by Jim Newton
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.
An appreciation of history and the outdoors, self-reliance, and ruddy athleticism were among the traits Ike learned in Abilene—along with a fierce will and a clumsy way with women—but what may have most shaped him in those early years were his lessons in moderation, the skill he developed as a boy to navigate between powerful forces, to fight his way past school-yard bullies, and to claim a place in his crowded home of brothers. It is no coincidence that the architect of the “middle way” grew up smack in the middle of six strong boys, their passions channeled by a patient mother.
Two other memories of Abilene influenced Ike in fact and legend. A battle with a stubborn goose as a five-year-old ended when his uncle armed him with a broom handle. The lesson: “Never … negotiate with an adversary except from a position of strength.” At school, meanwhile, Ike appreciated that students were summoned back from recess with a drum, a system that promoted “quiet, orderly movement … The drum communicates a message and calms as it warns. The siren is an assault on the senses.” He would always favor steadiness and order and be repelled by the shrill or abrupt.
David and Ida Eisenhower wished for their sons to acquire an education and, with it, prosperous careers; David mercilessly beat Edgar one day when he discovered that Edgar had been skipping school to work in a local doctor’s office. Despite occasional setbacks, however, the hopes of the Eisenhower parents were largely realized, as most of their sons pursued higher education. Arthur left home at fifteen and was one of two who did not attend college, but he became a successful banker anyway; Edgar went on to be a lawyer (that irritated his father, too; neither Ida nor David Eisenhower liked lawyers); Earl worked in journalism, radio, and newspapers; Milton, whom his brother liked to refer to as the brains of the family, compiled a distinguished career in academia, capped by the presidency of Johns Hopkins University. Roy also avoided college but worked as a druggist; he died young, too soon to see the crowning moments of Dwight’s career in Europe and the United States.
The Eisenhower brothers differed in looks and dispositions: Arthur and Roy were dark haired, Edgar and Milton were slightly fairer, Ike was blond, and Earl was a redhead; Arthur, Roy, and Milton were easygoing; Edgar, Earl, and Ike were “hot-tempered and quarrelsome.” Edgar was a cranky conservative and Milton an elegant liberal, and they often jostled for their middle brother’s ear; Milton almost always prevailed.
If Ike’s mother raised him and brothers enveloped him, still another source of sustenance was his friends. In those years and across the decades to come, one particularly meaningful chum was a strapping young man from Abilene, the imposing
but shy son of a town doctor. Everett Hazlett, known to Ike as Swede, had gone off to military school and returned to Abilene with a determination to win an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy; Hazlett’s signature contribution to the history of his nation was that he persuaded Ike to join him. Ike in those days was working nights and had concocted a plan with Edgar to spot each other through college: Little Ike worked for two years at a local creamery to help pay Big Ike’s way, at which point Edgar was to take time off to subsidize Dwight. That promised, however, to be a protracted undertaking, and when Ike first learned of the military academies, he was especially drawn by the prospect of a free education.
Taken with the idea and prodded by Hazlett, he spent several hours each afternoon huddled with Swede studying for the entrance examination for Annapolis. He solicited letters of support from friends and neighbors—discovering in the process the great esteem with which many Abilene residents regarded his parents—but then was chagrined to learn that by the time he would be ready to enter the academy, he would be too old to be admitted. Fortunately, the examination for West Point was nearly identical to that for Annapolis, and when the tests were tallied, Ike finished first among the Annapolis candidates and second among those applying to West Point. The leading West Point contender failed the physical, and Ike secured his appointment.
His mother, who had stoically accepted this turn of events despite her steadfast pacifism, was now forced to acknowledge that her third son was embarked on a military life. On a June day in 1911, he boarded the train with a single suitcase and headed east. Ida and David saw him off, then returned home. Ida entered the bathroom and closed the door behind her. From outside, Milton listened as, for the first time in his life, he heard his mother cry.
It was a Sunday afternoon in October 1915 when Lieutenant Eisenhower, the officer of the day, was making his inspection of the base at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. Eisenhower was on his first assignment since graduating that spring from West Point. He took his duties seriously.
He was nonplussed when the wife of a major interrupted his rounds and called him over to introduce him to a young woman. At first, Eisenhower brusquely declined. But she persisted, and within moments Ike was face-to-face with a sparkling brunette, still a teenager, daintily feminine in a pair of beige lace-up boots and equipped with what Eisenhower would later describe as “clear blue eyes that were full of impertinence.” Despite her uncomfortable shoes and distaste for walking, Mamie Geneva Doud joined the strapping young officer on his rounds. The attraction was immediate for both. They had dinner that night and again about ten days later.
Dwight Eisenhower in 1915, the Eisenhower whom Mamie Doud met that fall, was at a juncture familiar to many young men. Newly graduated into the world, he was ambitious and alert to his potential. He craved adventure, imagined himself a leader, was groomed for command. And yet he also was a bit of a prankster, and having grown up with six brothers and been educated at West Point, he was barely accustomed to the company of women.
Ike had managed to be both average and memorable at West Point. He was a modest student, and his athletic career, highlighted by a briefly successful effort to shut down the great Jim Thorpe, ended with a knee injury suffered during a 1912 football game against Tufts. He was disconsolate after the injury, bored with his studies, lethargic. “The fellows that used to call me ‘Sunny Jim’ call me ‘Gloomy Face’ now,” he wrote in 1913. He considered dropping out, but friends convinced him to stay. He took up smoking, to his later regret.
And his stubbornness cost him. Try as they might, Army bosses could never convince Ike of the importance of a tidy barracks. He racked up his share of demerits, more than his share in fact, as he qualified as one of the school’s legendary “century men,” so named because he spent more than a hundred hours marching off penalties for various infractions. They ranged from messy rooms to showing up late for parades or meals to “smiling in ranks at drill after being corrected” to violating Special Order 106, the section proscribing inappropriate dancing. Still, after his freshman year, he ranked fifty-seventh overall in his class under the “Order of General Merit,” with an especially high ranking in his best subject, English, where he ranked tenth. That was a respectable showing in a class of 212. As the class dwindled, Ike’s ranking fell, drawn down by his demerits—he finished sixty-sixth overall in a class of 168—and he managed to finish an unimpressive 125th in terms of conduct.
As his class standings made clear, Eisenhower was not preoccupied with his studies, nor was he committed to exemplary behavior. He was, however, a gregarious classmate, a solid athlete, and a joker. He developed a parlor trick that took advantage of his physical strength: he would bend his elbows and place his hands inches in front of his chest, then pitch face forward to the floor, stopping himself just before his nose crashed to the ground. Generations of soldiers would be treated to Ike’s gag.
Ike completed his studies in early 1915, graduating as part of the “class the stars fell on,” because so many of its graduates went on to become generals. His yearbook entry, prepared by a classmate, pokes fun at Eisenhower—weirdly, it calls him “the terrible Swedish-Jew” and teases him about his self-image as “the handsomest man in the Corps.” In contrast to the serious encomiums to his classmates, Ike’s entry reads as one playfully ribbing a man who can take it. On February 17, 1915, Eisenhower was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He requested to be stationed in the Philippines, the only member of his class to ask for that exotic posting, but instead was assigned to Fort Sam Houston. Before shipping out, Ike detoured home for the summer.
Through his West Point years, Ike carried on a flirtation with one Abilene girl, Ruby Norman, swapping stories from school and home and occasionally complaining of homesickness. Home between assignments in 1915, however, he transferred his affections to Gladys Harding, who was something more than a playful pal. They attended a picture show and enjoyed a summer of shows and concerts, riding and swimming, the occasional beer. They saw The Bawlerout and The Outcast, and Ike dazzled Gladys by appearing one evening in his dress whites.
Other girls hovered, too. Ruby worried Gladys, but Ike reassured her that Ruby “never gives me a thought, except as a good friend.” Infatuation turned to love, or at least what seemed like love to a young man and woman, especially as their summer drew to a close.
“Girl, I do love you,” Ike wrote in August, “and I want you to know it—to be as certain of it as I am—and to believe in me and trust me as you would your dad.” Ike was up late that night, smoking, wondering whether his feelings were reciprocated, dreading the moment when he had to ship out. “Sept. 1st seems so fearfully close tonight. This parting is going to be the hardest so far in my life.”
But Gladys was determined to pursue a career in music, and Ike had his orders. The end of summer thus meant their separation, and both approached it with dread and longing. By the time Ike had to leave for his first Army posting, Gladys described their farewell as a “sad parting.” It was, she sighed to her diary, “Love.”
They corresponded emotionally through the fall, pining and moony. “Sweet girl of mine,” Ike addressed her. But summer loves will fade. Their romance melted away as Eisenhower settled into his new life in Texas.
Mamie was another matter. From the start, Ike was smitten. Regarded as the prettiest of her four sisters, Mamie was well-off and slightly spoiled. Her father ran a meatpacking business so successful that he was believed to be a millionaire—he owned a car in 1904, the first man in Colorado Springs to be able to afford one. Birthdays and other holidays were extravagantly observed in the Doud home, money and jewelry lavishly bestowed. Although Mamie’s father, John Sheldon Doud, was a rugged man, he and his wife, Elvira Carlson, gave birth to small, somewhat frail daughters. Mamie’s older sister, Eleanor, was particularly weak and required nurses from the time she was eight; Mamie, though stronger, herself developed a rheumatic heart as a young girl. Worried for their health, John Doud moved
his family from Colorado Springs to the lower elevation of Denver and annually shipped them to San Antonio for the warmer winter.
Mamie had expectations of her new beau, and Ike did his best. He courted her with martial doggedness and flashes of generosity and creativity. He was still in debt from borrowing to buy his first uniforms, so he subsidized his courtship by playing poker to boost his income and skimped where he could. He stopped buying premade cigarettes and returned to rolling his own. That freed up a little cash, and he tried to keep his outings with Mamie affordable, often taking her to a local Tex-Mex restaurant or vaudeville house (more than fifty years later, Ike could still recall the price of a tamale at the Original). Economies such as those allowed him to indulge Mamie now and again, notably with an engraved, heart-shaped silver jewelry box at Christmas, an extravagant gift from a man making $147 a month—and to a girl to whom he was not yet engaged.
The romance between Ike and Mamie moved swiftly as she dropped other suitors to concentrate on him, preferring his sturdy military bearing to the less serious rivals for her attention. By Valentine’s Day 1916, he was bold enough to propose, giving her a copy of his West Point class ring, a bulky piece that she nevertheless happily wore on her delicate hand. Ike formally asked John Doud for permission to wed his daughter, and Doud, despite some reservations about Eisenhower’s ability to support a family, consented, initially with the caveat that he wanted to postpone the wedding until the fall, when Mamie would be twenty. Instead, the brewing conflict with Mexico stirred anxiety that Ike might be deployed in combat, and the two were married at noon on July 1, 1916. Mamie’s father escorted her down the stairs of the family home and to the fireplace altar. There were no attendants, and the service was brief. Afterward, Ike tried to commemorate the event by preserving Mamie’s bouquet in wax; it melted.
