Ike the Soldier

Ike the Soldier

As They Knew Him

Merle Miller

Ike the Soldier

Copyright © 1987 by Merle Miller

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Cover jacket design by Lon Kirschner

ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795351303

DEDICATION

For CAROL V. HANLEY, my collaborator in the fullest sense. This book is as much hers as it is mine.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Carol Hanley is one of many who assisted me in writing my previous book, Lyndon, and the only one I asked to stay on as my co-writer and researcher for Ike. She is also a close and dear friend. Carol worked with me from the book's inception in 1980 to its completion in 1986, and became as familiar with and as fond of Ike as I am. My debt to her is enormous and the dedication is a small token of appreciation.

I wish to thank David W. Elliott for his support and encouragement throughout the six years it took to write this book.

My thanks, too, to Alan Williams, my editor at G. P. Putnam's, who took over the first half of the manuscript in 1984, shaped and edited it and patiently saw the remainder of the manuscript through its lengthy gestation.

I am most grateful to Barbara Stroh, who typed and retyped the many drafts and revisions into beautiful manuscript pages; to Kathleen Hanley, who helped with the research and transcribed my early tapes of interviews; to John Reese, James Peterson, and Daniel Croswell, skilled historians and researchers in Kansas.

In Pennsylvania, Louise Arnold was particularly invaluable to me for her assistance in researching a wide range of material at the Eisenhower National Historic Site at Gettysburg, and later at the U.S. Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks.

Once again the author owes a debt of gratitude to the staff of the Danbury Public Library for their generous assistance in finding needed facts and for their patience and understanding.

In addition to the Danbury Library, I used many other libraries for my research and they include the Butler Library Oral History Research Office at Columbia University; the National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas; the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa; the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York; and the Sam Rayburn Library at Bonham, Texas.

I am also thankful to the many friends I made at the U.S. Military Academy Library at West Point. Robert E. Schnare of Special Collections searched through old files and records for most valuable information; Elaine Eatroff, Rare Book Curator and Cataloguer, was particularly patient in finding facts I needed, even facts I had not requested; and Egon Weiss, Head Librarian, gave freely of his time and assistance.

Many offered information and assistance. John M. Manguso, Director, Fort Sam Museum, Fort Sam Houston, Texas; C. W. Munie, Historian/Curator, State of Illinois Military & Naval Department, Camp Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois; Larry Adams, Curator, Mamie Doud Eisenhower Birthplace Foundation, Inc., Boone, Iowa; Gwen Goldsberry, owner and editor of the Colorado Prospector in Denver, Colorado; Ms. Bridget Janus, Librarian, The Gazette, Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Mr. Dan Fitzgerald, Manuscripts Department, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas; Mr. Larry L. Bland, George C. Marshall Research Foundation, Lexington, Virginia.

I am especially indebted to Eisenhower's many classmates, army and civilian associates, and relatives who granted me interviews and were generous with their memories. I am especially grateful to John Eisenhower who gave me many hours of his time and went out of his way to be particularly helpful.

Last, and surely not least, my thanks to the Hanley children, all eight of them, who so generously gave up their Mom for the duration of the writing of this book.

If we then ask what sort of mind is likeliest to display the qualities of military genius, experience and observation will both tell us that it is the inquiring rather than the creative mind, the comprehensive rather than the specialized approach, the calm rather than the excitable head to which in war we would choose to entrust the fate of our brothers and children, and the safety and honor of our country.

—Karl von Clausewitz, On War

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Where It All Began

Winning and Losing

A Good Gamble

The Dominant Quality

A Nice Little Town

The Renegade Texan

An Angry Man

The Stepping Stone

In the Truth

Marching Through Georgia

Not at the Top, But Climbing

A Matter of Age

The Summer of 1915

Fort Sam

Miss Mamie

The Nature of the Duty

The Army Wife

Keeping the Colonel Happy

Full Circle

Genuine Adventure

The Tortoise and the Hare

The Dark Shadow

A Grave Offense

The Invisible Figure

Slightly to the Rear

The Watershed

Prudens Futuri

Some Americans in Paris

The Assistant to the Assistant

The Insubordinate General

Good Man Friday

The Mission

The Electric Train

War Games

A Colonel Named Eisenhower

The First Answer

A Man of Responsibility

A Kansan Goes to London

A Precious Friendship

20   Grosvenor Square

Maelstrom

The Rock of Gibraltar

Friday the Thirteenth

A Bitter Decision

Power Plays

Turn of the Tide

An Auspicious Omen

The First Step

Holding Patton's Horse

The Soft Underbelly

The Sultan

The Final Plan

O.K., We'll Go

Piercing the Heart

Stormy Weather

Irish and Tragic

Out of the Woods

Crossing the Seine

A Fragile Reed

A Mere Incident

The Long-Distance Runner

His Greatest Moment

Postscript

Chapter Notes

Bibliography

Permission Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

When I first started living with Dwight D. Eisenhower five years and six months ago, I was mainly interested in his presidency. He had, most people said with almost no effort, kept the United States at peace and prosperous for eight years. Despite a conspicuous number of friends who were members of what in his farewell address he called the military-industrial complex, he had warned against the dangers of that lethal combination which has now brought this country close to economic collapse. He was not in awe of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In fact, he worried about a time when there would be a president who did not understand what those birds are up to. But the kind of man he was didn't interest me much—a dull, passive, lucky man who, as a soldier, had done nothing much remarkable. He had been a political general, a chairman of the board of directors, who had been told what to do by generals and civilians, Roosevelt and Churchill among them. I had spent some time looking into and writing about the lives of two other presidents of the United States. What had happened to this president before he was inaugurated was not of much interest to me. A chapter at most would handle it.

But as I worked, I discovered that Eisenhower—the man—before he became president was a story that has never been told. There have been over 100 full-length books about Dwight D. Eisenhower. He must surely be one of the most written about men of this century. But none of the books seemed to consider what kind of man he was and how he got that way, which is what this book attempts to do.

During the time of living with Eisenhower, I changed almost every preconceived idea I had about him. In the course of a year and a half of research, I uncovered a vast amount of material that had never been published; during interviews I learned of stories that had never been told. After another year, I thought: There is more to the man than the upstretched arms and the grin. Then I began to write.

It is very difficult to explain Dwight D. Eisenhower. He went so far, both farther and further than almost any American of this century, and yet he seemed not at all extraordinary. How then to explain his extraordinary journey from Abilene, Kansas, from the small, really quite shabby house on South East Fourth Street to all the places he went? Was it accident? Was it luck? Was he just a smiling country boy, an ordinary man, a run-of-the-mill graduate of West Point who happened to be in the right place at the right time?

No. It was none of these. He took the trouble to make it appear that way. He went to a lot of trouble to appear average, to seem ordinary, to appear guileless. And he fooled most people most of the time, including most of his biographers. A lot of people say they knew him; but I doubt they did. There was layer upon layer, and every time you thought that you really understood him, you realized that you didn't. He was generally considered to be a simple man, but he was not. He was most complex.

Dwight Eisenhower could and did outsmart, outthink, outmaneuver, out-govern, 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 Niccolò Machiavelli or La Rochefoucauld, but he practiced what they preached. Guileless? Don't be silly!

Eisenhower never let it all hang out. Usually he concealed his hand—he was, after all, a masterful poker player. He hung out what he wanted to let be known. He eluded everybody, largely, I imagine, because that's what he wanted to do. He took the trouble to be elusive. How else, to use the most obvious example, do you account for those bumbling nonsentences that emerged at presidential press conferences from a man who all his life wrote the most precise prose? The precision of his written prose and, often, his spoken prose, came not so much from what he had been taught in Dr. Holt's English classes at West Point, where he excelled, it came from reading aloud the King James version of the Bible. The cadence of those majestic sentences stayed with him all his life.

Eisenhower was far more familiar with himself than most people are, and while it would be too much to say that he was self-satisfied, he was certainly extraordinarily self-confident—to an almost unprecedented degree. When I asked John Eisenhower about his father's self-confidence, he said, It was a combination of things. He was very popular at West Point; he was more mature; he had earned his living a little bit. He had gotten a Distinguished Service Medal. . . . Success sort of breeds success. In the old Army there in Washington in the thirties, Dad may have been a major, but he was still exposed to all the biggies—Pershing, MacArthur—he wasn't awestruck.

He had no time, ever, for contemplating what-might-have-been, brooding over what-might-have-been. He always felt the decision he had made was the best he could have made at the time he made it, based on what he knew at the time. Thus, he never indulged himself in regrets.

Also, he believed in the American system, and he believed in the people. He was a real American in that sense. Drew Middleton said Eisenhower had a sure grasp of the resources of the United States. He knew what he could do. Even at times when the army disappointed him, he was unshakeable. For example, after the Allied defeat at the Kasserine Pass, he said, We'll get there, we'll get there. Once he told Winston Churchill, I am probably the most optimistic person in the world.

Ike knew the value of making the right impression on the right people, whether it was Charlie Case, a lawyer friend in Abilene, Bernard Baruch, John J. Pershing, or the commander of every post at which he was stationed. Such an ability is deprecated by many people, but the alternative is making a wrong impression on people. It is not wise to point out the deficiencies of one's superiors—and Eisenhower never did.

He did not diminish, by word or deed, so far as I discovered, those who were competing with him for an appointment, promotion, whatever. He set out to demonstrate that he could do the job, whatever it was, better than his competitors, almost always with success, and when he failed, as in his early life in the army, he seldom brooded publicly. Privately, yes. He was not Job.

He often surrounded himself with sonsofbitches, not because he wanted to be popular but because he found it difficult to say no to his friends, or for that matter to people he didn't much care for. So he had hatchet men, Bedell Smith, his chief of staff when he was supreme commander in Europe, to name one, to do what had to be done.

He was a concerned man, happy when he was with his friends, but never really at ease. One friend, Harry Anholt, said Ike was a potentially destructive man. He was a man with a sword in his hand. . . . And he was expected to use it. Not by his own free will but by orders. And that's not a very pleasant thing to carry around. Another friend said he always got the impression that there was something inside Eisenhower that was always crying to break out.

There were certain things he did not believe in, personal revenge, for example, personal vengeance. He did not believe in getting even; he did not hold grudges, but he did not forgive people either; if they had done something to offend him, they simply no longer existed.

With nations, Germany being the prime example, it was different. In July 1944, at his headquarters in Granville, France, he told Roosevelt's secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, The ringleaders and the SS troops should be given the death penalty without question, but the punishment should not end there. He added that he felt the German people were guilty of supporting the Nazi regime and that made them a party to the evil that had been done. They were, he said, a paranoid people, and there was no reason to treat a paranoid people gently. They have been taught to be paranoid in their actions and thoughts, and they have to be snapped out of it. The only way to do that is to be good and hard on them. I . . . see no point in bolstering their economy or taking any other steps to help them.

Eisenhower was a Christian; that is absolutely essential in understanding him. He was a Christian who for most of his life didn't believe you had to go to church to prove you were a Christian. He had been taught not to hate—the only thing to hate was evil. Hitler represented evil. Eisenhower had read the Old Testament back in Abilene, Kansas. The Old Testament God was stern. He punished transgressors.

John Eisenhower said his father was imbued with a hatred of Nazism and all it entailed—he appeared . . . to approach his mission of defeating Hitler with the same attitude with which he attacked his opponents in bridge or poker—in both of which he was expert. He appeared to view any situation with the cold, calculating attitude of a professional, confident as he was throughout his life that the Almighty would provide him with a decent set of cards. He never wavered in his faith that he would win, but he appeared not to share the metaphysical feeling that God owed him anything specific, such as good weather on a given day.

The idea that Eisenhower was a pleasant, smiling, genial, friendly fellow who kept the British and Americans from fighting one another, and that's all, is not correct. Vernon Walters said, When he landed in Europe, he had a mandate from the Combined Chiefs of Staff to, within two years, overthrow the Nazi Reich. Ten months to the day of the landing, he had accomplished that with losses far smaller than anybody in their wildest dreams had ever imagined.

His son, John, said, Dad will be remembered much longer as a general than as a president. I'm quite sure of that. And the reasoning is quite simple. We've had by now—what is it?—thirty-seven presidents. We've only had one supreme commander, which is a little bit more of a distinction.

There was no one at the time who would have made a better supreme commander.

This book is different from my previous two books. It is not an oral biography, it is a biography. Also, it is not about a president, it is an impartial biography about the man. There have been various conceptions of him, and they have altered somewhat from book to book, but none of the principal conceptions has been wildly at variance with the others, and none has been discredited. Consciously or unconsciously most biographers would have us believe that Eisenhower was not like other men. Is the explanation that Eisenhower really was a paragon? Was he stainless, as so many writers would have us believe? Did Americans revere him because by circumstance he came to stand for everything they held dear?

Eisenhower has become not merely a mythical figure but a myth of suffocating dullness, the victim of civic elephantiasis. The myth-making process was at work during Eisenhower's lifetime; while he was still supreme commander, people paid to see him in waxwork effigy.

In trying to discern the actual man behind the huge, impersonal, ever-growing legend, one must understand that he was not a paragon. From the time he left West Point in 1915 until the end of his life, Eisenhower wasn't anything more than he was—a soldier.

What biographer Marcus Cunliffe said of Washington could also be said of Eisenhower:

Here was a man who did what he was asked to do, and whose very strength resided in a sobriety some took for fatal dullness; who on his own proved the soundness of America. A good man; not a saint; a competent soldier, not a great one; an honest administrator, not a statesman of genius; a prudent conserver, not a brilliant reformer. But in sum an exceptional figure.

What I hope emerges from these pages is a portrait of a fascinating man.

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

At times the man who was to become supreme commander of the largest Allied army in history, a man who was to be known for his flawless memory had, or said he had, trouble remembering where he was born, but few things made him angrier than being called a Texan; he was, he inevitably said, a Kansan.

He was born in Denison, Texas, on October 14, 1890, too close to and on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. He grew up, also on the wrong side of the tracks, in an isolated town almost precisely in the geographical center of the United States, Abilene, Kansas. But the incredible journey he made really began on June 14, 1911, at that mighty, unarmed fortress on the west bank of the Hudson—West Point, New York. Eisenhower begins his best and most personal book, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, published in 1967, only two years before his death, with an account of his trip to West Point in June 1911. I traveled light, he said. There was no need for more than a single suitcase.

It was a late start; he was almost twenty-one, but he got a late start at almost everything. In 1915 Eisenhower wrote of his West Point classmate Omar Nelson Bradley, His most prominent characteristic is 'getting there.' He could have been writing of himself.

Those who did not know him well thought of him as bland, relaxed, uncompetitive. He was none of those things. Whatever he undertook, whether it was personal or professional, he had to win. Late in life Eisenhower said, I never give up a battle until I am licked, completely, utterly, and destroyed, and I don't believe in giving up any battle as long as I have a chance to win.

His son, John, said his father couldn't do anything without making it work out. Trying to be best at it. He wasn't the kind of competitive person who would say, 'I have to put that guy down,' but he had to be better than everybody else. The things he chose doing, he was good at.

Eisenhower was not a patient man. He later said he was a rather stern individual when I think I am being taken advantage of in any way or for any reason. He was the son of a Pennsylvania Dutchman with all the temper of the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Eisenhower wasn't particularly fond of West Point much of the time he was there. He had not gone because he had dreams of military glory; that was for soldiers like his sometime friend, sometime enemy George S. Patton, Jr. He went to the Point because it offered a free education and opportunities to play baseball and football. The education turned out to be limited and uninteresting, and his athletic ambitions were frustrated. He often regretted that he had come and spoke of leaving. But late in life, as old men will, he remembered much of his time there with nostalgia.

When he was dying at Walter Reed hospital in 1969, his old friend Mark Wayne Clark, West Point class of 1917, visited him daily. Every afternoon around five, Clark would sit near his bed and talk with him for half an hour. Clark said, He was really sick, all wired, emaciated, his head tilted, and weak as could be. But, you know, all he wanted to talk about was West Point, not about being president, not about being supreme commander, about D-Day, none of that. West Point was all, ever.

Ulysses S. Grant, class of 1843, the only other West Pointer who spent eight years in the White House, wrote in his Personal Memoirs, I had rather a dread for reaching my destination at all . . . I would have been glad to have had a steamboat or railroad collision, or any other accident happen, by which I might have received a temporary injury sufficient to make me ineligible, for a time, to enter the Academy. Nothing of the kind occurred, and I had to face the music. It must be remembered, of course, that Grant lacked most of Ike's advantages as a plebe. According to his biographer, William S. McPhealy, When Ulysses Grant reached West Point in 1839, he was still a boy. At 17 he weighed 117 lbs and was five feet one inch tall. Both Grant and Eisenhower were bored at West Point, and again as peacetime soldiers. Grant was so bored and depressed that in 1854, drinking heavily, he found it necessary to resign his commission. Eisenhower sometimes spoke of resigning, but he never really came close to doing it.

Eisenhower came to have a high regard for Grant. In 1946 when he was chief of staff of the army he wrote William Elizabeth Brooks, author of Grant of Appomattox, to say that not only had he read and enjoyed his book, but that many years ago he had read Grant's report to the secretary of war, submitted somewhere about the middle of July 1865. The first several paragraphs of that report

impressed me mightily—in them the Commander traced out his general idea or his general plan for the defeat of the Confederacy at the moment he was called upon to take charge of all the Northern armies. I think people frequently lose sight of the importance of this broad scheme which lies behind every move the Commander makes. As a consequence we see people—sometimes highly informed critics—attempting to separate one battle or one point of a campaign from the whole of the campaign and in doing so get it completely out of focus. Ever since I read that report my respect for Grant has been high, in spite of many bitter criticisms that I have read both of his military ability and of his personal habits.

With respect to this last item I am delighted that you have handled it so carefully and logically. It never seemed possible to me (and I have thought about it often during the months since December 1941) that a man who was so constantly under the influence of liquor could have pursued a single course so steadfastly, could have accepted frequent failures of subordinates without losing his own equilibrium, could have made numbers of close decisions which involved a nice balance between risk and advantage, and could have maintained the respect of such men as Sherman, Sheridan, Meade, and, above all, of President Lincoln.

Eisenhower was speaking not only of Grant's campaigns and battles; he was speaking of his own single course pursued steadfastly for winning the war in Europe, of the failures of his subordinates, of the many close decisions he had made involving a nice balance between risk and advantage. And for the names of Sherman, Grant, Meade, one can substitute the names of almost any Allied generals, save Montgomery. And instead of Lincoln one would name Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle, and, to be sure, Stalin.

No one ever accused Eisenhower of being constantly under the influence of liquor, but he was accused of indecisiveness, indecision, dangerous affability, of knowing nothing at all about military strategy, and of never having heard a shot fired in anger. All that was said even before he got into politics.

Eisenhower was impressively broad of shoulder and, at five feet ten inches, taller than most of the incoming cadets. He was older; most of them were in their teens, but he was within a few months of being able to vote, although he did not vote until 1948, when he could have had the presidential nomination of either major party and even, many people thought, both parties.

His hands were large—like elephant's feet, his brother Edgar said—and indicated a good deal about him. Harry Anholt, a friend who managed the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver before and during Eisenhower's presidency, said, You could tell his hands had done a good deal of hard work when he was young. They were very large, and he told me he had frozen them a few times.

His wife, Mamie, remembered that when he began painting, many experts were surprised. They didn't think he could pick up a paintbrush. . . . The knuckles of both Ike's hands had been broken because of football and baseball playing when he was young. Eisenhower himself often said his hands looked as if they were meant to hold an ax, not a pen.

In the summer of 1983, a statue of Eisenhower was dedicated at West Point; it overlooks the majestic plain. Almost everybody thought that the sculptor had done a good job, but there was one recurrent criticism. People who had never seen the man felt that the hands on the statue were too large.

As a new cadet, Eisenhower must have been conscious of his clothes that June day in 1911; they were poorly cut and had the look of the rube. In a photograph showing him in what he wore when he arrived at West Point, the sleeves of his jacket are too long and the jacket itself reaches almost to his knees. The trousers are also too long and baggy.

Many of the other entering cadets wore clothes that were for the most part well cut and seemed to fit perfectly. Many of them spoke of the class of 1915 plebe banquet they had attended on June 5 at the Hotel Drake in New York. The cost for the full-course dinner was $2.50, and room accommodations were made available to the incoming plebes for an additional dollar. But Eisenhower, for whatever reason, did not attend; nor did he stop in New York on his way to West Point. He later said the thought of stopping in that big city made him fearful. His only city experience had been a day and a night in St. Louis when he took the West Point entrance examinations, and then he had gotten lost.

If any of his fellow plebes were inclined to look down on him, they would soon learn that in West Point slang all plebes were lower than whale shit, were built wrong, walked like turkeys; their shoulders were round as globes, and they were so wooden that no one would believe that they wouldn't float if thrown in water.

When Eisenhower got off the train at the yellow-brick railroad station only a few steps away from the west shore of the Hudson, he was looking at one of the most spectacular views in America, the Hudson Highlands. George Washington called it the Gibraltar of America, and it seems likely that in 1942 when Eisenhower spent a great many uneasy days on the real rock of Gibraltar he once or twice wished he had accepted an offer to become commandant at the Point. The academy itself, with its forbidding granite gothic buildings, was intimidating. I was so scared, I almost turned back, he said.

But that feeling was temporary; as he was to discover, there was something comforting about the look of the place. It seemed settled, permanent, as if it had been there forever and would continue to be. The British had discovered at some cost during the Revolutionary War that it was impregnable. They had hoped to divide the rebellious colonists by taking it, but despite the treason of Benedict Arnold, they had failed. In the four years Eisenhower was there, he learned a great deal about what happened in that area during the Revolutionary War; those hills became more familiar than the flat plains of Kansas.

But on the morning of June 14, he was more aware of the intimidating climb up what was called the long hill to the adjutant's office, where he and the other entering cadets would abruptly cease to be civilians. They were to learn immediately that life at the academy was tough, at times brutal. They were the scum of the earth. They were entering purgatory for the first time. They were Ducrot, too insignificant to be worthy of attention. They were Mr. Dumgard, Dumbjohn, Dumflicket, Doojohn. "Drop those bags, mister. Pick them up, mister. That wasn't fast enough for me, mister. You hear me? That was not fast enough. Do not hesitate, mister. Drop those bags.

"There are only three answers to any question, mister. There are only three because you are so beastly you can only handle three. If you can handle three. You are subhuman, mister. You are beastly; that's why it's called Beast Barracks. The three answers to any question are, 'Yes, sir, No, sir, and No excuse, sir.' Now let's hear those three answers, mister. And brace yourself while you answer, mister."

Eisenhower said, My impression of that first day was one of calculated chaos. As to the hazing that day and in the three weeks of Beast Barracks that followed, he said, I had encountered difficult bosses before. . . . I suppose that if any time had been provided to sit down and think for a moment, most of . . . us would have taken the next train out. . . . But no one was given much time to think—and when I did it was always, 'Where else could you get a college education without cost?'

The whole performance of hazing struck Eisenhower as funny, he said, and in the semi-privacy of my room, I could laugh a little at myself and at the system. But whenever an upperclassman saw the sign of a smile, the shouting and nagging started again.

Eisenhower at West Point and later in life often said the system was ridiculous. But he did not rebel against it or try to change it much. It was that way throughout his life. He was not a man who tried to change things. Those who wanted him to improve things were inevitably disappointed. He was a man who went along with the status quo. That was true when he was a cadet; when he was a junior officer; a senior officer; when he was supreme commander. In French North Africa, for example, when as commander in chief of the Allied expedition there he hung on to the discredited Vichy officials rather than risk change. And as president he did not think it part of his job to educate the nation on the need for civil rights for Negroes. For that matter, he did not do much to interfere with the freewheeling reign of Joseph R. McCarthy. At the Point, there were never any courses on reforming the system. Instead, the cadets were taught to defend it when it was in trouble.

As for the brutality of Beast Barracks, Eisenhower later said, There's a bunch of freewheeling boys and they have to be brought quickly into an attitude of obeying orders and they do this with methods that the new cadets sometimes think of as rather harsh. . . . Their purpose is not to make it easy.

By dusk that first day, not only had the plebes been hazed mercilessly, they had checked their civilian baggage and their civilian identities; they had been measured for uniforms and had been taught how to march, to salute, and to brace (stand at exaggerated attention). They had learned to do everything, everything on the double. They were not yet cadets, but by dusk they were no longer civilians either. By then they were wearing gray trousers and white shirts, and they were ready to be sworn in. They raised their right hands and repeated what was holy writ for West Pointers, the oath of allegiance. It was a moment Eisenhower never forgot:

I, Dwight D. Eisenhower, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States, and bear true allegiance to the National Government; that I will maintain and defend the sovereignty of the United States, paramount to any and all allegiance, sovereignty, or fealty that I may owe to any state or county whatsoever; and that I will at all times obey the legal orders of my superior officers, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Eisenhower wrote of taking the oath:

Whatever had gone before, this was a supreme moment. . . . A feeling came over me that the expression The United States of America would now and henceforth mean something different than it ever had before. From here on in it would be the nation I would be serving, not myself. Suddenly the flag itself meant something. . . . Across half a century, I can look back and see a rawboned, gawky Kansas boy from the farm country, earnestly repeating the words that would make him a cadet.

The hazing bothered most of the other plebes much more. Not only were they young, most of them had had boyhoods that were privileged or sheltered. In Eisenhower's day there were no women, no blacks, no Hispanics, very few Catholics; and when he was a plebe there were three Jews, but not one of them graduated. Most of the cadets were solid middle-class WASPS. Eisenhower's roommate for the three weeks of Beast Barracks was quite typical. John Henry Dykes was from Lebanon, Kansas. His father and two uncles were doctors. According to John Henry's son, Delmar Spencer Rooky Dykes, One of my dad's uncles was a friend of Charles Curtis. Curtis was a powerful Kansas Republican who became a U.S. senator and was Herbert Hoover's vice president. Dykes, like most cadets, had parents with power and what was just as useful to the politicians who appointed them: money.

According to Dykes, "I was probably the first cadet to meet Ike at West Point. When the class of '15 arrived, we were assigned two to a room in alphabetical order. Dykes was the last of the Ds, Eisenhower was the first of the Es; so I drew Ike. For the next week . . . we went through the tough plebe indoctrination period called 'beast treatments.' The First Class officers made our lives miserable. They worked us over and chopped us down to size fast. We moved at a dead run all the time. We drilled, we shined brass buttons, we greased and cleaned rifles—and when taps blew at 10 P.M. we collapsed into bed.

Ike took the hazing in his stride. When he was asked a question, he always began his answer with, 'Well, now . . .' I've noticed, watching his press conferences on TV, that even today he begins his reply to questions with, 'Well, now . . .'!

When Eisenhower was president, John Mason Brown, in the Saturday Review, wrote, Few men in public life could in a half hour have used 'well' and 'now' so frequently as traffic islands on which to pause before advancing an idea. Few could ever have said so often, after indicating that they were unprepared or reluctant to answer, 'But I will say,' 'But I must say,' or 'I can say,' or 'I do say,' and then plunged, out of a feeling of courtesy or obligation, into an answer. 'Well,' as he has used it, has been generally a filler-in while he collected his thoughts and a signal that he intended to reply. With him 'now' has marked the conclusion of one point in an argument and his transition to the next step in its development. Although both words in his use of them have Webster's blessing, his over-reliance on them has created, for readers of the transcripts, the impression that Eisenhower was inarticulate when he was not.

Another technique Eisenhower found useful at his presidential press conferences was also developed at the academy; there they called it bugling, using many words to say nothing very much. According to Brigadier General Hume Peabody, West Point 1915, "One year, Ike and I were in math class together, and to appreciate my favorite memory of him, a knowledge of 'bugling' is necessary. Every cadet in the class usually recited on each day's assignment, first writing the problem on the blackboard. If he was not fully prepared he'd 'bugle'—stay at the board stalling and pray that before his turn came the bugle would sound recall from class.

One day I was supposed to recite last. I hadn't the foggiest notion about my topic—as I had previously confided to Ike—and my only hope was to 'bugle.' I covered part of the board with meaningless figures and listened with a sinking heart to recitation after recitation. When the man before me finished reciting, there must have been at least five minutes left—but the axe never fell. Ike stood up and asked a question, then another and still another. The instructor was completely taken in and answered each question thoroughly. Then that blessed bugle blew and I was off the hook. No 'bugler' was ever more expertly rescued from his plight than I was by Ike that day so long ago.

Beast Barracks lasted three weeks. In addition to the hazing, there were endless hikes, close-order drill, field problems in strategy, calisthenics, and the cleaning of rifles, the shining of belt buckles—sometimes six times a day. Eisenhower's classmate Omar Bradley said they were "taught how to make a bed, clean and care for their room; when to shave; when to shine our shoes; and always, always, to say 'sir' to our superiors."

No plebe was ever complimented; none was ever treated as a human being. Eisenhower bore it all, though. He remembered the words his mother often repeated, What man has done, man can do.

A 1980 guidebook for visitors to West Point indicates that the purpose of Beast Barracks—the guide calls it the plebe system—has not changed much in the over seventy years since Eisenhower was a plebe.

It says that the plebe is subject to an intense, unremitting, and lengthy period of trial and training to test the steel of his soul. . . . Always under the surveillance of the upper classes—who outnumber plebes three to one—his every deficiency is detected, pointed out and corrected. . . . This system usually succeeds in weeding out individuals who do not have an intense desire to succeed at being a West Pointer. In those remaining, it roots out whatever bad habits of posture, self-expression, or attitude they may have brought to the Academy, and it incubates the precepts of the Corps, Duty, Honor, Country.

Dykes said that Eisenhower, during Beast Barracks, would say, It won't always be like this. In his memoirs, Eisenhower says of Dykes, without naming him, that he had come to West Point quite young. He . . . thought everybody was cutting him to pieces. Everybody in his hometown in Kansas who mattered had attended a farewell party in his honor. But West Point was clearly not for him—he once fainted on the drill field. But he did stick it out until after the first exams; then he failed math and returned to Lebanon.

Thirty-one years later when General Eisenhower was in Algiers, Dykes, then living in Enid, Oklahoma, wrote to him saying that the young men being commissioned as second lieutenants after three months' training in officer candidate schools were better trained than those commissioned in the First World War. Of course, Dykes wrote, the niches found for some twelve thousand officers commissioned directly from 'cits,' were apparently for considerations other than their value to the services, according to my observations. This of course can be expected, and I presume you have to make room for lots of them.

Ike liked to save unpleasant things for last; throughout his life, he liked to begin whatever it was on a cheerful note. When he was supreme commander reporting to Chief of Staff of the Army George C. Marshall, for instance, he always began with some pleasantries, then got down to the facts, which were often not cheerful. In reply to Dykes, he wrote:

It is a long time since June 1911, but I can still picture you exactly as you looked on the day we entered West Point.

Then to the serious business, the criticism:

Please disabuse your mind from any thought that I have to make room for officers commissioned for some reason other than their value to the service. I don't do any such thing. A man delivers or, if I can find out about it, he gets out. So far as I am concerned, the War Department has never in any way asked me to make room for anybody, and, knowing the type of leadership we have in the War Department, I know that no such request will ever be made of me . . . so far as I am concerned, no failure or error of mine can ever properly be attributed to inefficient subordinates foisted off on me for reasons other than efficiency.

When in December 1942 it was announced that Eisenhower was Allied supreme commander, Dykes wrote, This will lead to the presidency in ten to fifteen years. Eisenhower wrote back, I don't think so, but I appreciate your kindness.

According to Dykes's son, Delmar, In 1952 Dad and three or four men from Enid drove up to Abilene to see Eisenhower launch his campaign. Dad hadn't seen Eisenhower since 1911, and naturally he was wondering if he'd be recognized. Eisenhower spoke to several people in the crowd, then looked at John Dykes, and without a second's hesitation he flashed the famous grin and said, 'Hi, Johnnie.' Returning to Enid that night, Dad was a very happy man.

After the initial weeks of Beast Barracks came an interlude of summer camp on the northeast corner of what was and still is known as The Plain. The day Eisenhower moved into the tent that was to be his home for six weeks was fearfully hot, and about a dozen boys, unable to take the heat and double-timing, were taken to the hospital that day.

In summer camp Eisenhower learned close-order drill, stood guard duty, hiked, and got in some target shooting. Sometimes he was part of a sham battle, usually conducted in the surrounding mountains. The evenings were rather dull, however, as there wasn't too much one could do in a tent barely eight feet square. At the end of summer camp, he was assigned to F company, one of the companies where the tallest cadets, most of them athletes, were assigned. The reason cadets were assigned according to their height was so that when they marched as a corps all hats, rifles and coats would be even.

Eisenhower's second roommate was still another Kansan, a plebe from Wichita he had met briefly when they both took the West Point examinations. He was Paul A. P.A. Hodgson. Hodgson, a sensitive, observant man, was Eisenhower's wife for four years and remained a close friend all his life. That was true of most of Eisenhower's friends. The exceptions were rare and noteworthy. The two were assigned a small, efficient room with a cobblestone floor and a fireplace for heat.

As a roommate, Eisenhower, according to P.A., could be a sly one about minor duties about the room; we were supposed to take turns opening the windows at night and closing them first thing in the morning. But Ike dressed so fast that he could linger in bed—and I, a slower dresser, always had to get out of my warm bed onto the cold floor and close the windows. I was always very careful about cleaning my part of the room whereas Ike was very nonchalant. But somehow I always got the demerits—he never did.

A West Point day began with reveille at 6:00; after roll call, the cadets marched to breakfast at 6:30. Then the cadets cleaned up their rooms, a task Eisenhower was happy to leave largely to P.A. Morning classes began at 8:00 and ended at noon, and after lunch they resumed at 1:00, continuing until 4:00. In a sense Eisenhower's day didn't really begin until after 4:00, which was time for sports. Then there was dinner and another brief free time. Most cadets used it for studying, but Eisenhower frequently found something better to do, like a quick game of poker.

Chapel was compulsory on Sunday, but otherwise, weekend schedules were about the same, just no classes. Inspections were endless. Cadets were not allowed to leave the grounds except for a special event like the Army-Navy game, and while you were a plebe, there were no furloughs and no summer vacation. P.A. said the whole thing was rather grueling.

Academics began the first week in September. To Eisenhower, they were usually no problem, although he soon discovered that English was his best subject. James A. Van Fleet, the classmate who was to command a division and become a major general in France in 1944, said Ike could express himself better than almost any member of the class. Consequently he was in the top section in English all the time. Some of the boys kidded him about it, claimed he was bookworming his way to the top. They kept it up until Ike pledged that he wouldn't open a book on English out of class for the rest of the term. He finally hit the bottom of the class. But he wouldn't crack a book until the class members released him from the pledge.

Clifford R. Jones, whose room was across the hall from Eisenhower's, said, While all the rest of us were cramming like mad, I'd see Ike with his feet on the desk, reading a magazine.

In later years P.A. remembered that one two-hundred-word theme had to be turned in every Monday afternoon at 2:00. Hodgson worried all week over his. Not Eisenhower. After lunch on Monday, Eisenhower would say, I need a nap. Call me at 1:30. After being wakened, P.A. said, Eisenhower would write until 1:55, and the theme would be only two or three words over two hundred and would inevitably earn a high grade.

Eisenhower had almost total recall. Then and later he had the infuriating habit of appearing not to listen to what was being said. He would often tap a pencil on a desk or doodle on a pad when someone was talking to him. But the speaker would almost always learn that Eisenhower could and would quote verbatim what had been said, not only minutes later but months and years afterward.

Robert B. Anderson, secretary of the treasury in Eisenhower's administration, said he had a very remarkable memory. I used to be amazed, when I would go over to tell him about financing, and there might have been another financing [briefing] thirty days before, he would remember to the precise fraction of a point of interest what we had paid, and even after he was in the hospital, one of the last times I visited with him, we were talking about an event which happened, and he said to me, 'Oh, yes, I remember that.' He said, 'You remember, while we were talking, that Lucius Clay called me on the telephone and said thus and so.' Well, he remembered just precisely what Lucius Clay had said and exactly the context in which he said it.

Nancy Jansen McCarty, who worked with him as his personal secretary from 1967 to 1968, the year before his death, said that while he was working on what was to be a book about Churchill and Marshall (never finished), he could recall in detail not only what they had said to each other but very often what they had for lunch that day. His memory for what he had read was equally good whether it was the Bible, Shakespeare, an account of a battle, or a statistical report.

In 1943, when he was in England planning the Overlord invasion, his personal secretary was a WAC captain, Mattie Pinnette. She, too, was impressed with his memory and was grateful that he dictated in complete sentences.

At his first press conference after he became supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, he was asked to make a statement for the newsreel photographers. He immediately dictated a three-hundred-word statement to Captain Pinnette. She typed it, gave it to him, and after he had glanced at it, he put it aside, and told the cameramen he was ready. Then, looking directly at the cameras, he made the statement without referring to the text; Captain Pinnette, who had a text, found that in speaking he made only two minor alterations and those were an improvement.

Eisenhower did write clear, precise English and he did write rapidly. He had what P.A. called in a letter home a natural gift . . . a very direct and pleasing style. Those of us who remember the presidential press conferences may find that hard to believe. Eisenhower said of those conferences:

I soon learned that ungrammatical sentences in the transcripts caused many to believe that I was incapable of using good English; indeed several people who have examined my private papers, many in my handwriting, have expressed outright astonishment that my writings and grammatical structure were at least adequate. By consistently focusing on ideas rather than on phrasing, I was able to avoid causing the nation a serious setback through anything I said in many hours, over eight years, of intensive questioning.

As a new cadet, Eisenhower was reasonably popular, according to Alexander M. Babe Weyand, a fellow cadet and football player, "but for some reason he tried to project the image of a 'breezy westerner' as against what he called the 'effete easterner.' He pronounced favorite to rhyme with kite, hostile to rhyme with file, and he pronounced Rutgers with a soft g, as in German. He'd say, 'independent as a hog on ice,' 'underslung as a bull dog,' 'as sure as God made little green apples.' And if somebody didn't move quick enough he'd say, 'You hog-tied or paralyzed, mister?' "

He was also described as a prankster. Weyand said, "As a plebe, he often pretended to be an upperclassman. He'd stand outside the door of another plebe and in a commanding voice boom out, 'Who lives in this house?' Whoever it was would drop everything and snap to attention until he saw that it was just another plebe.

He would also shout 'at ease' at other plebes, but when he swaggered into another plebe's room, his smile was so warm and friendly that we all had to laugh.

William H. Britton, class of 1916, described Eisenhower as an extrovert. He said when Eisenhower lived on the third floor and caught a cadet trying to sneak along the roof below his window to get to another division, he would dump a bucket of water on him. Whenever they heard a splash of water, they knew Eisenhower had caught another cadet. Britton said there were always snow fights during the wintertime, and Ike was always in the thick of it.

One of Ike's extracurricular exploits that he often talked about as an old man had to do with the time he and another plebe, Layson Enslow Atkins, Tommy, were found guilty of a minor infraction by an upperclassman named Adler and ordered to report to his room in full-dress coats. They did exactly that, wearing the coats and nothing else. Eisenhower remembered that, The sound that Corporal Adler let out was the cry of a cougar. Adler must have been surprised. As Eisenhower said, The full-dress coat is a cutaway with long tails in back, and tailored straight across the waist in front. Such exposure at West Point in 1911 was unusual, and it is not surprising that Eisenhower never forgot it. Adler probably didn't either. He was so angry at the two cadets that he ordered them to report back to his room immediately after taps in complete uniform with rifles and crossbelts. They were braced against the wall of Adler's room so long that they both left their body outlines on it in perspiration. Eisenhower said, afterward, we and the other Plebes had a lot of laughs—quiet ones—out of Adler's temporary discomfiture.

Major General Maxwell Taylor, class of 1922, said, In later years I asked him how he had got along with the upperclassmen when he was a plebe at West Point. 'No difficulty,' he replied. 'One of them ordered me to report to his room after taps for inspection in my full-dress coat. I went in the full-dress coat—nothing else. After that I wasn't bothered.'

Football practice also began in September. It was particularly rough in those days. The coach was Captain Ernest Pot Graves, and, according to Weyand, Graves liked to see blood on your hands, and since at the time there were no face guards, drawing blood wasn't difficult. Graves said that everything that didn't draw blood was a love pat.

Marty Maher, the team trainer, remembered Eisenhower clearly. He was always the first cadet on the field for practice and the very last to leave. I used to curse him because he would practice so late that I would be collecting the footballs that he had kicked away in the darkness. He never hit the rubbing table because he would always be out there practicing punts instead of getting a rubdown.

Marty, described as an athletic version of Mr. Chips, was beloved by generations of cadets during his more than fifty years at West Point. Eventually, with the help of Nardi Reeder Campion, Marty wrote an autobiography, Bringing Up the Brass, which was later adapted into a movie, The Long Gray Line.

Eisenhower never forgot Marty, who massaged his knee back to some usefulness after he injured it in a football game. After the war, on one of his visits to West Point, while marching in an informal parade with other old grads and classmates, he spotted Marty sitting on a chair under a tree. He broke ranks, raced to the tree, and with a beaming smile of delight, hand outstretched, he exclaimed, Marty!

P.A. made the varsity team when he was still a plebe. Eisenhower did not. Weyand said, Eisenhower talked such a good game we were all convinced he would make the squad but . . . he was too light, and as a result he was, to use one of his favorite expressions, 'fit to be tied.'

I weighed something on the order of 155 pounds, Ike said. However, I was big-boned and was strong and had average speed. He was able to become a member of the Cullum Hall squad, which was comparable to a junior varsity at other schools. The squad played a short schedule, and Cullum Hall's equivalent of the Army-Navy game was against Riverview Military Academy in nearby Poughkeepsie. The coaches of the Cullum team and the Riverview team were great rivals. Weyand wrote, Ike was conspicuous in Cullum's 11–6 victory.

I showed up fairly well in the games we played, Eisenhower said, and two or three times during the season was moved intermittently to the Varsity squad, but within two or three days, would be sent back as 'too light.' In high school I had played at end and tackle, but was converted by the picturesque Cullum Hall coach, Toby Zell, to a backfield position. At the season's end I was still a Cullum Hall player.

Since he had not made the varsity team, Eisenhower could not, as P.A. did, eat at the athletes' training table where the food was somewhat better and more plentiful. Moreover, at the training table a cadet just ate. At plebe tables, the plebes had to sit without lifting their eyes until they left the huge mess hall. They had to sit on the edge of their chairs, lifting food to their mouths at sharp right angles. After the food was in their mouths they had to put down their knives, forks, or spoons and keep their hands in their pockets until the food was completely chewed and swallowed.

In the spring of 1912 Eisenhower went out for baseball; the coach at the time was a hard-drinking, opinionated man, Sam Strang Nicklin, a former N.Y. Giants player. Colonel Russell P. Red Reeder, class of 1926, a longtime friend of Eisenhower's, said, Ike was a place hitter, and Nicklin didn't like that. He wanted Ike to swing from the handle the way he, Nicklin, did it.

Eisenhower said, "I was good at bat, trained by my coach [in Abilene] as a 'chop hitter'—to poke the ball, in effect, at selected spots in the infield, rather than swinging away freely. The West Point coach took me aside to say that he thought highly of my fielding. But he could not use me unless I mastered his style of hitting. 'Practice hitting my way for a year and you'll be on my squad next spring,' he said.

I practiced hitting the way the baseball coach had suggested, and during the summer months, whenever I had free time, I worked hard on the running track, practicing fast starts. By fall I had improved my speed considerably. I also set up a severe regimen of gymnastics to strengthen my leg and arm muscles. And I indulged my appetite at the table to the limit. But by the spring of 1913, when he might have tried out for the varsity baseball team and made it, Ike was unable to do so. By that time, due to a leg injury, he was incapable of participating in varsity sports of any kind.

President Eisenhower told Colonel Reeder in the Oval Office of the White House, Red, not making the baseball team at West Point was one of the greatest disappointments of my life, maybe the greatest. Reeder said, That was a great surprise to me. It must come as a great surprise to a great many people.

By the end of Eisenhower's plebe year,