The Written Word
for December 22, 1999

I have just finished an excellent one volume biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower by Geoffrey Parrott.

Having grown up alongside Ike’s fame I found this fascinating because I had always thought, in the back of my mind, that he was really a dull sort. This book, scarcely a hagiography, tells quite a different story.

Ike attended West Point where he had a good academic record and was a very good football player until injured. His time in the peacetime army showed a man who keenly felt the shortcomings of the force and who worked every imaginable angle to improve it. He missed the First World War – to his lasting unhappiness – because like George C Marshall, the US Commander in Chief in the Second World War, he was more valuable at home.

When war came to Europe in 1939 Ike saw the need for modernization on a rapid scale and was one of the moving forces behind America’s long slow haul to preparedness.

The selection of Ike to head up Torch – the Allied, mostly American and Free French invasion of North Africa in 1942 – came as a surprise to both him and the Allies but again Marshall, Roosevelt’s first choice, was more valuable to President Roosevelt at home.

Eisenhower’s handling of the invasion of Europe and the subsequent destruction of the Nazis was dominated by his quarrels with his two most brilliant commanders, Bernard Montgomery and George Patton. If for no other reason, Parrett’s book is worth it for this aspect alone. Monty was an egotistical tortoise of a soldier. He wouldn’t make a move without having absolute mastery of a situation which served him well at El Alamein but which made his a handicap in France where the situation was so fluid that chances had to be taken. Patton, just as egotistical as Monty, was the opposite. He cared nothing about his flanks or supplies. For him life was always full speed ahead. Monty was a particular pain in the ass to Ike because he constantly spoke of himself as being infallible and American commanders as being half wits. The real break in the relations came when Montgomery’s parachute offensive at Arnheim failed – mostly because of faulty execution – and Monty’s lack of initiative which made possible the Battle of the Bulge at Christmas 1944 which Montgomery had the temerity to blame the Americans for as he offered to bail them out.

Both the Democrats and Republicans wanted Eisenhower to run as their presidential candidate in 1948 but Ike, who didn’t really want to be president, didn’t want to use his position to run against the sitting President, Harry Truman. An interesting tid-bit I’d never heard before is that Truman apparently offered to run as Eisenhower’s vice-presidential candidate in 1948!

Ike initially refused to run in 1952 as well and indeed played very hard to get. What turned his mind was the prospect of the White House being captured by Robert Taft who was an isolationist who would have abandoned Europe and reduced the armed forces. The rest of course is history – Ike beat Taft for the Republican nomination then beat Adlai Stevenson in the election, a performance he repeated in 1956.

Ike as president is also an interesting story. At the time, I thought he was a weak president but the evidence demonstrates quite the contrary. He had low points of course, the lowest being when he let his Secretary of State abandon support for Egypt’s Aswan Dam leading directly to the Suez crisis. But he had lots of highs too. At the end of his terms America was prosperous and, despite what John Kennedy said in the 1960 election, well defended too.

I think the reader will come away from the book with a much enhanced view of Eisenhower both as a general and a president … not a Napoleon nor a Lincoln, but surely on the next rung down.