The Making of a Supreme Commander — How Eisenhower Became the Leader Who Delivered Victory on D-Day
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Summary
He came from the middle of nowhere, had never led men in battle, spent most of his career as a staff officer, and didn t become general until he was in his 50s. How then did he become the leader on whom the fate of the world would rest? Today, we trace the making of Dwight D. Eisenhower with Michelle Paradis, author of The Light of Battle, a book about D-Day.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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that dwight d eisenhower became supreme commander of the allied forces in europe
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orchestrating the largest amphibious invasion in history on june 6 1944 was far from inevitable
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he came from the middle of nowhere abilene kansas had never led men in battle spent most of his
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career as a staff officer and didn't make general until he was in his 50s how then did he become
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the leader on whom the fate of the world would rest today we trace the making of ike with michelle
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paradis author of the light of battle we talk about how eisenhower's midwestern upbringing shaped his
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character and how his most important education happened outside the classroom michelle shares
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how crucial mentors were in ike's development and how eisenhower made the most of those relationships
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we discuss the books that were most formative in shaping his thinking including what he got for
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we also get into some of the practices eisenhower used to lead effectively including how he
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budgeted his time to maintain his morale while under the pressure of planning d-day and what he did in
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the evening before the invasion to deal with the stress after the show's over check out our show
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notes at aom.is slash supreme commander all right michelle paradis welcome to the show thanks so much
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for having me so you got a book out called the light of battle which is about d-day d-day is one of the
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most studied and written about events in modern history what do you think gets missed in the books
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on d-day and what were you hoping to bring to our understanding of d-day with your book no that's
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exactly right there are so many great books about d-day too that i definitely knew in starting this one
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that i couldn't write just another book about d-day if only because like you know competing with you know
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people like max hastings is going to always be impossible and so you know i to me i think i think
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the thing we missed to answer your question about d-day the thing that fascinated me is not just the
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actual heroism of the men who hit the beaches you know on omaha or on juno but how much went into it
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how much was behind that we think about those 176 000 men who hit the beach in the first day
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you know obviously correctly they are the literal heroes of that story but you know depending on how
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you count it about 2 million people made d-day happen and that kind of collective action right
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that working together for a common goal was essential to d-day's success and that ultimately
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is what drew me especially to eisenhower and obviously there's no lack of historical celebration
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for dwight eisenhower but i also think we almost take him for granted you know there's a book a
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minute about people like you know about churchill about patten about d-day itself but there are
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actually very few serious studies of eisenhower the last you know significant biography certainly
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covering his wartime experience is at least about 10 15 years old now and i just thought that was
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amazing right i couldn't understand that because here you are you have this guy he comes from the
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middle of the country right about as far away from anywhere as you could possibly get which is
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abilene kansas and not only comes to the heights of military leadership in the second world war he
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commands the most complicated and i would argue consequential military operation of that war which
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is d-day and then goes on to be probably one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century the
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first president who we call the leader of the free world and so many i think even admiring takes of
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eisenhower sort of look at him as like this inevitable figure or a boring figure at worst like
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the you know the 50s the mayonnaise on white bread kind of thing and to me i just knew that there was
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something more going on there and so in thinking about d-day and thinking about the heroism of the
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men on the beach on d-day i really wanted to just understand how they got there and how they got
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there in a way to succeed and that took me to dwight eisenhower and that's what i loved about
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the book you get into his personality or try to because he is kind of an enigma he's kind of a
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sphinx character in a lot of ways just kind of this affable smiling guy and i think that's why he gets
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overlooked but you try to paint a picture of him that you know there's a lot going on with this guy
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that's why he was so successful as a commander and later as a president of the united states so let's
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dig into eisenhower and try to figure out like how did this guy manage to carry off one of the biggest
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military invasions in the history of humanity you mentioned he grew up in abilene kansas how do you
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think his kansas upbringing prepared him for his role in world war ii yeah it's i mean he's such a
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fascinating figure like as you say because he's known certainly in his lifetime particularly as
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president as being you know everyone likes ike he's this smiling guy he's sort of almost seen as
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again bland or non-threatening and yet he is probably you know responsible literally for the
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deaths of millions of germans and one of the most i think cunning and in some ways ruthless military
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and political figures of the 20th century but it's all concealed around this very sort of bland
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deceptively bland i would say packaging of smiling ike and a lot of that traces to his upbringing in
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kansas and there are a couple things that i think shape him you know he's born in 1890 which is sometimes
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celebrated as the year the west was closed and he grows up in abilene which had been a you know a cow
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town from the wild west but by that point had become a fairly reserved very religiously oriented
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community around the river brethren and his family his father's family was a very prominent religious
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family and farming family but his own father was a you know a complicated guy he wasn't a drinker but
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he was definitely abusive and even for the time i would say abusive you know late 1800s kansas and so
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eisenhower grows up in this community in the middle of kansas which emphasizes a certain kind of you know
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humility you know if you talk to anyone from kansas the most important thing to let you know is well
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kansas is nothing to talk about you know we're just we're just humble people from the plane and so
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that sense of eisenhower of being in a way self-effacing is right out of kansas right everyone
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in kansas recognizes that but i think the other things he gets from growing up in his very unique
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circumstances is one a a real burning desire to see the rest of the world i don't know that he travels
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more than about 100 miles or so before he ends up enrolling in west point when he's 19 years old
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and as the middle child of a fairly low income large family he just has this itch to want to see
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the absolute rest of the world and that leads him to cultivate all sorts of mentors both in abilene
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and then really for the rest of his life it's probably one of his greatest skills as a sort of a man in
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development is that he looks for people who seem to have figured something out that he wants to know
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and he gloms on to them and tries to learn from them in a really intimate way and in kansas one of
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his first mentors is the publisher of the local democrat newspaper uh the dickinson news and he
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just goes to this guy's newspaper shop uh hangs out there after school typically with some friends
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and you know this publisher sees an eisenhower curiosity and eisenhower wants to know what's going
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on in the rest of the world and so this guy starts just giving eisenhower books to read
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and one of eisenhower's favorite or the one that makes the biggest imprint on him is the life of
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hannibal now when i said eisenhower is the middle child of a very large low-income family that's also
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a religiously pacifist family his father and his mother are part of a movement called the bible
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students which we now know is the jehovah's witnesses but we're a much more how would you say
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mystical movement at the turn of the 20th century and his religiously pacifist mother is not at all
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impressed when he brings home the life of hannibal and in fact confiscates it from him and puts it
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away in her closet and as eisenhower sort of tells the story later he would wait until she was out in
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the garden you know culling some of the crops and he would sneak into her closet like he was looking
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for the playboy and read the life of hannibal sort of in secret and just became fascinated by really in
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love with a kind of military heroism a kind of manly figure and the thing he would always say about
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hannibal in particular is that he knew from the time he was a young boy that hannibal was one of
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the greatest generals in all of history because he was recounted as such but only ever by his enemies
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there are no extant tracks or histories by the carthaginians of hannibal's exploits only those
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written by the romans and to eisenhower the fact that someone could be so compelling as a figure so
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powerful as a general so brilliant so so heroic as to go down in history that way when the only
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people writing about you are the enemies who fought you in battle really impressed eisenhower from a
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young age and so that upbringing in kansas that combination of you know it sounds cliche but it's
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true small town values but combined with this real burning itch to get out of kansas to see the rest of
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the world to be a part of the world formed eisenhower's character at a young age in ways that
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you can see almost the day he dies so you mentioned west point was his ticket out of abilene he went to
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west point how did west point prepare him to be supreme allied commander you think it's a couple
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different ways you know eisenhower went to west point as his you know ironically enough his way of
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rebelling against his parents and to get his ticket out of abilene and he gets there and he's really
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quite awkward you know he he is a country boy but he has a sense of this is where he wants to be and
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this is where he's in a sense always wanted to be since he was a boy and so ends up doing two things
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in his career uh at west point that end up i think shaping him and the sort of the eisenhower we know
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forever one is he has this deep concern about his background he is not the son of a general he is
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not part of the sort of burgeoning american aristocracy that is filling the ranks of his
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classmates but that gray uniform they all wear at least covers up how sort of shabby and country his
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clothes are but the way he talks where he's from right no one's ever heard of kansas really but people
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have heard of abilene that old west sort of history that abilene carried as being the the place
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where cowboys had shootouts in the in the town square eisenhower fully embraces as part of his
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personality and it's where he begins to take on the nickname ike as well because ike is this sort of
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typical name for a cowboy in the dime westerns that you'd get you know a cowboy who was out on the land
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all alone who was his own man who was always there to do the right thing even if he was a little
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uncultured and really leans into this identity of being sort of from the cowboy town even though that
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is not at all consistent with how he actually grew up but develops this kind of like cool right it's
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funny to say eisenhower was cool but in west point he definitely develops this sense of cool and devil
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may care big smile you know always ready for a good time that cultivates i think a very warm kind of
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friendship and respect between his classmates who go on to be his contemporaries in the army over the
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next 30 years the other thing though and this is i think underappreciated now just given how different
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we think about sports but he also was a star football player in his freshman and sophomore years
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and not particularly skilled right he wasn't a very very fast runner but he was a hardcore player right
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he would just throw himself into the opposing line and so he was known as a bruiser and started you
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know having a lot of success and gaining quite a reputation for himself as a football player but
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then blows out his knee and at the time in west point if you had an injury like that you could get
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kicked out not of west point but kicked out of the army and so eisenhower is faced you know from a young
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age with the prospect of really not having a military career left just because of his knee injury
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but the one thing he does and the one thing the army sees in him is you know once he's literally
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back on his feet he can't play football anymore but he can coach it and he becomes the assistant
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coach of the football team and demonstrates a kind of genius for the game a genius for organizing men on
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the field that just as a practical matter the army really appreciated back then because people used
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to play a lot of very competitive football it's kind of the way softball leagues are maybe today
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but that in turn is what keeps him in the army the army always wants a good football coach and he
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basically spends the first 10 years almost of his career as like a star football coach in the army
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but that also gives eisenhower the first real lessons in leadership and those lessons in leadership
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of leading a football team coaching a football team end up i think shaping his understanding of
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what it means to lead in battle to lead an army in ways that far surpass anything he actually learns
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in the classroom either at west point or the command and general staff school or anywhere else
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it's really at west point and in that opportunity to be a football coach that he learns to really be a
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leader in this section about his his role um as army football coach and as a player for the team
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uh you talk about this guy ernest graves he was an army football coach and he wrote this book
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ernest graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive alignment and mixed in
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with it were these sort of just insights about leadership and after i read about that in your
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book i was like i had to go buy this book i'm gonna go find this ernest graves book and i read it in
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just like one setting it was really easy to read but you're right there's these leadership lessons
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that i think eisenhower probably picked up from graves on how to lead not only a football team but a
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an army a military unit yeah absolutely and i'll flash forward to i think one of the most uh you
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know spoiler alert but one of the most climactic moments in the d-day story and certainly in my
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telling of it is when eisenhower ultimately has to make the call based on some very unclear weather
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predictions about whether to launch this invasion and launching this invasion is either going to be the
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grand success that it became or it's going to be a complete and utter disaster there is literally a
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hurricane outside the doors as he's making this decision and when he finally does the thing he says
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is okay let's go and that's his famous sort of send-off speech uh for the d-day invasion
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and that exact quote is something ernest graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before
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the men were to go out onto the field he's like okay when it's time to go the coach needs to take
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control of the situation and say something like okay let's go and again whether or not that was
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sort of in the back of eisenhower's head whether or not it was just a coincidence you know we'll never
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really know but yeah that sense of okay it's my job to lead this team and the way to do it is the same
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way you would lead a football team i think is totally correct so he graduates west point 1915
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world war one is happening but he doesn't get sent off there instead he gets kind of sent off to
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different training positions and then he becomes sort of this staff officer not really on the battle
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grounds how did those staff positions prepare him for d-day you think i think they prepared him
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uniquely well and it gets to something i was saying a few minutes ago is that you know one of eisenhower's
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i think most important leadership lessons is the importance of followership and it's the importance
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particularly when you're young particularly when you're coming up to understand that your job is
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not to be the smartest person in the room your job is to figure out who the smartest person in the room
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is and make yourself as useful as possible to them because in doing that you know not only are you going
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to be much more effective than kind of butting heads with the person who actually knows what they're
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doing with your own ill-conceived ideas but you're going to learn a lot right if you keep a genuinely
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open mind and pay attention to what that person is doing and how they're making decisions you're
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going to learn a ton from them that you can then use as you rise up the ranks and so for eisenhower
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you know one of the ways i i even thought about telling his story is by telling it through his mentors
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and i could rattle them off but the big ones certainly are people you know like joe howe who was that
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newspaper publisher fox connor who he spends a long and very formative period with in panama but then
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people like general mosley um who is probably one of the more suspect figures in history but who has
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a big influence on eisenhower same thing with general mcarthur and then obviously general marshall
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and then i would even say roosevelt and churchill right as eisenhower rises up the ranks there's always
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someone who's the smarter person in the room he gets that but he makes himself as useful as possible to
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fulfilling their vision and in the course of doing that learns their skills learns how they either
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command an army how they manage a team or how they develop and use political power in ways to get
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things actually done the way roosevelt and churchill did and so it's by having the humility really to be
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that staff officer to be the one who helps the leader execute their plans that eisenhower really does
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grow into an incredibly formidable political figure in his own right yeah one thing i've taken away from
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eisenhower's experience as a staff officer is yeah that humility and then also patience with your
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career i know eisenhower lamented like when world war one was over he's like it's it my military career
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is over it's not going anywhere like i've gone as far as i can go and i missed it i missed my chance
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and he didn't know he was about to like embark on the biggest part of his military career and it would
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happen in his 50s yeah so i mean i think it's a great lesson there if for a young guy or even if
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you're a guy in your 30s or your 40s you think man i missed the boat this is as far as this is as good
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as it's going to get maybe not you could have a whole big giant book of life ahead of you like
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eisenhower had after his staff positions yeah it's definitely an encouraging uh encouraging story
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to anyone who's still not yet in their mid 50s to see that eisenhower you know starts world war ii
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as a colonel and within a matter of three years he's a five-star general and again one of the
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preeminent figures the 20th century to boot and and yeah you know it wasn't just after world war
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one there are a lot of false dusks in eisenhower's career where he thinks he's just finished it's all
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over i've wasted my best years this is the end and each time he's proven wrong because there's a new
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and often greater challenge just waiting just just a little bit further down the line that he ends up
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having to take on so you mentioned one of eisenhower's mentors during this staff officer period
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of his career was fox connor this was when he was in panama this is one of my favorite sections of
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the book because you explore the education that connor gave eisenhower this is where really eisenhower
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got his education he didn't get it at west point it was when he was in panama with this fox connor guy
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so what did that tutelage look like under connor like what did he tell eisenhower what did what
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did he assign eisenhower to read tell us about it because i think it's really interesting yeah yeah
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fox connor you know he started just in the past i would say 10 years or so maybe 10 15 years started
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to get more recognition by historians part of the reason that he hadn't had more previously is that
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he ordered all of his papers to be destroyed when he died so it's actually extremely difficult to
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do any real research with fox connor but yeah fox connor you know he's the son of a confederate
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wounded veteran has an army career a quite distinguished army career in its own right he's
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probably the principal military planner of the american expeditionary force in world war one
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where he comes to know george patten george marshall like fox connor has a pretty amazing
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repertoire of connections that obviously matter a lot in eisenhower's life too and eisenhower gets
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stationed with him in fort gaillard panama and this is a backwater in a backwater i i gotta be
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honest with you and one of the things that i never was able to fully pin down is why fox connor got
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marooned to command this podunk post in the middle of nowhere it's not obvious but one of the things
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that is suggestive though is that fox connor was not an easy person to get along at all you know he
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had a mississippian sort of rigidity to his personality he was extremely serious he inspired very
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little loyalty let alone affection in subordinates who saw him as extremely high-handed and brusque
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and eisenhower frankly is no different i think when he arrives in panama fox connor basically makes him
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every day write out these very complicated orders of the day what is everyone to do for today and how
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are they to do it and there's no point in this exercise right the army's job in camp gaillard is
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basically to make sure the camp doesn't fall into the panama canal and that's it there's nothing
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going on there it's the middle of nowhere everyone is bored most of the enlisted come from puerto rico
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so they don't even speak english which creates even bigger morale problems camp gaillard specifically had
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a a sodomy crisis system army called it at the time and there was all sorts of prostitution and
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gambling and alcoholism that was just rampant because everyone's bored in the middle of nowhere and
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eisenhower is just enduring this initially as the best he can maybe eisenhower his wife is there with
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him and leaves within a few months to have their son back in colorado and so eisenhower is alone
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working for this very difficult guy and ultimately though eisenhower you know kind of getting to what i was
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saying before eisenhower always understood that it was important to just be as useful as possible to
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the guy in charge and he understood that he was a staff officer fundamentally and so he did that and
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he would take just all sorts of abuse from fox connor about how he was writing out these orders
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of the day which again are complete busy work but eisenhower was there doing it and at one point fox
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connor invites eisenhower over to his house and the thing almost everybody who ever met fox connor noted
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about it was that he had this enormous personal library thousands of books that he would demand the army
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transport with him wherever he went so just crates and crates of books and eisenhower had never seen one
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person owned that many books and was impressed and connor kind of asks him in a friendly way do you
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like to read do you like military history and eisenhower at this point is making do he he loved
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military history as a boy right he loved hannibal but when he got to west point it was a very very
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dry dull military education he didn't get a thing out of it and eisenhower had been stationed in
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gettysburg during the first world war and so fox connor reaches over and hands him a handful of books
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mostly novels in fact about the battle of gettysburg and he says here you might like these give these a
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read and eisenhower reads these books reads them pretty fast actually and then brings them back
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connor and connor you know says what did you think about it and then they started having a conversation
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about it and so fox connor gives him some heavier reading right some memoirs of gettysburg and some
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firsthand accounts getting into the heavier non-fiction and eisenhower reads those and fox connor
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what did you think about them why do you think lee did this and they would go out often all day on
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horseback through the panamanian countryside discussing things like the battle of gettysburg
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or discussing the napoleonic wars or the battle of luthan and quickly eisenhower comes to appreciate
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that he is being given an incredible education not just in military history but in the history of being
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a general because those are the questions fox connor puts to him it's like why are people making
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these decisions what are they seeing what did they not see why are they making this mistake why are they
00:24:05.720
guessing right about this question some of the books that connor gives them though over the course of
00:24:11.060
these tutorials are not just military histories but philosophy literature shakespeare nietzsche on war
00:24:18.420
by carl von clauswitz which is essentially a theory of war and the use of military power to achieve
00:24:25.640
political ends and by the time eisenhower leaves the panama three years later he has you know a first
00:24:35.000
class education in how to be a general and it's with that education to include the writing out of the
00:24:42.340
very dull daily orders orders of day that eisenhower is essentially picked through some of the sort of
00:24:49.760
bureaucratic magic fox connor can exercise to go take the army's course in how to be a general called the
00:24:56.220
command and general staff college it's a course where you learn the principles of generalship and of staff
00:25:00.840
officership so that you can write out orders and eisenhower just like you know when he goes to west point is very
00:25:06.360
nervous about his skills right does he have the real background he'd never served in one he hadn't
00:25:12.560
really served in any serious positions to that point nothing like the classmates he'd be encountering at
00:25:16.600
command and general staff college and fox connor basically says to him look when you were under me
00:25:21.720
i had you write an order of the day every single day you're going to find no sense of inferiority when
00:25:28.640
you get to the command and general staff college and sure enough when eisenhower gets there he works a lot
00:25:32.900
harder than he claims to have but he's first in his class and it's from then on that eisenhower's
00:25:37.640
career just takes off we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors
00:25:41.800
and now back to the show you mentioned that one of the books connor gave him was the philosophy of
00:25:50.000
nietzsche and you talk about the book that book actually had a big impact left a lasting impact on
00:25:54.840
eisenhower how did nietzschean philosophy influence eisenhower you think oh that was a real surprise to me
00:26:01.980
right almost the last person you think about when you think about eisenhower is friedrich nietzsche
00:26:06.240
but sure enough you know i was able to again one of the real difficult things that as a research
00:26:12.060
matter but one of the most satisfying and trying to understand eisenhower was just figuring out what
00:26:15.920
books he read and then reading them so like what's in his head and where can you see these ideas pop up
00:26:20.960
later if at all and you know when i read the the copy of nietzsche that fox connor had almost right away
00:26:28.500
i'm looking at you know almost verbatim things eisenhower says later and there are a couple
00:26:34.180
things that are going on in nietzsche that or at least the friedrich nietzsche that eisenhower reads
00:26:38.860
that are incredibly formative to eisenhower one is you know what we probably would just call basic
00:26:44.060
stoicism you know going back to at least marcus aurelius you know this idea of manhood being about
00:26:51.580
seeing the world as it is in an unsentimental way and knowing that the truth is always going to matter
00:26:59.120
much more than any ideology or idea or wish for how the world could be and that anytime you find
00:27:05.720
yourself as he often did and would right uh complaining about oh things aren't turning out
00:27:11.320
the way i hoped knowing that you know shut up your feelings don't matter what matters is what is and as
00:27:18.640
soon as you can reconcile yourself to that the better and so that's a big part of eisenhower's
00:27:23.660
own philosophy just being very objective and really quite hostile to ideology which i think is one of
00:27:28.620
eisenhower's most important and laudable traits whether or not it's nazi fascism or communism or any
00:27:35.440
of the other sort of you know how would you sort of say sort of ideologies or theories of the day
00:27:40.580
like he's always worried and always thinking fundamentally about brass tacks okay how does this really matter
00:27:45.800
what's really going on what's really motivating another big thing in nietzsche that eisenhower
00:27:50.540
like fully embraces is the virtue of toughness and the manly virtues so to speak the willingness to
00:27:59.400
fight for something bigger than yourself as a virtue in and of itself and then the third thing i think
00:28:06.560
that eisenhower draws directly out of nietzsche actually quotes it several times without attributing
00:28:11.500
it but it's right out of nietzsche is this idea that human beings all have a fundamental desire
00:28:18.560
to be free and that when you motivate that when you can appeal to that individual desire to be free
00:28:24.620
people are willing to to do anything to fight and to die for their own freedom and indeed one of the
00:28:30.540
biggest quotes he often repeats that again is verbatim out of nietzsche is the idea that there is
00:28:36.040
nothing more powerful than a motivated democracy that democracy fundamentally is all about allowing
00:28:42.960
free people to be free and if you can harness that energy that drive towards something greater than
00:28:48.960
themselves that individual desire to be free to to make their own choices to pursue their own happiness
00:28:53.920
that you have harnessed the most powerful force that human beings can muster so eisenhower graduates from
00:29:01.080
the u.s army commanded general staff college he's still confined to sort of administrative positions
00:29:06.540
he's the aide to general douglas mcarthur he serves the chief of staff at the third infantry division
00:29:11.740
he holds various staff positions in washington dc he's a colonel when world war ii starts he's never
00:29:19.260
led a battle he doesn't have that you know big personality like mcarthur or padden but he still gets the job
00:29:27.500
of supreme allied commander in europe over george marshall who is also in the running and there's
00:29:32.200
a whole interesting story there but from the time he takes that command he's got less than six months
00:29:38.700
to plan operation overlord d-day what kind of physical and emotional toll did the pressure
00:29:46.260
in planning that invasion take on eisenhower yeah it's an incredibly compressed time frame the the day
00:29:52.480
by day is stunning and yeah it has a huge toll it has to eisenhower is basically sick the entire time
00:30:00.900
into varying degrees of severity um like his cold basically comes and goes he smokes like a chimney
00:30:07.680
he's up three packs a day by the time the d-day invasion launches i i did the math on that that's
00:30:13.680
about 11 to 12 hours of smoking per day he begins to drink too much he sleeps like three to four hours a
00:30:20.860
day and he really does bear the weight of it internally in ways that you you know i mean it's
00:30:28.480
almost difficult to imagine anyone else being able to endure you know he's lonely he misses his family he
00:30:35.720
misses his son there's a moment when he which i recount in the book because it's just so poignant
00:30:40.080
when he's asked to essentially give the commencement address at britain's equivalent of west point and you
00:30:47.720
know gives this very solemn speech about how the weight of the world is on these young men who are
00:30:53.380
going to be literally his subordinates in a matter of weeks and he writes this letter home that's so
00:31:00.140
meditative and it's quite dark where he says you know i just don't understand this human need to
00:31:06.120
destroy and how so many lives are put to waste and how we haven't learned as a species to do better
00:31:13.520
to be kinder to each other and i think the poignancy of that moment came not just in the fact
00:31:18.860
that he's looking at these young men who he is confident he is sending to their deaths at some
00:31:23.840
point or very well could but they're his son's age his son john is actually graduating from west
00:31:29.280
point ironically enough on june 6 1944 and you know as he's bestowing awards and shaking their hands like
00:31:36.060
they look and act and are exactly like his own son and that has to occur to him in terms of just like
00:31:44.220
what is really putting put at risk what are the costs what are the dangers that these young men who
00:31:49.020
are going to be crossing that beach what are they confronting and why are they doing it and he's the
00:31:53.580
one there sending them off right it's his responsibility ultimately he owns that and the pressure is insane
00:31:59.600
so besides smoking and drinking a lot another thing that helped eisenhower deal with the pressure of the
00:32:05.040
battlefront was spending time with what he called his official family and this was like his tight
00:32:10.520
inner circle of individuals he was close to it included uh case summersby his driver there was
00:32:17.600
his personal naval aide harry butcher his secretary maddie pinnett what role did eisenhower's official
00:32:25.140
family play in kind of boosting up his morale during this period yeah yeah i don't i don't want to
00:32:29.720
overstate he's not a drunk to be clear all right you know he basically he spends nobody spends his
00:32:34.600
nights you know he i thought i was very disciplined about organizing his time it's actually one of the
00:32:38.840
more like interesting and i think prescient leadership traits that he has is that he knows that
00:32:44.020
like a big part of his job is just making so many decisions day after day high consequence low
00:32:50.380
consequence just one after the other and to do that effectively to make the best decision he can
00:32:56.240
regardless of how it turns out he has to keep himself healthy both physically and mentally as much as
00:33:01.580
he possibly can and so he's very disciplined ultimately about budgeting out his time right
00:33:07.080
this is the era before smartphones and so when he goes home basically to the official family he
00:33:13.480
basically is disciplined from about seven or eight o'clock at night when he can about turning off the
00:33:18.780
office and playing bridge and you know watching movies together and chatting and reciting poetry it's a
00:33:24.880
really i think important opportunity he has to just like be as human as possible under the
00:33:30.420
circumstances and this official family is you know both his literal aides right there are secretaries
00:33:35.460
and drivers and things like that but i think they're just also the people that he can relax with these are
00:33:40.660
the people who are not gunning for him they're not trying to get anything from him they're not trying
00:33:44.100
to use or manipulate him for their own ends these are just the people he can trust day in and day out and
00:33:49.220
he knows he needs that retreat and he needs to take advantage of that retreat and not just constantly
00:33:54.400
be working because otherwise he'll collapse he'll burn out and he won't be able to make the hard
00:33:58.960
decisions that he has to make i think it's a great lesson for even if you're not the supreme allied
00:34:03.480
commander take your rest time seriously yeah make time for it if eisenhower could have done it during
00:34:09.020
overlord you can do it when you've got your nine to five job like you're okay that's right turn your phone
00:34:14.920
off yeah hang out with your kids have have a meal without looking at your phone all that yeah so you
00:34:20.320
mentioned there's a lot of internal struggles that eisenhower had you know he knew the impact his
00:34:25.900
decisions were going to have he was going to send lots of young men to their death i mean how did he do
00:34:31.880
that and think about the human consequences while not letting it paralyze him because i think that'd be
00:34:37.780
really hard i mean if i were in that position i would think oh my gosh i can't even make a decision
00:34:42.080
i would just freeze what do you think eisenhower did to overcome that while maintaining his humanity
00:34:48.200
at the same time i think actually the key thing was that he maintained his humanity you know we've
00:34:53.240
talked a bit about nietzsche and this is sort of a nietzschean idea or a stoic idea at least but i think
00:34:59.380
also comes right out of nietzsche is that he never he never looked away from the consequences of his own
00:35:06.420
decisions like he fully embraced them if only as a corrective to make sure he was making the
00:35:11.960
right decision and being able to hold those things in his head at the same time i think was a key
00:35:16.960
part certainly of his ability to lead in crisis and some of the hard decisions he made and i'll give
00:35:21.700
you just one example of it that almost brings me to tears every time i think about it is the night
00:35:25.760
before d-day launches he goes around and sees off the 101st airborne and there's you know probably the
00:35:31.600
most famous picture of eisenhower addressing these young men who are all painted up and getting ready
00:35:36.600
to jump out of these planes over france and he had been given an estimate just before that about
00:35:42.480
half of these guys are going to be lost like half and you know he's sending thousands of these young
00:35:48.160
men across the english channel so he goes and he goes to see them off and there's no fanfare right this
00:35:53.320
is not a review he literally just has k drive up as quietly as possible gets out and just starts
00:35:58.740
mingling between them and shaking their hands and talking to them and again there's this very famous
00:36:04.980
photograph where his hand is forward and he looks like he's very sternly telling them you know some
00:36:10.800
sort of great rallying cry to get them over the beaches and with a little bit of tracking down
00:36:16.340
we're able to find the um the actual story behind that photo and the guy he's talking to he's talking
00:36:22.960
to him about fishing because he would just go up to these guys and be like what do you like to do
00:36:26.140
where are you from what was your job what's your hobbies uh anyone from kansas and this guy said he
00:36:31.740
likes fishing and eisenhower is an adamant fisher himself and a fly fisherman on top of that and
00:36:37.340
he's like so when you throw a rod this is how i throw it and he's demonstrating the throwing of
00:36:41.800
his rod and the photographer just sort of happened to catch the moment in this way that has this very
00:36:45.720
sort of commanding overtone to it but what's really going on there is he's just treating that young man
00:36:51.240
like a human being like his son like himself and when he goes around and meets these young men and
00:36:57.800
shakes their hands he forces himself to look each one of them in the eye when he does it and think
00:37:04.700
about that each hand he shakes he knows that basically every other one is going to die right
00:37:11.700
every other one is some kid who is either his son's age or younger who's just not going to go home again
00:37:17.860
who's not going to see his own father again and eisenhower made himself do that not only i think to
00:37:24.400
you know be there for them and to let them know that he saw them and saw them you know not as
00:37:30.620
soldiers to be sent across the border but as young men who he cared about who had their own lives and
00:37:35.320
dreams and interests but to remind himself of that too and when he finishes he just collapses into the
00:37:42.120
back of his car and just said well no one can stop it now and that's that's how he ends june 5th
00:37:49.600
1944 but i also think that's how he does it because he doesn't numb himself to the costs of
00:37:55.060
what he's doing he understands it he internalizes it and owns it and so that when he has a hard
00:38:00.880
decision to make such as sending them over there knowing how many of them are unlikely to ever come
00:38:06.220
home again he's able to do it because he's weighed the costs the benefits in a real way that he owns it's
00:38:13.500
as much about responsibility and owning responsibility as it is you know just making
00:38:19.120
the best decision you can yeah i mean the idea of owning responsibility eisenhower famously wrote
00:38:24.740
two memos before d-day happened and one of them was if it was a failure it's like if this mission
00:38:31.180
failed i'd take full responsibility for it but he didn't have to publish that one but uh he kept
00:38:36.820
yeah yeah so okay this is june 5th he sent off the men personally how did he spend the night
00:38:45.500
before the invasion in the morning what was he doing smoking he was he basically he stayed up the
00:38:52.280
entire night best as we could tell smoking and reading westerns he was an adamant western reader
00:38:57.480
he had his guilty pleasures as we all do and he was very emphatic that he got to enjoy them and so
00:39:02.880
really from about two in the morning when he gets back to base camp to about seven seven thirty when
00:39:08.660
he finally sort of gets up and meets the day he's just sitting on his bed laying in bed reading
00:39:14.800
westerns and smoking cigarettes and just waiting for the news to come in yeah yeah you talk about
00:39:20.200
the western he read with black john is the name of the story yeah yeah the czar of half a day creek
00:39:24.980
eisenhower really liked good shoot-em-up westerns those were his favorite czar of half a day creek is not
00:39:30.100
one of those it has like a sort of more humorous vein to it there's not a lot of shooting but it
00:39:34.800
really was apt it really kind of met the moment very well because it's all about this guy the czar
00:39:39.960
of half day creek his name is black john smith who is the kind of the doer in the small camping town
00:39:46.420
in alaska where he or in yukon country i think it is actually where he's he's always up to he's always
00:39:51.800
up to something but he's keeping everyone just everything in line everyone kind of thinks he's this old
00:39:56.880
hillbilly but he actually is the guy who who's always got the plan is one step ahead so it was
00:40:01.660
a very apt book for eisenhower to be reading on d-day another lesson there from eisenhower don't
00:40:07.340
feel bad about just indulging in a guilty pleasure when you're going through a stressful period like
00:40:12.860
he read westerns it's okay if you want to i don't know watch a crappy movie on netflix that's okay as
00:40:18.820
long as it kind of just takes the edge off that's fine no that's entirely true because one of the things
00:40:23.600
that i found super interesting about eisenhower which you don't see on the surface at all but
00:40:28.380
it's very true is that he he thought a lot about how he thought and he understood that you know if
00:40:35.440
he was tired if he was exhausted if he was overwhelmed that he was going to make bad decisions
00:40:40.600
and bad decisions didn't mean that those decisions would not turn out the right way he understood that
00:40:45.960
there was always risk just like any poker player would but he wanted to make sure he was always making
00:40:50.540
the best decision available to him based on the information available to him and so doing things
00:40:56.280
like making time for guilty pleasures making time for friends not beating up on yourself too much about
00:41:02.640
your own vices right everyone's telling him he's got to stop smoking otherwise his cold will never get
00:41:06.500
better and he's like yeah yeah i get it but he understands that he only has so much energy only so
00:41:12.660
much sort of self-discipline and focus that he can direct and so prioritizing what you're paying
00:41:18.620
attention to what you're really investing your emotional and mental energy in is honestly just
00:41:25.560
as important as any one decision you make because your ability to make those decisions is going to
00:41:30.200
be entirely contingent on how focused you are how clear-minded you are and your ability to just
00:41:35.580
take everything in and decide and so yeah just giving yourself your guilty pleasures and focusing on
00:41:42.020
the things that matter and figuring out what matters is just as important as any one thing that you do
00:41:47.160
yeah that idea that eisenhower thought about his thinking and he was kind of this master self
00:41:52.340
psychologist another thing that i remember reading about him that he did he's he had an anger drawer
00:41:57.380
so he had a temper and he struggled with it his entire life but he had this tactic whenever someone
00:42:03.300
would piss him off and he wanted just like light him up what he did instead is he wrote this letter
00:42:09.140
out that you know exactly what he wanted to say no filter and then he just put it in this drawer
00:42:14.980
and that's right kind of it cooled off he's like okay i got it out of my system now i can approach this
00:42:21.420
with the cool head yeah no it's as you say he was his own psychologist um because there was no one
00:42:27.380
else around he could trust for that role really other than maybe k summersby or harry butcher and yeah
00:42:32.460
so he would do those sorts of things or if he just was like feeling overwhelmed just same thing
00:42:37.220
he was feeling overwhelmed and he was like if he was having trouble focusing on any one thing
00:42:41.760
he would sit down and literally just write himself a memo of all the things he had to think about one
00:42:47.560
after the other and putting down a couple thoughts about each one just again put it out on the page
00:42:52.840
get it out of his body and into something tangible so that he could focus on it more clearly he's just
00:42:57.660
full of all of these very like specific just habits and techniques for making him like a much better
00:43:04.680
thinker and leader than he otherwise would have been so something that you know eisenhower is known
00:43:10.560
for is his political ability he was able to manage these big egos montgomery padden marshall churchill
00:43:16.400
de gaulle did it definitely i don't think any other person could have done that but the other thing
00:43:21.800
that impressed me about eisenhower was his grasp of public relations like he knew how to manage
00:43:27.960
the media yeah how would you describe his approach i think this is like underappreciated about
00:43:33.120
eisenhower oh yeah a hundred percent i agree i think it's totally underappreciated he got in a
00:43:39.200
very like sophisticated way that like media had changed a lot and had changed politics a lot by the
00:43:47.240
1940s and he understood that there were really two things that he needed to do to be an effective
00:43:53.760
manager of his public persona which in turn would give him a much for your hand in dealing with
00:44:00.180
difficult political issues and one was you got to be friends with the press and he made sure that you
00:44:05.840
know when he was playing bridge and smoking and drinking that reporters were always with him just to
00:44:10.320
kind of hang out you know with a few exceptions as guys and having that kind of intimate sort of
00:44:16.260
friendship level relationship with reporters enabled him to know what was going on what they were
00:44:21.980
going to print publish before they did and also gave him opportunities to you know what we would
00:44:26.780
now call shape the narrative before things hit the press and that helped him on several occasions
00:44:31.740
not the least being with people like george patten but the other thing though and this was so i mean
00:44:37.700
it's part of who he is but it's so prescient that it demands to be remarked upon is he also understood
00:44:45.860
that as the media was becoming more intimate and celebrity driven where you had these personalities
00:44:53.640
who were not just on the radio or in newspapers but actually on film and could be seen that there
00:45:01.080
was a huge value in being seen as ordinary and i'm not saying he put that on this is in a way who he
00:45:08.680
is these are his kansas instincts coming out but he leaned really hard into it in a way that was
00:45:14.780
certainly um designed to conceal the sophistication of his own thinking in most situations where he understood
00:45:20.840
that being kind of folksy and having this like oh i just like going out and fishing and being very
00:45:27.300
seen as not grasping for power in an environment where most politicians to include roosevelt and
00:45:33.940
roosevelt being only sort of a marginal exception to this we're still seen as these very like stern
00:45:39.580
statuesque figures was its own kind of political power it's where we get the idea of i like i the idea
00:45:46.220
that a politician should not be only a leader but likable more or less draws directly from eisenhower
00:45:52.280
and i know this this again almost seems too obvious to say now but it's difficult to overstate how
00:45:59.320
revolutionary it was for a general like a major powerful general to be known broadly in the public
00:46:08.740
for smiling a smiling general there's almost nothing more incongruous than that if you really think
00:46:14.940
about it and eisenhower fully leaned into that and had a kind of folksy celebrity that obviously
00:46:20.980
becomes his trademark and i think in the environment that he's in particularly with people like de gaulle
00:46:27.760
with people like churchill and stalin and roosevelt is crucial to his ability to wield power because
00:46:35.040
none of them understand that yet none of them understand the importance of likability in the media
00:46:41.500
as a kind of political power and so everyone around eisenhower just underestimates him all of the
00:46:48.260
time as just being sort of like a smiling nice guy because they're obviously very much still in the
00:46:54.080
the marble statue mold and eisenhower both i think understands that and uses that to such great effect
00:47:00.020
that now it's actually difficult to think about a politician who doesn't smile all the time
00:47:04.600
right where it's not this sort of like happy i'm a nice guy i'm just like you whether or not it's you
00:47:10.660
know george w bush on his ranch and crawford clearing brush or donald trump you know eating a taco bowl
00:47:16.700
or you know barack obama smiling big and throwing baskets right all of our politicians now we want
00:47:22.640
them to quote unquote to be just like us and eisenhower kind of sets that mold and sees that that's where
00:47:28.940
society is going way earlier than anybody else does so after researching and writing about eisenhower
00:47:36.200
what's something that stuck with you the most about his life or his leadership i think for me the you
00:47:43.760
know in addition to it giving hope to 40 year olds everywhere that life is not yet over i think the
00:47:48.720
most you know both inspiring and cautionary aspects of eisenhower's life to me are that he really did come
00:47:56.380
from nowhere to achieve the absolute greatest heights of political power in the 20th century
00:48:02.360
like he through a combination of i think intelligence luck and ruthlessness hold himself up to that
00:48:09.360
height to great i think benefit to not only the united states but to the world and so the both
00:48:15.520
encouraging but cautionary things that i always think about when i think of eisenhower is encouraging
00:48:19.820
is that you know talent is everywhere talent can come from the middle of nowhere from someone you'd
00:48:24.780
never expect where it wouldn't even be recognized by most people you know until well into their 30s or 40s or
00:48:31.400
even 50s and the cautionary piece of that that i worry about sometimes is do we still live in that
00:48:36.780
america right do we still live in a society where talent can rise because we have more people than
00:48:41.800
ever we have more opportunity for more people than ever as well and fewer barriers you know based on
00:48:47.060
old lines whether or not it's gender or race but do we still have a society that allows the very best
00:48:53.140
to rise and i don't know the answer to that i worry about that sometimes because all the
00:48:57.940
opportunities eisenhower had have become much more difficult and much stricter and much more tied up
00:49:03.460
in tradition or bureaucracy or sort of other kinds of red tape that i i worry we you know we we may not
00:49:12.440
be getting the talent that we have at our disposal to have the kind of leaders that we put up possibly
00:49:17.460
could have well michelle this has been a great conversation work people go to learn more about the book
00:49:22.340
in your work yeah um the book is available and anywhere fine books are sold the light of battle
00:49:27.460
it makes a great gift in time for father's day i'll plug that and yeah feel free to always reach
00:49:32.400
out i'm very easy to find and so if you had any questions or ideas or thoughts about the book good
00:49:36.940
bad or ugly feel free to email me i try to respond as quickly as i can fantastic well michelle paradis
00:49:41.860
thanks for time it's been a pleasure thank you it was a lot of fun my guest is michelle paradis he's
00:49:47.680
the author of the book the light of battle it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere
00:49:51.300
you can check out our show notes at aom.is slash supreme commander we find links to resources we
00:49:56.320
delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to
00:50:08.400
check out our website at artofmanless.com where you find our podcast archives and make sure to check
00:50:12.400
out our new newsletter it's called dying breed you can sign up at dyingbreed.net it's a great way to
00:50:17.040
support the show directly as always thank you for the continued support until next time's brett mckay
00:50:21.480
remind you on listening podcast but put what you've heard into action