By Neil Earle
My wife, Susan, and I joined about 500 guests at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, CA on Veteran’s Day for the launching of a new book by David and Julie Eisenhower. The book titled Going Home to Glory is about the last years of General and President Dwight David Eisenhower. General “Ike” Eisenhower commanded the crucial Normandy invasion of 1944 and later served two terms as U.S. President (1953-1961).
There were plenty of Republicans out in force that day (including emcee Ben Stein) but Julie Nixon Eisenhower, daughter of President Richard M Nixon (1969-1974), had earlier admitted on a TV interview that she had voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Husband David, Ike’s grandson, himself stated “I am more of a moderate than a conservative.”
These empathetic attitudes from the two authors helped create a warm and attentive atmosphere. The two met at the inauguration of President Eisenhower in January, 1957. There is a famous picture of David staring at Julie on the reviewing stand. Julie was sporting a black eye at the time incurred from a sledding accident a week before. Later, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower actively pushed David to look up Julie as she attended Smith College. One evening David did and ran out of cab fare so that she had to pay for the ice cream on their first date. It must have clicked because they’ve been married for 41 years.
They both saw ex-President Eisenhower up close during the 1960s after he left the White House. The book details Ike’s last decade living on his farm in Gettysburg, PA before his death in 1969. David is not only famous for being the person after whom “Camp David,” the Presidential retreat in Maryland, is named but he also claims to have “painted the fences at Gettysburg five times.”
Both the presenters were in fine relaxed form. Julie emerged as quite the speaker, concise, empathetic and fluent. Her four lessons learned from Ike’s life may even justify this pastor’s excursion into the hemlines of history. Here they are:
First, stand firm for values. Julie’s remarks got me to reminisce how Ike was brought up on a small farm in northern Texas and his brother Milton later became President of Johns Hopkins University, bespeaking a life that knew something about hard work, dependability, reasonable ambition and commitment to principle. Though Julie didn’t mention it, Ike’s mother was a pacifist from a small German sect called the River Brethren. That may have explained Ike’s reputation as a “peace general” across his life. He openly wondered in 1945 if it was necessary to bomb Hiroshima for example and he used all his considerable diplomatic skills to help end the war in Korea soon after he took office (1953) as he had promised. “Principles are the building blocks of solid character” Ike would often say. Even though Ike had a temper, he was known in the 1950s as a moderate President, indeed, so much behind the scenes that people thought for years he was playing golf rather than running the country. Later research has changed that picture. Ike emerges now as the “hidden hand” President, steadfastly refusing under heavy pressure to use nuclear weapons during at least two occasions in his Presidency.
Second, grin and fight. Ike was an all-American football player at West Point and played professional baseball for a year with Kansas City in 1909-1910, as David reminded us. He was no wimp. Once when he was knocked down three times by a fighter his assailant told him, “When you’re hit come back up grinning, that can disarm anyone.” The Eisenhower grin of course became world famous during World War Two when the average solider, British, American or Canadian felt a rapport with their commander in chief – a valuable trait in leading a force of 5 million men.
Third, forgiveness. This, Ike knew, was one of the most powerful forces in life. David recalled when he was fired once for goofing off on the farm. It took Ike three holes of golf to finally tell David he’d been rehired. But he got there. As Julie mentioned this I thought of one of the most famous examples of Ike’s forgiveness and how it paid off greatly. This was when he stood by General George Patton when everyone wanted his hide for slapping a solider in Sicily. That loyalty stood the Allies in good stead later in the war. I couldn’t help think how this quality of big-mindedness, of being able to see both sides of an issue, is perhaps the one major flaw we see in our political life today.
Fourth, face life with courage. Julie was like most people around Eisenhower, he could sometimes seem formidable and somewhat unapproachable. Yet in his last days at Walter Reed Hospital he surprised visitors by pulling away his hospital shift showing a “Nixon” sticker attached to his heart monitor. (Nixon was elected in November, 1968). Ike, as David related, took a major step toward civil rights enforcement when he sent federal troops into Little Rock in 1957 to escort several black students to Little Rock High School that year. Such a gesture from Washington had not been seen since the Grant Administration. His overtures to the Soviet Union, from “Atoms for Peace” in 1953 to hosting Chairman Khrushchev on a U.S. tour in 1959 and his warnings against the “military-industrial complex” took a lot of courage from a President elected by strong and even right-wing political and business interests. The General did not fit easily into a box.
Ike Eisenhower had a sense of God’s presence. Time magazine of June 16, 1952 recalls him speaking in his home town of Abilene, Kansas, near the eight anniversary of the momentous D-Day invasion June 6, 1944. With an intent look on his face, Presidential candidate Eisenhower frankly admitted: “This day eight years ago, I made the most agonizing decision of my life…If there was nothing else in my life to prove the existence of an almighty and merciful God, the events of the next twenty-four hours did it. The greatest break in a terrible outlay of weather occurred the next day and allowed that great invasion to proceed, with losses far below we had anticipated.”
Julie recalled Ike’s interview with Walter Cronkite in August 1963 when CBS had him on the very Normandy beaches that were so decisive to ending World War Two. Ike felt nervous about speaking to the widows and mothers of the fallen soldiers on the next day. “These young men gave us a chance,” he told TV producer Fred Friendly, obviously deeply moved. “They brought time for us…a chance for eternal peace.”
Ike’s own sense of history was profound. One day on September 26, 1962 he told David, a historian in his own right: “Forty-four years before was the Meuse-Argonne offensive.” This was a decisive engagement of US soldiers in World War One and Ike had it notched in his brain. Yet few top generals have ever been less war-like.
Ike Eisenhower was easy to like. The people at the Nixon Library on November 11, 2010 obviously thought so. It will be a day to remember.