Yes, Some Still Like Ike

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 27, 1999 | by Josiah Bunting

A new biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower reveals little that isn't known about the Allied commander and two-term president, but it reconsiders qualities of mind and character.

Great men and women retire. They are offered sums of money to write their memoirs or, rather, to oversee their preparation. In a few years a popular biography appears, then a memoir or two, the affectionate reminiscences of friends. Next comes a definitive academic biography. And finally, perhaps, some sort of reassessment, a summing-up of the subject's career.

The process repeats itself as each generation reevaluates the subject in light of the preoccupations of its age and, occasionally, on the fruits of fresh research. Biographers of succeeding generations invariably condescend to the work of their predecessors; in this, they usually are both wrong and wrongheaded.

Geoffrey Perret's Eisenhower (Random House, $35, 685 pp) is the first major life story of its subject since Stephen Ambrose's magisterial two-volume biography, published in 1983, 14 years after Ike's death. The book is aimed at a large audience of military buffs and Americans old enough to remember, often with fondness and longing, the Dwight D. Eisenhower who became an icon of his times.

Eisenhower considered his years as Allied commander in Europe the most productive and satisfying of his life, and he will be remembered far more for them than for his two terms as president. Take, for instance, Ike's arrival in London in June 1942: "They had been waiting a long time for him, nearly three years.... One day, an American general would arrive as an avatar in khaki, brass buttons and a rainbow smear of medal ribbons, the manifest form of the assurance of victory, with all the power of America at his back."

Ike perfectly fulfilled Britain's expectation of what such a hero might look like. He was, above all, confident. He radiated optimism. His delight in his authority and work was palpable. And he took a particular joy in the English. Indeed, something made him a natural coalitionist for all his life, the settled foe of nativist American isolationism.

Perret shows the sources of this ebulliently comfortable temperament, many already familiar: the hardscrabble prairie boyhood with its early twinges of ambition and determination; the departure from Abilene, Kan., for West Point (to which Eisenhower was attracted, not because he wanted to be a career soldier, but because he wanted a good, inexpensive education); and the array of assignments between 1918 and 1940, which surely belie received notions about the tedium of interwar military service.

There followed his rapid ascent during the war, overseen by George Marshall, all the way to supreme command in Europe and later to Army chief of staff, a post he seems to have disliked. Afterward, Eisenhower served as president of Columbia University, whose faculty then included Mark van Doren, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. Although he brought along two recently retired field-grade Army officers to serve as his assistants, Ike promised not to have anything to do with faculty appointments. After Columbia, Eisenhower took over the command of NATO and in 1952 became the Republican candidate for president. He would serve eight years in the White House.

Of Eisenhower's presidency, the book reproduces Ike's own accounting for his stewardship in a letter written shortly after he had seen a survey of presidential leadership that ranked him "below average," alongside Franklin Pierce and Chester Arthur. His list opens with statehood for Alaska and Hawaii and includes the end of the Korean War, the largest reduction in taxes to that time and the first civil-rights law.

Perret also revisits issues such as Ike's relationship with Kay Summersby (exonerating him of unfaithfulness to Mamie) and his failure to insist on a paragraph of praise for Marshall in a 1952 speech in Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Wisconsin. Although Perret is sharply critical of his subject in some areas, the tone of the book is adulatory. Ultimately, this narrative account of Eisenhower's life tells little that people did not know before, but it tells the familiar story well enough to again capture the subject.

There is a family of biography that does not pretend to definitiveness or amplitude but rather reconsiders those qualities of character, mind and, most perishable, personality that account for their subjects' achievements and failures. This family includes Andre Maurois' life of Benjamin Disraeli, Bruce Catton's reassessment of U.S. Grant, Richard Brookhiser's recent depiction of George Washington and Gary Will's 1999 life of St. Augustine. Ike is ready for this.

Josiah Bunting serves as superintendent and professor of the humanities at Virginia Military Institute.