Eisenhower in War and Peace Read online

  In high school Eisenhower made good grades with minimal effort. He had a logical mind, a retentive memory, and a natural gift for writing clear, effective prose. His best grades were in English and history. Classmates, in their senior yearbook, predicted that he would become a professor of history at Yale. That may seem outrageous academic optimism for a high school on the Great Plains that produced fewer than thirty graduates a year, but the school’s rigorous emphasis on fundamentals was not misplaced. In 1950, three pre–World War I graduates of tiny Abilene High were presidents of major American universities: Dwight Eisenhower at Columbia; Milton at Penn State; and Deane Malott at Cornell.

  As a student, Ike engaged in the usual pranks, enjoyed team sports—especially baseball and football—and suffered the customary bumps and bruises. “He was just another average chap,” Orin Snider, his high school coach, said later. “He was a capable player, but just another player.”31

  Eisenhower discovered West Point by chance. Some young men, often from military families—men such as Douglas MacArthur and George Patton—grow up thinking of nothing but West Point. Others, such as Ulysses Grant and John J. Pershing, go to the academy for a professional education at the government’s expense. And for others attendance is accidental. In Eisenhower’s case it was a combination of accidental discovery and the recognition that West Point would provide a free college education that he might not otherwise acquire.

  In the summer of 1910, after he had put in a year at the creamery, Eisenhower happened to renew his friendship with an old high school chum, Everett “Swede” Hazlett. Swede was the son of a prosperous Abilene physician who had entered high school with Ike, but soon transferred to a prep school in Wisconsin. He was spending the summer tending a gaslight-fixture store his father owned near the creamery, and had already received a congressional appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Unfortunately, he failed the mathematics portion of the entrance examination and was in Abilene to study for a retake. Ike and Swede became lifelong friends. Their correspondence, which continued until Swede’s death in 1958, is remarkably intimate—as introspective and revealing as any Ike ever wrote, explaining his actions, trying out ideas, and using Swede as a sounding board.32

  In the course of the summer, Swede convinced Ike that the service academies offered the best ticket out of Abilene. “It was not difficult to persuade me this was a good move,” Eisenhower wrote later.33 There is no evidence he fretted about his parents’ pacifist convictions. To the contrary, he worked diligently that summer to secure an appointment. His first choice was to accompany Swede to Annapolis, and if that were not possible, to go to West Point.34

  At Swede’s suggestion, Ike wrote Senator Joseph L. Bristow, who had recently been elected to the United States Senate; he was from Salina—just twenty-five miles west of Abilene. Bristow (whose campaign had been directed by his close friend William Allen White of The Emporia Gazette) was a reform Republican, an enemy of the spoils system, and the first Kansas senator to be elected by popular vote instead of by the state legislature. Unlike most members of Congress, he was holding a competitive examination for his academy appointments. For Eisenhower, it was a lucky break. His family had no political connections, and he would have been out of the running for a patronage appointment.

  On August 20, 1910, Eisenhower wrote the Sunflower State’s junior senator:

  Dear Sir:

  I would very much like to enter either the school at Annapolis, or the one at West Point.…

  I have graduated from high school and will be nineteen years of age this fall.

  If you find it possible to appoint me to one of these schools, your kindness will certainly be appreciated by me.

  Respectfully yours,

  DWIGHT EISENHOWER35

  To enter the Naval Academy an applicant could not be older than nineteen (West Point set the maximum age at twenty-two). Ike was already nineteen when he wrote, and would turn twenty on October 14, 1910. That would have made him ineligible for Annapolis. So he fudged his birth date. In a time before birth certificates were required, his action was not uncommon. Lucius Clay (West Point Class of 1918) lied about his age as well. In Clay’s case he thought he was too young, so he added a year. “Everybody knows your birthday—family and whatnot,” said Clay. “So it was much easier to change the year.”36 e

  Senator Bristow did not reply, but in early September the Abilene Daily Reflector printed a notice from the senator’s office announcing that a competitive examination for West Point and Annapolis would be held in Topeka on October 4 and 5, 1910. Ike wrote immediately to inquire whether he might take the exam, and the senator replied that he was welcome to do so.37

  Eisenhower was one of eight applicants to appear for the examination on October 4. Four, including Ike, indicated they would accept an appointment to either West Point or Annapolis. The other four sought West Point only. After a grueling two days the grades were tallied and Eisenhower finished second overall, and first among those who indicated they would accept either appointment. His scores ranged from 99 in English to 73 in American history, with a final average of 87.5. George Pulsifer of Fort Leavenworth, who finished first overall with an average score of 89.5, was awarded a presidential at-large appointment to West Point, and Ike was named to the senatorial vacancy.38

  On October 24, Senator Bristow wrote Eisenhower to inform him of his selection. Bristow said that to complete the War Department nomination form, he needed “a statement of your exact age, years and months, and a statement as to how long you have been an actual resident of Kansas.”39

  Eisenhower replied the following day. “I am just nineteen years and eleven days of age, and have been a resident of Abilene, Kans. for eighteen years.”40 For the second time Ike misstated his age, although at twenty he was fully eligible for the Military Academy.

  Armed with a senatorial appointment, Ike cleared the final hurdle on January 13, 1911, when he passed the West Point entrance exam and physical at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri. In March, he received orders from the secretary of war to report to West Point on June 14, 1911, where he would join the Class of 1915. Eisenhower left Abilene on the night train for Kansas City on June 8. His mother saw him off from the front porch. “It is your choice,” she said, and waved good-bye as he headed to the station. After he was gone she returned to her room. Milton later told Ike it was the first time anyone had ever heard her cry.41

  In June 1911 the corps of cadets numbered 650 men divided into four classes: most in the fourth (plebe) year, least in the first, attrition taking a heavy toll. At the age of twenty, Eisenhower was older and more mature than most of his classmates and, having done two years of manual labor, was better prepared for the harsh plebe summer, the relentless spit and polish, and the painstaking attention to detail. “The discipline was not so much harsh as inexorable,” he recalled.42 Like Ulysses Grant, who could not tell one tune from another, Ike had trouble marching in step.f “For days I was assigned to the Awkward Squad until I could coordinate my feet with the beat.”43

  Two hundred and sixty-four young men took the oath of allegiance with Eisenhower on June 14, 1911. There were no women in Ike’s class, no blacks, no Hispanics, very few Catholics, and only three young men of the Jewish faith. Most were from white, Protestant, middle-class America. “There weren’t many boys from poverty classes,” a contemporary of Eisenhower remembered, “and the richer boys went to prep schools that sent them to Harvard or Yale.”44

  Despite the fact that West Point offered a free professional education, its academic reputation was in serious decline when Ike entered. Once a leader in some fields, especially engineering and the natural sciences, the academy had secluded itself from the changing currents in higher education. Rote memorization masqueraded as creative thought. Instructors, almost all of whom were recent academy graduates, routinely graded a cadet’s daily performance but rarely explained the material or encouraged critical discussion. With but four or five exceptions, the cur
riculum was identical to that established by Sylvanus Thayer more than a century before. “West Point is not a subject for reform,” wrote Superintendent Hugh Scott. “It goes forward on its majestic course from year to year toward the fulfillment of its destiny, moving serenely under its traditions of ‘honor, duty, country’…without need of radical alteration.”45

  The outbreak of war in 1914 made little impact. While the armies of Europe bled to death in front of Passchendaele and in the marshes of East Prussia, West Point’s department of military art concentrated on Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and the Shenandoah. Instructors emphasized the romantic élan of cavalry encounters rather than the grim reality of trench warfare. “The Military Academy is forty years behind the times,” Army chief of staff Peyton March complained, but to little effect.46 President Charles Eliot of Harvard, a member of West Point’s board of visitors and a leader in the field of academic reform, lamented the mischievous effect of the “red tape methods” in which the cadets were drilled day after day.47 Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, was shocked when he visited West Point after the war.

  I do not think that young men who are being prepared for the duties of an officer should be required to repeat the same gestures every day during four years. This seems to be too long, and I fear that this monotony must result in fixing the graduate’s mind into a groove so rigid that elasticity becomes impaired.

  He comes out a well-instructed and obedient subaltern and a first rate drill-master, but outside of a small category that have exceptional force of character, he has got to pass considerable time before he can break the rigid forms into which his nature has become crystallized and regain his mental vigor.48

  Douglas MacArthur, who was appointed superintendent shortly after Pétain’s visit, did his utmost to bring the academy into the modern era—but that was long after Eisenhower graduated. “How long are we going to continue preparing for the War of 1812?” MacArthur asked his staff upon assuming command.49

  It is often suggested that the friendships made at West Point contribute to the effectiveness of the officer corps in time of war—that they enable officers who serve together to know more about one another and to have more, or less, confidence in one another, as the case might be. The benefit is more apparent than real. As one of Ike’s contemporaries noted, “Of course you know whether you like them or not. But the later development of some of the members of my own class did not indicate that my judgment was any too accurate. I just don’t think you have enough maturity of judgment for that to have much value.”50

  Like many another cadet, Eisenhower had little patience with the excessive memorization that posed as academic effort. “They had a course called Military History,” he said.

  One of the things we had to study was the battle of Gettysburg. We were required to remember the name of every general officer or acting general officer in the entire opposing forces. You also had to learn what the officer commanded—the exact character of the command. Then you had to remember the situation or the position of each of these commands at such and such an hour on such and such a day. I always did hate memory tests, although I have a pretty good memory. But this wasn’t the kind of thing that interested me, so I didn’t pay any attention and I almost got “found” [failed] in military history.51

  If Eisenhower was indifferent to academic requirements, his conduct as a cadet bordered on reckless.

  My success in compiling a staggering catalogue of demerits was largely due to a lack of motivation … except for the simple and stark resolve to get a college education. Class standing was of small moment to me. I enjoyed life at the Academy, and had a good time with my pals, and was far from disturbed by an additional demerit or two. I didn’t think of myself as either a scholar whose position would depend on the knowledge he had acquired in school, or as a military figure whose professional career might be seriously affected by his academic or disciplinary record. I probably looked with distaste on classmates whose days and nights were haunted by fear of demerits or low grades.52

  Eisenhower’s principal vices were cigarette smoking and poker—both of which were forbidden. Ike learned serious poker in Abilene, and called it his “favorite indoor sport.” During his first two years at the academy he played incessantly and kept a book in which he recorded his classmates’ IOUs to be paid after graduation. In his junior year he learned contract bridge and quickly became addicted. “We started playing in November 1913,” his friend William Britton recalled. “We played every night, except Saturday, until April. Ike and his partner beat us consistently.”53 With almost total recall and an uncanny ability to focus on the game, Eisenhower was formidable at both bridge and poker. Later he stopped playing poker because many of those with whom he played could not afford to lose and resented their losses.

  It was also in his junior year that Ike took up smoking—a source of infinite demerits. Cadets were permitted to smoke pipes and cigars, but cigarettes—which were considered déclassé—were strictly against the rules. “So I started smoking cigarettes. These could not be purchased at the cadet store but loose Bull Durham tobacco was available and I became a ‘roll your own’ smoker.”54 Eisenhower continued smoking throughout his military career, often two or three packs a day. Journalist John Gunther remembered lunching with Ike in Washington, “and between 12:45 and 3:00 p.m. he smoked at least fifteen cigarettes. He smoked like a furnace. I asked him what brand of cigarettes he liked and he replied it didn’t matter in the slightest—he smoked anything.”55 g

  Despite Eisenhower’s eagerness to live at the edge, the West Point tactical department evidently recognized his latent leadership qualities. The fact that he was two to three years older than most of his classmates may have helped. Being a middle child in a brood of six may also have been an advantage, providing Ike with valuable experience dealing with those both older and younger. After his plebe year Eisenhower was promoted to corporal (he ranked eleventh out of the thirty-six promoted) but was soon busted back to the ranks for an unseemly prank and required to walk the area for a month. In his junior year he was promoted to supply sergeant of his company but was even more quickly reduced to private for “improper dancing” with the daughter of a Spanish instructor. That apparently did not dissuade authorities from naming him color sergeant his senior (first-class) year—affording him the honor of carrying the academy’s colors at formations and parades of the corps of cadets.

  Had it not been for athletics it is questionable whether Eisenhower would have completed his four years at West Point. Just as Grant resisted conformity by reading literature and painting in the studio of the academy’s art instructor, Eisenhower found relief on the playing field. “Ike was the first cadet on the field for football practice and the very last to leave,” said longtime Army trainer Marty Maher. “I used to curse him because he would practice so late that I would be collecting footballs he kicked away in the darkness.”56

  Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for the game exceeded his ability. “Ike talked a grand game,” said classmate Alexander “Babe” Weyand, a varsity standout and Olympic wrestler, but he always came up a bit short. Eisenhower went out for baseball in 1912 but failed to make the team. When he went out for football his plebe year, he was judged too small and too light. (He weighed 155 pounds.) He played junior varsity that year and beefed up to a muscular 175 pounds. He made the varsity his sophomore year, started in five games (including Army’s 27–6 loss to Pop Warner’s Carlisle Indians), and suffered a career-ending knee injury against Tufts late in the season. “I couldn’t get up, so they took me off the field, and I never got back on as a player again.”57

  Eisenhower, second from right, color sergeant at West Point. Ike carries the academy colors. (illustration credit 1.5)

  During his last two years at the academy, Ike coached the junior varsity to successful seasons and became head cheerleader at Army football games. (Franklin D. Roosevelt served in the same capacity at Harvard.) He also took up gymnastics and learned to chin
himself five times using only his right hand, and three times with only his left. He also perfected the technique of standing stiffly erect, hands at his side, and then falling face-first to the floor, breaking the fall at the very last second before his nose hit the deck.h

  For Ike, West Point meant athletics. Although he was never a player of the first rank, he made up in dedication and enthusiasm what he lacked in size and talent. Competitiveness, teamwork, and the pursuit of a common goal were imprinted as indelibly on Eisenhower’s character as was the warrior ethic on men such as Patton and MacArthur. If the Duke of Wellington believed the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton, Ike attributed similar virtues to athletic life at West Point. Looking back on his time as supreme commander, he wrote, “I noted with real satisfaction, how well ex-footballers seemed to have leadership qualifications. I think this was more than a coincidence. I believe that football, almost more than any other sport, tends to instill in men the feeling that victory comes through hard work—almost slavish—work, team play, self-confidence, and an enthusiasm that amounts to dedication.”58

  Eisenhower was popular among his classmates. His full-throated renditions while showering of “My Darling Clementine” and “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” became cadet legends. “In those days, Ike affected a tough breezy western manner,” remembered one classmate.59 “Everyone liked him and apparently he liked everyone in turn,” said another. “If there is such a thing as a magnetic personality, he had it. He had the priceless ability to make anyone he met feel that he had a genuine interest in him and in his ideas.”60

  At graduation, the tactical department summed up their assessment of Ike. “We saw in Eisenhower a not uncommon type, a man who would thoroughly enjoy his Army life, giving both to duty and recreation their fair values. We did not see in him a man who would throw himself into his job so completely that nothing else would matter.”61 Recognizing Ike’s devil-may-care attitude, West Point’s commandant of cadets suggested that he “be assigned to an organization under [a] strict commanding officer.”62