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MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Let me start with this question. To be honest, many people do not rate Dwight Eisenhower as one of our greatest presidents. If you ask great historians to rank presidents, they wouldn’t say he was one of the best. Yet at the beginning of your book, you say that, with the exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was the most successful president of the twentieth century. How would you explain that?

MR. JEAN EDWARD SMITH (JES): I might even place him ahead of Franklin Roosevelt. If you consider international relations, Eisenhower immediately, after taking office, made peace in Korea. Truman had not been able to do that. Eisenhower did it. Not one American was killed in combat for the remaining eight years of his term.

Eisenhower also thawed the Cold War. At the Geneva Summit of 1955, he was friendly with the Soviet premier and defense minister Nikolai Bulganin and with Nikita Khrushchev. [Khrushchev was then first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, later Soviet premier. The 1955 summit brought together Eisenhower, Bulganin, Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain, and Prime Minister Edgar Faure of France.]

He invited Khrushchev to the United States. Khrushchev spent three nights at Camp David. He went to the Eisenhowers’ farm in Gettysburg.

Eisenhower knew the Soviet Union. He had been a guest of Stalin immediately after the war was over. On the flight from Berlin to Moscow, Eisenhower saw that there wasn’t a house still standing. That convinced him that the Russians didn’t want war, and he proceeded on that basis. Eisenhower also single-handedly forced Great Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw from Egypt after they had seized the Suez Canal in 1956, one week before the American presidential election.

And he overruled the members of the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs about dropping an atomic weapon to protect the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu [site of the pivotal battle in 1953–54 between French and Viet Minh forces in the First Indochina War], and then to protect the Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu. [The islands were attacked during the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958 that pitted the People’s Republic of China against the Republic of China in Taiwan.]

Eisenhower said, “You guys must be crazy. We aren’t going to drop an atomic weapon on Asiatic peoples twice in ten years.”

That’s in foreign policy. Domestically, Eisenhower punctured the bubble of McCarthyism. He built the Interstate Highway System, which we take for granted, and he built it without impacting the federal budget by simply raising the tax on gasoline. The Interstate Highway System cost more than was spent on the entire New Deal from 1933 to 1940, but without impacting the federal budget. He built the Saint Lawrence Seaway together with Canada, opening the Great Lakes to ocean traffic.

And—I think most importantly—he brought desegregation to the South. He ended segregation in the United States when he sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. [In 1957, three years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision found segregated schools to be unconstitutional, the paratroopers escorted a group of African American students to Little Rock Central High School and kept white protestors under control.]

That’s eight major achievements just off the top of my head.

DR: Those are pretty good things. But let me ask you this. Eisenhower rose up because, as you write in your book, he was a very good writer, very disciplined, a hard worker, very articulate, knew how to get things done. Yet as a president he seemed to be a little lazy, some people might say, and he was not very articulate in press conferences. Why did that image take hold, and is it unfair?

JES: Let me dispute his inarticulateness in press conferences. Whenever Ike misspoke, he was misspeaking deliberately.

DR: Many people would say that about themselves. I’d say that about myself too.

JES: For example, on the question of whether he would use an atomic weapon to defend Formosa, he told his press secretary, Jim Hagerty, “Jim, don’t worry about it. I’ll confuse them in the press conference.” At the press conference, he goes on for about three minutes around the topic, totally confusing everyone. Eisenhower wasn’t that concerned about cultivating the press.

DR: If you were to ask Eisenhower, “What would you consider the greatest accomplishment of your life?” would it be the D-Day invasion or being president of the United States for eight years? Which do you think he was prouder of?

JES: One of the things I’ve learned writing biography is that you really don’t want to guess what your subject is going to say. But it would seem to me it would be his eight years as the president. D-Day was a one-shot deal.

DR: Let’s talk about Ike as a young man. He came from a religious family. You point out in the book that his military career was—I won’t say a fluke, but it wasn’t predictable. He lied about his age, and that helped him get into the military academy. While there, he injured his knee and probably shouldn’t have been commissioned. Early in his career, he was almost court-martialed. Was his military career based on having a little bit of luck?

JES: Eisenhower was always lucky, yes. But let me go back to his military career.

Eisenhower took a competitive exam for the academy, did very well, and was appointed by Senator Joseph Bristow from Kansas. In his initial correspondence with Bristow, he lied about his age, because he thought he might get into the Naval Academy, which had a lower age limit. When he got to West Point, he found out that he was the proper age and didn’t lie about it.

As for the knee injury, and later with the court-martial, Eisenhower was very fortunate in many respects. In the 1920s, his career was forwarded enormously by General Fox Conner. The court-martial arose because Eisenhower had claimed his son on his housing allowance—the sum involved was $250—when the son was not living with the Eisenhowers but with relatives back in Iowa.

Eisenhower was caught. I don’t think he intentionally did it—it was a routine matter. Conner, who had been the chief operations officer for General John J. Pershing in World War I and later became deputy chief of staff, was going to Panama. He wanted to take Ike with him.

Pershing had just become army chief of staff. Conner saw Pershing, and the court-martial charges against Eisenhower were dropped before they were brought, really. The army’s inspector general simply wrote a letter of reprimand.

Four additional times during the 1920s, Conner intervened on Eisenhower’s behalf. After serving three years in Panama, Eisenhower came back and wanted to go to the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth—a normal stopping point for career officers. The chief of infantry had passed him over. Conner had him transferred to the Adjutant General’s Corps. He attended Leavenworth as part of the adjutant general’s quota of students and finished first in his class.

After a miserable stint at Fort Benning, Conner had him transferred to Pershing’s staff in Washington, where he wrote a book on the battles of World War I. Conner intervened again after two years and sent him to the Army War College in Washington, D.C., for a year.

After that, Eisenhower rejoined Pershing in Paris. He spent fourteen months there on the American Battle Monuments Commission. [The commission oversees American war memorials and military cemeteries overseas.] After fourteen months, he felt that he was out of the mainstream of the army.

Conner intervened for the fifth time, and Eisenhower was assigned to be the military assistant to the assistant secretary of war in the War Department, which was in the old State, War, and Navy Building—what is now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington. So Fox Conner really was behind Eisenhower’s career in the 1920s, and five times worked to his advantage.

DR: Eisenhower had an ability to have people promote him and help him. One of those was General Douglas MacArthur. What was the relationship between MacArthur and Eisenhower initially, and then later, when they went to the Philippines?

JES: Eisenhower was working in the State, War, and Navy Building for the assistant secretary of war when MacArthur became army chief of staff. His office was just down the hall. He saw Eisenhower and installed him as his military assistant. That was in 1931.

For the next four years, Eisenhower was MacArthur’s military assistant in Washington. He wrote virtually everything that MacArthur signed, including the defense of the attack on the “Bonus Army” marchers. [The Bonus Army comprised World War I veterans who marched on Washington, D.C., in 1932 to ask the government to cash out bonus certificates they had been given during their military service. Troops under MacArthur’s command destroyed the marchers’ encampment.]

When MacArthur went to the Philippines in 1935, he took Ike with him. They did not command the American Army in the Philippines. They commanded the Philippine Army, although they were still on active duty in the U.S. Army. They were paid additionally by the Philippine government. That continued until 1939.

Eisenhower’s view of MacArthur began as hero worship in 1931. By 1938 and ’39, it had eroded. In the Philippines, MacArthur spent most of his time in his elegant apartment in the Manila Hotel and left the day-to-day operations to Eisenhower.

The members of the Philippine legislature decided to introduce legislation abolishing MacArthur’s job and giving it to Eisenhower. Eisenhower found out about it and said, “Gosh, don’t do that.” He then came back to the U.S. on a mission to purchase equipment. While he was gone, MacArthur found out about this piece of legislation. MacArthur believed that Eisenhower was behind it, which he was not. But from that point on, the relationship between the two was poisonous.

DR: Eisenhower missed World War I. He didn’t get over there, to his regret. There’s been no other chance for him to gain combat experience. When World War II breaks out, we’re not in the war initially. How did Eisenhower manage to go from never having been in combat to leading the D-Day invasion? What qualified him to do that?

JES: Eisenhower was at Fort Sam Houston as the chief of staff of the Fourth Army when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Immediately afterward, General Marshall ordered him to Washington. When Marshall reorganized the War Department in March of ’42, Eisenhower became head of the Operations Division in the department.

The United States decided to enter the war, and Marshall and Roosevelt wanted to invade the Continent from Great Britain in November 1942. Eisenhower then, in June of ’42, was sent by Marshall to England to become the head of the American forces in Europe. He was going there simply to get things in order for Marshall to come over and take command in November when the invasion took place.

Well, the idea of invading Europe in November of ’42 was wishful thinking. The British wanted no part of it. Eventually it was decided that the Americans and the British would invade North Africa in November of 1942.

General Marshall didn’t want any part of commanding an invasion of North Africa. But Eisenhower was there. He was commanding the European theater, and so it just fell into his lap. He bypassed 250 generals more senior.

DR: The people who were military-commander types—George Patton, Bernard Montgomery—these were people who actually had combat experience. They were in effect working for Eisenhower during the North African invasion and later during the invasion of Italy. What did they think of Eisenhower as a leader, as a commander?

JES: Eisenhower was always able to make the decisions that you expected a commander to make. He never waffled. He was never hesitant. Don’t forget, General Marshall had never been in combat either, so I don’t think in the military chain of command that’s all that unusual.

DR: After the invasion of North Africa more or less works and then the invasion of Italy more or less works, the Allied commanders go back to England and say, “Okay, let’s plan for the D-Day invasion.” Marshall is thought to be the person who is going to do it. How did Eisenhower manage to maneuver so that he actually led the invasion? How did Marshall get outmaneuvered?

JES: Eisenhower didn’t maneuver it, nor did Marshall. Roosevelt made the decision.

And you’re quite right. General Marshall believed that he was going to command the invasion when it took place in 1944. Mrs. Marshall was moving their furniture out of Quarters 1 at Fort Myer to their home in Leesburg. He had his desk shipped over to Europe.

On the way to the Tehran Conference in late 1943, Roosevelt stopped in North Africa to take a judgment of Eisenhower. He was going to spend one day there but really spent three days there and liked what he saw.

Stalin, at the Tehran Conference, pressed Roosevelt to name a commander. Roosevelt said he would think about it.

Marshall’s problem was that he was not popular with the British. They did not want Marshall to command the invasion. Churchill did not want Marshall to command the invasion. Roosevelt knew that. He had looked at Eisenhower and felt that Eisenhower, having experienced the North African Campaign and the Sicily Campaign and the landing in Italy, had good credentials as a military commander.

And so, on the way back from Tehran, Roosevelt met with Marshall in Cairo and asked him if he wanted to command the invasion. General Marshall, to his credit, said, “It’s not my decision to make. It’s your decision.” The president said, “In that case, it will be Eisenhower.”

DR: So the D-Day invasion is being planned. It takes many months to do it. Did Eisenhower ever think we might not win? Did he prepare for that?

JES: Oh, I think he was prepared for it. Whenever you do something like that, you realize that it’s a very risky business. Eisenhower wrote a letter taking full responsibility for the failure, if it failed. He had it in his pocket and was ready to issue it.

“General Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the orders of the day…” Ike speaks to U.S. paratroopers in England on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

But let me go back to North Africa just for a moment. Eisenhower learned in North Africa. He did not know anything about command in warfare until the North African Campaign. It was really a school for Eisenhower in which he learned how to command.

His three deputy commanders—air, ground, and navy—were British, and Eisenhower learned from them. He learned in Sicily, and he learned in Italy as well. And he had accumulated the lessons from those campaigns, which were not pretty.

DR: And D-Day succeeded, as we all know. But suppose the Germans had their troops in a different position or Hitler had been more alert to what was going on. Do you think we would not have prevailed?

JES: It would certainly have been much closer. The German commander, Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, had five panzer divisions in reserve in the general area, and his orders were that he couldn’t mobilize them until Hitler agreed to do so. It took them twenty-four hours to get Hitler to agree and put the panzers in place, and by that time the beachheads were secure.

There were also nineteen divisions north of the Seine. Hitler did not believe that the invasion that took place on D-Day was a real invasion. He thought it was a fake and that the real invasion would come north of the Seine across the English Channel. And so these nineteen divisions were unavailable to the Germans fighting the landings for the first two weeks of the campaign.

DR: Let’s talk about Eisenhower’s personal life for a moment. As a young man, Eisenhower married a woman named Mamie Doud. She was from a wealthy family. How was their life together when he was moving around so much?

JES: Ike met Mamie in November of 1915, just after he graduated from West Point. He was twenty-five. Mamie was nineteen. They were married July 1 the next year. He was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. Mamie came down and lived with him there. World War I came very quickly after that, and they were transferred out to Fort Meade.

They did not have quarters at Fort Meade initially, and that became a problem. But during the war itself, that was not a problem.

It was a much greater problem for them when Ike was sent to Panama after the war. Mamie did not like Panama at all. She came back from Panama to join her parents in Denver. John, their second son, was born in Denver. So the time in Panama was a difficult time for them in the marriage.

Portrait of Mamie Eisenhower. She and Ike married the year after he graduated from West Point. Their marriage survived his wartime attachment to his driver Kay Summersby.

After that they were in Washington and Paris, and that was fine. But when Eisenhower went to the Philippines in 1935, Mamie did not go with him for the first year. Mamie stayed in Washington. They lived at the Wyoming apartment building, which you may know is down at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Columbia Road. They had a very large apartment there. Mamie stayed there for an additional year before she came to the Philippines. Panama and the Philippines were difficult times.

DR: Now, when he was in England, he had a driver named Kay Summersby. He developed a relationship with her. It was later reported by President Harry S. Truman that Eisenhower had written a letter to George Marshall saying, “I want to leave my wife and marry Kay Summersby.” How did Marshall respond to that?

JES: Marshall said if he did that, he would relieve him of command, a threat that Eisenhower took literally. Let me go into that a little bit.

Kay Summersby was Ike’s driver in London in 1942 from the end of June until he went to North Africa in November. From that point on, Kay was no longer his driver. She was his executive assistant. In order to get to Eisenhower’s office, you had to go through Kay’s office.

Kay lived with Ike in the same quarters both in North Africa and outside of London in the country. The Eisenhower family always tried to disguise this by calling Kay his driver. That really insulted Sergeant Leonard Dry, who was actually his driver and who remained his driver for many, many years, even into the presidency.

Kay was very close to Eisenhower, and Eisenhower did write to General Marshall telling him that he wanted to divorce Mamie, and General Marshall did threaten to relieve him if he did so. Eisenhower at that point simply turned on a dime, and never mentioned it again.

When he left Germany to come back to the United States in November 1945, Kay, who was still with him, was due to come back with him. The day they were to come back, her orders were changed. She was assigned to General Clay in Berlin and did not come back to the United States until a year later. She called on Eisenhower at the Pentagon. She was in the American Army at the time. And the next day she was ordered to California.

DR: He was not the only general who may have had a driver. Is that right?

The prime minister and the future president: Winston Churchill and Ike share a pint at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia, circa 1948.

JES: I believe everyone did except General Omar Bradley.

DR: Wow, okay. Let’s talk about what happens after the war is won. Eisenhower comes back and replaces George Marshall as army chief of staff. Truman says, “I don’t want to run for reelection in 1948. Why don’t you come and run as a Democrat?” What does Eisenhower say?

JES: It happened before that, at the Potsdam Conference right outside Berlin, in 1945. Truman and Eisenhower and Bradley went for a tour around Berlin to look at the ruins from the war. It was during that ride around Berlin that Truman said, “If you would like the Democratic nomination in 1948, I will step back and become vice president again.” Bradley couldn’t believe it at the time. Eisenhower mumbled and said he really wasn’t interested. Later on, Truman offered it to him once more, and Eisenhower again said no, he didn’t want it.

DR: He didn’t take the job. But he later leaves the military and takes a job as president of Columbia University.

JES: Columbia had offered him the presidency, to succeed Nicholas Murray Butler, who had been president for forty years. Eisenhower saw President Truman, who urged him to take it and said he would relieve him as chief of staff in late 1947, which he did.

Before reporting to Columbia he wrote his book Crusade in Europe. And then after Crusade in Europe was completed, he became the president of Columbia.

DR: He did that job for a few years and then rejoined the military. He went back to Europe?

JES: Yes. In late 1950, after NATO had been established, President Truman asked him to go back to organize the ground forces for NATO, and Eisenhower agreed to do that. He left Columbia in January of 1951 to become the first commanding officer of the NATO military forces, in order to organize them and get them together. Field Marshal Montgomery was his deputy. It was sort of a repeat of World War II. Eisenhower was still president of Columbia but was on leave.

DR: It’s hard to imagine today somebody being on leave from an Ivy League university and going over and being in the military. But that’s a separate issue.

JES: That’s true. But let me say a word about Eisenhower as president of Columbia, because Eisenhower did an excellent job and he’s not generally given credit for it. Nicholas Murray Butler, who had been president for forty years, hadn’t raised any money for the last ten. In the 1940s, Columbia was the only major university whose endowment went down, because Butler was living on it.

Eisenhower not only balanced the budget, he organized the first fund drive that Columbia had ever had. He raised $3 million for Columbia in 1947. Multiply that by twelve to put it into today’s dollars.

And Eisenhower as president of Columbia defended academic freedom. He defended the right of Communists to speak on campus. “We’re not going to erect an intellectual iron curtain,” he said. He defended the faculty and the faculty’s right to hire whom they wanted and did an excellent job as president.

DR: When he goes back to Europe to be the NATO commander, his friend Lucius Clay, who had worked under him as a general in World War II, had gone into investment banking. Clay said, “Why don’t you consider running for the Republican nomination?” instead of the Democratic nomination. What was Eisenhower’s response?

JES: The crucial point is that Tom Dewey lost the election in ’48. If Dewey had won the election in 1948, Eisenhower would simply have remained as president of Columbia. But having run twice, Dewey was not going to get the nomination in ’52, which meant that the Republican nomination was open. Eisenhower was aware of that.

Clay and Governor Thomas Dewey and Herbert Brownell in New York were really behind the campaign to get Eisenhower to announce that he was willing to become a candidate for the Republican Party. And that was very difficult.

In November of 1951, President Truman offered him the Democratic nomination once again, for the 1952 election. Eisenhower again said no, he really didn’t want it.

It was at that point that Clay and Dewey and Brownell began to work for Eisenhower, but they could not get him to say that he wanted to be a candidate. The problem was that Senator Robert Taft was running now, having run in 1940, 1944, and 1948. He was running for the fourth time in the Republican primary and was amassing a very significant number of votes. And Clay and Dewey and Brownell could not get Eisenhower to announce.

DR: He decided to give his assent if somebody wanted to move his nomination forward. Is that how it happened?

JES: At the time of the New Hampshire primary, in order to enter a candidate, the candidate had to be a member of that party. Eisenhower would not announce that he wanted to be a candidate. General Clay told Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to go ahead and file for Eisenhower, announce that he’s a Republican. Lodge thought that Clay had talked to Eisenhower and cleared it, which he had not.

After it was done, Clay wrote to Eisenhower, and Eisenhower said, “That’s okay.” He didn’t object to it—which, again, was one of those indications that it was okay with Ike.

But they really couldn’t get Eisenhower to announce. He carried all sixteen delegates in New Hampshire in the primary, but Taft was still rolling up delegates throughout the Middle West and was really on his way to the nomination, and still they could not get Eisenhower to announce.

Finally, the Republican National Committee announced that General MacArthur was going to give the keynote address at the Republican Convention. Clay told Dewey, “Write to Eisenhower. Tell him that MacArthur is going to give the keynote and that we are afraid that he will mesmerize the delegates and he will be nominated by acclamation.” Dewey’s letter was hand-carried over to Paris, where Eisenhower was, by a TWA airline pilot. That’s the way they communicated.

The day after Eisenhower received Dewey’s letter, he announced that he was leaving NATO, coming back, and would announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination. It was his animosity toward MacArthur, which Clay of course knew about, that did it.

DR: When he announced, Taft was still way ahead, but Eisenhower obviously got the nomination. How did he decide who would be his vice president?

JES: Let me say a word about the nomination. When the roll call was called, Eisenhower was not over the top. He was leading Taft, but he was not over the top.

Minnesota had voted for Harold Stassen, its favorite son. Warren Burger, the Warren Burger [who went on to become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court], was waving the Minnesota standard. Joe Martin, presiding officer of the convention, recognized Minnesota. Governor Edward Thye of Minnesota then switched from Stassen to Eisenhower and put him over the top in the first ballot.

Ike turned down a chance to run for president in 1948 but was persuaded to stand as the Republican nominee four years later.

That evening in Eisenhower’s suite at the Blackstone Hotel, Ike was having dinner with Herbert Brownell and Clay. Brownell asked him, “General, have you given any thought to whom you would like to be your vice-presidential candidate?” Eisenhower said, “Isn’t that up to the convention?” Brownell and Clay looked at each other and rolled their eyes, and Brownell said, “Yes, yes, that’s up to the convention, but I’m sure they will look to you for guidance.”

Eisenhower nodded and nodded and he said, “Well, I think C. R. Smith, the head of American Airlines, is a terrific executive; and Charles Wilson of General Electric, General Electric Wilson is a good executive. They’d both make good vice presidents.”

Brownell and Clay are looking at each other again, and Brownell said, “Yes, General, they’re all good, but we really need a candidate whose name would be recognizable to the delegates on the floor. If you haven’t thought about it any, General Clay and I believe that we should go with Richard Nixon. Nixon is young, he’s from California. He was in the navy. He’s had good public relations lately.”

Eisenhower said, “Well, I think I’ve met him. Clear it with the Taft people, and if they say okay, that’s fine.” That’s how Nixon got the nomination. I might add that it was Herbert Brownell who told me that story.

DR: Then Nixon ran into a problem: he had a political fund paying some of his expenses. Eisenhower was nervous that they wouldn’t win, and he wanted Nixon to resign from the ticket. How did Nixon outmaneuver Eisenhower on that?

JES: Just before Nixon was to go on television that evening, Governor Dewey called Nixon and said, “Eisenhower wants you, at the end of your speech, to take yourself off the ticket—to resign.” Nixon hemmed and hawed. Eisenhower legitimately thought that Nixon was going to take himself off the ticket that night. They had brought Senator William Knowland back from Hawaii to make him the replacement if they took Nixon off the ticket.

Eisenhower was watching the speech with a yellow pad and a pencil, and when it got to the end and Nixon didn’t take himself off the ticket, Eisenhower broke his pencil on the pad. He was really annoyed at that point that Nixon hadn’t taken himself off the ticket.

You may recall that Nixon said, “I’ll leave it up to the Republican National Committee. If you think I should withdraw from the ticket or stay on the ticket, contact the Republican National Committee.” He was going over Ike’s head, he thought, by saying that. Eisenhower was really annoyed at him at that point and stayed annoyed at him for a long time.

DR: He stays on the ticket, and they get elected in a landslide over Adlai Stevenson. As president, Eisenhower puts together a cabinet known as “eight millionaires and a plumber.” Who were they, and how did they get picked?

JES: On Election Day, Herbert Brownell came to see Eisenhower, who was still at Morningside Heights in New York City being the president of Columbia. During the conversation with Brownell, Eisenhower asked him if he wanted to be attorney general. Brownell said yes. Eisenhower went down to Augusta, Georgia, to the golf course and left it up to Clay and Brownell to pick the rest of the cabinet.

Clay wanted John McCloy to be secretary of state, but Dewey and Brownell argued that they really owed John Foster Dulles, so Dulles was made secretary of state. But all the other cabinet officers were picked by Brownell and Clay, and Eisenhower went along with them. At the end, they realized they didn’t have a Democrat in the cabinet, and so they got Martin P. Durkin, who was head of the plumbers’ union, to become secretary of labor.

DR: Eisenhower played a lot of golf and was criticized at the time for it. Today, we wouldn’t criticize a president for that. Was he a good golfer?

JES: Eisenhower had a thirty-six-hole workweek at one point. He wasn’t a great golfer, but he was a good golfer and he was very consistent.

DR: Let’s talk about the Interstate Highway System for a moment. Eisenhower’s idea for this may have come to him when he was a young man. Where did he get the experience that made him think that an interstate highway system was necessary?

JES: Immediately after World War I, the army decided to send a convoy from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, across country. It had never been done before. Eisenhower was one of six officers who volunteered for the convoy.

It took them sixty-two days—sixty-two days, think about it—to go from the Ellipse here in Washington to San Francisco. Eisenhower was aware of the need for public transportation, for a highway system.

In Germany, Eisenhower saw the autobahns that Hitler had built and recognized the need for something similar in the U.S. After the Korean War, the economy turned down, and Eisenhower also needed something to spur the economy on. He appointed Lucius Clay—Lucius Clay again—who put together a committee of five people. They devised the Interstate Highway System. At the end of the process, Clay recommended that they pay for it by simply raising the tax on gasoline, which they did.

DR: Let’s talk about the U-2. The U.S. had a special spy plane, the U-2, and Eisenhower personally approved the missions every time. The last one that he approved turned out to be the one that was shot down. Can you go through the importance of that mission?

JES: The U-2 came in in the mid-fifties and did an excellent job. I’ll give you an example. At the time of the Suez Crisis, U-2 flights determined that the Russians were not moving any troops into that area. So it served a useful purpose, but it kept on and on and on and it had outlived its usefulness, and Soviet antiaircraft fire improved in the process.

Finally, in 1960, just prior to the Paris Summit between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, the CIA recommended sending one final U-2 flight across the Soviet Union—this is on the eve of the summit—and Eisenhower approved it.

It was a serious mistake. The U-2 was shot down. Its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive. The episode really aborted the Paris Summit, which would have been very successful had it not been for that.

Khrushchev and the Russians throughout gave Eisenhower lots of slack so that he could blame CIA director Allen Dulles and the CIA for this. Eisenhower, in some ways to his credit, declined to do that, and took personal responsibility for it. He had plenty of opportunity to simply say that this was something that they didn’t need to know anything about. But he did not do that.

DR: Eisenhower had some health problems in his first term. He had a heart attack. He had some intestinal issues. Did he ever consider not running for reelection? Did he ever consider not keeping Nixon on the ticket?

JES: He considered not running for reelection in 1955 when he had a very serious heart attack out in Denver. He recovered satisfactorily from the heart attack and concluded that there was no one else suitable for the Republican nomination.

He believed that Lucius Clay and George Humphrey, the secretary of the treasury, were both capable but had no political support. All the other Republican candidates, he felt, were not up to it, and so he decided to run for reelection.

DR: Did he want to keep Nixon as vice president?

JES: He tried to drop Nixon. He had a conference with Nixon and told him he thought he really ought to become secretary of defense or secretary of the treasury, so he would get some administrative experience. Nixon did not do that, and Eisenhower was not ready to formally drop Nixon.

DR: Nixon runs for president in 1960 against John Kennedy. At a press conference, Eisenhower is asked: “Can you name some great things that Nixon did during his term as vice president for eight years?” What does Eisenhower say?

JES: Eisenhower says, “Well, give me a week and I will think about it and I’ll let you know.” That was not a mistake.

DR: When Eisenhower retires, he decides he doesn’t want to be called “Mr. President” the rest of his life. He wants to be called something else. What?

JES: He wanted to be called “General of the Army.” It’s one of those permanent ranks that you never retire from. If you’re made general of the army, a five-star rank, you stay a general of the army until you die. And Eisenhower, after he left the presidency, wanted to become general of the army again. He had resigned when he announced his candidacy for the presidency. President Kennedy was a little surprised at that, but the Democrats passed the appropriate legislation to reinstall Eisenhower as general of the army.

DR: Golfers are sometimes known to pray for their shots. Was Eisenhower known for being a religious person?

JES: Eisenhower’s family was very religious. He had five brothers who lived past infancy. Their parents were fundamentalists. They were originally River Brethren, a fundamentalist sect from Germany that settled on the Susquehanna River, then moved out to Kansas.

His parents were extremely religious. His father read the Bible at mealtimes, and in the evening the children were required to do so. Interestingly, none of the children carried those religious beliefs into their adult lives.

Eisenhower is the only person ever elected president of the United States who did not belong to a church at the time. MacArthur once asked Eisenhower, “Ike, why don’t you go to church on Sunday?” Eisenhower said, “Because when I was a cadet at West Point, they made me go every Sunday, and I’m not going back.”

And Eisenhower did not go back. He did not belong to a church, and he did not go to church.

After he was elected and during the election campaign, many in the Republican Party suggested that he join the church. Eisenhower declined to do so. But finally, Clare Boothe Luce, after he was elected, talked Ike into joining the church, and he joined the Presbyterian Church. [Luce was an author, journalist, and political figure who became U.S. ambassador to Italy during Eisenhower’s presidency.]

Now, I don’t mean that Ike was an atheist or antireligion. He just didn’t want to belong to a church.

DR: When Nixon ran in ’68, was Eisenhower reconciled to him at that point? Did he support him?

JES: Eisenhower was in the hospital at the time. Yes, he supported Nixon. His grandson had married Nixon’s daughter. The animosity had passed. But Eisenhower was never really a fan of Richard Nixon.