in 1944. This time laughter mixed with the tears. Then, on May 1, 1946, nearing her eighty-fourth birthday, Ida Stover Eisenhower passed away. Ike praised “her serenity, her open smile, her gentleness with all and her tolerance of their ways.” There was no challenge in finding the words to express her son’s boundless affection for her, the light of all their lives.

Whatever view one takes of these two very different presidents from the American heartland, whose relationships with each other fluctuated, the striking similarity was the pivotal influence of their mothers. Not long before Martha Ellen Young Truman died in 1947, she feared that her least favorite Republican, Senator Robert A. Taft, would be nominated for president the following year and that her son might not choose to run against him. “Don’t you think it’s about time you made up your mind?” she demanded of Harry Truman. Ida Stover Eisenhower would not have been so concerned about politics, but she had also insisted that her sons make up their own minds. Both mothers had laid a strong foundation for them to do so, buttressed by a buoyancy that balanced their husbands’ concurrence with the same conclusions.