The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


#641： How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike's Granddaughter


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Summary

Susan Eisenhower is a writer, consultant, and policy strategist, and the author of the new book, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower s Biggest Decisions. In this episode, Susan talks about her relationship with her grandfather, Dwight Eisenhower, and why she decided to write a book about his leadership style.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The Art of Manliness Podcast
00:00:30.000 Her name is Susan Eisenhower. She's a writer, consultant, and policy strategist, one of Dwight's four grandchildren, and the author of the new book, How Ike Led, The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions.
00:00:42.880 Susan and I begin our conversation with her relationship with Ike as both historic leader and ordinary grandfather, and why she decided to write a book about his leadership style.
00:00:50.040 We then delve into the principles of his leadership, beginning with his decision to greenlight the D-Day invasion, what it reveals about his ironclad commitment to taking responsibility, and how that commitment allowed him to be such an effective delegator.
00:01:00.660 From there, Susan explains how a love of studying history born in Ike's boyhood allowed him to take a big-picture approach to strategy, how he used a desk drawer to deal with his lifelong struggle with anger, and how his belief in morale as input rather than output inspired him to always stay optimistic for the benefit of those he led.
00:01:15.460 We then turn to how Eisenhower dealt with the discovery of concentration camps at the end of World War II, and making peace with Germany after it.
00:01:21.580 We then talk about his nonpartisan governing style as president, which he called the middle way, and which involved emphasizing cooperation, compromise, and unity, including members of both political parties in his cabinet, limiting his use of the bully pulpit to sway public opinion, and striving not to turn policy issues into personality confrontations.
00:01:37.340 We then discuss how this style influenced how he dealt with Joseph McCarthy, and enforced the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
00:01:42.960 At the end of our conversation, Susan explains that while she doesn't expect everyone to agree with the difficult decisions her grandfather made, she thinks there's something to be learned from how he managed to make them, and to make them without becoming hard and cynical in the process.
00:01:54.040 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash howikeled.
00:02:01.060 All right, Susan Eisenhower, welcome to the show.
00:02:07.800 Well, thank you. It's just great to be with you.
00:02:09.740 So you've got a new book out, How Ike Led, The Principle Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions, and you also happen to be one of Dwight Eisenhower's granddaughters.
00:02:20.040 I'm curious, let's start off with this kind of the context.
00:02:21.760 What was it like being Eisenhower's granddaughter?
00:02:24.560 Like, how old were you when he was general and then president of the United States?
00:02:28.580 Well, he was actually inaugurated in 1953, and so I was a toddler at the time.
00:02:35.580 I was born on the last day of 1951, so I wasn't aware of too much for a while, and my father was in the Army as well.
00:02:45.700 And he, of course, went to every Army post he could go to probably in many of those years.
00:02:53.400 But back in around 1957, we moved back to Washington, D.C. for some of my father's assignments,
00:02:59.780 and that's when I really got to know my grandparents really well.
00:03:04.400 And were there moments when you were, like, was he just grandpa for you, or did you have moments even as a kid where you realized that, you know, Eisenhower was more than just grandpa?
00:03:12.960 Well, it was a little hard to avoid the fact that he was more than grandpa because my siblings and I had Secret Service protection, so that didn't seem very normal.
00:03:25.980 And to have big guys with big guns following you under the playground isn't exactly normal.
00:03:31.500 But I must say, in retrospect, I look back and I think it was really remarkable how normal a family life we had.
00:03:40.300 And I think that's because there are two simple reasons for it.
00:03:44.860 My father made sure that we didn't, quote, unquote, start wearing the boss's stars, end quote.
00:03:52.660 In other words, we were to understand that our grandfather was different and that this conferred nothing on us except a responsibility to be good kids.
00:04:04.740 And then I think the other thing was we were taught to compartmentalize.
00:04:08.620 So I have very strong feelings about him as a grandfather, but I spent my professional career as a policy analyst, and his legacy is everywhere.
00:04:18.780 So I had to learn to be able to think of him separately from being a grandfather.
00:04:25.360 This book is the first time I've put it together in a way, and that was a pretty wild experience.
00:04:31.860 Well, what did you think?
00:04:33.100 Why write this book now?
00:04:34.740 What was it that got you thinking, I need to write?
00:04:37.080 Because you've written a biography of your grandmother, Eisenhower's wife.
00:04:40.660 What made you decide to go in and write a biography of Eisenhower, particularly how he's led?
00:04:46.660 Well, first of all, we had the anniversary of the end of World War II in this year.
00:04:54.180 And then in September, the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. is going to be unveiled, dedicated.
00:05:03.100 And then I also thought that, you know, we're in a very highly contentious political time.
00:05:08.740 And I thought it was important for rising generations and for people who don't know Dwight Eisenhower very well to learn something about him in an easy way.
00:05:19.840 But I don't think you have to know a huge amount about the period to be able to understand that there were indeed principles behind the way Eisenhower looked at different situations.
00:05:30.300 And I thought that might be useful right now in this particular environment, political environment.
00:05:36.520 So the way you organize this book, it's a biography, but it's a biography of Eisenhower's leadership style and how he developed it and how it manifested itself in different parts of his career.
00:05:45.940 And you start off the book with this famous note that Eisenhower, as Supreme Allied Commander, wrote in World War II on the eve of D-Day.
00:05:54.440 And it was to only be released if his decision to green light the invasion failed.
00:05:59.640 And it said in part, if any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.
00:06:06.720 Why did you start the book off with this note?
00:06:08.620 And what do you think it tells us about Eisenhower's leadership style?
00:06:12.560 Well, I think the note is an important note.
00:06:14.600 First of all, it wasn't known for a very long time.
00:06:17.180 It came out probably after Ike's death.
00:06:20.200 It's not that it wasn't known.
00:06:21.800 It was already published in Harry Butcher's book called My Three Years with Eisenhower.
00:06:27.360 But somebody found it when reading that book probably 20 years ago and started talking about it a lot.
00:06:34.560 And I think it's because it strikes a chord with us today.
00:06:37.500 We have so many leaders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue who stand up and blame somebody else for mistakes that have occurred.
00:06:46.720 But this was not Eisenhower's way.
00:06:49.040 And I dare say that, you know, the military is well-schooled to understand that they have to take responsibility.
00:06:55.840 There's something at West Point called the no excuses.
00:06:58.740 He took responsibility even for the weather forecast in that it was his decision to go at that time.
00:07:05.460 In any case, you see that same willingness to take responsibility throughout his presidency, famously after the U-2, this is an aerial reconnaissance airplane, was shot down over the Soviet Union in May of 1960.
00:07:20.900 He took full responsibility for the fact that he'd ordered that overflight.
00:07:26.160 And many of his advisors were asking him to continue to say that, you know, come up with something that would be what we call today plausible deniability.
00:07:38.420 But Eisenhower wanted to make sure the Soviet Union knew that he was in charge and that there was no ambiguity about who made orders there within the administration.
00:07:46.920 And then finally, the Suez crisis, which actually was in 1956, that whole crisis emerged just as voters were going to the polling booth.
00:07:57.060 And he said to my father that if the, you know, if the Suez crisis goes south, he guesses he'll lose the election.
00:08:05.120 But there we are.
00:08:06.380 So there was a kind of fatalism marked with a strong belief that there were no excuses.
00:08:11.840 So let me just, Brett, let me just leave you with something that I find rather wonderful.
00:08:16.440 He once said, leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.
00:08:26.520 That's hard to do.
00:08:27.800 A lot of, I mean, but how did he deal with like the burdens of that?
00:08:32.860 Like how did he, I mean, people don't like doing it because it feels terrible to take responsibility for failure, particularly failures where like you weren't directly involved.
00:08:41.900 Like, you know, he was a big delegator.
00:08:43.640 So he was, he, he, he, he only focused on high level strategy and he would delegate the sort of the tactical things to the people who are working with them beneath them.
00:08:53.900 So how, I mean, how did he, how did he deal with taking responsibility for stuff that he might not have had any direct influence on?
00:09:01.800 Well, you can't, you can't mobilize those you delegate to if they don't feel like the leader has their back.
00:09:10.500 And that's what I think that, that sentence about leadership is that if you don't give them the credit and take the responsibility, then, then you don't have a system that will accommodate delegation.
00:09:25.340 Now, the reason delegation is important is somebody's got to be the strategic leader.
00:09:30.620 And part of the reason my book is so oriented towards strategic leadership is we simply don't have it anymore.
00:09:36.860 We're like political day traders and we can't figure out what we're really trying to accomplish, what our timeline is and what, and how we're going to get from where we are today to address those longer term goals.
00:09:52.140 So I think that's just inevitable if you're going to delegate is you have to, you have to give people the knowledge that they will be able to do their jobs.
00:10:03.700 And yeah, that idea that, you know, people who, that Eisenhower led that they felt that they had, that he had their back.
00:10:10.640 I mean, you talk about these, in these instances where soldiers would say basically like I would do anything for you.
00:10:15.700 Like there's a time when later in his life, when he was having problems with his heart, you had, there was people writing letters saying, I'll, I'll give you my, my still alive heart as a heart transplant so you can live.
00:10:27.520 Isn't that amazing?
00:10:28.800 I mean, I remember when it happened, I was, uh, I would say I was tangentially part of that conversation.
00:10:34.440 The doctor came out and said that they had received all these, you know, all of these offers.
00:10:38.980 And, you know, I compared this against my brother's memory and, and yes, that is indeed absolutely correct.
00:10:45.660 And, you know, it's, it's, it's very moving, but you know, they, the bond that I had with his soldiers was one of trust.
00:10:52.980 And if he wasn't willing to take the responsibility, even for their failure, then how could they trust him?
00:10:58.620 And what, you mentioned that Eisenhower, he thought strategically, he was thinking big picture.
00:11:04.480 He was playing the, the 10,000 foot, you know, level game while everyone else was playing, you know, there's thinking about the next quarter, the next year.
00:11:12.460 Where do you, where did he develop that, that mindset?
00:11:16.000 Do you think?
00:11:17.540 Well, it's interesting.
00:11:18.940 He displayed his interest in bigger picture studies when he was a kid.
00:11:24.800 He grew up on a farm in Abilene, Kansas, and, you know, his parents were surviving just financially.
00:11:33.420 He always said that we were poor, but didn't know it.
00:11:36.300 In any case, he, he would do, I wouldn't call it daydreaming, but he was obsessed about history.
00:11:42.020 And the family was very well educated.
00:11:44.320 As a matter of fact, Ike's mother, my great grandmother actually went to college and they could read ancient Greek and Latin,
00:11:53.100 which is pretty amazing for those days, his farm family.
00:11:56.060 But Ike was always reading history books and he was fascinated by what these great historical figures were trying to accomplish.
00:12:05.440 And why did they make the decisions they did?
00:12:08.220 And in, in making those decisions, how much information did they have when they made those decisions?
00:12:13.020 And I, I think it's, it's fascinating that an interest in that, uh, would extend all the way, you know, as a lifetime, as a lifetime undertaking.
00:12:23.480 Yeah.
00:12:23.940 That's something that people don't know about Eisenhower is that how educated he was and how, you know, deeply and well-read he was.
00:12:31.140 And there was moments where he talked about where he would say, like when he was a president of Columbia, he just surprised people with just lectures about, you know, military history, going all the way back to Alexander the Great.
00:12:42.420 And professors were just baffled because they just thought of Eisenhower was just this army guy who, you know, smiled and waved and that was it.
00:12:49.380 Well, you know, what's interesting about this, and this is the reason I felt it was pretty important to include the leadership traits he developed during the war and to take that into the presidency, because the biographers tend to fall into two categories, the presidential biographers of Eisenhower and the wartime biographers of Eisenhower.
00:13:10.600 And then there are some books that try to put it all together.
00:13:13.920 But again, if it's done chronologically, they end up being very, very big books.
00:13:17.740 But I do think that, you know, there is a consistency about the way he thinks and about the way he approaches issues.
00:13:26.200 So I think the Eisenhower who is general and the Eisenhower who is president are one in the same person, which is why as a kid, I could never understand why people said he was a do-nothing president.
00:13:39.480 And he didn't know, you know, that he, you know, was not on top of things when this was the guy who, you know, ended Nazism for the Western Alliance.
00:13:49.960 I just could never figure that out, even as a kid.
00:13:53.320 Right.
00:13:53.740 Well, yeah, so going back to sort of the popular image we have of Eisenhower, sort of this, you know, especially as president, you know, this sunny, friendly, grandfatherly character who played golf.
00:14:03.060 And we'll talk about what he was actually doing as president when people, that's all he was doing.
00:14:08.900 But you mentioned that, you know, you talk about throughout the book, he grappled with inner struggles, particularly anger.
00:14:15.360 Ever since he was a boy, what was his anger like?
00:14:18.200 Was it like, like, instead of a short temper, did he just dwell on things, get resentful?
00:14:24.720 What was that like?
00:14:25.600 Well, it's interesting as a kid, he, he really did have a temper and he admitted that he would have occasional meltdowns and then be disciplined by his father and counseled by his mother.
00:14:37.240 I think part of it was, if you ever read the full set of his diaries and also his letters to Mamie Eisenhower, you know, his wife, my grandmother, you will see there a very, very passionate nature.
00:14:49.820 And as a kid, he felt the sense of injustice very strongly, but he had a very passionate nature.
00:14:57.100 And so he had to learn how to control what I'd call his inner landscape, his inner resources.
00:15:04.340 And he had, his mother really made the case after one particularly frightening experience where he had, as we call it a meltdown because his two older brothers were allowed to go out and trick or treat and he wasn't.
00:15:16.940 And, and, and she really talked to him very quietly about what this was doing to him and it wasn't hurting anybody else.
00:15:23.760 It was hurting him.
00:15:25.040 And he always remembered that.
00:15:27.580 And so he started developing tricks and some of the tricks were actually rather sophisticated and I like them.
00:15:34.380 I use them myself sometimes.
00:15:36.380 He would, for instance, keep a diary that now that's very important.
00:15:40.340 He was a diarist his whole life.
00:15:41.880 So he blew off steam on the written page.
00:15:44.420 In addition to being a diarist, he would write whatever it was that was bothering him on a piece of paper.
00:15:51.420 Then he'd crumple up the piece of paper and he'd throw it away.
00:15:54.940 So this was actually a rather artful way of getting the anger inside out and on a piece of paper.
00:16:02.100 Then it suddenly becomes depersonalized.
00:16:05.340 And I, I think it's a very smart idea.
00:16:08.620 I, I do have to laugh about it though, because he did this during the white house years.
00:16:13.040 And then he'd throw these crumpled up pieces of paper into a lower drawer in his desk.
00:16:18.300 And it was a responsibility of his secretary to go in and clean out the crumpled up pieces of paper.
00:16:23.840 I swear she had to have a security clearance in order to be able to do that.
00:16:28.020 Cause she more than anybody knew who he was upset with that day.
00:16:30.980 And then the other idea he had is that he would, um, put the problem on a chair and get up and walk around it.
00:16:38.900 But as you can see, there is a theme here, which is getting this anger out of you, out of you inside and depersonalizing it.
00:16:49.680 So I think a lot of people, you know, would benefit from knowing that there was a very powerful person who found these tools useful.
00:16:59.860 Besides anger, did he ever get discouraged or get depressed?
00:17:03.760 I mean, there's a lot of things during his career he could get discouraged or depressed about during the war and later on in his presidency.
00:17:09.800 Well, I don't think he'd be a human being if he hadn't been depressed and concerned at times.
00:17:14.180 But he thought that morale was an input, not an output.
00:17:18.100 In other words, people have to feel good about things and have a sense of morale in going into any challenge and not just the result of being victorious.
00:17:27.860 And I think this is really true.
00:17:30.000 Pessimism at the top is very infectious.
00:17:33.420 So who wants to go into battle with somebody who doesn't have confidence in the mission?
00:17:38.900 So he made it, as he said in his diaries, a lifelong commitment to try and stay optimistic in front of everybody else all the time.
00:17:51.100 So during this dire moment, during the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, when the Germans have finally managed to launch what looked like it was a successful offensive,
00:18:01.140 Eisenhower comes into the room and says to his commanders, there will be no long faces in this room.
00:18:05.900 He says, do you realize what the Germans have just done?
00:18:09.020 They've given us an opening.
00:18:10.320 For the first time, they're showing us their faces.
00:18:12.940 So let's go.
00:18:14.880 You know, that sort of twist on the thing that worried everybody most, you know, turns out to be the thing that inspires confidence.
00:18:23.420 If the commander has it.
00:18:25.700 Took a lot of personal discipline, Brett.
00:18:28.100 But I really have to say that I'm full of admiration for that because I struggle as a professional myself all the time and try very hard to show this optimism.
00:18:40.180 But it isn't always so easy.
00:18:42.700 Yeah.
00:18:42.800 And something he noted as well, besides being optimistic, you know, Eisenhower was very adamant about leaders.
00:18:48.360 If they have personal problems, personal issues, they got to take care of that privately.
00:18:52.720 And that's kind of counter to what you see today, where it's like, if you have a problem, just show it, like emote it, express it, and, you know, see people, you kind of, you put it out there on social media.
00:19:03.440 That wouldn't be what Eisenhower would have done.
00:19:06.100 Absolutely not.
00:19:07.080 It's called too much information.
00:19:09.000 And I think what it's done is somebody's making it everybody else's problem too.
00:19:15.020 And that would be counter to personal responsibility.
00:19:19.020 You've got to, you've got, as I say, you've got to keep your own landscape in good, in good order.
00:19:24.500 You did ask me a minute ago, what did his temper look like when, when it came across him?
00:19:29.320 I always thought as a kid, it was like a thunderstorm, you know, and I didn't see it that much, I have to say, but it was like a thunderstorm because he would get angry.
00:19:40.020 I mean, his associates told me this, and then it would, it would pass, you know, and he didn't hold grudges.
00:19:46.000 So nobody really worried about it.
00:19:48.360 They observed it occasionally, but they didn't worry about it because if they had made a mistake, he, or, or if they had let him down in some way that was more personal, he just didn't hold grudges.
00:19:59.500 And I think, you know, some of that is self-discipline too, but some of it is back to, you know, the state of your insides.
00:20:09.940 Is it toxic in there?
00:20:11.640 Are you allowing all this negative energy to build up or are you finding another way to deal with it so that you can move on?
00:20:19.440 And one thing that you stress throughout the book, one of, an important part of Eisenhower's leadership style, yes, he was a big picture strategist and he was able to see and play the long game.
00:20:28.960 But something else that gets overlooked about Eisenhower was that he was, he had, he had really good people skills.
00:20:35.220 I think one of his strengths was he knew how to read people and how he understood what people needed.
00:20:41.180 And he was very attuned to people's needs and wants.
00:20:44.880 Well, I think that is.
00:20:46.200 And I think he, he got that trait from his mother who was an extremely empathetic person.
00:20:52.480 I mean, she was very religious.
00:20:53.960 As a matter of fact, few people realized that he grew up in a pacifist household.
00:20:58.180 She had been born and raised just after the civil war in Virginia and saw the horrors of, of that war and made a determination that she was never going to support war of any kind.
00:21:12.960 So she was, she was very empathetic.
00:21:15.220 And I would say that the one thing, wonderful thing he had from his childhood is that he had a mother who was empathetic and focused on cooperation and optimism.
00:21:25.300 And he had a father who took care of the discipline end of things.
00:21:30.300 And, and so for many reasons, not the least of which he had this, this team of his parents that, that brought different sides to his personality.
00:21:42.580 And, you know, he had some, all of his brothers were extremely successful too, but I think the, the empathy was one of Eisenhower's biggest traits.
00:21:51.960 It's the one I admire because I think when you're making decisions at this level, it would be so easy to become hard and cynical, but he never allowed himself that at all, at all.
00:22:05.140 I never saw any evidence of it.
00:22:06.880 Yeah. And during the war, you know, he's often asking when they're making decisions, like, what would this look like to the other guy?
00:22:13.820 How would the other guy take this?
00:22:15.660 And it got him into trouble, not trouble, but it frustrated some of his American colleagues because he was trying to reach out to British allies and work with them and cooperate with them.
00:22:27.600 And when there was people on the American side, which is like, no, we want to do our thing, forget about the British, but Eisenhower made it, he was very adamant that we have to, we have to work with these guys too, and make sure that they're getting what they need as well with any operation that we do.
00:22:42.920 Well, he really believed in alliances, and he was the first supreme allied commander in warfare during World War II, or sorry, during the First World War, everybody managed their own troops, but there was nobody that integrated all of the forces.
00:23:01.940 And so this was, this was a very, very new concept, also to integrate the British with the Americans and to have French forces under his command, it just had never been done before.
00:23:14.380 And he would not have been able to keep that alliance together if he hadn't been able to stand back and look at this joint effort from other people's point of view.
00:23:24.740 There was a lot of national pride involved, there was a very big difference in how each of these nations looked at strategy, the concepts behind strategy, and he also had to deal with A-type personalities who had very strong views about the righteousness of their own positions.
00:23:43.260 So this, looking at it from the other guy's point of view, was a self-educating way to say, you know what, it might be more productive to use this tool in my toolbox rather than another.
00:23:56.000 And what I learned from him in this is that not every fight is worth it.
00:24:01.040 To concentrate on the fights that are pivotal at his level, and to make sure that everybody feels like they're heard.
00:24:07.540 So another issue or big decision Eisenhower faced as supreme allied commander was towards the end of the war when they started discovering the concentration camps.
00:24:18.960 What was his response?
00:24:20.300 How did he decide, how did he implement sort of his higher level strategy thinking on what to do with this issue?
00:24:26.360 Well, one of the major issues for the impending victorious allied forces was how Germany was going to be treated after the war.
00:24:38.380 And the shocking discovery of the internment camps, the death camps, really sent a shiver throughout allied forces.
00:24:47.840 Eisenhower liberated Ordruf, which was a sub-camp of Buchenwald, and was just overcome, actually.
00:24:55.140 I think he kept his counsel.
00:24:57.340 The scene was so bad that George Patton was unable to go through parts of the camp for fear of getting sick.
00:25:05.240 And the smell, apparently, was just absolutely overwhelming.
00:25:09.020 So Eisenhower looked at all this, and I think this is one of the remarkable things about this story.
00:25:14.440 He sort of instantly understood that unless this Holocaust was chronicled, that 50 years from now people would say it never happened.
00:25:22.900 That night, he gets back to Patton's headquarters, and he writes to Marshall immediately and says,
00:25:29.420 I want you to bring all of the reporters you can send from the United States, members of Congress,
00:25:35.420 and then everybody who was close to any of those camps was ordered to go through them
00:25:41.080 and to take photographs and take eyewitness assessments of what was going on there.
00:25:48.720 My own father, as a matter of fact, went to Buchenwald.
00:25:51.880 He was an amateur photographer and made a whole photo album of these atrocities for precisely the same reason.
00:25:59.640 I was raised on those photographs, and even my own grandchildren have seen them.
00:26:04.140 A terrible, terrible time.
00:26:05.700 And what was interesting, too, is Eisenhower made sure that the German people in the villages that were nearby these camps,
00:26:14.080 he made them come and look at it and see what was going on underneath their noses.
00:26:18.240 Well, he more than had them come look at it.
00:26:20.360 He made them give the victims of the Holocaust a dignified burial,
00:26:24.820 and I think it was deeply, deeply shattering for many people who turned a blind eye to what was going on.
00:26:31.320 And Ike had absolutely no patience for the military who said they didn't know this was going on
00:26:36.440 because, in his view, it was willful denial.
00:26:40.060 And one of the big jobs during this particular period in the last weeks of the war
00:26:46.560 was to make sure that as we liberated areas that we were never seen to be adopting anything like the same tactics that the Germans did.
00:26:54.580 What I mean there is that we did not look like we had come as a conqueror,
00:26:59.860 and we were also holding these people in detention.
00:27:02.700 So that became a very challenging thing to make sure that the victims of the Holocaust understood that friends had arrived
00:27:09.500 and that they would be treated with a dignity henceforth,
00:27:13.500 and their needs would be met to the extent that it was humanly possible at this stage of the proceedings.
00:27:19.940 And along with this, this was a thing that he had to balance as well,
00:27:24.000 is that on the one hand, he wanted to hold accountable the German people for what happened in their country.
00:27:29.880 But at the same time, Eisenhower had this thing, he wanted to move on.
00:27:32.320 He thought, he was thinking he was very future-oriented.
00:27:34.940 So how did he do that?
00:27:35.780 How did he hold people accountable at the same time,
00:27:39.380 like, you know, not holding this grudge on them permanently forever
00:27:42.720 where they could never move on and go on to better things?
00:27:46.160 Well, there was sort of a multifaceted way of looking at this.
00:27:49.920 War criminals had to be held accountable.
00:27:52.340 Those who said that they didn't know but had every prospect of knowing given where they were located,
00:27:58.600 they too were dealt with in a certain way.
00:28:01.080 The German population itself not only was forced to give a dignified burial to those who died,
00:28:08.000 but in many cases their housing was requisitioned for victims of the Holocaust to live there for a time.
00:28:15.540 And then finally, I guess the United States Army put together a video of these atrocities
00:28:22.780 and made many, many Germans see this film.
00:28:26.140 I mean, they had to understand what they did or what was done in their names
00:28:30.320 in order to begin that period of renewal.
00:28:33.240 Then after that, of course, it was probably higher policy as well
00:28:37.400 to assure that former Nazis were not running the new government in Germany at any level.
00:28:43.180 And then, of course, the big work of establishing NATO
00:28:47.820 and eventually bringing West Germany into NATO in 1955 is another threshold moment.
00:28:54.140 I would just say here, Brett, which is really amazing and symbolic,
00:28:58.980 but on exactly the 10th anniversary of the Germans' unconditional surrender,
00:29:04.520 the Eisenhower administration, Dwight Eisenhower himself,
00:29:07.120 brought West Germany into NATO.
00:29:10.880 And we, as one German described it to me,
00:29:13.760 that we held them in our iron embrace
00:29:16.080 until, in fact, that country became a prosperous democracy.
00:29:20.760 And eventually, of course, in 1989-90,
00:29:23.980 you could say that World War II was finally over for Germany.
00:29:27.160 We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
00:29:33.040 And now back to the show.
00:29:35.300 So after the war, Eisenhower, he was president of Columbia University.
00:29:40.540 And all during this time, there's lots of people pushing for him to run for president.
00:29:45.680 And he kept on telling them,
00:29:46.920 no, I don't want that job.
00:29:48.320 Leave me alone.
00:29:49.140 Quit asking me.
00:29:50.480 What finally pushed him over the edge
00:29:52.580 and caused him to throw his hat into the ring and run for president?
00:29:57.260 Well, I think it's pretty clear.
00:29:59.640 Eisenhower was very worried about the fact that the country was still on war footing.
00:30:05.520 By this time, we're in the middle of a war in Korea.
00:30:08.880 And he did not believe in small wars.
00:30:11.100 He didn't believe that it was in our national security interest to bleed ourselves dry
00:30:18.780 in terms of human capital and also financial expense.
00:30:23.020 And he went to Korea right after he became the president-elect to see what the situation was there
00:30:31.640 and eventually brought about the armistice in that summer.
00:30:35.400 But that Korean War played a role in his decision to run for president,
00:30:41.320 just as the deteriorating financial situation, a lot of labor unrest after the war.
00:30:47.660 But I think probably the most important thing was,
00:30:50.460 is it looked like there was a prospect that the Republicans might win the 1952 election,
00:30:56.620 in that Harry Truman's popularity ratings were very low.
00:31:01.300 And if that were to happen, the isolationist wing of the Republican Party would have come to power.
00:31:07.100 I believe that we could never go back to the way it was between the first war and the second war.
00:31:12.400 And so I think if Robert Taft, who was the key senator, Mr., quote-unquote, Mr. Republican,
00:31:20.440 who was destined to get that nomination,
00:31:22.900 if Robert Taft had agreed to support NATO and America's internationalist role in the world,
00:31:30.560 Ike probably would not have run.
00:31:32.720 He certainly had other plans for himself after the war.
00:31:36.140 But Robert Taft refused to support NATO.
00:31:38.580 He had no liking for the United Nations at all.
00:31:41.500 He was against a lot of foreign aid and other things that Eisenhower thought were crucial.
00:31:46.320 So, in fact, Eisenhower decides that he's going to run.
00:31:50.720 And it was a dramatic thing.
00:31:52.460 It's one of those turning points, certainly for the future of the Republican Party,
00:31:57.320 and as it turned out for the United States of America.
00:32:01.000 And that was a big decision because to run for president, he had to give up his commission as general.
00:32:06.180 Yes, he did.
00:32:06.820 He had to give up his commission, for sure.
00:32:09.120 And his longtime valet from World War II, who was still with him,
00:32:14.380 reacted to the general's news that he had given up his commission.
00:32:18.940 And since he might or might not win the presidency, his valet was free to find another job.
00:32:24.120 And the valet, a wonderful man named John Moni, said to his boss, he said,
00:32:29.940 you know, we've been together for a long time, and if you don't win the election,
00:32:33.540 I think the two of us can probably find a job somewhere else.
00:32:38.260 Sergeant Moni, a wonderful, wonderful man, was the only African-American,
00:32:43.600 or the first African-American to be a pallbearer at a president's funeral.
00:32:47.200 And he and his family are, he's long gone, but his family are still close to mine.
00:32:53.460 So Eisenhower gets elected president, and he ran on the Republican ticket,
00:32:58.480 won on the Republican with the Republican Party, but it didn't seem like he was much of a partisan.
00:33:03.880 How would you describe his governing style as president of the United States?
00:33:08.140 Well, Brad, I think it's, you could argue that Eisenhower was the most nonpartisan president
00:33:15.200 since George Washington, or one of the other military leaders, perhaps.
00:33:20.600 He's certainly more nonpartisan than Ulysses S. Grant.
00:33:24.000 But the, I think the key here is that he had his difficulties with the Republican Party
00:33:30.900 in the first term, and in the second term, he had some difficulty with the Democrats.
00:33:35.500 So in a way, you could argue that he crafted his middle way pretty effectively,
00:33:40.700 because both sides, or I should say the extreme wings of both parties,
00:33:47.640 you know, felt quite skeptical about his governance.
00:33:50.800 He had an enormous popularity rating, though, during his two terms.
00:33:54.440 He was averaging mid to high 60s for his two terms in office.
00:33:59.900 Part of it was, I think, how he organized the White House.
00:34:02.520 And he organized it in some ways, very much like he organized a war effort.
00:34:07.600 He surrounded himself by diverse viewpoints, and he wanted pushback.
00:34:13.820 He thought that was the way he could understand the complexity and the dimensions of any particular issue.
00:34:20.720 He wanted, he would have a cabinet meeting once a week,
00:34:24.720 and all cabinet members had to come to those meetings fully briefed on whatever the topic was,
00:34:30.260 even if it was outside of their own agency.
00:34:33.000 And he would referee the debates and make sure that he understood all the viewpoints.
00:34:40.160 He had not only, you know, conservative Republicans in his cabinet,
00:34:43.800 but also all the way through the spectrum to Democrats, a couple of Democrats.
00:34:47.800 And after he heard this vigorous debate, then he would go into his office and make a decision.
00:34:53.360 After that, there would be a special unit at the White House that was there to implement the decisions
00:35:00.020 and to make sure everybody followed, you know, the decisions that the president had made.
00:35:04.340 I think he also held a press conference once a week because he thought it was important to retain his visibility with the public
00:35:12.580 and for them to understand what was going on at the White House and why he was handling things a certain way.
00:35:18.400 I think it's just important to add here, finally, is that you can have all the greatest strategy in the world,
00:35:23.980 but if you don't have an organization not only to pursue rigorously the facts, wherever they might lead,
00:35:30.800 but also to implement the president's decisions and to make sure that a diverse set of viewpoints are considered,
00:35:37.760 it won't, you know, you can't, you can't exercise a strategy without that kind of infrastructure.
00:35:45.100 And unfortunately, that whole system was dismantled after his administration.
00:35:50.520 Yeah, I mean, this is a sort of, you've seen a continuation of his leadership style that he developed as a general.
00:35:56.740 You know, he had, he was only concerning himself with the high level strategic thinking,
00:36:01.500 and then he made sure that there was an organization in place beneath that to take care and make sure everything else,
00:36:06.800 that a strategy gets, gets put into action.
00:36:09.960 That's right. And of course, delegation plays a huge role in that.
00:36:13.240 He was almost a genius at figuring out how much leeway people could be given.
00:36:19.160 In other words, which, which individuals struggled a little bit more to,
00:36:23.900 to think about how to tackle an issue and the rest of it.
00:36:27.340 And those who he knew were brilliant and could carry on with the administration's viewpoint in mind.
00:36:34.100 So, and I think another key, of course, to delegation is to protect, you know,
00:36:40.580 to have the back of the people you've delegated to.
00:36:44.200 Yeah, we talked about that earlier.
00:36:45.640 He did that in the military.
00:36:46.720 He took responsibility for the failures.
00:36:49.140 And he let the people-
00:36:50.100 Exactly. Quite rightly too.
00:36:51.800 Yeah.
00:36:52.740 Well, and another interesting thing about the office of the president of the United States,
00:36:56.900 I don't think a lot of people understand or realize,
00:36:59.080 is that the president of the United States has two roles.
00:37:02.260 First, he's, he's a politician.
00:37:03.800 Like, he's there to implement policy or to execute policy.
00:37:07.600 But on the other hand, he's also a figurehead for the entire country.
00:37:10.840 Like, in other countries, like, say, in England, like, the queen is the figurehead.
00:37:13.960 And then you have the prime minister who's doing the, the, the dirty politics, right?
00:37:17.960 But in the president, those, those things are in one.
00:37:20.600 And there can be, sometimes there's contradictory, they contradict each other.
00:37:25.380 Eisenhower somehow was able to resolve those conflicting roles in the presidency.
00:37:30.360 How do you think he did that?
00:37:32.060 Well, first of all, actually, I would say there are probably three different roles.
00:37:35.920 One would be head of state.
00:37:37.340 One would be head of the executive branch.
00:37:39.180 And the other would be head of the, your political party.
00:37:42.140 And it's been very hard for some presidents to reconcile these contradictory roles.
00:37:47.760 Eisenhower believed that unity of purpose or to unite the country behind a set of policies
00:37:54.420 is what he called the middle way.
00:37:56.120 And to do that, he had to, to serve as the figure that could bring everybody together.
00:38:01.260 He was not, though, disconnected from his role as chief executive or as head of his party.
00:38:08.720 But he didn't, he didn't display that as much as other presidents had,
00:38:13.500 because he thought that that would be at cross purposes with the larger goal of
00:38:17.700 uniting the country.
00:38:19.040 As today, we see presidents who are largely parties or those that combine that with being
00:38:26.440 a chief executive.
00:38:27.360 But this idea of being the uniter, at least in the public perception,
00:38:33.920 is not something that we've seen too much of since his era.
00:38:38.100 So he was, he was still doing politics, but he did it in the background.
00:38:41.880 Yeah, he did it where, where that it was, it was out of sight.
00:38:46.120 And actually, Brett, I would say that's probably one of the reasons why his leadership style
00:38:50.140 has been misunderstood for so long, because we're so used to valuing the bully pulpit.
00:38:58.000 But Eisenhower really believed that the bully pulpit could be useful at some times,
00:39:03.100 but it could be counterproductive in meeting goals if it was used at the wrong time.
00:39:07.820 So he developed an idea about not, not singling out personalities, not turning issues into
00:39:15.180 personality confrontations, because this way it'd be very, very hard, not only to unite
00:39:22.560 the country, but secondly, of course, to get that person ever to cooperate with you or his
00:39:28.400 allies.
00:39:28.920 Today, we see that we have become so tribalized that this exchange of insults only hardens the
00:39:37.020 bases of these political parties.
00:39:38.880 And that's something that I wanted to avoid.
00:39:42.000 In any case, this was his strategy.
00:39:45.020 Maybe I'm not going to say it was unique to him, but it certainly was out of sight for
00:39:50.660 many people.
00:39:51.980 And so we still see today many people who analyze his presidency and think that he wasn't involved
00:39:58.540 in issues that he was deeply involved in, just in a behind-the-scenes way.
00:40:03.960 Well, speaking of this idea that he had about just dealing with people and governing, this
00:40:08.500 idea of never dealing with personalities, he had to deal with this in his first term because
00:40:13.040 in his own party, there's a guy, Joseph McCarthy, who was stirring up trouble, accusing people
00:40:18.600 of communism.
00:40:20.660 And Eisenhower had to deal with it because it was causing problems within his own party and
00:40:23.660 preventing him to get stuff done.
00:40:25.680 But as you said, he didn't go after McCarthy directly.
00:40:29.280 He did this sort of kind of behind-the-scenes thing to manage him.
00:40:34.160 Well, there are two reasons for that strategically.
00:40:37.460 First of all, the President of the United States cannot censure a member of the United States
00:40:44.060 Senate or the House of Representatives.
00:40:46.160 We have three co-equal branches of government.
00:40:48.920 So it would not be analogous to comparisons that are made with any of our leaders today who one
00:40:54.960 side of the other thinks is, you know, is using demagogic arguments because as a co-equal
00:41:01.680 branch of government, which was the Senate, only the Senate could censure Joseph McCarthy.
00:41:07.740 And actually, the Senate supported Joseph McCarthy.
00:41:11.560 And this was the President's own political party.
00:41:13.980 So he had to use surgery rather than, you might say, you know, bombardment of this particular
00:41:21.340 problem because his own party needed to, you know, survive this really toxic confrontation
00:41:30.080 that McCarthy had begun.
00:41:32.640 Now, the other thing about McCarthy is that he was a junior senator.
00:41:36.100 He wasn't in the leadership at all.
00:41:38.380 And so Eisenhower decided as a second way of looking at this is that he would not give
00:41:44.880 McCarthy the thing that McCarthy wanted most.
00:41:47.800 Joseph McCarthy wanted to be elevated to a level where he could be in direct dialogue
00:41:55.700 with the President of the United States because he had presidential ambitions of his own.
00:42:00.240 And Ike said, I'm going to deprive this guy of the one thing he wants most, which is to engage
00:42:05.500 the office of the presidency in an unworthy debate about, you know, these many fallacious
00:42:13.340 accusations that McCarthy made.
00:42:16.240 And so today, you know, there is some resonance to that, but still Eisenhower's own handling of
00:42:22.160 this is still not understood because the third pillar of his strategy was to work behind the
00:42:27.280 scenes with members of the Republican Party to make them understand that this, the activities
00:42:34.080 of Senator McCarthy were toxic, unjustified, and very possibly, ultimately damaging for
00:42:43.160 the party itself.
00:42:44.280 And it turned out to be the case.
00:42:46.540 The Army McCarthy hearings at the end of this drama revealed McCarthy for who he was, and
00:42:52.240 the Senate finally censured the senator.
00:42:54.800 But this idea that the President of the United States could have done anything to stop McCarthy
00:42:59.280 is just wrong.
00:43:00.160 It was up to the Senate colleagues, and he worked, Eisenhower worked very adroitly behind
00:43:05.120 the scenes to help them understand that they had to take measures.
00:43:09.560 And I imagine this took a lot of, I mean, all throughout his presidency, he had this, he
00:43:13.280 was very principled in this middle way and his style of governing.
00:43:17.200 And I'm sure he was getting pressured all the time, you know, saying, you need to, you need
00:43:20.760 to confront McCarthy directly.
00:43:22.200 You need to, you know, hit the bully pulpit and say that, you know, but he had to resist that
00:43:26.580 pressure all throughout his presidency.
00:43:28.180 He was under enormous pressure.
00:43:30.280 He was under pressure from people in his administration.
00:43:32.900 He was under pressure from family members.
00:43:34.860 He was under pressure from everybody.
00:43:36.920 But he truly, he understood he did not have the power or the authority to censure Senator
00:43:44.000 McCarthy.
00:43:44.640 What he had to do is create the condition so that Senator McCarthy's own colleagues would
00:43:49.520 do it.
00:43:50.000 And it took longer than I know he liked, but that's just the reality of our constitutional
00:43:55.080 government.
00:43:55.620 In the meantime, he managed to preserve the integrity of the presidency itself by not, quote
00:44:01.640 unquote, getting down into the gutter with that guy and allowing McCarthy to set the rhetorical
00:44:08.400 agenda.
00:44:09.760 Ike used the bully pulpit all right.
00:44:11.280 He just never mentioned Senator McCarthy.
00:44:13.220 He was out giving speeches about, he'd say, you can't fight communism by destroying America
00:44:19.540 or the only Americans can hurt America.
00:44:24.600 He really believed that we had a choice about whether or not we were going to allow this
00:44:30.620 kind of unwarranted accusations to occur.
00:44:34.480 In the meantime, of course, he also had an internal security system, as Truman had, to
00:44:41.720 actually make proper investigations.
00:44:44.220 But certainly the McCarthy effort was over the top and out of bounds.
00:44:50.340 So another big issue he faced as president was the Brown versus Board of Education decision
00:44:55.180 in the Supreme Court.
00:44:56.160 And as the head of the executive branch, his job is to enforce decisions made by the Supreme
00:45:03.640 Court.
00:45:03.940 But this was an issue that was fraught with a lot of, you know, it was just a really highly
00:45:09.440 contentious issue.
00:45:10.440 How did Eisenhower handle enforcing the Brown versus Board of Education decision?
00:45:15.800 I think if there's one thing about some of the scholarship, not all of it that's out there
00:45:19.680 today that distresses me, it is simply some people interpreting what Eisenhower meant by some
00:45:26.480 very forceful words.
00:45:27.540 I don't know why there's any question about it, but repeatedly from the campaign through
00:45:33.540 the first State of the Union address and on and on, Eisenhower said that his strategy was
00:45:40.040 to desegregate everything that the federal government controlled, which he pretty much accomplished
00:45:45.740 by the end of his eight years.
00:45:48.240 Let's remember the Brown versus Board of Education was a measure that came before the Supreme Court
00:45:54.300 that called for the desegregation of schools.
00:45:58.960 But by this time, Dwight Eisenhower, because he controlled the District of Columbia, had
00:46:04.340 already desegregated Washington, D.C. schools and actually the city, the District of Columbia
00:46:11.040 itself.
00:46:12.360 So this idea that he would do what he could control is what a good strategist would say.
00:46:17.000 This is what I can accomplish in eight years.
00:46:19.500 A change in the hearts and minds of the public in general is going to be a very, very,
00:46:24.300 tough road to hoe, and it's going to take time.
00:46:27.120 Now, with respect to Brown versus Board of Education, it was his Supreme Court appointee
00:46:32.900 as chairman, that would be Earl Warren, who was the one who produced that result in the
00:46:39.220 Supreme Court.
00:46:40.060 And Eisenhower had absolutely no problem enforcing a set of, enforcing a Supreme Court decision
00:46:46.820 that he agreed with.
00:46:47.820 I'd like to single out David Nichols' wonderful book called A Matter of Justice, which was really
00:46:54.220 a turning point in the understanding of Eisenhower's policy on civil rights.
00:46:59.420 Let's not also forget that he was the first president since Reconstruction to achieve passing
00:47:06.140 a civil rights bill in 1957.
00:47:09.460 And another thing that was really controversial that he did is he sent in the 101st Airborne.
00:47:14.080 It was in Arkansas, right?
00:47:15.220 To enforce desegregation.
00:47:16.740 Yes, Eisenhower believed in the idea of the appearance of overwhelming force.
00:47:22.140 That particular decision to send the 101st Airborne came after Governor Falbus refused to enforce
00:47:28.460 Brown versus Board of Education.
00:47:30.800 The president gave Falbus a chance to do the right thing after a meeting.
00:47:35.400 And when Falbus didn't do the right thing and stepped back from assurances he made the president
00:47:41.080 at that meeting, the 101st Airborne was called into action.
00:47:45.660 What they did was to help escort and protect nine African-American students as they made their way
00:47:54.240 to Central High School for the beginning of the school year.
00:47:57.240 Of course, unfortunately, and this is where the federal government could only do so much,
00:48:02.080 whether or not the schools remained public schools was really up to each state of the union.
00:48:08.340 So, unfortunately, the following year, the state took it upon themselves to cancel classes.
00:48:17.080 And, you know, we're still having this struggle, as we know.
00:48:21.420 We do have everything desegregated, but we're still having this terrible struggle.
00:48:26.500 But it is worth noting that Eisenhower used federal forces to protect the African-American
00:48:32.020 youngsters who were being harassed and threatened by a white mob.
00:48:36.120 So, again, like, you know, he got criticized because people felt that he was just overstepping
00:48:41.040 his bounds.
00:48:41.660 It was, you know, tyranny.
00:48:43.500 But at the same time, he was also getting criticized.
00:48:45.320 He got criticized throughout his presidency that he didn't do enough for civil rights as well.
00:48:49.520 And again, it's sort of like a theme that you see throughout his, you know, even as a general,
00:48:53.500 his career, like he was really committed to this principled middle way.
00:48:58.280 And he understood that it wasn't going to make everyone happy.
00:49:00.400 Well, here's the thing about the middle way.
00:49:03.440 In his mind, the middle way was the middle ground where people could come together from
00:49:08.600 both sides and compose their differences and find compromises that would lead to progress.
00:49:15.040 As it is now, we're in a winner and loser situation where we either get everything we
00:49:19.660 want or we don't cooperate.
00:49:21.860 And, of course, that would have been an anathema to him that progress is key.
00:49:26.960 And that middle way was the area in the middle that could bring people into that place where
00:49:34.020 a progress could be realized.
00:49:37.620 And I think also that it is worth noting that the idea behind a middle way is what I would
00:49:44.260 call devising sustainable strategies.
00:49:49.140 Everybody can have a strategy, but if it isn't sustainable because it's actually built on something
00:49:54.580 that isn't universally agreed or at least generally agreed, then it's not sustainable.
00:50:00.040 And then you get thrown back on it next time around.
00:50:04.100 Actually, if you look at the things that he undertook in his presidential career, it's
00:50:08.620 remarkable how many of the frameworks he put into place are still with us today.
00:50:14.620 So we talked earlier, you know, part of his leadership strategy or his understanding of leadership
00:50:18.660 was that a leader, he has to take care of personal issues himself because the morale of the people
00:50:26.300 you're leading is often dependent upon what the leader looks like.
00:50:29.920 If they're optimistic, people are going to be optimistic.
00:50:33.000 And that can be lonely because you might want to grouse.
00:50:36.960 You might have just doubts.
00:50:38.900 You might get depressed.
00:50:40.020 So who was Eisenhower's like inner circle that he would go to so he could, you know, get some
00:50:46.660 support or sort of vent?
00:50:48.300 Because if he couldn't do that with, you know, his subordinates, because he was really adamant
00:50:52.640 about, you know, keeping that sort of distance between leader and subordinate.
00:50:56.600 Well, let me take the leader and subordinate thing here first.
00:51:00.400 You know, I understand it.
00:51:01.680 He wanted to be in a position to be unencumbered in his relationship with his colleagues and
00:51:11.300 subordinates at work, be unencumbered from the social aspect because of potential for
00:51:17.680 it's skewing your thinking.
00:51:19.740 So he wanted to come in and have a highly professionalized environment that, you know,
00:51:25.660 was not colored by a social relationship.
00:51:28.520 Let's put it that way.
00:51:29.580 OK, and so he obviously depended on having friends elsewhere.
00:51:35.260 There were a number of rules in the Eisenhower orbit, and that was that there are no favors
00:51:39.980 to be asked.
00:51:41.300 He told, I mean, I discovered this in the scholarship and in books written by his colleagues, many,
00:51:47.580 many comments about if anybody calls you and says that they're a friend of mine, ignore
00:51:52.420 it, give them no help because we don't do that.
00:51:55.520 Right.
00:51:56.040 So, you know, that, of course, you know, to some degree, you know, reflected the fact
00:52:02.780 that of his friends, he wanted them to be friends and not to make the situation more
00:52:07.880 complex.
00:52:08.300 But even ultimately, when somebody has that much power, it's a very distorting thing for
00:52:15.140 a lot of relationships.
00:52:16.120 In the book, I had some fun thinking of the many relationships that get distorted by this
00:52:22.160 kind of power, including one's relationship with one's doctor.
00:52:25.600 And at the end of the day, I think it's just inevitable that anybody in that position of
00:52:32.880 authority is going to be relying pretty much on his family.
00:52:35.340 And that is the inner circle.
00:52:37.860 I benefited from having an older brother who was extremely conservative Republican and
00:52:44.480 a younger brother who was a liberal Republican.
00:52:47.740 So he got lots of pushback and lots of differing advice, even from his own family, not to mention
00:52:53.240 my father, John, who was one of his confidants.
00:52:56.440 Well, that was some of the interesting things about his relationship with his brothers and
00:53:00.000 the discussions they would have via letters.
00:53:01.560 But sometimes they would like spill out into public, you know, he'd get asked at a press
00:53:05.760 conference, your brother Edgar said this.
00:53:08.460 And like Eisenhower would be like, well, that's Edgar's opinion.
00:53:10.700 I don't care.
00:53:11.560 Yeah.
00:53:11.920 And in one case, he says, oh, yeah, that's Edgar.
00:53:14.040 He's been criticizing me since I was five years old.
00:53:17.180 Yeah.
00:53:17.780 I don't know.
00:53:18.600 I enjoyed looking into these letters.
00:53:22.360 I knew Edgar Eisenhower.
00:53:23.920 I mean, he was quite a charismatic character and very sure of his opinion and, you know,
00:53:34.740 God love him.
00:53:35.600 But he certainly gave his younger brother, the president, a run for his money.
00:53:41.400 And I think at the end of the day, Ike would say that it was helpful, just as he relied on
00:53:46.200 Milton Eisenhower, his younger brother, for a view of what the liberals were saying and
00:53:51.300 thinking in his party.
00:53:52.500 But at the end of the day, Brett, and I think this is the thing that stood out for me most,
00:53:57.280 he really believed in the privacy of heart and mind.
00:54:00.820 He didn't like fussers and cluckers.
00:54:03.180 And he wanted to go into his quiet space to process what he'd seen, to process what he's
00:54:10.240 hearing, and to make his own decisions.
00:54:12.780 And then he would stick with them and live by them.
00:54:15.620 And I think there's kind of a maturity that has always stayed with me.
00:54:20.860 Yeah, he took up painting.
00:54:23.280 That was one of the things he did when he was processing information.
00:54:25.960 He'd go and paint a landscape.
00:54:27.940 Well, it has been noted that his landscapes are very serene.
00:54:32.580 As a matter of fact, I have a couple here that he gave me.
00:54:36.080 And they look so calm.
00:54:38.740 And of course, you know that what he was dealing with at the time wasn't calm at all.
00:54:43.380 I have one painting from 1957.
00:54:45.480 He was undoubtedly working on the deployment of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock
00:54:52.060 and the aftermath of the launching of the Soviet Sputnik into space.
00:54:57.400 And you would have no idea from looking at this landscape that that's what was on his mind.
00:55:03.280 But, you know, he's very absorbed by color.
00:55:05.460 And like anything else, it's like people get this from playing golf or going out and engaging
00:55:11.120 in athletics or sailing or something.
00:55:13.080 By the time you get back, your brain's been somewhere else and you can think about things
00:55:16.900 more clearly.
00:55:18.500 So we talked about how Eisenhower was sort of aloof from people that he led.
00:55:21.640 But at the same time, he was very interested in people.
00:55:23.960 And you highlight these moments that people had with Eisenhower where you could see he
00:55:29.220 was always thinking about people and their needs and their wants.
00:55:32.940 And he'd just do little small, really thoughtful things that would just floor people because
00:55:38.480 they weren't going to expect that from the president of the United States.
00:55:41.840 Were there any moments like that that really stood out to you?
00:55:45.000 Yes.
00:55:45.360 I'd just like to say one thing first is that I would use a different word than aloof,
00:55:51.040 that he was not engaged socially.
00:55:53.060 In other words, he didn't like to mix business and pleasure would be another way of saying
00:55:57.120 that because it interferes with the way you think about an issue, an issue that needs clarity
00:56:03.440 of thought because of the relationship.
00:56:05.780 You know, there are always complaints that people in government decide, make their decisions
00:56:11.140 based on the last person they've spoken to.
00:56:13.400 Well, he wanted to avoid that kind of a trap.
00:56:16.440 Now, with respect to, I think the thing, and I had an opportunity over the years to do a
00:56:25.240 fair amount in the leadership and strategic leadership area.
00:56:29.320 And character, of course, plays a huge role in any leader's capacity to build a bond of
00:56:34.700 trust with those he's leading.
00:56:36.080 And a huge part of that is how you treat those people.
00:56:41.740 And in this respect, small gestures really matter.
00:56:45.560 I outline in my book so many small things he did that let his men during the war know that
00:56:54.220 he was not, that this wasn't about him.
00:56:57.360 It was about us.
00:56:58.600 OK, and one of the ways he did that, rather ironically, is he never wore a helmet.
00:57:04.780 I'd almost challenge anybody to find a picture of Ike with a helmet on because he didn't want
00:57:10.020 to pretend he was out there on a day-to-day basis facing the same physical dangers they
00:57:15.300 were, though sometimes he was in some physical danger.
00:57:18.520 You know, he passes up honors and awards that only go to GIs like the Congressional Medal of
00:57:24.400 Honor, et cetera.
00:57:25.060 But what I, the gestures I like the most, or at least I witnessed and therefore was able
00:57:31.720 to write about, were the gestures made to people who couldn't do anything for him.
00:57:36.480 They couldn't vote for him.
00:57:37.780 They couldn't, you know, they couldn't recommend them, recommend him to anybody of any importance.
00:57:44.360 The small gestures he made to kids he'd never met before or GIs who, after the war, made
00:57:51.880 his acquaintance.
00:57:52.600 And it's moving to me because that's what the army calls when no one was looking, right?
00:57:58.620 What are people doing when no one is looking?
00:58:01.660 And I think that benchmark is where you can begin to discuss what character really looks
00:58:07.880 like.
00:58:09.600 As you were researching and writing this book, was there anything new that you learned about
00:58:12.680 your grandfather?
00:58:14.040 Well, I'll tell you, Brett, I was raised to compartmentalize my grandfather's career from
00:58:20.100 what I knew of him as a grandfather.
00:58:21.960 I've already made that point on numerous occasions because I think it's important to know that
00:58:27.640 I don't expect everyone to agree with his decisions.
00:58:32.620 But I do, I did want to bring something new to this book that I had, you know, insight into,
00:58:39.920 which is, you know, how he handled things and how he thought about things.
00:58:44.460 And so for the first time in my life, I really put it all together.
00:58:49.360 I mean, what I knew of him with his policies.
00:58:52.260 And there were times when I would read somebody's scholarship and they'd say, well, he did this
00:58:57.120 because.
00:58:57.880 And then I thought, well, no, that wasn't really it because he used to say at the dinner table,
00:59:02.180 dot, dot, dot.
00:59:03.440 Right.
00:59:03.680 So I think, I think I'm not going to say I was surprised by this, but I guess I will
00:59:10.980 always, for as long as I live, will always be in awe of how he handled the burden of this
00:59:18.800 power and this, and, and consequential leadership.
00:59:22.540 And, and in the face of that never became hard or cynical.
00:59:27.680 I just saw no signs of it.
00:59:29.800 And I, I not only, it's not just me.
00:59:32.440 I mean, if you read the books of his associates, they were, they were all sort of amazed that
00:59:37.700 he could still be an optimistic forward thinking person after he'd been to some of the darkest
00:59:44.000 places humankind has ever been.
00:59:45.880 And, um, I think part of the way he did that is that he believed in something bigger than
00:59:52.300 himself.
00:59:53.160 This wasn't about him.
00:59:54.860 This is about our country.
00:59:56.280 And it was about securing the peace for a world that had seen catastrophes beyond anything
01:00:03.440 imaginable for today's generation.
01:00:05.760 That is a world war two.
01:00:08.560 And, um, as he once said about this higher cause, he says, a man just has to forget his
01:00:14.200 fortunes and he forgot his fortunes and was able to serve his country.
01:00:19.960 I think in a, certainly a, uh, genuine way and in a way that was, uh, full of dedication
01:00:27.600 and integrity.
01:00:29.620 Well, Susan, this has been a great conversation.
01:00:31.160 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
01:00:33.480 Well, I think, uh, probably my website, apologies to everybody that it isn't more fulsome than
01:00:39.380 it should be, but a lot of information about the book is on there.
01:00:42.220 That's a www.SusanEisenhower.com.
01:00:46.500 And, uh, I could be followed on Twitter, but I sometimes find myself simply speechless to
01:00:51.680 know what I should be saying about the current situation.
01:00:54.840 I look forward to engaging with anybody.
01:00:57.400 And for those who are interested in a copy of the book, I can be reached through my website
01:01:02.480 and would be happy to get a book plate in the mail.
01:01:05.640 Fantastic.
01:01:05.900 Well, Susan Eisenhower, thanks for your time.
01:01:07.220 It's been a pleasure.
01:01:08.500 Well, I just want to thank you, Brett, for this opportunity.
01:01:10.820 And, uh, you've got a, you've got a, uh, wonderful website there and I just wish you
01:01:16.160 the best of luck.
01:01:17.360 Thank you so much.
01:01:18.700 Take care.
01:01:19.720 My guest today was Susan Eisenhower.
01:01:21.000 She's the author of the book, How Ike Led.
01:01:23.020 It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
01:01:25.260 You can find out more information about her work at our website, susaneisenhower.com.
01:01:28.660 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash howikeled, where you can find links to resources
01:01:33.240 where you delve deeper into this topic.
01:01:34.560 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AWIM podcast.
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