With malice toward none

TABLE TALK

DENIS BROGAN

The long-expected death of 'Ike' leaves only one of the great war leaders alive, General de Gaulle.- And they had some things in common. They were the same age and both 'came up from behind,' as they say on the race track. But while there is no doubt about the great importance for good and ill of General de Gaulle's role in France and Europe, there has always been some ambiguity in the fame of General Eisenhower. For one thing, President de Gaulle is more important than General de Gaulle, but it is not certain that President Eisenhower was as important or as useful as General Eisenhower. Then General Eisenhower in his war services, which were great, was not the most important Or the most brilliant of the American generals and, as President, his eight years look like a curious interim period, from which the United States emerged with the election of Kennedy and to which, with all the will in the world, Presi- dent Nixon cannot return.

There was—and is—a danger that because of the immense popularity of General Eisen- hower, his abilities may be underestimated. He was a father-figure. The bewildered American people, after the Second World War and the Korean War, turned to this soldier to give a civilian tone to American life. President Eisenhower was a peacemaker. His most bril- liant campaign promise—or gimmick—in 1952 was his announcement that, if elected, he would go to Korea, with the implication that he would make peace. There is a curious parallel be- tween this part of his career and the promises made by the dnly other West Pointer to enter the White House. For General Grant's pro- gramme was 'Let us have peace.' He presented himself as one who could, to quote from Lin- coln, 'bind up the nation's wounds.' In that, he notably failed.

On the other hand, the new President Eisen- hower did make peace, of a kind, in Korea, although on terms that neither Mr Truman nor Mr Acheson would have dared accept. And despite some remarkably foolish appointments and some very rash campaign promises, for a considerable time President Eisenhower did provide domestic tranquillity for a perplexed and angry people. And although he was a soldier President and would not have been considered for any political office but for his war record, he was not a military President. Ulysses S. Grant fell back from time to time on military solutions. One of his chief instru- ments of policy was that very remarkable soldier, General Philip Sheridan. But Ike was a notably pacific soldier. Perhaps he owed this to having grown up in a pacifist family. His Parents belonged to a very small German pietistic sect, 'The River Brethren.' an her old age his mother became a Jehovah's Witness, a rather awkward fact for the President which was not stressed in the public prints.) And the famous last warning given from the White House against the 'military-industrial com- plex perhaps reflected the basic feelings of this eminent soldier who had so little of the military temper.

But was he an eminent soldier? I don't think he can be compared with either General Douglas MacArthur or General George Mar- shall. MacArthur was a very brilliant soldier indeed, and had been a very remarkably reforming Superintendent at West Point.

General Marshall was the great reorganiser of the American army and, if one may make a Prussian parallel, a combination of von Moltke and von Roon. I do not think General Eisenhower had the abilities or the character of these two great American soldiers. And if General George Marshall had not been de- prived of the right to command the invading army in Europe, by what was the very com-

plimentary 'decision of FOR that the Chief of Staff must stay in Washington, it is possible that the military reputation of General Eisen- hower today would be less impressive than that of General Bradley or possibly even than that of General Patton.

Yet General Eisenhower had great qualities for the job he got. Marshal Foch, so unlike General Eisenhower in temperament and so superior in intrinsic ability, once said some- thing that explains the kind of achievement for which General Eisenhower was rightly honoured. Foch said that since he had com- manded a coalition army, his opinion of Napoleon had fallen. Even his opinion of the most brilliant of the Emperor's campaigns, that of France in 1814, had fallen, for he realised, now, the immense difficulties of the commander of a coalition army. Yet how many people can, offhand, remember who was the com- mander of the coalition army in 1814? He was the Austrian general, P-rince Schwarzen- berg.

Prince Schwarzenberg was not only not the most brilliant of the Allied generals, rive was not the most brilliant of the Austrian generals. The most brilliant was, undoubtedly, the Archduke Charles, the first man to beat Napoleon in battle; but for various reasons, in- cluding family jealousies, the Archduke Charles was not used. Prince Schwarzenberg was not as competent and original a soldier as BIlicher or Kutusov and, of course, not remotely in the same class as Wellington. But he had the great merit of reasonable professional com- petence and of a complete absence of the 'Fancy Dan' temperament which General Bradley attributed to General MacArthur.

It could be argued that General Eisen- 'bower's intermittent activity was an asset. Some of the things he refused to do or ignored, some of the projects which his very remarkable chief of staff, Bedell Smith, kept from reach- ing him, would have been great and unneces- sary gambles. Then General Eisenhower had to deal with the fanciest of 'Fancy Dans,' General Montgomery. That he got the best out of Monty and the best out of Patton was a very great achievement. True, he had very little political sense, but then neither had George Marshall. They did not understand the full im-

plications of Clausewitz's dictum that war is the pursuit of political ends by other means.

General Eisenhower was not a very good Chief of Staff to the peacetime American army, any more than he was a good or even tolerable

President of Columbia University. But as Commander-in-Chief of NATO he showed the same qualities as he had shown as Com- mander-in-Chief of the D-day army.

What was he like as a President? In the White House his intermittent activity was more of a nuisance than it had been at his army headquarters. He delegated far too much power, notably to Secretary of State Dulles and Secretary of the Treasury Humphrey. No one was less prepared to act on Harry Truman's motto, 'The buck stops here.' As far as pos- sible Ike tried to see that the buck didn't get to him. He also suffered a great loss by the death of Bedell Smith, for whom there was no substitute, certainly not Sherman Adams. The President's idleness became a joke, and sometimes a bad joke.

I can remember a very distinguished West Pointer, a great friend of Ike's, who, inheriting a large fortune, had left the army, but had kept in touch with Ike, saying, 'You don't understand him. His normal expectation was to retire as a colonel, and go to play golf at San Antonio or San Diego. By a process that he doesn't fully understand, he has become a five-star general and President of the United States. The trouble is he thinks the White House is the club house.' But Ike's inertia bad its good side. He prevented some of the worst follies of John Foster Dulles and Admiral Arleigh Burke. After Dulles died, the President became more active and sometimes usefully active. He was a great deal more intelligent than many people thought His innocent ad- miration for very rich men (in which he imitated President Grant) led him to say and do some foolish things. Quite often he hadn't done his homework, as was shown at press conferences. It was also shown in the cam- paigns of 1952 and 1956, although things were better in '56.

But the campaign of 1952 revealed a very unattractive side of Ike's character. He sup- pressed a deserved tribute to General Marshall, then under vicious attack by Joe McCarthy, on the advice of Governor Kohler of Wisconsin (advice which the Governor deeply repented of having given), because it was believed that a defence of George Marshall would hurt the Republican ticket. A good many American soldiers and civilians, especially the numerous pupils of General Marshall in the army, never forgave this act of prudent cowardice. It was, as the election showed, quite unncessary. In the same way General Eisenhower let down Governor Scranton in 1964 and his support for Mr Nixon in 1960 was too little and too late. He certainly was no man to go tiger shooting with.

But he was a remarkable man and `did the state some service.' Fun was rightly made of his rambling syntax and grammar in press con- ferences and occasionally in public speaking. But few records of press conferences or un- rehearsed speeches stand very close examina- tion. John Kennedy's didn't. I doubt if even Gladstone's did. Of course, some of the Eisen- hower -malapropisms have high comic value, and led to the famous parody of the Gettysburg speech in the manner of Ike. His Crusade in Europe, though partly ghosted, was an able and well-written book, superior to Lord Mont- gomery's. if very inferior to that masterpiece, The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. And there is no doubt that, for a time, General Eisenhower's popularity was a great political force. I can remember in the campaign of 1956 an interesting variation on the buttons which read 'I like Ike.' These buttons read 'Ike likes you. and this slightly comic sentiment was one great source of strength. He did try to do what Linco:n promised in the Second Inaugural: to at 'with malice toward none; with charity for all: with firmness in the right, as God gives us :o see the right.' lice's misfortune was that, unlike Lincoln, he was not assassinated after his second Inaugural.