Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  g On June 5, 1884, General William Tecumseh Sherman informed the Republican National Convention, “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.” John Marszalek, “William Tecumseh Sherman,” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War 1769 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

  h Bedell Smith, when asked by Major General Sir Ian Jacob, Churchill’s deputy chief of staff, whether Ike wanted to be president, replied, “Want it! He wants it so bad he can taste it.” Jacob, interview by Peter Lyon, cited in Lyon, Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero 348 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974).

  i “Before the atom bomb was used,” Eisenhower later told Saturday Evening Post war correspondent Edgar Snow, “I would have said yes, I was sure we could keep peace with Russia. Now I don’t know. I had hoped the bomb wouldn’t figure in this war. Until now I would have said that we three, Britain with her mighty fleet, America with the strongest air force, and Russia with the strongest land force on the continent, we three could have guaranteed the peace of the world for a long, long time to come. But now, I don’t know. People are frightened and disturbed all over. Everyone feels insecure again.” Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning 360–61 (New York: Random House, 1958).

  j Liberal journalist Murray Kempton, in a perceptive appraisal of Eisenhower’s presidency, noted that Zhukov’s description of moving through German minefields made a lasting impression on Ike. “Keep Nixon and Dulles around for marching through minefields” became one of Eisenhower’s operating principles. Murray Kempton, “The Underestimation of Dwight D. Eisenhower,” Esquire 109, September 1967.

  k At the press conference, Eisenhower told the Russian correspondents present that they must expect that American publishers would be harshly critical of the Soviet Union. “They will give you the devil,” said Ike. “All I suggest is that we all keep our sense of values and not be upset by the lies or propaganda of a few crackpots.” The New York Times, August 15, 1945.

  l On August 11, 1945, Patton complained to Eisenhower that too many trained administrators were being removed from office because of the denazification program and were being replaced by “inexperienced and inefficient people.” According to Patton, “It is no more possible for a man to be a civil servant in Germany and not have paid lip service to Nazism than it is for a man to be a postmaster in America and not have paid at least lip service to the Democratic Party or Republican Party when it is in power.”

  Eisenhower pulled Patton up short. “The United States entered this war as a foe of Nazism,” he reminded the Third Army commander. “Victory is not complete until we have eliminated from positions of responsibility and, in appropriate cases properly punished, every active adherent to the Nazi party.… The discussional stage of this question is long past.… I expect just as loyal service in the execution of this policy … as I received during the war.”

  GSP to DDE, August 11, 1945, in Blumenson, 2 Patton Papers 738; DDE to GSP, September 11, 1945, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 6, Occupation 351–52.

  m On Sunday, December 9, 1945, Patton was involved in a freak automobile accident near Mannheim. His neck was broken, and he died in the hospital on December 21. He is buried alongside his troops in the U.S. Military Cemetery at Hamm in Luxembourg. It was War Department policy at the time that servicemen who died overseas be buried overseas. On December 21, Eisenhower cabled Bedell Smith that if Mrs. Patton wished George to be returned for a stateside burial, he would assume responsibility for doing so, and would clear it with higher authority. No request was made.

  Neither Eisenhower nor Bedell Smith was listed among the honorary pallbearers at Patton’s funeral. Patton’s final judgment of Eisenhower was harsh. “I hope he makes a better President than he was a General.” Quoted in D’Este, Patton 801. DDE to Smith, December 21, 1945, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 7, Chief of Staff 673–74. Cited subsequently as 7 Chief of Staff.

  n In 1950, Thomas was indicted and convicted for taking kickbacks from his congressional staff and sentenced to eighteen months in a federal penitentiary. He was pardoned by President Truman on Christmas Eve, 1951.

  o Zhukov replied that he regretted that they would not be able to meet as frequently as in the past. “I nevertheless hope that we shall remain good friends as we have been, and therefore I agree beyond all doubt to your calling me your friend, and I trust that you will likewise allow me to call you my friend.” The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 7; Chief of Staff 592n1.

  p As a young boy growing up in the capital in the 1930s, I vividly remember being taken by my parents late on Sunday afternoons to watch the retreat ceremony of the 3rd Cavalry, at which the Army Band rendered honors. The ceremony was conducted by the flagpole in front of Quarters 1, and General Marshall, sometimes in dress blues, was often there. I am sure Patton was there as well, but he was not so well known that my parents would have recognized him and pointed him out.

  q In his postpresidential memoirs, Eisenhower noted that public relations had become an essential skill for a military officer. Until World War II, said Ike, the Army had ignored the public and as a result had become “a budgetary stepchild.” DDE, At Ease 320.

  r One of the by-products of Truman’s displeasure with Byrnes was passage of congressional legislation altering the line of presidential succession. From the time of Grover Cleveland, the order of succession ran from president to vice president to secretary of state, and then around the cabinet by rank. The purpose was to ensure that the party in power remained in power, assuming all members of the president’s cabinet would be of the same party. At Truman’s urging, Congress inserted the Speaker of the House and the president pro tem of the Senate before the secretary of state. The ostensible reason was that the Speaker and president pro tem held elected office and the secretary of state did not. The underlying reason was Truman’s disdain for Byrnes, whom he did not want in a position to succeed him.

  s The fruitless Columbia presidential search is described in detail by Travis Beal Jacobs in Eisenhower at Columbia 1–49 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001). Offers were made to James Phinney Baxter III, president of Williams, and Robert G. Sproul, president of the University of California, both of whom declined.

  t “It was almost the first decision I ever had to make in my life that was directly concerned with myself,” Eisenhower wrote Bedell Smith. “I had to struggle against every instinct I had.… I think my real dream was to get a small college of an undergraduate character somewhere in the Virginia or Pennsylvania area or possibly even in the Northwest and live quietly with Mamie in that kind of an atmosphere.” DDE to Smith, July 3, 1947, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 8, Chief of Staff 1799–800.

  SEVENTEEN

  Columbia

  Stand Columbia! Alma Mater

  Through the storms of Time abide

  —GILBERT OAKLEY WARD

  Eisenhower stepped down as chief of staff on February 7, 1948, and Omar Bradley was sworn in as his successor. By arrangement with the board of trustees, Ike would assume his duties at Columbia at the end of the academic year, and by agreement with Bradley, he and Mamie would remain at Quarters 1 until he was ready to move to New York.a In the interim, Eisenhower intended to write his memoirs.

  Eisenhower had planned to write his memoirs from the time he assumed command of the North African invasion of 1942. Kay Summersby and Harry Butcher had kept diaries for him, Ike occasionally made entries in his own diary, and the staff both at AFHQ and SHAEF had been meticulous in maintaining a record of his activities. Even before the war ended Eisenhower received offers from publishers, but did not take them seriously until toward the end of his tour as chief of staff. “I don’t believe that any man on active duty has the right or the time to undertake the writing of a book of this kind.”1

  What Ike did do was set aside evenings at Quarters 1 to reread the Memoirs of Ulysses Grant, which he would use as a model.2 Grant’s lean and elegant prose has often been cited by c
ritics as diverse as Edmund Wilson and Gertrude Stein as the finest nonfiction writing in American literature.3 Grant was generous in his praise and sparing with his criticism, which also appealed to Ike. “I would not indulge in the kind of personal criticism or disparagement of others that had badly marred many military accounts.”4

  Negotiations began in earnest in December 1947. Ike was approached by Simon and Schuster and by Harper and Brothers, but eventually signed on with Doubleday, acting in conjunction with the New York Herald Tribune, who made what Eisenhower considered a preemptive offer. Instead of the customary advance against royalties, Doubleday and the Trib proposed to buy all of the rights to Ike’s book in a single package. There would be no royalties, but Eisenhower would receive a lump sum payment of $635,000 upon completion of the manuscript.5 b It was a handshake deal. Ike said a written contract was not necessary.6

  Under the arrangement, Eisenhower received roughly the modern equivalent of $6 million, about half of what President Clinton received from Alfred A. Knopf as an advance against royalties for his memoirs. But unlike Clinton’s royalties, Ike’s lump sum payment in 1948 was treated as a capital gain, not as income. That was standard IRS procedure at the time for onetime authors who received a lump sum payment, and Ike received no special consideration.7 It meant that instead of paying income tax at the rate of 82.13 percent, which would have been Ike’s tax bracket, he paid taxes at the capital gains rate of 25 percent.8 That left Ike $476,250, or roughly $4.5 million in today’s dollars, and it made him financially independent. Some biographers have suggested that Eisenhower would have been better off under a standard royalty arrangement—over a million copies of Crusade in Europe have been sold—but the near-confiscatory income tax rates in the 1940s and ’50s make that doubtful.

  Eisenhower began writing on February 8, 1948. He worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. There was no ghost writer. Ike dictated to three stenographers who worked in tandem. When a chapter was typed, Eisenhower edited it lightly and then gave it to a team of staff officers who fact-checked and served as research assistants. “Because I habitually rose at six, it was a tough grind for all of us,” Ike recalled, “but in a way it was fun. There were no delays for lack of material. My secretarial help was superb and at times my execrable handwriting provided a reason for a laugh.”9

  After the fact-checking was finished, there was another round of editing and the chapter was sent off to Ike’s editors in New York, the legendary Kenneth McCormick, editor in chief of Doubleday, and Joe Barnes, then foreign editor of the Herald Tribune and later editor in chief of Simon and Schuster. McCormick and Barnes were awed by Eisenhower’s performance. Barnes said that on one occasion he saw Ike dictate, without stopping, five thousand words that required almost no editing. Barnes had “never seen such a performance.”10 Eisenhower listened to the advice he received from McCormick and Barnes, but for the most part he relied on his own instincts for rewriting and correcting, and his determination to get the facts right.11

  As a result, Crusade in Europe remains one of the clearest and least opinionated books to come out of World War II. If Ike had an ax to grind, he avoided doing so in his book. Like Grant’s Memoirs, it is also free of the petty bitterness that characterized the books of Montgomery and Lord Alanbrooke, and the diaries of George Patton, which were published posthumously. Unlike Churchill’s monumental six-volume history of the war, Eisenhower also did not avoid subjects that were embarrassing and did not hesitate to accept responsibility for matters that went wrong. Grant’s reputation as one of the finest American writers of nonfiction remains secure, but Crusade in Europe is a remarkably complete record of the war in Europe and a reliable reference that will continue to be consulted by future historians. The fact that it is still in print after sixty-five years speaks for itself.

  When the manuscript was finished, in mid-April, William Robinson, publisher of the Herald Tribune, presented Eisenhower two checks totaling $625,000, and then whisked Ike and Mamie off for a two-week vacation at the Augusta National Golf Club. It was Eisenhower’s first visit to Augusta, and the club soon became an integral part of his life.c At Augusta, Robinson introduced Ike to a group of men who became his lifelong friends. Rich, Republican, and devoted to golf and bridge, they took it upon themselves to make Eisenhower’s leisure time enjoyable and to pick up the expenses. Known as “the Gang,” they included, in addition to Robinson, Clifford Roberts, a New York investment banker who with golfing legend Bobby Jones had founded the Augusta National; Robert Woodruff, chairman of the board of Coca-Cola; W. Alton (“Pete”) Jones, president of Cities Service Company (a precursor to Citgo); and Ellis Slater, president of Frankfort Distilleries. The sole Democrat in the Gang was Mississippi’s George Allen, one of the country’s sharpest legal minds who hid his talent behind a roly-poly façade as court jester to presidents. The Gang made Eisenhower a member of Augusta, built a cottage for him near the tenth tee, and put in a fish pond well stocked with bass for his private use.12

  Presidential boomlets for Eisenhower erupted spontaneously. A national Draft Eisenhower league set up shop, and the biweekly polls conducted by the Gallup and Roper organizations showed Ike to be running ahead of Governor Dewey and Senator Taft among likely Republican voters, and ahead of President Truman among Democrats. Eisenhower did nothing to encourage his supporters. But he also did nothing to discourage them. “I am frequently flayed,” he wrote Bedell Smith in September 1947, “because I insist that I do not want to have any political office and still will not use the language of Sherman. The two cases are not parallel.”13 A month later he explained to his brother Milton that he would feel under no obligation to accept the nomination if it came to him as the result of a deadlocked convention (as it did to Sherman), but a genuine draft was a different matter. And for that reason he did not want to use Sherman’s words. “Every citizen,” said Ike, “is required to do his duty for the country no matter what it may be.”14

  The issue came to a head in January 1948. On January 9, a group of New Hampshire Republicans formally entered a slate of delegates pledged to Eisenhower in the upcoming March primary. Leonard Finder, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, wrote to inform Ike of the action and enclosed a front-page editorial from the paper endorsing him. “No man should deny the will of the people in a matter such as this,” wrote Finder.15

  Eisenhower pondered his reply for more than a week. All signs pointed to a Republican victory in the fall. Thomas E. Dewey, the GOP front-runner, was forty-eight; Robert A. Taft was fifty-nine—both young enough to serve two terms. In eight years Ike would be sixty-six, much too old for a man to make his first campaign for the presidency, particularly for someone who was not in politics.16 If Eisenhower were going to run, he would have to do so now.

  Given the choice of whether to fish or cut bait, Eisenhower chose to cut bait. “It is my conviction that the necessary and wise subordination of the military to civil power will best be sustained … when lifelong professional soldiers, in the absence of some obvious and overriding reasons, abstain from seeking high political office,” he replied to Finder on January 22, 1948. After thanking those who had worked on his behalf, Ike issued the flat denial that seemingly closed the door on the possibility of his becoming president. “My decision to remove myself completely from the political scene is definite and positive. I could not accept nomination even under the remote circumstance that it was tendered to me.”17

  Numerous commentators have speculated that if Eisenhower had been the Republican candidate in 1948 he would have won. That may be so, but it would have been an uphill fight for him to win the nomination. Few states elected their convention delegates by primaries in 1948, and even if Ike had won all of the primaries, he would have gone into the convention far short of the number of delegates required. Dewey and Taft had been campaigning for eight years, and the Republican organization in most states was pledged to one or the other. Regardless of his public support, it is unlikely that Eisenhower could have wo
n the nomination.18

  Ike arrived on Morningside Heights on May 2, 1948. He and Mamie moved into the president’s mansion at 60 Morningside Drive and began to settle in. Nicholas Murray Butler had died in early December, and the house had been completely renovated by Dorothy Draper, one of the nation’s best-known interior decorators.d Built of brick and Indiana limestone in 1912 by McKim, Mead, and White for Butler, the four-story Italianate house was as close to a ducal palazzo as one might find west of Florence. The two lower floors were designed for formal entertaining, with marble floors, crystal chandeliers, and a dining room that seated thirty comfortably. Butler once estimated that between 2,500 and 3,000 people came to the presidential house for receptions, lunches, and dinners every year.19 Guests included the King and Queen of England, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), more than a dozen heads of state, and countless Nobel Prize winners.e According to The New Yorker, an invitation to 60 Morningside Drive was “the most sought after of high cultural invitations, proof that the privileged recipient had arrived in New York society.”20

  The third floor of the mansion was set aside for family living, with guest rooms and servants quarters on the fourth. Draper had converted an old water storage room on the roof into a penthouse solarium for the Eisenhowers. Mamie furnished it with her Philippine rattan furniture, members of the Gang gathered there regularly for bridge, and Ike had a studio for painting. There was a household staff of nine—which Mrs. Butler had trained to perfection—to which were added Sergeant John Moaney, Ike’s valet, and Sergeant Leonard Dry, who had been his driver since 1943.

  By arrangement with the board of trustees, Eisenhower would assume his official duties as president on June 7, 1948, one week after commencement, with a formal installation ceremony scheduled for the fall. The month’s hiatus between his arrival in May and June 7 would give him a chance to become familiar with the university and his responsibilities. Ike had requested that the president’s offices in Low Memorial Library be relocated and made more accessible. Butler’s office, one floor above the rotunda, could be reached only by a private elevator from the office of the secretary of the university. Eisenhower chose rooms on the main floor, just off the rotunda. “There, I hoped, both students and faculty might have direct and easy access to their President and I would not feel immured in a remote citadel.”21 The campus regarded the move with satisfaction. Less salubrious was Ike’s decision to bring with him from the Pentagon Major Robert L. Schulz as his administrative aide, and Kevin McCann as a special assistant. Schulz and McCann, who knew little about university affairs and nothing about Columbia, organized Eisenhower’s office like a military headquarters, kept the faculty at arm’s length, and were determined to protect Ike rather than allowing him to be himself. “They didn’t have the knowledge of things academic,” said historian Harry J. Carman, the beloved dean of Columbia College, and “I put part of the difficulty which President Eisenhower encountered here squarely at their doorstep.”22