Hugh Sidey's America

By Hugh Sidey

It was a warm day in 1941 or 1942, and Wes Jackson, who was 5 or 6, climbed into the family's Lafayette sedan with assorted cousins. They drove from their farm near Topeka over to Abilene, Kans., for a family reunion at his great- aunt Ida Eisenhower's white frame house on Fourth Street, south of the tracks. Her son Dwight was either in Washington or Europe, even then on the edge of his great fame.

Wes dutifully greeted the elders present, wandered over the few acres and through the barn out back, then lounged under an old hackberry tree. At noon dinner he loaded up his plate with fried chicken and mashed potatoes and took a seat with a cousin on the back porch. Wes cleaned his plate. His cousin did not. Aunt Ida came inspecting. She spied the wasted food, stopped and delivered a stern dose of family doctrine: "Waste not, want not." Right then another remarkable career may have been started through the mixture of Eisenhower family values and the ethic of that prairie society. Jackson, now one of the nation's most renowned and innovative agriculture researchers, founded the Land Institute in Salina, Kans., in search of perennial prairie grain crops that will halt the wasting of the planet.

He is as much a philosopher as a geneticist, and he has thought a great deal about his first cousin once removed, Dwight David Eisenhower. Jackson believes the bedrock of Ike's achievements and his growing stature in history came from the white frame house in Abilene and the harmony the town required and imposed for a rewarding life. Many strata of worldly experience were laid down over Ike's character during his 50 years of public service. But the final high silhouette of his life followed the outlines shaped in the streets of Abilene.

The tributes for Ike's 100th birthday last week focused on his career as "the most successful general of the greatest war ever fought," to use biographer Stephen Ambrose's words. Ambrose goes further, suggesting that Ike is destined to be ranked "with Wilson and the Roosevelts as one of the four truly great Presidents of the 20th century." He is the most famous American soldier of all time. He commanded 4.5 million men in combat, more than any other man in history.

Victory explains his military stature. Peace and prosperity define his presidential ranking. Yet those achievements fall short of the sum of Dwight Eisenhower. That other part of him is found in the nature of the man.

Had Ike been around for last week's celebrations, he most probably would have gone back to Kansas and talked about growing up in Abilene. He had been granted, he once said, "the great and priceless privilege of being raised in a small town." After the war he returned to Abilene 19 times, insisted that he be buried there. He had really never let go.

On the night before the Normandy invasion, moving among the men of the 101st Airborne who were loading up for their drop, he met a man from Dodge City. "Go get 'em, Kansas," he said with a thumbs-up. When the great battles were done and Ike stood in London's Guildhall, talking about the successful struggle for freedom, he was back home again. "The valley of the Thames draws closer to the farms of Kansas," he declared.

"Family values," explains Jackson. The Eisenhowers treasured what they had -- one another and a fresh land. "Our pleasures were simple -- they included survival" is the way Ike put it. Bible Scripture was read three times a day in the Eisenhower home. Those lessons were reinforced in the town where Eisenhower sought and won approval from almost everyone, including the town toughs whom he fought when necessary. Hemmed in by family and neighborhood, he had no other choice -- or experience. Happiness was discipline.

At age 10, when Ike was denied the right to go trick-or-treating on Halloween with his brothers, his temper overwhelmed him. He ran outside and pummeled a tree until his small fists were torn and bleeding. He went to bed and sobbed for an hour. His mother came in, salved and bandaged his hands, then explained the futility of uncontrolled anger: "He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city." Much later Ike claimed that was "one of the most valuable moments of my life." Five times in 1954 when he was President, there were emotional appeals from his advisers to strike militarily at the troublemakers in Asia. Each time he went off to think, and each time he heard the echo from that day in Abilene. He kept the peace.

He had neither the inclination nor the need to worry about his financial or social status in Abilene. Ike revered an older man, Bob Davis, who taught him how to play poker and how to net fish on the banks of the Smoky Hill River. Davis was illiterate. Ike's best friend was Everett ("Swede") Hazlett, son of an Abilene physician who lived in the affluent part of town. In his exuberance Ike rounded up companions for baseball, football and camping from anyplace. His most famous fistfight was with Wes Merrifield, and according to Ike himself, the fight went more than an hour, ended in a draw when both boys were exhausted. The two got along out of necessity after that.

In war, Ike's magic was to inspire foot soldiers and generals alike, blending English lords with plain Americans, reconciling and focusing the energies of haughty, contentious commanders such as Britain's Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery and the U.S Third Army's General George Patton. Holding the trust of the grandiloquent politicians such as Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt was just as challenging. It took all Ike had and four packs of Camels a day.

In the White House he soothed the sulking Democrats of Capitol Hill. They still smarted over the fact that he had interrupted their party's long grip on the presidency. He won Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson to his side as often as not. One evening after plying L.B.J. with Scotch, Ike pointed to his own chair in the Oval Office and said, "Senator, someday you should be in that chair." Johnson roared back to his office in the Capitol wearing that tribute like a battle ribbon.

In this warm and happy memoir there is a shadow, not over Ike's time or his achievements but over the U.S. of today. Jackson talks about it from his corner of Kansas above the Smoky Hill River, the same one that nurtured Ike. Was the unspoiled land and Abilene and the Eisenhower family -- and so many others like them in that era -- a one-time event in our history, now swept away by excessive wealth, greed, waste, softness and self-pity? Jackson confesses he has no certain answer. But he is worried by what he sees throughout the nation. When he talks about it, he sounds like Ike might sound were he alive.

"The farms, the ranches and the small towns were our sources of decency," says Jackson. "They seeded the cities in Ike's time. Now they are vanishing. Our cultural seed stock came from church, school and the community baseball team. We must now confront the Jeffersonian idea about living in harmony with the land. Is it mere nostalgia, or is it a practical necessity?"

Not long ago, Jackson went to Harvard to lecture, and he asked his audience if the university was educating people "to go home, not necessarily where they came from, but to some place where they can dig in and support meaningful things, not just upward mobility." Jackson got no firm answer, nor did he expect one. He carries the question with him wherever he travels to make people think again about what they may have lost and what they really treasure. He seeks a new generation that can find and grasp the "great and priceless privilege" that Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps the most beloved and respected American of this century, found in Abilene.