Ex Libris: Dwight Eisenhower

A teenage Eisenhower (C) in a 1907 photograph indicates just how far West Point took him from his humble beginnings in Kansas. Public Domain

Dwight David Eisenhower (1890–1969), also known by his nickname, “Ike,” grew up in a strict but loving Mennonite home in Abilene, Kansas. He and his brothers joined their parents daily in prayer, worked hard at their chores, and received the standard education of the time. From there, Eisenhower entered West Point, graduated, rose through the ranks, and eventually led Allied forces in the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy. In 1952, he won the presidency as a Republican. He ended the Korean War, served another term, and presided over both the beginning of the Cold War and the 1950s’ economic boom.

On his journey from Abilene to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he retired, Eisenhower enjoyed a variety of hobbies. As a young man, he played football and baseball, and was a skilled pistol shot and poker player. He became an expert at bridge, developed a passion for golf, and was a lifelong fan of fishing and the outdoors. In his later years, Eisenhower took up painting as a means of pleasure and relaxation.

A final component in this mix of pastimes was his love for books and reading.

Eisenhower (Far R) with three friends in a 1919 photograph. Public Domain

The ‘Key’ to the Past

Though the Abilene of Eisenhower’s adolescence was only a few decades removed from its origins as a rough frontier town, his mother Ida maintained an excellent library. Here, the boy developed an interest in history that remained a lifelong passion.

Of special interest to the young Eisenhower were the histories of ancient Greece and Rome, with Hannibal being a particular hero. Often he, his brothers, and their friends acted out these battles outdoors. In “Ike: An American Hero,” biographer Michael Korda noted that this fascination with history prompted a young woman charged with predicting the future of her classmates for the high school yearbook to surmise that Eisenhower would become a “professor of history at Yale.”

He became so enamored with history that he would steal away from his chores to read. At one point, Ida locked his favorite books in a closet to keep her son’s attention focused on work, yet in one of his rare acts of rebellion, Eisenhower found the key. Whenever Ida was out of the house, he would unlock the closet and sink again into those histories.

His parents’ fervent faith acquainted him with scripture. Like so many others of his time, he also read George Bancroft’s “The History of the United States.” In 1966, he cited that work, along with the Bible and Carl von Clausewitz’s “On War,” as having had the greatest influence in his life.

The White House's official 1959 portrait photograph of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Public Domain

The Mentor Who Mattered

The dry-as-dust teaching of military history at West Point had driven Eisenhower away from his early love of that subject. But Gen. Fox Conner brought him back to it again.

Recognizing the talent of his junior officer, the general began lending Eisenhower books from his extensive library in the early 1920s. Conner would then quiz his protégé about this reading, sparking prolonged discussions about Civil War campaigns or the genius and leadership of Caesar and Napoleon. He focused in particular on Clausewitz’s “On War,” requiring Eisenhower to go through the book three times. According to Korda, “Ike could not only recite pages of it by heart but defend his own view of Clausewitz’s maxims about waging war.”

Through their discussions, Conner also brought to life the works of Shakespeare for Eisenhower and urged him to expand his boyhood affection for the ancients by studying such writers as Plato, Tacitus, and Xenophon. As Korda tells us, Eisenhower would later write that Conner’s guidance was “a sort of graduate school ... leavened by the comments and discourses of a man who was experienced in his knowledge of men and their conduct.”

Gifts and Talents Deliberately Hidden

Eisenhower read for pleasure as well as for profit.

During World War II and afterwards, he relaxed by reading Westerns, particularly the novels written by Zane Grey. Having come of age in Abilene, where the old men shared their memories of the town’s Wild West days, Eisenhower’s selection of this particular genre for entertainment seems only natural.

Yet contemporary critics of his presidency seized on this choice of reading material as more evidence of an inferior president, along with his passion for golf, bridge, and fishing. They judged him a genial duffer who treated the White House as a vacation house or a rest home. Today, we know that Eisenhower deliberately concealed his many gifts—his intelligence, his knowledge of history, his abilities to work out compromises, his decision-making—behind a bland exterior.

During his presidency and later in his home office in Gettysburg, the key to this style of leadership, cousin to Theodore Roosevelt’s axiom “Speak softly but carry a big stick,” lay on Eisenhower’s desk for all to see. It was a paperweight with the Latin inscription “Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re,” which translates as “gently in manner, firmly in action.”

The man who had prepared himself for great deeds and who became the defender of democracy might also have embraced another Latin tag, “In libris, libertas.”

“In books, there is freedom.”

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