Eisenhower biography suggests that we should avoid war
I’ve been gradually listening to Eisenhower in War and Peace as an audio book. The author, Jean Edward Smith, is a professor of political science.
It turns out that the Eisenhower family confirms the thesis regarding a genetic basis for family success put forward in The Son Also Rises. The Eisenhower boys were descended from successful German immigrants on both maternal and paternal sides. Their father, however, was unsuccessful as a provider and as a father, providing virtually no emotional or financial assistance. Yet, according to the book, all of the Eisenhower brothers achieved significant career success. (The Son Also Rises suggests that an unsuccessful family will have the occasional outlier who is successful and that a successful family will have the occasional outlier, e.g., Eisenhower’s father, who is unsuccessful, but that a next generation is likely to achieve more in line with the family mean.)
Are you dismayed that our current crop of politicians is dishonest if not always outright corrupt? The author, who is sympathetic to both his subject and to FDR, characterizes Roosevelt as a habitual “dissembler” and Eisenhower as, while ostentatiously taking “buck stops here” responsibility for small mistakes, pinning the blame for his biggest mistakes on others by rewriting (military) history with some lies built in. Upset at the lack of decorum during campaigns? Eisenhower’s opponents spread rumors that he was Jewish and chanted “Ike the Kike”. Adlai Stevenson, Ike’s opponent, had been sued by his wife in 1949, thus making him the first divorced presidential candidate. This opened the door to opponents insinuating that Stevenson was homosexual. (The ex-wife went on to sue her mother in 1958 in order to obtain possession of a lakefront mansion.) Harry S. Truman and Robert A. Taft are the only politicians who are portrayed as having complete integrity. One anti-partisan act by Truman described in this book is the destruction of a letter from George C. Marshall to Eisenhower that revealed the affair with Kay Summersby (see below).
The book describes nearly all of the senior American military officers stationed in Europe as having had local sweethearts and little attempt was made to disguise these sexual relationships. Eisenhower’s was Kay Summersby, a source of some gossip back in D.C. Divorce was a career-ender, however, so these women were generally abandoned when it was time to return home to the U.S. and the wife. This was prior to the era of statutory cash profits for out-of-wedlock children (quite limited even today in most of Europe) and the women behaved in apparent accordance with the economic incentives of the day, not producing any children despite the comparatively primitive nature of contraception at the time.
When these American officers were not having sex with their mistresses (sometimes in luxurious Mediterranean villas on 5-day vacations from the war) they turned their attention to matters military. The standard story here seems to be that we were incompetent in the early parts of the war, e.g., getting beaten by heavily outnumbered German forces in North Africa (and even French forces, who refrained from fighting the Germans, nearly beat us), but that we learned to fight. This book says that our senior generals, including Eisenhower, never learned anything about fighting other than “Let British officers plan the actual fighting.” According to the book, with the exception of those made by George Patton, in-the-field decisions by American generals were almost always disastrous. This was true during the Normandy invasion, for example, when the American-led assault on Omaha beach was nearly thrown back while the Canadian- and British-led attacks on other beaches went more smoothly. Patton summarized his friend Eisenhower’s qualities with “I hope he makes a better president than he was a general.”
According to this biographer, Eisenhower is responsible for the division of Germany. Under British command the ground war was basically won in the fall of 1944. The Germans expected that any day the Allies would concentrate their forces, punch through the German lines, and drive to Berlin. This didn’t happen because Eisenhower wanted to assume battlefield glory for himself. He took over command and applied the American doctrine of “attack on a wide front,” which was regarded as inappropriate in modern warfare by British, French, and German generals. Smith says that this extended the war by at least six months and cost the Allies 500,000 men killed, wounded, or missing. It also gave the Russians time to conquer eastern Germany and Berlin. It gave the Germans time to kill 100,000+ Jews in various death camps (see deaths-by-year chart in Wikipedia).
If this author is correct, the American military is essentially unable to learn from its mistakes and, even with a 10:1 advantage in soldiers and equipment, is at risk of losing any fight.
[Note that Jean Edward Smith describes Eisenhower as being exceptionally competent at high-level coordination and some big picture stuff. As a military officer he opposed the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan, which he considered to have been very nearly defeated via conventional means. As President he twice rejected advice from subordinates to use nuclear weapons (against China and Vietnam). Eisenhower correctly predicted that the U.S. could not maintain a monopoly on nuclear weapons technology and favored giving all nations equal access to such technology. (i.e., he failed to foresee that states such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, would lose central government control and thus that their military weapons would fall into the hands of non-state groups). As president of Columbia University, a position in which he exerted little effort, he was an advocate for open debate (proponents of speech limits then were trying to exclude Communist points of view). One big area where the jury may never come back is whether Eisenhower was correct to favor maintaining a U.S. military presence all around the world and fighting the anti-Communist fight. His principal Republican opponent, Robert A. Taft, advocated a military and foreign policy more like China’s today: trade with everyone, restrict military activities to one’s immediate neighborhood. Presumably there have been some benefits to us from the World Police role, but can they offset the costs of the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars?]
Readers: Has our military gotten a lot better at fighting and at learning since World War II? Or does our track record since then show that we still aren’t the military geniuses we imagine ourselves to be? (Or we do correctly perceive our incompetence and inefficiency and therefore spend way more than anyone else in order to avoid having Mexico and Canada take us over?)
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