Memories of The Great and The Good (10 page)

In the late afternoons, he retired to his house for a nap and soon afterwards appeared, amiable again. It was here that you could get a sharp impression of him in the years of his retirement. And it was here too that I found myself bringing into focus my own tentative judgment about his virtues in war and in peace.

By the time of this, our last, meeting, he was very much an old country squire, sitting on his terrace with his back to the light and the book held high in his hands because like many old men whose eyesight does alarming things from month to month, he was just then in between prescriptions, so to speak. So his glasses were perched on the end of his nose, and by holding the book high and looking through the bottom of the lenses he could get things in focus until the new bifocals arrived. From time to time he put the book down and squinted out across his fields to the pasture. And he would watch the cattle going in, or scrutinize a blighted elm, or remark that a particular feed grass he was using burned out too quickly in the drenching summer heat of that very hot valley.

We all, they say, revert to our origins in old age, and if you'd not known who Ike was you would have guessed, and rightly, that he was a lifelong farmer—and by now a prosperous one. They were having a fierce drought that summer in Pennsylvania, as everywhere else in the East, and as the sun declined and the evening became bearable, we strolled out onto the grass and towards a small circular lawn that was a precious thing to Ike. It was a rudimentary putting green and it had only one hole, with a flag stuck in it whose pennant was stamped with the five stars of a General of the Army. But, strangely, this hole was invisible; it was so grown over with weeds that I doubt you could have sunk a small cannonball in it. I asked about this and he said, in that hesitant yet strenuous tone he brought to all questions of conscience: “Well, you see, the governor of Pennsylvania put out a proclamation over a month ago, I guess, asking people to save water and do no watering of lawns, gardens, golf courses and so on. Looks pretty sad, doesn't it?”

In retrospect, it was altogether a sad occasion. In his old age, there were two things Ike lived for: his farm and his golf. And the greater of these was his golf. At that time he was beginning to be plagued by innumerable ailments, and I remember on that particular day he was a little querulous because he had had some tests made on an affliction of his diaphragm, and the results were not in. But what worried him most was the arthritis in his hands. The next day he kept rubbing the joints and wondering if he would ever play golf again. I hinted, in a subsequent conversation, that he had the golf bug pretty badly. “In the worst way,” he said. “I didn't really take it up until after the war when I was in my mid-fifties, when I was at SHAPE. And, as you know, it takes about two years to learn to hit the ball. And sometimes during briefing sessions, I'd let my mind wander from the disposition of the Russian armies and our NATO equipment and so on, and just worry about my game. There was a time when I used to dash out of Paris to St. Cloud and, by golly, I'd say never mind the Russian threat to Europe, if only I can straighten out this terrible duck-hook that I've developed.”

If it happened just like that, I'm sure that no one felt more guilt about it than Ike. For he had, at all times, an overwhelming sense of mission—whether you agreed or not with the mission didn't matter. While he was in Paris, and while he was in the presidency, there were certain priorities in his mind that had the force of moral absolutes. One was the security of Western Europe, and we ought not to forget, in the ups and downs of European independence, that it was Ike's authority, and the certainty of the attitude he conveyed to the Russians, which kept Europe untouched in the dangerous days when the Soviet Union was sorely tempted to move into the southern periphery of Europe. It is a curious psychological fact, never satisfactorily explained, why the Russians seemed to respect the peaceful intentions of a professional soldier more than they did those of Ike's predecessor or his successors. Although American presidential election campaigns tend, by their ferocity and length, to cause the parties to overdramatize their differences and pretend they are offering the people drastically opposite policies, it may appear in time that American foreign policy, towards Europe anyway, was all of a piece from the day that President Truman warned the Russians about Greece to the day that President Johnson warned them again about Berlin. But the man who secured this policy and gave it stamina was Eisenhower. And for that, perhaps more than anything else, I believe, we are all in his debt.

Whether he was a great president, or even a very good one, is something that I don't think it possible to decide today. Arnold Toynbee, for example, has the rather alarming conviction that the man responsible for our present ills and the coming of Doomsday is Truman, and that John Foster Dulles's brinkmanship was only a way of saying what Truman had long ago been doing. Eisenhower, it seems to me, had two golden periods, of which the second was his first term as president. The first, of course, began with his appointment as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces.

Many harsh things have been said about him as a soldier and about the “luck” of his promotion, over many superiors, to the American command in Europe. Among European commentators, Eisenhower's total inexperience as a field commander is by now almost a byword. From this literal fact the false inference is readily drawn that he was essentially a desk man quite out of touch with the demands of modern war. Nothing could be farther from the truth or, incidentally, reflect so poorly on General Marshall's judgment. Marshall had watched Eisenhower's masterly conduct of the vast Louisiana maneuvers in September 1941, a field exercise in a “war of supply” that few old field commanders had ever experienced.

It is true that Ike's most recent professional experience, that of creating a defense for the Philippines, brought him into immediate close contact with Marshall in the days after Pearl Harbor when the Philippines were the most vulnerable of America's outposts in the Pacific. But a desk man would have been routinely consulted and dismissed. Marshall threw at Ike the whole strategical problem of the Pacific, and Ike's quick decision that Australia must become the essential base to build and hold for the protection of China, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies coincided with Marshall's private, and unexpressed, judgment. Moreover, Marshall had at his elbow innumerable Eisenhower reports on what the shape of a two-ocean war might be. For, during his years as confidential adviser to the Army Chief of Staff, Eisenhower had become absorbed by the probable scope and character of a future global war: by “such subjects as the mobilization and composition of armies, the role of air forces and navies in war, tending toward mechanization, and the acute dependence of all elements of military life upon the industrial capacity of the nation. This last was to me of special importance because of my intense belief that large-scale motorization and mechanization and the development of air forces in unprecedented strength would characterize successful military forces of the future."

The plodding quality of the prose—”such subjects as,” “all elements of military life,” “tending toward mechanization”—disguises the novelty of a strategical doctrine that was revolutionary, at the least highly questionable, to the high command of both the British and French in the mid-1930s. An obscure French major, one Charles de Gaulle, had written by then an obscure little book, which had a pitifully small sale. It was called
The War of Movement
. It predicted the end of the traditional war of deep fortifications and prepared defensive positions. The Maginot Line, he suggested, was already obsolete. The new war would be one of rapid movement by highly mechanized forces, hundreds of tanks and murderous accompanying aircraft. (The only famous commander who was known to have been impressed by de Gaulle's book, and by two earlier, equally fantastical, German monographs, was Adolf Hitler. He rendered the Maginot Line obsolete by going round it, and he proved how successfully he “tended toward mechanization” by inventing the Blitzkrieg and devastating Poland within a week.)

Once the revolutionary nature of Eisenhower's thesis is recognized, it is not hard to see why General Marshall, having succeeded in resisting Roosevelt's persistent pleas to take the Supreme Command in Europe, had no other candidate in mind than the man who had started his career in tank training, the obscure fifty-year-old (named in early press reports Lt. Col.
D
.
D. Ersenbeing) who had brilliantly conducted that mock “war of movement” with four hundred thousand men in Louisiana only two months before Pearl Harbor.

Eisenhower may not have been, like Montgomery or Rommel, a soldier's soldier (which, for good or ill, means a practiced old warrior). But he was, for the war years, the ideal choice also for a human task which the Allies of the First World War, bristling with a long tradition of military chauvinism, so stubbornly and grievously evaded: that of uniting by one likable and fair-minded personality the warring elements of many nations, many diverse temperaments, and some very rum characters. So that, apart from Eisenhower's early perception of the industrial shape of modern war, he had one touch of genius that could probably not have been found in any other known Allied military commander. Very soon after his arrival in England, and his early meetings with Prime Minister Churchill and the combined Allied command, he devised for himself a code, at once compassionate but strict, which forbade the use of pejorative slurs on any nationality of the alliance: “Any time I heard a man condemning somebody and saying he was a British so-and-so or an American so-and-so or whatever, I pointed out there was an order.” An American colonel apparently defended himself by saying that his opposite number had argued harshly: “I don't care how harshly you argued, you said he was a British so-and-so. Go home!” The man was sent back to America and his military career was as effectively tarnished as that of one of Ike's oldest friends, General George Patton, after he had slapped a wounded soldier in a hospital bed.
His
fate was worse than any journey home. He was relieved of his beloved command, and from then on did Eisenhower's bidding.

Eisenhower's touch of genius was nothing very dramatic or much admired by the military of any nation. It was to be a peacemaker among Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Poles and others crackling with national pride and driven by personal ambition. It may be that such immortality as, in the long run, Eisenhower achieves will be guaranteed by two qualities that do not usually, in a worldly world, secure a man much more than the affection of his friends. By the force of these qualities, Eisenhower was able to make trusting friends of about two hundred and fifty million people fighting for their lives. They are candor and decency.

O
ne evening toward the end of 1923, there appeared this item, in the daily column of a popular New York journalist who often wrote a parody of Pepys's diary: “And to H. Ross's, and we talked about the low state periodical comick literature is sunk into.”

It was true “enough. But nobody in America apparently was doing anything about it. There was the old
Life
, and there was
Judge
, two family magazines whose stock-in-trade was deaf old ladies, comic valentines, he-she jokes, and a dreadful series of contributed saloon gags called Krazy Kracks. Sophisticated New Yorkers might wince at this stuff, but the instinct to wince was merely satisfying proof of their own urbanity.

Yet there was one man who winced for a living. He was coeditor of
fudge
, and as he corrected its laughing copy every wince was a stab at his pride, his taste, and his patriotism. He would reach in his drawer and finger the pages of
Punch
and
Simplicissimus
and sigh over the superiority of Europe. He quit his job and turned to improve American humor with the almost suicidal frenzy of a Strindberg hero. He was impossibly cast for this part. He wanted to found a sophisticated, ironic metropolitan weekly. He was a gawky outlander, a runaway from a small town high in the Rockies, an itinerant newspaperman who had bummed his way to San Francisco, a doughboy who had gone AWOL to run an American army magazine from Paris, a cantankerous, poker-crazy, all-swearing, all-drinking westerner—Huck Finn in a slept-in business suit and cracked yellow shoes. He was, however, the H. Ross of “F. P.'s” little item. He looked for a wealthy backer and found one in the socialite heir to a yeast fortune.

In February 1925 he put out a thin, unlikely-looking firstborn. It combined
Punch's
Charivari with
Judge's
two-line jokes. It had some comic strips barely dignified as “panels.” There were a few local advertisements, some caricatures of actors, and art notes by “Froid.” Its only note of superiority was a derisive promise that it would not be edited for “the Old Lady in Dubuque.” Ross called it
The New Yorker
.