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.