Eisenhower installed as the thirteenth president of Columbia University, October 12, 1948. The mace is carried by English professor John H. H. Lyon. (illustration credit 17.1)
Stand Columbia! Alma Mater
Through the storms of Time abide
—GILBERT OAKLEY WARD
Eisenhower stepped down as chief of staff on February 7, 1948, and Omar Bradley was sworn in as his successor. By arrangement with the board of trustees, Ike would assume his duties at Columbia at the end of the academic year, and by agreement with Bradley, he and Mamie would remain at Quarters 1 until he was ready to move to New York.a In the interim, Eisenhower intended to write his memoirs.
Eisenhower had planned to write his memoirs from the time he assumed command of the North African invasion of 1942. Kay Summersby and Harry Butcher had kept diaries for him, Ike occasionally made entries in his own diary, and the staff both at AFHQ and SHAEF had been meticulous in maintaining a record of his activities. Even before the war ended Eisenhower received offers from publishers, but did not take them seriously until toward the end of his tour as chief of staff. “I don’t believe that any man on active duty has the right or the time to undertake the writing of a book of this kind.”1
What Ike did do was set aside evenings at Quarters 1 to reread the Memoirs of Ulysses Grant, which he would use as a model.2 Grant’s lean and elegant prose has often been cited by critics as diverse as Edmund Wilson and Gertrude Stein as the finest nonfiction writing in American literature.3 Grant was generous in his praise and sparing with his criticism, which also appealed to Ike. “I would not indulge in the kind of personal criticism or disparagement of others that had badly marred many military accounts.”4
Negotiations began in earnest in December 1947. Ike was approached by Simon and Schuster and by Harper and Brothers, but eventually signed on with Doubleday, acting in conjunction with the New York Herald Tribune, who made what Eisenhower considered a preemptive offer. Instead of the customary advance against royalties, Doubleday and the Trib proposed to buy all of the rights to Ike’s book in a single package. There would be no royalties, but Eisenhower would receive a lump sum payment of $635,000 upon completion of the manuscript.5 b It was a handshake deal. Ike said a written contract was not necessary.6
Under the arrangement, Eisenhower received roughly the modern equivalent of $6 million, about half of what President Clinton received from Alfred A. Knopf as an advance against royalties for his memoirs. But unlike Clinton’s royalties, Ike’s lump sum payment in 1948 was treated as a capital gain, not as income. That was standard IRS procedure at the time for onetime authors who received a lump sum payment, and Ike received no special consideration.7 It meant that instead of paying income tax at the rate of 82.13 percent, which would have been Ike’s tax bracket, he paid taxes at the capital gains rate of 25 percent.8 That left Ike $476,250, or roughly $4.5 million in today’s dollars, and it made him financially independent. Some biographers have suggested that Eisenhower would have been better off under a standard royalty arrangement—over a million copies of Crusade in Europe have been sold—but the near-confiscatory income tax rates in the 1940s and ’50s make that doubtful.
Eisenhower began writing on February 8, 1948. He worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. There was no ghost writer. Ike dictated to three stenographers who worked in tandem. When a chapter was typed, Eisenhower edited it lightly and then gave it to a team of staff officers who fact-checked and served as research assistants. “Because I habitually rose at six, it was a tough grind for all of us,” Ike recalled, “but in a way it was fun. There were no delays for lack of material. My secretarial help was superb and at times my execrable handwriting provided a reason for a laugh.”9
After the fact-checking was finished, there was another round of editing and the chapter was sent off to Ike’s editors in New York, the legendary Kenneth McCormick, editor in chief of Doubleday, and Joe Barnes, then foreign editor of the Herald Tribune and later editor in chief of Simon and Schuster. McCormick and Barnes were awed by Eisenhower’s performance. Barnes said that on one occasion he saw Ike dictate, without stopping, five thousand words that required almost no editing. Barnes had “never seen such a performance.”10 Eisenhower listened to the advice he received from McCormick and Barnes, but for the most part he relied on his own instincts for rewriting and correcting, and his determination to get the facts right.11
As a result, Crusade in Europe remains one of the clearest and least opinionated books to come out of World War II. If Ike had an ax to grind, he avoided doing so in his book. Like Grant’s Memoirs, it is also free of the petty bitterness that characterized the books of Montgomery and Lord Alanbrooke, and the diaries of George Patton, which were published posthumously. Unlike Churchill’s monumental six-volume history of the war, Eisenhower also did not avoid subjects that were embarrassing and did not hesitate to accept responsibility for matters that went wrong. Grant’s reputation as one of the finest American writers of nonfiction remains secure, but Crusade in Europe is a remarkably complete record of the war in Europe and a reliable reference that will continue to be consulted by future historians. The fact that it is still in print after sixty-five years speaks for itself.
When the manuscript was finished, in mid-April, William Robinson, publisher of the Herald Tribune, presented Eisenhower two checks totaling $625,000, and then whisked Ike and Mamie off for a two-week vacation at the Augusta National Golf Club. It was Eisenhower’s first visit to Augusta, and the club soon became an integral part of his life.c At Augusta, Robinson introduced Ike to a group of men who became his lifelong friends. Rich, Republican, and devoted to golf and bridge, they took it upon themselves to make Eisenhower’s leisure time enjoyable and to pick up the expenses. Known as “the Gang,” they included, in addition to Robinson, Clifford Roberts, a New York investment banker who with golfing legend Bobby Jones had founded the Augusta National; Robert Woodruff, chairman of the board of Coca-Cola; W. Alton (“Pete”) Jones, president of Cities Service Company (a precursor to Citgo); and Ellis Slater, president of Frankfort Distilleries. The sole Democrat in the Gang was Mississippi’s George Allen, one of the country’s sharpest legal minds who hid his talent behind a roly-poly façade as court jester to presidents. The Gang made Eisenhower a member of Augusta, built a cottage for him near the tenth tee, and put in a fish pond well stocked with bass for his private use.12
Presidential boomlets for Eisenhower erupted spontaneously. A national Draft Eisenhower league set up shop, and the biweekly polls conducted by the Gallup and Roper organizations showed Ike to be running ahead of Governor Dewey and Senator Taft among likely Republican voters, and ahead of President Truman among Democrats. Eisenhower did nothing to encourage his supporters. But he also did nothing to discourage them. “I am frequently flayed,” he wrote Bedell Smith in September 1947, “because I insist that I do not want to have any political office and still will not use the language of Sherman. The two cases are not parallel.”13 A month later he explained to his brother Milton that he would feel under no obligation to accept the nomination if it came to him as the result of a deadlocked convention (as it did to Sherman), but a genuine draft was a different matter. And for that reason he did not want to use Sherman’s words. “Every citizen,” said Ike, “is required to do his duty for the country no matter what it may be.”14
The issue came to a head in January 1948. On January 9, a group of New Hampshire Republicans formally entered a slate of delegates pledged to Eisenhower in the upcoming March primary. Leonard Finder, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, wrote to inform Ike of the action and enclosed a front-page editorial from the paper endorsing him. “No man should deny the will of the people in a matter such as this,” wrote Finder.15
Eisenhower pondered his reply for more than a week. All signs pointed to a Republican victory in the fall. Thomas E. Dewey, the GOP front-runner, was forty-eight; Robert A. Taft was fifty-nine—both young enough to serve two terms. In eight years Ike would be sixty-six, much too old for a man to make his first campaign for the presidency, particularly for someone who was not in politics.16 If Eisenhower were going to run, he would have to do so now.
Given the choice of whether to fish or cut bait, Eisenhower chose to cut bait. “It is my conviction that the necessary and wise subordination of the military to civil power will best be sustained … when lifelong professional soldiers, in the absence of some obvious and overriding reasons, abstain from seeking high political office,” he replied to Finder on January 22, 1948. After thanking those who had worked on his behalf, Ike issued the flat denial that seemingly closed the door on the possibility of his becoming president. “My decision to remove myself completely from the political scene is definite and positive. I could not accept nomination even under the remote circumstance that it was tendered to me.”17
Numerous commentators have speculated that if Eisenhower had been the Republican candidate in 1948 he would have won. That may be so, but it would have been an uphill fight for him to win the nomination. Few states elected their convention delegates by primaries in 1948, and even if Ike had won all of the primaries, he would have gone into the convention far short of the number of delegates required. Dewey and Taft had been campaigning for eight years, and the Republican organization in most states was pledged to one or the other. Regardless of his public support, it is unlikely that Eisenhower could have won the nomination.18
Ike arrived on Morningside Heights on May 2, 1948. He and Mamie moved into the president’s mansion at 60 Morningside Drive and began to settle in. Nicholas Murray Butler had died in early December, and the house had been completely renovated by Dorothy Draper, one of the nation’s best-known interior decorators.d Built of brick and Indiana limestone in 1912 by McKim, Mead, and White for Butler, the four-story Italianate house was as close to a ducal palazzo as one might find west of Florence. The two lower floors were designed for formal entertaining, with marble floors, crystal chandeliers, and a dining room that seated thirty comfortably. Butler once estimated that between 2,500 and 3,000 people came to the presidential house for receptions, lunches, and dinners every year.19 Guests included the King and Queen of England, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), more than a dozen heads of state, and countless Nobel Prize winners.e According to The New Yorker, an invitation to 60 Morningside Drive was “the most sought after of high cultural invitations, proof that the privileged recipient had arrived in New York society.”20
The third floor of the mansion was set aside for family living, with guest rooms and servants quarters on the fourth. Draper had converted an old water storage room on the roof into a penthouse solarium for the Eisenhowers. Mamie furnished it with her Philippine rattan furniture, members of the Gang gathered there regularly for bridge, and Ike had a studio for painting. There was a household staff of nine—which Mrs. Butler had trained to perfection—to which were added Sergeant John Moaney, Ike’s valet, and Sergeant Leonard Dry, who had been his driver since 1943.
By arrangement with the board of trustees, Eisenhower would assume his official duties as president on June 7, 1948, one week after commencement, with a formal installation ceremony scheduled for the fall. The month’s hiatus between his arrival in May and June 7 would give him a chance to become familiar with the university and his responsibilities. Ike had requested that the president’s offices in Low Memorial Library be relocated and made more accessible. Butler’s office, one floor above the rotunda, could be reached only by a private elevator from the office of the secretary of the university. Eisenhower chose rooms on the main floor, just off the rotunda. “There, I hoped, both students and faculty might have direct and easy access to their President and I would not feel immured in a remote citadel.”21 The campus regarded the move with satisfaction. Less salubrious was Ike’s decision to bring with him from the Pentagon Major Robert L. Schulz as his administrative aide, and Kevin McCann as a special assistant. Schulz and McCann, who knew little about university affairs and nothing about Columbia, organized Eisenhower’s office like a military headquarters, kept the faculty at arm’s length, and were determined to protect Ike rather than allowing him to be himself. “They didn’t have the knowledge of things academic,” said historian Harry J. Carman, the beloved dean of Columbia College, and “I put part of the difficulty which President Eisenhower encountered here squarely at their doorstep.”22
Scarcely had he settled in when Eisenhower was confronted with two major challenges pertaining to civil liberty and academic freedom. The spring and early summer of 1948 witnessed the arrival of the Cold War with full intensity. The Russians launched the Berlin blockade in June, and Communist witch-hunting would soon reach epidemic proportions in the United States. State legislature after state legislature enacted loyalty-oath requirements for university faculty, and the great private universities of the Ivy League—Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia—were not immune from the witch-hunting virus.
At Columbia, the issues involved guest speakers on campus and the use of endowed chairs for faculty appointments. In December 1947, before Ike’s arrival, the university had raised no objection when Columbia’s Marxist Study Group invited Arnold Johnson, the legislative director of the American Communist Party, to speak on campus in Pupin Hall.f Pupin’s daughter had written to question Columbia’s policy, and with the arrival of Eisenhower her husband took up the cause. “Will Columbia agree to keep traitors out of Pupin Hall?” he wrote Ike on May 20. “With Kremlin agents … among our school and college teachers and administrators, it is now no time for speakers ‘explaining Marxism’ by attacking all our characteristic institutions.”23
Eisenhower replied immediately. While he had not been on campus at the time, said Ike, he fully supported the decision Columbia had made to allow Johnson to speak.
The virtues of our system will never be fully appreciated … unless we also understand the essentials of opposing ideologies.… I deem it not only unobjectionable but very wise to allow opposing systems to be presented by their proponents.… Indeed, I believe that arbitrary refusal to allow students—especially upon their own request—to hear the apostles of these false systems, would create in their minds a justified suspicion that we ourselves fear a real comparison between democracy and dictatorship.24
The second issue involved an endowed chair funded by the Polish government for the study of Polish philology, language, and literature. Columbia had accepted the gift in early May, and announced the appointment of Professor Manfred Kridl, an eminent Polish scholar at Smith College, to the post. The Polish-American Congress demanded that the university rescind the gift, charging that the Polish government was the tool of Moscow and was engaged in a campaign of “academic infiltration” at Columbia. The press took up the cry. “Coddling Communism at Columbia,” said The San Francisco Examiner in a lead editorial.25
Once again, Eisenhower stood firm. Professor Kridl, said Ike, was a distinguished scholar of Polish literature who had been appointed “solely by Columbia without advice or suggestion from non-University sources.” The establishment of the Polish chair, he said, “will make it possible for the students of Columbia to learn more about the language and literature of a country that has suffered so much. A great deal of the trouble in the world today is traceable to a lack of understanding of the culture of various countries. I intend to do all in my power to remedy this situation.”26
When Eisenhower reported the incident to the trustees on September 20, he said the charges made against Columbia were absurd. “I am certain that none of the professors [involved in filling the Polish chair] is disloyal to our government.”27 At his official installation on October 12, Eisenhower returned to the theme with a spirited defense of academic freedom. “There will be no administrative suppression or distortion of any subject that merits a place in this University’s curriculum,” said Ike. “The facts of communism, for example, shall be taught here.… Ignorance of communism, fascism, or any other police-state philosophy is far more dangerous than ignorance of the most virulent disease.… Columbia University will forever be bound by its loyalty to truth and the basic concepts of democratic freedom. No intellectual iron curtain shall screen students from disturbing facts.”28
Eisenhower’s standing on campus could not have been higher. Historian Allan Nevins, writing in The New York Times, said, “No one can visit Morningside without feeling great energies vibrating there.” With her new president, “Columbia’s greatest years lie before her, and she knows that she will share them with a nation which has become the first power on the globe, and a city which has become a world capital.”29
In late June, Governor Dewey won the Republican nomination on the third ballot and selected Governor Earl Warren of California as his running mate. It looked like an unbeatable ticket. In despair, many Democrats turned to Ike. “No one knew whether he was a Democrat or a Republican,” wrote The New Yorker’s Richard Rovere. “For all anyone knew he might have been a Greenbacker or a Social Credit crank. No one knew whether he knew what he was.” What people knew was that “he could win an election.”30
Eisenhower installed as the thirteenth president of Columbia University, October 12, 1948. The mace is carried by English professor John H. H. Lyon. (illustration credit 17.1)
As the Democratic convention approached, the pressure on Ike intensified. On July 1, 1948, the Eisenhowers celebrated their thirty-second wedding anniversary with the Gang at 60 Morningside Drive. Ellis “Slats” Slater recalled that an enthusiastic throng of two to three hundred persons gathered outside the residence chanting “We Like Ike.” Eisenhower went out on the balcony and waved good-naturedly to the crowd.31 On July 3, a host of Democratic leaders, including New York mayor William O’Dwyer, Senator Lister Hill (Alabama), Governor Chester Bowles (Connecticut), Jacob Arvey (Illinois), Governor J. Strom Thurmond (South Carolina), Congressman James Roosevelt (California), and Minneapolis mayor Hubert H. Humphrey, sent telegrams to all 1,592 Democratic delegates inviting them to attend a caucus in Philadelphia on July 10—two days before the convention would begin. The purpose was to “find the ablest and strongest man available” to lead the party in the coming election. No candidate was mentioned, but it was clearly an effort to dump Truman and draft Ike. At this point Eisenhower recognized that he had to step in. On the evening of July 5, he authorized Robert Harron, Columbia’s director of public information, to issue a formal statement to the press restating his January refusal to run. “I shall continue, subject to the pleasure of the University Trustees, to perform the important duties I have undertaken as President of Columbia,” said Ike. “I will not, at this time, identify myself with any political party, and could not accept nomination for any public office or participate in a partisan political contest.”32
As Eisenhower later told journalist Marquis Childs, he thought with that statement he was out of the woods.33 But the phrase “at this time” encouraged Ike’s supporters to believe that he would accept a draft. President Truman evidently thought so as well. At Truman’s direction, Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall called Eisenhower, and over the telephone Ike and Royall drafted a follow-up statement that was then dispatched to James Roosevelt, Senator Claude Pepper (Florida), and Jersey City mayor Frank Hague—all of whom were still beating the drum for Ike. This time Eisenhower was unequivocal. “No matter under what terms, conditions, or premises a proposal might be couched, I would refuse to accept the nomination.”34 So ended the boom for Eisenhower in the Democratic party, although few doubted the nomination would have been his if he had wanted it.
Eisenhower was very much a presence on Columbia’s campus in the fall of 1948. He attended home football games at Baker Field, presided over the traditional dinner for freshmen in John Jay Hall, and welcomed the alumni back on a gala Homecoming Day. Ike particularly liked to break off an occasional afternoon and visit Baker Field at 218th Street and Broadway to watch the Columbia football team practice under coaching great Lou Little. A few months before, Little had received an attractive offer from Yale, but to the delight of every Columbia alumnus, Eisenhower had persuaded him to remain on Morningside Heights. “You never will, in your entire time as president of the university, do anything which will elicit more universal approval,” wrote Joseph Lang (LLB, 1921).35 Little had been at Columbia since 1930. In 1934, his team had scored a stunning upset over Stanford in the Rose Bowl, and in 1947 had snapped Army’s thirty-two-game winning streak with a dramatic fourth-quarter, come-from-behind, 21–20 victory. Ike liked to talk football with Little, and would occasionally reminisce about their first meeting on the football field in 1924, when Eisenhower was coaching the Fort Meade team and Little was at Georgetown. (Georgetown won 7–0.)36
Eisenhower and Columbia coach Lou Little watch football practice at Baker Field. (illustration credit 17.2)
Eisenhower also took up painting. Encouraged by Churchill, and inspired by watching Thomas Stephens do a portrait of Mamie, Ike began to paint with oils in his penthouse conservatory. Stephens had supplied the initial paints and brushes, and Ike, after some early hesitation, became an enthusiastic dauber. “My most urgent need at the start was a generous-sized tarpaulin to cover the floor around the easel,” wrote Ike years later. “The one thing I could do well from the beginning was to cover hands, clothes, brush handles, chair and floor with more paint than ever reached the canvas.”
Eisenhower thought the conservatory at 60 Morningside was an ideal studio. “A professional might have objected to its lack of northern exposure, but privacy and quiet were more important to me than lighting.”37 Gradually, Eisenhower became proficient, although unlike Churchill he never took himself seriously as a painter. “I have nothing whatever of artistic talents,” he wrote his childhood friend Swede Hazlett in August 1949. “I simply get a bang out of working with colors and occasionally one of my efforts comes out with sufficient appeal about it to entice some of my friends to steal it and carry it away. Many others find their way to the waste paper basket.” Eisenhower not only derived pleasure from painting, but found the quiet time useful for meditating and assembling his thoughts. At Columbia, he usually painted in the evening between eleven and twelve-thirty, but as he warned Hazlett, “if you ever take it up it will consume so many of your vertical hours that you will wonder how they have ever slipped away from you.”38
Eisenhower took no role in the 1948 election. On election night he was joined at 60 Morningside Drive by George Allen, Bill Robinson, and Cliff Roberts for dinner and bridge. As they played cards and listened to the returns, it became apparent that the election was going to be close and that Truman might win. Roberts said Ike was “just as disappointed as Robinson and I were.” Roberts was unable to recall Eisenhower’s exact words, but remembered that the general “indicated quite clearly to me that he was having second thoughts about his decision to stay clear of political involvement.”39 g
With Dewey’s defeat, Eisenhower was back in the political spotlight. The GOP nomination in 1952 was now wide open, and Ike moved cautiously to reposition himself. During the fall, Eisenhower had been in Washington on several occasions to consult with Defense Secretary James Forrestal and the Joint Chiefs on the Defense Department budget. On November 4, two days after Truman’s victory, Ike wrote Forrestal. Without referring to the election, Ike told the secretary that he shared Forrestal’s concern over the state of world affairs, and volunteered his assistance. “I can scarcely think of any chore that I would refuse to do whenever people in responsible positions feel that I might be able to help.”40
Forrestal was delighted. The National Security Act of 1947, which had created the Department of Defense, did not provide for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.h Forrestal saw Ike’s offer as a way to circumvent that omission. “What I have in mind,” he wrote Truman on November 9, “was inviting him [Eisenhower] to come down, with your approval, of course, to sit with us for a period of three or four weeks. I should like, if it were possible, to have him named by you to preside over the Joint Chiefs, but if that were impossible an informal basis would be second best.”41
One hand washed the other. With Dewey defeated, life at Columbia may have looked less attractive to Ike, and with Congress barring the door to the creation of a chairman for the Joint Chiefs, Forrestal saw Eisenhower as an informal substitute. Whether Ike and Forrestal coordinated more closely is unclear, but on November 18, Eisenhower wrote Truman to congratulate him on his reelection. “It seems almost needless for me to reaffirm my loyalty to you as President; or to assure you again that I always stand ready to attempt the performance of any professional duty for which my constitutional superiors believe I might be specially suited.”42
Ike was fishing and President Truman took the bait. “You didn’t have to reaffirm your loyalty to me,” he replied on November 26. Resorting to a bit of double entendre, the president told Eisenhower, “I always know exactly where you stand.” Nevertheless, he asked Ike to stop by the White House and see him the next time he was in Washington.43
Eisenhower followed a familiar game plan. When stymied in his career, he invariably sought outside assistance. He had appealed to Fox Conner three times—to attend Leavenworth, to escape from the 24th Infantry, and to be rescued from a dead-end assignment with Pershing in Paris. In 1939, when duty in Manila with MacArthur paled, he wrote his friend Mark Clark and was promptly reassigned to the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Lewis, Washington. For any number of reasons Ike was growing restive at Columbia, and his approach to Forrestal and Truman followed a pattern.
The irony is that in the fall of 1948, Eisenhower had mastered Columbia. “General Eisenhower has taken Columbia the way he took Normandy Beach,” said The New York Times on November 7. “The entire university population of 35,000—students, professors, officers, trustees, and janitors—has happily surrendered and adores its conqueror.”44
Eisenhower was also much in demand as a public speaker. The New York Herald Tribune began serializing Crusade in Europe the Sunday after the election, and the book was released by Doubleday on November 22. Prepublication publicity had been massive, the first pressrun was 150,000 copies, and the book was greeted with critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Drew Middleton, writing in The New York Times Book Review, placed Crusade “in the first rank of military memoirs.” Robert Sherwood, who had won three Pulitzer Prizes as a playwright and a fourth for his biography Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, called the book “a heartening demonstration of what we are pleased to call Americanism at its best.” Liberal critic Richard Rovere, writing in Harper’s, considered Crusade in Europe “a document that sometimes comes close to splendor.” In London, Goronwy Rees, reviewing Crusade for The Spectator, called Ike “the greatest single architect of the greatest military alliance in history. I don’t believe any other man could have achieved what he achieved.”45
On the Columbia campus, where publish or perish was a way of life, the response was rapturous. Ike might not have had a graduate degree, but he had proved he could hold his own with the nation’s best historians. Allan Nevins said he started reading the book as his train was leaving Washington and became so absorbed that he missed his stop at Princeton where he was scheduled to give a lecture and had to take another train back.46
Eisenhower also mixed effectively with faculty and students when he chose to do so. When Professor Robert Livingston Schuyler asked him to speak to his graduate class in historiography, Ike not only agreed but “spoke with passion and deep knowledge about two of the college’s most illustrious former students, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.”47 When the history faculty invited Eisenhower to their annual black-tie dinner, Ike stole the show. According to Jacques Barzun, Columbia’s brilliant intellectual historian, one of his colleagues quoted Churchill’s remark about Europe’s “soft underbelly.” Eisenhower, according to Barzun, “got quite huffy, and said, ‘That is one of the most ignorant remarks made by anybody,’ and he proceeded to give us, without prompting, a history of the campaigns, beginning with Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War, that had taken place in the south of Europe which, as we all know, is a mass of mountains, and he went right on to the Austrian War of 1866, the German-Austrian War. It was a masterly performance and with hardly a hesitation for words.”48 Henry Graff, a junior member of the department at the time, recalled that it was “a dazzling talk delivered without notes and with uncommon insight and learning. He spoke of the great captains of history who had preceded him on the battlefields of Europe. Let no one tell you that he was not an historian, that he was not one of us.”49
Eisenhower also invigorated the administrative side of the university. He instituted organizational reforms advocated by the consulting firm of Booz Allen years earlier, and established a mandatory retirement age of sixty-eight for faculty and administrative staff. Most important, he balanced Columbia’s budget for the first time in four years and put in place the first systematic fund-raising structure the university had known. Nicholas Murray Butler had been spectacularly successful as a fund-raiser during his first thirty years as president, but he did so on a strictly personal basis. Unlike Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, Columbia had no fund-raising arm other than Butler himself. The combination of advancing age, the Great Depression, and the progressive income tax caused Columbia’s fund-raising to dry up almost completely. Its principal source of income, other than tuition, was the rent on Manhattan real estate, most of which had been let on long-term leases at prices far below 1948 levels. As a result, Columbia was living off its capital. Figures provided by the American Council of Education show that between 1929 and 1939, Columbia’s endowment decreased by $3 million ($46 million in current dollars). During the same period, Harvard’s endowment increased by $27 million ($416 million currently) and Yale’s by $18 million ($278 million). Of the sixteen universities in the council’s study, Columbia was the only institution whose endowment had declined.50
Columbia’s financial problem was exacerbated by a decaying physical plant in which scheduled maintenance had been deferred, and by the influx of thousands of veterans who had to be accommodated. Eisenhower addressed the problem by putting in place a private gifts organization patterned on Princeton’s annual alumni campaign, and in October 1948 launched a $210 million fund drive ($1.9 billion currently) to restore the university’s solvency. Ike had not anticipated that he would be required to raise money when he accepted Columbia’s offer in 1947—Watson and Parkinson had explicitly assured him that he would not—but when confronted with the reality of the university’s budgetary shortfall, he moved promptly with the support of the trustees to correct it.
In nonacademic matters, Eisenhower also used his considerable clout to Columbia’s advantage. When university maintenance workers threatened to strike over wages and working conditions, Ike negotiated directly with Michael J. Quill, head of the Transport Workers Union of America. (The Columbia employees were members.) Eisenhower and Quill quickly reached a settlement. “Look, General,” said Quill, “I’m not going to have any trouble with you. I’ve got more sense than to be taking on an opponent who is as popular as you seem to be in this city.”51
A more enduring contribution, for which Columbia faculty and students have been eternally grateful, is that Eisenhower prevailed upon Mayor William O’Dwyer and the New York City Council to close 116th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. The main campus of Columbia, a total of twenty-six acres, stretches from 114th Street to 120th, and is bounded on the east by Amsterdam Avenue and on the west by Broadway. When the university moved from midtown to Morningside Heights in 1897, all of the interior streets were closed off except for 116th, which bisected the campus. Like all New York streets, it was noisy and crowded with traffic and parked cars. It made the Columbia campus look like a factory yard, said more than one observer. Nicholas Murray Butler had sought repeatedly and without success to have the street closed off. But as was the case with Mike Quill, no one on the city council wanted to pick a fight with Ike, and the street was soon closed, bringing the two halves of the campus together. Located in the midst of Manhattan, Columbia is scarcely a green oasis. Yet thanks to Eisenhower it now stands as a single entity, giving the campus a unified appearance. A visitor to Columbia today would never suspect that 116th Street was a through street as recently as the early 1950s.
In his first six months on campus, Eisenhower demonstrated to the satisfaction of even the greatest skeptic that he was capable of providing the leadership that Columbia required. But he was not comfortable. The complexity of Columbia confounded him. Initially he had assumed—based on his West Point experience—that Columbia was primarily an undergraduate institution with a few professional schools attached. His educational mission, as he saw it, was to encourage the teaching of civic virtue. In reality, Columbia was an aggregation of more than two dozen schools and faculties ranging from law and medicine to education and journalism. Columbia College, the undergraduate body, had but 2,400 students—roughly 8 percent of the total enrolled at the university. And very few (if any) of the faculty saw their mission as one of teaching the responsibilities of citizenship.
Dean Carman recalled that Eisenhower invited him for a talk early that fall and related how he had really wanted to be president of a small rural college where “he thought he could be useful.” But, said Ike, “in a moment of weakness I listened to the blandishments of a couple of your Trustees and here I find myself with a gigantic organization on my hands, and I don’t know a goddamn thing about it.”52
Universities are governed by consensus. Eisenhower was accustomed to a chain of command. Like most who have not served an apprenticeship in academe, he assumed the important people on campus were the deans and department chairmen. They were his corps and divisions commanders. The faculty were the officers and the students the enlisted personnel. In reality, particularly in the supercharged intellectual atmosphere on Morningside Heights, it is the scholars who determine policy. They are the university. And in 1948–49, the faculty at Columbia was one of the most distinguished ever assembled. The roster reads like a who’s who of intellectual life in America: Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in anthropology; C. Wright Mills, Robert Lynd, Robert Merton, and Paul Lazarsfeld in sociology; Nobel Prize winners Enrico Fermi and Isador Rabi in physics; Harold Urey (another Nobel laureate) in chemistry; Joseph Wood Krutch, Lionel Trilling, and Mark Van Doren in English. The history department represented the core of the discipline in the twentieth century. In addition to Barzun and Graff, the senior scholars included Henry Steele Commager, Dumas Malone, Carlton J. H. Hayes, Lynn Thorndike, Garrett Mattingly, and Allan Nevins. Among the younger members were David Herbert Donald, Richard Hofstadter, and William Leuchtenburg.
By dealing through deans and chairmen and ignoring Columbia’s scholars, Eisenhower was moving against the grain. If Ike had dedicated himself full-time to Columbia, he would have soon mastered the nuances of university life. But in late December 1948, he went to Washington, conferred with Forrestal and the president, and agreed to become the senior adviser to the secretary of defense and acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Unification of the services was working poorly, the Army and Navy were at loggerheads over the defense budget, and Forrestal’s health had begun to deteriorate. Ike assured Columbia’s trustees that he could handle both jobs, and began a backbreaking schedule commuting between Washington and Morningside Heights. “We would go up to New York,” recalled Major Schulz, “be met by a car, go to Columbia, get a little work done, go downtown to a dinner where the General would speak, over to Penn Station, into a train, and do it all over again. Frankly, there were days that I didn’t know whether I was waking up in New York or Washington. And he [Eisenhower] must have been the same way. It was a rat race.”53
By February it was clear that the situation in the Pentagon would require Ike’s full-time presence in Washington. Not only was the budget contentious, but the Navy and the Air Force were at each other’s throat over the future of the naval air arm. “Pres. and Mr. F[orrestal] assume that I have some miraculous power to make these warring elements lie down and make peace together,” Eisenhower recorded in his diary on February 9, 1949.54 Ike agreed to assume the duties of chairman of the Joint Chiefs for a period of three months, and the Columbia trustees granted him a leave of absence. “Cognizant of the tradition of public service which has characterized Columbia’s long history,” said board chairman Frederick Coykendall, the trustees “are happy to give their full approval to President Eisenhower’s important work in Washington … and are glad the University can make this contribution to the public welfare.”55 No acting president was named, and Columbia’s provost, Albert C. Jacobs, assumed operating responsibility in Ike’s absence.
Not having to commute eased the pressure on Eisenhower partially, but Forrestal collapsed in late February, Truman accepted his resignation, and Louis Johnson, who became secretary of defense, expected Ike to carry the ball. Eisenhower continued his extensive speaking schedule and returned to New York monthly to meet with the trustees. Mamie remained at 60 Morningside Drive, and Ike lived out of a suitcase at Washington’s Statler Hotel. Nevertheless, the infighting at the Pentagon continued. “I am so weary of this inter-service struggle for position, prestige and power that this morning I practically ‘blew my top,’ ” Ike wrote on March 14, 1949. “I would hate to have my doctor take my blood pressure at the moment.”56 Five days later, after a particularly testy meeting with the Joint Chiefs, he began his diary entry with the blunt statement “The situation grows intolerable”—a reference to the Navy’s reluctance to cooperate with unification. Even worse, Secretary Johnson informed Eisenhower that he expected him to remain in Washington for the “next six months, at least. He says he told Pres. he’d take job only if I stayed on!”57
The tension of holding two jobs, even if he was on leave from Columbia, was getting to Ike. On March 21, after a luncheon with the Motion Picture Association of America, he became ill with a severe stomach disorder and returned to his hotel. Major Schulz recalled that by the time they got Eisenhower to his room, “his stomach was bloated and getting larger. It seemed like a balloon.” Dr. Snyder flew down from New York, diagnosed Ike’s condition as “a severe case of acute gastroenteritis,” and ordered complete rest. “I knew that I was sick,” wrote Eisenhower in his memoir. Dr. Snyder “treated me as though I were at the edge of the precipice and teetering a bit. For days, my head was not off the pillow.”58
Eisenhower, at Truman’s recommendation, flew to the naval station at Key West aboard The Sacred Cow, where he underwent an extensive battery of tests and was forbidden solid food and cigarettes. After two weeks in Key West, he flew to Augusta, where Mamie joined him. Ike remained at the Augusta National Golf Club for the next month, playing golf and painting. “I feel stronger every day,” he wrote Secretary Johnson on April 20, “though I must admit the ‘drives’ are somewhat short of their expected destination.”59 A week later he wrote Swede Hazlett that he had been miserable for a time but that for the past two weeks “I have been puttering around with a bit of golf every day.”60 There is no evidence, as some have asserted, that Eisenhower suffered a mild heart attack and that Dr. Snyder had covered it up.i
Ike returned to Columbia in mid-May, presided over commencement activities in June, and then went on an extended summer vacation to Wisconsin and Colorado. “I am going to take not less than a total of 10 weeks leave during the year,” he wrote his brother Milton at Kansas State. “If I am not able to keep up to this leave schedule, I will simply quit all my jobs except that of helping out in Washington.”61
Eisenhower was back at Columbia, but the university had become a secondary interest. As the supreme commander of the greatest allied effort in history, and recently exposed to the wrenching problems of military unification, Ike found academic affairs increasingly trivial. At commencement, he declined to host the traditional reception for honorary degree recipients (“He wouldn’t even read the citations,” said Provost Jacobs), and chose instead to have a private dinner at 60 Morningside with General Lucius D. Clay and his wife, Marjorie. Provost Jacobs held the reception for the university’s distinguished guests, including Helen Hayes, Arnold Toynbee, and General Omar Bradley, at the Men’s Faculty Club in Ike’s stead.62 j
After two months of fishing and golf in the lake country of Wisconsin and in Denver, Eisenhower was back on Morningside Heights on September 17. He had been appointed president of Columbia twenty-seven months earlier, but of those twenty-seven months, he had spent less than ten on campus. The seeds of discontent were beginning to sprout. Columbia needed a full-time chief executive, and Ike was devoting less and less time to university affairs. Eisenhower had an “auspicious start,” Lionel Trilling recalled, but it “gradually and quickly disintegrated. I began to sense he was nowhere in relation to the University.”63 Professor Eli Ginsberg, who had worked with Ike in Washington and who was one of his few acquaintances on the faculty, thought that Eisenhower “never found a way of responding to anything substantive on campus. Nothing gave him a real kick … a central focus.”64 Jacques Barzun, who would soon become provost, thought Eisenhower had “a curiously ambivalent feeling about the University, especially the faculty.”65 Trilling, Ginsberg, and Barzun were not only senior scholars, but had devoted their professional lives to Columbia and understood the university intimately. They had no ax to grind.
Eisenhower lacked a sixth sense, an intuitive feel to tell him what was important to the faculty. He declined to preside at meetings of the university council and at various faculty meetings as Butler had done, refused to attend the university’s gala celebration for John Dewey on the philosopher’s ninetieth birthday, and avoided almost all participation in academic affairs, leading many on Morningside Heights to conclude that he “begrudged the University.”66
The Eisenhowers, both Ike and Mamie, also had a sense of entitlement that rubbed the faculty the wrong way. The presidential mansion at 60 Morningside Drive was traditionally the social center of the university. Evenings with Nicholas Murray Butler could be “exceedingly stiff and formal,” Dean Carman recalled, but those evenings served a useful university purpose.67 The Eisenhowers never revived those dinners. Ike and Mamie saw 60 Morningside as their private residence. They entertained old Army friends who might be passing through New York and invited the Gang for dinner and bridge several nights a week. In the late evening, Eisenhower would get out his paints and canvas and go to work. On weekends, John and Barbara would come down from West Point with their son David for a visit. But the house no longer brought the Columbia community together. “I don’t know of a single instance where any of the Columbia people were ever invited,” said Gang member Cliff Roberts.68
Ike recognized that he was being pulled in different directions. He was no longer traveling to Washington, but his extensive speaking schedule kept him on the road and away from Columbia. “I believe that if a man were able to give his full or nearly full attention to such a job as this,” he wrote Swede Hazlett, “he would find it completely absorbing.… Sometimes, however, my loyalties to several different kinds of purposes lead me into a confusing kind of living.”69 For Eisenhower, national politics were never far from the horizon. In November, he met privately with Governor Dewey. The Columbia Business School had just completed a comprehensive report on the New York State hospital system, and Ike presented it to the governor in a formal ceremony at the Men’s Faculty Club. Afterward they adjourned to 60 Morningside. Dewey “remains of the opinion that I must soon enter politics,” Ike wrote in his diary on November 25, 1949. “He wants me to run for Gov. of N.Y. in 1950. I said ‘No’—but he wants to talk about it once more. Every day this question comes before me in some way or other. I’m worn out trying to explain myself.”70
By the spring of 1950 the support for Eisenhower at Columbia had all but evaporated. A puff piece by Quentin Reynolds in Life magazine (“Mr. President Eisenhower”) backfired badly,71 and the feeling developed on campus that Ike was using the university for his own political purposes. “There is intense hostility toward him on the part of both faculty and the student body,” wrote Richard Rovere in Harper’s. “Columbia’s disappointment in Eisenhower stems not so much from any administrative ineptitude as from his inattentiveness to the problems of administration. It isn’t so much that he is a bad president as that he hardly ever functions as president.”72 Grayson Kirk, who would succeed Eisenhower as president, said that Ike “had alienated many on the faculty by making speeches about the purpose of education being to develop citizens rather than develop people intellectually.”73
Kirk’s observation is valid. Eisenhower was not an intellectual. But on the other side of the ledger, at a time when many university presidents ran for cover, Ike did not flinch when members of the Columbia faculty came under attack for Communist leanings. On March 8, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the first-term Republican from Wisconsin, accused Ambassador-at-Large Philip C. Jessup, Hamilton Fish professor of international law and diplomacy at Columbia, of “an unusual affinity for Communist causes.” This was one month after McCarthy’s dramatic speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed to have a list of 205 Communist sympathizers in government, and he was flying high. Jessup was called to testify before a Senate subcommittee, and Eisenhower—without prompting—wrote a letter on Jessup’s behalf that was introduced into the record. “My dear Jessup,” wrote Ike. “I am writing to tell you how much your University deplores the association of your name with the current loyalty investigation in the United States Senate. Your long and distinguished record as a scholar … has won for you the respect of your colleagues and of the American people as well. No one who has known you can for a moment question the depth or sincerity of your devotion to the principles of Americanism.”74 Ike’s public letter handed McCarthy his first setback. A year later, when he was in France commanding NATO, Eisenhower again came to Jessup’s defense.75
When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the Cold War turned hot, and speculation about Eisenhower’s future occupied the nation’s pundits. American forces were in headlong retreat on the Korean Peninsula, and many wondered how long he would remain on the sidelines. On Friday, October 13, 1950, Governor Dewey called Ike and said he was scheduled to appear on Meet the Press on Sunday, and that he planned to endorse Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican nomination. “I merely said I’d say ‘No comment,’ ” Ike recorded in his diary.76 Governor Dewey followed through, the press picked up the scent, and Eisenhower’s hat was in the ring. His official denial of interest, which was issued by the Columbia public information office the next day, was scarcely designed to take him out of the race.k And the fact that Dewey cleared his announcement with Ike beforehand speaks for itself.
The combination of the Berlin blockade and the fighting in Korea acted as a spur to the United States and the nations of Western Europe to move forward with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and to establish a military force under NATO’s control. President Truman and the European heads of government believed that only Eisenhower, the supreme commander in World War II, had sufficient credibility to bring those forces into being—and at the same time to be taken seriously by the Soviets. American public opinion was also not convinced that U.S. forces should be sent back to Europe, particularly with the war in Korea, and it would require someone of Ike’s stature to make the case.
Discussions began in late October 1950. President Truman caught up with Eisenhower in Chicago—Ike was on a speaking tour to Columbia alumni groups in the Midwest—and in a brief telephone conversation asked him to come to Washington when the tour ended to discuss the possibility of his assuming command of the (still to be created) Atlantic Pact Defense Forces. “I arrived in Washington by military plane about midnight on Friday, the 27th,” Eisenhower recorded in his diary. “The situation seems to be about as follows:”
The American Chiefs of Staff are convinced that the Commander-in-Chief for the Atlantic Pact Forces should be named immediately. Originally, it was the conception that the Commander should not be named until there were actually large forces to command.… The opinion finally prevailed that if a commander’s prestige was going to do any good, it would be best used … while we are trying to get each of the nations involved to put forth maximum effort. I am informed that they unanimously desire that the Commander should be an American and specifically myself.77
Eisenhower and Truman sparred briefly over semantics. Ike wanted to be ordered back to active duty; the president wanted to make it a “request.” But that was not a sticking point. A more serious problem pertained to German rearmament. The United States and Britain wanted German forces included in NATO; the French were strongly opposed. Ike thought the matter could be gradually resolved with a bit of give-and-take on both sides, but that if it were not, he would have “great doubts” about the wisdom of accepting command. “As of this moment, I would estimate that the chances are about nine out of ten that I will be back in uniform in a short time.”78
No public announcement was made. Throughout November the matter remained in abeyance, although the Columbia Spectator, the campus undergraduate newspaper, reported that Eisenhower’s presidential office would make no appointments for him after January 5, 1951.79 The technicalities were tricky. Truman could not name Ike as supreme commander until requested to do so by the North Atlantic Council, and the council did not meet until December 18. On the morning of the eighteenth in Brussels, they unanimously requested Truman to name Eisenhower, and as soon as he was informed, the president called Ike with the news.80
Eisenhower was sitting in a Pullman car outside Tiffin, Ohio, when he was told that the president was trying to reach him. Ike had stopped at Tiffin to speak at Heidelberg College, which was celebrating its centennial year, and was en route to Denver for the Christmas holidays.
“Where can I take the call?” Eisenhower asked.
“Well, there is a little box down the line,” he was told. “Maybe an eighth of a mile. You can take the call right there.”81
Eisenhower tromped down the tracks through a foot of snow and got a connection to the White House, and the president asked him to take the NATO command. As Ike recalled, Truman put it in the form of a request, and he met the president halfway. “I told him I had been a soldier all my life and I would report at any time he said.”82
The Columbia trustees immediately granted Eisenhower an indefinite leave of absence and named Vice President Grayson Kirk as the university’s chief administrative officer in Ike’s absence. “It is understood,” said board chairman Coykendall, “that General Eisenhower will resume his duties as President of the University immediately upon his military release.”83
The Columbia Spectator, which had been critical of Eisenhower in recent months, praised Ike for having restored Columbia’s reputation. “The University must strive to maintain the ideals which its President has been called upon to defend once again. With General Eisenhower go the hopes of the nation and free world.”84
Eisenhower reports to President Truman on the parlous state of Western Europe’s defenses, January 31, 1951. (illustration credit 17.3)
Eisenhower, in uniform again, departed for Paris on an exploratory visit on January 6, 1951. He returned to Washington on January 31 and was met by President Truman at National Airport. After briefing the president, he addressed a joint session of Congress and then delivered a radio and television broadcast to the nation. Time magazine, which put Ike on its cover for the sixth time, said that he had done what President Truman could not do. According to Time, Eisenhower had routed the “calamity-howlers and the super cautious. In the desolate winter of 1951, the Western world heard the first, heart-warming note of spring.”85
Ike’s media blitz was an indication of how controversial the idea of a North Atlantic alliance had become. While Eisenhower and the Truman administration argued that America’s borders were no longer on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, but on the Elbe and the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea, the Republican Old Guard appeared determined to retreat to Fortress America. Former president Herbert Hoover, emerging from the long eclipse into which FDR had cast him, demanded the withdrawal of all American forces from Europe, and Senator Robert Taft, perhaps the most vocal Republican in the Senate, had not only voted against the NATO treaty but was actively trying to scuttle the plan to build up Western forces in Europe by arguing that the president had no authority to send troops overseas in peacetime without congressional authorization.
Taft was making his fourth bid for the presidency, and with the internationalist wing of the Republican party in disarray following the successive defeats of Wendell Willkie in 1940, and Dewey in 1944 and 1948, was the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination in 1952. Eisenhower saw Taft as the key to obtaining a domestic consensus for the idea of collective security. On his own authority, and without discussing the matter with President Truman, Ike invited Taft to the Pentagon for a private chat. If Taft would support American participation in NATO on a bipartisan basis, Eisenhower was prepared to repudiate any efforts to make himself the GOP candidate in 1952. Since Ike was the only person who stood between Taft and the nomination, his refusal to run would cinch the nomination for Taft.
Eisenhower was fully aware of the import of his commitment. As he had done the night before D-Day, he wrote out a note in longhand and put it in his coat pocket. If Taft would come on board and support collective security, Ike planned to issue the statement to the press that evening, dramatically taking himself out of the presidential race. “Having been called back to military duty,” he wrote, “I want to announce that my name may not be used by anyone as a candidate for president—and if they do I will repudiate such efforts.”86
The meeting went poorly. Taft was whisked up to Ike’s office clandestinely for what Eisenhower later described as “a long talk.” Despite every argument Ike mounted, Taft remained unmoved. NATO, he thought, was more likely to provoke the Soviet Union rather than deter it. Membership in the alliance represented an “interventionist” policy that would involve the United States in the old quarrels of Europe. It would also require money, which would mean higher taxes and might possibly fuel inflation. “Our conversation was friendly,” Ike recalled, “but I had no success.” When Taft left, Eisenhower called in his aides and tore up the statement he had written.87 “My disappointment was acute,” said Ike. “I concluded that it might be more effective to keep some aura of mystery around my future plans. For the moment I decided to remain silent, not to declare myself out as a potential political factor.”88
Ike had taken Taft’s measure. He did not disagree with the senator on domestic issues, but found his insularity appalling. “He is a very stupid man,” Eisenhower subsequently told Cyrus Sulzberger of The New York Times. “He has no intellectual ability, nor any comprehension of the world”—a surprisingly harsh assessment from someone who had finished well down in his class at West Point.89 Taft had been valedictorian at Yale and finished first in his class at Harvard Law, but whereas Ike had grown to assume global responsibility, Taft over the years had become painfully provincial.90
On February 8, 1951, Eisenhower met with Columbia’s board of trustees. Ike said that after examining the situation in Europe, he could not estimate the length of his assignment. He suggested that his leave commence March 1, and that the president’s house be closed during his absence. “You gentlemen cannot long afford to go on under the situation of having an ‘absentee’ president,” said Ike. He told the board they should feel free whenever they found it necessary “to take steps to find my successor. You may consider, accordingly, that you have my resignation before you, to be acted on at any time you desire.”91
That evening, Ike and Mamie said farewell to three hundred trustees and faculty at a reception at the Faculty Club. “Dr. Butler would have had the reception at 60 Morningside,” noted Dean Carl Ackerman of the School of Journalism, “but Mrs. E. has not received any Univ. people in Pres. House.” Eisenhower, speaking to the guests assembled, said, “I will always have a warm spot in my heart for Columbia,” and that he “hoped to return some day.” After a brief vacation in Puerto Rico, he and Mamie departed for Paris on February 15.92
University presidents come and go like ships passing in the night. They hope for clear sailing. Those who provide sustained academic leadership are few and far between: Charles Eliot at Harvard, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Robert Hutchins at Chicago are the most notable examples. Eisenhower was far from a failure. He gave Columbia enhanced international prestige, defended academic freedom in a time of uncertainty, broke the cycle of deficit spending, and put the university’s fiscal house in order. “He didn’t mess things up,” said Columbia historian Eric Foner. “That’s what one hopes for in a president.”93
a General Bradley lived down the street from Eisenhower at Fort Myer’s Quarters 7. Ike and Bradley worked together harmoniously but did not socialize. Evidently Mamie and Bradley’s wife, Mary, did not get along. Bradley and Blair, General’s Life 463.
b Ulysses Grant was offered a similar lump sum arrangement by Mark Twain for his memoirs but turned it down in favor of royalties. If Twain did not make money on the book, Grant did not want any. “This was just like Grant,” said Twain. “It was absolutely impossible for him to entertain for a moment any proposition which might prosper him at the risk of any other man.” Samuel Clemens, 1 Mark Twain’s Autobiography 40 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924).
c The Augusta National Golf Club, site of the annual Masters Tournament, is ranked by golfing aficionados as the finest course in the nation. Membership in the club is limited to three hundred and is by invitation only. One does not apply. Annual dues are low because of the television earnings from the Masters. Current members include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, and T. Boone Pickens.
d Dorothy Draper, considered by many to be the doyenne of the design industry in the twentieth century, is best known as the inventor of “Modern Baroque”—a flamboyant style best suited for large public places where people might come and feel elevated in the presence of great beauty. Her works include New York’s Hotel Carlyle and Hampshire House; the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia; Washington’s Mayflower Hotel; the Drake Hotel in Chicago; and the Palácio Quitandinha in Petrópolis, an hour north of Rio de Janeiro. The restaurant at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was once nicknamed the “Dorotheum” because of her design. Carleton Varney, The Draper Touch: The High Life and High Style of Dorothy Draper (New York: Prentice Hall, 1988).
e Butler himself had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, sharing it with Jane Addams, former president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and founder of Hull House in Chicago.
f Pupin Hall, a National Historic Landmark, was built by McKim, Mead, and White in the late twenties, and is one of the major edifices on the Columbia campus. It was named for Michael I. Pupin, a Serbian American professor of electromechanics at Columbia from 1901 to 1935, and houses the physics and astronomy departments. The building is best known as the site where Enrico Fermi first split the atom on January 25, 1939. Its large seminar rooms were often used for public lectures, and at the time were easily accessible from 120th Street and Broadway.
g Stephen Ambrose, citing an undated interview with John Eisenhower, alleges that November 2 “was the darkest night of Eisenhower’s life” because he would be thrust back into the political arena. The quotation does not ring true, given Eisenhower’s subsequent activity. As with many of Ambrose’s “interviews,” his assertion should be taken with a large grain of salt. See Richard Rayner, “Channeling Ike,” The New Yorker, April 26, 2010.
h Congressman Carl Vinson, a powerful Democrat from Georgia who had chaired the House Naval Affairs Committee and who would chair the new Armed Services Committee, strongly opposed the creation of a post that would resemble a single chief of staff for the armed forces. To gain Vinson’s support for the bill when it was before the House, the Truman administration dropped the proposal for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
i Dr. Thomas Mattingly, a cardiologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, who treated Eisenhower following his heart attack in 1955, suggested that Ike may have suffered a previous attack in 1949, but that it had been covered up by Snyder’s “deceptive diagnosis.” Mattingly acknowledged, however, that he had no proof. See pages 80–82 of Mattingly’s unpublished “Life Health Record of Dwight D. Eisenhower” at the Eisenhower Library. Professor Clarence G. Lasby of the University of Texas examined Mattingly’s claim in detail and after ten pages of convincing evidence notes that it points to one conclusion: “Eisenhower did not have a heart attack in 1949.” Consider, for example, Ike’s letter to his former aide James Stack written on May 16, his first day back at Columbia, which belies the possibility of a heart attack. Ike told Stack that “I have frequently played eighteen holes of golf a day during the past month and on one or two occasions even twenty-seven holes. This did not seem to bother me in spite of the fact that I take a great many more strokes than the average person does in getting around the course.” DDE to James Stack, May 16, 1949, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 10, Columbia 581; Clarence G. Lasby, Eisenhower’s Heart Attack: How Ike Beat Heart Disease and Held On to the Presidency 47–50 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); compare, Robert H. Ferrell, Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust 63, 65 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992).
j The fact that Ike and Mamie chose to dine with Lucius and Marjorie Clay and snub Omar and Mary Bradley not only suggests Eisenhower’s disdain for university responsibilities but also reflects the tension in the relationship between Mamie and Mary Bradley.
k Eisenhower’s October 16, 1952, statement is reprinted in full below. Compare it to his statement on the eve of the Democratic convention, which is at page 477. Said Ike:
Any American would be complimented by the knowledge that any other American considered him qualified to fill the most important post in our country. In this case the compliment comes from a man who is Governor of a great State and who has devoted many years of his life to public service. So, of course, I am grateful for Governor Dewey’s good opinion of me.
As for myself, my convictions as to the place and methods through which I can best contribute something to the cause of freedom have been often expressed. They have not changed. Here at Columbia University I have a task that would excite the pride and challenge the qualifications and strength of any man—I still believe that it offers to such an individual as myself rich opportunities for serving America. The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 11, Columbia 1383.
