Published Friday, December 02, 2005

I LIKE IKE

My opinion
Paul Greenberg


They've finally chosen a site for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, and it's in the right neighborhood: just across from the National Mall near the monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR.

Who would have thought, when his second term in the White House ended in 1961, that Ike would be classed in that company?

Wasn't he just an amiable duffer in politics, the popular general who muddled through while the country marked time in the conformist 1950s?

Yet somehow this mere figurehead of a president ended the Korean War and kept the Cold War from getting hot again; created the Interstate Highway System; resolved a constitutional crisis in 1957 when he enforced a federal court order ending racial segregation in the public schools; and calmly gave Joe McCarthy, the most prominent demagogue of the day, enough time and rope to hang himself.

Because his style was undramatic, his critics thought of Ike as ineffective. When his speechwriters handed him the first draft of a presidential address, Ike would go through it deliberately striking any colorful phrases. He knew cleverness, especially for its own sake, tends to divide people rather than unite them. Because he tended to draw people together toward the middle of the political spectrum, the Great Thinkers of both left and right thought him passive.

Remember Quemoy and Matsu? Those tiny islands off the Chinese coast have long since faded in the world's memory, but they were once Page One news. They're not remembered as the fuse that lit World War III because Dwight Eisenhower's specialty was defusing crises.

Ike was a master of what has since come to be recognized as strategic ambiguity. He deserves to be remembered not only for the campaigns he won as a general but the wars he avoided as president.

There's a story about Ike and Jim Hagerty, the presidential press secretary who had the thankless task of turning his boss's wordfog into something vaguely approaching English.

Hagerty was particularly worried when shells from the Chinese mainland started raining on those Nationalist-held islands, perhaps preparatory to a Communist invasion of Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek, like a tiny Pekinese barking at a huge mastiff, was begging to be "unleashed."

One careless remark from the president, his aide feared, and war might be upon us. He needn't have been concerned. "Don't worry, Jim," Ike told him. "I'll just go out there and confuse 'em." He did. At length. And the crisis passed. Call it peace through confusion.

But the most eloquent, and revealing, message Eisenhower ever composed was one that he never had to deliver. It was a short statement he wrote out and stuck in his billfold on the afternoon of June 5, 1944, in case the invasion of Normandy he had ordered for the next day, D-Day, had failed:

"Our landings ... have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. 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 to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

 Can you imagine any American leader today, civil or military, being willing to take such clear, simple, personal responsibility for his decisions?

That note belongs among the many exhibits at the Eisenhower Memorial now being planned. None would so capture the character of the general, the president and the man.

 Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Greenberg is Editor of the Editorial page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.