Unhurried Stroll

AT EASE: STORIES I TELL TO FRIENDS by Dwight D. Eisenhower. 400 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

In Dwight Eisenhower's three volumes covering World War II and a major portion of his presidency, his prose was always at Attention or, at best, a stiff Parade Rest. At last Ike is At Ease. He writes of this book: "It will be fun just to wander, with no worries about verbosity, coherence, repetitions or literary criticism."

A "fun" author Eisenhower will never be. But this meandering autobiography does offer a refreshingly human review of Ike's life as he looks back, at 77, on the years that took him from a barefoot boy in Abilene to the White Housebound war hero in 1952.

Poker with Bob. In the unhurried, slightly wistful style of an Old Soldier reminiscing in the sun, the general summons up memories of his scrabbling childhood ("our pleasures were simple --they included survival") and of his full-of-the-Old-Nick cadet days at West Point. He recalls learning Christian responsibility from his mother, the wonders of Tacitus, Shakespeare and Plato from a Canal Zone general, and the intricacies of playing cool-percentage poker from an Abilene illiterate who could only write his name by "starting it with straight lines around which he drew the necessary curves to spell BOB DAVIS."

Ike never completely outgrew his maverick-cadet personality. He tells of a tedious two-month, coast-to-coast motorcade in 1921 when he and another officer amused themselves by convincing "an Easterner" in the troop that Indians were about to attack the caravan in the wilds of Montana. President Roosevelt once asked Eisenhower how he liked the title "Supreme Commander," and Ike recalls: "I acknowledged that it did have a ring of importance--something like 'Sultan.' " And while he was Supreme Commander in London, Ike consistently refused to attend formal dinners--largely, he says, because he was a four-pack-a-day smoker who could not wait for the traditional toast to the King before lighting up.

The Reason Why. In his accounting, Ike does not ignore the frustrations of his peacetime military years. Yet in 1940, when his son John said he wanted to go to West Point, Eisenhower outlined the drawbacks of being an army professional, then laid out his personal reason for sticking with the career that wound up in the White House. "I said," writes Ike, "that the real satisfaction was for a man to do the best he could. My ambition in the Army had always been to make everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to other duty." It is a sentence that could have been spoken by a J. P. Marquand hero. It is the thinking of an organization man, a sense of duty sharpened (but not too much) by ambition. It hardly suggests greatness, but this is, after all, a book of reminiscences in pace.

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