The History Club Page discussion

"“NO PRESIDENT HAD EVER HAD so little experience of politics and so little firsthand experience of American life” as Dwight D. Eisenhower, asserted the veteran political journalist Marquis Childs in his 1958 book, The Captive Hero.

And many critics echoed this claim: after a long career in the protective, isolated world of the American military, including lengthy postings overseas in Panama, the Philippines, and Europe, Eisenhower, upon taking office as president, knew little about the basic rhythms of ordinary American life and was unschooled in the ways of politics. True, Eisenhower had spent his adult life in the hierarchical, rule-bound world of the army, and he’d never been elected to anything in his life.

But Childs was doubly wrong. Eisenhower was intimately familiar with the nature of rural American life, having been raised by God-fearing, dutiful, and frugal parents in the Kansas farmlands, and he left Kansas at the age of 20 to enter upon a career in the most political of institutions, the U.S. Army, in which he rose, over many years of patient labor, to a position of preeminence. His humble origins and his extensive leadership experience were the twin sources of Eisenhower’s popular appeal and his political success. He had deep roots in Middle America, of which he remained proud and by which he set his moral compass. At the same time he learned how to operate in, and finally dominate, a massive bureaucracy filled with ambitious egos hungry for glory.

As Garry Wills memorably wrote, Eisenhower made his ascent to power by climbing “a slippery ladder of bayonets.” Not only did he achieve greatness in the American armed services; during the Second World War he asserted control over the British Army as well, forging its fractious, skeptical generals into a cohesive fighting force alongside the Americans. Together—and under his command—they defeated the Germans. His leadership of the combined Allied armies in Western Europe required vision, patience, compromise, goodwill, and inexhaustible persistence: precisely the skills that prepared him for the White House."