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| Ike: An American Hero By Michael Korda HarperCollins 779 pp., $34.95 |
What's not to like about Ike?
'Ike: An American Hero' illuminates the quiet virtues of Dwight D. Eisenhower
By Chuck Leddyfrom the August 21, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
In today's landscape of ideology-driven, scorched-earth political partisanship, Dwight D. Eisenhower looks like some extinct dinosaur from eons ago. Americans, to echo the famous campaign slogan, genuinely liked Ike. Europeans liked Ike. Michael Korda likes Ike, too, and after reading Ike: An American Hero, his mammoth biography, it's easy to see why: "Ike was an American from Abilene, but he was also a good European, perhaps even a great one; and his view of life was rooted in common sense, decency, and tolerance, not in ideology."
Whether as president during the 1950s or as Supreme Commander of Allied forces during World War II, Eisenhower developed productive working relationships with some of the most difficult personalities imaginable, including US Gen. George Patton, France's Charles DeGaulle, Winston Churchill, and British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery. Korda sums up Eisenhower's unique genius for working well with others: "Even his critics praised his fairness, his energy, his patience, his common sense ... and above all his matchless ability to deal with even the most difficult of prima donnas."
Korda spends most of this biography on Eisenhower's military career, describing how Eisenhower rose through the ranks and somehow kept the fragile military alliance between the US and Britain together during World War II. The two allies disagreed on important strategic matters, such as when the D-Day invasion should begin, but Eisenhower never let personalities undermine the alliance.
Patton and Montgomery, for example, often held each other in contempt (Patton once referred to Monty as "a tired little fart"), but Eisenhower needed both these brilliant military leaders working together, especially after D-Day. Although he has sometimes been denigrated as a "politician-general" rather than a "fighting-general," Korda continually illustrates the paramount value of Eisenhower's consensus-building skills.
"Monty was a loner, arrogant, vain, unforgiving, professionally brilliant, and utterly convinced that he was always right," writes Korda. Patton was pretty much the same, but also had a penchant for making stupid, bloviating comments to the press, much to Eisenhower's frustration. Monty may have been speaking for many when he dismissed Ike as a "[n]ice chap, no soldier," but Eisenhower always kept his patience. Korda makes it clear that Ike had wanted to command soldiers in battle from the beginning of his military career, but his superiors found his political and administrative skills so unique that he was repeatedly denied that opportunity.
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