Machiavellian Ike the Soldier

By Otto Friedrich

The first time Dwight Eisenhower met General Bernard Law Montgomery in 1942, the irascible British commander outranked the American newcomer and made no secret of his feelings on the matter. Required to give Eisenhower a briefing, he arrived very late and said, "I'm sorry I'm late, but I really shouldn't have come at all." While Montgomery approached a wall map with his pointer, Eisenhower lit a cigarette. Without turning around, Montgomery stopped his briefing and demanded, "Who's smoking?"

"I am, sir," said Eisenhower.

"Stop it," said Montgomery, still not turning around. "I don't permit it here."

Eisenhower flushed deeply but said nothing as he snuffed out his cigarette.

That was an example of how he learned to get along with the British.

Merle Miller, who died shortly after finishing this mammoth book last year, achieved his greatest success with his oral biographies of Presidents Truman and Johnson. He obviously knows a good story, and he admires his hero. Though a number of Eisenhower's fellow commanders in World War II regarded him mainly as an international "board chairman," Miller, himself a combat correspondent for Yank, sees Eisenhower as a consummate politician and diplomat whose mixture of heartiness, cunning and charm helped hold together a fragile military coalition. "He was most complex," Miller writes. "Dwight Eisenhower could and did outsmart, outthink, outmaneuver, outgovern, and outcommand almost anybody you'd care to name, including Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and yes, even Franklin Roosevelt. I don't know that he ever read Niccolo Machiavelli or La Rochefoucauld, but he practiced what they preached."

These were skills that later served Eisenhower well in the White House, but Miller believes he learned them all in the Army. Even his bumbling incoherence at press conferences was a trick that West Point cadets called "bugling," using many words to say very little; as a general, his written orders and instructions were clear and forceful.

Miller writes as though his view represents some kind of radical reassessment. That may have been so for a liberal like Miller, but his judgment is actually coming to be pretty much the conventional wisdom. History has been kind to Dwight Eisenhower, virtually reversing Mark Antony's declaration that the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. All but forgotten now is the Eisenhower who spent much of his presidency playing bridge and golf, who collected handsome presents from rich friends, who presided over an era that is still synonymous with complacency and sloth. The same amnesia covers many of his policies. Forgotten, too, is the Eisenhower who was reluctant to enforce the Supreme Court's desegregation decisions, who would not stand up to Senator McCarthy or oppose the spread of blacklisting, who bequeathed Richard Nixon to the country. Just about all that history remembers is a patriotic soldier who kept America prosperous and at peace. And that, the triumph of the image Eisenhower developed during his Army years, is perhaps just as it should be.