Inside Eisenhower's complex interior war room

By Jean Edward Smith

Random House. 944 pp. $40

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Reviewed by Paul Jablow

The United States' three most defining wars were alike in at least one respect: Each produced a military hero who went on to the presidency.

The historic verdicts are pretty much in on George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. But the legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower is still the source of continuing debate. Despite an occasionally fawning tone, Jean Smith's comprehensive biography, Eisenhower in War and Peace, throws a rich light on a deceptively complicated subject. The anecdote that ends the book illustrates that difficulty.

Smith, a senior scholar in Columbia University's history department who has previously written biographies of Grant and Franklin D, Roosevelt, describes an incident that occurred several years after Eisenhower's death in 1969.

His grandson David Eisenhower asked grandmother Mamie whether she had really known Ike.

Her reply: "I'm not sure anyone did."

It seems that behind the affable, avuncular exterior and the grin wide as a football field lay a cold shrewdness that both advanced his career and served the country well in difficult times. Perhaps in the end, what was good for Dwight Eisenhower was good for the country.

The insight, intelligence, and skills that helped vault him past dozens of West Point classmates who may have been better pure soldiers also helped him put his stamp on such American historical landmarks as the Normandy invasion, the ending of the war in Korea, federal support for school desegregation, and the interstate highway system. To those, one might add his prescient warning, as he left office, of the dangers of "the military-industrial complex."

History has treated Washington as a flawed military commander whose battlefield gifts were mostly inspirational and carried over into success as a political leader. Grant was the battlefield genius who went on to a failed presidency.

Eisenhower was clearly in the Washington tradition, but without the combat experience. He just missed out on World War I, and when he became directly involved in tactical decisions in World War II, Smith writes, the results weren't always pretty. Two examples he cites were the clumsy landings in North Africa and the fiasco of Salerno in the Allies' campaign in Italy.

Smith clearly agrees with the assessment of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery that Eisenhower was not a great soldier "but he was a great supreme commander - a military statesman." Omar Bradley, a hero of the Normandy invasion who later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said flat-out that Eisenhower "didn't know how to manage a battlefield." Smith believes that his "preference for consensus" hurt on the battlefield but was invaluable to him off it.

"Ike moved by subtlety and indirection," Smith writes. "His amiable personality concealed a calculating political instinct that had been honed to perfection."

That instinct could be cold and ruthless, as it was when Eisenhower, realizing that his affair with his British Army driver, Kay Summersby, threatened to block his military advancement, sent her a "Dear John" letter on War Department stationery that Smith describes as follows: "FDR would have been incapable of writing such a missive and George Patton would have said a warmer goodbye to his horse."

Fortunately, that political instinct was more often revealed in Eisenhower's shrewd handling of difficult men, including Gen. George S. Patton, Charles de Gaulle, and Montgomery himself, stroking their egos when necessary, always making the most of their talents. In de Gaulle's case, it meant going to the edge of insubordination by realizing, where Roosevelt couldn't, that de Gaulle was perhaps the only man who could lead postwar France.

In Eisenhower's presidency, that instinct was useful in neutralizing potential demagogues: Giving Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin enough rope to hang himself during the postwar Red scare, or allowing Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas a symbolic fig leaf that cleared the way for the integration of Central High School in Little Rock.

Interestingly enough, two men he seemingly misjudged were Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin - at the first meeting, anyway - and Richard M. Nixon. Stalin he described as "benign and fatherly" following their encounter in 1945.

Nixon was a more complicated case. After revelations of a "slush fund" maintained by the California senator's supporters made him an apparent liability on the 1952 Republican ticket, Eisenhower tried almost every way possible to maneuver or humiliate Nixon into dropping out of the race. But Nixon, realizing that Eisenhower would not publicly ask him to quit for fear of angering the GOP's right wing, hung in and rescued himself with the maudlin "Checkers" speech that became a political classic.

Smith notes that Eisenhower's approval ratings during his presidency averaged 64 percent, the highest ever since World War II. And, of course, he governed in a far simpler time, aided by his hero's aura from the war.

"Moral complacency was the hallmark of the Eisenhower years," Smith writes. "He reflected the nation's self-satisfaction in the 1950's. It was good politics and it fit with Ike's starchy sense of propriety" (Kay Summersby notwithstanding).

One could argue that the least impressive aspect of Eisenhower's presidential legacy was an area in which his interpersonal skills least came in to play: Increasing the role of the intelligence community in foreign affairs. He helped make the CIA a major instrument of American policy. Early in his administration, CIA support helped topple the government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, whom Ike grew to fear had Communist leanings. The result was enhanced power for the Shah of Iran - and a political time bomb that would explode two decades later.