The Road to Character

CHAPTER 3

SELF-CONQUEST

Ida Stover Eisenhower was born in 1862 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, one of eleven children. Her childhood was more or less a series of catastrophes. When she was a young girl, Union soldiers invaded her home, hunting for her two teenage brothers. They threatened to burn down the barn and ransacked the town and surrounding country. Her mother died when Ida was nearly five, and her father died when she was eleven.

The children were scattered among distant relations. Ida became the assistant cook for the large household that was putting her up. She baked pies, pastries, and meats, darned socks, and patched clothing. She was not, however, sad and pitiable. From the start, she had spark and drive and pushed daringly against her hardships. She was an overworked orphan, but folks in town remembered her as something of a tomboy, wiry and unafraid, galloping bareback through town on any borrowed horse, and one time falling and breaking her nose.

Girls were generally not educated beyond eighth grade at the time, but Ida, who in early adolescence had memorized 1,365 Bible verses in six months on her own, possessed a tremendous drive to improve herself, in both Adam I and Adam II terms. One day, when she was fifteen, her host family went off on a family outing, leaving her alone. She packed her belongings and sneaked away, walking to Staunton, Virginia. She got a room and a job and enrolled herself in the local high school.

She graduated, taught for two years, and at twenty-one came into a $1,000 inheritance. She used $600 of that (more than $10,000 today) to buy an ebony piano, which was to remain the most treasured possession of her life. The rest she devoted to her education. She hitched on with a Mennonite caravan heading west, though she was not a Mennonite, and settled with her brother at the grandly named Lane University in Lecompton, Kansas. There were fourteen freshmen the year Ida matriculated, and classes were held in the parlor of a residential house.

Ida studied music. She was, according to faculty reports, not the brightest student, but she was diligent, and she earned good grades through hard digging. Her classmates found a joyful, gregarious personality and an extremely optimistic nature, and they elected her valedictorian.¹ She also met her temperamental opposite while at Lane, a dour and stubborn fellow named David Eisenhower. Inexplicably, they fell in love, and they remained together for life. Their children could not remember a serious argument between them, though David gave Ida ample cause.

They were married within the River Brethren church, a small orthodox sect that believed in plain dress, temperance, and pacifism. After a daring girlhood, Ida devoted herself to a strict, but not too strict, life. The women of the River Brethren sect wore bonnets as part of their religious garb. One day Ida and a friend decided they no longer wanted to wear the bonnets. They were ostracized at church, forced to sit alone in the back. But eventually they won the day and were readmitted, bonnetless, into the community. Ida was strict in her faith but fun-loving and humane in practice.

David opened a store with a partner named Milton Good near Abilene, Kansas. Later, after the store failed, David told his family that Good had disappeared and stolen all the store’s money. That was a face-saving lie, which his sons appeared to believe. The fact is that David Eisenhower was solitary and difficult. He seems to have abandoned the business or had a falling-out with his partner. After the business collapsed, David left for Texas, leaving Ida with an infant son at home and another on the way. “David’s decision to quit the store and abandon his pregnant wife is incomprehensible,” the historian Jean Smith writes. “He had no job lined up or a profession on which to fall back.”²

David eventually found a job doing manual labor in a railroad yard. Ida followed him to Texas and set up home in a shack along the tracks, where Dwight was born. By the time Ida was twenty-eight, they’d hit bottom. They had $24.15 in cash and few possessions except the piano back in Kansas, and David had no marketable skills.³

The extended Eisenhower family came to the rescue. David was offered a job at a creamery in Abilene, and they moved back to Kansas and back to the middle class. Ida raised five boys, all of whom would go on to remarkable success and all of whom would spend their lives revering her. Dwight would later call her “the finest person I’ve ever known.”⁴ In At Ease, the memoir composed late in life, Ike revealed how much he idolized her, though his prose, characteristically, was restrained: “Her serenity, her open smile, her gentleness with all and her tolerance of their ways, despite an inflexible religious conviction and her own strict pattern of personal conduct, made even a brief visit with Ida Eisenhower memorable for a stranger. And for her sons, privileged to spend a boyhood in her company, the memories are indelible.”⁵

There was no drinking, card playing, or dancing in the house. There was not much demonstrated love. Dwight’s father was quiet, somber, and inflexible, while Ida was warm and down to earth. But there were Ida’s books, her tutelage, and her commitment to education. Dwight became an avid reader of classical history, reading about the battles of Marathon and Salamis and heroes like Pericles and Themistocles. There was also Ida’s vibrant, funny personality, and her maxims, which came in a steady, tough-minded flow: “God deals the cards and we play them,” “Sink or swim,” “Survive or perish.” The family prayed and read the Bible every day, the five brothers taking turns and forfeiting the right to be the reader when they stumbled over a line. Though Dwight was not religious later in life, he was steeped in the biblical metaphysic and could cite verses with ease. Ida, though devout herself, strongly believed that religious views were a matter of personal conscience and not to be imposed on others.

During Eisenhower’s presidential campaigns, Abilene was portrayed as an idyllic, Norman Rockwell piece of rural America. In reality, it was a harsh environment covered by a thick code of respectability and propriety. Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases. Victorian morality was reinforced by puritan rigor, what one historian has called Augustinianism come to America.

Ida began raising her boys in a house Ike would later calculate to be about 833 square feet. Thrift was essential, self-discipline a daily lesson. Before modern medicine, with sharp tools and hard physical labor to be done, there was a greater chance of accidents and more catastrophic consequences when they came. One year an invasion of grasshoppers ruined the crops.⁶ Dwight suffered a leg infection as a teenager and refused to let the doctors amputate because it would have ended his football career. He slipped in and out of consciousness and had one of his brothers sleep on the threshold of his room to prevent the doctor from cutting off the leg while Ike was asleep. Once, when Dwight was babysitting his three-year-old brother, Earl, he left a pocketknife open on a windowsill. Earl got up on a chair, tried to grasp the knife, but it slipped from his hands and plunged into his eye, damaging the eye and producing a lifelong sense of guilt in Dwight.

Somebody should write a history of how the common death of children shaped culture and beliefs. It must have created a general sense that profound suffering was not far off, that life was fragile and contained unbearable hardships. After Ida lost one son, Paul, she converted to the sect that would later become the Jehovah’s Witnesses, in search of a more personal and compassionate expression of faith. Eisenhower himself would later lose his own firstborn son, Doud Dwight, known in the family as “Icky,” an experience that darkened his world ever after. “This was the greatest disappointment and disaster in my life,” he would write decades later, “the one I have never been able to forget completely. Today, when I think of it, even now as I write about it, the keenness of our loss comes back to me as fresh and terrible as it was in that long dark day soon after Christmas, 1920.”⁷

The fragility and remorselessness of this life demanded a certain level of discipline. If a single slip could produce disaster, with little in the way of a social safety net to cushion the fall; if death, or drought, or disease, or betrayal could come crushingly at any moment; then character and discipline were paramount requirements. This was the shape of life: an underlying condition of peril, covered by an ethos of self-restraint, reticence, temperance, and self-wariness, all designed to minimize the risks. People in that culture developed a moral abhorrence of anything that might make life even more perilous, like debt or childbirth out of wedlock. They developed a stern interest in those activities that might harden resilience.

Any child raised by Ida Eisenhower was going to value education, but the general culture placed much less emphasis on it than ours does now. Of the two hundred children who entered first grade with Dwight in 1897, only thirty-one graduated with him from high school. Academics were less important because you could get a decent job without a degree. What mattered more to long-term stability and success was having steady habits, the ability to work, the ability to sense and ward off sloth and self-indulgence. In that environment, a disciplined work ethic really was more important than a brilliant mind.

One Halloween evening, when he was about ten, Eisenhower’s older brothers received permission to go out trick-or-treating, a more adventurous activity in those days than it is now. Ike wanted to go with them, but his parents told him he was too young. He pleaded with them, watched his brothers go, and then became engulfed by uncontrolled rage. He turned red. His hair bristled. Weeping and screaming, he rushed out into the front yard and began pounding his fists against the trunk of an apple tree, scraping the skin off and leaving his hands bloody and torn.

His father shook him, lashed him with a hickory switch, and sent him up to bed. About an hour later, with Ike sobbing into his pillow, his mother came up and sat silently rocking in the chair next to his bed. Eventually she quoted a verse from the Bible: “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city.”

As she began to salve and bandage his wounds, she told her son to beware the anger and hatred burning inside. Hatred is a futile thing, she told him, which only injures the person who harbors it. Of all her boys, she told him, he had the most to learn about controlling his passions.

When he was seventy-six, Eisenhower wrote, “I have always looked back on that conversation as one of the most valuable moments of my life. To my youthful mind, it seemed to me that she talked for hours, but I suppose the affair was ended in fifteen or twenty minutes. At least she got me to acknowledge that I was wrong and I felt enough ease in my mind to fall off to sleep.”⁸

That concept—conquering your own soul—was a significant one in the moral ecology in which Eisenhower grew up. It was based on the idea that deep inside we are dual in our nature. We are fallen, but also splendidly endowed. We have a side to our nature that is sinful—selfish, deceiving, and self-deceiving—but we have another side to our nature that is in God’s image, that seeks transcendence and virtue. The essential drama of life is the drama to construct character, which is an engraved set of disciplined habits, a settled disposition to do good. The cultivation of Adam II was seen as a necessary foundation for Adam I to flourish.

Sin

Today, the word “sin” has lost its power and awesome intensity. It’s used most frequently in the context of fattening desserts. Most people in daily conversation don’t talk much about individual sin. If they talk about human evil at all, that evil is most often located in the structures of society—in inequality, oppression, racism, and so on—not in the human breast.

We’ve abandoned the concept of sin, first, because we’ve left behind the depraved view of human nature. In the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century, many people really did embrace the dark self-estimation expressed in the old Puritan prayer “Yet I Sin”: “Eternal Father, Thou art good beyond all thought, but I am vile, wretched, miserable, blind…” That’s simply too much darkness for the modern mentality.

Second, in many times and many places, the word “sin” was used to declare war on pleasure, even on the healthy pleasures of sex and entertainment. Sin was used as a pretext to live joylessly and censoriously. “Sin” was a word invoked to suppress the pleasures of the body, to terrify teenagers about the perils of masturbation.

Furthermore, the word “sin” was abused by the self-righteous, by dry-hearted scolds who seem alarmed, as H. L. Mencken put it, by the possibility that someone somewhere might be enjoying himself, who always seem ready to rap somebody’s knuckles with a ruler on the supposition that that person is doing wrong. The word “sin” was abused by people who embraced a harsh and authoritarian style of parenting, who felt they had to beat the depravity out of their children. It was abused by those who, for whatever reason, fetishize suffering, who believe that only through dour self-mortification can you really become superior and good.

But in truth, “sin,” like “vocation” and “soul,” is one of those words that it is impossible to do without. It is one of those words—and there will be many in this book—that have to be reclaimed and modernized.

Sin is a necessary piece of our mental furniture because it reminds us that life is a moral affair. No matter how hard we try to reduce everything to deterministic brain chemistry, no matter how hard we try to reduce behavior to the sort of herd instinct that is captured in big data, no matter how hard we strive to replace sin with nonmoral words, like “mistake” or “error” or “weakness,” the most essential parts of life are matters of individual responsibility and moral choice: whether to be brave or cowardly, honest or deceitful, compassionate or callous, faithful or disloyal. When modern culture tries to replace sin with ideas like error or insensitivity, or tries to banish words like “virtue,” “character,” “evil,” and “vice” altogether, that doesn’t make life any less moral; it just means we have obscured the inescapable moral core of life with shallow language. It just means we think and talk about these choices less clearly, and thus become increasingly blind to the moral stakes of everyday life.

Sin is also a necessary piece of our mental furniture because sin is communal, while error is individual. You make a mistake, but we are all plagued by sins like selfishness and thoughtlessness. Sin is baked into our nature and is handed down through the generations. We are all sinners together. To be aware of sin is to feel intense sympathy toward others who sin. It is to be reminded that as the plight of sin is communal, so the solutions are communal. We fight sin together, as communities and families, fighting our own individual sins by helping others fight theirs.

Furthermore, the concept of sin is necessary because it is radically true. To say you are a sinner is not to say that you have some black depraved stain on your heart. It is to say that, like the rest of us, you have some perversity in your nature. We want to do one thing, but we end up doing another. We want what we should not want. None of us wants to be hard-hearted, but sometimes we are. No one wants to self-deceive, but we rationalize all the time. No one wants to be cruel, but we all blurt things out and regret them later. No one wants to be a bystander, to commit sins of omission, but, in the words of the poet Marguerite Wilkinson, we all commit the sin of “unattempted loveliness.”

We really do have dappled souls. The same ambition that drives us to build a new company also drives us to be materialistic and to exploit. The same lust that leads to children leads to adultery. The same confidence that can lead to daring and creativity can lead to self-worship and arrogance.

Sin is not some demonic thing. It’s just our perverse tendency to fuck things up, to favor the short term over the long term, the lower over the higher. Sin, when it is committed over and over again, hardens into loyalty to a lower love.

The danger of sin, in other words, is that it feeds on itself. Small moral compromises on Monday make you more likely to commit other, bigger moral compromises on Tuesday. A person lies to himself and soon can no longer distinguish when he is lying to himself and when he isn’t. Another person is consumed by the sin of self-pity, a passion to be a righteous victim that devours everything around it as surely as anger or greed.

People rarely commit the big sins out of the blue. They walk through a series of doors. They have an unchecked problem with anger. They have an unchecked problem with drinking or drugs. They have an unchecked problem of sympathy. Corruption breeds corruption. Sin is the punishment of sin.

The final reason sin is a necessary part of our mental furniture is that without it, the whole method of character building dissolves. From time immemorial, people have achieved glory by achieving great external things, but they have built character by struggling against their internal sins. People become solid, stable, and worthy of self-respect because they have defeated or at least struggled with their own demons. If you take away the concept of sin, then you take away the thing the good person struggles against.

The person involved in the struggle against sin understands that each day is filled with moral occasions. I once met an employer who asks each job applicant, “Describe a time when you told the truth and it hurt you.” He is essentially asking those people if they have their loves in the right order, if they would put love of truth above love of career.

In places like Abilene, Kansas, the big sins, left unchallenged, would have had very practical and disastrous effects. Sloth could lead to a failure of a farm; gluttony and inebriation to the destruction of a family; lust to the ruination of a young woman; vanity to excessive spending, debt, and bankruptcy.

In places like that, people had an awareness not only of sin but of the different kinds of sins and the different remedies for each. Some sins, such as anger and lust, are like wild beasts. They have to be fought through habits of restraint. Other sins, such as mockery and disrespect, are like stains. They can be expunged only by absolution, by apology, remorse, restitution, and cleansing. Still others, such as stealing, are like a debt. They can be rectified only by repaying what you owe to society. Sins such as adultery, bribery, and betrayal are more like treason than like crime; they damage the social order. Social harmony can be rewoven only by slowly recommitting to relationships and rebuilding trust. The sins of arrogance and pride arise from a perverse desire for status and superiority. The only remedy for them is to humble oneself before others.

In other words, people in earlier times inherited a vast moral vocabulary and set of moral tools, developed over centuries and handed down from generation to generation. This was a practical inheritance, like learning how to speak a certain language, which people could use to engage their own moral struggles.

Character

Ida Eisenhower was funny and warm-hearted, but stood sentry against backsliding. She forbade dancing and card games and drinking in her home precisely because her estimation of the power of sin was so high. Since self-control is a muscle that tires easily, it is much better to avoid temptation in the first place rather than try to resist it once it arises.

In raising her boys she showed them bottomless love and warmth. She allowed them more freedom to get into scrapes than parents generally do today. But she did demand that they cultivate the habit of small, constant self-repression.

Today, when we say that somebody is repressed, we tend to mean it as a criticism. It means they are uptight, stiff, or unaware of their true emotional selves. That’s because we live in a self-expressive culture. We tend to trust the impulses inside the self and distrust the forces outside the self that seek to push down those impulses. But in this earlier moral ecology, people tended to distrust the impulses inside the self. These impulses could be restrained, they argued, through habit.

In 1877, the psychologist William James wrote a short treatise called “Habit.” When you are trying to lead a decent life, he wrote, you want to make your nervous system your ally and not your enemy. You want to engrave certain habits so deep that they will become natural and instinctual. James wrote that when you set out to engrave a habit—say, going on a diet or always telling the truth—you want to launch yourself with as “strong and decided an initiative as possible.” Make the beginning of a new habit a major event in your life. Then, “never suffer an exception” until the habit is firmly rooted in your life. A single slip undoes many fine acts of self-control. Then take advantage of every occasion to practice your habit. Practice a gratuitous exercise of self-discipline every day. Follow arbitrary rules. “Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house of goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and may possibly never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin.”

What William James and Ida Eisenhower were trying to inculcate, in their different ways, was steadiness over time. Character, as the Yale law professor Anthony T. Kronman has put it, is “an ensemble of settled dispositions—of habitual feelings and desires.”⁹ The idea is largely Aristotelian. If you act well, eventually you will be good. Change your behavior and eventually you rewire your brain.

Ida emphasized the importance of practicing small acts of self-control: following the rules of etiquette when sitting at the table, dressing in one’s Sunday best when going to church, keeping the Sabbath afterward, using formal diction in letter writing as a display of deference and respect, eating plain food, avoiding luxury. If you are in the army, keep your uniform neat and your shoes polished. If you are at home, keep everything tidy. Practice the small outward disciplines.

In the culture of that time, people also believed that manual labor was a school for character. In Abilene, everybody, from business owners to farmers, did physical labor every day, greasing the buggy axles, shoveling coal, sifting the unburned lumps from the stove ash. Eisenhower grew up in a home with no running water, and the boys’ chores began at dawn—waking up at five to build the morning fire, hauling water from the well—and continued through the day—carrying a hot lunch to their father at the creamery, feeding the chickens, canning up to five hundred quarts of fruit annually, boiling the clothing on washday, raising corn to be sold for spending money, digging trenches when plumbing became available, and wiring the house when electricity came to town. Ike grew up in an atmosphere that is almost the inverse of the way many children are raised today. Today’s children are spared most of the manual labor Dwight had to perform, but they are not given nearly as much leeway to roam over forests and town when the chores were done. Dwight had a great deal of assigned work, but also a great deal of freedom to roam around town.

David Eisenhower, Dwight’s father, practiced this sort of disciplined life in a harsh and joyless way. He was defined by his punctilious sense of rectitude. He was rigid, cool, and strictly proper. After his bankruptcy he had a horror of taking on any debt, of slipping even a bit. When he was a manager at his company he forced his employees to save 10 percent of their salary every month. They had to report to him what they had done with their 10 percent, either putting it in the bank or investing it in stocks. He wrote down each answer each month, and if he was not satisfied with their report, they lost their job.

He seemed never to relax, never taking his boys out hunting or fishing or playing with them much at all. “He was an inflexible man with a stern code,” one of the boys, Edgar, was to recall. “Life to him was a very serious proposition, and that’s the way he lived it, soberly and with due reflection.”¹⁰

Ida, on the other hand, always had a smile on her lips. She was always willing to be a little naughty, to violate her sense of rectitude, even taking a shot of alcohol if the situation warranted. Ida seemed to understand, as her husband did not, that you can’t rely just on self-control, habit, work, and self-denial to build character. Your reason and your will are simply too weak to defeat your desires all the time. Individuals are strong, but they are not self-sufficient. To defeat sin you need help from outside.

Her character-building method had a tender side as well. Fortunately, love is the law of our nature. People like Ida understand that love, too, is a tool to build character. The tender character-building strategy is based on the idea that we can’t always resist our desires, but we can change and reorder our desires by focusing on our higher loves. Focus on your love for your children. Focus on your love of country. Focus on your love for the poor and downtrodden. Focus on your love of your hometown or alma mater. To sacrifice for such things is sweet. It feels good to serve your beloved. Giving becomes cheerful giving because you are so eager to see the things you love prosper and thrive.

Pretty soon you are behaving better. The parent focusing on the love of his or her children will drive them to events day after day, will get up in the middle of the night when they are sick, will drop everything when they are in crisis. The lover wants to sacrifice, to live life as an offering. A person motivated by such feelings will be a bit less likely to sin.

Ida demonstrated that it is possible to be strict and kind, disciplined and loving, to be aware of sin and also aware of the possibility of forgiveness, charity, and mercy. Decades later, when Dwight Eisenhower took the presidential oath of office, Ida asked him to have the Bible open to 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” The most powerful way to fight sin is by living in a sweet, loving way. It’s how you do the jobs you do, whether it’s a prestigious job or not. As others have noted, God loves adverbs.

Self-Control

Dwight seems to have belonged to the category of those who believe that religion is good for society but who are not religious themselves. There’s no evidence that he had an explicit sense of God’s grace or any theological thoughts about redemption. But he inherited both his mother’s garrulous nature and her sense that that nature had to be continually repressed and conquered. He just held these beliefs in secular form.

He was rambunctious from birth. His childhood was remembered in Abilene for a series of epic brawls. At West Point, he was defiant, rebellious, and misbehaving. He ran up a string of demerits, for gambling, smoking, and general disrespectfulness. At graduation, he ranked 125th out of 164 men for discipline. Once he was demoted from sergeant to private for dancing too exuberantly at a ball. He was also bedeviled, throughout his military career and his presidency, with the barely suppressed temper that his parents had seen on that Halloween evening. Throughout his military career, his subordinates came to look for the telltale signs of his looming fury, such as certain set expressions that signaled an imminent profanity-laced explosion. Dubbed “the terrible-tempered Mr. Bang” by a World War II journalist, Eisenhower’s capacity for rage was always there, just under the surface.¹¹ “It was like looking into a Bessemer furnace,” one of his aides, Bryce Harlow, recalled. His wartime doctor, Howard Snyder, noticed the “twisted cord-like temple arteries standing out on the side of his head” just before one of Eisenhower’s explosions. “Ike’s subordinates were awed by his capacity for rage,” his biographer Evan Thomas wrote.¹² Eisenhower’s appointments secretary, Tom Stephens, noticed that the president tended to wear brown whenever he was in a foul temper. Stephens would see Eisenhower from the office window. “Brown suit today!” he would call out to the staff as forewarning.¹³

Ike was even more divided than most of us. He was a master of army expletives, but he almost never cursed in front of women. He would turn away if someone told a dirty joke.¹⁴ He was reprimanded at West Point for habitually smoking cigarettes in the halls, and by the end of the war he was a four-pack-a-day smoker. But one day he quit cold turkey: “I simply gave myself an order.” “Freedom,” he would later say in his 1957 State of the Union address, “has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline.”¹⁵

His internal torment could be convulsive. By the end of World War II, his body was a collection of aches and pains. He spent the nights staring at the ceiling, racked by insomnia and anxiety, drinking and smoking, tortured by throat infections, cramps, spiking blood pressure. But his capacity for self-repression—what might be called noble hypocrisy—was also immense. He was not naturally good at hiding his emotions. He had a remarkably expressive face. But day by day he put on a false front of confident ease and farm-boy garrulousness. He became known for his sunny, boyish temperament. Evan Thomas writes that Ike told his grandson, David, that that smile “came not from some sunny feel-good philosophy but from getting knocked down by a boxing coach at West Point. ‘If you can’t smile when you get up from a knockdown,’ the coach said, ‘you’re never going to lick an opponent.’ ”¹⁶ He thought it was necessary to project easy confidence in order to lead the army and win the war:

I firmly determined that my mannerisms and speech in public would always reflect the cheerful certainty of victory—that any pessimism and discouragement I might ever feel would be reserved for my pillow. To translate this conviction into tangible results, I adopted a policy of circulating through the whole force to the full limit imposed by physical considerations. I did my best to meet everyone from general to private with a smile, a pat on the back and a definite interest in his problems.¹⁷

He devised stratagems for dismissing his true passions. For example, in his diaries he made lists of people who offended him as a way of sealing off his anger toward them. When he felt a surge of hatred, he refused to let it rule him. “Anger cannot win. It cannot even think clearly,” he noted in his diary.¹⁸ Other times he would write an offender’s name on a piece of paper and then drop it into the wastebasket, another symbolic purging of emotion. Eisenhower was not an authentic man. He was a passionate man who lived, as much as his mother did, under a system of artificial restraints.

Organization Man

Ida sent Ike off from Abilene to West Point on June 8, 1911. She Remained an ardent pacifist, determinedly opposed to the soldier’s vocation, but she told her son, “It is your choice.” She saw the train off, went home, and shut herself in her room. The remaining boys could hear her sobbing through the door. His brother Milton later told Ike it was the first time he had ever heard their mother cry.¹⁹

Ike graduated from West Point in the class of 1915. He thus spent his early career in the shadow of World War I. Trained for combat, he never saw action in the war that was supposed to end all wars. He never even left the United States. He spent those years training troops, coaching football, and doing logistics. He lobbied furiously to be sent to war, and in October 1918, when he was twenty-eight, he received orders. He was to ship out to France on November 18. The war, of course, ended on November 11. It was a bitter blow. “I suppose we’ll spend the rest of our lives explaining why we didn’t get into this war,” he lamented in a letter to a fellow officer. Then he made an uncharacteristically unrestrained vow: “By God, from now on I am cutting myself a swath that will make up for this.”²⁰

That vow didn’t immediately come true. Eisenhower was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1918, in advance of his coming deployment. He would not be promoted again for twenty years, until 1938. The army had a glut of officers who’d been elevated during the war, and there were not many openings for advancement in an army that by the 1920s was shrinking and assuming a marginal role in American life. His career stagnated, while the careers of his civilian brothers zoomed ahead. By the time he was in his forties, he was easily the least accomplished of the boys in the Eisenhower family. He was in middle age. He did not receive his first star until he was fifty-one. Nobody expected great things of him.

During these interwar years Ike served as an infantry officer, football coach, and staff officer, intermittently attending school at the Infantry Tank School, the Command and General Staff School, and eventually the War College. Ike would occasionally unleash his frustration at the bureaucratic bungling of his institution, at the way it smothered his opportunities and wasted his talents. But on the whole, his response was amazingly restrained. He became the classic Organization Man. From Ida’s rules of conduct, Ike slid easily into the military code of conduct. He subsumed his own desires for the sake of the group.

He wrote in one of his memoirs that by the time he was in his thirties he had learned “the basic lesson of the military—that the proper place for a soldier is where he is ordered by his superiors.”²¹ He was given a run-of-the-mill assignment. “I found no better cure than to blow off steam in private and then settle down to the job at hand.”²²

As a staff officer—never a coveted or glamorous role—Eisenhower learned to master procedure, process, teamwork, and organization. He learned the secrets of thriving within the organization. “When I go to a new station I look to see who is the strongest and ablest man on the post. I forget my own ideas and do everything in my power to promote what he says is right.”²³ Later, in At Ease, he wrote, “Always try to associate yourself closely and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.” He was a fanatic about both preparation and then adaptation: “The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything,” he would say. Or, “Rely on planning, but never trust plans.”

He also gained a perspective on himself. He began carrying around an anonymous little poem:

Take a bucket, fill it with water,

Put your hand in—clear up to the wrist.

Now pull it out; the hole that remains

Is a measure of how much you’ll be missed….

The moral of this quaint example:

To do just the best that you can,

Be proud of yourself, but remember,

There is no Indispensible Man!²⁴

Mentors

In 1922, Eisenhower was ordered to Panama, where he joined the 20th Infantry Brigade. Two years in Panama did two things for Ike. First, it allowed him a change of scene after the death of his firstborn son, Icky. Second, it introduced him to General Fox Connor. As the historian Jean Edward Smith put it, “Fox Connor was understatement personified: self-possessed, soft-spoken, eminently formal, and polite—a general who loved reading, a profound student of history, and a keen judge of military talent.”²⁵ Connor was completely devoid of theatricality. From Connor Ike learned the maxim “Always take your job seriously, never yourself.”

Fox Connor served as the beau ideal of the humble leader. “A sense of humility is a quality I have observed in every leader whom I have deeply admired,” Eisenhower later wrote. “My own conviction is that every leader should have enough humility to accept, publicly, the responsibility for the mistakes of the subordinates he has himself selected and, likewise, to give them credit, publicly, for their triumphs.” Connor, Ike continued, “was a practical officer, down to earth, equally at home in the company of the most important people in the region and with any of the men in the regiment. He never put on airs of any kind, and he was as open and honest as any man I have ever known…. He has held a place in my affections for many years that no other, not even a relative, could obtain.”²⁶

Connor also revived Ike’s love of the classics, military strategy, and world affairs. Eisenhower called his service under Connor “a sort of graduate school in military affairs and the humanities, leavened by the comments and discourses of a man who was experienced in his knowledge of men and their conduct…. It was the most interesting and constructive [period] of my life.” On a visit to Panama, Ike’s boyhood friend Edward “Swede” Hazlett noted that Eisenhower had “fitted up the 2nd story screened porch of their quarters as a rough study, and here, with drawing board and texts, he put in his spare time re-fighting the campaigns of the old masters.”²⁷

At the same time, Ike was particularly affected by the training of a horse, “Blackie.” In his memoirs, he wrote:

In my experience with Blackie—and earlier with allegedly incompetent recruits at Camp Colt—is rooted my enduring conviction that far too often we write off a backward child as hopeless, a clumsy animal as worthless, a worn-out field as beyond restoration. This we do largely out of our own lack of willingness to take the time and spend the effort to prove ourselves wrong: to prove that a difficult boy can become a fine man, that an animal can respond to training, that the field can regain its fertility.²⁸

General Connor arranged for Eisenhower to attend the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He would graduate first in his class of 245 officers. Like Blackie, he was not to be written off.

In 1933, after graduating from the War College as one of the youngest officers ever to attend, Eisenhower was appointed General Douglas MacArthur’s personal assistant. For the next several years, Eisenhower worked with MacArthur, primarily in the Philippines, helping that nation prepare for its independence. Douglas MacArthur was the theatrical one. Ike respected MacArthur but was put off by his grandiosity. He described MacArthur as “an aristocrat, but as for me, I’m just folks.”²⁹

Under MacArthur, Eisenhower met the ultimate test of his temper. Their small office rooms adjoined, separated by only a slatted door. “He called me to his office by raising his voice,”³⁰ Eisenhower remembered. “He was decisive, personable, and he had one habit that never ceased to startle me. In reminiscing or in telling stories, he talked of himself in the third person.”³¹

Several times, Ike asked to leave his staff assignment. MacArthur denied the request, insisting Eisenhower’s work in the Philippines was far more important than anything he could do as a mere lieutenant colonel in the American army.

Ike was disappointed, but he remained with MacArthur for six more years, working behind the scenes with more and more planning work falling on his shoulders.³² Ike remained respectful in his boss’s presence but eventually came to detest MacArthur for the way he put himself above the institution. After one of MacArthur’s more memorable acts of egomania, Eisenhower erupted in the privacy of his diary:

But I must say it is almost incomprehensible that after 8 years of working for him, writing every word he publishes, keeping his secrets, preventing him from making too much of an ass of himself, trying to advance his interests while keeping myself in the background, he should suddenly turn on me. He’d like to occupy a throne room surrounded by experts in flattery; while in a dungeon beneath, unknown to the world, would be a bunch of slaves doing his work and producing the things that, to the public, would represent the brilliant accomplishment of his mind. He’s a fool, but worse he is a puking baby.³³

Eisenhower served loyally and humbly, putting himself inside the mind of his superior, adopting his perspectives as his own, getting his work done efficiently and on time. In the end, the officers he served—MacArthur included—ended up promoting him. And when the great challenge of his life came during World War II, Ike’s ability to repress his own passions served him well. He never greeted war with a sense of romantic excitement, the way his lifelong colleague George S. Patton did. He saw it as another hard duty to be endured. He had learned to focus less on the glamor and excitement of wartime heroics and more on the dull, mundane things that would prove to be the keys to victory. Preserving alliances with people you might find insufferable. Building enough landing craft to make amphibious invasions possible. Logistics.

Eisenhower was a masterful wartime commander. He suppressed his own frustrations in order to keep the international alliance together. He ferociously restrained national prejudices, which he felt as acutely as anyone, in order to keep the disparate armies on the same team. He passed credit for victories on to his subordinates and, in one of the most famous unsent messages in world history, was willing to put the blame for failures upon himself. This was the memo he was going to release if the D-Day invasion failed. “Our landings…have failed…and I have withdrawn the troops,” he wrote. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

Eisenhower’s disciplined and self-regulating life had its downsides. He was not a visionary. He was not a creative thinker. In war, he was not a great strategist. As president, he was often oblivious to the most consequential emerging historical currents of his time—from the civil rights movement to the menace of McCarthyism. He was never good with abstract ideas. He behaved disgracefully in failing to defend General George C. Marshall from attacks upon his patriotism, to his great regret and shame later on. And all that artificial self-restraint could make him cold when he should have been warm, ruthlessly practical when he should have been chivalrous and romantic. His behavior toward his mistress, Kay Summersby, at the end of the war is repellent. Summersby had served, and presumably, loved Eisenhower through the hardest years of his life. He did not give her even the benefit of a good-bye. One day, she found that her name had been dropped from his travel roster. She received an icy typewritten note from Ike on official Army stationery: “I am sure you understand that I am personally much distressed that an association that has been so valuable to me has to be terminated in this particular fashion but it is by reasons over which I have no control…. I hope that you will drop me a note from time to time—I will always be interested in how you are getting along.”³⁴ He had become so practiced at suppressing his own emotions that in this moment he was even able to suppress any hint of compassion, any ember of gratitude.

Eisenhower was occasionally aware of his shortcomings. Thinking of his hero George Washington, he said, “I’ve often felt the deep wish that the Good Lord had endowed me with his clarity of vision in big things, his strength of purpose and his genuine greatness of mind and spirit.”³⁵

But for some, life is the perfect school; it teaches them exactly those lessons they will need later on. Eisenhower was never a flashy man, but two outstanding traits defined the mature Eisenhower, traits that flowed from his upbringing and that he cultivated over time. The first was his creation of a second self. Today, we tend to live within an ethos of authenticity. We tend to believe that the “true self” is whatever is most natural and untutored. That is, each of us has a certain sincere way of being in the world, and we should live our life being truthful to that authentic inner self, not succumbing to the pressures outside ourself. To live artificially, with a gap between your inner nature and your outer conduct, is to be deceptive, cunning, and false.

Eisenhower hewed to a different philosophy. This code held that artifice is man’s nature. We start out with raw material, some good, some bad, and this nature has to be pruned, girdled, formed, repressed, molded, and often restrained, rather than paraded in public. A personality is a product of cultivation. The true self is what you have built from your nature, not just what your nature started out with.

Eisenhower was not a sincere person. He hid his private thoughts. He recorded them in his diary, and they could be scathing. Of Senator William Knowland, he wrote, “In his case, there seems to be no final answer to the question, ‘How stupid can you get?’ ”³⁶ But in public he wore a costume of affability, optimism, and farm-boy charm. As president, he was perfectly willing to appear stupider than he really was if it would help him perform his assigned role. He was willing to appear tongue-tied if it would help him conceal his true designs. Just as he learned to suppress his anger as a boy, he learned to suppress his ambitions and abilities as an adult. He was reasonably learned in ancient history, admiring especially the crafty Athenian leader Themistocles, but he never let that on. He did not want to appear smarter than other people, or somehow superior to the average American. Instead he cultivated the image of simple, unlearned charm. As president he would supervise a detailed meeting about an arcane topic, issuing clear and specific instructions about what was to be done. Then he would go out to a press conference and massacre the English language in an effort to disguise his designs. Or he would just pretend the whole subject was over his head: “That’s just too complicated for a dumb bunny like me.”³⁷ He was willing to appear more stupid than he really was. (This is how we know he was not a New Yorker.)

Ike’s simplicity was strategic. After his death, his vice president, Richard Nixon, recollected, “[Ike] was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of these words. Not shackled to a one-track mind, he always applied two, three, or four lines of reasoning to a single problem…. His mind was quick and facile.”³⁸ He was a famously good poker player. “Ike’s wide smile, open as the Kansas sky,” Evan Thomas writes, “concealed a deep secretiveness. He was honorable but occasionally opaque, outwardly amiable but inwardly seething.”³⁹

Once, before a press conference, his press secretary, Jim Hagerty, informed him of an increasingly delicate situation in the Formosa Strait. Ike smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Jim, if that question comes up, I’ll just confuse them.” Predictably, the question was raised by journalist Joseph Harsch. Good-naturedly, Eisenhower responded:

The only thing I know about war is two things: the most changeable factor in war is human nature in its day-by-day manifestation; but the only unchanging factor about war is human nature. And the next thing is that every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred and the way it is carried out…. So I think you just have to wait, and that is the kind of prayerful decision that may some day face a president.⁴⁰

After the conference, Thomas writes, “Eisenhower himself joked that he must have given fits to Russian and Chinese translators trying to explain to their bosses what he meant.”⁴¹

Ike’s double nature could make it hard for people to really know him. “I don’t envy you trying to figure Dad out,” John Eisenhower told the biographer Evan Thomas. “I can’t figure him out.” After his death, his widow, Mamie, was asked whether she had really known her husband. “I’m not sure anyone did,” she replied.⁴² But self-repression helped Eisenhower to control his natural desires and to fulfill the tasks assigned to him, both by his military superiors and by history. He looked simple and straightforward, but his simplicity was a work of art.

Moderation

His final trait which ripened with his full maturity was moderation.

Moderation is a generally misunderstood virtue. It is important to start by saying what it is not. Moderation is not just finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there. Neither is moderation bland equanimity. It’s not just having a temperate disposition that doesn’t contain rival passions or competing ideas.

On the contrary, moderation is based on an awareness of the inevitability of conflict. If you think that the world can fit neatly together, then you don’t need to be moderate. If you think all your personal qualities can be brought together into simple harmony, you don’t need to hold back, you can just go whole hog for self-actualization and growth. If you think all moral values point in the same direction, or all political goals can be realized all at once by a straightforward march along one course, you don’t need to be moderate, either. You can just head in the direction of truth as quickly as possible.

Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half-truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits. As Harry Clor put it in his brilliant book On Moderation, “The fundamental division in the soul or psyche is at the root of our need for moderation.” Eisenhower, for example, was fueled by passion and policed by self-control. Neither impulse was entirely useless and neither was entirely benign. Eisenhower’s righteous rage could occasionally propel him toward justice, but it could occasionally blind him. His self-control enabled him to serve and do his duty, but it could make him callous.

The moderate person contains opposing capacities to the nth degree. A moderate person can start out hot on both ends, both fervent in a capacity for rage and fervent in a desire for order, both Apollonian at work and Dionysian at play, both strong in faith and deeply doubtful, both Adam I and Adam II.

A moderate person can start out with these divisions and rival tendencies, but to live a coherent life, the moderate must find a series of balances and proportions. The moderate is forever seeking a series of temporary arrangements, embedded in the specific situation of the moment, that will help him or her balance the desire for security with the desire for risk, the call of liberty with the need for restraint. The moderate knows there is no ultimate resolution to these tensions. Great matters cannot be settled by taking into account just one principle or one viewpoint. Governing is more like sailing in a storm: shift your weight one way when the boat tilts to starboard, shift your weight the other way when it tilts to port—adjust and adjust and adjust to circumstances to keep the semblance and equanimity of an even keel.

Eisenhower understood this intuitively. Writing to Swede, his boyhood friend, in his second term as president, he mused “Possibly I am something like a ship which, buffeted and pounded by wind and wave, is still afloat and manages in spite of frequent tacks and turnings to stay generally along its plotted course and continues to make some, even if slow and painful, headway.”⁴³

As Clor observes, the moderate knows she cannot have it all. There are tensions between rival goods, and you just have to accept that you will never get to live a pure and perfect life, devoted to one truth or one value. The moderate has limited aspirations about what can be achieved in public life. The paradoxes embedded into any situation do not allow for a clean and ultimate resolution. You expand liberty at the cost of encouraging license. You crack down on license at the cost of limiting liberty. There is no escaping this sort of trade-off.

The moderate can only hope to have a regulated character, stepping back to understand opposing perspectives and appreciating the merits of each. The moderate understands that political cultures are traditions of conflict. There are never-ending tensions that pit equality against achievement, centralization against decentralization, order and community against liberty and individualism. The moderate doesn’t try to solve those arguments. There are no ultimate solutions. The moderate can only hope to achieve a balance that is consistent with the needs of the moment. The moderate does not believe there are some policy solutions that are right for all times (this seems obvious, but the rule is regularly flouted by ideologues in nation after nation). The moderate does not admire abstract schemes but understands that it is necessary to legislate along the grain of human nature, and within the medium in which she happens to be placed.

The moderate can only hope to be disciplined enough to combine in one soul, as Max Weber put it, both warm passion and a cool sense of proportion. He aims to be passionate about his ends but deliberate about the proper means to realize them. The best moderate is blessed with a spirited soul and also the proper character to tame it. The best moderate is skeptical of zealotry because he is skeptical of himself. He distrusts passionate intensity and bold simplicity because he know that in politics the lows are lower than the highs are high—the damage leaders do when they get things wrong is greater than the benefits they create when they get things right. Therefore caution is the proper attitude, an awareness of the limits the foundation of wisdom.

For many people at the time and for many years after, Eisenhower seemed like an emotionally flat simpleton with a passion for Western novels. His star has risen among historians as his inner turmoil has become better appreciated. And at the end of his presidency, he delivered a speech that still stands today as a perfect example of moderation in practice.

Ike’s speech came at a crucial pivot point in American politics and even public morality. On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy gave an inaugural address that signaled a cultural shift. Kennedy’s speech was meant to indicate a new direction in the march of history. One generation and one era was ending and another generation would, as he put it, “begin anew.” There would be a “new endeavor” and “a new world of law.” The possibilities, he argued, were limitless. “Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty,” he declared. Kennedy issued a call to uninhibited action. “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship….” He called on his listeners not just to tolerate problems, but to end them: “Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease.” It was the speech of a man supremely confident in himself. It inspired millions of people around the world and set the tone and standard for political rhetoric ever since.

Three days earlier, however, Eisenhower had given a speech that epitomized the worldview that was fading away. Whereas Kennedy emphasized limitless possibilities, Eisenhower warned against hubris. Whereas Kennedy celebrated courage, Eisenhower celebrated prudence. Whereas Kennedy exhorted the nation to venture boldly forth, Eisenhower called for balance.

The word “balance” recurs throughout his text—a need to balance competing priorities, “balance between the private economy and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped-for advantages, balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable, balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.”

Eisenhower warned the country against belief in quick fixes. Americans, he said, should never believe that “some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” He warned against human frailty, particularly the temptation to be shortsighted and selfish. He asked his countrymen to “avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.” Echoing the thrifty ethos of his childhood, he reminded the nation that we cannot “mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.”

He warned, most famously, about the undue concentration of power, and the way unchecked power could lead to national ruin. He warned first about the military-industrial complex—“a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” He also warned against “a scientific-technological elite,” a powerful network of government-funded experts who might be tempted to take power away from the citizenry. Like the nation’s founders, he built his politics on distrust of what people might do if they have unchecked power. He communicated the sense that in most times, leaders have more to gain from being stewards of what they have inherited than by being destroyers of what is there and creators of something new.

This was the speech of a man who had been raised to check his impulses and had then been chastened by life. It was the speech of a man who had seen what human beings are capable of, who had felt in his bones that man is a problem to himself. It was the speech of a man who used to tell his advisers “Let’s make our mistakes slowly,” because it was better to proceed to a decision gradually than to rush into anything before its time. This is the lesson that his mother and his upbringing had imparted to him decades before. This was a life organized not around self-expression, but self-restraint.