The Art of Manliness - How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike's Granddaughter

00:00:00.000 Hey, it's Brett. We're taking a break today, so I got a rebroadcast for you. It's episode

00:00:03.200 number 641, How Eisenhower Led, where I talk to Susan Eisenhower. She's a writer, consultant,

00:00:08.280 a policy strategist, and one of Dwight D. Eisenhower's four grandchildren. We talk about

00:00:12.480 her grandfather's leadership principles and styles from her book, How Ike Led. Hope you

00:00:17.040 enjoy it. We'll be back with a brand new episode on Wednesday. See you then.

00:00:20.080 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. From guiding the

00:00:32.220 Allies to victory in World War II as Supreme Commander, to steering the ship of state for

00:00:35.840 eight years as one of the country's least partisan and most popular presidents, few leaders in history

00:00:39.880 have had to make as varied and consequential decisions as Dwight D. Eisenhower. My guest

00:00:44.140 today possesses insights into how he made the many choices he was faced with in his military

00:00:47.780 and political careers that are gleaned not only from studying Ike's life, but from personally

00:00:51.480 knowing the man beneath the mantle. Her name is Susan Eisenhower. She's a writer, consultant,

00:00:55.860 and policy strategist, one of Dwight's four grandchildren, and the author of the new book,

00:00:59.720 How Ike Led, the principles behind Eisenhower's biggest decisions. Susan and I begin our conversation

00:01:04.720 with her relationship with Ike as both historic leader and ordinary grandfather, and why she decided

00:01:09.020 to write a book about his leadership style. We then delve into the principles of his leadership,

00:01:12.880 beginning with his decision to greenlight the D-Day invasion, what it reveals about his

00:01:16.160 ironclad commitment to taking responsibility, and how that commitment allowed him to be such

00:01:19.920 an effective delegator. From there, Susan explains how a love of studying history born in Ike's

00:01:23.940 boyhood allowed him to take a big picture approach to strategy, how he used a desk drawer to deal

00:01:28.460 with his lifelong struggle with anger, and how his belief in morale as input rather than output

00:01:32.840 inspired him to always stay optimistic for the benefit of those he led. We then turn to how

00:01:36.800 Eisenhower dealt with the discovery of concentration camps at the end of World War II and making peace

00:01:40.940 with Germany after it. We then talk about his non-partisan governing style as president,

00:01:44.520 which he called the middle way, and which involved emphasizing cooperation, compromise,

00:01:48.760 and unity, including members of both political parties in his cabinet, limiting his use of the

00:01:52.660 bully pulpit to sway public opinion, and striving not to turn policy issues into personality

00:01:56.800 confrontations. We then discuss how this style influenced how he dealt with Joseph McCarthy

00:02:00.680 and enforced the Brown versus Board of Education decision. At the end of our conversation,

00:02:04.740 Susan explains that while she doesn't expect everyone to agree with the difficult decisions her

00:02:08.120 grandfather made, she thinks there's something to be learned from how he managed to make them,

00:02:11.520 and to make them without becoming hard and cynical in the process. After the show's over,

00:02:15.220 check out our show notes at aom.is slash howikeled.

00:02:25.460 All right, Susan Eisenhower, welcome to the show.

00:02:28.260 Well, thank you. It's just great to be with you.

00:02:30.480 So you've got a new book out, How Ike Led, the principle behind Eisenhower's biggest decisions,

00:02:35.800 and you also happen to be one of Dwight Eisenhower's granddaughters. I'm curious,

00:02:40.980 let's start off with this kind of the context. What was it like being Eisenhower's granddaughter?

00:02:45.020 Like, how old were you when he was general and then president of the United States?

00:02:49.060 Well, he was actually inaugurated in 1953, and so I was a toddler at the time. I was born on the last day

00:02:58.280 of 1951, so I wasn't aware of too much for a while, and my father was in the Army as well. And he,

00:03:07.800 of course, went to every Army post he could go to probably in many of those years. But back in

00:03:14.620 around 1957, we moved back to Washington, D.C. for some of my father's assignments, and that's when I

00:03:21.240 really got to know my grandparents really well.

00:03:23.980 And were there moments when you were, like, was he just grandpa for you, or did you have moments

00:03:29.280 as even as a kid where you realized that, you know, Eisenhower was more than just grandpa?

00:03:34.180 Well, it was a little hard to avoid the fact that he was more than grandpa because my siblings and I

00:03:42.040 had Secret Service protection, so that didn't seem very normal. And to have big guys with big guns

00:03:48.500 following you under the playground isn't exactly normal. But I must say, in retrospect, I look back

00:03:55.360 and I think it was really remarkable how normal a family life we had. And I think that's because

00:04:02.460 there are two simple reasons for it. My father made sure that we didn't, quote unquote, start wearing

00:04:10.320 the boss's stars, end quote. In other words, we were to understand that our grandfather was different

00:04:18.200 and that this conferred nothing on us except a responsibility to be good kids. And then I think

00:04:26.500 the other thing was we were taught to compartmentalize. So I have very strong feelings about him as a

00:04:33.080 grandfather, but I spent my professional career as a policy analyst, and his legacy is everywhere. So I

00:04:39.740 had to learn to be able to think of him separately from being a grandfather. This book is the first time

00:04:47.020 I've put it together in a way. And that was a pretty wild experience.

00:04:52.380 Well, what did you think? Why write this book now? What was it that got you thinking,

00:04:57.140 I need to write? Because you've written a biography of your grandmother, Eisenhower's wife.

00:05:01.120 What made you decide to go in and write a biography of Eisenhower, particularly how he's led?

00:05:07.100 Well, first of all, we had the anniversary of the end of World War II in this year. And then

00:05:15.800 in September, the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. is going to be unveiled, dedicated. And then I

00:05:24.180 also thought that, you know, we're in a very highly contentious political time. And I thought it was

00:05:30.620 important for rising generations and for people who don't know Dwight Eisenhower very well

00:05:35.520 to learn something about him in an easy way. But I don't think you have to know a huge amount

00:05:42.480 about the period to be able to understand that there were indeed principles behind the way

00:05:47.460 Eisenhower looked at different situations. And I thought that might be useful right now in this

00:05:54.040 particular environment, political environment.

00:05:56.980 So the way you organize this book, it's a biography, but it's a biography of Eisenhower's leadership style

00:06:01.540 and how he developed it and how it manifested itself in different parts of his career.

00:06:06.400 And you start off the book with this famous note that Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander

00:06:11.360 wrote in World War II on the eve of D-Day. And it was to only be released if his decision to green

00:06:17.920 light the invasion failed. And it said in part, if any blame or fault attaches to the attempt,

00:06:24.900 it is mine alone. Why did you start the book off with this note? And what do you think it tells

00:06:30.240 us about Eisenhower's leadership style?

00:06:32.040 Well, I think the note is an important note. First of all, it wasn't known for a very long

00:06:37.200 time. It came out probably after Ike's death. It's not that it wasn't known. It was already

00:06:42.900 published in Harry Butcher's book called My Three Years with Eisenhower. But somebody found it when

00:06:50.180 reading that book probably 20 years ago and started talking about it a lot. And I think it's because

00:06:55.940 it strikes a chord with us today. We have so many leaders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue

00:07:01.900 who stand up and blame somebody else for mistakes that have occurred. But this was not Eisenhower's

00:07:09.060 way. And I dare say that, you know, the military is well-schooled to understand that they have to take

00:07:14.760 responsibility. There's something at West Point called the no excuses. He took responsibility even for

00:07:21.200 the weather forecast in that it was his decision to go at that time. In any case, you see that same

00:07:28.620 willingness to take responsibility throughout his presidency, famously after the U-2, this is an aerial

00:07:35.540 reconnaissance airplane was shot down over the Soviet Union in May of 1960. He took full responsibility for

00:07:44.040 the fact that he'd ordered that overflight. And many of his advisors were asking him to continue

00:07:50.200 to say that, you know, come up with something that would be what we call today plausible deniability.

00:07:58.860 But Eisenhower wanted to make sure the Soviet Union knew that he was in charge and that there was no

00:08:03.360 ambiguity about who made orders there within the administration. And then finally, the Suez crisis,

00:08:10.320 which actually was in 1956, that whole crisis emerged just as voters were going to the polling booth.

00:08:16.960 And he said to my father that if the, you know, if the Suez crisis goes south, he guesses he'll lose

00:08:24.860 the election. But there we are. So there was a kind of fatalism marked with a strong belief that there

00:08:30.840 were no excuses. So let me just, Brett, let me just leave you with something that I find rather

00:08:36.480 wonderful. He once said, leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that

00:08:42.120 goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.

00:08:47.020 That's hard to do. A lot of, I mean, but how did he deal with like the burdens of that? Like,

00:08:53.380 how did he, I mean, that's, people don't like doing it because it feels terrible to take responsibility

00:08:57.940 for failure, particularly failures where like you weren't directly involved. Like, you know,

00:09:02.700 he was a big delegator. So he only focused on high level strategy and he would delegate

00:09:08.440 the sort of the tactical things to the people who are working with them beneath them. So how,

00:09:15.700 I mean, how did he, how did he deal with taking responsibility for stuff that he might not have

00:09:20.040 had any direct influence on? Well, you can't, you can't mobilize those you delegate to if they don't

00:09:28.740 feel like the leader has their back. And that's what I think that that sentence about leadership

00:09:34.800 is that if you don't give them the credit and take the responsibility, then, then you don't have

00:09:41.780 a system that will accommodate delegation. Now, the reason delegation is important is somebody's got

00:09:49.720 to be the strategic leader. And part of the reason my book is so oriented towards strategic leadership

00:09:55.080 is we simply don't have it anymore. We're like political day traders and we can't figure out what

00:10:02.040 we're really trying to accomplish, what our timeline is and what, and how we're going to get from where

00:10:08.900 we are today to address those longer term goals. So I think that's just inevitable. If you're going to

00:10:16.460 delegate is you have to, you have to give people the knowledge that they will be able to do their jobs.

00:10:24.560 And yeah, that idea that, you know, people who, that Eisenhower led that they felt that they had,

00:10:30.060 that he had their back. I mean, you talk about these, in these instances where soldiers would

00:10:34.380 say basically like, I would do anything for you. Like there was a time when later in his life,

00:10:38.120 when he was having problems with his heart, you had, there was people writing letters saying,

00:10:42.560 I'll, I'll give you my, my still alive heart as a heart transplant so you can live.

00:10:47.940 Isn't that amazing? I mean, I remember when it happened, I was,

00:10:51.960 I would say I was tangentially part of that conversation. The doctor came out and said that

00:10:56.380 they had received all these, you know, all of these offers. And, you know, I compared this

00:11:01.260 against my brother's memory and, and yes, that is indeed absolutely correct. And, you know, it's,

00:11:07.080 it's, it's very moving, but you know, they, the bond that I had with his soldiers was one of trust.

00:11:13.480 And if he wasn't willing to take the responsibility, even for their failure, then how could they trust him?

00:11:20.240 And what, you mentioned that Eisenhower, he thought strategically, he was thinking big picture.

00:11:24.760 He was playing the, the 10,000 foot, you know, level game while everyone else was playing,

00:11:30.520 you know, there's thinking about the next quarter, the next year. Where do you, where did he develop

00:11:34.480 that, that mindset? Do you think? Well, it's interesting. He displayed his interest in bigger

00:11:41.120 picture studies when he was a kid, he grew up on a farm in Abilene, Kansas. And, you know,

00:11:49.060 his parents were surviving just financially. He always said that we were poor, but didn't know it.

00:11:56.980 In any case, he, he would do, I wouldn't call it daydreaming, but he was obsessed about history

00:12:01.940 and the family was very well educated. As a matter of fact, Ike's mother, my great grandmother,

00:12:08.900 actually went to college and they could read ancient Greek and Latin, which is pretty amazing

00:12:14.640 for those days as farm family. But Ike was always reading history books and he was fascinated by

00:12:21.500 what these great historical figures were trying to accomplish and why did they make the decisions

00:12:27.720 they did? And in, in making those decisions, how much information did they have when they made those

00:12:33.040 decisions? And I, I think it's, it's fascinating that an interest in that, uh, would extend all the

00:12:39.600 way, you know, as a lifetime, as a lifetime undertaking. Yeah. That's something people

00:12:45.280 don't know about Eisenhower is that how educated he was and how, you know, deeply and well-read he was.

00:12:51.780 And there was moments where you talk about where he would say, like when he was a president of

00:12:55.420 Columbia, he just surprised people with just lectures about, you know, military history going

00:13:00.800 all the way back to Alexander the Great. And professors were just baffled because they just thought

00:13:04.880 of Eisenhower was just this army guy who, you know, smiled and waved and that was it.

00:13:10.760 Well, you know, what's interesting about this, and this is the reason I felt it was pretty important

00:13:15.500 to include the leadership traits he developed during the war and to take that into the presidency

00:13:21.740 because the biographers tend to fall into two categories, uh, the presidential biographers of

00:13:28.020 Eisenhower and the wartime biographers of Eisenhower. And then there are some books that try to put it

00:13:33.820 all together. But again, if it's done chronologically, they end up being very, very big books. But I do

00:13:39.320 think that, you know, there is a consistency about the way he thinks and about the way he approaches

00:13:45.520 issues. So I think the Eisenhower who is general and the Eisenhower is president are one in the same

00:13:54.140 person, which is why as a kid, I could never understand why people said he was a do nothing

00:13:59.380 president. And he didn't know, you know, that he, you know, was not on top of things when this was

00:14:06.180 the guy who, you know, ended Nazism for the Western Alliance. I, I just could never figure that out even

00:14:12.780 as a kid. Right. Well, yeah, so going back to sort of the popular image we have of Eisenhower sort of

00:14:17.200 this, you know, especially as, as president, you know, the sunny, friendly, grandfatherly character

00:14:22.360 who played golf. And we'll, we'll, we'll talk about what he was actually doing, um, as president when

00:14:27.420 people that that's all he was doing. But you mentioned that you talk about throughout the

00:14:31.800 book, he, he grappled with inner struggles, particularly anger ever since he was a boy.

00:14:37.240 What was his anger like? Was it like short, like instead of a short temper that he just, uh, just

00:14:43.500 dwell on things, get resentful. What was that like? Well, it's interesting as a kid, he, he really did

00:14:49.180 have a temper and he admitted that he would have occasional meltdowns and then be disciplined by his

00:14:55.760 father and counseled by his mother. I think part of it was, if you ever read the full set of his

00:15:01.180 diaries and also his letters to Mamie Eisenhower, you know, his wife, my grandmother, you will see

00:15:07.860 there a very, very passionate nature. And as a kid, he felt the sense of injustice very strongly, but he

00:15:15.900 had a very passionate nature. And so he had to learn how to control what I'd call his inner landscape,

00:15:21.760 his inner resources. And he had, his mother really made the case after one particularly frightening

00:15:30.080 experience where he had, as we call it a meltdown because his two older brothers were allowed to go

00:15:35.840 out and trick or treat and he wasn't. And, and she really talked to him very quietly about what this was

00:15:41.920 doing to him and it wasn't hurting anybody else. It was hurting him. And he always remembered that.

00:15:47.620 And so he started developing tricks and some of the tricks were actually rather sophisticated and I

00:15:54.180 like them. I use them myself sometimes. He would, for instance, keep a diary that now that's very

00:16:00.340 important. He was a diarist his whole life. So he blew off steam on the written page. In addition to

00:16:05.880 being a diarist, he would write whatever it was that was bothering him on a piece of paper. Then he'd

00:16:12.200 crumple up the piece of paper and he'd throw it away. So this was actually a rather artful way of

00:16:18.280 getting the anger inside out and on a piece of paper. Then it suddenly becomes depersonalized.

00:16:25.720 And I, I think it's a very smart idea. I do have to laugh about it though, because he did this during

00:16:32.660 the White House years and then he'd throw these crumpled up pieces of paper into a lower drawer in his

00:16:38.060 desk. And it was a responsibility of his secretary to go in and clean out the crumpled up pieces of

00:16:43.860 paper. I swear she had to have a security clearance in order to be able to do that because she more than 1.00

00:16:49.180 anybody knew who he was upset with that day. And then the other idea he had is that he would put the

00:16:56.720 problem on a chair and get up and walk around it. But as you can see, there is a theme here, which is

00:17:03.180 getting this anger out of you, out of you inside and depersonalizing it. So I think a lot of people,

00:17:12.940 you know, would benefit from knowing that there was a very powerful person who found these tools useful.

00:17:20.320 Besides anger, did he ever get discouraged or get depressed? I mean, there's a lot of things during

00:17:25.520 his career he could get discouraged or depressed about during the war and later on in his presidency.

00:17:29.460 Well, I don't think he'd be a human being if he hadn't been depressed and concerned at times. But

00:17:34.820 he thought that morale was an input, not an output. In other words, people have to feel good about

00:17:41.080 things and have a sense of morale in going into any challenge and not just the result of being

00:17:46.820 victorious. And I think this is really true. Pessimism at the top is very infectious. So who wants

00:17:54.900 to go into battle with somebody who doesn't have confidence in the mission? So he made it, as he

00:18:01.940 said in his diaries, a lifelong commitment to try and stay optimistic in front of everybody else all

00:18:10.760 the time. So during this dire moment during the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, when the

00:18:15.780 Germans have finally managed to launch what looked like it was a successful offensive, Eisenhower comes 0.99

00:18:22.420 into the room and says to his commanders, there will be no long faces in this room. He says, do you

00:18:27.600 realize what the Germans have just done? They've given us an opening. For the first time, they're 0.99

00:18:31.820 showing us their faces. So let's go. You know, that sort of twist on the thing that worried everybody

00:18:39.740 most, you know, turns out to be the thing that inspires confidence. If the commander has it.

00:18:45.180 It took a lot of personal discipline, Brett. I really have to say that I'm full of admiration

00:18:52.500 for that because I struggle as a professional myself all the time and try very hard to show

00:19:00.000 this optimism, but it isn't always so easy. Yeah. And something he noted as well, besides being

00:19:04.780 optimistic, you know, Eisenhower was very adamant about leaders. If they have personal problems,

00:19:10.140 personal issues, they got to take care of that privately. And that's kind of counter to what

00:19:14.780 you see today, where it's like, if you have a problem, just show it, like emote it, express it

00:19:20.400 and, you know, see people, you kind of, you put it out there on social media. That wouldn't be what

00:19:25.040 Eisenhower would have done. Absolutely not. It's called too much information. And I think what it's

00:19:31.560 done is somebody's making it everybody else's problem too. And that would be counter to personal

00:19:38.460 responsibility. You, you've got to, you've got, as I say, you've got to keep your own landscape and

00:19:42.920 good, in good order. You did ask me a minute ago, what did his temper look like when, when it came

00:19:49.180 across him? I always thought as a kid, it was like a thunderstorm, you know, and I didn't see it that

00:19:55.200 much, I have to say, but it was like a thunderstorm because he would get angry. I mean, his associates told

00:20:01.680 me this and then it would, it would pass, you know, and he didn't hold grudges. So nobody really

00:20:07.380 worried about it. They observed it occasionally, but they didn't worry about it because if they had

00:20:12.660 made a mistake, he, or, or if they had let him down in some way that was more personal,

00:20:18.460 he just didn't hold grudges. And I think, you know, some of that is self-discipline too, but some

00:20:24.460 of it is back to, you know, the state of your insides. Is it toxic in there? Are you allowing

00:20:33.100 all this negative energy to build up or are you finding another way to deal with it so that you

00:20:38.060 can move on? And one thing that you stress throughout the book, one of, an important part

00:20:43.360 of Eisenhower's leadership style, yes, he was a big picture strategist and he was able to see

00:20:47.940 and play the long game. But something else that gets overlooked about Eisenhower was that he was,

00:20:53.060 he had, he had really good people skills. I think one of his strengths was he knew

00:20:57.240 how to read people and how he understood what people needed. And he was very attuned to people's

00:21:04.200 needs and wants. Well, I think that is. And I think he, he got that trait from his mother,

00:21:09.420 who was an extremely empathetic person. I mean, she was very religious. As a matter of fact,

00:21:15.500 few people realized that he grew up in a pacifist household. She had been born and raised just after

00:21:21.960 the civil war in Virginia and saw the horrors of, of that war and made a determination that she was

00:21:30.300 never going to support war of any kind. So she was, she was very empathetic. And I would say that the

00:21:36.780 one thing, wonderful thing he had from his childhood is that he had a mother who was empathetic and

00:21:42.960 focused on cooperation and optimism. And he had a father who took care of the discipline end of things.

00:21:50.300 And, and, and so for many reasons, not the least of which, uh, he had this, this team of

00:21:59.120 his parents that, that brought different sides to his personality. And, you know, he had some,

00:22:05.040 all of his brothers were extremely successful too, but I think the, the empathy was one of

00:22:09.860 Eisenhower's biggest traits. It's the one I admire because I think when you're making decisions at this

00:22:16.240 level, uh, it would be so easy to become hard and cynical, but he never allowed himself that at all,

00:22:25.000 at all. I never saw any evidence of it. Yeah. And during the war, you know, he's all often asking

00:22:30.740 when they're making decisions, like, what would this look like to the other guy? How would the other guy

00:22:35.120 take this? And it got him into trouble, not trouble, but it frustrated, uh, some of his American

00:22:40.760 colleagues, cause he was trying to reach out to British allies and work with them and cooperate

00:22:47.440 with them. And when there was people on the American side, which is like, no, we want to do our thing,

00:22:52.680 forget about the British, but Eisenhower made it, he was very adamant that we have to, we have to work

00:22:57.880 with these guys too, and make sure that they're getting what they need as well with any operation

00:23:02.900 that we do. Well, he really believed in alliances and he was the first Supreme allied commander

00:23:09.780 in, in, uh, warfare during world war two or sorry, during the first world war, everybody

00:23:16.580 managed their own troops, but there was nobody that integrated all of the, all the forces. And so this

00:23:23.960 was, this was a very, very new concept also to integrate the British with the Americans and to have

00:23:30.820 French forces under his command. It just had never been done before. And he would not have been able

00:23:36.540 to keep that alliance together if he hadn't been able to stand back and look at this joint effort

00:23:43.740 from other people's point of view. There was a lot of national pride involved. There was a very big

00:23:49.400 difference in how each of these nations looked at strategy, the concepts behind strategy. And he also

00:23:55.180 had to deal with a type personalities who had very strong views about the righteousness of their own

00:24:03.160 positions. So this, this looking at it from the other guy's point of view was a self-educating way

00:24:09.400 to say, you know what, I, it might be more productive to use this tool in my toolbox rather than another.

00:24:16.280 And what I learned from him in this is that not every fight is worth it to concentrate on the fights

00:24:22.920 that are pivotal at his level and to make sure that everybody feels like they're heard.

00:24:28.700 So another issue or big decision Eisenhower faced as Supreme Allied Commander was towards the end of

00:24:35.080 the war when they started discovering the concentration camps. What was his response? How did he decide,

00:24:41.820 how did he implement sort of his higher level strategy thinking on what to do with this issue?

00:24:46.800 Well, one of the major issues for the impending victorious Allied forces was how Germany was going

00:24:56.180 to be treated after the war. And the shocking discovery of the internment camps, the death camps really

00:25:04.740 sent a shiver throughout Allied forces. Eisenhower liberated Ordruf, which was a sub camp of Buchenwald and

00:25:12.820 was just overcome. Actually, I think he kept his counsel. It was the scene was so bad that George

00:25:20.580 Patton was unable to go through parts of the camp for fear of getting sick. And the smell apparently was

00:25:27.100 just absolutely overwhelming. So Eisenhower looked at all this. And I think this is one of the remarkable

00:25:32.840 things about this story. He, he sort of instantly understood that unless this Holocaust was chronicled,

00:25:40.440 that 50 years from now, people would say it never happened. That night, he gets back to Patton's

00:25:46.540 headquarters and he writes to Marshall immediately and says, I want you to bring all of the reporters

00:25:52.900 you can send from the United States, members of Congress. And then everybody who was close to any of

00:25:59.760 those camps was ordered to go through them and to take photographs and, and take eyewitness,

00:26:05.340 eyewitness, uh, assessments of what was going on there. My own father, as a matter of fact,

00:26:10.860 went to Buchenwald. He was an amateur photographer and, and made a whole photo album of these atrocities

00:26:18.280 for precisely the same reason. I was raised on those photographs and even my own grandchildren have seen

00:26:23.800 them a terrible, terrible time. And what was interesting too, is, is Eisenhower made sure that

00:26:29.780 the German people, like in the villages that were nearby these camps, they, he made them come and 1.00

00:26:35.660 look at it and see what was going on underneath their noses. Well, he more than had them come

00:26:40.080 look at it. He made them give the victims of the Holocaust a dignified burial. And I think it was

00:26:46.540 deeply, deeply shattering for many people who turned a blind eye to what was going on.

00:26:52.340 Ike had absolutely no patience for the military who said they didn't know this was going on because

00:26:57.300 in his view, it was willful denial. And one of the big jobs, uh, during this particular period in the,

00:27:04.500 you know, the last weeks of, of the war was to make sure that as we liberated areas that we were

00:27:09.840 never seen to be adopting anything like the same tactics that the Germans did. I, what I mean there 0.94

00:27:16.400 is that we did not look like we had come as a conqueror and we were also holding these people

00:27:22.100 in detention. So that became a very challenging thing to make sure that the victims of the

00:27:27.760 Holocaust understood that friends had arrived and that they would be treated with a dignity henceforth

00:27:33.740 and, and their needs would be met to the extent that it was humanly possible at this stage of the

00:27:39.760 proceedings. And along with this, this was a thing that he had to balance as well as the one hand he had

00:27:45.140 a, he had a, he wanted to hold accountable the German people for what happened in their country.

00:27:50.020 But at the same time, Eisenhower, this thing, he wanted to move on. He thought he was thinking he

00:27:53.820 was very future oriented. So how did he do that? How did he hold people accountable at the same time?

00:27:59.680 Like, you know, not holding this grudge on them permanently forever where they could never move

00:28:04.300 on and, and, and go on to better things. Well, there was sort of a, a multifaceted way of looking

00:28:09.900 at this war criminals had to be held accountable. Those who said that they didn't know, no, but had

00:28:16.280 every prospect of knowing given where they were located, they too were dealt with in a certain

00:28:21.140 way. The German population itself not only was forced to give a dignified burial to those who

00:28:27.900 died, but in many cases, their housing was requisitioned for victims of the Holocaust to

00:28:34.580 live there for a time. And then, and then finally, I guess the United States army put together a video of

00:28:42.420 these atrocities and made many, many Germans see this film. I mean, they had to understand 0.97

00:28:47.920 what they did or what was done in their names in order to begin that period of renewal. Then after

00:28:54.360 that, of course, it was probably higher policy as well to assure that former Nazis were not running 0.95

00:29:00.720 the new government in Germany at any level. And, and then of course, the big work of establishing

00:29:07.880 NATO and eventually bringing West Germany into NATO in 1955 is another threshold moment. I would just 0.58

00:29:15.160 say here, Brett, which is really amazing and symbolic, but on exactly the 10th anniversary of

00:29:22.580 the Germans' unconditional surrender, the Eisenhower administration, Dwight Eisenhower himself,

00:29:28.080 brought Germany, West Germany into NATO. And we, as one German described it to me, that we held them

00:29:35.120 in our iron embrace until in fact, that country became a prosperous democracy. And eventually,

00:29:42.400 of course, in 1989, 90, you could say that World War II was finally over for Germany.

00:29:49.240 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:29:53.460 And now back to the show. So after the war, Eisenhower, he was, did something, he was president

00:29:59.440 of Columbia University. And all during this time, he was, there's lots of people pushing for him to

00:30:05.000 run for president. And he kept on telling them, no, I don't, I don't want that job. Leave me alone.

00:30:09.440 Quit asking me. What finally pushed him over the edge and caused him to throw his hat into the ring

00:30:15.860 and run for president? Well, I think it's pretty clear. Eisenhower was very worried about the fact that

00:30:23.340 the country was still on war footing. By this time, we're in the middle of a war in Korea. And he did 0.76

00:30:30.100 not believe in small wars. He didn't believe that it was in our national security interest to bleed

00:30:37.900 ourselves dry in terms of human capital and also financial expense. And he went to Korea right after

00:30:46.540 he became the president elect to see what the situation was there and eventually brought about

00:30:53.500 the armistice and in, in that summer. But that Korean war played a role in his decision to run

00:31:01.180 for president, just as the deteriorating financial situation, a lot of labor unrest after the war.

00:31:07.960 But I think the, probably the most important thing was, is it looked like there was a prospect that

00:31:12.840 the Republicans might win, uh, the 1952 election in that Harry Truman's popularity ratings were very

00:31:21.380 low. And if that were to happen, the isolationist wing of the Republican party would have come to

00:31:26.680 power. I believe that we could never go back to the way it was between the first war and the second

00:31:32.500 war. And so I think if Robert Taft, who was the key Senator, Mr. quote unquote, Mr. Republican,

00:31:40.440 who was destined to get that nomination, if, if Robert Taft had agreed to support NATO and America's

00:31:48.540 internationalist role in the world, Ike probably would not have run. He certainly had other plans

00:31:54.900 for himself after the war, but Robert Taft refused to support NATO. He had no liking for the United

00:32:01.100 Nations at all. He was against a lot of foreign aid and other things that Eisenhower thought were

00:32:05.840 crucial. So in fact, Eisenhower decides that he's going to run. And it was a dramatic thing. It's

00:32:13.040 one of those turning points, certainly for the future of the Republican party. And as it turned

00:32:18.660 out for the United States of America. And that was a big decision because to run for president,

00:32:23.480 he had to give up his commission as general. Yes, he did. And he had to give up his commission for

00:32:29.280 sure. And his longtime valet from World War II, who was still with him, reacted to the general's

00:32:37.320 news that he had given up his commission. And since he might or might not win the presidency,

00:32:42.480 his valet was free to find another job. And the valet, wonderful man named John Money said to his

00:32:48.960 boss, he said, you know, we've been together for a long time. And if you don't win the election,

00:32:53.820 I think the two of us can probably find a job somewhere else. Sergeant Money, a wonderful,

00:33:00.880 wonderful man, was the only African-American or the first African-American to be a pallbearer at

00:33:06.740 a president's funeral. And he's, he and his family are, he's long gone, but his family are still close

00:33:12.700 to mine. So Eisenhower gets elected president and he ran on the Republican ticket, won on the Republican

00:33:19.800 with the Republican party. But it didn't seem like he was much of a partisan. How would you describe

00:33:25.360 his governing style as president of the United States? Well, Brad, I think it's, it's, you could

00:33:31.920 argue that Eisenhower was the most nonpartisan president since George Washington or one of the

00:33:38.200 other military leaders, perhaps. He's certainly more nonpartisan than Ulysses S. Grant. But the,

00:33:45.420 I think the, the key here is that he had his difficulties with the Republican party in the

00:33:52.100 first term. And in the second term, he had some difficulty with the Democrats. So in a way you could

00:33:57.100 argue that he crafted his middle way pretty effectively because both sides, or I should say

00:34:04.900 the extreme wings of both parties, you know, felt quite skeptical about his governance. He had an

00:34:11.880 enormous popularity rating though, during his two terms, he averaging a mid to high sixties for his

00:34:18.740 two terms in office. Part of it was, I think how he organized the white house and he organized it

00:34:24.380 in some ways, very much like he organized a war effort. He surrounded himself by diverse viewpoints

00:34:30.980 and he wanted pushback. He thought that was the way he could understand the, the complexity and the

00:34:38.720 dimensions of any particular issue he wanted. Um, he would have a cabinet meeting once a week and all

00:34:45.660 cabinet members had to come, uh, to those meetings fully briefed on whatever the topic was, even if

00:34:51.080 it was outside of their own agency. And he would referee the debates and make sure that, uh, he

00:34:58.820 understood all the viewpoints. He had not only, you know, uh, conservative Republicans in his cabinet,

00:35:04.220 but also all the way through the spectrum to Democrats, a couple of Democrats. And after he

00:35:09.500 heard this vigorous debate, then he would go into his office and make a decision. After that, uh, there

00:35:15.300 would be a special unit at the white house that was there to implement the decisions and to make sure

00:35:21.200 everybody followed, you know, the decisions that the president had made. I think he also held a press

00:35:27.060 conference once a week because he thought it was important to retain his visibility with the public

00:35:33.040 and for them to understand what was going on at the white house and why he was handling things a

00:35:37.580 certain way. I think it's just important to add here. Finally, is that you can have all the greatest

00:35:43.400 strategy in the world, but if you don't have an organization, not only to pursue rigorously the facts

00:35:49.940 wherever they might lead, but also to implement the president's decisions and to make sure that a

00:35:54.780 diverse set of viewpoints are considered. It won't, you know, you can't, you can't exercise a

00:36:02.840 strategy without that kind of infrastructure. And unfortunately that whole system was dismantled

00:36:08.400 after his administration. Yeah. I mean, this is a sort of, you've seen a continuation of his

00:36:14.000 leadership style that he developed as a general, you know, he had, uh, he was only concerning himself

00:36:19.920 with the high level strategic thinking. And then he made sure that there was an organization in

00:36:24.180 place beneath that to take care and make sure everything else that a strategy gets, gets put into

00:36:29.580 action. That's right. And of course, delegation plays a huge role in that. He, he was almost a

00:36:34.880 genius at figuring out how much leeway people could be given. In other words, which, which individuals

00:36:41.780 struggle a little bit more to, to think about how to tackle an issue and the rest of it. Uh, and those

00:36:48.520 who he knew were brilliant and could, uh, carry on with the administration's viewpoint in mind.

00:36:54.560 So, and I think another key, of course, to delegation is to, uh, protect, you know, to have

00:37:01.640 the back of the people you've delegated to. Yeah. We, we talked about that earlier. He did that in

00:37:06.580 the military. He took responsibility for the failures and he let. Exactly. Quite rightly too.

00:37:12.160 Yeah. Well, and another interesting thing about the, um, office of the president of the United States,

00:37:17.340 I don't think a lot of people understand or realize is that the president of the United States has

00:37:22.000 two roles. First, he's, he's a politician. Like he's there to, to implement policy or to execute

00:37:26.800 policy. But on the other hand, he's also a figurehead for the entire country. Like in other

00:37:31.940 countries, like say in England, like the queen is the figurehead. And then you have the prime

00:37:35.180 ministers doing the, the, the dirty politics. Right. But in the president, those, those things are

00:37:40.360 in one, and there can be, sometimes there's contradictory, they contradict each other. Eisenhower

00:37:46.240 somehow was able to resolve those conflicting roles in the presidency. How do you think he did that?

00:37:52.000 Well, first of all, actually, I would say there are probably three different roles. Uh, one would

00:37:56.960 be head of state, one would be head of the executive branch, and the other would be head of the,

00:38:01.040 your political party. And it's been very hard for some presidents to reconcile these contradictory

00:38:07.540 roles. Eisenhower believed that unity of purpose or to unite the country behind a set of policies is

00:38:15.140 what he called the middle way. And to do that, he had to, to serve as the figure that could bring

00:38:20.540 everybody together. He was not though disconnected from his role as chief executive or as head of his

00:38:28.680 party, but he didn't, he didn't display that as much as other presidents had, because he thought

00:38:34.940 that that would be at cross purposes with the larger goal of uniting the country. As today, we see

00:38:41.020 presidents who are largely parties or those that combine that with being a chief executive. But this

00:38:48.820 idea of being the uniter, at least in the public perception, uh, is not something that, uh, we've

00:38:56.320 seen too much of since his era. So he was, he's still, he was still doing politics, but he did it in the

00:39:01.540 background. Yeah, he did it where, where that it was, it was out of sight. And actually, Brad, I would say

00:39:08.080 that's probably one of the reasons why his leadership style has been misunderstood for so long

00:39:12.700 because we're so used to valuing the bully pulpit, but Eisenhower really believed that the bully pulpit

00:39:21.340 could be useful at some times, but it could be counterproductive in meeting goals if it was used

00:39:27.200 at the wrong time. So he developed an idea about, uh, not, not singling out personalities, not turning

00:39:34.820 issues into personality, uh, confrontations, uh, because this way it'd be very, very hard not only

00:39:42.320 to unite the country, but secondly, of course, to get that person ever to cooperate with you or his

00:39:48.860 allies. Today, we see that we've become so tribalized that, uh, this exchange of insults only hardens

00:39:56.780 the bases of these political parties. And that's something that I wanted to avoid. In any case,

00:40:03.620 this was his strategy. Uh, maybe I'm not going to say it was unique to him, but it certainly was out of

00:40:10.620 sight for many people. And so we still see today many people who analyze his presidency and think

00:40:17.960 that he wasn't involved in issues that he was deeply involved in just in a behind the scenes way.

00:40:24.440 Well, speaking of this idea that he had about just dealing with people and governing of this idea of

00:40:29.340 never dealing with personalities, he had to deal with this in his first term because in his own

00:40:34.140 party, there's a guy, Joseph McCarthy, who was stirring up trouble, accusing people of, of communism

00:40:40.260 and Eisenhower had to deal with it because it was causing problems within his own party and

00:40:44.120 preventing him to get stuff done. But as you said, he didn't go after McCarthy directly. He did this

00:40:50.180 sort of kind of behind the scenes thing to, to manage him. Well, there are two, two reasons for

00:40:56.340 that, uh, strategically. First of all, the president of the United States cannot censure a member of the

00:41:03.940 United States Senate or the house of representatives. We have three co-equal branches of government.

00:41:09.180 So it would not be analogous to comparisons that are made with, uh, any of our leaders today who one

00:41:15.420 side of the other thinks is, uh, you know, it's using demagogic, uh, arguments because as a co-equal

00:41:22.120 branch of government, which was the Senate, only the Senate could censure Joseph McCarthy. And actually

00:41:28.860 the Senate supported Joseph McCarthy. And this was the president's own political party. So he had to,

00:41:35.820 he had to use surgery rather than you might say, you know, bombardment of this particular problem

00:41:42.400 because his own party needed to, you know, survive, uh, this really toxic confrontation that McCarthy

00:41:51.500 had, had begun. Now, the other thing about McCarthy is that he was a junior Senator. He wasn't, uh,

00:41:57.520 in the leadership at all. And so Eisenhower decided as a, as a second way of looking at this is that he

00:42:04.740 would not give McCarthy the thing that McCarthy wanted most. Joseph McCarthy wanted to be elevated

00:42:10.880 to a level where he could be in a direct dialogue with the president of the United States because

00:42:17.980 he had presidential ambitions of his own. And Ike said, I'm going to deprive this guy of the one

00:42:23.460 thing he wants most, which is to engage the office of the presidency in an unworthy debate about, um,

00:42:32.080 you know, these, uh, many fallacious accusations that McCarthy made. Uh, and so, uh, today, you know,

00:42:38.640 there is some resonance to that, but still Eisenhower's own handling of this is still not

00:42:43.400 understood because the third pillar of his strategy was to work behind the scenes with members of the

00:42:49.640 Republican party to make them understand that this, the activities of Senator McCarthy were toxic,

00:42:58.460 unjustified, and very possibly ultimately damaging for the party itself. And, and, uh, it turned out to

00:43:06.300 be the case. The army McCarthy hearings at the end of this drama revealed McCarthy for who he was and

00:43:12.680 the Senate finally censured the Senator. But this idea that the president of the United States could

00:43:18.100 have done anything to stop McCarthy is just wrong. It was up to the Senate colleagues and he worked,

00:43:23.940 Eisenhower worked very adroitly behind the scenes to help them understand that, uh, they had to take

00:43:28.920 measures. And I imagine this, this took a lot of, I mean, all throughout his presidency, he had this,

00:43:33.560 he was very principled in this middle way and his style of governing. And I'm sure he was getting

00:43:38.520 pressured all the time, you know, saying you need to, you need to confront McCarthy directly. You need

00:43:43.080 to, you know, hit the bully pulpit and say that, you know, but he had to resist that pressure all

00:43:47.620 throughout his presidency. He was under enormous pressure. He was under pressure from people in

00:43:52.380 his administration. He was under pressure from family members. He was under pressure from everybody,

00:43:57.160 but he truly, but he understood he did not have the power or the authority to censure Senator

00:44:04.460 McCarthy. What he had to do is create the condition so that Senator McCarthy's own colleagues would do

00:44:10.200 it. And it took longer than I know he liked, but that's just the reality of our constitutional

00:44:15.520 government. In the meantime, he managed to preserve the integrity of the presidency itself by not

00:44:21.640 quote unquote, getting down into the gutter with that guy and allowing McCarthy to set the rhetorical

00:44:28.860 agenda. Ike usable, he pulpit all right. He just never mentioned Senator McCarthy. He was out giving

00:44:34.480 speeches about, he'd say, you can't fight communism by destroying America or the only, the only, only

00:44:43.380 Americans can hurt America. He really believed that we had a choice about whether or not we were going to 0.97

00:44:50.360 allow this kind of unwarranted accusations to occur. In the meantime, of course, he also had an internal

00:44:58.240 security system as Truman had to actually, you know, make proper investigations. But certainly the

00:45:06.320 McCarthy effort was over the top and out of bounds.

00:45:10.800 So another big issue he faced as president was the Brown versus Board of Education decision in the Supreme

00:45:16.240 Court. And, you know, as the head of the executive branch, his job is to enforce decisions or decisions

00:45:23.300 made by the Supreme Court. But this was an issue that was fraught with a lot of, you know, it was just a

00:45:29.380 really highly contentious issue. How did Eisenhower handle enforcing the Brown versus Board of Education

00:45:35.260 decision? I think if there's one thing about some of the scholarship, not all of it that's out there

00:45:40.120 today that distresses me, it is simply some people interpreting what Eisenhower meant by some very

00:45:47.200 forceful words. I don't know why there's any question about it, but repeatedly from the campaign

00:45:53.060 through the first State of the Union address and on and on, Eisenhower said that his strategy was to

00:46:00.700 desegregate everything that the federal government controlled, which he pretty much accomplished by the

00:46:06.560 end of his eight years. Let's remember that Brown versus Board of Education was a measure that came before

00:46:13.780 the Supreme Court that called for the desegregation of schools. But by this time, Dwight Eisenhower, because he

00:46:22.980 controlled the District of Columbia, had already desegregated Washington, D.C. schools and actually the

00:46:29.680 city, the District of Columbia itself. So this idea that he would do what he could control is what a good

00:46:36.340 strategist would say. This is what I can accomplish in eight years. A change in the hearts and minds of

00:46:42.220 the public in general is going to be a very, very tough row to hoe and it's going to take time. Now, with 1.00

00:46:48.300 respect to Brown versus Board of Education, it was his Supreme Court appointee as chairman, that would be

00:46:54.900 Earl Warren, who was the one who produced that result in the Supreme Court. And Eisenhower had absolutely no

00:47:02.440 problem enforcing a set of, enforcing a Supreme Court decision that he agreed with. I'd like to single out

00:47:10.560 David Nichols' wonderful book called A Matter of Justice, which was really a turning point in the

00:47:16.060 understanding of Eisenhower's policy on civil rights. Let's not also forget that he was the first president

00:47:23.340 since Reconstruction to achieve passing a civil rights bill in 1957.

00:47:28.760 And another thing that was really controversial that he did is he sent in the 101st Airborne. It

00:47:34.720 was in Arkansas, right, to enforce desegregation. 0.83

00:47:37.680 Yes, Eisenhower believed in the idea of the appearance of overwhelming force. That particular

00:47:43.280 decision to send the 101st Airborne came after Governor Falbus refused to enforce Brown versus

00:47:49.540 Board of Education. The president gave Falbus a chance to do the right thing after a meeting. And when

00:47:56.080 Falbus didn't do the right thing and stepped back from the assurances he made the president at that

00:48:01.920 meeting, the 101st Airborne was called into action. What they did was to help escort and protect

00:48:09.680 nine African-American students as they made their way to Central High School for the beginning of the

00:48:16.600 school year. Of course, unfortunately, and this is where the federal government could only do so much,

00:48:22.040 whether or not the schools remained public schools was really up to each state of the union.

00:48:29.440 So unfortunately, the following year, the state took it upon themselves to cancel classes. And,

00:48:37.640 you know, we're still having this struggle. As we know, we do have everything desegregated,

00:48:44.500 but we're still having this terrible struggle. But it is worth noting that Eisenhower used federal

00:48:50.160 forces to protect the African-American youngsters who were being harassed and threatened by a white mob.

00:48:57.260 And again, like, you know, he got criticized because he, people felt that was, he was just

00:49:01.080 overstepping his bounds. It was, you know, tyranny. But at the same time, he was also getting

00:49:05.340 criticized. He got criticized throughout his presidency that he didn't do enough for civil

00:49:09.260 rights as well. And as again, it's sort of like a theme that you see throughout his, you know, even as a

00:49:13.600 general, his career, like he was really committed to this, this principled middle way. And he understood that

00:49:19.700 it wasn't going to make everyone happy.

00:49:21.640 Well, here's the thing about the middle way. In his mind, the middle way was the middle ground

00:49:26.700 where people could come together from both sides and compose their differences and find compromises

00:49:33.480 that would lead to progress. As it is now, we're in a winner and loser situation where we either get

00:49:39.580 everything we want or we don't cooperate. And of course, that's, would have been an anathema to him

00:49:44.880 that progress is key. And that middle way was the area in the middle that could bring people

00:49:51.920 into that place where a progress could be realized. And I think also that it is worth noting that the

00:50:02.260 idea behind a middle way is what I would call devising sustainable strategies. Everybody can have a

00:50:10.660 strategy, but if it isn't sustainable, because it's actually built on something that isn't universally

00:50:16.060 agreed, or at least generally agreed, then it's not sustainable. And then you get thrown back,

00:50:21.940 back on it next time around. Actually, if you look at the things that he undertook in his presidential

00:50:27.900 career, it's remarkable how many of the frameworks he put into place are still with us today.

00:50:34.120 So we talked earlier, part of his leadership strategy or his understanding of leadership

00:50:39.120 was that a leader, he has to take care of personal issues himself because the morale of the people

00:50:46.760 you're leading is often dependent upon what the leader looks like. If they're optimistic,

00:50:51.600 people are going to be optimistic. And that can be lonely because you might want to grouse,

00:50:57.260 you might have just doubts, you might get depressed. So who was Eisenhower's inner circle that he would

00:51:04.920 go to so he could get some support or sort of vent? Because if he couldn't do that with his

00:51:10.820 subordinates, because he was really adamant about keeping that sort of distance between leader and

00:51:16.200 subordinate. Well, let me take the leader and subordinate thing here first. I understand it.

00:51:22.140 He wanted to be in a position to be unencumbered in his relationship with his colleagues and

00:51:31.760 subordinates at work, be unencumbered from the social aspect because of potential for skewing your

00:51:38.940 thinking. So he wanted to come in and have a highly professionalized environment that, you know,

00:51:46.100 was not colored by a social relationship. Let's put it that way. Okay. And so he obviously depended

00:51:53.400 on having friends elsewhere. There were a number of rules in the Eisenhower orbit, and that was that

00:51:59.780 there are no favors to be asked. He told, I mean, I discovered this in the scholarship and in books

00:52:05.840 written by his colleagues, many, many comments about if anybody calls you and says that they're a friend

00:52:11.580 of mine, ignore it, give them no help because we don't do that. Right. So, you know, that of course,

00:52:19.760 you know, to some degree, you know, reflected the fact that of his friends, he wanted them to be

00:52:25.200 friends and not to make the situation more complex. But even ultimately, when somebody has that much

00:52:32.580 power, it's a very distorting thing for a lot of relationships. In the book, I had some fun thinking

00:52:39.100 of the many relationships that get distorted by this kind of power, including one's relationship

00:52:44.400 with one's doctor. And at the end of the day, I think it's just inevitable that anybody in that

00:52:52.760 position of authority is going to be relying pretty much on his family. And that is the inner circle.

00:52:58.580 I benefited from having an older brother who was extremely conservative Republican and a younger

00:53:05.320 brother who was a liberal Republican. So he got lots of pushback and lots of differing advice,

00:53:11.980 even from his own family, not to mention my father, John, who was one of his confidants.

00:53:16.900 Well, that was some of the interesting things about his relationship with his brothers and the

00:53:20.580 discussions they would have via letters. But sometimes they would like spill out into public.

00:53:24.560 You know, he'd get asked at a press conference, your brother Edgar said this and like Eisenhower to be

00:53:29.600 like, well, that's Edgar's opinion. I don't care.

00:53:31.640 Yeah. And in one case, he says, oh, yeah, that's Edgar. He's been criticizing me since I was five

00:53:36.500 years old. I don't know. I enjoyed looking into these letters. I knew Edgar Eisenhower. I mean,

00:53:44.800 he was quite a charismatic character and very sure of his opinion. And, you know, God love him. But

00:53:56.220 he certainly gave his younger brother, the president, a run for his money. And I think at the

00:54:02.940 end of the day, Ike would say that it was helpful, just as he relied on Milton Eisenhower, his younger

00:54:08.160 brother, for, you know, a view of what the liberals were saying and thinking in his party. But at the

00:54:14.360 end of the day, Brett, and I think this is the thing that stood out for me most, he really believed in

00:54:18.880 the privacy of heart and mind. He didn't like fussers and cluckers. And he wanted to go into

00:54:25.940 his quiet space to process what he'd seen, to process what he's hearing, and to make his own

00:54:32.540 decisions. And then he would stick with them and live by them. And I think there's a kind of a

00:54:38.740 maturity that has always stayed with me.

00:54:41.880 Yeah, he took up painting. That was one of the things he did when he was processing information.

00:54:46.280 He'd go and paint a landscape.

00:54:48.440 Well, it has been noted that his landscapes are very serene. As a matter of fact, I have a couple

00:54:54.500 here that he gave me. And they look so calm. And of course, you know that what he was dealing with

00:55:02.340 at the time wasn't calm at all. I have one painting from 1957. He was undoubtedly working on the deployment

00:55:09.380 of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. And the aftermath of the launching of the Soviet

00:55:15.820 Sputnik into space. And you would have no idea from looking at this landscape that that's what

00:55:22.380 was on his mind. But he's very absorbed by color. And like anything else, it's like people get this

00:55:28.660 from playing golf or going out and engaging in athletics or sailing or something. By the time

00:55:34.280 you get back, your brain's been somewhere else and you can think about things more clearly.

00:55:38.780 So we talked about how Eisenhower was sort of aloof from people that he led. But at the same time,

00:55:42.960 he was very interested in people. And you highlight these moments that people had with Eisenhower where

00:55:48.820 you could see he was always thinking about people and their needs and their wants. And he'd just do

00:55:53.880 little small, really thoughtful things that would just floor people because they weren't going to

00:55:59.820 expect that from the president of the United States. Were there any moments like that that really

00:56:04.180 stood out to you? Yes. I'd just like to say one thing first is that I would use a different word

00:56:10.240 than aloof, that he was not engaged socially. In other words, he didn't like to mix business and

00:56:15.980 pleasure would be another way of saying that because it interferes with the way you think about an issue,

00:56:22.760 an issue that needs clarity of thought because of the relationship. You know, there are always

00:56:27.240 complaints that people in government decide, make their decisions based on the last person they've

00:56:33.020 spoken to. Well, he wanted to avoid that kind of a trap. Now, with respect to, I think the thing,

00:56:40.400 and I had an opportunity over the years to do a fair amount in the leadership and strategic leadership

00:56:48.360 area. And character, of course, plays a huge role in any leader's capacity to build a bond of trust with

00:56:55.700 those he's leading. And a huge part of that is how you treat those people. And in this respect,

00:57:03.800 small gestures really matter. I outline in my book so many small things he did that let his men

00:57:12.500 during the war know that he was not, that this wasn't about him. It was about us. Okay. And one of the

00:57:21.080 ways he did that, rather ironically, is he never wore a helmet. I'd almost challenge anybody to find

00:57:27.160 a picture of Ike with a helmet on because he didn't want to pretend he was out there on a day-to-day

00:57:33.160 basis facing the same physical dangers they were, though sometimes he was in some physical danger.

00:57:38.960 You know, he passes up honors and awards that only go to GIs, like the Congressional Medal of Honor,

00:57:45.040 etc. But what I, the gestures I liked the most, or at least I witnessed and therefore was able to write

00:57:52.580 about, were the gestures made to people who couldn't do anything for him. They couldn't vote for him.

00:57:58.240 They couldn't, you know, they couldn't recommend them, recommend him to anybody of any importance.

00:58:05.020 The small gestures he made to kids he'd never met before or GIs who, after the war, made his acquaintance.

00:58:13.060 And it's moving to me because that's what the army calls when no one was looking, right? What are

00:58:19.600 people doing when no one is looking? And I think that, that benchmark is where you can begin to

00:58:25.960 discuss what character really looks like. As you're researching and writing this book,

00:58:31.480 was there anything new that you learned about your grandfather? Well, I'll tell you, Brett, for,

00:58:36.480 I was raised to compartmentalize my grandfather's career from what I knew of him as a grandfather. I've

00:58:42.740 already made that point on numerous occasions because I think it's important to know that I

00:58:48.380 don't expect everyone to agree with his decisions, but I do, I did want to bring something new to this

00:58:57.180 book that I had, you know, insight into, which is, you know, how he handled things and how he thought

00:59:03.360 about things. And so for the first time in my life, I really put it all together. I mean,

00:59:10.260 what I knew of him with his policies. And there were times when I would read somebody's scholarship

00:59:15.580 and they'd, they'd say, well, he did this because, and then I thought, well, no, that wasn't really it

00:59:20.540 because he used to say at the dinner table, dot, dot, dot. Right. So I think, I think I'm not going to

00:59:27.720 say I was surprised by this, but I guess I will always, for as long as I live, will always be

00:59:34.040 in awe of how he handled the burden of this power and this, and, and consequential leadership. And,

00:59:44.140 and in the face of that never became hard or cynical. I just saw no signs of it. And I, I,

00:59:51.320 not only, it's not just me. I mean, if you read the books of his associates, they were,

00:59:56.140 they were all sort of amazed that he could still be an optimistic forward-thinking person after he'd

01:00:03.420 been to some of the darkest places humankind has ever been. And, um, I think part of the way he did

01:00:10.480 that is that he believed in something bigger than himself. This wasn't about him. This is about our

01:00:16.320 country. And it was about securing the peace for a world that had seen catastrophes beyond anything

01:00:23.900 imaginable for today's generation. That is a world war two. And, um, as he once said about this

01:00:31.320 higher cause, he says, a man just has to forget his fortunes and he forgot his fortunes and was able

01:00:39.500 to serve his country. I think in a, certainly a, uh, genuine way and in a way that was, uh, full of

01:00:47.380 dedication and integrity. Well, Susan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn

01:00:52.340 more about the book and your work? Well, I think, uh, probably my website apologies to everybody that

01:00:58.640 it isn't more fulsome than it should be, but a lot of information about the book is on there.

01:01:02.940 That's a www.SusanEisenhower.com. And, uh, I could be followed on Twitter, but I sometimes find myself

01:01:10.880 simply speechless to know what I should be saying about the current situation. I look forward to

01:01:16.720 engaging with anybody. And for those who are interested in a copy of the book, I can be reached

01:01:22.180 through my website and would be happy to get a book plate in the mail.

01:01:26.100 Fantastic. Well, Susan Eisenhower, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

01:01:28.960 Well, I just want to thank you, Brett, for this opportunity. And, uh, you've got a, you've got a,

01:01:33.660 a wonderful website there and I just wish you the best of luck.

01:01:37.920 Thank you so much.

01:01:39.160 Take care.

01:01:40.180 My guest today was Susan Eisenhower. She's the author of the book,

01:01:42.520 How Ike Led. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more

01:01:46.240 information about her work at our website, SusanEisenhower.com. Also check out our show notes

01:01:49.980 at aom.is slash how Ike led, where you can find links to resources, where you delve deeper into

01:01:54.600 this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at

01:02:05.700 artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles

01:02:09.000 we've written over the years, including a series about the leadership style of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

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01:02:46.400 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - March 07, 2022

How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike's Granddaughter

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