21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (28 page)

“No!” Dwight wheezed.

Edgar pummeled him again then grabbed Dwight’s hair and slammed his head against the floor. Dwight flailed uselessly, yelling for help. Ida went on about her business at the stove.

Finally, Dwight’s younger brother Earl rushed into the room and tried to pull Edgar off of Dwight. “Earl,” Ida said sharply, “let them alone.” And Dwight was left to fend for himself.

David and Ida Eisenhower encouraged their six sons to solve their own problems, to stand up for themselves, to be self-reliant and competitive. If an older son was pounding the stuffing out of a younger son, the younger son would just have to learn to fight his own battles.

The Eisenhower family was a deeply religious family, steeped in the Mennonite tradition of pacifism. The Eisenhower boys were taught never to fight with other children in the neighborhood (why pacifism was not enforced
inside
the Eisenhower home is not clear).

One time, Dwight (who was nicknamed “Little Ike”) was being chased down the street by a neighborhood boy just as Dwight’s father, David, was arriving home from his job at the creamery. David called Dwight to him and demanded, “Why do you let that boy run you around like that?”

“Because,” Dwight said, breathless from the chase, “if I fight him, you’ll give me a whipping whether I win or lose!”

David pointed to the neighborhood boy, who stood gloating by the street, and he said sternly, “Ike, you chase that boy out of here!” And he did so.
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In the Eisenhower home, Mennonite pacifism clearly had its limits. Dwight’s parents didn’t want the boys to be bullies or start fights with the neighborhood kids—but neither did they want the boys to run away or get beaten. Historian Stephen Ambrose explains:

The school subjects that most appealed to young Ike Eisenhower were spelling and arithmetic. He especially enjoyed spelling contests, because they were competitive, and he loved to excel. The appeal of mathematics lay in its simple logic and certainty: an answer could be right or wrong, but there were no gray areas.

The subject that he most avidly pursued on his own time was history—especially military history. In spite of his pacifist upbringing, young Ike consistently preferred wars over chores. The family library contained a number of books on history, and Ike read and reread the sections dealing with great military leaders. The heroes he admired most were Hannibal, the great Carthaginian military commander, and George Washington, who prevailed over the British even though his cause often seemed hopeless.

Young Dwight Eisenhower was naturally curious, intensely competitive, self-reliant, and confident. Growing up with five brothers and learning to stand on his own provided a solid foundation for a competent, confident military leader. But he still had much to learn and experience on his way to becoming a great military leader on a global stage.

Eisenhower graduated from Abilene High School, class of 1909. Ike and his brother Edgar both wanted to attend college, but their family couldn’t afford it. So Ike and Edgar worked out a plan to alternately put each other through college. As Edgar went off to college, Ike went to work as a night supervisor in the creamery.

In September 1910, Ike learned that an examination was being offered for applicants to the two service academies, West Point and Annapolis. Of the eight Abilene candidates taking the exam, he scored second and won an appointment to West Point. Though his Mennonite mother was anguished over his decision to become a soldier, both she and Ike’s father saw him off as he boarded the train.

For Dwight Eisenhower, going to West Point was the fulfillment of a boyhood dream. On arriving at the academy, he was awestruck by the history of the place. During the Revolutionary War, it had been the site of Fort Clinton, guarding the Hudson against the British Navy. General George Armstrong Custer and General Winfield Scott were buried in the West Point Cemetery, and he could go to the barracks and visit the rooms where Grant, Lee, Sherman, and other legends of American history had studied the lessons of leadership.

Eisenhower was part of the fabled West Point graduating class of 1915, known as “the class the stars fell on.” Of the 164 graduates of the class of ’15, 59 achieved a rank of brigadier general or higher. One of Ike’s best friends at West Point was Omar Bradley, who would distinguish himself as field commander in North Africa and Europe during World War II, and would, like Eisenhower himself, become a five-star general. Ike did not stand out as a West Point grad, ranking 61st academically and 125th in discipline, but he made a name for himself on the varsity football team, starting at running back and linebacker.
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Ike married Mamie Geneva Doud of Boone, Iowa, in 1916, while he was stationed in Texas. They had two sons, Doud, who was born in 1917 and died at age three, and John, who joined the army and retired as a brigadier general. Ike rarely discussed the sorrow of losing their first son.

Once Ike assumed his duties as a commissioned officer, his superiors began to recognize him as a competent administrator. In 1917, in view of his exceptional organizational abilities, he received an appointment as commander of the tank training center at Camp Meade, Maryland. Though he regretted not seeing combat during World War I, he made a significant contribution to future war efforts. An innovative thinker, he devised a new strategy of speed-oriented tank warfare. His radical ideas were initially resisted by his superiors then adopted, and have been proven in combat from World War II through Desert Storm.

In 1926, having achieved the rank of major, he graduated from Command School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, first in a class of 275. Two years later, he graduated first in his class at Army War College.

In 1933, Eisenhower was assigned as an aide to army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur. He would ultimately spend seven years under MacArthur, much of it in the Philippines. MacArthur was a bombastic, egotistical officer with a flair for the dramatic. Eisenhower served faithfully and efficiently under MacArthur. In a fitness report MacArthur wrote in the early 1930s, he said of Eisenhower, “This is the best officer in the Army. When the next war comes, he should go right to the top.”
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MacArthur inexplicably put the brakes on Eisenhower’s military career—possibly because he saw Eisenhower as an eventual rival. MacArthur valued Eisenhower’s leadership skills, keeping Ike at his side for years while denying him promotions. Years later, after Eisenhower became a five-star general, MacArthur dismissed him as “the best secretary I ever had.” For his part, Eisenhower observed that he once studied “dramatics” under MacArthur.
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Historian Matthew F. Holland observed that Eisenhower’s experience dealing with MacArthur’s outsized ego and prickly personality prepared him well for his unique role in World War II “when he had to work with such egotistical characters as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George S. Patton, and Bernard Montgomery.”
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And those skills would serve him well in the White House as well.

By late 1939, Eisenhower was rising in prominence. In 1941, Ike was promoted to full colonel and appointed commander of the Third Army. By September of that year, he was a brigadier general. As the United States entered World War II in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, army chief of staff George Marshall appointed Eisenhower to the War Plans Division in Washington. Ike’s responsibilities under Marshall included preparing a strategy for Allied invasions of Europe and Japan. Historian Stanley Weintraub observed:

In March 1942, Ike was promoted to major general and named head of the Operations Division of the War Department. In May, General Marshall sent Eisenhower to England to assess the readiness of the European theater command. Ike returned with a pessimistic report. In June, Marshall sent him back to London—this time as commanding general, European Theater of Operations. In giving Eisenhower that appointment, he passed over 366 more senior officers—an impressive testimony to Marshall’s opinion of Eisenhower’s competence to lead.

In November 1942, Eisenhower took command of the campaign in North Africa. The early phases of the North Africa campaign were an organizational nightmare, in which Eisenhower commanded a mismatched collection of forces from several Allied nations—yet Eisenhower was able to impose a unified command that successfully coordinated invasions of Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy. Through his organizational and strategic skills, he racked up such an impressive record of success that in December 1943, he was appointed supreme allied commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force.

In December 1943, President Roosevelt chose Eisenhower to be supreme allied commander in Europe. When Roosevelt’s son James asked why he chose Eisenhower, FDR replied, “Eisenhower is the best politician among the military men. He is a natural leader who can convince other men to follow him, and this is what we need in his position more than any other quality.”
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Eisenhower’s responsibility was nothing less than to oversee the invasion and liberation of Western Europe. The campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, and Tunisia served as a valuable training ground for Eisenhower as he faced one of the most challenging military campaigns in human history.

The invasion plan was code-named Operation Overlord. The Allied invasion force would consist of 4,400 ships, 11,000 planes, and nearly 155,000 assault troops. The biggest X factor was the weather. Eisenhower had originally selected June 5, 1944, as the date for the assault, but high winds and heavy seas forced a postponement until June 6. A predicted break in the storm over the English Channel would enable the Allies to catch the enemy by surprise. But if the operation went forward and the storm didn’t break, the D-Day assault might end in catastrophe.

Early on the morning of June 5, General Eisenhower, Field Marshal Montgomery, and other senior members of the Allied high command gathered in the map room of Southwick House, near Portsmouth. They studied intelligence reports and weather reports, and Eisenhower invited all opinions—but the decision whether to proceed with the invasion or abort was Ike’s alone to make. At that moment, ships were steaming toward France. Before long, it would be too late to recall them. The fate of nations hung on Eisenhower’s decision.

Finally, Ike said, “Okay, let’s go.” And the decision was sealed.

Eisenhower knew his decision might end in disaster. He prepared a note that read, in essence, “Our landings have failed and I have withdrawn our troops. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”

Advance troops parachuted into France just after midnight on June 6. The landing craft and amphibious tanks of the main invasion force reached the beaches just after sunrise. Allied troops came ashore in the face of heavy fire from German artillery and machine guns. They scaled cliffs and cut through coils of barbed wire. By the time the invasion had secured some eighty square miles of French coastline, more than ten thousand soldiers were dead, missing, or wounded.

Eisenhower’s note proved unnecessary. Operation Overlord was costly but successful, and it paved the way for an ultimate Allied victory.

The liberation of Europe was a slow, grinding, bloody process. On April 30, 1945, as the Soviet Red Army rolled through Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. On May 7, 1945, German general Alfred Jodl arrived at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, France, to sign an unconditional surrender. Contemptuous of the Nazi high command, Eisenhower refused to be present for the signing. He delegated that task to his chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith.
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It was the end of the war in Europe.

When Allied forces opened up the Nazi concentration camps and discovered the horrors within, Eisenhower ordered camera crews to document the evidence of war crimes for the Nuremberg trials. Eisenhower himself toured the concentration camps. He wanted to be able to testify of his own personal knowledge of the full extent of the Holocaust. He hoped that by so doing, he could prevent future acts of atrocity and genocide. He also ordered every American soldier in the vicinity to tour the camps and bear witness to what they had seen. He didn’t want anyone to be able to deny the reports of the Holocaust.

In July 1945, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was at Ike’s headquarters in Germany. A number of high-ranking army and War Department officials were present. During the after-dinner conversation, Secretary Stimson received a telegram. He read it to the group, all of whom had top security clearances. It said that the army had successfully tested the first atomic bomb. The bomb was ready to be dropped on Japan. Eisenhower later recalled: