TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102990/1029105.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.1 KB | 173 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 45

HUGH SIDEY'S AMERICA

Why We Still Like Ike


A century after his birth, Americans revere Dwight Eisenhower's
small-town humanity and commonsense leadership

By Hugh Sidey


    It was a warm day in 1941 or 1942, and Wes Jackson, who was
5 or 6, climbed into the family's Lafayette sedan with assorted
cousins. They drove from their farm near Topeka over to
Abilene, Kans., for a family reunion at his great-aunt Ida
Eisenhower's white frame house on Fourth Street, south of the
tracks. Her son Dwight was either in Washington or Europe, even
then on the edge of his great fame.

    Wes dutifully greeted the elders present, wandered over the
few acres and through the barn out back, then lounged under an
old hackberry tree. At noon dinner he loaded up his plate with
fried chicken and mashed potatoes and took a seat with a cousin
on the back porch. Wes cleaned his plate. His cousin did not.
Aunt Ida came inspecting. She spied the wasted food, stopped
and delivered a stern dose of family doctrine: "Waste not, want
not." Right then another remarkable career may have been
started through the mixture of Eisenhower family values and the
ethic of that prairie society. Jackson, now one of the nation's
most renowned and innovative agriculture researchers, founded
the Land Institute in Salina, Kans., in search of perennial
prairie grain crops that will halt the wasting of the planet.

    He is as much a philosopher as a geneticist, and he has
thought a great deal about his first cousin once removed,
Dwight David Eisenhower. Jackson believes the bedrock of Ike's
achievements and his growing stature in history came from the
white frame house in Abilene and the harmony the town required
and imposed for a rewarding life. Many strata of worldly
experience were laid down over Ike's character during his 50
years of public service. But the final high silhouette of his
life followed the outlines shaped in the streets of Abilene.

    The tributes for Ike's 100th birthday last week focused on
his career as "the most successful general of the greatest war
ever fought," to use biographer Stephen Ambrose's words.
Ambrose goes further, suggesting that Ike is destined to be
ranked "with Wilson and the Roosevelts as one of the four truly
great Presidents of the 20th century." He is the most famous
American soldier of all time. He commanded 4.5 million men in
combat, more than any other man in history.

    Victory explains his military stature. Peace and prosperity
define his presidential ranking. Yet those achievements fall
short of the sum of Dwight Eisenhower. That other part of him
is found in the nature of the man.

    Had Ike been around for last week's celebrations, he most
probably would have gone back to Kansas and talked about
growing up in Abilene. He had been granted, he once said, "the
great and priceless privilege of being raised in a small town."
After the war he returned to Abilene 19 times, insisted that
he be buried there. He had really never let go.

    On the night before the Normandy invasion, moving among the
men of the 101st Airborne who were loading up for their drop,
he met a man from Dodge City. "Go get 'em, Kansas," he said
with a thumbs-up. When the great battles were done and Ike
stood in London's Guildhall, talking about the successful
struggle for freedom, he was back home again. "The valley of
the Thames draws closer to the farms of Kansas," he declared.

    "Family values," explains Jackson. The Eisenhowers treasured
what they had -- one another and a fresh land. "Our pleasures
were simple -- they included survival" is the way Ike put it.
Bible Scripture was read three times a day in the Eisenhower
home. Those lessons were reinforced in the town where
Eisenhower sought and won approval from almost everyone,
including the town toughs whom he fought when necessary. Hemmed
in by family and neighborhood, he had no other choice -- or
experience. Happiness was discipline.

    At age 10, when Ike was denied the right to go
trick-or-treating on Halloween with his brothers, his temper
overwhelmed him. He ran outside and pummeled a tree until his
small fists were torn and bleeding. He went to bed and sobbed
for an hour. His mother came in, salved and bandaged his hands,
then explained the futility of uncontrolled anger: "He that
conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city."
Much later Ike claimed that was "one of the most valuable
moments of my life." Five times in 1954 when he was President,
there were emotional appeals from his advisers to strike
militarily at the troublemakers in Asia. Each time he went off
to think, and each time he heard the echo from that day in
Abilene. He kept the peace.

    He had neither the inclination nor the need to worry about
his financial or social status in Abilene. Ike revered an older
man, Bob Davis, who taught him how to play poker and how to net
fish on the banks of the Smoky Hill River. Davis was
illiterate. Ike's best friend was Everett ("Swede") Hazlett,
son of an Abilene physician who lived in the affluent part of
town. In his exuberance Ike rounded up companions for baseball,
football and camping from anyplace. His most famous fistfight
was with Wes Merrifield, and according to Ike himself, the
fight went more than an hour, ended in a draw when both boys
were exhausted. The two got along out of necessity after that.

    In war, Ike's magic was to inspire foot soldiers and
generals alike, blending English lords with plain Americans,
reconciling and focusing the energies of haughty, contentious
commanders such as Britain's Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery
and the U.S Third Army's General George Patton. Holding the
trust of the grandiloquent politicians such as Winston
Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt was just as challenging. It
took all Ike had and four packs of Camels a day.

    In the White House he soothed the sulking Democrats of
Capitol Hill. They still smarted over the fact that he had
interrupted their party's long grip on the presidency. He won
Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson
to his side as often as not. One evening after plying L.B.J.
with Scotch, Ike pointed to his own chair in the Oval Office
and said, "Senator, someday you should be in that chair."
Johnson roared back to his office in the Capitol wearing that
tribute like a battle ribbon.

    In this warm and happy memoir there is a shadow, not over
Ike's time or his achievements but over the U.S. of today.
Jackson talks about it from his corner of Kansas above the
Smoky Hill River, the same one that nurtured Ike. Was the
unspoiled land and Abilene and the Eisenhower family -- and so
many others like them in that era -- a one-time event in our
history, now swept away by excessive wealth, greed, waste,
softness and self-pity? Jackson confesses he has no certain
answer. But he is worried by what he sees throughout the
nation. When he talks about it, he sounds like Ike might sound
were he alive.

    "The farms, the ranches and the small towns were our sources
of decency," says Jackson. "They seeded the cities in Ike's
time. Now they are vanishing. Our cultural seed stock came from
church, school and the community baseball team. We must now
confront the Jeffersonian idea about living in harmony with the
land. Is it mere nostalgia, or is it a practical necessity?"

    Not long ago, Jackson went to Harvard to lecture, and he
asked his audience if the university was educating people "to
go home, not necessarily where they came from, but to some
place where they can dig in and support meaningful things, not
just upward mobility." Jackson got no firm answer, nor did he
expect one. He carries the question with him wherever he
travels to make people think again about what they may have
lost and what they really treasure. He seeks a new generation
that can find and grasp the "great and priceless privilege"
that Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps the most beloved and respected
American of this century, found in Abilene.