Eisenhower: A Biography
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About this ebook
American general and 34th president of the United States, Eisenhower was the principal architect of the successful Allied invasion of Europe during World War II and of the subsequent defeat of Nazi Germany.
World War II expert John Wukovits explores Dwight D. Eisenhower's contributions to American warfare. American general and 34th president of the United States, Eisenhower led the assault on the French coast at Normandy and held together the Allied units through the European campaign that followed. The book reveals Eisenhower's advocacy in the pre-war years of the tank, his friendships with George Patton and Fox Conner, his service in the Philippines with Douglas MacArthur, and his culminating role as supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe.
Wukovits skillfully demonstrates how Eisenhower's evolution as a commander, his military doctrine, and his diplomatic skills are of extreme importance in understanding modern warfare.
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Reviews for Eisenhower
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This biography primarily focused on Eisenhower's war years, with a single brief chapter covering his post-WWII life; combined with a few chapters that discussed growing up in Abilene, the academy and his staff maturation...many years on the staff. It also focuses on his mentors with the effect they had on his life. MacArthur was one of them, but a good influence? Wukovits produced a readable narrative of Eisenhower's military life--does a good job relating the stresses that the man faced as he balanced political and military personalities (prima donnas). The audio version had about a dozen irritating repeats of a sentence or two--a little like the needle slipped on the vinyl. Overall, a readable and concise history.
Book preview
Eisenhower - John Wukovits
CHAPTER 1
Kansas Isn’t the Whole World
Ironically, Dwight Eisenhower’s ancestors came from a region of the world whose destruction he would later so capably orchestrate. Family stories reveal that centuries before, Eisenhower’s relatives from Bavaria served as medieval warriors for the famed local ruler, Charlemagne. Over the years pacifist tendencies tempered the clan’s militaristic leanings to such a degree that in the seventeenth century some, who then spelled the last name Eisenhauer, a word meaning iron cutter,
fled to Switzerland to escape the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War.
In 1741 Hans Nicholas Eisenhauer transplanted the family to the New World, moving first to Philadelphia and later settling near present-day Harrisburg. Several Eisenhauer boys served in the Civil War before Dwight’s grandfather, the dynamic Reverend Jacob Eisenhower, uprooted his family from Pennsylvania and headed toward the lush prairies of Kansas. He purchased 160 acres of farmland 12 miles south of Abilene, determined to combine a lucrative career in raising corn and breeding animals with his love for delivering thundering sermons.
Jacob’s interests did not extend to his son, David, born in 1863. Quiet, scholarly, and without ambition, David preferred the quiet realm of books and thought to the rigors of the fields or the gregarious world of the pulpit. While attending Lane University in nearby Lecompton, Kansas, David gazed up from his books long enough to catch sight of Ida Elizabeth Stover, a strong-willed, yet lovely, pacifist. The two fell in love and were married on September 23, 1885.
For some strange reason, David, who had no sense for business, opened a general store in Hope, Kansas. Three years later, with his farmer clients wallowing in the midst of a suffocating drought and unable to pay their bills, and with David spending more time studying classical literature than his accounting books, David closed the store. While Ida tended to their two sons, Arthur and Edgar, David headed to Texas to look for work, then sent for his family in 1889 after landing a job with a railroad company in Denison, Texas.
There, in a dilapidated shanty on the wrong side of the tracks, David Dwight Eisenhower was born on October 14, 1890. His mother, hating the notion that her son would be referred to as Jr.,
quickly reversed the names so that the child would be called Dwight David.
David, still uncomfortable with having to put down his books and work, failed to earn much money in Texas. When his brother-in-law offered him a job in Abilene in 1891, David, with $24.15 in his pocket, collected his family and his few meager possessions and returned to Kansas, hoping this stint would be more productive than his first.
Hope as he might, David lacked the burning intensity to ensure that his family enjoyed even a modest standard of living. For six years Ida tended to the children in another run-down structure, this one standing beside the Union Pacific railroad tracks that divided the wealthy residents of Abilene from its less fortunate citizens. Finally, in 1898 David’s brother rented him a small, two-story, white frame house, an improvement for the Eisenhower family but still far from what their neighbors possessed across the tracks. The irrepressible Ida, however, made things work, and there she raised six strapping young boys (Roy, Earl, Milton, Arthur, Edgar, and Dwight—another brother, Paul, died within ten months of his birth).
The Eisenhowers never thought of themselves as poverty-stricken. Crops grown on a family farm supplemented whatever David brought home, while Ida’s ingenuity and love supplied the rest. Dwight and his brothers lived a carefree life of sports, hunting, fishing, and swimming naked in a nearby pond, as if Huck Finn had been transplanted to the Kansas prairie. They fought and argued like most brothers but banded together when threatened by outsiders.
Dwight early exhibited a gift for independence. During a family reunion held on a farm shortly before his fifth birthday, Dwight encountered an ornery goose that kept charging the boy whenever he walked into the barnyard. The boy’s uncle, Luther, gave him a broom handle, showed him how to swat the goose, and turned him loose. Little Dwight marched into the barnyard, stared at the offending animal, then forced it into a hasty retreat with a few well-aimed smacks with the broom. When reflecting on the incident years later, Eisenhower wrote, "This all turned out to be a rather good lesson for me because I quickly learned never to negotiate with an adversary except from a position of