Eisenhower in War and Peace Read online

  ALSO BY JEAN EDWARD SMITH

  FDR

  Grant

  John Marshall: Definer of a Nation

  George Bush’s War

  Lucius D. Clay: An American Life

  The Conduct of American Foreign Policy Debated

  (ed., with Herbert M. Levine)

  The Constitution and American Foreign Policy

  Civil Liberties and Civil Rights Debated

  (ed., with Herbert M. Levine)

  The Papers of General Lucius D. Clay (ed.)

  Germany Beyond the Wall

  Der Weg ins Dilemma

  The Defense of Berlin

  (illustration credit front.)

  Copyright © 2012 by Jean Edward Smith

  Maps copyright © 2012 by Mapping Specialists

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Smith, Jean Edward.

  Eisenhower in war and peace / by Jean Edward Smith.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64429-3

  1. Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Dwight David), 1890–1969. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography 3. Generals—United States—Biography. 4. United States—Politics and government—1953–1961. 5. United States. Army—Biography. I. Title.

  E836.S56 2012 973.921092—dc22 2011008605

  [B]

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Base Art Co.

  Jacket painting: Michael J. Deas

  v3.1

  For Christine

  I hate war as only a

  soldier who has lived it can.

  —DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

  Preface

  Dwight Eisenhower remains an enigma. For the majority of Americans he is a benign fatherly figure looming indistinctly out of the mists of the past—a high-ranking general who directed the Allied armies to victory in Europe, and a caretaker president who presided over eight years of international calm and domestic tranquility. To those who knew him, Ike was a tireless taskmaster who worked with incredible subtlety to move events in the direction he wished them to go. Most would agree he was a man of principle, decency, and common sense, whom the country could count on to do what was right. In both war and peace he gave the world confidence in American leadership.

  Ike’s generalship has often been disparaged. Some have suggested he lacked strategic vision, that he was a mere administrator, a hail-fellow-well-met who simply kept everyone content and in harness while working toward a common goal. It is easy to understand how such misconceptions could arise. Eisenhower made victory appear inevitable. He did not posture or pose for the press, he issued no grandiloquent communiqués, and he did not pit himself against high command or political authority. He got on with the job with a minimum of fuss. He was parsimonious with the lives of the troops entrusted to his command, evenhanded toward his allies, and ready to take responsibility for whatever occurred. He was a military leader in the time-honored tradition of Washington and Grant, a man who symbolized American democracy: the ideal commander for a citizen army of draftees.

  Eisenhower’s job was not easy. Topside were Churchill, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle, each with his own ideas about how the war should be fought. The chain of command ran through the Combined Chiefs of Staff, principally General George Marshall and Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, who were often at odds over what course to follow. Ike handled his command relationships with what appeared to be effortless aplomb. In fact, he did it so well that one rarely considered the complexities involved.

  The task he faced was daunting. Eisenhower commanded the largest multinational force ever assembled, mounted an unprecedented cross-Channel invasion of Europe, mastered logistical problems on a scale never before encountered, and came to grips with a battle-tested German Army fighting on familiar terrain. Dealing with fractious but gifted subordinates such as George Patton and Bernard Montgomery seemed relatively simple by comparison.

  Like Grant and Pershing, Eisenhower commanded on the spot. He did not dodge difficult decisions, he did not pass the buck to staff conferences or subordinate commanders, and he always knew that if he did not measure up, he would be summarily relieved. Supreme commanders do not enjoy job security. “At any moment a necessity might arise for my relief and consequent demotion,” Ike wrote his son John in 1943. When the war ended, Eisenhower’s accomplishment in leading the Western powers to victory was fully recognized, yet today it has largely receded from our understanding.

  Eisenhower’s presidential years appear equally remote. Yet with the exception of Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower was the most successful president of the twentieth century. He ended a three-year, no-win war in Korea with honor and dignity; resisted calls for preventive war against the Soviet Union and China; deployed the Seventh Fleet to protect Formosa from invasion; faced down Khrushchev over Berlin; and restored stability in Lebanon when sectarian violence threatened to pull the country apart. On the home front, Ike punctured the Roosevelt coalition, weaned the Republican party from its isolationist past, restored the nation’s sanity after the McCarthyite binge of Communist witch-hunting, and proved unbeatable at the polls. During his two terms in the White House, his monthly approval rating averaged 64 percent, a figure never equaled since World War II.

  Eisenhower believed that the United States should not go to war unless national survival was at stake. “There is no alternative to peace,” he famously said. He dismissed the necessity of conflict beneath the nuclear threshold and refused to engage American troops in brushfire wars for political abstractions. After Ike made peace in Korea, not a single American died in combat for the next eight years.

  When the National Security Council—Dulles, Nixon, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—recommended intervention (including the use of nuclear weapons) at Dien Bien Phu to rescue the beleaguered French garrison, Eisenhower summarily rejected the proposal. “You boys must be crazy,” he told his national security assistant, Robert Cutler. “We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God.” Five years later, when China threatened force against Taiwan, the Joint Chiefs recommended an immediate nuclear response, and once again Eisenhower rejected the idea.

  When Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, Eisenhower forced them to withdraw, toppling Anthony Eden’s government in London, undercutting the Fourth Republic in France, and threatening financial sanctions against Israel. That repudiation of what Ike called “old fashioned gunboat diplomacy” not only kept the peace but enhanced American prestige throughout the world.

  Domestically, Eisenhower tamed inflation, slashed defense spending, balanced the federal budget, and worked easily with a Democratic Congress. Two of his appointees to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren and William Brennan, launched a judicial revolution. Presidents cannot control the decisions of their appointees, and Ike was disappointed in some of the rulings of the Warren Court, but the advances Americans have experienced in civil liberty and social justice during the past fifty years are in some very large measure attributable to Warren and Brennan.

  It was also Eisenhower who began the practice of submitting the names of potential judicial nominees to the American Bar Association for preliminary vetting (a practice discontinued in 2001 by the Bush administration but resumed under President Obama). His appointees to the
lower federal courts, moderate Republicans including John Minor Wisdom in Louisiana and Elbert P. Tuttle in Georgia, were the judicial heroes of the civil rights struggle, and Ike’s Justice Department backed them to the hilt.

  Eisenhower held a textbook view of presidential power. As more than one scholar has observed, he may have been the last president to actually believe in the Constitution. For Ike, Congress made policy and the president carried it out. He took his constitutional responsibility to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” at face value. In 1957, when a United States District Court in Little Rock, Arkansas, ordered the desegregation of Central High, Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to enforce the court’s order. If he had not acted, and if he had not used overwhelming force to ensure compliance with the district court’s order, desegregation in the South would have been set back at least a generation. “Sending in the troops was the hardest decision I had had to make since D-Day,” Eisenhower said afterward. “But Goddamn it, it was the only thing I could do.”

  Eisenhower was a progressive conservative. He believed traditional American values encompassed change and progress. He looked to the future, not the past, and his presidency provided a buffered transition from FDR’s New Deal and the Fair Deal of Harry Truman into the modern era. “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would never hear of that party again,” Ike wrote his brother Edgar. “There is a tiny splinter group that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt [and] a few other Texas millionaires. But their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

  When the economy turned down after the Korean War, Eisenhower initiated the interstate highway program and constructed the St. Lawrence Seaway, not only revolutionizing the American transportation system, but opening the Great Lakes to ocean traffic. Neither program affected the federal budget. The interstate system—the cost of which eventually exceeded the total expenditures of the New Deal from 1933 to 1941—was funded entirely by increased gasoline taxes, and the seaway through the sale of interest-bearing revenue bonds issued by the U.S.-Canadian Seaway Development Corporation. The National Defense Education Act, which Eisenhower signed into law in 1958, broke the long-standing taboo against direct federal aid to education and has done more to change the face of American universities than any measure since enactment of the GI Bill during World War II.

  As president, Eisenhower restored stability to the nation. His levelheaded leadership ensured that the United States would move forward in measured steps under the rule of law at home and collective security abroad. His sensible admonition upon leaving office to be wary of the military-industrial complex was the heartfelt sentiment of a president who recognized the perils of world leadership. Eisenhower gave the country eight years of peace and prosperity. No other president in the twentieth century can make that claim.

  As with FDR, politics came naturally to Eisenhower. Bismarck once observed that political judgment was the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history. Ike possessed that talent in abundance. As historian Garry Wills put it, Ike was a political genius. “It is no mere accident that he remained, year after year, the most respected man in America.” Veteran political scientist Samuel Lubell said, “It would be difficult to cite any president, including both Roosevelts, who has been more adept in giving the people what they want.” Unlike FDR, however, Eisenhower went to great lengths to conceal his political acumen. That too was deliberate. All of his life Eisenhower had managed crises without overreacting. He made every task he undertook look easy. Ike’s military experience taught him that an outward display of casualness inspired confidence, and he took that lesson into the White House. Liberal columnist Murray Kempton, who penetrated the façade, noted with grudging admiration that Eisenhower was “the president most superbly equipped for consequential decisions we may ever have had … as calm when he was demonstrating the wisdom of leaving a bad situation alone as when he was moving to meet it on those occasions when he absolutely had to.”

  Eisenhower was one of the few presidents who had achieved national prominence before entering the White House. He was a revered figure on the world stage and moved easily among foreign leaders. Ike had no need to prove himself. That sense of self added stature to the presidency—much as Roosevelt did after 1933.

  Dwight Eisenhower was the product of the peacetime professional Army. He had endured the stagnation, the endless wait for promotion, the woeful lack of equipment and manpower that characterized the United States Army between World War I and World War II. Advancement from one rank to the next was based strictly on seniority. The hidden virtue in Ike’s case was that a promotion system based on seniority permitted an exceptional independence of thought and action. A junior officer was not required to flatter his commander’s whims in order to obtain that outstanding efficiency report upon which meritorious promotions now hinge. There were no meritorious promotions. There was no rapid advancement. Everyone stood in line, at least to the rank of colonel. And while that meant inordinate delay for men such as Eisenhower to reach the top (Ike served in the rank of major for sixteen years), it also ensured that their independence of thought was still intact when they got there. As a result, Eisenhower had supreme confidence in his own judgment.a

  Contrary to conventional wisdom, Eisenhower was not runner-up to George C. Marshall to command OVERLORD—the Allied invasion of Europe. FDR recognized that Marshall, who was performing superbly as Army chief of staff, had clashed too often with the British on matters of global strategy to be fully effective as supreme commander. The president had taken Eisenhower’s measure in North Africa and Sicily, observed his easy manner with the British and French, his fairness and patience dealing with Allied commanders, and concluded he was best suited to lead a multinational force across the Channel. The job was Marshall’s if he wanted it, but with characteristic self-discipline, the chief of staff deferred to Roosevelt’s judgment. FDR’s decision proved correct, and despite the inevitable friction of coalition warfare, Ike waged a masterful campaign that left no ally disappointed. As the French military historian Olivier Wieviorka has written, “Eisenhower was the right man at the right place at the right time.”

  The Army of Eisenhower’s day valued understatement. With rare exceptions generals did not decorate themselves like Christmas trees. Action spoke for itself. Nothing did that more eloquently than the simple soldier’s funeral of the nation’s thirty-fourth president. On April 2, 1969, in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower was laid to rest in the presence of his family. He was buried in a government-issue, eighty-dollar pine coffin, wearing his famous Ike jacket with no medals or decorations other than his insignia of rank.

  JEAN EDWARD SMITH

  * * *

  a I am indebted to General Lucius D. Clay for that observation. “Efficiency reports had no bearing whatever on when you would be promoted,” said Clay. “They helped determine your next assignment, but unless someone was manifestly unfit you knew exactly the order in which you would be promoted.” Clay, interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University (COHP).

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  One JUST FOLKS

  Two THE GREAT WAR

  Three THE PEACETIME ARMY

    Four WITH PERSHING IN PARIS

    Five WITH MACARTHUR IN WASHINGTON

    Six MANILA

  Seven LOUISIANA MANEUVERS

  Eight WITH MARSHALL IN WASHINGTON

  Nine TORCH

  Ten BAPTISM BY FIRE

  Eleven SICILY

  Twelve SUPREME COMMANDER

  Thirteen D-DAY

  Fourteen THE LIBERATION OF FRANCE

  Fifteen GERMANY

  Sixteen CHIEF OF STAFF

  S
eventeen COLUMBIA

  Eighteen “I LIKE IKE”

  Nineteen THE GREAT CRUSADE

  Twenty EIGHT MILLIONAIRES AND A PLUMBER

  Twenty-one FIRST OFF THE TEE

  Twenty-two DIEN BIEN PHU

  Twenty-three NEW LOOK

  Twenty-four HEART ATTACK

  Twenty-five SUEZ

  Twenty-six LITTLE ROCK

  Twenty-seven MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

  Twenty-eight TAPS

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  ONE

  Just Folks

  I’m just folks. I come from the people, the ordinary people.

  —DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

  Dwight D. Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas, on October 14, 1890.1 He was the third of seven sons born to David and Ida Eisenhower, and the only one born in Texas. The Eisenhowers lived in Denison from October 1888 to March 1892, and it was the economic low point of their married life. David worked for ten dollars a week as an engine wiper for the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas (Katy) Railroad, and the family lived in a soot-encrusted shanty near the tracks.

  David’s bout with poverty was self-inflicted. His Eisenhower ancestors had been prosperous farmers, first in the Odenwald region of Germany, south of Frankfurt, then in Pennsylvania, then Kansas. The first Eisenhower to arrive in America was Hans Nicholas, who landed in Philadelphia in 1741, part of the wave of Protestant emigration from Europe to the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. The family flourished amid the fertile soil of the Susquehanna Valley. Originally Lutheran, they married into the River Brethren, a doctrinaire offshoot of the Mennonites, embraced the faith, and quickly emerged as leaders of the flock.a Jacob, David’s father (and Ike’s grandfather), became the preacher and a patriarch of the sect, attracting large audiences to his sermons, which he delivered in German—the plattdeutsch vernacular that was still spoken in most households.