July 27, 2023 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Stephen Ambrose wrote the definitive biography of Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was born in a small rented shack beside the railroad tracks in Denison, Texas. He was raised in a family of Mennonites—fundamentalists in their Christian faith who were also pacifists.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show
and our favorite subject history and all of our history
stories are brought to us by the great folks at
Hillsdale College, where you can go to study all the
things that are beautiful in life, all the things that
matter in life. And if you can't get to Hillsdale,
Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific
(00:32):
online courses.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Go to Hillsdale dot edu.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading historians. Stephen Ambrose
passed in two thousand and two, but his storytelling accounts
can now be heard here at Our American Stories, thanks
to those who run his estate. Ambrose wrote the definitive
biography of Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was born in eighteen ninety
in a rented shack near the railroad tracks in Dennison, Texas.
(00:59):
He was raised in a fan of Mennonites, fundamentalists in
their Christian faith were also pacifists. Here's Stephen Ambrose with
the story of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Drog David Eisenhower was a great and a good man.
These two qualities don't always or even often go together.
But they did with him. Obviously, that is an assertion
that needs proof. Let me begin with some definitions. In
(01:31):
nineteen fifty four, President Eisenhower wrote his childhood friend Sweet
Hazlet on the subject of greatness. He thought greatness depended
either on achieving pre eminence in some broad field of
human thought or endeavor, or on assuming some position of
great responsibility, and then so discharging his duties as to
(01:55):
have left a marked and favorable imprint upon the future.
The qualities of goodness in a man I believe include
a broad sympathy for the human condition, that is, an
awareness of human weaknesses and shortcomings, and a willingness to
be forgiving of them. A sense of responsibility toward others,
(02:19):
a genuine modesty combined with justified self confidence, a sense
of humor, and most of all, a love of life
and of people. That last is the key. Eisenhower loved life,
and he loved people. To me, that's the heart of
(02:43):
his character. From it flowed all the rest. In the
fall of nineteen twelve, third class Cadet Dwight Eisenhower, twenty
two years old, was walking down a hallway at West
Point when a plead running full tilt on some fool
errand for an upperclassman, ran into him knocked him over.
(03:07):
Reacting with what he called a bellow of astonishment and
mock indignation, Eisenhower scornfully demanded, mister dumguard a generic term
for a pleb, what was your PCs previous condition of servitude?
What did you do before you became a cadet? And
then Eisenhower added, sarcastically, you look like a barber. I
(03:28):
was a barber, sir. It was Eisenhower's turn to go
red with embarrassment. Without a word, he returned to his room,
where he told his roommate, I'm never gonna haze another
pleab as long as I'm at this place. As a
matter of fact, they'll have to run over and knock
me out of the company street before I'll make any
(03:49):
attempt again. I've just done something that was stupid and unforgivable.
I managed to make a man ashamed of what he
did to earn a living. He never hazed again, and
as an adult, he never shamed a man. Respect for others,
honesty in his dealings, love of life. These were some
(04:11):
of the basic parts of his character. From whence did
they come. Nurture and nature played their respective roles in
shaping Dwight Eisenhaer. Physically, he inherited a strong, tough, big
athletic body and extremely good looks with a quite fabulous grin,
(04:32):
along with keen intelligence. He also inherited a strong competitive
streak from his parents, plus a bad temper, along with
unquestioning love, stern discipline, ambition, and religion. They made him study.
His parents did read the Bible aloud, do chores, hold jobs.
(04:53):
As soon as he was old enough, they instilled in
him a series of controls over his emotions, his temper.
Most of all, they gave him a solid Victorian outlook
on the relations between the sexes and on proper conduct.
All his life he would blush if he slipped and
said a hell or a dam in front of a lady.
(05:17):
Thus he grew up in a strong Christian atmosphere, not
a sectarian atmosphere. He said once as president that this
country has to be founded on a strong religious faith,
and I don't care what it is. What he meant
was he didn't care if it was Baptist or Methodist,
or Presbyterian or River Brethren. He wants to find an
(05:38):
atheist as someone who could watch Southern Methodists play Notre
Dame and not care who won. As president, he began
attending church regularly because he felt it was important to
set an example. It wasn't something that he had done
earlier in his life, but the religion was always very
(06:00):
deeply there. He began his first inaugural address with a prayer,
and it went over so well he decided to begin
all of his cabinet meetings with prayers. About a year
after he'd been in office, he was a half hour
into a cabinet meeting when he slapped himself on the
head and said, God, do we forgot the prayer from
(06:24):
his parents and from his experiences in Abilene, which is
after all, almost exactly in the heart of America the
Glower forty eight. He absorbed such values as honesty and
fair play and all dealings into the very marrow of
his bones. He abhorred the idea of cheating or lying,
(06:47):
and he never did either. He also absorbed a fervent
attachment to democracy that amounted to a religious faith. This
grew naturally in the soil of that little town out there,
the Kansas Prairie.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
And you've been listening to Stephen Ambrose tell the story
of Dwight D. Eisenhower. More of this remarkable story here
on Our American Stories. Liehbibe here the host of our
(07:33):
American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring
stories from across this great country, stories from our big
cities and small towns. But we truly can't do the
show without you. Our stories are free to listen to,
but they're not free to make. If you love what
you hear, go to Alamericanstories dot com and click the
donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to
(07:56):
Alamerican Stories dot com and give And we continue with
our American Stories, and with the story of Dwight D.
Eisenhower told by the person who wrote the best book
(08:17):
on Ike and we're talking about Stephen Ambrose. Let's return
to Ambrose with more of this remarkable story.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
At West Point and in his first twenty five years
in the army, Eisenhower satisfied few of his ambitions. He
didn't get to war in the First War, the Great War,
and he was still a lieutenant colonel when the Second
World War began and about to be forcibly retired, but
he had learned his profession, and he had demonstrated another
(08:46):
characteristic trait, patience, and it was rewarded. After Pearl Harbor,
his star arose, and soon he was in Washington making
war plans for Chief of Staff George Marshall, and then
on to London to take command of the American forces
in the European theater of operations. This threw him into
(09:07):
the middle of the great decision making process of the
Allies at the very highest level in London, dealing daily
with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He proved to be an
outstanding diplomat and politician, not only with Churchill, but with
de gaul and other French leaders as well. He was
successful because he was true to his character. The situation
(09:31):
in North Africa following the invasion in the fall of
nineteen forty two was exceedingly complicated, with a lot of
false promises coming from the British, the Americans, to the
various French factions, but not from Eisner. I know only
one method of operation, he wrote in his diary, to
be as honest with others as I am with myself.
(09:53):
When President Franklin Roosevelt pressured him to get tough with
the local French. Eisenhower refused, explaining, my whole strength and
dealing with the French has been based upon my refusal
to quibble or to stoop to any kind of subterfuge
or double dealing. The French responded to this, De Gaulle
told him, as long as you say that, I believe it.
(10:17):
He was equally successful with his sometimes difficult British subordinates
and his sometimes egotistical American subordinates. And he'd only mentioned
the names of Montgomery and Patent. You know what I'm
talking about. They might not agree with his decisions, but
they gave him their trust. Indeed, whenever his wartime associates
(10:39):
described Eisenhower, whether they were superiors or subordinates, there was
one word that almost every one of them used. It
was trust. General Montgomery didn't think much of Eisenhower as
a soldier, but he appreciated other qualities. His real strength
lies in his human qualities, Montgomery, he said, he has
(11:00):
the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him,
as the magnet attracts the bit of metal. He merely
has to smile at you when you trust him. At
once scrupulous honesty was an integral part of Eisenhower's character
and a learned experience. He saw an experienced the payoff
(11:22):
for this trust. He knew that telling the truth was
the only way to deal effectively with his problems. He
also developed a technique to deliver his message. I refuse,
he wrote, I refuse to put anything in diplomatic or
suave terminology, and carefully cultivate the manner and reputation of
(11:43):
complete bluntness and honesty. Just a man too simple minded
to indulge in circumlocution. Thus did the Kansas farm boy
approach Charles de Gaulle, Ann Winston, Kerchiam and Franklin Roosevelt
and so many others, and it always worked. He was
(12:05):
the general who hated war. Some like pat and gloried
in it, but Eisenhower could not. He signed every letter
of condolence coming out of Europe for three years, a
very sobering experience. He was the one who ordered the
bombing and shelling of German cities. He hated doing that too,
(12:27):
hated having to destroy when he wanted to build, But
he did his duty with all his skill and energy.
In nineteen forty three, his older brother, Arthur, sent him
a newspaper clipping that stressed his mother's pacifism and the
irony of her son being a general. Eisenower wrote back
(12:47):
to say, the pacifist I doubt whether any of them
detest war as I do. They probably have not seen
bodies riding on the ground, or smelled the stinch of
decaying human flesh. Probably they have not visited a field
hospital crowded with the desperately wounded. What separates me from
the pacifist is that I hate the Nazis more than
(13:11):
I hate war. He told Mamy in a wartime letter.
I think that all these trials and tribulations must come
upon the world because of some great wickedness. Yet one
would feel that man's mere intelligence, to say nothing of
his spiritual perceptions, would find some way of eliminating war.
(13:35):
The contrast between Eisenhower and those generals who gloried in
war could not have been greater. He had a very
keen sense of family, of the way in which each
casualty meant a grieving family back home. In nineteen sixty three,
when he was filming with Walter Cronkite a television special
entitled D Day Plus twenty years Cronkite sitting on that
(13:59):
stone wall that looks onto that magnificent cemetery at Omaha.
Conkie asked him what he thought about when he returned
to Normandy. In reply, he spoke not of the things
that other generals would have brought up. He didn't speak
about the tanks or the guns, or the planes or
the ships, or the personalities of the commanders of their opponents,
or how he fooled the Germans or of the victory. Instead,
(14:22):
he spoke of the families of the men buried in
the American cemetery. He said he could never come to
this spot without thinking of how blessed he and Mami
were to have grandchildren, and how much it saddened him
to think of all the couples in America who had
never had that blessing because their only son was buried here.
(14:47):
So far, he looks like a saint, But he was
a healthy, vigorous man in his early fifties during the war,
and men at war are notoriously receptive to female charm
when they are far from home and close to danger.
For many people, the test of character is the marriage vow.
In other words, what about Kay Sommersby. Kay was Ike's
(15:14):
personal secretary and sometime driver. She was young enough to
be his daughter, very attractive, with a bubbly personality The
Churchill and almost everyone else found charming. She had lost
her fiance in North Africa and had fallen in love
with her boss. For his part, how could he help it?
Be responsive? He liked her enormously, probably had a crush
(15:37):
on her. They were always together, but almost never alone.
Decades later, in a book published after her death, Kay
claimed that they had fallen in love and that both
had realized it. In January nineteen forty four, when he
returned to England from a short visit to Washington, they
(15:58):
had their only evening together alone. There was a fireplace.
They sat on the floor. His kisses absolutely unrattled me,
Kay wrote. According to her account, it was a passionate
but unconsummated experience, because after they took off each other's clothes,
Eisenhower was flastened. This may have been because, as one
(16:22):
aid put it, in a grand understatement, he had a
lot on his mind. More likely, it seems to me
his stern sense of morality, character and honesty overrote his passion.
He was incapable of cheating on his wife, or maybe
(16:43):
if the incident never happened, that it was merely an
old woman's fantasy. No one will ever know. What is
important to note is that not even Kay ever claimed
that they had a genuine love affair. Nor is it
true that Eisenhower asked President Harry Truman for permission to
divorce his wife in order to marry Kay, which was
(17:05):
always a ridiculous story to begin with, because he was
a five star general. They don't ask anybody's permission to
do anything. What he did ask Truman for was permission
to have Mamie join him and occupied Germany throughout the war.
When Kay was with him always, his love for Mamie
(17:26):
was constant. His sustaining force was the thought that when
the war was over, he and Mamie could live together again.
He loved Mamie for half a century, except when he
was off at war. They slept in the same bed
for fifty years.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
And you've been listening to the voice of Stephen Ambrose.
The story of Dwight D. Eisenhower continues here on our
American stories, And we continue with our American stories, and
(18:12):
with the story of Dwight d. Eisenhower is told by
Stephen Ambrose, let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Loving Mamy did not necessarily preclude loving Kay, or at
least loving her under the special situation in which they
lived from the summer of nineteen forty two to the
spring of nineteen forty five. He was lucky to have
her around, and the Allies were lucky she was there.
(18:40):
The best advice in attempting to pass any judgment on
the Eisenhower Summersby relationship was given by one of Eisenhower's
staff officers to an office gossip back in nineteen forty three.
Leave Kay and Ike alone. She's helping him win the war.
In nineteen thirty nine, when it looked like he might
be forcibly retired as a lieutenant colonel, his son John
(19:02):
had asked him if he regretted having spent his career
in the army. Not at all, he is now replied.
He said, he had found his life in the army
wonderfully interesting. It brought me into contact with men of ability, honor,
and a sense of high dedication to their country. The
real satisfaction for a man is to do the best
he can. My ambition in the army was to make
(19:24):
everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to
other duty. Leadership was another part of his character. He
was born to lead, and he was trained to lead.
He told John once that leadership was the one art
that could be learned. But of course only the born
(19:46):
leader can say that. Eisenhower reinforced his natural talent. He
studied the subject of leadership intensely, and he wrote some
of his best analytical material on the subject. An important
part of leadership for Eisenhower rested on certain matters of character.
These included modesty and a genuine eagerness to share the applause. Thus,
(20:09):
through the war, he never forgot how much he was
dependent on others. Thus, through the war, when reporters came
to him, he would say, go see Bradley, go see Patton.
Get your story there. And they're the ones that are
winning this war for us. Sharing the credit for a
success and taking the personal blame for what went wrong
was Eisenhower's leadership style. In all the announcements of D Day,
(20:35):
the operative words were the Allies or we. In the
announcement Eisenhower wrote by hand to release to the press
in the event of failure, The operative word was I,
as in, it's all my fault. Always take your job seriously,
(20:58):
never yourself. One of his favorite lines. A corollary to
that sentiment was his willingness to sacrifice himself for the
good of the whole. In early nineteen forty four, Eisenhower
wanted to put the Allied bombers to work on transportation
targets in France in order to isolate Normandy. The bomber
commander said no, they wanted to continue the strategic bombing
(21:20):
campaign inside Germany. Eisenhower felt so strongly about the issue
that he told the combined chiefs of Staff that either
they gave him his transportation targets railroads and turntables and
marshaling yards and bridges and the like in France, or
I'm simply going to have to go home. In other words,
(21:42):
Eisenhower was not ready to commit his forces to the
attack until he was certain that he had utilized every
asset he had to the uttermost. If he couldn't use
the assets as he saw fit, he would resign his commission.
When he made the threat, he was holding the most
coveted command in the history of warfare. He got his way,
(22:04):
and the transportation plan was a big success. He later
used the same threat and a knockdown dispute with Montgomery
over strategy and command, and he again had his way.
It was an integral part of him, this ability to
know exactly when to use his personal asset, the power
of his name, to make the ultimate threat. It showed
(22:26):
a nice sense of balance about political factors and an
accurate measurement of his own strength in a struggle over policy.
He much preferred working with the team to having to
act on his own. A stress on teamwork began when
he was a child, showed again at West Point and
was reinforced by his experiences as a football coach on
(22:48):
various army bases in the nineteen twenties. By nineteen fifty two,
the year Eisenhower entered into politics at age sixty two,
his character is formed by heredity and experience, was set
and cement. It included, as I have said, the qualities
of love, honesty, faithfulness, responsibility, modesty, generosity, duty, and leadership,
(23:13):
along with the hatred of war. These were bedrock or
were they? This paragon of virtue I am describing had
lived in the shelter of the army nearly all of
his life, character testing opportunities or temptations were almost unknown
(23:34):
to him. It's easy to be virtuous when virtue is rewarded,
and this will be a hard sell of many veterans
in here, but it usually is in the army. It's
not so easy to be virtuous when virtue is ignored
and partisanship is rewarded, as in politics. He grew up
(23:54):
in the army, and he swore like a sergeant, although
the words he used were never a secrual or had
anything to do with anatomy. They were always christ and
damn and goddamn words like that. Once he was at
a luncheon with some cabinet members during the fifty six
(24:18):
reelection campaign, and someone said something about somebody proposing something,
and Eisenharers snored these damned amateurs. He said, you know,
there's only in all the world, there's only two places
where amateurs think that they're better than the professionals, military
strategy and prostitution. Now, this was an all male luncheon,
(24:41):
and having said that, he blushed and confessed a bit shamefacedly.
That's the only off color story I know where his
characters showed most decisively was on questions of war and
more specific a first strike against the Soviet Union or
(25:03):
in Asia. He was president during the worst decade of
the Cold War. He was the only president to have
a decisive lead over the Soviets and nuclear weapons, a
lead so decisive that he could have ordered a preventative
war which would have destroyed the Soviet Union as a
military power, and they would have been unable to retaliate.
(25:26):
Given the amounts of money the United States was spending
in the arms race and the fear it engendered, and
the fact that the Soviets would soon be able to
retaliate and eventually might pull even in nuclear weaponry, the
temptation to use the bomb while we still had the
lead was tremendous at the time of the nbn FU
(25:47):
in nineteen fifty four, during the various crises over the
Chinese offshore islands in the mid fifties, and regularly with
regard to the Soviet Union, some of Eisenhower's principal advisers
gave into that temptation. These included his joint chiefs of Staff,
his vice president, his Secretary of State, members of his
National Security Council, and many pundits told on May one,
(26:10):
nineteen fifty four, that the National Security Council was preparing
a paper calling for the use of atomic bombs to
save the French at the NBN. Foo Eyes now responded,
I certainly do not think that the Adam bomb can
be used by the United States unilaterally. He then went
on to get to the heart of the matter. You
boys must be crazy. We can't use those awful things
(26:34):
against Asians. For the second time in less than ten years.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
My God, And you're listening to Steven Ambrose recounting many
of the stories he told in his Definitive biography of
Dwight D. Eisenhower. And I love a few of the
things he said about Ike's leadership style, and this the
most important. Sharing the credit for success and taking the
(26:58):
blame for what went wrong was his leadership style. And
this quote perhaps best states his character. Always take your
job seriously, not yourself. When we come back, more of
this remarkable story with one of the great storytellers in
American history telling the story of one of the great
(27:20):
military leaders in American history. Ambrose on Eisenhower. Here on
our American stories, and we continue here with our American
stories and the story of Twight d. Eisenhower is told
(27:43):
by Stephen Ambrose, let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
It was characteristic of him always to ask what happens next?
If we do suck and soul, what are the likely consequences?
Suppose we do pull it off, then what and what
did the other players do? It was an attempt to
look into the future, and it stood him in good
stead as president. After DNB and Foo fell, the Joint
(28:11):
Chiefs recommended a preventative attack against the Soviet Union. Eisenhower
asked them to think about what they were proposing. I
want you to carry this question home with you. Gain
such a victory, and what are you going to do
with it? Here would be a great area from the
Elba River all the way to vladis Vostok, just torn
up and destroyed, without government, without its communications, just an
(28:33):
area of starvation disaster. I ask you, what would the
civilized world do about it? I repeat, there is no
victory accepting your imagination. Another quality was patience. Make no
mistakes in a hurry was a favorite axiom of his.
When advisors urged him to destroy the Soviet Union while
(28:56):
you could still get away with it, he told them
to be patient. That in the end, the Soviet system
would implode because it was rotten at its core. That
this would take a long time, maybe as long as
fifty years, but they would have to educate their own
people in order to stay up with modern technology, and
when they did, they would sow the seeds of their
(29:19):
own undoing. He was a good steward. His farewell adess.
He pointed out, we you and I our government must
avoid plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious
resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of
(29:42):
our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political
and spiritual heritage. And then he uttered, what all his
lines is my all time favorite? He said, we want
democracy survive for all ages to come. That faith in
(30:05):
democracy was total, even after five years of dealing with Congress.
In nineteen fifty seven, he told Swede, each congressman thinks
of himself as intensely patriotic, but it does not take
the average member long to conclude that his first duty
to his country is to get himself re elected. This
(30:26):
leads to a capacity for rationalization that is beyond belief.
It was characteristic of him to seek compromise extremes to
the right and to the left of any political dispute
are always wrong. He liked to say. The Democrats controld
Congress for six of his eight years in office. He
(30:46):
got on with them smoothly. A brief assessment of his
accomplishments as president reveals something more of the man and
his character. First and foremost, he presided over eight years
of prosperity, marred only by two minor recessions. By later standards,
it was a period of nearly full employment. The average
(31:09):
unemployment rate in the fifties was four percent and no inflation.
The average inflation rate in the nineteen fifties was one
and a half percent a year, about which he worried
offy there was a four percent rise in real wages
each year for blue collar workers. Indeed, by almost every
(31:31):
standard GNP personal income and savings, home buying, auto purchases,
capital investment, highway construction, and so forth, it was the
best decade of the century. Shirley Eisenhower's fiscal policies, his
refusal to cut taxes or increased defense spending, his insistence
on a balanced budget, played some role in creating this
(31:52):
happy situation. His special triumphs came in the field of
foreign affairs and were directed directly related to his character.
By making peace in Korea five months after taking office
and avoiding war thereafter, and by holding down the cost
of the arms race, he achieved greatness. No one knows
(32:12):
how much money he saved the United States. No one
knows how many lives he saved by ending the war
in Korea and refusing to enter any others, despite a
half dozen and more virtually unanimous recommendations to do so,
Dn Benfu, Kumoi Matsu, many others. But he made peace,
(32:34):
and he kept the peace. Whether any other man could
have led the country through that decade without going to
war cannot be known. What we do know is that
Eisenwer did it. Eisnower seldom boasted, but he did on
this one. The United States never lost a soldier or
a foot of ground in my administration. He said, we
(32:56):
kept the peace. People ask how it happened. By God,
it didn't just happen. I'll tell you that his magnetic
appeal to millions of his fellow citizens seemed to come
about as a natural and effortless result of his sunny disposition.
But he worked at his apparent artlessness, that big grin
(33:19):
and bouncy step often masked depression, doubt, or utter weariness.
He believed it was the critical duty of a leader
to always exude optimism. He made it a habit to
save all of his doubts for his pillow. For forty years,
he changed smoked cigarettes four packs a day. At age
(33:45):
fifty eight, he quit cold turkey, and he never again
touched tobacco. Clearly he was a man in tremendous willpower.
Although at the Paris Summit, the abortive Paris Summit in
nineteen sixty, when Khrushoff was going on and on about
Francis Gary powers and YouTube and demanding an apology and
(34:06):
pounding the table and saw an eyeshower scribbled on the
back of his Mimo pad. God, I wish I had
a cigarette. He used that tremendous willpower to conquer his
own most negative characteristic, an awful temper. When he got mad,
(34:28):
it just everybody knew immediately. His face just lit up,
beat red, and and the tension in his body was
a palpable thing that could be felt all through the room.
His aides lived in terror of those moments of outbreak
of his temper. Now anger that has contrived, that is
(34:49):
put on for show and a purpose. An actor's anger
can be an effective tool leadership. It was one eyes
Now often used, but genuine anger, deep blind anger, is
the enemy of leadership. Eyes Noower often felt it with Montgomery,
with McCarthy, with others, but he never acted on it.
(35:14):
One way he controlled his anger was to do his
best to follow his own rule, never question another man's motives.
His wisdom, yes, but not his motives. He also tried
to always assume the best about others until shown otherwise.
He could do so consistently, even in a world full
of high powered men whose motives were often self serving
(35:37):
or base. Because of this most outstanding personal characteristic of
his love for life and for people. No one ever
caught this better than Richard Nixon, who observed on the
day Eisenhower died in nineteen sixty nine that everybody loved
ike because I c lobbed everybody. Nixon went on to
(36:01):
confess that he could scarcely believe such a thing was possible,
because he said, in my experience, most politicians are men
with very strong hatreds. But Lord knows that Nixon was
a man full of such feelings and a man who
always questioned the other guy's motives. But as Verisenhower, the
(36:27):
only man he ever really hated was Adolf Hitler. He
was the general who hated war, but who hated the
Nazis more. He was old fashioned, a Victorian who came
to power in the mid twentieth century. His virtues were
those of the nineteenth century. Honesty, integrity, and religious devotion
(36:53):
and conviction were some of them. To my knowledge. He
never lied in his private life, not once. And his
public responsibilities he lied twice, once in nineteen forty four
to Hitler about where he was going to invade, and
(37:14):
once again on May Day, nineteen sixty to Khrushoff about
what Francis gary Powers was doing in that U two
over the Soviet Union. In my own life, when I'm
faced with a moral question, or a dilemma, or a
personal problem of choice, I'm in the habit of asking
(37:37):
myself what would I do? Sad to relate, I often
come up short of his standards. My only consolation is
that so do most of the men I know for
whose lives I have studied.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
And you've been listening to Steven Ambrose and what storytelling.
A special thanks to the estate, also to Greg Hangler
for pulling that all together. The story of Dwight D.
Eisenhower hold by Stephen Ambrose. Here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show
and our favorite subject history and all of our history
stories are brought to us by the great folks at
Hillsdale College, where you can go to study all the
things that are beautiful in life, all the things that
matter in life. And if you can't get to Hillsdale,
Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific
(00:32):
online courses.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Go to Hillsdale dot edu.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading historians. Stephen Ambrose
passed in two thousand and two, but his storytelling accounts
can now be heard here at Our American Stories, thanks
to those who run his estate. Ambrose wrote the definitive
biography of Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was born in eighteen ninety
in a rented shack near the railroad tracks in Dennison, Texas.
(00:59):
He was raised in a fan of Mennonites, fundamentalists in
their Christian faith were also pacifists. Here's Stephen Ambrose with
the story of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Drog David Eisenhower was a great and a good man.
These two qualities don't always or even often go together.
But they did with him. Obviously, that is an assertion
that needs proof. Let me begin with some definitions. In
(01:31):
nineteen fifty four, President Eisenhower wrote his childhood friend Sweet
Hazlet on the subject of greatness. He thought greatness depended
either on achieving pre eminence in some broad field of
human thought or endeavor, or on assuming some position of
great responsibility, and then so discharging his duties as to
(01:55):
have left a marked and favorable imprint upon the future.
The qualities of goodness in a man I believe include
a broad sympathy for the human condition, that is, an
awareness of human weaknesses and shortcomings, and a willingness to
be forgiving of them. A sense of responsibility toward others,
(02:19):
a genuine modesty combined with justified self confidence, a sense
of humor, and most of all, a love of life
and of people. That last is the key. Eisenhower loved life,
and he loved people. To me, that's the heart of
(02:43):
his character. From it flowed all the rest. In the
fall of nineteen twelve, third class Cadet Dwight Eisenhower, twenty
two years old, was walking down a hallway at West
Point when a plead running full tilt on some fool
errand for an upperclassman, ran into him knocked him over.
(03:07):
Reacting with what he called a bellow of astonishment and
mock indignation, Eisenhower scornfully demanded, mister dumguard a generic term
for a pleb, what was your PCs previous condition of servitude?
What did you do before you became a cadet? And
then Eisenhower added, sarcastically, you look like a barber. I
(03:28):
was a barber, sir. It was Eisenhower's turn to go
red with embarrassment. Without a word, he returned to his room,
where he told his roommate, I'm never gonna haze another
pleab as long as I'm at this place. As a
matter of fact, they'll have to run over and knock
me out of the company street before I'll make any
(03:49):
attempt again. I've just done something that was stupid and unforgivable.
I managed to make a man ashamed of what he
did to earn a living. He never hazed again, and
as an adult, he never shamed a man. Respect for others,
honesty in his dealings, love of life. These were some
(04:11):
of the basic parts of his character. From whence did
they come. Nurture and nature played their respective roles in
shaping Dwight Eisenhaer. Physically, he inherited a strong, tough, big
athletic body and extremely good looks with a quite fabulous grin,
(04:32):
along with keen intelligence. He also inherited a strong competitive
streak from his parents, plus a bad temper, along with
unquestioning love, stern discipline, ambition, and religion. They made him study.
His parents did read the Bible aloud, do chores, hold jobs.
(04:53):
As soon as he was old enough, they instilled in
him a series of controls over his emotions, his temper.
Most of all, they gave him a solid Victorian outlook
on the relations between the sexes and on proper conduct.
All his life he would blush if he slipped and
said a hell or a dam in front of a lady.
(05:17):
Thus he grew up in a strong Christian atmosphere, not
a sectarian atmosphere. He said once as president that this
country has to be founded on a strong religious faith,
and I don't care what it is. What he meant
was he didn't care if it was Baptist or Methodist,
or Presbyterian or River Brethren. He wants to find an
(05:38):
atheist as someone who could watch Southern Methodists play Notre
Dame and not care who won. As president, he began
attending church regularly because he felt it was important to
set an example. It wasn't something that he had done
earlier in his life, but the religion was always very
(06:00):
deeply there. He began his first inaugural address with a prayer,
and it went over so well he decided to begin
all of his cabinet meetings with prayers. About a year
after he'd been in office, he was a half hour
into a cabinet meeting when he slapped himself on the
head and said, God, do we forgot the prayer from
(06:24):
his parents and from his experiences in Abilene, which is
after all, almost exactly in the heart of America the
Glower forty eight. He absorbed such values as honesty and
fair play and all dealings into the very marrow of
his bones. He abhorred the idea of cheating or lying,
(06:47):
and he never did either. He also absorbed a fervent
attachment to democracy that amounted to a religious faith. This
grew naturally in the soil of that little town out there,
the Kansas Prairie.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
And you've been listening to Stephen Ambrose tell the story
of Dwight D. Eisenhower. More of this remarkable story here
on Our American Stories. Liehbibe here the host of our
(07:33):
American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring
stories from across this great country, stories from our big
cities and small towns. But we truly can't do the
show without you. Our stories are free to listen to,
but they're not free to make. If you love what
you hear, go to Alamericanstories dot com and click the
donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to
(07:56):
Alamerican Stories dot com and give And we continue with
our American Stories, and with the story of Dwight D.
Eisenhower told by the person who wrote the best book
(08:17):
on Ike and we're talking about Stephen Ambrose. Let's return
to Ambrose with more of this remarkable story.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
At West Point and in his first twenty five years
in the army, Eisenhower satisfied few of his ambitions. He
didn't get to war in the First War, the Great War,
and he was still a lieutenant colonel when the Second
World War began and about to be forcibly retired, but
he had learned his profession, and he had demonstrated another
(08:46):
characteristic trait, patience, and it was rewarded. After Pearl Harbor,
his star arose, and soon he was in Washington making
war plans for Chief of Staff George Marshall, and then
on to London to take command of the American forces
in the European theater of operations. This threw him into
(09:07):
the middle of the great decision making process of the
Allies at the very highest level in London, dealing daily
with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He proved to be an
outstanding diplomat and politician, not only with Churchill, but with
de gaul and other French leaders as well. He was
successful because he was true to his character. The situation
(09:31):
in North Africa following the invasion in the fall of
nineteen forty two was exceedingly complicated, with a lot of
false promises coming from the British, the Americans, to the
various French factions, but not from Eisner. I know only
one method of operation, he wrote in his diary, to
be as honest with others as I am with myself.
(09:53):
When President Franklin Roosevelt pressured him to get tough with
the local French. Eisenhower refused, explaining, my whole strength and
dealing with the French has been based upon my refusal
to quibble or to stoop to any kind of subterfuge
or double dealing. The French responded to this, De Gaulle
told him, as long as you say that, I believe it.
(10:17):
He was equally successful with his sometimes difficult British subordinates
and his sometimes egotistical American subordinates. And he'd only mentioned
the names of Montgomery and Patent. You know what I'm
talking about. They might not agree with his decisions, but
they gave him their trust. Indeed, whenever his wartime associates
(10:39):
described Eisenhower, whether they were superiors or subordinates, there was
one word that almost every one of them used. It
was trust. General Montgomery didn't think much of Eisenhower as
a soldier, but he appreciated other qualities. His real strength
lies in his human qualities, Montgomery, he said, he has
(11:00):
the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him,
as the magnet attracts the bit of metal. He merely
has to smile at you when you trust him. At
once scrupulous honesty was an integral part of Eisenhower's character
and a learned experience. He saw an experienced the payoff
(11:22):
for this trust. He knew that telling the truth was
the only way to deal effectively with his problems. He
also developed a technique to deliver his message. I refuse,
he wrote, I refuse to put anything in diplomatic or
suave terminology, and carefully cultivate the manner and reputation of
(11:43):
complete bluntness and honesty. Just a man too simple minded
to indulge in circumlocution. Thus did the Kansas farm boy
approach Charles de Gaulle, Ann Winston, Kerchiam and Franklin Roosevelt
and so many others, and it always worked. He was
(12:05):
the general who hated war. Some like pat and gloried
in it, but Eisenhower could not. He signed every letter
of condolence coming out of Europe for three years, a
very sobering experience. He was the one who ordered the
bombing and shelling of German cities. He hated doing that too,
(12:27):
hated having to destroy when he wanted to build, But
he did his duty with all his skill and energy.
In nineteen forty three, his older brother, Arthur, sent him
a newspaper clipping that stressed his mother's pacifism and the
irony of her son being a general. Eisenower wrote back
(12:47):
to say, the pacifist I doubt whether any of them
detest war as I do. They probably have not seen
bodies riding on the ground, or smelled the stinch of
decaying human flesh. Probably they have not visited a field
hospital crowded with the desperately wounded. What separates me from
the pacifist is that I hate the Nazis more than
(13:11):
I hate war. He told Mamy in a wartime letter.
I think that all these trials and tribulations must come
upon the world because of some great wickedness. Yet one
would feel that man's mere intelligence, to say nothing of
his spiritual perceptions, would find some way of eliminating war.
(13:35):
The contrast between Eisenhower and those generals who gloried in
war could not have been greater. He had a very
keen sense of family, of the way in which each
casualty meant a grieving family back home. In nineteen sixty three,
when he was filming with Walter Cronkite a television special
entitled D Day Plus twenty years Cronkite sitting on that
(13:59):
stone wall that looks onto that magnificent cemetery at Omaha.
Conkie asked him what he thought about when he returned
to Normandy. In reply, he spoke not of the things
that other generals would have brought up. He didn't speak
about the tanks or the guns, or the planes or
the ships, or the personalities of the commanders of their opponents,
or how he fooled the Germans or of the victory. Instead,
(14:22):
he spoke of the families of the men buried in
the American cemetery. He said he could never come to
this spot without thinking of how blessed he and Mami
were to have grandchildren, and how much it saddened him
to think of all the couples in America who had
never had that blessing because their only son was buried here.
(14:47):
So far, he looks like a saint, But he was
a healthy, vigorous man in his early fifties during the war,
and men at war are notoriously receptive to female charm
when they are far from home and close to danger.
For many people, the test of character is the marriage vow.
In other words, what about Kay Sommersby. Kay was Ike's
(15:14):
personal secretary and sometime driver. She was young enough to
be his daughter, very attractive, with a bubbly personality The
Churchill and almost everyone else found charming. She had lost
her fiance in North Africa and had fallen in love
with her boss. For his part, how could he help it?
Be responsive? He liked her enormously, probably had a crush
(15:37):
on her. They were always together, but almost never alone.
Decades later, in a book published after her death, Kay
claimed that they had fallen in love and that both
had realized it. In January nineteen forty four, when he
returned to England from a short visit to Washington, they
(15:58):
had their only evening together alone. There was a fireplace.
They sat on the floor. His kisses absolutely unrattled me,
Kay wrote. According to her account, it was a passionate
but unconsummated experience, because after they took off each other's clothes,
Eisenhower was flastened. This may have been because, as one
(16:22):
aid put it, in a grand understatement, he had a
lot on his mind. More likely, it seems to me
his stern sense of morality, character and honesty overrote his passion.
He was incapable of cheating on his wife, or maybe
(16:43):
if the incident never happened, that it was merely an
old woman's fantasy. No one will ever know. What is
important to note is that not even Kay ever claimed
that they had a genuine love affair. Nor is it
true that Eisenhower asked President Harry Truman for permission to
divorce his wife in order to marry Kay, which was
(17:05):
always a ridiculous story to begin with, because he was
a five star general. They don't ask anybody's permission to
do anything. What he did ask Truman for was permission
to have Mamie join him and occupied Germany throughout the war.
When Kay was with him always, his love for Mamie
(17:26):
was constant. His sustaining force was the thought that when
the war was over, he and Mamie could live together again.
He loved Mamie for half a century, except when he
was off at war. They slept in the same bed
for fifty years.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
And you've been listening to the voice of Stephen Ambrose.
The story of Dwight D. Eisenhower continues here on our
American stories, And we continue with our American stories, and
(18:12):
with the story of Dwight d. Eisenhower is told by
Stephen Ambrose, let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Loving Mamy did not necessarily preclude loving Kay, or at
least loving her under the special situation in which they
lived from the summer of nineteen forty two to the
spring of nineteen forty five. He was lucky to have
her around, and the Allies were lucky she was there.
(18:40):
The best advice in attempting to pass any judgment on
the Eisenhower Summersby relationship was given by one of Eisenhower's
staff officers to an office gossip back in nineteen forty three.
Leave Kay and Ike alone. She's helping him win the war.
In nineteen thirty nine, when it looked like he might
be forcibly retired as a lieutenant colonel, his son John
(19:02):
had asked him if he regretted having spent his career
in the army. Not at all, he is now replied.
He said, he had found his life in the army
wonderfully interesting. It brought me into contact with men of ability, honor,
and a sense of high dedication to their country. The
real satisfaction for a man is to do the best
he can. My ambition in the army was to make
(19:24):
everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to
other duty. Leadership was another part of his character. He
was born to lead, and he was trained to lead.
He told John once that leadership was the one art
that could be learned. But of course only the born
(19:46):
leader can say that. Eisenhower reinforced his natural talent. He
studied the subject of leadership intensely, and he wrote some
of his best analytical material on the subject. An important
part of leadership for Eisenhower rested on certain matters of character.
These included modesty and a genuine eagerness to share the applause. Thus,
(20:09):
through the war, he never forgot how much he was
dependent on others. Thus, through the war, when reporters came
to him, he would say, go see Bradley, go see Patton.
Get your story there. And they're the ones that are
winning this war for us. Sharing the credit for a
success and taking the personal blame for what went wrong
was Eisenhower's leadership style. In all the announcements of D Day,
(20:35):
the operative words were the Allies or we. In the
announcement Eisenhower wrote by hand to release to the press
in the event of failure, The operative word was I,
as in, it's all my fault. Always take your job seriously,
(20:58):
never yourself. One of his favorite lines. A corollary to
that sentiment was his willingness to sacrifice himself for the
good of the whole. In early nineteen forty four, Eisenhower
wanted to put the Allied bombers to work on transportation
targets in France in order to isolate Normandy. The bomber
commander said no, they wanted to continue the strategic bombing
(21:20):
campaign inside Germany. Eisenhower felt so strongly about the issue
that he told the combined chiefs of Staff that either
they gave him his transportation targets railroads and turntables and
marshaling yards and bridges and the like in France, or
I'm simply going to have to go home. In other words,
(21:42):
Eisenhower was not ready to commit his forces to the
attack until he was certain that he had utilized every
asset he had to the uttermost. If he couldn't use
the assets as he saw fit, he would resign his commission.
When he made the threat, he was holding the most
coveted command in the history of warfare. He got his way,
(22:04):
and the transportation plan was a big success. He later
used the same threat and a knockdown dispute with Montgomery
over strategy and command, and he again had his way.
It was an integral part of him, this ability to
know exactly when to use his personal asset, the power
of his name, to make the ultimate threat. It showed
(22:26):
a nice sense of balance about political factors and an
accurate measurement of his own strength in a struggle over policy.
He much preferred working with the team to having to
act on his own. A stress on teamwork began when
he was a child, showed again at West Point and
was reinforced by his experiences as a football coach on
(22:48):
various army bases in the nineteen twenties. By nineteen fifty two,
the year Eisenhower entered into politics at age sixty two,
his character is formed by heredity and experience, was set
and cement. It included, as I have said, the qualities
of love, honesty, faithfulness, responsibility, modesty, generosity, duty, and leadership,
(23:13):
along with the hatred of war. These were bedrock or
were they? This paragon of virtue I am describing had
lived in the shelter of the army nearly all of
his life, character testing opportunities or temptations were almost unknown
(23:34):
to him. It's easy to be virtuous when virtue is rewarded,
and this will be a hard sell of many veterans
in here, but it usually is in the army. It's
not so easy to be virtuous when virtue is ignored
and partisanship is rewarded, as in politics. He grew up
(23:54):
in the army, and he swore like a sergeant, although
the words he used were never a secrual or had
anything to do with anatomy. They were always christ and
damn and goddamn words like that. Once he was at
a luncheon with some cabinet members during the fifty six
(24:18):
reelection campaign, and someone said something about somebody proposing something,
and Eisenharers snored these damned amateurs. He said, you know,
there's only in all the world, there's only two places
where amateurs think that they're better than the professionals, military
strategy and prostitution. Now, this was an all male luncheon,
(24:41):
and having said that, he blushed and confessed a bit shamefacedly.
That's the only off color story I know where his
characters showed most decisively was on questions of war and
more specific a first strike against the Soviet Union or
(25:03):
in Asia. He was president during the worst decade of
the Cold War. He was the only president to have
a decisive lead over the Soviets and nuclear weapons, a
lead so decisive that he could have ordered a preventative
war which would have destroyed the Soviet Union as a
military power, and they would have been unable to retaliate.
(25:26):
Given the amounts of money the United States was spending
in the arms race and the fear it engendered, and
the fact that the Soviets would soon be able to
retaliate and eventually might pull even in nuclear weaponry, the
temptation to use the bomb while we still had the
lead was tremendous at the time of the nbn FU
(25:47):
in nineteen fifty four, during the various crises over the
Chinese offshore islands in the mid fifties, and regularly with
regard to the Soviet Union, some of Eisenhower's principal advisers
gave into that temptation. These included his joint chiefs of Staff,
his vice president, his Secretary of State, members of his
National Security Council, and many pundits told on May one,
(26:10):
nineteen fifty four, that the National Security Council was preparing
a paper calling for the use of atomic bombs to
save the French at the NBN. Foo Eyes now responded,
I certainly do not think that the Adam bomb can
be used by the United States unilaterally. He then went
on to get to the heart of the matter. You
boys must be crazy. We can't use those awful things
(26:34):
against Asians. For the second time in less than ten years.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
My God, And you're listening to Steven Ambrose recounting many
of the stories he told in his Definitive biography of
Dwight D. Eisenhower. And I love a few of the
things he said about Ike's leadership style, and this the
most important. Sharing the credit for success and taking the
(26:58):
blame for what went wrong was his leadership style. And
this quote perhaps best states his character. Always take your
job seriously, not yourself. When we come back, more of
this remarkable story with one of the great storytellers in
American history telling the story of one of the great
(27:20):
military leaders in American history. Ambrose on Eisenhower. Here on
our American stories, and we continue here with our American
stories and the story of Twight d. Eisenhower is told
(27:43):
by Stephen Ambrose, let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
It was characteristic of him always to ask what happens next?
If we do suck and soul, what are the likely consequences?
Suppose we do pull it off, then what and what
did the other players do? It was an attempt to
look into the future, and it stood him in good
stead as president. After DNB and Foo fell, the Joint
(28:11):
Chiefs recommended a preventative attack against the Soviet Union. Eisenhower
asked them to think about what they were proposing. I
want you to carry this question home with you. Gain
such a victory, and what are you going to do
with it? Here would be a great area from the
Elba River all the way to vladis Vostok, just torn
up and destroyed, without government, without its communications, just an
(28:33):
area of starvation disaster. I ask you, what would the
civilized world do about it? I repeat, there is no
victory accepting your imagination. Another quality was patience. Make no
mistakes in a hurry was a favorite axiom of his.
When advisors urged him to destroy the Soviet Union while
(28:56):
you could still get away with it, he told them
to be patient. That in the end, the Soviet system
would implode because it was rotten at its core. That
this would take a long time, maybe as long as
fifty years, but they would have to educate their own
people in order to stay up with modern technology, and
when they did, they would sow the seeds of their
(29:19):
own undoing. He was a good steward. His farewell adess.
He pointed out, we you and I our government must
avoid plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious
resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of
(29:42):
our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political
and spiritual heritage. And then he uttered, what all his
lines is my all time favorite? He said, we want
democracy survive for all ages to come. That faith in
(30:05):
democracy was total, even after five years of dealing with Congress.
In nineteen fifty seven, he told Swede, each congressman thinks
of himself as intensely patriotic, but it does not take
the average member long to conclude that his first duty
to his country is to get himself re elected. This
(30:26):
leads to a capacity for rationalization that is beyond belief.
It was characteristic of him to seek compromise extremes to
the right and to the left of any political dispute
are always wrong. He liked to say. The Democrats controld
Congress for six of his eight years in office. He
(30:46):
got on with them smoothly. A brief assessment of his
accomplishments as president reveals something more of the man and
his character. First and foremost, he presided over eight years
of prosperity, marred only by two minor recessions. By later standards,
it was a period of nearly full employment. The average
(31:09):
unemployment rate in the fifties was four percent and no inflation.
The average inflation rate in the nineteen fifties was one
and a half percent a year, about which he worried
offy there was a four percent rise in real wages
each year for blue collar workers. Indeed, by almost every
(31:31):
standard GNP personal income and savings, home buying, auto purchases,
capital investment, highway construction, and so forth, it was the
best decade of the century. Shirley Eisenhower's fiscal policies, his
refusal to cut taxes or increased defense spending, his insistence
on a balanced budget, played some role in creating this
(31:52):
happy situation. His special triumphs came in the field of
foreign affairs and were directed directly related to his character.
By making peace in Korea five months after taking office
and avoiding war thereafter, and by holding down the cost
of the arms race, he achieved greatness. No one knows
(32:12):
how much money he saved the United States. No one
knows how many lives he saved by ending the war
in Korea and refusing to enter any others, despite a
half dozen and more virtually unanimous recommendations to do so,
Dn Benfu, Kumoi Matsu, many others. But he made peace,
(32:34):
and he kept the peace. Whether any other man could
have led the country through that decade without going to
war cannot be known. What we do know is that
Eisenwer did it. Eisnower seldom boasted, but he did on
this one. The United States never lost a soldier or
a foot of ground in my administration. He said, we
(32:56):
kept the peace. People ask how it happened. By God,
it didn't just happen. I'll tell you that his magnetic
appeal to millions of his fellow citizens seemed to come
about as a natural and effortless result of his sunny disposition.
But he worked at his apparent artlessness, that big grin
(33:19):
and bouncy step often masked depression, doubt, or utter weariness.
He believed it was the critical duty of a leader
to always exude optimism. He made it a habit to
save all of his doubts for his pillow. For forty years,
he changed smoked cigarettes four packs a day. At age
(33:45):
fifty eight, he quit cold turkey, and he never again
touched tobacco. Clearly he was a man in tremendous willpower.
Although at the Paris Summit, the abortive Paris Summit in
nineteen sixty, when Khrushoff was going on and on about
Francis Gary powers and YouTube and demanding an apology and
(34:06):
pounding the table and saw an eyeshower scribbled on the
back of his Mimo pad. God, I wish I had
a cigarette. He used that tremendous willpower to conquer his
own most negative characteristic, an awful temper. When he got mad,
(34:28):
it just everybody knew immediately. His face just lit up,
beat red, and and the tension in his body was
a palpable thing that could be felt all through the room.
His aides lived in terror of those moments of outbreak
of his temper. Now anger that has contrived, that is
(34:49):
put on for show and a purpose. An actor's anger
can be an effective tool leadership. It was one eyes
Now often used, but genuine anger, deep blind anger, is
the enemy of leadership. Eyes Noower often felt it with Montgomery,
with McCarthy, with others, but he never acted on it.
(35:14):
One way he controlled his anger was to do his
best to follow his own rule, never question another man's motives.
His wisdom, yes, but not his motives. He also tried
to always assume the best about others until shown otherwise.
He could do so consistently, even in a world full
of high powered men whose motives were often self serving
(35:37):
or base. Because of this most outstanding personal characteristic of
his love for life and for people. No one ever
caught this better than Richard Nixon, who observed on the
day Eisenhower died in nineteen sixty nine that everybody loved
ike because I c lobbed everybody. Nixon went on to
(36:01):
confess that he could scarcely believe such a thing was possible,
because he said, in my experience, most politicians are men
with very strong hatreds. But Lord knows that Nixon was
a man full of such feelings and a man who
always questioned the other guy's motives. But as Verisenhower, the
(36:27):
only man he ever really hated was Adolf Hitler. He
was the general who hated war, but who hated the
Nazis more. He was old fashioned, a Victorian who came
to power in the mid twentieth century. His virtues were
those of the nineteenth century. Honesty, integrity, and religious devotion
(36:53):
and conviction were some of them. To my knowledge. He
never lied in his private life, not once. And his
public responsibilities he lied twice, once in nineteen forty four
to Hitler about where he was going to invade, and
(37:14):
once again on May Day, nineteen sixty to Khrushoff about
what Francis gary Powers was doing in that U two
over the Soviet Union. In my own life, when I'm
faced with a moral question, or a dilemma, or a
personal problem of choice, I'm in the habit of asking
(37:37):
myself what would I do? Sad to relate, I often
come up short of his standards. My only consolation is
that so do most of the men I know for
whose lives I have studied.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
And you've been listening to Steven Ambrose and what storytelling.
A special thanks to the estate, also to Greg Hangler
for pulling that all together. The story of Dwight D.
Eisenhower hold by Stephen Ambrose. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com