Eisenhower (6 page)

There, on August 3, Mamie gave birth to John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower. Ike arrived just in time. Mamie went into labor late at night, and Ike, trying not to wake the neighbors, rolled the car to the end of the driveway before starting it. Nervous and hurrying, he stepped on the gas, but the car would not move. “Ike,” Mamie implored, “you have to start the ignition.”

Nothing would ever erase the memory of Icky’s short, loving life, but John would occupy his own place in his parents’ hearts. He grew to be a clever boy, willful and headstrong, the spitting image of his older brother. There would always remain a shadow of grief—as well as a residue of distance between Ike and Mamie and a veiled sense that John would fulfill not only his own destiny but that of his departed brother. But now, too, there was joy and family. Mamie returned to Panama with their son.

It did not last long. Charged with raising a baby even as her husband was increasingly absorbed in his work and tutelage under Conner, Mamie lost weight and grew frantic. The jungle pressed in, the insects and bats hovered and intruded. She worried over John—surely, she could not survive the loss of a second son. She could not sleep. Conner’s wife, Virginia, watched with concern as Ike and Mamie seemed to drift apart. Finally, Mamie announced that she was leaving. Ike begged her to reconsider, pleading so fervently that she never forgot—though never recorded—his desperate attempt to hold on to her.

Once home, she regained her strength and reconsidered. Mamie, with John, at last returned to Panama. This time, it stuck. She took to riding to have time with her husband, he gave her a tea set, and they hosted regular dinner parties. “Am finally getting Ike housebroken again,” Mamie reported happily to her parents.

Panama thus marked a crisis and recovery in the Eisenhower marriage. It also brought Ike some of his greatest professional satisfaction. He and Conner explored the jungle and roamed the margins of the canal. As they rode and camped, Conner painstakingly broadened his charge’s horizons, drawing out Ike with soft questions, posed in his Mississippi drawl. “He gave the appearance of being leisurely,” Eisenhower recalled.

Conner kept a learned library, deep in military history and classics—Shakespeare, Clausewitz, Plato, Tacitus, Nietzsche, Generals Grant and Sheridan, and many other accounts of the Civil War. He doled his books out to Eisenhower. Ike devoured them and, with Conner’s help, extrapolated their meanings. Conner advocated the integration of technology, emphasized intelligence and logistics, stressed readiness as a means of deterrence.

Conner made Ike read Clausewitz’s
On War
three times, and the message finally stuck. Clausewitz’s analysis of military conquest and integrated command and his emphasis on the need for tactical flexibility and the centrality of political calculations in military planning all found expression in the presidency of the young man who studied him between the wars. Decades later, President Eisenhower would quote Clausewitz to his national security advisers and note his significance at work in areas as far-flung as the continuity of civilian-military leadership and the implications of war fighting in a nuclear era, when, as Clausewitz observed, the decisive goal would be to defeat not an enemy’s capacity to fight but rather his will to do so. Military historians tend to divide between those who admire Napoleon and those who follow Clausewitz. Eisenhower, his son observed later, was “Clausewitz all the way.”

Conner was a uniquely gifted tutor, patient and prescient—and practical as well. He foresaw that Germany would not be held down forever, that another war would test Europe before long. To defeat a resurgent Germany, Conner understood, would require a new type of Allied response, a union of nations willing to fight under a unified command, an excruciatingly difficult undertaking for independent nations, even those fighting for their lives. Conner knew it would be difficult. “Dealing with the enemy is a simple and straightforward matter when contrasted with securing close cooperation with an ally,” he wrote. “America should, if she ever indulges in the doubtful luxury of entering another coalition, advocate the establishment of a Supreme War Council, coincident with entering a war with allies.”

It was in those long, pleasant sessions, a fire to warm them in Conner’s quarters or beneath a tropical night sky, that Eisenhower made a leap of intellect, the refinement of a serious, intelligent officer into a wise one. Conner would leave soon, and Eisenhower was relieved to exit Panama as well once it no longer had the attraction of the general. But in their time together, Conner created the foundation for the officer and politician that Eisenhower would become. Conner received in Panama a grief-stricken, promising, but still somewhat shallow officer; he sent back to the United States a man who could lead an army.

Eisenhower never questioned the debt he owed. On July 4, 1942, two weeks after arriving in Britain, he surveyed the challenges of unifying the Allies for war with Germany and recalled Conner’s lessons. “More and more in the last few days my mind has turned back to you and to the days when I was privileged to serve intimately under your wise counsel and leadership,” Eisenhower wrote to his mentor. “I cannot tell you how much I would appreciate, at this moment, an opportunity for an hour’s discussion with you.”

The following year, with fighting fierce in Italy and along the eastern front, with D-day six months away, Ike paused briefly on the day after Christmas to write to Conner’s wife. He inquired about the old general’s health and reminisced about those formative days in Panama: “I still long for opportunities to sit down with him in front of a wood fire and discuss this damnable business of war.” There was no doubt about the degree of Conner’s mark upon his protégé. “Outside of my parents,” Eisenhower reflected late in his life, “no one influenced me as much.”

Of Eisenhower’s military mentors, none would occupy such a complicated place in his life as General Douglas MacArthur. Like Conner, MacArthur was incisive. Like Patton, he was theatrical. But MacArthur’s explosions of brilliance, his undeniable daring, reinforced a profound arrogance that made him not just arresting but dangerous. Conner was the mentor who enlightened young Eisenhower; MacArthur was the one who warned him, by example.

MacArthur was a gigantic personality, a renowned alumnus of West Point, overbearing, and commandingly self-assured. He had a stunning memory—Ike recalled that MacArthur could look over a speech or memorandum and immediately recite large portions of it from memory. MacArthur often spoke of himself in the third person and insisted that his headquarters, wherever they were located, bear his name.

MacArthur displayed his ego early in Ike’s time with him. The occasion was an infamous confrontation, the Bonus March of 1932. With the Depression deepening and broadening that year, veterans of World War I demanded bonuses that had been promised them for their service. The terms of that bonus, approved by Congress in 1924 over the veto of President Coolidge, allowed payments to veterans of the war but deferred the full bonus until 1945, a condition that seemed punitive to those veterans cast out of work by the Depression. In protest, they descended on Washington that May, their gathering mass a source of fear and threat to the Hoover administration, which moved ambivalently: Hoover tried to protect the rights of the marchers and even secretly slipped them supplies, but he also resisted their entreaties for aid. As thousands of bedraggled men set up tents in and just outside of Washington, clashes with police produced a few casualties and, among those inclined to imagine anarchy, raised the specter of an ominous challenge to order.

After the Washington, D.C., police department forcibly evicted the protesters from an abandoned set of Washington office buildings, Hoover ordered the Army to push the marchers away from the Capitol but to refrain from following them across the river, where more were camped. Eisenhower urged MacArthur to delegate the matter—it was, Ike thought, unseemly for the chief of staff to move on ragged marchers. MacArthur ignored him. Instead, he donned his uniform and ordered Eisenhower to do so as well—Ike had to scurry home to get it.

The troops under MacArthur’s command pushed the marchers out of the buildings and toward the bridges leading away from Washington. As they approached, an order arrived from the White House reiterating Hoover’s message of restraint: “Don’t allow any of our troops to go across the Anacostia bridge.” Eisenhower hailed MacArthur, but the general refused to listen. “I don’t want to hear them, and I don’t want to see them,” he said of the orders the messenger carried. “Get him away.” Instead, MacArthur ordered his troops to follow the veterans across the bridge, and on the other side the encampments burst into flame. “It was a very pitiful scene,” Eisenhower recalled, “these ragged, discouraged people burning their own little things.” Eisenhower, having advised MacArthur not to lead the troops himself and having been ignored, now advised MacArthur to decline comment. He was ignored again. MacArthur met with the press and sealed his place as the symbol of the attack on the marchers.

“That mob was a very angry looking one,” he told reporters that evening. “It was animated by the essence of revolution.” The elimination of the marchers was necessary, he added, because “they came to the conclusion that they were about to take over in some way either direct control or indirect control of the Government.” That was absurd: twenty thousand ratty veterans, even with a few radicals among them, stood no chance of overthrowing the U.S. government, even in 1932. But it accurately captured MacArthur’s megalomania and his paranoia. MacArthur saw radicals in those shabby shanties on either side of the Potomac River. Eisenhower saw desperate men, veterans who had served their country and wanted promised compensation for it. In New York, the ambitious young governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, listened to the radio reports of the rout and came to his own conclusion: Hoover, FDR decided, had just lost the 1932 election.

Many of the nation’s newspapers defended MacArthur, not just in big cities, but in small towns across the country. The
Indianapolis News
predicted it would instill “a new pride in [the] federal structure,” and the
Santa Cruz Sentinel
faulted authorities only for waiting so long. Ike was not deceived, and press coverage gradually soured as details of the rout were revealed. Eisenhower knew better than to break publicly with his commanding officer, but he had seen what he had seen.

In 1935, as MacArthur concluded his tenure as chief of staff, Eisenhower looked forward to leaving the Pentagon and receiving a command of his own, a return to leading troops rather than aiding a great man. MacArthur, however, was invited to command the construction of the army for the newly independent Philippines. He accepted and insisted that Ike join him. Twenty years after requesting the Philippines upon graduation from West Point, Eisenhower now received the belated assignment. Reluctantly, he went.

By the time Eisenhower shipped out to the Philippines in the final days of 1935, he recognized that he was entering the higher ranks of history. He began to keep a journal, and though his attention to it was sporadic, it marks the first evidence of an emerging self-awareness, of a sense that his was a story worth recording. It also supplies a convincing counterargument to the later contention that Eisenhower was clumsy with words. It is a direct and graceful document, not exactly introspective, but self-critical and occasionally deep. It records his admiration for MacArthur’s ability alongside his increasing skepticism of MacArthur’s integrity. In May 1936, Ike remarked on a decision made “quite suddenly” with unexpected effects on their mission. A few months later, Eisenhower noted MacArthur’s vacillation over the acceptance of a Filipino military title and observed the general’s reaction to the offer: “He is tickled pink—and feels he’s made a lot of ‘face’ locally.” By the fall of 1936, bemusement had grown to outright critique, as Eisenhower complained of a “bawling out” over a difference of opinion with MacArthur regarding the coming presidential election, in which MacArthur had become convinced that Alf Landon was a shoo-in to defeat Roosevelt. When Ike and a colleague disagreed, MacArthur responded with an “almost hysterical condemnation of our stupidity.” Eisenhower’s diary entry for that day concludes with the universal lament of the subordinate in the service of an unworthy boss: “Oh hell.”

The relationship between Eisenhower and MacArthur stretched over decades and defies glib synopsis. Their correspondence is a study in guardedness, with Eisenhower frequently writing to flatter his former boss and complain that reporters had fabricated enmity between them. Invariably, MacArthur shrugged off the suggestions of discord or jealousy as his former subordinate claimed an ever more prominent role in the life of the nation. No matter how much Ike disavowed those reports, however, they captured his essential view of MacArthur: he was, in Eisenhower’s estimation, startlingly vain and alarmingly contemptuous of command. Eisenhower similarly was flabbergasted at MacArthur’s willingness to casually blame his subordinates for his own mistakes. “He had an obsession that a high commander must protect his public image at all costs and must never admit his wrongs,” Eisenhower said in 1967.

The Eisenhowers weathered the Philippine years together. John spent much of his youth in the islands. He was a successful Boy Scout and shared the unair-conditioned hotel suite with his parents, absorbing military culture and eventually finding his steps within his father’s. Thus, by the time Washington summoned Ike home, he was a proud father and a seasoned senior officer. It was with his son that Eisenhower shared his most considered thoughts on leadership, those acquired from the likes of Conner, Patton, and MacArthur.

“The best leadership and the finest relationship with associates, superior[s] and subordinates does not demand theatrics,” he wrote to John decades later, and one hears “MacArthur,” though his name is unmentioned. “On the contrary, honest straight-forward bearing of responsibility both for self and for subordinate, complete self-control in spite of any circumstances that put a strain on moral or physical stamina, and a human or even humorous relationship with men—are the qualities on which an enduring value and reputation are founded.”