Behind the Huck Finn Face

By Gerald Clarke

THE EISENHOWER DIARIES Edited by Robert H. Ferrell; Norton; $19.95

"He merely has to smile frequently at you," addmitted crusty Field Marshall Montgomery, "and you trust him at once. " But if that grin became as famous as the Mona Lisa's, it was also enigmatic. Behind the aging Huckleberry Finn face was as shrewd and calculating a mind as has ever won a war or run a country. Dwight David Eisenhower, his diaries make clear, could have given a few lessons in statecraft to Machiavelli.

The diaries begin Dec. 27, 1935, shortly after he arrived in Ma nila to help Douglas MacArthur build a Philippine defense force. He was 45 and a major, with dubious prospects for advancement; like Grant before Fort Sumter, he was waiting for events. The last entry is dated March 14, 1967, two years before his death. Again like Grant, he had been elevated to the presidency -- tout served with far greater success. In 1962 Historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. asked 75 prominent "students of American history" to rate the Presidents up to 1961. Eisenhower, the 34th and last in line, came in 22nd, just before Andrew Johnson. (Grant and Harding were at the bottom.) Nine teen years and six Chief Executives later, a school of revisionist historians is working to raise Ike's stature. With good reason.

Eisenhower's major virtue, which appeared less important in 1962 than it does now, was a sense of proportion; he had an instinctive knowledge of what could be done and, more important, what could not be done. As far back as 1951, for example, when the French were fighting in Viet Nam, he foresaw nothing but swamps. "I'm convinced that no military victory is possible in that kind of theater," he noted. In 1955 members of his Cabinet predicted imminent war with Red China in the Formosa Strait. Ike knew better: "I have so often been through these periods of strain that I have become accustomed to the fact that most of the calamities that we anticipate really never occur."

This cold practicality sometimes made him appear colorless and without conviction. But he frequently clashed with colleagues, even with MacArthur, recording the general's "regular shouting tirades," and acidly observing that MacArthur "likes his boot lickers."

This ironic detachment was precisely what appealed to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, who in 1942 jumped Ike over 366 more senior officers to make him Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe. He was the ideal choice to lead contentious allies: few others could have withstood the oversized egos of a Churchill, a De Gaulle or a Patton. Ike merely smiled and confided his frustrations to paper. His strongest language was reserved for the head of the U.S. Navy, Admiral Ernest King. "One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King," he wrote. "He's the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he's a mental bully."

In 1943, months before the Normandy invasion, Patton remarked that "Ike wants to be President so badly you can taste it." If so, he did not tell his diary, in which he expressed the same indifference to political office that he professed in public. The only thing that could sway him, he said, was a call to duty. Yet Patton appears to have been right: he either knew Ike better than Ike knew himself, or Eisenhower, always careful, was not confiding his true emotions to pages that in some cases were dictated to his secretary. In either case, the seeming lack of interest was a master stroke, establishing him as a man above mere politics.

When Truman succeeded F.D.R., he said that he felt as if "two planets and the whole constellation" had fallen on him. Eisenhower was a good bit more relaxed when he took over from Truman: "My first day at the President's desk. Plenty of worries and difficult problems. But such has been my portion for a long time--the result is that this just seems like a continuation of all I've been doing since July 1941--even before that."

Except for Grant, Ike was the only Republican President to hold office for two full terms, but these diaries will not be of much comfort to ideological and defense-minded Republicans. His harshest words as President were reserved for right-wing ideologues, and he fought back all attempts to repeal the New Deal. "Human progress," he wrote, "is possible only as extremes are avoided and solutions to problems are found in a great middle way." He also warned against giving too much to the military: "Excessive expenditures for nonproductive items could, in the long run, destroy the American economy." He kept his word. In eight years his Pentagon budget varied scarcely a jot.

Unfortunately, Eisenhower was not a faithful diarist, and many presidential and personal crises went unremarked. He rarely confided his emotions, even to himself, and his writing, though workmanlike, is usually as flat as the plains of Kansas, where he grew up. When he was emotional, as on the death of his father, he could be poignant. "I'm proud he was my father," he noted. "My only regret is that it was always so difficult to let him know the great depth of my affection for him." Of his wife Mamie and his son John he said almost nothing. The diaries, and the histories that are now emerging, are be ginning to reveal Eisenhower, the adept politician. The man behind the smile remains an enigma still.

-- By Gerald Clarke

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