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.