Eisenhower in War and Peace

892 Pages·2012·11.18 MB·English

by  Jean Edward Smith

ALSO BY JEAN EDWARD SMITH
FDR
Grant
John Marshall: Definer of a Nation
George Bush’s War
Lucius D. Clay: An American Life
The Conduct of American Foreign Policy Debated
(ed., with Herbert M. Levine)
The Constitution and American Foreign Policy
Civil Liberties and Civil Rights Debated
(ed., with Herbert M. Levine)
The Papers of General Lucius D. Clay (ed.)
Germany Beyond the Wall
Der Weg ins Dilemma
The Defense of Berlin
(illustration credit front.)

Copyright © 2012 by Jean Edward Smith
Maps copyright © 2012 by Mapping Specialists
All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Smith, Jean Edward.
Eisenhower in war and peace / by Jean Edward Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64429-3
1. Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Dwight David), 1890–1969. 2. Presidents—United
States—Biography 3. Generals—United States—Biography. 4. United States—
Politics and government—1953–1961. 5. United States. Army—Biography. I.
Title.
E836.S56 2012 973.921092—dc22 2011008605
[B]

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Jacket design: Base Art Co.
Jacket painting: Michael J. Deas
v3.1
For Christine
I hate war as only a
soldier who has lived it can.
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Preface

Dwight Eisenhower remains an enigma. For the majority of Americans he is a
benign fatherly figure looming indistinctly out of the mists of the past—a high-
ranking general who directed the Allied armies to victory in Europe, and a
caretaker president who presided over eight years of international calm and
domestic tranquility. To those who knew him, Ike was a tireless taskmaster who
worked with incredible subtlety to move events in the direction he wished them
to go. Most would agree he was a man of principle, decency, and common sense,
whom the country could count on to do what was right. In both war and peace he
gave the world confidence in American leadership.
Ike’s generalship has often been disparaged. Some have suggested he lacked
strategic vision, that he was a mere administrator, a hail-fellow-well-met who
simply kept everyone content and in harness while working toward a common
goal. It is easy to understand how such misconceptions could arise. Eisenhower
made victory appear inevitable. He did not posture or pose for the press, he
issued no grandiloquent communiqués, and he did not pit himself against high
command or political authority. He got on with the job with a minimum of fuss.
He was parsimonious with the lives of the troops entrusted to his command,
evenhanded toward his allies, and ready to take responsibility for whatever
occurred. He was a military leader in the time-honored tradition of Washington
and Grant, a man who symbolized American democracy: the ideal commander
for a citizen army of draftees.
Eisenhower’s job was not easy. Topside were Churchill, Roosevelt, and de
Gaulle, each with his own ideas about how the war should be fought. The chain
of command ran through the Combined Chiefs of Staff, principally General
George Marshall and Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, who were often at odds
over what course to follow. Ike handled his command relationships with what
appeared to be effortless aplomb. In fact, he did it so well that one rarely
considered the complexities involved.
The task he faced was daunting. Eisenhower commanded the largest
multinational force ever assembled, mounted an unprecedented cross-Channel
invasion of Europe, mastered logistical problems on a scale never before
encountered, and came to grips with a battle-tested German Army fighting on
familiar terrain. Dealing with fractious but gifted subordinates such as George
Patton and Bernard Montgomery seemed relatively simple by comparison.
Like Grant and Pershing, Eisenhower commanded on the spot. He did not
dodge difficult decisions, he did not pass the buck to staff conferences or
subordinate commanders, and he always knew that if he did not measure up, he
would be summarily relieved. Supreme commanders do not enjoy job security.
“At any moment a necessity might arise for my relief and consequent demotion,”
Ike wrote his son John in 1943. When the war ended, Eisenhower’s
accomplishment in leading the Western powers to victory was fully recognized,
yet today it has largely receded from our understanding.
Eisenhower’s presidential years appear equally remote. Yet with the exception
of Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower was the most successful president of
the twentieth century. He ended a three-year, no-win war in Korea with honor
and dignity; resisted calls for preventive war against the Soviet Union and
China; deployed the Seventh Fleet to protect Formosa from invasion; faced
down Khrushchev over Berlin; and restored stability in Lebanon when sectarian
violence threatened to pull the country apart. On the home front, Ike punctured
the Roosevelt coalition, weaned the Republican party from its isolationist past,
restored the nation’s sanity after the McCarthyite binge of Communist witch-
hunting, and proved unbeatable at the polls. During his two terms in the White
House, his monthly approval rating averaged 64 percent, a figure never equaled
since World War II.
Eisenhower believed that the United States should not go to war unless
national survival was at stake. “There is no alternative to peace,” he famously
said. He dismissed the necessity of conflict beneath the nuclear threshold and
refused to engage American troops in brushfire wars for political abstractions.
After Ike made peace in Korea, not a single American died in combat for the
next eight years.
When the National Security Council—Dulles, Nixon, and the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff—recommended intervention (including the use of nuclear
weapons) at Dien Bien Phu to rescue the beleaguered French garrison,
Eisenhower summarily rejected the proposal. “You boys must be crazy,” he told
his national security assistant, Robert Cutler. “We can’t use those awful things
against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God.” Five years
later, when China threatened force against Taiwan, the Joint Chiefs
recommended an immediate nuclear response, and once again Eisenhower
rejected the idea.
When Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt to seize the Suez Canal in
1956, Eisenhower forced them to withdraw, toppling Anthony Eden’s
government in London, undercutting the Fourth Republic in France, and
threatening financial sanctions against Israel. That repudiation of what Ike called
“old fashioned gunboat diplomacy” not only kept the peace but enhanced
American prestige throughout the world.
Domestically, Eisenhower tamed inflation, slashed defense spending,
balanced the federal budget, and worked easily with a Democratic Congress.
Two of his appointees to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren and
William Brennan, launched a judicial revolution. Presidents cannot control the
decisions of their appointees, and Ike was disappointed in some of the rulings of
the Warren Court, but the advances Americans have experienced in civil liberty
and social justice during the past fifty years are in some very large measure
attributable to Warren and Brennan.
It was also Eisenhower who began the practice of submitting the names of
potential judicial nominees to the American Bar Association for preliminary
vetting (a practice discontinued in 2001 by the Bush administration but resumed
under President Obama). His appointees to the lower federal courts, moderate
Republicans including John Minor Wisdom in Louisiana and Elbert P. Tuttle in
Georgia, were the judicial heroes of the civil rights struggle, and Ike’s Justice
Department backed them to the hilt.
Eisenhower held a textbook view of presidential power. As more than one
scholar has observed, he may have been the last president to actually believe in
the Constitution. For Ike, Congress made policy and the president carried it out.
He took his constitutional responsibility to “take care that the laws be faithfully
executed” at face value. In 1957, when a United States District Court in Little
Rock, Arkansas, ordered the desegregation of Central High, Eisenhower
dispatched the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to
enforce the court’s order. If he had not acted, and if he had not used
overwhelming force to ensure compliance with the district court’s order,
desegregation in the South would have been set back at least a generation.
“Sending in the troops was the hardest decision I had had to make since D-Day,”
Eisenhower said afterward. “But Goddamn it, it was the only thing I could do.”
Eisenhower was a progressive conservative. He believed traditional American
values encompassed change and progress. He looked to the future, not the past,
and his presidency provided a buffered transition from FDR’s New Deal and the
Fair Deal of Harry Truman into the modern era. “Should any political party
attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs,
you would never hear of that party again,” Ike wrote his brother Edgar. “There is