Authors: Jim Newton
Moreover, Eisenhower added, creating a new force of tactical nuclear weapons could only be accomplished in one of two ways. The United States could switch from building deterrent weapons to building tactical ones, or it could attempt to do both. To cease building large nuclear weapons even as the Soviet Union galloped to catch up with the United States was almost too perilous to contemplate, but attempting both also came with profound implications. It would require a stupendous increase in military spending, an idea that Ike had fought his entire presidency as he strove for balance between national security and economic stability. To reverse now would require the focused expenditures and sacrifices possible only within a controlled economy, nothing short of a “garrison state.”
Dulles fought back. America’s European allies needed at least the illusion that they could resist a Soviet attack, a defensive capability short of global nuclear war. Ike was bewildered. What sort of defense would that be, he asked, when 175 Soviet divisions confronted 6 Western divisions? Dulles countered that the United States was, of course, encouraging the development of Western forces, but the imbalance remained and, with it, the instability of the alliance. Pressing his point, the secretary of state remarked that he was soon to depart for Berlin, where he would perform the “ritual act” of insisting that any Soviet attack on that city be treated as an attack on America itself. Eisenhower refused to let that pass. He did not consider America’s pledge to the defense of Berlin shallow or illusory. Failure to respond with the full might of American forces in the event of a Berlin takeover, he reminded Dulles, would doom the city and then Western Europe. Western security depended on the existence of an American deterrent and the willingness to use it. Eisenhower dreaded the day that such a decision might be his, but he understood that to avoid it, he had to be prepared to order it.
Ike, whose temper could flare at times, this day chose to be gracious even as he was insistent. The discussion, he said, was one of the most important ever to come before the council. And the National Security Council’s strategic paper, known as NSC 5810, was worth all the other policy papers he had read in the past six months. He acknowledged that he and Dulles were on opposite sides of this crucial question and said he expected to keep facing these questions in the future.
And yet there was no mistaking his resolve. Eisenhower’s top command continued to debate details, but Ike had already prevailed. He would not, then or ever, reorient American forces so that they might more easily fight a nuclear war. He would pay a political price. Democrats, including Senator John Kennedy, positioned themselves as the more stalwart cold warriors, more serious than Eisenhower about investing in national security and fighting Communism. They baited him for allowing a “missile gap,” for being too soft on defense. Ike refused to waver. He would check the Soviets where he could, roll back Communism when the opportunity arose, negotiate for arms reductions, fight relentlessly for peace, and construct an astonishing period of prosperity, stability, and freedom. Far from the caricature presented by Childs and others, Eisenhower was certain, resolute, and, though respectful of his advisers, commandingly their boss.
The NSC concluded its business at 11:18 a.m. Ike welcomed the mayor of Duluth and his wife and chatted with them for a few minutes. He conferred with his appointments secretary and a representative of the Secret Service. In the afternoon, he met with a representative of the United Nations on refugee matters, talked with a few aides, then hit a bucket of golf balls on the White House’s South Lawn. At 5:40 p.m., he called it a day.
The next day’s papers contained no hint of the NSC deliberations, barely any reference to Eisenhower at all. Publicly, he had conducted routine business during a quiet day at the White House. Privately, he had committed the United States to his precarious pursuit of peace.
PART ONE
MAKING IKE
By the time he declared his candidacy for president in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower was a formed man, exquisitely prepared for the burdens and the opportunities of the office. No person in the United States had greater experience in leadership, greater knowledge of America’s most important allies, greater grasp of Washington’s most essential institutions. And yet he developed all of those insights and skills outside the realm of politics. Ike constructed them from the lessons of his mother, the patience of his wife, the gallantry of George Patton, the patient tutoring of Fox Conner, the negative example of Douglas MacArthur, the serene leadership of George Marshall, and the wise political tutelage of Herbert Brownell.
Those seven women and men—and the experiences they bestowed upon Eisenhower—made him the person and the leader who would guide America through the 1950s, inheriting a nation at war and leaving one at peace. All of those men and women led lives of their own, some of great consequence, others of humility. Collectively, however, their greatest contribution was that they made Ike.
1
The Lessons of Family
I
da Stover Eisenhower was a woman of special depth—cheerful and sunny, serious and devoted, a dedicated pacifist whose aversion to war was forged in the aftermath of the Civil War, into which Ida was born. Her memories of those days must have been dim—born in 1862, she barely experienced the war itself—but she came of age in Virginia, a land torn to pieces. Ida’s mother died when she was five, her father when she was eleven, leaving her a small inheritance. She was raised by her mother’s father, taught for a time, and then, in 1883, decamped for Kansas and college.
Ida’s determination to get a college degree, so uncommon for a woman of her era, suggests her distinction. She was studious and religious, though hardly doctrinaire. She read Greek and consulted Greek texts of the Bible when she had questions about its commands. As a student at Lane University in Lecompton, Kansas, she met David Jacob Eisenhower, an aspiring engineer of German stock who had come west in 1878. Ida was a year older. They were married on September 23, 1885.
By 1890, David and Ida had two sons, as well as a burden and a grudge. Their wedding present from David’s parents was a 160-acre farm and $2,000, but he had no interest in farming, so he mortgaged the land to his brother-in-law and used the money to open a store in Hope, Kansas. Hard times followed, and as farmers fell behind on their credit, the store suffered, then collapsed when Eisenhower’s business partner stole what little cash there was left. The failure of that enterprise shadowed the Eisenhower family and impressed on David Eisenhower a devotion to frugality; never again would he go into debt or allow his family to borrow a dime.
The loss of his store wounded David, and those around him felt he never quite recovered. Ida was less rattled by the episode but no less resolute. So determined was she to see justice done that she taught herself the law, pining for a confrontation with the ex-partner that never came.
David took his family to Texas, where he secured work as a railroad engineer and tried to rebuild their lives. It was there, in a Texas thunderstorm on October 14, 1890, that Ida gave birth to her third son, David Dwight Eisenhower.
David may have been the family patriarch, but he was a brooding, remote presence, especially in his later years. He administered discipline and provided for his family, but he was serious to the point of being glum. Ida, by contrast, was the steadfast center of a boisterous home. Although she appears dark haired in some pictures, especially as she grew older, her children remembered her as blond and fair. She played the piano and often sang to herself. She was an accomplished baker who cooked as quickly as her sons could eat. She could whack the head off a chicken without remorse, impart gentle bits of wisdom, chuckle over mischief. “I have seldom seen an unsmiling photograph of her,” recalled one of Ike’s brothers.
Religion, too, was at the core of their lives. David Eisenhower was raised as a member of the River Brethren, a Pennsylvania Mennonite sect whose Kansas migration swept along the Eisenhower family. Of the nine River Brethren congregations that settled in Kansas in the 1880s, four were clustered in Dickinson County, where Abilene was located. They nevertheless remained a small sect, never numbering more than six hundred followers in the area. They practiced a firm, devotional faith, with emphasis on the moral value of work, the permanence of marriage, and an aversion to gambling, smoking, and drink. Dinner was followed by readings from the Bible; when members of the family fell ill, their fellow congregants prayed for their recovery. But if religion was central to the Eisenhower home, so was a spirit of inquiry. Though David grew up with the River Brethren, he and his wife dabbled with the Baptists and the Methodists and finally joined the Bible Students, a tiny Mennonite group devoted, as the name suggests, to biblical study.
Ida’s force of will and David’s financial distress combined to create, in some minds, the impression that David was a marginal figure in the Eisenhower home. Ida was indeed a source of great strength. She cared about her values and was entirely devoted to her sons. The slighting of David, however, does him an injustice. Ike recalled his father as a forceful parent, an occasional wielder of the hickory stick against his sons; he fought, usually successfully, to control a brooding temper. “He was not one to be trifled with,” Ike wrote many years later, “unless you were prepared to take the consequences.”
Their stay in Texas was brief. Soon after Dwight was born, the family returned to Kansas, where the Eisenhowers settled first into a small cottage, then into a modest home that they purchased from David’s brother, Ike’s uncle Abe. From that point on, David and Ida and their growing family of boys shared a two-story white clapboard ranch house, most of the boys sharing bedrooms in decidedly tight quarters: the home was 818 square feet, smaller than the office Dwight would eventually occupy as chief of staff of the Army.
Abilene was then, as it is today, a modest post on the Kansas plain, windswept in winter, blazing in summer. Wide porches shielded residents from the sun of the prairie, and dust gathered in the corners of every home. The sun beat down on the wheat that extended for miles in every direction. Shade trees shimmered in the evenings and supplied the switches used to discipline the Eisenhower boys. Floods enriched the soil and occasionally did damage. Cattle thundered through the rail yards, heading for eastern markets.
Though destined for a career of breathtaking consequence, Dwight gave bare indication of such potential in his early years. He jockeyed for position in a home of intense competition. Ida and David ran a formidable household where Ike was one of six brothers. Arthur was the oldest, followed by Edgar, then Ike; Earl, Roy, and Milton were younger. A seventh, Paul, died of diphtheria in infancy. Surrounded, Dwight had to wrestle for an identity. Even his nickname, Little Ike, was a nod to his brother Edgar, known in those years as Big Ike. Nor was school a source of distinction. He was a bright student but hardly a dazzling one. Ike’s math teacher mildly recalled him as “a very capable and interesting boy.” Ike himself recognized his limits. “Baseball, football, boxing were all I wanted to know,” he confessed.
For Little Ike, Abilene was formative in ways both subtle and obvious. He fished and trapped and would remain comfortable sleeping in tents and wading in streams his whole life. He struggled with a powerful temper, once beating his fists until they were bloody because he was denied the right to trick-or-treat with his older brothers. He was fascinated by history, particularly military affairs and leaders. He took to sports and learned to play poker percentages with calculating skill. He assumed his share of responsibility in a working home where the boys made money raising and selling vegetables on a small plot near the house.
Ida rotated chores weekly to avoid fights. She was, among her many other characteristics, intensely devoted to fairness. Late in life, when her middle son had vanquished Hitler’s Germany and earned the gratitude of the free world, Ida was asked what she thought of her “famous son.” Her reply: “Which son do you mean?”
In addition to the family vegetable garden, the boys oversaw a small flock of chickens; they milked the family cow, tended the orchard, washed dishes, cleaned clothes. Among the chores as the boys grew older was cooking, and that, too, left a lasting impression on Ida’s middle son. For the rest of his life, Eisenhower would cook to please family and friends—and to calm his nerves.
Ida would later describe Ike as the most difficult of her six boys, but she handled most flare-ups with equanimity. Problems that reached David were often solved with “the old leather strap,” but Ida “would philosophize … As you thought it over years later, you realized what she had given you.” That was no small feat with young Ike, for the boy manifested at least one outstanding trait: he was magnificently stubborn. One fistfight at age thirteen was destined for the history books not because he won it but because he and his combatant fought to exhaustion; by the time it was over, Ike “couldn’t lift an arm.” And when an infection overwhelmed him and threatened to cost him a leg, even in his delirium, Ike resisted. He enlisted Edgar, Big Ike, to fend off the doctor. Edgar stationed himself at the door to his brother’s room, and Dwight, drifting in and out of consciousness, gritted his teeth and toughed it out. Finally, on what the doctor judged as the last opportunity to save him, they painted the young boy’s body with carbolic acid. Ike screamed, but it stopped the creeping infection. The leg and the boy were saved.
Eisenhower in those years acquired an enduring and endearing folksiness, one that would ground his achievements in a solid sense of home. Take, for instance, the notes he appended to his final memoir. Among them: his stirring 1945 Guildhall address in London and his recipe for vegetable soup. And Abilene, too, supplied lessons and imagery of the Old West. In his later years, when Ike would visit home, he would often stop by the grave of Tom Smith, the town marshal in its wilder days, axed to death by local outlaws in 1870, just twenty years before Ike was born. Smith, his gravestone reads, was a “martyr to duty … who in cowboy chaos established the supremacy of law.” Eisenhower extended a schoolboy fascination with Smith into a lifelong admiration. He loved the romance, the triumph of order, the paean to duty. From it was born, among other things, a devotion to Westerns.