Harry and Ike: The Partnership That Remade the Postwar World
By Steve Neal
Scribner, 368 pages, $26
Political ambition, that blinding drive known to produce strange bedfellows, also creates intriguingly illogical enemies. Public figures you expect to get along develop conflicting personal agendas that trigger egocentric feuding akin to hand-to-hand combat.
In “Harry and Ike,” Steve Neal probes the complicated (and, to be sure, historically significant) relationship between Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. At a time when, for various reasons, the presidency seems less majestic, Neal, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist and author of several political biographies, reminds us that not long ago national leaders constantly worked and worried to preserve what they called, without hyperbole, civilization. On human shoulders rested freedom’s fate.
While other books about Truman and Eisenhower treat in passing their association (with its early sunny days and eventual dark squalls), Neal tracks every move between them from their first meeting in 1945 until Eisenhower’s death in 1969. Sharp focus notwithstanding, a compelling picture of a turbulent time emerges, complete with larger lessons in political psychology.
Strikingly similar in backgrounds–Truman and Eisenhower grew up 150 miles apart in Missouri and Kansas within families struggling to make ends meet–both men learned to love history and to respect the military. They shared a belief in American internationalism, and a hatred of isolationism. Both were, in Neal’s phrase, “late bloomers,” owing their positions of prominence (Truman as president and Eisenhower as World War II Allied commander) to one person, Franklin Roosevelt. Later, another individual, Joseph McCarthy, drove them apart with a fury only the former senator from Wisconsin could arouse.
As much as possible, Neal relies on the words of Truman, Eisenhower and those who knew them to tell his story. At certain points, in fact, quotations seem to run into each other and lack the necessary breathing space of explanation and analysis.
Yet by their words–in letters, diaries, speeches, press conferences and reports of meetings–we get to know both men. Truman is direct, colorful, generous and politically protective (of the Democratic Party and himself). Eisenhower is indirect, formal, willing to take orders and politically disinterested (in partisan terms until late in life).
Neal chronicles how they worked together on ending World War II, rebuilding Europe, reforming the military and preventing the spread of Soviet influence in Western countries. The two didn’t always agree (Eisenhower opposed the use of atomic bombs in Japan and Truman’s equally controversial decision to desegregate the armed forces), but for several years mutual respect marked what the subtitle aptly terms their “partnership.”
Shortly after Roosevelt’s death in 1945 elevated Truman, a reluctant vice president, to the presidency, the new occupant of the White House began to plot how he might get Eisenhower, the popular war hero, elected commander in chief in 1948. According to Neal’s research, Truman went so far as to offer himself as Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate to persuade the general to lead the Democratic ticket.
After all overtures failed, Truman ran in a remarkable campaign that featured two splinter Democratic candidates (Henry Wallace on the left and Strom Thurmond on the right) and the heavy favorite, Republican Thomas Dewey. Truman’s dramatic upset gave him more confidence, but still didn’t deter him from trying to persuade Eisenhower to be the Democratic standard-bearer in 1952.
As Neal repeatedly shows, Truman’s love of party always exceeded personal political motivations. Eisenhower, by contrast, consciously avoided the hurly-burly of partisan battle as long as he could, thinking of himself and his future instead of any larger political organization.
Although the book doesn’t explore this point, it’s possible Eisenhower’s involvement in military conflict and devotion to maintaining peace made him reluctant to engage in domestic, democratic warfare. He longed for the presidential nomination of Democrats and Republicans, and former U.S. Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois even called for an unprecedented joint draft by the two parties.
But no support developed for a president picked by acclamation, so Eisenhower became a Republican, largely because he calculated that the Democrats couldn’t win the White House a sixth consecutive time. Although he talked about the need to preserve the two-party system, this was really a rhetorical smokescreen to justify his newfound partisanship and to enhance his chances.
Eisenhower’s Republican allegiance, such as it was, didn’t prevent him from telling his son how impressed he was with Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee in 1952. ” ‘I would have stayed [in the military],’ ” Eisenhower said, ” ‘if I had known the Democrats were going to run Stevenson.’ ” In subsequent speeches, Truman (rather than Stevenson) received Eisenhower’s ire, the well-wishing patron now treated as principal enemy.
To win the GOP nomination, Eisenhower took on “Mr. Republican,” Robert Taft, and the isolationist-minded supporters of the Ohio senator. Then, during the fall campaign, he sought accommodation with McCarthy and other Republicans who were charging that communists had infiltrated the government and military.
With attention to detail and context, Neal portrays Eisenhower as an opportunistic (and less-than-heroic) politician, unwilling to jeopardize any potential votes by questioning McCarthy’s unsubstantiated accusations. In the senator’s home state, Eisenhower declined to read a portion of an already-circulated speech defending Gen. George Marshall, Eisenhower’s mentor and friend, against McCarthy’s fabricated claims Marshall was (in Neal’s word) “the unwitting dupe of an immense Soviet conspiracy.”
The few words Eisenhower failed to utter provoked thousands more by journalists reporting the omission and particularly pointed ones from the plain-spoken Truman. ” ‘I had never thought the man who is now the Republican candidate would stoop so low,’ ” he told one campaign crowd. ” ‘A man who betrays his friends in such a fashion is not to be trusted with the great office of President of the United States.’ “
From this moment and for nearly a decade, the mutual trust between Truman and Eisenhower turned into mutual contempt, with both men cold when together and fiery at other times. Truman’s assessment that Eisenhower ” ‘doesn’t know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday’ ” prompted the then-president to say of his predecessor that ” ‘Truman didn’t know any more about government than a dog knows about religion.’ ” In a brief (frankly, too brief) final chapter, Neal recounts the rekindling of warmth between the two former leaders that began in 1961, when Eisenhower visited Truman’s library in Independence to see how it operated and organized exhibits. Two years later, they spent several hours together in friendly conversation after John Kennedy’s state funeral.
Neal’s just-the-facts style makes “Harry and Ike” solid, informed, journalistic history. But unlike a work by a David McCullough or a Stephen E. Ambrose, for this book a reader needs to imagine the human drama surrounding the relationship and to speculate privately about the motivations of each man.
Neal, for instance, duly reports the multiple exchanges of a globe Eisenhower used during World War II, but doesn’t make much of the various transfers of ownership. Initially, Truman’s attraction to the globe during a trip to Europe prompted Eisenhower to send it to the president as a gift. But after their falling out in 1952, Truman made a point of leaving the globe in the White House when he departed, only to have a mellowing Eisenhower eventually send it back to Truman in retirement for display in his library.
That mobile globe is more than a symbol of a complex relationship between two powerful public figures. It also represents the lifetime commitment shared by both men to preserve freedom and democracy in a civilization-endangered world.
