How Ike Led: the Principles Behind Eisenhower’S Toughest Decisions

How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower’s Toughest Decisions by Susan Eisenhower Thomas Dunne Books, 2020 400 pp $29.99 ISBN: 978-1250238771 Reviewed by Walter M. Hudson art memoir, part historical recounting, part leadership lesson, Susan Eisenhower’s How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower’s president. In fact, this book is a good place to start as PToughest Decisions is not only the sum, but the prod- a complement to the work of so-called Eisenhower uct of its parts, in keeping with her grandfather’s revisionism, that reappraisal of Ike that began in the own “Great Equation.” Each part magnifies and late 70s and that has culminated in Ike being seen as amplifies the other: exploring Eisenhower in such one of the greatest of presidents and most recently, a personal way helps us understand his historical with a national monument in Washington. period; delving into the historical context informs Famously, Fred Greenstein, one of the key us about the man; providing the strategic insights revisionists, posited the “hidden hand” theory of the illuminates both Ike and his times. This is a rich, Eisenhower presidency. According to Greenstein, multiform yet still cohesive book. contrary to common perceptions that a presi- We see a variety of angles of the private dent must be seen as “tough, skilled politician,” Eisenhower—as portrait painter (better at portraits Eisenhower instead, “went to great lengths to con- than landscapes, and fittingly so), as bridge player ceal the political side of his leadership.” He did it so (a good one, so good and intense during a game that well that in fact, his reputation suffered as a result nobody but his longtime partner General Alfred for at least a decade and a half: “[M]ost writers on Gruenther would play with him), as golfer (his blood the presidency viewed him through the lens of his pressure would rise so alarmingly when his good 1950s liberal critics as an aging hero who reigned friend Arnold Palmer would play that his doctors more than he ruled and [who] lacked the energy, almost banned him from watching) and more motivation, and political know-how to have a signif- importantly, as grandfather and father, husband, icant impact on events.” brother, son, and friend. Susan Eisenhower provides a more personal All these are brought bear on Eisenhower and more revealing theory than Greenstein’s. the leader, both wartime general and Cold War Eisenhower, after all, was not an inaccessible Walter M. Hudson is an Associate Professor at the Eisenhower School of National Defense University, and a Global Fellow at the Wilson International Center for Scholars. The opinions expressed in this review are his alone and not those of the Department of Defense or National Defense University. 140 | BOOK REVIEWS PRISM 9, NO. 2 mystery to those who loved and knew him. To his force experts who had plotted its courses of action. granddaughter, his actions as a leader were less As George Kennan, one of the task force members, the product of orchestrated calculation and more pointed out, Ike showed his “intellectual ascendancy those of a lifetime of hard fought experience, some over every man in the room.” of which she herself observed up close. And what As for his military career, his granddaughter she saw was a successful struggle for self-mastery. points out that Ike didn’t grow up with dreams of Ike had a terrible temper even as a child. He sought marital glory. He didn’t come from a military family, to master it, and for the most part, he did. He was but from one with pacifist roots. He went to West raised to take responsibility for one’s own actions. At Point, as Susan Eisenhower notes, to get a free edu- critical moments in his life, he took it. cation. But having gone in the Army, he certainly did And Ike learned that always seeming to act, not lack ambition. He found his footing, being men- always seeming to persuade, was itself a deeply tored by Pershing, Fox Conner, and MacArthur, and flawed model, not only of leadership, but of basic gaining leadership lessons along the way. human behavior. Of course an entire presidential As for politics, Eisenhower was part of a genera- theory of leadership spawned at Harvard argued tion of military officers who did not vote at all. And the opposite. presidential power, argued Richard likely this apoliticism had beneficent effect. Political Neustadt in his now-classic study, was very much positions did not define his inner life in the slight- determined by the president’s power of persuasion. est, and perhaps as a result he could distinguish But this really wasn’t Ike’s way. Once, as Susan the theater of politics from the workshop of policy. Eisenhower recounts, when Ike was being harshly The former is filled with posturing and zero-sum criticized for “moving too slowly,” he was visited by outcomes—you either win or you don’t; the latter the great American poet Robert Frost. Perhaps to is where analysis and compromise take place---and bolster him, on the flyleaf of a book that he left for perhaps the place where outcomes with multiple the president, Frost aptly inscribed the concluding winners are attainable. line of one of his declarative verses: “The strong are Ike ultimately practiced leadership at the saying nothing until they see.” highest levels. As Susan Eisenhower puts it, her Susan Eisenhower carefully weaves together grandfather was a “strategic rather than operational incidents of child- and adulthood. His boyhood [leader]. ... [H]is role was to receive all the inputs- was something out of Huck Finn, in the creeks and -across the entire enterprise: both internal and fields around Abilene, Kansas. But he was always external, political and practical, fundamental and seen as bright, even as intellectual—as a boy his class future oriented.” This distinction between strategic yearbook “predicted he would one day become a and operational is critical and profound. Strategy renowned history teacher at Yale.” Long downplayed is something that transcends long range planning or outright dismissed by the intelligentsia of his and immediate action. It is orchestrating and syn- time, Eisenhower’s mental powers were formidable. thesizing. At the highest levels, the strategic leader As anyone who has read his writings knows, he was takes plans (inputs) and oversees actions (outputs), a powerful, lucid writer. He possessed high order but more importantly, that leader consolidates and conceptual intelligence. Susan Eisenhower illus- harmonizes, sometimes so subtly that one does not trates this well in her recounting of his masterful notice it, the welter of opinions and positions. synthesizing, for forty five minutes straight, without According to Susan Eisenhower, Ike was trou- a single note, of 1953’s Project Solarium to the task bled when JFK dismantled his more formalized PRISM 9, NO. 2 BOOK REVIEWS 141 senior leadership system. JFK, largely influenced final address he pointed out not only the dangers of by Harvard academics, thought that the President the military industrial complex, but the “need for needed quicker access, more ability to cut through balance,” consistent with his calls throughout his bureaucracy, something that might be even consid- presidency for both security and solvency. ered a forerunner to contemporary organizational And how has history viewed the balance sheet? thinking about “flattened” organizations. As she John Lewis Gaddis, in Strategies of Containment puts it, what Ike feared was that JFK would be “so remarks that, contrary to Eisenhower revisionists, overwhelmed by diverse and second-order inputs Ike was not a genius: “Still his strategy was coher- that he would resort to governing like an operational ent, bearing signs of his influence at every level, leader rather than a strategic one.” Eisenhower’s careful, for the most part, in its relations of ends more hierarchical system, on the other hand had its to means, and, on the whole, more consistent than own qualities not only in what it permitted, but in detrimental to the national interest.” While Gaddis what it disallowed. notes this claim is “modest,” it was certainly prefer- This point is critical: much of Eisenhower’s able the more reckless strategies that immediately leadership is characterized by what might be called preceded and followed—the excessive spending of negative evidence—by what Ike did not do. He didn’t NSC-68 under Truman or the “flexible response” immerse America in Indochina in 1954 during or under JFK and LBJ, that sought monsters to destroy after Dien Bien Phu, he didn’t push for a massive and instead lead to disaster in Southeast Asia. That military budget when in 1957 Sputnik sent the coun- “modest claim” would likely be for Eisenhower a try into panic, he didn’t dismantle the New Deal or fitting encomium. After all, a “middle way” eschews call for tax cuts before he felt the country was ready epoch-ringing boasts. for them. Such negations are the seeming antitheses Was there, in the end, a kind of Eisenhowerian of get-things-done type leaders, who want to be seen genius? Yes, according to his granddaughter. Ike’s as doing something, anything, to prove they are the genius lay, perhaps not in the art of strategy, but in masters of the moment. the art of leadership itself. His special genius was not Instead, Ike’s grand strategies were rooted in military wizardry, rhetorical skill or even politi- ordinary, common-sense behaviors. Don’t disman- cal acumen, but something deeper, more personal. tle the social safety net that FDR and Truman had According to Susan Eisenhower, Ike had a capacity established on the one hand.

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