On Saturday, August 8, 1953, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery visited the British prime ministerial country residence in Buckinghamshire to spend the weekend with his old wartime boss and comrade, Winston Churchill. Over dinner they discussed what one of those present, Churchill’s assistant private secretary Jock Colville, termed “the five capital mistakes” that the Americans had made in World War II. It was a favorite topic of conversation for Monty—perhaps the favorite—but one that the committed Atlanticist Churchill hardly ever indulged in, partly perhaps because one of America’s most important planners of operations during the war, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been elected president the previous November.
Montgomery, however, had no such reticence, writing in his memoirs, “I would not class Ike as a great soldier in the true sense of the word. He might have become one if he had ever had the experience of exercising direct command of a division, corps, and army—which unfortunately did not come his way.”1 Monty was fully supported in this uncharitable view by the reliably Yankeephobic Field Marshal Lord Alan Brooke, who as Sir Alan Brooke had been chief of the imperial general staff from December 1941 until 1946 and who had written in his diary on May 15, 1944, “The main impression I gathered was that Eisenhower was no real director of thought, plans, energy or direction. Just a coordinator, a good mixer, a champion of inter-allied cooperation, and in those respects few can hold the candle to him. But is that enough? Or can we not find all the qualities of a commander in one man?”2 On the day Brooke wrote that, Eisenhower had briefed King George VI, Churchill, and all the senior chiefs of staff and commanders at St. Paul’s School in Hammersmith, London, on the looming Operation Overlord. Not for nothing was Alanbrooke’s nickname in the army “Colonel Shrapnel.”
The charges against Eisenhower were leveled not only by Britons but also by some distinguished American historians. The double Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Rick Atkinson has recently said of him, “He was not a particularly good field marshal, he was not a Great Captain. Frankly it gnawed at him; he had a lifelong admiration for Hannibal, and he longed to orchestrate a double envelopment, like Cannae. But he lacked the gift of seeing a battlefield in depth spatially and temporally, or of inexorably imposing his operational will on an enemy. There are repeated examples where he simply did not grasp the battle.”3
It is almost impossible not to like Ike, with his cheery countenance, relentlessly can-do optimism, and his insistence on absolute equality between Americans and Britons on his staff. His naval aide, Captain Harry C. Butcher, recalled him reprimanding an American officer for quarreling with his British counterpart: “I forgive you for calling him a son-of-a-bitch. But I cannot forgive you for calling him a British son-of-a-bitch.”4 On the occasion at St. Paul’s School cited earlier, Eisenhower had closed his remarks with the joke “In half an hour Hitler will have missed his one and only chance of destroying with a single well-aimed bomb the entire high command of the Allied forces.”5 Yet however much one likes Ike, one must address the criticisms of him made by his British counterparts and by modern American historians such as Atkinson.
WHAT WERE THE SUPPOSED “five capital mistakes” made by the United States in the western theater of World War II that Churchill and Monty enunciated together that summer evening in 1953? To quote Colville:
They had prevented [General Sir Harold] Alexander getting to Tunis the first time, when he could easily have done so.
They had done at Anzio what [General Sir Frederick] Stopford did at Suvla Bay [on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915]: clung to the beaches and failed to establish positions inland as they could well have done. Churchill said he wanted it to be a mainly-British operation.
They had insisted on Operation Anvil [the attack on the French Riviera in August 1944], thereby preventing Alexander from taking Trieste and Vienna.
Eisenhower had refused to let Monty, in Overlord, concentrate his advance on the left flank. He had insisted on a broad advance, which could not be supported, and had thus allowed Rundstedt to counter-attack on the Ardennes and had prolonged the war, with dire political results, to the spring of 1945.
Eisenhower had let the Russians occupy Berlin, Prague and Vienna—all of which might have been entered by the Americans.6
Yet when one examines this seemingly formidable indictment sheet, much of its apparent power slips away:
It was Monty himself who let the Afrika Korps escape after El Alamein; his slow pursuit allowed the Germans time to defend Tunis. Although Alexander’s was a different operation, Montgomery sounds like he was covering himself for something for which he was more guilty than the Americans.
The Stopford analogy at Anzio was a good one and very Churchillian, relating as it does to the disaster at Suvla Bay that clearly still rankled him nearly forty years later. But the American general at Anzio, John P. Lucas, was sacked by General Mark Clark, and Churchill was wrong to claim that it could ever have been a British operation, as the U.S. Fifth Army was on the west coast of Italy and the British Eighth Army on the east, and the Americans had the shipping and available men.
True, Anvil was an unnecessary diversion, but Alexander did eventually take Trieste. Whether he could have repeated Napoleon’s 1797 campaign and marched on Vienna (which Napoleon never actually reached on that campaign) is highly debatable, and in any case the Russians gave up Vienna on the day they promised to. Marshall could be criticized in his selection of Mark Clark, whose obsession with taking Rome before D-Day allowed the Germans to escape capture after the success of Operation Diadem, but not for opposing the Balkans plan, which only promised much more of the same kind of fighting, especially around the so-called Ljubljana Gap.
The main criticism of Eisenhower in late 1944 and 1945 is that the broad front strategy that Eisenhower adopted for the invasion of Germany lengthened the war because it left the Allies with too few places that military strategists call the Schwerpunkt or point d’appui, the single place of decisive main effort. It meant that scarce supplies were spread out thinly instead of being massed at a point ripe for a breakthrough. The accusation some make is that being unable or unwilling to choose among Montgomery, Patton, and Bradley over who should lead a narrow thrust, he chose none of them. Yet this, too, is unfair: Operation Market Garden was precisely such a thrust, and it failed comprehensively. The only time Eisenhower gave in to Monty on the broad front versus narrow thrust had, therefore, ended in fiasco, so it was understandable why he was unwilling to try it again, or to let Patton do the same in the south. He also needed to avoid another Ardennes by keeping up pressure all along the line and not allowing in February or March 1945 any recurrence of what had happened in December 1944 and January 1945. After the hard-won but undeniable victory in the Battle of the Bulge, there was still hard fighting in February 1945 between the River Ruhr and the Rhine. Very bad weather grounded aircraft and flooded the fields, and intelligence about the nature of likely German resistance inside Germany itself was patchy. “Eisenhower is to blame for the broad-front strategy that stretched Allied lines so thin that German armor had little difficulty breaking through,” writes an American biographer of his, Jean Edward Smith, in an otherwise admiring biography, claiming that Eisenhower should not have let the Germans get as far as they did before counterattacking.7 In fact, the Ardennes offensive was a thirty-nine-divisional surprise attack carried out under complete radio silence, through three feet of snow, with searchlights bounced off the 100 percent cloud cover to turn night into day and prevent Allied air superiority from being brought to bear. Nothing could have prevented the Wehrmacht from getting to the Meuse; indeed, it took astonishing courage in places like Bastogne to slow their advance and to prevent their reaching the English Channel. Had Eisenhower adopted the alternative strategy of deep thin thrusts across the Rhine, the Allies would have been stretched even tighter.
It was simply not true to say that Eisenhower “let” the Russians occupy Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, because each had already been earmarked for the Russians by joint Allied-Russian commissions starting even before Yalta. The Russians suffered more than eighty thousand casualties taking Berlin, numbers that the Western Allies preferred not to suffer, and it is a myth to suppose that the Germans were going to lay down their arms before the Americans had they got there earlier. “Personally and aside from all logistical, tactical, or strategical implications,” Marshall wrote to Eisenhower in April 1945, “I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.”8 As Churchill’s deputy military secretary Sir Ian Jacob put it, “His [Marshall’s] idea was to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible, bring the boys home and let the politicians pick up the pieces.” It was an understandable reaction.
General George Patton could be cutting about Eisenhower, jealously joking that the “D.D.” in Ike’s name must stand for “Divine Destiny” because his constant promotions happened without his having commanded any troops in the field. Yet Eisenhower was denied the chance of active service in World War I and had to command the American landings in North Africa in 1942 from a cave in Gibraltar, so it is perfectly true that the first time he saw a shot fired in anger was when he shot a rat in his headquarters at Caserta in Italy in 1943. But most of the troops in Operation Torch had not seen action, either, and much of his insistence on good discipline stemmed from that knowledge. As Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Eisenhower had overall control of 4.5 million American and 1 million other Allied troops in 91 divisions, 28,000 aircraft, 970,000 vehicles, and 18 million tons of supplies. At that level of command, war fighting was about much more than having been in combat in one’s youth. Above all, it required huge delegation at the substrategic and the tactical levels, which simply in terms of natural justice means that the supreme commander cannot be blamed for every reverse.
When considering Patton’s malicious comments about his commander, one must factor in Eisenhower’s statement about Patton’s famous face-slapping incident, that “it raised serious doubts about his future usefulness as a commander.”9 Yet Eisenhower had not sacked Patton, recognizing that generals of his quality were in short supply.
Harder to defend Eisenhower against are the criticisms by Atkinson, of the moments
when the Germans and Italians escaped from Sicily across the Straits of Messina in August 1943; when [Eisenhower] approved a hare-brained scheme to drop the 82nd Airborne Division on Rome in September 1943 with the nearest substantial supporting ground force landing at Salerno two hundred miles away; when . . . various missteps by the high command led to part of the German force escaping from the so-called Falaise Gap in Normandy in August 1944; and when he failed to heed clear warnings about the importance of capturing the estuarial approaches to Antwerp—the River Scheldt—in addition to the city itself, so that when Allied forces captured this absolutely vital port intact in early September 1944, the Germans kept the approaches and the port was useless for almost three more months.10
Like Monty’s, this looks like a formidable rap sheet, yet German escapes from such tight corners as the Messina Straits and the Falaise Gap were an indication more of the continued strong discipline and professionalism of the Wehrmacht in retreat than any failure of Eisenhower’s strategic sense, just as the German capacity for counterattack constantly had to be guarded against. The 82nd Airborne wasn’t in the end dropped on Rome, when last-minute intelligence made it appear that the negotiations then being held between General Maxwell Taylor and Marshal Pietro Badoglio might be an Axis trap. (They weren’t.)
Instead, the 82nd Airborne Division was kept back for Operation Overlord. A month before D-Day, the air commander in chief, British Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, warned Eisenhower that the 82nd was courting disaster on the projected sites for gliders on dangerous landing areas against tough German opposition miles behind enemy lines on the Cotentin Peninsula. Although Eisenhower didn’t disagree with Leigh-Mallory’s projections, he would not change the plan, and replied by saying, “A strong airborne attack in the region indicated is essential to the success of the whole operation and it must go on.”11 It was, and it did, and it seriously disrupted the German attempt to reinforce the peninsula, at a high but not unacceptable cost.
The tardiness in freeing up the vital supply route along the Scheldt to Antwerp can indeed be laid at Eisenhower’s door. The amount of fuel that was consumed bringing ammunition, weapons, troops, supplies, and equipment to the battlefields of northwestern France, and thus subsequently Germany, all the way from the Mulberry Harbors would have been cut in half had it all been able to come straight across the Channel and down the Scheldt. Yet to set against that was the stout German resistance in the area; they knew the strategic importance of Antwerp as well as he did, and the Scheldt is fifty miles long from its mouth to Antwerp.
In Eisenhower’s defense, what he was trying to do had never been attempted before in history. The integration of the Allied command structure alone was unprecedented. In the First World War, planning and execution had been left up to individual armies in individual sectors, so this was a revolutionary way for a campaign to be fought. As Churchill put it in his war memoirs: “At no time has the principle of alliance between noble races been carried and maintained at so high a pitch.”12 The advice Eisenhower gave Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten when he took over as Supreme Allied Commander of the South East Asia Command perfectly illustrates his challenge. “Never permit any problem to be approached in your staff on the basis of national interest,” Eisenhower ordered.
An Allied Commander-in-Chief must be self-effacing, quick to give credit, ready to meet the other fellow more than half way and absorb advice and must be willing to decentralize. . . . He is in a very definite sense the Chairman of the Board, a Chairman that has very definite executive responsibilities. The point I make is that while the set-up may be somewhat artificial, and not always so clean-cut as you might desire, your personality and good sense must make it work.13
Eisenhower was a good picker of men and was enormously helped in this by one of his best personnel choices, Walter Bedell Smith, one of the great chiefs of staff in American history. Although Eisenhower was good at delegating, a vital prerequisite in such a job, he was careful never to cede ultimate control. One of his few resignation threats came two months before D-Day over a British attempt to redirect the activities of the bomber force that was softening up targets in Normandy and the Pas de Calais. He made a few resignation threats to his diary—which do not count—such as when he wrote: “I am tired of dealing with a lot of prima donnas. By God, you tell that bunch that if they can’t get together and stop quarrelling like children, I will tell the Prime Minister to get someone else to run this damn war.”14
George Patton once said, “God deliver us from our friends. We can handle the enemy,” and the senior Allied commanders were indeed prima donnas, Patton himself vying with Monty as the worst of all.15 Bradley had “total disdain” for Monty and contempt for Patton, who in turn was “sickened” when Monty became a field marshal. Monty meanwhile despised both Patton and Bradley. Despite constant and extreme provocations, Eisenhower somehow held the ring successfully until V-E Day. Furthermore, in an army where George Patton, Omar Bradley, Mark Clark, Albert Wedemeyer, and Orlando Ward thoroughly detested the British, Ike actually liked them. One can quite understand why Britons like Monty and Brooke might not be everyone’s cup of tea—or “tiffin” as Eisenhower called it, and by the time he left England he had also learned “petrol” rather than “gasoline”—but it was necessary that the person at the top did get on with his hosts. It irritated Americans hugely; Patton even sneered that “Ike’s the best damn general the British have got.”16
Criticism from the British press that he was too cautious a commander did not alarm Eisenhower, but left him tired and mildly irritated. “It wearies me to be thought of as timid, when I’ve had to do things that were so risky as to be almost crazy,” he wrote on February 7, 1944, probably thinking of the attacks on Salerno and Pantelleria.17 Early in 1944 he complained in his diary, “They dislike to believe that I had anything particularly to do with the campaigns. They don’t use the words ‘initiative’ and ‘boldness’ in talking of me, but often do in speaking of Monty.”18 And then he merely wrote, “Oh hum.”
The hide of a pachyderm is necessary to a great commander, and Eisenhower certainly had one. He was outwardly calm in every crisis, something that he learned from his period in the Philippines in the late 1930s, which he described as “learning dramatics under Douglas MacArthur.” For all that Eisenhower came to dislike MacArthur personally while serving under him, he nonetheless learned how to conduct himself as a great man, and how not to, in Churchill’s phrase, “fall below the level of events.”
Yet the secret of Eisenhower’s success can be summed up in two words—“George Marshall”—whose protégé he was. Having been a major for sixteen years when Marshall discovered him, Eisenhower then ascended from lieutenant colonel to five-star general in only forty-two months, an average of six months between promotions. The regular officers in the prewar army did see rapid promotion: In 1939 there were only fifteen thousand officers in the U.S. Army; by 1944 there were thirteen hundred generals. But it was not all easy for Eisenhower. In January 1943, a month before the defeat at Kasserine Pass, the relative lack of success in North Africa after the initially successful Operation Torch landing led his aide, Harry Butcher, to write, “His neck is in a noose and he knows it.” Patton wrote in his diary that Eisenhower “thinks his thread is about to be cut.” Soon afterward, Eisenhower wrote to his son John, “It will not break my heart and it should not cause you any mental anguish. . . . Modern war is a very complicated business and governments are forced to treat individuals as pawns.”19 Yet throughout these moments, George Marshall stood by Eisenhower and believed in him.
For all Marshall’s support, Eisenhower knew he was expendable if he did not perform well. After sacking his friend General Lloyd Fredendall of II Corps when Rommel had defeated him in Tunisia, Eisenhower wrote to his replacement, George Patton, “This matter frequently calls for more courage than any other thing you will have to do, but I expect you to be perfectly cold-blooded about it.”20 If he couldn’t always sack a general, he could sometimes damn him with faint praise: When in early 1945 Marshall asked Eisenhower to place in order of value all the senior generals in the European theater of operations, he ranked Lieutenant General Jacob L. Devers, the commander of the 6th Army Group, twenty-fourth on the list.
Eisenhower had a good deal of common sense and much emotional intelligence, something that was not the case with a surprisingly large number of senior commanders. Montgomery belittled the American contribution to the Battle of the Bulge at a press conference; Patton slapped two soldiers suffering from shell shock and was generally unhinged by the end of the war; MacArthur had no concept of how others saw him; Mountbatten tried to sack General William Slim, the best and most beloved general in the British Army. Eisenhower, meanwhile, showed perfectly mature judgment throughout campaign after exhausting campaign. “It is impossible to read his correspondence,” notes the historian Correlli Barnett, “without being impressed with the good sense, energy and all-round capability which he applied to problems ranging widely from high allied policy to inter-allied relations; to military discipline, training and tactics; and to logistics, especially the available lift by road and air.”21
Eisenhower was a decision maker. It was he who signed off on all the major planning decisions for Operation Overlord, which was easily the largest and most complicated multinational, triservice amphibious landing in the history of warfare. Yet despite the pressure of having tens of thousands of lives hanging on his decisions, he kept calm. “A sense of humor and a great faith, or else a complete lack of imagination,” he joked, “are essential to sanity.”22 He had enough imagination to think the unthinkable and to write out a communiqué that would state that in the event of D-Day’s turning out badly, “The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty can do. If blame attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.” Douglas MacArthur, in his evaluation of Eisenhower in 1932, wrote that he was “distinguished by force, judgment and willingness to accept responsibility,” and never more so was that true than in the draft communiqué, which he left in his pocket and forgot about.
After the original attack date of June 5 for D-Day had to be postponed the very day before, on June 4, Eisenhower had to take the decision on June 5 as to whether to launch the invasion on the sixth, on the basis of the projections of a British meteorologist, Group Captain James Stagg, who told him that June 6 would see fine weather, which would then worsen after that vital day. The window was small, and Stagg’s conclusion was not unanimously supported by the whole meteorological team. “This is a decision I alone can take,” Eisenhower told his staff. “After all, that is what I am here for. We will sail tomorrow.”23 He was smoking four packets of cigarettes a day at the time, and in July had a blood pressure of 176 over 110—indicating high-risk, stage two hypertension. Yet such were his leadership skills that none of his troops seem to have noticed it.
After the battles of Caen and the Falaise Gap came the great debate between the broad front versus the narrow thrust strategy for the next stage of the campaign, the advance into Germany. Put crudely, Montgomery wanted to use the logistic reserves and part of Bradley’s 12th Army Group to join his own 21st Army Group to send a forty-divisional force north of the Ardennes to capture the Ruhr in a narrow but fast thrust that would deprive Germany of much of its manufacturing base. Yet there were three great rivers in Holland—the Rhine, the Maas, and the Waal—that had not been crossed, and the whole of the rest of the front would need to halt if Monty was to get his way. Furthermore, by the end of September continued German resistance along the Atlantic Wall meant that only the ports of Cherbourg and Antwerp were in Allied hands. The latter was unusable because of the continued German presence on the Scheldt, and only one Mulberry Harbor was operational after a storm had damaged the other one soon after D-Day.
Any narrow thrust, therefore, would be in danger of being attacked from flanking counterstrokes, or even of being completely cut off and surrounded; the Germans would show in the Ardennes in December 1944 that they still had plenty of fight left in them. Eisenhower even suspected, as he told Marshall, that Montgomery was only making the proposal “based on wishful thinking” and to commandeer the maximum amount of resources possible. Another factor—the fear of Patton’s trying to make the same maneuver farther south—might also have motivated Montgomery. Nonetheless, despite Eisenhower’s clear-sighted view of Montgomery’s motives, he did authorize Montgomery’s disastrous Market Garden Operation that destroyed the British 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem in late September, in a smaller version of what might well have happened to Montgomery’s narrow thrust into the Ruhr.
At No. 10 Downing Street in late 1944, at a conference with Churchill and the British chiefs, including Brooke, Eisenhower explained the logic behind his broad front strategy, in contrast to the one advocated by Montgomery. Brooke used the same phrase then that he had used two years earlier at the Casablanca Conference—“I flatly disagree”—but now Eisenhower marshaled all his facts and outargued Brooke, to the satisfaction of everyone except Brooke (and his always readable but often poisonous diary).
The broad front strategy approach was finally vindicated in late March 1945, by which time all German resistance west of the Rhine had been pulverized into submission. Back on March 8, Eisenhower confirmed that the 21st Army Group should cross the Rhine at Wesel on March 24, and that Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group should initiate operations in the Saar, which would establish bridgeheads over the Rhine in the Mainz-Mannheim sector. This involved the U.S. general Alexander Patch breaking through the Siegfried Line and taking part in a massive pincer movement, with Patton’s Third Army attacking toward the Rhine near Koblenz, which managed to surround the German Seventh Army and take 107,000 prisoners. Eisenhower’s strategy resulted in the capture of 280,000 German prisoners. With Bradley’s 12th Army Group thrusting toward Frankfurt and German industry effectively no longer producing armaments for the Reich, it was only a matter of time before Germany surrendered.
At the end of March the last great Anglo-American strategic argument took place, when Eisenhower wanted to agree with Stalin on a line from Erfurt through Leipzig to Dresden for the junction of the Anglo-American forces with the Red Army. Churchill and Montgomery wanted to take advantage of the German collapse in the west to cross the Elbe and advance as far eastward as possible, even possibly taking Berlin before the Russians. Churchill wanted this for political reasons; the Russians were about to take Vienna, and if they took Berlin, too, he argued to Roosevelt on April 1, it would “lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future.”24
At that point, Red Army forces were 45 miles from Berlin while Eisenhower’s were 250 miles. A race to Berlin would have been extraordinarily costly and, unless the Western powers were willing to face down the Red Army and rip up the already agreed demarcation agreements—which was politically unthinkable at that time—ultimately worthless.
Eisenhower did not get everything right, by any means. When he left the Mediterranean theater to command the invasion of France, he told reporters that Hitler was “going to write off this southern front, and I don’t think he is going to defend it long.”25 Of course generals needed to be upbeat when speaking to journalists, but much more tellingly he told his diary on September 5, 1944, “The defeat of the German armies is complete,” over eight very bloody months before it genuinely was.26 Yet overall, he got more important things right than anyone else, which is what the Allies needed in a supreme commander.
Roosevelt chose Eisenhower as supreme commander in January 1944 because he was both a natural leader and also someone with exceptional political instincts. Generals need also to be statesmen and in wartime politicians have to be strategists, because there is no clear divide between politics and strategy in modern war any more than there was in ancient times, when the post of strategos, or general, in fifth-century B.C. Athens implied political leadership as well as naval or military. Eisenhower was ideal in both roles, as his successful presidency also shows. As we have seen with Napoleon, Churchill, and others, the qualities needed in a successful soldier are often complementary to those for a successful politician, and they, too, coalesced in Dwight Eisenhower.
In the spring of 1944 Eisenhower wrote to his wife, Mamie—they were the only letters he didn’t dictate—wondering, “How many youngsters are gone forever. A man must develop a veneer of callousness that lets him consider such things dispassionately.”27 But it was only ever a veneer. Eisenhower was a fundamentally decent man. In 1926, fifteen years before World War II, he had graduated from the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, top out of 245 candidates, an achievement that would have given anyone a sense of superiority—though Eisenhower never let his show. He experienced several setbacks in his life, often thinking that he was serving in backwaters, but he never allowed these to embitter him. Considering that he did not see action in either world war, his achievement in ending up as the senior serving Allied officer was truly remarkable.
Engraved over his tomb in Abilene, Kansas—which is only twenty miles from the geographical center of the United States—are the words he spoke at London’s Guildhall a month after V-E Day: “Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in blood of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.” They are noble words and ones that no soldier or statesman should forget.
After General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims, Ike wrote with admirable humility, accuracy, and some terseness to the Combined Chiefs of Staff to report: “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 02.41 local time, May 7th 1945.” Marshall replied, “You have commanded with outstanding success the most powerful military force that has ever been assembled. You have made history, great history for the good of all Mankind, and you have stood for all we hope for and admire in an officer of the United States Army.”28 Notwithstanding the occasionally justified criticisms of some modern historians, and to a far lesser extent the sniping of his contemporaries and rivals, there is not one word of Marshall’s estimation that needs to be altered today, more than seventy years after it was written. It deserves to be the settled historical verdict on Dwight D. Eisenhower.