Mamie in Paris, 1929. (illustration credit 4.1)
No man can make a successful career on his own. He needs help.
—MAMIE EISENHOWER
When Eisenhower completed the course at the Command and General Staff School, he was pulled three ways. The adjutant general proposed to send him to a major university as the professor of military science and tactics, heading the ROTC program. In addition, it was arranged that Ike would coach the university’s football team at a salary of $3,500—roughly doubling his take-home pay. The commandant at CGSS wanted him to remain at Leavenworth on the faculty, a sure ticket to an eventual general staff billet. And the chief of infantry thought Ike needed more troop duty. The chief of infantry prevailed. Eisenhower was appointed executive officer of the 24th Infantry Regiment at Fort Benning.
In retrospect, it is evident that the office of the chief of infantry resented Eisenhower’s end run around it to attend the CGSS. Political correctness aside, assignment to the 24th Infantry—the Old Deuce-Four—was scarcely a career-enhancing move. Like the 10th Cavalry, the 24th was an all-black regiment commanded by white officers, few of whom relished their posting. This was the segregated Army, and black units, despite a glorious heritage tracing to the Civil War, were regarded as second-class. The 24th had been founded in 1866, fought with distinction at San Juan Hill and in the Philippines, and marched with Pershing against Pancho Villa. But it sat out World War I, had not been ordered to France, and was currently employed as support troops for the Infantry School at Fort Benning. It was the infantry’s Siberia.a In his memoirs Eisenhower does not mention that the 24th Infantry was a black unit, and his early biographers apparently were unaware of the fact. Nevertheless, it is manifest that Ike was unhappy with the assignment and used his influence to wriggle out. A permanent change of station in the peacetime Army normally involved a three-year posting. Ike stayed at Benning less than five months.
Once again, Fox Conner rode to the rescue. In 1921, Conner had saved Ike from a possible court-martial. In 1924, he circumvented the chief of infantry to send him to Leavenworth. And in 1926 he intervened once more to transfer Ike out of the 24th Infantry. On December 15, 1926, orders arrived from the War Department assigning Eisenhower to the American Battle Monuments Commission—a free-standing, independent government agency in Washington headed by General of the Armies John J. Pershing. Conner was now the Army’s deputy chief of staff—the number two military man in the War Department. He appreciated Ike’s talent and recognized it was not being properly utilized. To assign the honor graduate of the Command and General Staff School as executive officer of a unit of support troops at Fort Benning made no sense whatever. If not punitive, it was certainly myopic. “No man can make a successful career on his own,” Mamie Eisenhower once said. “He needs help. And Ike was fortunate to have sponsors such as Fox Conner and later MacArthur and General Marshall who pushed him ahead.”1
The Battle Monuments Commission was charged with compiling and organizing the record of American participation in World War I. To some extent it was established as a sinecure for General Pershing. A General of the Armies is never retired from active duty, and the commission provided a post for Pershing outside the War Department chain of command. He continued to be the ranking officer in the Army, and his office remained in the ornate State, War, and Navy Building adjacent to the White House, but his responsibilities were confined to memorializing the American war effort in France. The general needed help preparing a guide to the American battlefields, and Conner suggested that Eisenhower was the person for the job.
Ike and Mamie moved to Washington in January 1927. Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, and the nation basked in pre-Depression prosperity. “The business of America is business,” President Coolidge told the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The Washington of 1927 was a slow-paced city of southern charm, genteel civility, and white supremacy. Schools, restaurants, hotels, and the federal civil service were strictly segregated; an isolationist Congress had recently enacted the National Origins Act of 1924, effectively closing off most immigration to the United States; and the remarkable Washington Senators, relying on the arm of Walter “Big Train” Johnson, won back-to-back American League pennants and the 1924 World Series. Prohibition notwithstanding, Capitol Hill was awash in booze, and there were few legislative problems that House Speaker Nicholas Longworth and minority leader John Nance Garner could not resolve over a bottle of bootleg bourbon in the Speaker’s chambers.
Since no military quarters were available for Ike and Mamie, they took an apartment in the Wyoming, a gracious dowager from Washington’s belle epoque at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Columbia Road. Because of its spacious apartments, soaring ceilings, and marble corridors, the Wyoming was home to a legion of upper- and midlevel officials, including a United States senator, several members of Congress, the surgeon general, and a dozen or more field-grade and general officers. Chief Justice William Howard Taft lived around the corner; Justices Louis Brandeis and George Sutherland down the street. The Eisenhowers had a two-bedroom apartment with a large living room, a separate dining room, a study, and a cavernous kitchen. For this they paid $130 a month—roughly three times the average rent in Washington. Ike’s take-home pay was $391 a month, Mamie received an additional $100 from her father, and the cost of living was remarkably low. Bread was 10¢ a loaf, milk cost 9¢ a quart, and Ike’s cigarettes were a dollar a carton. Other prices were equally low. A man’s tailored three-piece suit sold for less than $30. A gallon of gas cost 15¢, and a new Chevrolet, Ford, or Plymouth could be had for $600 to $800. The Eisenhowers had a full-time maid who also cooked, and a new automobile. They were members of the Army-Navy town club and the Army-Navy Country Club, and they entertained frequently at the Willard Hotel—Washington’s leading hostelry. As the wife of an Army contemporary remarked, “We never lived that well again.”2
Eisenhower’s task with the Battle Monuments Commission was to sort through the unit histories and official records of the AEF and prepare a narrative of the American effort in France. Appended to the narrative history was a description of the battle monuments that had been erected and the locations of the various cemeteries where American war dead were buried. The purpose was to provide an easily accessible reference work for Americans who might visit France, and Eisenhower was given a six-month deadline.
To call A Guide to the American Battle Fields in Europe simply a tourist guidebook trivializes the undertaking.3 It is a guidebook. But more important, it is a complete history, battle by battle, of the American war on the western front. Of the 282 pages, roughly a third are devoted to describing the battlefield monuments; the remaining two hundred pages provide a concise summary of the fighting, beginning with Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood in June 1918 and concluding with the armistice in November. The book is written from the vantage point of Pershing’s headquarters, and in describing the fighting Eisenhower presents the details with remarkable clarity. Ike had not served in France, but like any good historian he assimilated the facts and described the battlefront as though he had taken part. Anyone who reads the Guide will be struck by its completeness. The Encyclopaedia Britannica called it “an excellent reference work on World War I.” Republished in 1992 by the Army’s Center of Military History,4 it remains one of the best references to the American effort in World War I. Ike’s prose lacks the eloquence of Grant’s Memoirs, but it would be fair to say that when the project was complete, Eisenhower was the best-informed officer in the Army on the strategy and battle tactics Pershing employed, apart from Pershing himself and Fox Conner (who directed the operations of the AEF).
Writing the history of the western front gave Eisenhower a feel for the geography and an understanding of the problems involved in coordinating the Allied armies. He treats the logistical problems of the AEF exhaustively. It is difficult to imagine a more useful assignment for a future supreme commander than to write a history of the analogous American effort in World War I. In 1927 a second war in Europe was scarcely on the horizon, and Eisenhower often chafed under the tight deadlines Pershing imposed. But the substantive knowledge of the war in France that he derived from the exercise surely stood him in good stead when he commanded the Allied effort seventeen years later.
The Eisenhowers settled in easily at the Wyoming. The building was so congenial that they lived there—off and on—a total of nine years. Ike could take the Connecticut Avenue streetcar (five cents) to work, or walk in good weather. Mamie delighted in Washington’s department stores, and bought all of Eisenhower’s clothes. Army officers assigned to Washington during the interwar years wore mufti, and as Mamie recalled, “he wouldn’t go into a shop and purchase them.”5
Eisenhower went to work early and stayed at his desk until six. When he came home he wanted to relax. “Ike was the sort of man that when he finished his day’s work, he left his work at the office,” said Mamie. “When he came home, he was home and we didn’t discuss what his big problems were. He kept them to himself. That was the way we managed our lives. That’s the way we’ve kept it. So many people say to me, ‘Didn’t General Eisenhower used to talk over some of his problems with you?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, no.’ And I didn’t say to him, ‘The dishwasher didn’t work today.’ He wouldn’t have been interested.”6
Young Johnny was five when the Eisenhowers moved to Washington. He was enrolled first in a Montessori school, and then when he turned six in the nearby public school. There was little or no homework in those days, but according to Mamie, Ike always reviewed the day’s activities with him before he was sent to bed. “If Ike and I were delaying our dinner for some reason, or if we were going out to a party, Johnny would sit down to dinner with candles, and silver candelabra, and his finger bowl, and everything just as if we were at the table. He was even served and he had everything done perfectly.”7
Shortly before Eisenhower finished his assignment, he was informed that he had been selected for the next class at the Army War College, then located at Washington Barracks (now Fort McNair), in southwest Washington, D.C. Again, the hand of Fox Conner is evident. Unlike the Command and General Staff School, whose purpose was to prepare field-grade officers for the general staff, the War College curriculum was designed to teach future generals an overview of war—how armies were mobilized, supplied, and deployed; relations with allies; and grand strategy.8 Ike was the youngest member of his class, and one of the youngest ever admitted to the War College.9
On August 15, 1927, when Eisenhower’s assignment with the Battle Monuments Commission ended, General Pershing expressed his appreciation in a letter to the chief of infantry:
The detail of Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, who has been assisting the American Battle Monuments Commission in preparing the guide book, expires today. I wish to take this occasion to express my appreciation of the splendid service he has rendered since being with us.
In the discharge of his duties, which were most difficult, and which were rendered even more difficult by reason of the short time available for their completion, he 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.
With kindest regards, I am
Sincerely yours,
JOHN J. PERSHING10
Pershing’s letter of commendation established a watershed in Eisenhower’s career. Before that, he was merely a gifted protégé of Fox Conner’s, still subject to whatever roughhouse the infantry establishment might choose to inflict. After Pershing’s commendation, he was admitted to the ranks of the chosen few. Pershing was parsimonious with praise, and the glowing recommendation he gave Ike made the chief of infantry take notice. Eisenhower’s path to the top was not guaranteed. But from that point on his assignments were certain to be commensurate with his ability. If he failed to perform, he would be left by the wayside. But if he continued to excel, he could shoot for the stars.
Eisenhower’s sojourn at the War College was a leisurely respite from his hectic days at Leavenworth and the Battle Monuments Commission. There were no tests, no grades, and no final examinations. Students were required to write an original research paper, and Eisenhower chose to address the neglected problem of mobilization. Congress had reduced the Regular Army to fewer than 120,000 men; the National Guard was at half strength; and graduates of the various reserve officer programs numbered about a hundred thousand. But there were virtually no troops for them to command. Eisenhower advocated the creation of an enlisted reserve force, staffed by veterans whose service tour had expired.11 The report was seventeen pages long, and Eisenhower—contrary to the national mood of pacifist isolation—structured the nation’s military needs to meet a possible overseas crisis. When Ike graduated at the end of June 1928, he was given an overall rating of “superior” (students were not ranked for class standing). General William D. Connor, the school commandant, said Eisenhower’s theoretical training for high command was superior; his suitability for the War Department General Staff was superior; and his academic accomplishment was superior—in short, he was “a young officer of great promise.”12 Ike was thirty-seven years old.
Along with most of his classmates, Eisenhower was assigned to the War Department General Staff—another choice assignment.13 But General Pershing, who had moved the Battle Monuments Commission to Paris, set out to redo the guidebook, and wanted Eisenhower for the job. That would necessitate Ike’s transfer to Paris, and would enable him to visit the battlefields firsthand. When Pershing inquired, Eisenhower jumped at the opportunity. “This was my first chance to get to know a European country. I saw Paris for the first time. The job now took on new interest. It involved travel, all the way from the Vosges in the southeast of France to the English Channel.”14 The fact that Mamie wanted to go to Paris made the decision easy. On December 16, 1927, “By order of the President,” Ike was instructed to join the Battle Monuments Commission in Paris when his course at the War College was complete.15
The Eisenhowers sailed for France on July 31, 1928, aboard the recently refitted SS America, formerly the SS Amerika of the Hamburg-Amerika Line.b They were joined by Mamie’s parents, and experienced a smooth nine-day crossing, arriving in Cherbourg in the early morning hours of August 9, 1928. They boarded the boat train for Paris and found temporary hotel accommodations. While Ike reported for duty with Pershing, Mamie began the quest to find a suitable apartment. She was assisted by several resident Army wives and an exceptionally favorable exchange rate. The American dollar, normally worth five francs, now bought at least twenty-five, and occasionally as many as forty or fifty. There was little inflation in France; the prices Frenchmen paid had changed little since the war, but the French franc had fallen out of bed on the international exchange market. According to the 1928 Guide Michelin, a superior room at world-class hotels such as the Ritz, the Crillon, or the Plaza Athénée cost 250 to 300 francs a night. For Americans that translated into ten to twelve dollars. (Today, the cheapest room at one of these hotels is well in excess of $700.) Prices at less famous establishments were substantially lower. Ernest Hemingway, writing for the Toronto Star, said, “Paris in winter is rainy, cold, beautiful and cheap. It is also noisy, jostling, crowded and cheap. It is anything you want—and cheap.”16
Within a week Mamie had found an elegant furnished apartment in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement, on the Right Bank, about a mile downstream from the Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower, and close by the Bois de Boulogne. Located on the premier étage at 68 Quai d’Auteuil, overlooking the Seine and Pont Mirabeau, the apartment was within easy walking distance of Pershing’s headquarters at 20 rue Molitor.17
The apartment belonged to the Comtesse de Villefranche, the doyenne of one of France’s most distinguished families, and rented for five thousand francs a month—a price that would have been unaffordable for the Eisenhowers except for the exchange rate. It was furnished with fin de siècle elegance: walls paneled in brocade; windows framed by satin draperies cinched with ropes of twisted silk; exquisite Aubusson carpets covering the floors; crystal chandeliers suspended from ornate ceilings; rooms crowded with gilt and brocade chairs and sofas, inlaid desks and armoires, and innumerable small tables laden with Sèvres figurines and bibelots. Mamie said the difference between the Comtesse de Villefranche’s apartment and typical Army quarters was “as far as Peary and Amundsen when they reached their respective poles.”18 There was a large vestibule, two drawing rooms, a dining room, three bedrooms, and an immense kitchen, and quarters for the help in the attic. The Eisenhowers employed a live-in maid and a full-time cook, and enjoyed off-street parking for their car, which had been shipped over from the United States.
Eisenhower initially relished his posting to Paris. He and Mamie commenced daily French lessons, and Ike set out to explore Paris on foot. After three months of daily instruction, Eisenhower became proficient at reading and writing French, but the spoken word eluded him. “Major,” said his teacher, “you are one of the best readers of French and translators of the written language that I have among my students, but you are the worst candidate as a French linguist I have ever tried to teach.”19 Ike persevered for a year, but his effort to speak French proved hopeless. Mamie, for her part, began enthusiastically but soon lost patience. Unaccustomed to rigorous study, she learned no French at all during their fourteen months in Paris and used a pocket dictionary to communicate. What Mamie did enjoy was shopping. According to Ike, she became “a specialist in the shops that ranged from the flea market and sidewalk stands to the grands magasins.”20 When the Eisenhowers left the White House for Gettysburg in 1961, Mamie’s closets were still filled with gowns and dresses and shoes she had purchased during their Paris years.21
Paris of the 1920s was a mecca for a generation of Americans. Aside from the favorable exchange rate and the absence of Prohibition, the City of Light had regained its role as the world’s great international metropolis. France as a whole had suffered dreadfully during the war. War damage was extensive in the north and east of the country, and casualties were proportionately higher than in any other nation—1.3 million dead, with more than three million wounded and disabled. One in ten Paris conscripts never returned from the fighting.22 But the city itself had avoided significant damage. The economy flourished, national averages surpassed prewar levels, and the birthrate had turned positive. “I feel as if I was biting into a utopian fruit,” said the writer Anaïs Nin about life in the city: “Something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.”23
No other city lived the frantic twenties with greater energy, imagination, and indulgence.24 Cabaret star Josephine Baker dominated the entertainment scene with her quirky singing and exotic dancing. Anglophone writers, freed from conventional restraints, spawned some of the masterpieces of literary modernism and often wrote of their Paris years. James Joyce, Henry Miller, John Dos Passos, Edith Wharton, E. E. Cummings, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane shared Ike’s time in Paris. There is no evidence their paths crossed, but the Paris they wrote about was the same. Crane captured its essence: “Dinners, soirées, poets, erratic millionaires, painters, translations, lobsters, absinthe, music, promenades, oysters, sherry, aspirin, pictures, sapphic, heiresses, editors, books, sailors. And How!”25
Two English-language dailies, James Gordon Bennett’s venerable Paris Herald (daily circulation thirty-nine thousand) and Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s upstart Paris Tribune, a successor of the Chicago Tribune’s Army edition published for the AEF, not only kept the expatriate community informed, but provided employment for a generation of fledgling journalists, including William L. Shirer, Waverley Root, and James Thurber.
Mamie in Paris, 1929. (illustration credit 4.1)
Eisenhower and his colleagues at Pershing’s Battle Monuments Commission paid little attention to the city’s artistic community, traditionally drawn to Paris by the combination of cheap rents and available studio space. Picasso, Modigliani, Miro, Chagall, Max Ernst, and the American sculptor Alexander Calder flourished in Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter. What did make an impression, at least among Army wives, was the great Paris exposition of decorative arts shortly before the Eisenhowers’ arrival, which launched Art Deco as a new international style.
Many years later Ike and Mamie agreed that the fourteen months they spent in Paris was the most idyllic period in their marriage. “We had a nice life and a nice group of friends. Our son, John, was going to a good school, and we had lots of fun and lots of company.”26 Mamie was at her best. Naturally gregarious and fun-loving, she entertained generously in their spacious apartment, so much so that 68 Quai d’Auteuil was soon christened Club Eisenhower, a home away from home for the American military in Paris. “The apartment became a sort of informal, junior-size American Express for friends who were visiting Paris,” said Ike. “Mamie and I were drawn into their trips. In time we both became small-scale authorities on what should not be missed and what should be avoided.”27 When the Eisenhowers entertained formally, it was at the elegant officers’ club, the Cercle de l’Union Interalliée, on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near the Palais de l’Élysée.28
Eisenhower trooped the battlefields relentlessly, not only those on which the AEF fought, but the entire front from the Swiss border to the English Channel. Often away from Paris for days at a time, he immersed himself in mapping, cataloging, and taking notes about every aspect of the battles, tracing trench lines and terrain features. “In this way I came to see the small towns of France and to meet the sound and friendly people working in the fields and along the roads.” Captain George Horkan, a colleague on the Battle Monuments Commission who later served as Ike’s quartermaster general, believed that the experience gave Eisenhower “a grasp of the military terrain of northern Europe that was absolutely invaluable.”29
Ike was not all business. “Whenever possible,” he recalled, “I stopped along the road to join groups of road workers who were eating their noonday lunch. They were invariably relaxed and hospitable. When my chauffeur (he was always my interpreter) and I would ask if we could join them, their custom was to offer something from their lunchboxes. I developed a habit of carrying a bottle of Evian and an extra bottle of vin rouge…which was always welcome. Whenever I could find no group along the road, I would save my lunch, look for a little auberge, and eat there to mingle with the people.”30
In the spring of 1929 Ike began to take Mamie and young John on his battlefield trips. “Verdun was a forbidding place,” John remembered. “A large portion of the town lay in ruins. Its most frightening place was a strong point named Fort Douaumont. Nearby we visited the Trench of Bayonets, where a squad of Frenchmen, preparing to go over the top, had been buried alive by the impact of a nearby German shell. By some miracle the bayonets had remained sticking out of the ground, and the bodies of the victims had been left unmolested by the French as a national monument.”31
Eisenhower followed French politics as best he could. The Herald and the Tribune provided satisfactory summaries in English, and to improve his French he consulted the Paris press. He was dismayed at the multiplicity of parties, the doctrinaire extremism of the Left and the Right, and the absence of a democratic consensus. Unlike Americans, the French did not agree on the rules of the game. Since 1789 there had been three republics, three separate monarchical regimes, two empires, a provisional government, and the Paris Commune.c The French Revolution was not so much a revolution as a civil war—and the outcome was still being contested. The radical Right and the church rejected the republic, and the republic rejected Christianity and the church. The principal party of the Third Republic was the Radical-Socialists, which was neither radical nor socialist but a middle-class party dedicated to the secularization of France. The issues were intractable, and Eisenhower soon concluded that France was inherently ungovernable. That realization—which Ike came to during his fourteen months in Paris—helps explain his undisguised admiration and support for Charles de Gaulle fifteen years later. The last thing Eisenhower wanted in 1944 was for his headquarters to be saddled with governing liberated France. De Gaulle and his Free French movement were eager to take on that responsibility, and Eisenhower—despite the entrenched opposition of FDR and the U.S. State Department—was only too happy to turn the problem over to him.
De Gaulle, for his part, always appreciated what Eisenhower had done. The mutual admiration between the two was remarkable.32 They were almost exactly the same age, shared similar military careers, and possessed extraordinary political instincts. “He knew how to be adroit and supple,” wrote de Gaulle about Ike in his Memoirs, “but he was also capable of great daring.” Later, when de Gaulle was president of the Fifth Republic during the final years of Ike’s presidency, the two old soldiers, now heads of state, not only found common ground, but also discovered that they enjoyed each other’s company. Eisenhower invited de Gaulle to the farm in Gettysburg, and de Gaulle welcomed Ike to overnight at his summer residence, the Château de Rambouillet.33 (De Gaulle, incidentally, spoke flawless English, but reserved it for those with whom he felt a special affection.)
On March 20, 1929, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied commander in chief during the final year of the war, died following a brief illness. General Pershing was an honorary pallbearer, and the officers of the Battle Monuments Commission marched in the funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, to the cathedral of Notre Dame. For Eisenhower, it was the greatest spectacle of his career. Three million Frenchmen lined the parade route. In addition to the military units and the procession of anciens combatants that stretched for half a mile, the cardinals of Paris and Rouen marched behind the catafalque in full panoply of office, marking their first participation in a civic ceremony since the separation of church and state fifty years earlier.34
Duty with the Battle Monuments Commission was pleasant enough. While Eisenhower worked at revising the guidebook, General Pershing undertook to write his memoirs.35 The general’s work habits were rigid, but somewhat Churchillian. He rarely came to the office until early afternoon and worked until well past midnight. Pershing appreciated Eisenhower’s way with words, and soon drew him into the project. “I’m unhappy about the description of Saint Mihiel … and also about the Argonne,” he told Ike. “Read the parts of the book that cover these two periods and let me know what you think.”36
Eisenhower, fifth from right, marching with Pershing’s staff at the Paris funeral of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, March 26, 1929. (illustration credit 4.2)
Pershing’s account hewed closely to his wartime diary. Eisenhower read the chapters and suggested that a strong narrative, interspersed with diary entries, would be easier for the reader to follow. Pershing responded enthusiastically and asked Ike to redraft the material. “With considerable effort I produced two chapters and left them with the General,” Eisenhower recalled. “After reading them over, he said he was happy with them.” Pershing said that before making a final decision, however, he wanted to show the chapters to his former aide, Colonel George C. Marshall. In such matters, he told Ike, he always turned to Marshall for final advice.37
Eisenhower had not met George Marshall, but several days later he arrived in Paris and spent several hours with Pershing. He read Ike’s chapters and found them interesting. “Nevertheless,” he told Eisenhower, “I’ve advised General Pershing to stick with his original idea. I think to break up the format at the climax of the war would be a mistake.” Colonel Marshall rarely explained why he decided anything, and his explanation to Eisenhower suggests he respected the effort Ike had put in.
“I said there was some virtue in continuity,” Eisenhower replied, “although I still thought that the battles should be treated as a single narrative, with the proper annotations to give it authenticity.
“He [Marshall] remarked, rather kindly, that my idea was a good one. Nevertheless he thought General Pershing would be happier if he stayed with the original scheme.”38 Eisenhower would not see Marshall again for ten years. But evidently he had made an impression.
After a year in Paris, Eisenhower became anxious about his assignment. He enjoyed the relaxed life he and Mamie led and welcomed the opportunity to travel, but fretted about his career. In many respects the Battle Monuments Commission was a cul-de-sac. Two more years of revising the Army’s guidebook for American tourists seemed a frivolous waste of time. Eisenhower was impatient and, as he did whenever he felt stymied, he contacted Fox Conner. Conner was no longer in Washington but was commanding the Hawaiian Division at Schofield Barracks in Honolulu. Once again, he lent a sympathetic ear. On August 10, 1929, Eisenhower received orders from the War Department to report to Washington, where he was to assume the duties of military assistant to the assistant secretary of war. As at Fort Benning three years earlier, his tour was being curtailed—a highly unusual move where an overseas assignment was involved.
Eisenhower’s associates at the Battle Monuments Commission were stunned. Major Xenophon Price, Pershing’s executive officer, thought Ike was passing up a shining future. “Every officer attached to the Commission is going to be known as a man of special merit,” said Price.39
Eisenhower disagreed. Price responded by giving him an exceptionally low efficiency report for his last four and a half months in Paris. Price had previously rated Eisenhower four times over a period of three years, and each rating had been “superior.” His final rating was “satisfactory.” Price acknowledged that Ike possessed a “fine command of the English language,” and that he was “an excellent officer of great natural ability.” But he was stung by Eisenhower’s decision to return to Washington. Price said Ike was “not especially versitile [Price’s spelling] in adjusting to changed conditions” and that he “had difficulty adjusting to Paris.” It was Eisenhower’s lowest rating since he served as a young lieutenant at Fort Oglethorpe in 1917. Its impact on Eisenhower’s career, however, was negligible.d
On September 17, 1929, the Eisenhowers sailed from Cherbourg on the United States Lines’ SS Leviathan—the largest (54,282 tons) and fastest (twenty-six knots) liner afloat. Built in 1913 as the SS Vaterland for the Hamburg-Amerika Line, the ship had been in New York when World War I began and, like the Amerika, had been seized and converted into a troopship by the United States in 1917. The Eisenhowers’ cabin was crammed with flowers and presents from their friends in Paris, but no champagne—a jolting reminder they were back in the land of Prohibition.
a During World War II, the 24th was relegated to policing up pockets of holdout Japanese troops after the main fighting was over. It took part in the occupation of Japan and was one of the first units ordered into Korea in 1950. But like many units ordered from Japan into Korea, the 24th initially fought badly—so badly, in fact, that it became the subject of a derisive ditty, “The Bugout Boogie”: “When them Chinese mortars begin to thud, the Old Deuce-Four begin to bug.”
According to a study of the regiment published in 1996 by the Department of the Army (William T. Bowers, William M. Hammond, and George L. MacGarrigle, Black Soldier, White Army: The 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea [Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1996]), the soldiers of the 24th considered it “a ‘penal’ regiment for white officers who had ‘screwed up.’ ” (The quotation appears on this page.)
Ironically, the poor performance of the 24th in Korea played a decisive role in the desegregation of the Army. President Truman had ordered the desegregation of the armed services on July 26, 1948 (Executive Order 9981). The following day, General Omar Bradley, Army chief of staff and Truman’s fellow Missourian, took exception to the president’s order. “The Army is not out to make any social reforms,” said Bradley. “The Army will put men of different races in different companies. It will change that policy when the nation as a whole changes it” (The New York Times, July 30, 1948).
Executive Order 9981 provided that desegregation take place as rapidly as possible, “having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale,” and Bradley’s demurrer was taken in that context. He repeated the Army’s reluctance to move before society had done so in a prepared statement to the President’s Committee on Equality in the Armed Forces, March 28, 1949, and that is where the issue rested until the Korean War. The Army remained segregated despite the president’s order.
It was the poor showing of the 24th in Korea that broke the logjam. In September 1950, two months after the war began, Major General William B. Kean, commander of the 25th Infantry Division, requested that the Eighth Army disband the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment because of its poor performance. General Matthew Ridgway, commanding the Eighth Army, had long opposed segregation. “It has always seemed to me both un-American and un-Christian for free citizens to be taught to downgrade themselves this way as if they were unfit to associate with their fellows or to accept leadership themselves.” Ridgway’s efforts to desegregate the Eighth Army were stymied temporarily by MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo and the Department of the Army. But when he succeeded MacArthur as supreme commander in the spring of 1951, Ridgway forced the issue and ordered the desegregation of the troops in the theater, beginning with the 24th Infantry. This time no one in Washington objected.
Morris J. MacGregor, Jr., Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940–1965 436–47 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army 1981); Matthew B. Ridgway, The Korean War: How We Met the Challenge 192–93 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967).
b The SS America was built in 1905 at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast for the Hamburg-Amerika Line. At 22,225 tons, it was the largest ship of the period, and carried 386 persons in first class, 150 in second, 222 in third, and 1,750 in steerage. When war broke out in August 1914, the Amerika was in port in Boston. It remained there until the United States entered the war in April 1917, whereupon it was seized, renamed the America, and converted to a troopship. After the war it became American property pursuant to the reparations provisions of the Versailles Treaty and was given to the United States Lines, which converted it into a two-class passenger ship. It was seriously damaged by fire while undergoing repairs at Newport News, Virginia, in 1927, and had just been refitted when the Eisenhowers boarded. After service as a troopship in World War II, it was scrapped in January 1957.
c Following the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, France experimented for three years with a constitutional monarchy. Louis XVI remained on the throne with his powers curtailed. But in 1792 he was deposed and executed, and the First Republic was established. Napoléon seized power in 1799 and proclaimed the first French Empire. Historians often assert that Napoléon “interrupted” the work of the revolution and left the outcome in doubt. In 1814 the Bourbon monarchy was restored, only to be overthrown in 1830 in favor of the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe, the duc d’Orléans. The Revolution of 1848 toppled the Orleanist monarchy and established the Second Republic, which ruled France until 1852, when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (Napoléon’s nephew) mounted a coup and established the Second Empire. Napoléon III (as he was styled) ruled France until Germany’s 1870 victory in the Franco-Prussian War. A period of instability ensued, marked by the tumultuous episode of the Paris Commune of 1871, a legendary benchmark for the Marxist Left, and the provisional government of Adolphe Thiers. The Third Republic was ushered in in 1875 with little prospect of survival but remarkably had endured, always under attack from the monarchist Right (divided into Bourbon and Orleanist factions), the authoritarian Right (successors to the imperial tradition), and the antidemocratic Left, heirs to the spirit of the Commune.
d When Eisenhower returned to Washington as chief of staff in 1946, he inquired what had happened to Xenophon Price. A search of War Department records revealed that he was on active duty with the Corps of Engineers in the rank of lieutenant colonel. Since Price was a year senior in the prewar Army, Eisenhower was shocked. “Why was he only a lieutenant colonel?” he asked. “Bad judgment,” came the reply. “Hell, he’s not that bad,” said Ike, and he ordered Price promoted to colonel. Letter, John S. D. Eisenhower to JES, March 10, 2008.
