#34 Dwight D. Eisenhower : We All Like Ike Because He Liked it That Way

Eisenhower: Soldier and President by Stephen E. Ambrose, 1990.

As a lifelong Kansan, I wanted to be overwhelmed by our favorite son, Eisenhower.  And there is so much to like and respect about the man.  He is credited with the reemergence of fiscal conservatism and the republican party after a generation under

Roosevelt and Truman. However, in light of today’s party extremism, he is now considered a moderate.  And while he had few major accomplishments for his eight years in office, he still ranks in the top third of presidents based on the high respect people have for the man personally and the idolized image of the stability and prosperity of the 1950’s. 

So everyone still likes Ike, even today.

Every Kansas kid visits here in Abilene

Dwight was born in 1890 in Denton, TX but his family moved to Abilene, KS before he was two years old.  He father was a mechanic at a dairy and worked very hard to support the family which grew to include six boys.  They were devout Mennonites and strict but loving with their kids.  Dwight was always close with his brothers, especially Milton who became a career diplomat. When Dwight got a massive infection in his leg during his

Making my son Caleb appreciate Ike!

freshman year, he almost died and the doctor wanted to amputate it even though Dwight refused.  So his brother Edger laid in front of the door to stop the doctor from entering and Dwight recovered slowly.  The boys were tough and competitive with each other, leading Dwight to be a star football and baseball player in school.  He was an average student but very popular and good-looking, with a big grin and bright blue eyes.  He wanted to play football in college but was not really big enough to get a scholarship.  So a friend convinced him to take the exam to go to the Naval Academy.  However, his score was only good enough to get into West Point and off he went.

Odd stance for a running back

Dwight enjoyed West Point and played varsity football, until a horrible knee injury ended his playing days.  Dwight’s academic ranking fell from the middle of the class to near the bottom as he was so depressed.  However, he became the coach of the junior varsity football team and a cheerleader and that turned it all around.  He was good at encouraging his team and gaining their respect, future general skills.

Wedding pic, he is a hunk.

After he graduated in 1915, he was stationed in Texas and met 18-year-old Mamie Doud, from a wealthy family. Mamie was a bit spoiled, having grown up with a private maid. However, she worked hard to support him as a military wife but never really learned to cook.  The Eisenhowers moved 35 times in the first 35 years of their marriage.  Their first son, Dwight Doud was nicknamed Icky, but he died at the age of 4 from scarlet fever, an illness that also impacted Mamie and made her health always somewhat fragile. While they did have one other child, a son John, the loss of Icky was never forgotten and he is buried with them in Abilene. 

My favorite quote from Mamie is when she said no woman over the age of 50 should have to get out of bed before noon. She would sit in her bed half the day, dictating to her staff from her “Mamie pink” princess bed.

When World War One broke out, Ike was a captain in charge of training recruits in the use of a new weapon, the tank! Thousands of men passed through his training center and the army would not let him leave it to go to the front lines.  Finally, in 1918, Ike was set to go to France but the war ended. 

Ike is often stuck between Patton and Bradley

After WW1, Ike was sent to Panama as a chief of staff for a general and several other postings.   He also became good friends with George Patton and Omar Bradley, a former classmate at West Point. Eventually he was made a major and was sent to work at the war dept in Washington DC. 

Eisenhower disliked working for MacArthur

 Ike was then assigned to work for General Douglass MacArthur as his chief of staff.  Eisenhower described him as “a peculiar fellow” and he frequently clashed with the publicity hound, MacArthur during their almost 10 years together.  Five years of that time were spent in the Philippines trying to train and strengthen their army against the budding Japanese threat.  Eisenhower was miserable there; Mamie was frequently ill and he asked many times for MacArthur to let him transfer stateside. MacArthur thought he was irreplaceable and would not let him leave. 

Finally in 1939, he returned to the states to command a battalion and was promoted to colonel.  When the war broke out, he went to Washington to work directly with George Marshall, the Army chief of staff.  His hard work and ability to get along with everyone, especially the prickly British General Montgomery, caused Marshall to promote him to General and make him the US commander in Europe.  The British insisted on invading North Africa, Sicily then Italy.  While allied victories occurred, they were slow and costly, especially in Italy. Eisenhower’s cautious approach was intensified by his frequent need to push Montgomery to speed up his advances.

Roosevelt appointed Ike as Supreme Commander of Allied Europe Forces for three main reasons. First, he had the most experience in organizing major offensives using multiple nations, like the North Africa campaign.  Second, he was the only man who seemed to work well and be liked/respected by Churchill, DeGaulle and the Soviet General Zhukov. Third, his ability to deal with the temperaments of Patton and Bradley was crucial.   Eisenhower’s ability to coordinate so many plans with such a vast and diverse group far exceed any military genius of strategy that he possessed. His insistence on the massive use of air power and his choice of the date of the D-Day invasion were perhaps his greatest direct contributions.  However, his failure to push for Berlin and allow the Russians to take it first, was probably the worst decision he made.

Ike with the troops, wearing the Eisenhower jacket. He always asked if anyone was from Kansas.

After the war Eisenhower continued to be the military overseer of Germany but by 1945 he returned to serve as the Army Chief of Staff for Truman, replacing Marshall. Truman offered to hand the Democratic presidential nomination to Eisenhower for the 1948 election and offered to serve as Ike’s vice president.   Eisenhower insisted for many years he had no interest in the presidency, in fact no one even knew what party he would pick.  But he began to hang around almost exclusively with a group of very wealthy republicans who helped him get a job as the president of Columbia University in 1949. 

Ike was rude to Truman.

When the US joined the Korean War in 1950, Eisenhower was sent to Europe to be the commander of NATO- a post he loved.  However, he was frustrated by the lack of funding and troops the US and other nations would commit to NATO. Also, Eisenhower’s insistence that the German military needed to participate in NATO to hold back the Soviets angered the French and Brits.  In 1951, his gang of wealthy friends started making a serious push for him to run for president.  When Truman submitted a budget with a huge deficit in February 1952, that seemed to be what made Ike decide to run as a Republican.

Ike: "Dick , your name fits you!"

Ike ran on a platform of balancing the budget and getting the troops out of Korea. Nixon was selected as his running mate to add some youth to the ticket (at 62 Ike would be the oldest president) and to appeal to the western states, even though Ike was not really a big fan of Nixon.  He also had to walk a fine line between looking tough on communism without being pulled into the McCarthy witch-hunt by the far-right Republicans.  Eisenhower won easily over Adlai Stevenson but his harsh campaign rhetoric about Truman ruined any sort of relationship.

Ike’s consistent goal was always to have a balanced budget, a difficult task when both parties wanted to massively increase defense spending on nuclear weapons during the cold war.  Ike did oversee a massive build up of ICBMs but managed to reduce other

military expenses. Ike knew that the use of nuclear weapons would

just lead to our own destruction.  His refusal to use them at anytime and his attempts to limit testing and set arms limits with the Soviets was an impressive accomplishment considering how many times he was advised to use them against China. Instead he greatly increased more covert methods, expanding the use of the CIA worldwide.

Eisenhower oversaw a truce with North Korea even though he was the first to use the “Domino theory” about the fall of countries to communism. Only his own military and personal reputation could make this solution not feel like a defeat.  But it just postponed this problem to our current times. 

Relations with the Soviets continued to get worse during his terms due to the U2 spy plane scandal and the Soviet launch of Sputnik. With all the worry over communism, Ike refused to openly confront Joe McCarthy,who he personally hated.  Ike thought McCarthy would just fade out if he was ignored.  This lack of action by Ike just allowed McCarthy to run amok for years and launch attacks on friends like Marshall and Bradley. In fact, critics have called Ike’s presidency, “the great postponement” as Ike liked to avoid conflicts, a reason that everyone liked him.

Ike’s creation of the Interstate highway system and the post war economic boom, (while not a direct result of anything he actually did) made him even more popular.  And he refused to cut taxes unless spending was cut an equal amount... I love this idea! However, his greatest failure as president was his refusal to  actively endorse or support civil rights legislation and desegregation.  Ike needed the support of southern democrats on many issues in congress and would not upset them.  Until the federal govt was forced to intervene in Little Rock, he was very non-committal and tried to avoid the issue saying it was up to the states.  His own views on race were pretty bad by today’s standards. However, he inadvertently did one of the best things ever for civil rights when he appointed Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Eisenhower was always very active playing golf, hunting, fishing but for most of his life was a chain smoker with up to four packs per day. (He played golf 150 times a year as president- WHAT!) However, he had a large heart attack in 1955 that sidelined him from running the country for months and then a mild stroke in 1957 in his second term.  Eisenhower’s wishy-washy support for Nixon contributed to Nixon's loss to Kennedy in 1960.

After his presidency, he and Mamie retired to their farm in Gettysburg.

Ike had been catered to for so many years he did not know how to make a phone call, pay a toll or by clothes at a store.  He made a lot of money writing his memoirs and continued to advise presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon on foreign and military issues. He supervised the creation of the Eisenhower library and burial site in Abilene.  In the 1968 election he was more vocal in his support of Nixon and his grandson soon married Julie Nixon.

By April 1968 Ike had experienced his third major heart attack and knew his heart was failing. He continued to become more frail and died March of 1969 with Mamie and his son John by his side.  She survived ten years after his death.

Ike's ability to hold down military spending  and to foresee the rise of the powerful "military industrial complex" is almost spooky.  One of his greatest worries about his predecessors was  that "Some day there is going to be a man sitting in my present chair who has not been raised in the military services and who will have little understanding of where slashes in their estimates can be made with little or no damage.  If that should happen while we still have the state of tension that now exists in the world, I shudder to think of what could happen to this country."  WOW, this sounds like almost every president since Ike.

Ike would be horrified at our current debt, tax cuts, $700 billion military budget, and lack of dignity in politics. 

Another accurate prophecy.