HOW IKE LED

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 General Dwight D. Eisenhower (U.S. Army Pictorial Service)

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 IN T RODUC T ION

T he rolling hills and the orchards of southern Pennsylvania

are especially lush in late summer. Farmers’ roadside stands
burgeon with some of the season’s most succulent picks. The still,
heavy air, the rattle of cicadas, and the hum of occasional bees
bring a sense of timeless tranquility.
Amid the neat stone farmhouses and open fields of soybeans
and corn, one must remind oneself that the Battle of Gettysburg
was one of the bloodiest and most significant battles of the Civil
War. It was one of the key turning points of a conflict that split our
nation in two. Lee, Meade, and Pickett left their historical marks
on this land. And a little less than one hundred years later, my
grandparents, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, chose this place as
their home. In 1950 they bought a Civil War–­era farmhouse and
189 acres of land in the distant shadow of South Mountain. For a

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 2 HOW IK E L E D

little more than ten short years the newly rebuilt house, along with
the land Ike restored, served as the first and last private home my
grandparents shared. It was the centerpiece of family life.
As president, and later in his retirement, Ike brought many
old friends and colleagues to this farm, including British prime
minister Winston Churchill and French president Charles de
Gaulle. Sometimes he also used the farm as a place for political
discussions, and as a retreat for taking the measure of key peo-
ple, including Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Indian prime
minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of
Germany, and Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos, to name
just a few. It was here too that the United States and the Soviet
Union stood back from an ultimatum that might have led to war.1
I grew up in the years of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. As
one of his four grandchildren, I was subject to an odd combina-
tion of family intimacy and life in the public spotlight. My sib-
lings and I had Secret Service protection for those eight years, so
it was clear to us and everyone we encountered that we were not
living a conventional childhood.
An incident during my middle-­school years was a stark re-
minder of this fact. My history teacher once requested that I ask
my grandfather a few questions about his time in office. I felt
uncomfortable about carrying these questions to Granddad, but
out of respect for my teacher I did so. One question related to the
1956 Hungarian uprising. Ike did not like mixing “business” and
“home time” (or having any of his grandchildren placed in the
awkward role of go-­between). That is why, perhaps, he replied
somewhat tartly when I asked why he hadn’t intervened: “What—­
and risk starting World War III?”
In a flash I understood the gravity of the decisions my grand-
father had had to make.
Yet it was not until my grandparents had died that I really
began to think of them as public figures. And when I did, I could
see clearly that knowing that side of them was critical for my own
appreciation of them as people, as well as for my understanding of
the history of World War II and the postwar period.

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 IN T RODUC T ION 3

In 1996 I wrote a family biography that was centered on my

grandmother, Mamie, and her marriage to Ike. Writing Mrs. Ike:
Memories and Reflections on the Life of Mamie Eisenhower was an
adventure for me. I learned about my grandparents’ lives before I
knew them, through their stories as they recounted them and the
observations of others who knew them. And just as important, I
gained a sense of who they were as they emerged as public figures.
But in my professional career as a Washington policy strate-
gist, it is my grandfather who has come to mind most often. It
has been nearly impossible for me to undertake any topic that has
not been touched by his legacy in some way. For that reason I
started to read about his career and the times in which he lived—­
perhaps somewhat defensively at first. (In high school and college,
my siblings and I were accustomed to years of professorial swipes,
and sometimes downright rude lectures on Eisenhower’s alleged
shortcomings.)
What occurred over time was not just the rise of Eisenhower’s
reputation, but for me the remarkable process of getting to know
the other side of this someone I loved. It has made me regret that
when he was alive I did not know fully the multidimensional
person he now is for me. Discovering the “other side” of Ike has
left me, frankly, in awe of how he handled some of the most con-
sequential decisions ever undertaken by a general or a president—
all while retaining a genuine capacity for empathy and kindness,
which belied or survived the hard and painful decisions he’d been
compelled to make. I don’t know how he did it, but I saw first-
hand that he never became callous, hard, or cynical.

In Gettysburg I still feel close to my grandparents, and I still

go to these rolling hills for reflection. Yet so much has changed
since that time—­not just the disappearance of the Stuckey’s
souvenir shops or the Rexall drugstore on Gettysburg’s main
square—­t he fabric of our society today has a different texture
than it did in the 1950s: some of it stronger but much of it very
badly frayed.
Engaging one’s deepest self was easier in those days—­with long

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 4 HOW IK E L E D

waits between letters and long-­distance phone calls deferred until

Sunday when the rates were cheaper. Today, tethered to smart-
phones and transfixed by Twitter and Instagram, we lurch from
one demand to another with scarcely a moment to think. Our
impulses are reactive, not considered. They are short-­term rather
than strategic. We have lost our capacity to act in the present
while thinking into the future. We are struggling.
I have always been one to look forward. Increasingly, how-
ever, it has been impossible for me to do this without looking
back—­at our nation’s journey since my grandfather’s years. What
is profoundly striking is how far we have veered from the guiding
principles of those days.
This became increasingly obvious to me as I worked on this
book. It has required countless hours of reading firsthand ac-
counts and academic scholarship on Dwight Eisenhower and
his professional responsibilities. The books on this subject have
been sources of fascination for me, and I have nothing but ap-
preciation and gratitude for the many who have, as one author
described it to me, “lived with Ike for years.” I know that feel-
ing, and in undertaking this project I have sought to add what I
knew of the man to the many outstanding contributions on his
life and times.
What I have written is not a biography, nor does it pretend
to cover fully Eisenhower’s wartime or presidential years. Rather
it is a primer, a sampler perhaps, for the many readers who may
not remember or know much about Dwight Eisenhower and his
approach to the important questions of his day. While it is im-
possible to write about every crisis or assess every controversy in a
short book, my intention is to convey that he was a leader during
transformational times, and that later as chief executive he was
arguably the most bipartisan president we have had in modern
American history. I have used, where possible, Ike’s own words,
and I have also given primacy to the assessments of his associates.
They are the people who knew him best, professionally.
Ike was not a leader in the way we customarily “teach” leader-
ship in our country. He was a strategic rather than an operational

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 introduction 5

one. During the war his role was to receive all the inputs—­across
the entire enterprise: both internal and external, political and
practical, fundamental and future oriented. His job was to “strip
down” a problem to its essence, prioritize it among many, and
ensure that any plan reflected those factors in a coherent form,
ready for execution. His decisions were undertaken with the entire
enterprise in mind.
Eisenhower had the thirty-thousand-foot responsibilities. In
fact, it is noteworthy that his job description, when he was given
the supreme command of Operation Overlord, was in essence to
invade the mainland of Europe and bring about the destruction
of Nazi forces. No other leadership job in the Western Alliance
looked anything like his. And the opinion that truly mattered
rested with his superiors’ assessment of his performance. Ike, in
his own words, described what was expected of him:

A Supreme Commander in a situation such as faced by us

in Europe cannot ordinarily give day-­to-­day and hour-­by-­
hour supervision to any portion of the field. Nevertheless,
he is the one person in the organization with the authority
to assign principal objectives to major formations. He is
also the only one who has under his hand the power to al-
lot strength to the various major commands in accordance
with their missions, to arrange for the distribution of in-
coming supply, and to direct the operations of the entire air
forces in support of any portion of the line.2

Eisenhower’s talent for envisioning a whole, especially in the

context of the long game, may explain why he did not necessar-
ily need combat experience to be a brilliant strategic leader. It
is also why he never lost the confidence of his superiors during
the conduct of World War II, even if his subordinates groused
about some of his decisions—­many of which, not surprisingly,
related to resource allocation and personal authority. Eisenhow-
er’s subordinates simply did not have the same considerations
he did.

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 6 HOW IK E L E D

Ike had to worry about the direction of the war, the assets he
had at his disposal, the liabilities he had to mitigate, and a timeline
that had to be met. He had finite human and material resources.
He also had to scale up a war effort that, for the American cohort
alone, began as a small group in 1942 and culminated in a force
of more than three million people under his command only two
years later. The performance of key subordinates was his responsi-
bility at a time of nationalist tensions within the wartime alliance.
And he had to factor in the worthiness of his military options and
view them in the context of the political, social, or resource priori-
ties made clear to him by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill,
and the Combined Chiefs of Staff (COSSAC). He also had to be
adept enough to sense the moment when the plan had to change.
Again, as president Eisenhower was the nation’s chief strategic
leader. Influenced by his success during the war, he developed a
process—­a staff system—­that would assure the collection of all
possible facts and facets of any issue; an organization that would
also serve to coordinate the implementation of the president’s own
direction. Eisenhower was deeply troubled when his successors,
starting with John F. Kennedy, dismantled it. Ike feared that
the nation’s chief executive, whose job it is to “connect the dots,”
would be so overwhelmed by diverse and second-­order inputs that
he would resort to governing like an operational leader rather than
a strategic one. Eisenhower predicted that without a system for un-
biased analysis and policy integration, avoidable mistakes would
be inevitable. His views, many historians say, have been vindi-
cated over the years—­starting with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a failed
attempt by the Kennedy White House to invade Cuba and initiate
an uprising. It was impacted significantly by JFK’s last-­minute
decision to cancel air support and relocate the landing beaches.3
Even as a young man, Eisenhower had a strong preference for
big-­picture thinking in warfare and beyond. Before graduation
from West Point, Ike’s class of 1915 participated in a “staff ride” of
the Gettysburg battlefield: “Each student was instructed to mem-
orize the names of every brigadier in the opposing armies and
know exactly where his unit was stationed at every hour during

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 introduction 7

the three days of the battle,” he wrote. “Little attempt was made to
explain the meaning of the battle, why it came about, what the
commanders hoped to accomplish, and the reason why Lee invaded
the North the second time. If this was military history, I wanted
no part of it.”
Later one of his mentors, Gen. Fox Conner, chief of operations
during World War I, recommended a reading list in the hope
that it would change his protégé’s mind about the usefulness of
studying military history. And, during their time together in Pan-
ama in the 1920s, Conner would school Eisenhower with provoc-
ative questions about earlier battles. “What conditions existed
when the decisions were made? What might have happened if a
different decision had been made?” And “What were the alterna-
tives?” he would ask.4
To understand Eisenhower is to understand that in war and
peace his primary aim was to foster unity of purpose and to ap-
proach every issue from an “architectural perspective”—­in other
words to begin any significant undertaking by framing it and
building a strong foundation for future betterment. He was keenly
aware that no president has the time to finish fully any major ini-
tiative, so a sustainable approach, approved on a bipartisan basis,
must be advanced at the outset.
Another key element of Eisenhower as a leader should be
viewed in the context of his character and the impact he had on
others. I was drawn to assess how he made people feel, and to pon-
der whether his relationship with the American people furthered
American goals or subverted them. In addition to his obvious
talent in the use of force, Eisenhower also believed deeply in “soft
power,” which has all but disappeared as a tool of influence in our
country today.
I never had the chance to discuss these things directly with my
grandfather—­I was seventeen when he died—­but his passing left
an enormous void in my life, as it did for all our family members.
So, in 1984, when I first came to Washington, I tried to meet
everyone in the city and beyond who had known him. Many had
served in the Eisenhower administration, or with him during the

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 8 HOW IK E L E D

war. While a number of key people had already died, the many I
met and came to know validated my instincts about Ike as a per-
son and taught me much about strategy and leadership.
Striking to me was the way they talked about “the Boss,” and
the wistfulness they displayed in thinking about how far our
country had already come in disavowing the mechanisms of good
governance. They lamented, as I did even then, that much of our
public life had already become highly politicized, regardless of
how we see the 1970s and ’80s now as “the good ol’ days.”
The revolving door had made it too easy to put one’s own
selfish desires ahead of the job that was there—­and still is—­to be
done. Those decades were marked by crises and scandals, includ-
ing exploding debt, union busting, a savings and loan crisis, and
the Iran-­Contra affair.
Even in the 1980s one could feel that it was fast becoming
politically old-fashioned to develop a plan for all Americans, as
both political parties increasingly focused on only their bases of
support.
Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, Ike’s trusted White House staff
secretary and defense liaison, and later supreme commander of
NATO and superintendent of West Point, was my mentor. Well
over six feet tall, he had a commanding presence and spoke with
quiet, unshakable authority. For years we had adjacent offices at
the Eisenhower Institute, which we founded together. The count-
less hours I spent in his company were often punctuated by sto-
ries, expressions, or anecdotes that came from his time with my
grandfather.
Over more than a decade, Goodpaster had plenty to say about
current affairs, as he watched the country move from one with a
clear-­cut national security strategy to a more muddled and op-
portunistic approach. He talked often about a strategy “for the
long haul,” and it was from him that I learned to think of the
challenges facing this country as a tent.
“It is critical to determine,” he would say, “which of all the ar-
eas of national affairs are the ‘long poles’ and which ones are the
‘short poles.’ ” It should be noted that the long poles, if they are

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 introduction 9

not kept sturdy through reinforcement and timely maintenance,

can bring down the whole tent.
One of the long poles was our foreign relations, and in that
General Goodpaster and my father, John, gave me all the en-
couragement a young professional could hope for in pursuing a
dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union in the
mid-­to-­late 1980s. Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in the
USSR—­and the window for improving U.S.–­Soviet relations had
just started to open.
A decade and a half after we started these initiatives, General
Goodpaster would sometimes come into the office with a look of
concern. “Did you read the paper this morning?” he would ask
me. “This is just not serious. Most of the stories in the paper are
second- o­ r third-­order issues.” Such conversations confirmed to me
that we had known and were deeply influenced by the same man.
Sometimes Goodpaster, or “Andy” as we called him, would use
some of Granddad’s favorite maxims, and we would both laugh.
“Take your job seriously, but never yourself,” was one of Ike’s
warnings. Or “All generalizations are false including this one.”
Or “There’s no such thing as an indispensable man or woman.” Or
the one I liked especially for its ironic humor: “Let’s not make
our mistakes in a hurry.” Goodpaster, however, often told me the
question most asked by President Eisenhower at cabinet meetings
was “What’s best for America?”—­for the country as a whole?
Goodpaster’s long association with Dwight Eisenhower could
be seen in other ways, too. In the 1990s he and I, along with a
few others, resigned from the board of a Washington-­based think
tank over the fact that they were accepting money from defense
contractors to pay for national security studies. Today such prin-
cipled departures are all but unheard of, and such “conflicts” are
commonplace. But back in those days, Goodpaster held the view
that such practices were unacceptable and only aided and abetted
the potential for the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-­
industrial complex”—­a concept articulated by the Boss in his
farewell address to the nation in 1961. Goodpaster believed this
phenomenon was real, and that it had the potential to deform

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 10 HOW IK E L E D

our democratic processes—­­especially the development of policy

making.
Former attorney general Herbert Brownell, Ike’s chief civil
rights adviser, also took me under his wing, along with others
such as Maxwell Rabb, Ike’s cabinet secretary and Arthur Flem-
ming, the former secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.5
Arthur Flemming, who had worked on both domestic (HEW)
and defense (Office of Defense Mobilization) matters during the
Eisenhower administration personified for me Ike’s view of the in-
terconnectedness of domestic and national security issues. I had
so much to learn from Secretary Flemming, in fact, that for years
we had lunch together regularly at Twigs, a quiet little restaurant
at the Capital Hilton on 16th Street where he had his own per-
manently reserved table.
I knew numerous other people, too, who had served their
country in one capacity or another with Ike; many from the war
years like Gen. Elwood “Pete” Quesada, commander of tactical
bombing on D-day, and Gen. Alfred Gruenther, former supreme
commander of NATO (and Ike’s favorite bridge partner).
I was eager to learn about the service of these remarkable people,
and I was intrigued by their current views. I also wanted to hear
what they had to say about Eisenhower’s leadership style, how he
tackled issues, and what it was like to work for him.
This quest eventually led me to the Supreme Court of the
United States, where Chief Justice Warren Burger, was willing
to meet me for fifteen minutes, his assistant told mine. When we
were seated in his spacious office, he began to warm up. Over
the course of two and a half hours he told me stories about what
he learned from serving in the Justice Department during the
Eisenhower administration, while they crafted the framework of
the civil rights revolution that was gathering force.
He was impressed, he told me, that President Eisenhower had
deployed the 101st Airborne Division in Little Rock to desegre-
gate Central High School. The use of the 101st instead of the
National Guard sent an unmistakable signal of resolve, not just
to Little Rock and the state of Arkansas, but far beyond its state

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 introduction 11

boundaries. Little Rock also showed the international community

that the United States was, resolutely, a country of laws. I was
intrigued when the chief justice told me that his decision on the
Kent State shootings was positively influenced by Eisenhower’s
handling of Little Rock.6
All these distinguished people, including my grandfather’s
youngest brother, Milton, wanted to make sure I knew and re-
membered some key points about their experience in working
for Ike. They also wanted me to know how he had organized
things—­and why it produced results.
They often spoke of Ike’s intellectual honesty, his unmistakable
adherence to specific strategic concepts, and his judicious use of
power—which included not just the political and constitutional
power he wielded, but also the power he had over other people.
They described to me his charisma, his energy, and what that
meant in the context of being part of his team.
Arthur Burns, a former Columbia University economist and
later Ike’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (later
still, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board under Nixon), may
have been the first public official who ever described for me, in
such vivid ways, one of the president’s qualities that had already
been flagged by Ike’s classmates at West Point. Eisenhower was, ac-
cording to his 1915 yearbook, “As big as life and twice as natural.”
When I first visited Dr. Burns at his office in Washington in
1985, where he worked after serving as the U.S. ambassador to
West Germany, he described to me the overwhelming power of
Dwight Eisenhower’s presence, his magnetism, his warmth and
his vibrancy—­or what State Department official Robert Bowie
called his “electricity.” I, of course, knew of this quality firsthand,
but I was intrigued by the apparent impact Ike’s personality and
physical magnetism had on his team.
Burns was quick to tell me, however, that beneath the cheery
demeanor and the easy, jocular way Eisenhower interacted with
people, there was a mind that worked like a steel trap. He was a
man of deep conviction and a firm set of ideas honed during the
“crisis years” of World War II. I can attest to the fact that everyone

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 12 HOW IK E L E D

in Eisenhower’s orbit felt this power and had an instinctive desire

to live up to his expectations and to win his approval.
When Ike walked into a room, and I experienced this myself,
his energy radiated. His personal power could, as some of his col-
leagues noted, “fill an empty space.”
For that reason I could never understand, as a kid, how Ike’s
political opponents characterized him during his presidency as
passive, bumbling, or ineffective. Didn’t they know this was the
same person who’d stood down Hitler? Never was there anything
I saw in him that could have been described as passive or out of
touch—­even in the very last months of his life. Indeed, Henry
Kissinger, who had opposed Eisenhower on a number of issues,
once described to me his first and only meeting with Ike just after
Nixon’s election and just months before his death. Kissinger said
he was unprepared for the former president’s sharpness, and the
mental energy he exuded even as he lay in his hospital bed, phys-
ically diminished by a series of heart attacks.
I remember vividly, too (and recounted in Mrs. Ike), an in-
cident just after one of Granddad’s many heart attacks in 1968.
Gen. Leonard Heaton, his physician and surgeon general of the
army, came into his hospital room as our immediate family was
gathered around Granddad, who was lying flat, his body emaci-
ated from his ailments. We thought, in those precious moments,
that we were saying our last good-­byes. Heaton told his patient
that it was time for us to leave the room so he could get some rest.
With that, Ike roared from his bed: “How many stars do you
have?” Heaton, surprised, said “Three, Sir.”
Granddad retorted: “Well I’ve got five, and I tell you they are
going to stay.”

Ike’s personal power was part of what drew people to him. But
his straightforward approach to things also won him admirers. Bill
Robinson, a newspaperman and later chairman of Coca-­Cola,
once recounted to William Ewald, a White House staffer and
later an Eisenhower historian, some of his first impressions of
Ike.

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 introduction 13

Robinson had kept notes from an encounter he had with

Eisenhower after the war, in 1947. He described the general’s
style:

There was no pose, no pretense, no attempt to establish

anything for the record. . . . ​He was natural, alive, alert,
spirited, and gave the impression of having an intense
amount of unloosened energy, both intellectual and physi-
cal. . . . [No] public man whom I have ever known, or had
ever known about, had such intellectual honesty as Eisen-
hower. I also had the impression that here was a man who
was realistic, practical and disciplined.7

Bill Ewald himself also recalled another kind of honesty. After

the presidency, he was tapped to help coedit Ike’s White House
memoirs with my father, John.
Ewald’s job in that effort was to provide documents and look
for details that would assure “fidelity to the facts,” as the former
president worked on drafts of the manuscript. Ike had an extraor-
dinary memory, as well as an organized mind that made it possi-
ble for him to dictate not only letters but whole book chapters in
nearly paragraph-­perfect form. In 1945, for instance, one month
after the Germans’ unconditional surrender, he even gave his fa-
mous twelve-­minute Guildhall Address from memory before a
London crowd of millions.
One day, Ewald challenged, indeed contradicted, the former
president on his recall of a specific event. “He was absolutely cer-
tain he had done one thing, though I had brought him documen-
tary evidence that he hadn’t,” Bill recalled.
Ike’s frustration and anger began to rise, and he got up from
his chair and left the room. (“Imagine, contradicting the general
about what was, after all, his own history. Conceivably, he could
even, though it seemed unlikely, be right,” Ewald worried. He was
sure he would be fired, “and I felt I deserved it.”)
A few moments later Ike returned. “If that’s the way the record
is,” he said, “that’s the way it should read.”

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 14 HOW IK E L E D

“Whatever his foibles,” Ewald concluded, “this iron respect for

the truth underlay the feeling that I came to have for Dwight
Eisenhower.” 8
Those associated with Ike knew that honesty was embedded in
his thinking. It resided at the very core of his values. I don’t think
you can assess Eisenhower the general or Eisenhower the president
without understanding this.
Ike’s capability as a long-­range thinker also explains one other
quality that I later found remarkable. He could be utterly in the
moment, while at the same time absorbing and assessing what
the consequences of an experience, event, or trend could have in the
decades to come.
On visiting Ordruf, a Nazi concentration camp near Buchen-
wald on August 12, 1945, Eisenhower put in place, virtually on
the spot, a policy of far-­reaching impact. So overwhelmed was he
by the “savagery” and “bestiality” of what the Nazis had done in
this “horror camp,” he insisted that from then on the Holocaust’s
atrocities must be chronicled and preserved for all time—­on the
basis that at some point in the future there would be people who
would say it never happened.
It is hard to imagine someone instinctively thinking about fifty
years from now as he is standing, confronted for the first time, by
a profoundly shocking discovery. But without Eisenhower’s im-
mediate response at Ordruf, one can only imagine how the lies of
Holocaust deniers might have taken root after the war.
Ike’s leadership approach was also informed by an under-
standing of human nature, the determination to establish an
effective mode of operation and organization, as well as the
conviction that it is necessary not just to inspire but also to
challenge his associates’ shortcomings—­starting with his own.
He was always mindful, however, that not all personal growth
and change can happen under the glare of public scrutiny. He
would also show the effectiveness of advancing his set of princi-
ples publicly—­a nd even privately—­if the results were likely to
be more effective.
While there may be many who will still challenge some of

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 introduction 15

the decisions Ike made, no one can dispute that he brought

sincerity, idealism, and utter dedication to the performance of
his duty.
Bill Ewald, in referring to Eisenhower, once observed that self-­
sacrifice and selflessness—­on which the highest form of duty is
based—­“is the possession of the objectivist; the man who sees that
the truth is greater than himself.” 9
Eisenhower’s leadership—one of head and heart—was pro-
jected in the context of a higher cause, one that rested on account-
ability and humility. The importance of serving something bigger
than yourself is a truth that Ike would tell from power—­through
the full force of his personal, political, and military will.

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 General Eisenhower meets paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Divi-
sion in Newbury, England, prior to their boarding for the invasion,
June 5, 1944. (U.S. Army)

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