Once he was accepted for Leavenworth, Ike began to worry whether he was qualified. He had not attended the Infantry School at Fort Benning, normally a prerequisite for line officers, and CGSS had the reputation of being hypercompetitive. Leavenworth was the Army’s eye of the needle. Those who did well usually went on to higher command; those who did poorly fell by the wayside. As doubt got the better of him, Eisenhower wrote Fox Conner to ask how he could best prepare for the ordeal.
Conner reassured him. “You may not know it,” he wrote Ike, “but because of your three years’ work in Panama, you are far better trained and ready for Leavenworth than anybody I know. You will feel no sense of inferiority.”70 Armed with Conner’s encouragement, Ike asked George Patton for his notes from his year at CGSS—Patton stood 25th of 248 officers in the Class of 1923–24. According to Mamie, “He studied them to tatters.”71 Eisenhower also obtained copies of lesson plans and problems from previous years and worked through them, checking his answers against the approved solutions. After a month of intense effort, Ike discovered that Conner was right. The work came easily and he enjoyed it.72
Eisenhower reported to Leavenworth in August 1925—one of 245 field-grade officers selected by the War Department to attend an eleven-month course on the problems of military command. Because he was senior to most of his classmates (his date of rank reflected his prior service as a lieutenant colonel), he and Mamie were assigned a spacious four-bedroom apartment in what eventually became the post’s VIP quarters rather than in the cramped accommodations provided for most student families. Mamie flourished in that environment, and although Ike was busy around the clock, the earlier marital tensions disappeared. Mamie had matured since Panama, and as Susan Eisenhower put, “She had now passed muster as a real army wife.”73
The Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth was one of the first postgraduate schools in America to employ the case method, and the curriculum was designed to discover not only who had mastered the material, but who could function and survive under severe stress. In battle, exhausted men are required to think and act under extreme pressure, and Leavenworth replicated that. Classes began at eight-thirty and lasted until noon. Afternoons were devoted to solving hypothetical problems. The problems were the core of the curriculum, and a clear head was essential. “If you are mentally fatigued or too stuffed up with facts and figures, it is almost certain a poor mark will result,” Eisenhower wrote.74 “I established a routine that limited my night study to two hours and a half; from seven to nine-thirty. Mamie was charged with the duty of seeing that I got to bed on time.”75
Students were encouraged to form study groups and most did. Eisenhower thought group study too cumbersome and time-consuming, and chose instead to work through the problems with an old friend from the 19th Infantry at Fort Sam Houston, Leonard Gerow. Gerow shared Eisenhower’s intensity. He had finished first in his class at the Infantry School, and his wife and Mamie were close friends of long standing. Evening after evening Ike and Gerow met in the upstairs war room Eisenhower had established in his apartment and gamed their way through the next day’s exercise. When the course ended in June 1926, Eisenhower finished first and Gerow second, separated by two-tenths of a percentage point.
“Congratulations,” wrote George Patton. “You are kind to think my notes helped you, though I feel sure that you would have done as well without them. If a man thinks war long enough it is bound to affect him in a good way.”76
Shortly after he graduated from Leavenworth, Eisenhower summarized his impressions for the adjutant general. The essay was subsequently published anonymously in the Infantry Journal.77 Ike sought to demystify the Command and General Staff School and provide advice for future students: Use common sense; don’t magnify the importance of insignificant details; don’t worry about bygones; and keep it simple. “Remember that Napoleon’s battle plans are among the simplest that history records.” Focus, common sense, simplicity, and attitude—the recipe for Ike’s success.
* * *
a The fact that Patton did not enter West Point through the competitive process should not belie his academic credentials. In 1903 he took the entrance examination for Princeton and was admitted to the Class of 1907, although he chose to attend VMI instead. Blumenson, 1 Patton Papers 57.
b Patton finished fifth in the modern pentathlon at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. The five events included pistol (25 m), swimming (300 m), fencing, mounted steeplechase (5,000 m), and a distance run (4,000 m). The Stockholm Olympics (the Fifth Olympiad) were attended by four thousand athletes, including the first women, representing twenty-eight countries.
c Because of the animosity between Pershing and March, Secretary Baker, with congressional approval, had retained the AEF headquarters as an independent entity in Washington with Pershing in command. That permitted Pershing to continue on active duty without having to report to March, and it relieved March of the burden of issuing orders to a general who outranked him.
d The old Army’s concern for a precise accounting of every expenditure paid enormous dividends in World War II and Korea, where there was scarcely an incident of financial malfeasance or excess profits. As a young artillery lieutenant during the Korean conflict, I remember well my battalion executive officer, Major Ejner J. Fulsang, reminding me: “Smith, if you take care of the nickels and dimes, the dollars will take care of themselves.”
e When Pershing returned to the United States in 1919, and following a round of gala receptions in Washington and New York, he spent three weeks of vacation in isolation with the Conners at the twenty-seven-thousand-acre Adirondack retreat that belonged to Mrs. Conner’s family. Frank E. Vandiver, 2 Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing 1044–45 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1977); Gene Smith, Until the Last Trumpet Sounds: The Life of General of the Armies John J. Pershing 233–35 (New York: Wiley, 1998).
f Eisenhower attended Leavenworth on the adjutant general’s quota, although the record indicates there had been no need for Conner to circumvent the chief of infantry. In January 1925, before Ike’s transfer to the AG corps, the chief of infantry had recommended forty-seven officers to attend the 1925–26 CGSS course. Eisenhower was listed twenty-sixth. Recommendation by the chief of infantry was tantamount to selection. Of course, Eisenhower did not know that, and no one in the chief’s office thought it necessary to inform him. Carlo D’Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life 177–78 (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).
FOUR
With Pershing in Paris
No man can make a successful career on his own. He needs help.
—MAMIE EISENHOWER
When Eisenhower completed the course at the Command and General Staff School, he was pulled three ways. The adjutant general proposed to send him to a major university as the professor of military science and tactics, heading the ROTC program. In addition, it was arranged that Ike would coach the university’s football team at a salary of $3,500—roughly doubling his take-home pay. The commandant at CGSS wanted him to remain at Leavenworth on the faculty, a sure ticket to an eventual general staff billet. And the chief of infantry thought Ike needed more troop duty. The chief of infantry prevailed. Eisenhower was appointed executive officer of the 24th Infantry Regiment at Fort Benning.
In retrospect, it is evident that the office of the chief of infantry resented Eisenhower’s end run around it to attend the CGSS. Political correctness aside, assignment to the 24th Infantry—the Old Deuce-Four—was scarcely a career-enhancing move. Like the 10th Cavalry, the 24th was an all-black regiment commanded by white officers, few of whom relished their posting. This was the segregated Army, and black units, despite a glorious heritage tracing to the Civil War, were regarded as second-class. The 24th had been founded in 1866, fought with distinction at San Juan Hill and in the Philippines, and marched with Pershing against Pancho Villa. But it sat out World War I, had not been ordered to France, and was currently employed as support troops for the Infantry School a
t Fort Benning. It was the infantry’s Siberia.a In his memoirs Eisenhower does not mention that the 24th Infantry was a black unit, and his early biographers apparently were unaware of the fact. Nevertheless, it is manifest that Ike was unhappy with the assignment and used his influence to wriggle out. A permanent change of station in the peacetime Army normally involved a three-year posting. Ike stayed at Benning less than five months.
Once again, Fox Conner rode to the rescue. In 1921, Conner had saved Ike from a possible court-martial. In 1924, he circumvented the chief of infantry to send him to Leavenworth. And in 1926 he intervened once more to transfer Ike out of the 24th Infantry. On December 15, 1926, orders arrived from the War Department assigning Eisenhower to the American Battle Monuments Commission—a free-standing, independent government agency in Washington headed by General of the Armies John J. Pershing. Conner was now the Army’s deputy chief of staff—the number two military man in the War Department. He appreciated Ike’s talent and recognized it was not being properly utilized. To assign the honor graduate of the Command and General Staff School as executive officer of a unit of support troops at Fort Benning made no sense whatever. If not punitive, it was certainly myopic. “No man can make a successful career on his own,” Mamie Eisenhower once said. “He needs help. And Ike was fortunate to have sponsors such as Fox Conner and later MacArthur and General Marshall who pushed him ahead.”1
The Battle Monuments Commission was charged with compiling and organizing the record of American participation in World War I. To some extent it was established as a sinecure for General Pershing. A General of the Armies is never retired from active duty, and the commission provided a post for Pershing outside the War Department chain of command. He continued to be the ranking officer in the Army, and his office remained in the ornate State, War, and Navy Building adjacent to the White House, but his responsibilities were confined to memorializing the American war effort in France. The general needed help preparing a guide to the American battlefields, and Conner suggested that Eisenhower was the person for the job.
Ike and Mamie moved to Washington in January 1927. Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, and the nation basked in pre-Depression prosperity. “The business of America is business,” President Coolidge told the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The Washington of 1927 was a slow-paced city of southern charm, genteel civility, and white supremacy. Schools, restaurants, hotels, and the federal civil service were strictly segregated; an isolationist Congress had recently enacted the National Origins Act of 1924, effectively closing off most immigration to the United States; and the remarkable Washington Senators, relying on the arm of Walter “Big Train” Johnson, won back-to-back American League pennants and the 1924 World Series. Prohibition notwithstanding, Capitol Hill was awash in booze, and there were few legislative problems that House Speaker Nicholas Longworth and minority leader John Nance Garner could not resolve over a bottle of bootleg bourbon in the Speaker’s chambers.
Since no military quarters were available for Ike and Mamie, they took an apartment in the Wyoming, a gracious dowager from Washington’s belle epoque at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Columbia Road. Because of its spacious apartments, soaring ceilings, and marble corridors, the Wyoming was home to a legion of upper- and midlevel officials, including a United States senator, several members of Congress, the surgeon general, and a dozen or more field-grade and general officers. Chief Justice William Howard Taft lived around the corner; Justices Louis Brandeis and George Sutherland down the street. The Eisenhowers had a two-bedroom apartment with a large living room, a separate dining room, a study, and a cavernous kitchen. For this they paid $130 a month—roughly three times the average rent in Washington. Ike’s take-home pay was $391 a month, Mamie received an additional $100 from her father, and the cost of living was remarkably low. Bread was 10¢ a loaf, milk cost 9¢ a quart, and Ike’s cigarettes were a dollar a carton. Other prices were equally low. A man’s tailored three-piece suit sold for less than $30. A gallon of gas cost 15¢, and a new Chevrolet, Ford, or Plymouth could be had for $600 to $800. The Eisenhowers had a full-time maid who also cooked, and a new automobile. They were members of the Army-Navy town club and the Army-Navy Country Club, and they entertained frequently at the Willard Hotel—Washington’s leading hostelry. As the wife of an Army contemporary remarked, “We never lived that well again.”2
Eisenhower’s task with the Battle Monuments Commission was to sort through the unit histories and official records of the AEF and prepare a narrative of the American effort in France. Appended to the narrative history was a description of the battle monuments that had been erected and the locations of the various cemeteries where American war dead were buried. The purpose was to provide an easily accessible reference work for Americans who might visit France, and Eisenhower was given a six-month deadline.
To call A Guide to the American Battle Fields in Europe simply a tourist guidebook trivializes the undertaking.3 It is a guidebook. But more important, it is a complete history, battle by battle, of the American war on the western front. Of the 282 pages, roughly a third are devoted to describing the battlefield monuments; the remaining two hundred pages provide a concise summary of the fighting, beginning with Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood in June 1918 and concluding with the armistice in November. The book is written from the vantage point of Pershing’s headquarters, and in describing the fighting Eisenhower presents the details with remarkable clarity. Ike had not served in France, but like any good historian he assimilated the facts and described the battlefront as though he had taken part. Anyone who reads the Guide will be struck by its completeness. The Encyclopaedia Britannica called it “an excellent reference work on World War I.” Republished in 1992 by the Army’s Center of Military History,4 it remains one of the best references to the American effort in World War I. Ike’s prose lacks the eloquence of Grant’s Memoirs, but it would be fair to say that when the project was complete, Eisenhower was the best-informed officer in the Army on the strategy and battle tactics Pershing employed, apart from Pershing himself and Fox Conner (who directed the operations of the AEF).
Writing the history of the western front gave Eisenhower a feel for the geography and an understanding of the problems involved in coordinating the Allied armies. He treats the logistical problems of the AEF exhaustively. It is difficult to imagine a more useful assignment for a future supreme commander than to write a history of the analogous American effort in World War I. In 1927 a second war in Europe was scarcely on the horizon, and Eisenhower often chafed under the tight deadlines Pershing imposed. But the substantive knowledge of the war in France that he derived from the exercise surely stood him in good stead when he commanded the Allied effort seventeen years later.
The Eisenhowers settled in easily at the Wyoming. The building was so congenial that they lived there—off and on—a total of nine years. Ike could take the Connecticut Avenue streetcar (five cents) to work, or walk in good weather. Mamie delighted in Washington’s department stores, and bought all of Eisenhower’s clothes. Army officers assigned to Washington during the interwar years wore mufti, and as Mamie recalled, “he wouldn’t go into a shop and purchase them.”5
Eisenhower went to work early and stayed at his desk until six. When he came home he wanted to relax. “Ike was the sort of man that when he finished his day’s work, he left his work at the office,” said Mamie. “When he came home, he was home and we didn’t discuss what his big problems were. He kept them to himself. That was the way we managed our lives. That’s the way we’ve kept it. So many people say to me, ‘Didn’t General Eisenhower used to talk over some of his problems with you?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, no.’ And I didn’t say to him, ‘The dishwasher didn’t work today.’ He wouldn’t have been interested.”6
Young Johnny was five when the Eisenhowers moved to Washington. He was enrolled first in a Montessori school, and then when he turned six in the nearby public schoo
l. There was little or no homework in those days, but according to Mamie, Ike always reviewed the day’s activities with him before he was sent to bed. “If Ike and I were delaying our dinner for some reason, or if we were going out to a party, Johnny would sit down to dinner with candles, and silver candelabra, and his finger bowl, and everything just as if we were at the table. He was even served and he had everything done perfectly.”7
Shortly before Eisenhower finished his assignment, he was informed that he had been selected for the next class at the Army War College, then located at Washington Barracks (now Fort McNair), in southwest Washington, D.C. Again, the hand of Fox Conner is evident. Unlike the Command and General Staff School, whose purpose was to prepare field-grade officers for the general staff, the War College curriculum was designed to teach future generals an overview of war—how armies were mobilized, supplied, and deployed; relations with allies; and grand strategy.8 Ike was the youngest member of his class, and one of the youngest ever admitted to the War College.9
On August 15, 1927, when Eisenhower’s assignment with the Battle Monuments Commission ended, General Pershing expressed his appreciation in a letter to the chief of infantry:
The detail of Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, who has been assisting the American Battle Monuments Commission in preparing the guide book, expires today. I wish to take this occasion to express my appreciation of the splendid service he has rendered since being with us.
Eisenhower in War and Peace Page 9
