Word: ike
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...strategist of sorts. He loved to ride the bridge of a warship, wearing his black cape. But warfare was simpler then, and Roosevelt's long reign as an active Commander in Chief did educate him. Harry Truman had good instincts about war, and even better men around him. Ike, of course, knew roughly what he was doing...
...students of American history" to rate the Presidents up to 1961. Eisenhower, the 34th and last in line, came in 22nd, just before Andrew Johnson. (Grant and Harding were at the bottom.) Nine teen years and six Chief Executives later, a school of revisionist historians is working to raise Ike's stature. With good reason...
...example, when the French were fighting in Viet Nam, he foresaw nothing but swamps. "I'm convinced that no military victory is possible in that kind of theater," he noted. In 1955 members of his Cabinet predicted imminent war with Red China in the Formosa Strait. Ike knew better: "I have so often been through these periods of strain that I have become accustomed to the fact that most of the calamities that we anticipate really never occur...
This ironic detachment was precisely what appealed to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, who in 1942 jumped Ike over 366 more senior officers to make him Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe. He was the ideal choice to lead contentious allies: few others could have withstood the oversized egos of a Churchill, a De Gaulle or a Patton. Ike merely smiled and confided his frustrations to paper. His strongest language was reserved for the head of the U.S. Navy, Admiral Ernest King. "One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King...
...months before the Normandy invasion, Patton remarked that "Ike wants to be President so badly you can taste it." If so, he did not tell his diary, in which he expressed the same indifference to political office that he professed in public. The only thing that could sway him, he said, was a call to duty. Yet Patton appears to have been right: he either knew Ike better than Ike knew himself, or Eisenhower, always careful, was not confiding his true emotions to pages that in some cases were dictated to his secretary. In either case, the seeming lack...