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Rhett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. That Dwight D.
Eisenhower became Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, orchestrating the largest amphibious invasion in history on June 6, 1944, was far from inevitable.
He came from the middle of nowhere, Abilene, Kansas, had never led men in battle, spent most of his career as a staff officer, and didn't make general intelligence in his 50s.
How then did he become the leader on whom the fate of the world would rest?
Today we trace the making of Ike with Michel Paradis, author of The Light of Battle.
We talk about how Eisenhower's Midwestern upbringing shaped his character and how his most important education happened outside the classroom.
Michel shares how crucial mentors were in Ike's development and how Eisenhower made the most of those relationships.
relationships. We discussed the books that were most formative in shaping his thinking, including what he got from Nietzsche.
We also get into some of the practices Eisenhower used to lead effectively, including how he budgeted his time to maintain his morale while under the pressure of planning D -Day, and what he did in the evening before the invasion to deal with the stress.
After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom .is slash Supreme Commander.
all right michelle parody welcome to the show thanks so much for having me so you got a book out called the light of battle which is about d -day d -day is one of the most studied and written about events in modern history what do you think gets missed in the books on d -day and what were you hoping to bring to our understanding of d -day with your book no that's exactly right there are so many great books about d -day too that i definitely knew in starting this one that That I couldn't write just another book about D -Day.
If only because competing with people like Max Hastings is going to always be impossible.
And so, to me, I think the thing we missed, to answer your question about D -Day, the thing that fascinated me is not just the actual heroism of the men who hit the beaches on Omaha or on Juneau, but how much went into it?
How much was behind that?
we think about those 176 ,000 men who hit the beach in the first day, you know, obviously correctly, they are the literal heroes of that story.
But, you know, depending on how you count it, about 2 million people made D -Day happen.
And that kind of collective action, right, that working together for a common goal was essential to D -Day's success.
And that ultimately is what drew me, especially to Eisenhower.
And obviously, there's no lack of historical celebration for Dwight Eisenhower.
But I also think we almost take him for granted.
There's a book a minute about people like Churchill, about Patton, about D -Day itself.
But there are actually very few serious studies of Eisenhower.
The last significant biography, certainly covering his wartime experience, is at least about 10, 15 years old now.
And I just thought that was amazing.
I couldn't understand that.
Because here you are, you have this guy, he comes from the middle of the country right about as far away from anywhere as you could possibly get which is abilene kansas and not only comes to the heights of military leadership in the second world war he commands the most complicated and i would argue consequential military operation of that war which is d -day and then goes on to be probably one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century the the first president who we call the leader of the free world.
And so many, I think, even admiring takes of Eisenhower sort of look at him as like this inevitable figure or a boring figure at worst, like the, you know, the 50s, the mayonnaise on white bread kind of thing.
And to me, I just knew that there was something more going on there.
And so in thinking about D -Day and thinking about the heroism of the men on the beach on D -Day, I really wanted to just understand how they got there and how they got there in a way to succeed.
And that took me to Dwight Eisenhower.
And that's what I loved about the book.
You get into his personality or try to, because he is kind of an enigma.
He's kind of a Sphinx character in a lot of ways, just kind of this affable smiling guy.
And I think that's why he gets overlooked.
But you try to paint a picture of him that, no, there's a lot going on with this guy.
And that's why he was so successful as a commander and later as a president of the United States.
So let's dig into Eisenhower and try to figure out how did this guy manage to carry off one of the biggest military invasions in the history of humanity?
You mentioned he grew up in Abilene, Kansas.
How do you think his Kansas upbringing prepared him for his role in World War II?
Yeah, I mean, he's such a fascinating figure.
Like, as you say, because he's known certainly in his lifetime, particularly as president as being, you know, everyone likes Ike.
He's this smiling guy.
He's sort of almost seen as, again, bland or non -threatening.
And yet he is probably, you know, responsible literally for the deaths of millions of Germans.
and one of the most, I think, cunning and in some ways ruthless military and political figures of the 20th century.
But it's all concealed around this very sort of bland, deceptively bland, I would say, packaging of Smiling Ike.
And a lot of that traces to his upbringing in Kansas.
And there are a couple of things that I think shape him.
He was born in 1890, which is sometimes celebrated as the year the West was closed.
And he grows up in Abilene, which had been a, you know, a cow town from the Wild West, but by that point had become a fairly reserved, very religiously oriented community around the river brethren.
And his family, his father's family was a very prominent religious family and farming family.
But his own father was, you know, a complicated guy.
He wasn't a drinker, but he was definitely abusive.
And even for the time, I would say abusive, you know, late 1800s Kansas.
And so Eisenhower grows grows up in this community in the middle of Kansas, which emphasizes a certain kind of humility.
If you talk to anyone from Kansas, the most important thing they'll let you know is, well, Kansas has nothing to talk about.
We're just humble people from the plain.
And so that sense of Eisenhower of being, in a way, self -effacing is right out of Kansas.
Everyone in Kansas recognizes that.
But I think the other things he gets from growing up in his very unique circumstances is one, a real burning desire to see the rest of the world.
I don't know that he travels more than about 100 miles or so before he ends up enrolling in West Point when he's 19 years old.
And as the middle child of a fairly low income, large family, he just has this itch to want to see the absolute rest of the world.
And that leads him to cultivate all sorts of mentors, both in Abilene and then really for the rest of his life.
It's probably one of his greatest skills as a sort of a man in development is that he looks for people who seem to have figured something out that he wants to know.
And he gloms onto them and tries to learn from them in a really intimate way.
And in Kansas, one of his first mentors is the publisher of the local Democrat newspaper, the Dickinson News.
And he just goes to this guy's newspaper shop, hangs out there after school, typically with some friends.
And this publisher sees in Eisenhower a curiosity, and Eisenhower wants to know what's going on in the rest of the world.
And so this guy starts just giving Eisenhower books to read.
And one of Eisenhower's favorite, or the one that makes the biggest imprint on him, is The Life of Hannibal.
Now, when I said Eisenhower is the middle child of a very large, low -income family, that's also a religiously pacifist family.
His father and his mother are part of a movement called the Bible Students, which we now know is the Jehovah's Witnesses, but were a much more, how would you say, mystical movement at the turn of the 20th century.
And his religiously pacifist mother is not at all impressed when he brings home the life of Hannibal and in fact confiscates it from him and puts it away in her closet.
And as Eisenhower sort of tells the story later, he would wait until she was out in the garden, you know, culling some of the crops and he would sneak into her closet like he was looking for the the playboy and read the life of Hannibal sort of in secret and just became fascinated by, really in love with a kind of military heroism, a kind of manly figure.
And the thing he would always say about Hannibal in particular is that he knew from the time he was a young boy that Hannibal was one of the greatest generals in all of history because he was recounted as such, but only ever by his enemies.
There are no extant tracts or histories by the Carthaginians of Hannibal's exploits, only those written by the Romans.
And to Eisenhower, the fact that someone could be so compelling as a figure, so powerful as a general, so brilliant, so heroic as to go down in history that way, when the only people writing about you are the enemies who fought you in battle, really impressed Eisenhower from a young age.
And so that upbringing in Kansas, that combination of, you know, it sounds cliche, but it's true, small town values, but combined with this real burning itch to get out of Kansas to see the rest of the world to be a part of the world formed Eisenhower's character at a young age in ways that you can see almost the day he dies.
So you mentioned West Point was his ticket out of Abilene.
He went to West Point.
How did West Point prepare him to be Supreme Allied Commander, you think?
It's a couple different ways.
You know, Eisenhower went to West Point as his, you know, ironically enough, his way of rebelling against his parents and his ticket out of abilene and he gets there and he's really quite awkward you know he he is a country boy but he has a sense of this is where he wants to be and this is where he's in a sense always wanted to be since he was a boy and so ends up doing two things in his career uh at west point that end up i think shaping him and the sort of the eisenhower we know forever.
One is he has this deep concern about his background.
He is not the son of a general.
He is not part of the sort of burgeoning American aristocracy that is filling the ranks of his classmates.
But that gray uniform they all wear at least covers up how sort of shabby and country his clothes are.
But the way he talks, where he's from, right?
No one's ever heard of Kansas, really.
But people have heard of Abilene, that old West sort of history that Abilene carried as being the place where cowboys had shootouts in the town square, Eisenhower fully embraces as part of his personality.
And it's where he begins to take on the nickname Ike as well, because Ike is this sort of typical name for a cowboy in the dime westerns that you'd get.
You know, a cowboy who was out on the land all alone, who was his own man, who was always there to do the right thing, even if he was a little uncultured, and really leans into this identity of being sort of from the cowboy town, even though that is not at all consistent with how he actually grew up, but develops this kind of like cool, right?
It's funny to say Eisenhower was cool, but in West Point, he definitely develops this sense of cool and devil may care, big smile, you know, always ready for a good time that cultivates, I think, a very warm kind of friendship and respect between his classmates who go on to be his contemporaries in the army over the next 30 years.
The other thing though, and this is I think underappreciated now, just given how different we think about sports, but he also was a star football player in his freshman and sophomore years and not particularly skilled, right?
He wasn't a very fast runner, but he was a hardcore player, right?
He would just throw himself into the opposing line.
And so he was known as a bruiser and started, you know, having a lot of success and gaining quite a reputation for himself as a football player, but then blows out his knee.
And at the time in West Point, if you had an injury like that, you could get kicked out, not of West Point, but kicked out of the army.
And so Eisenhower is faced, you know, from a young age with the prospect of really not having a military career left just because of his knee injury.
But the one thing he does and the one thing the army sees in him is, you know, once he's literally back on his feet, he can't play football anymore, but he can coach it.
And he He becomes the assistant coach of the football team and demonstrates a kind of genius for the game, a genius for organizing men on the field that just as a practical matter, the army really appreciated back then because people used to play a lot of very competitive football.
That's kind of the way softball leagues are maybe today.
But that in turn is what keeps him in the army.
The army always wants a good football coach, and he basically spends the first 10 years almost of his career as like a star football coach in the army.
But that also gives Eisenhower the first real lessons in leadership.
And those lessons in leadership of leading a football team, coaching a football team, end up, I think, shaping his understanding of what it means to lead in battle, to lead an army in ways that far surpass anything he actually learns in the classroom, either at West Point or the Command and General Staff School or anywhere else.
it's really at West Point and in that opportunity to be a football coach that he learns to really be a leader in this section about his his role um as army football coach and as a player for the team you talk about this guy Ernest Graves he was an army football coach and he wrote this book Ernest Graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive linemen and mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership and after I read about that in your your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book.
I'm going to go find this Ernest Graves book.
And I read it in just like one setting.
It was really easy to read, but you're right.
There's these leadership lessons that I think Eisenhower probably picked up from Graves on how to lead not only a football team, but a, uh, an army, a military unit.
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll, I'll flash forward to, I think one of the most, uh, you know, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D -Day story.
And certainly in in my telling of it is when Eisenhower ultimately has to make the call based on some very unclear weather predictions about whether to launch this invasion.
And launching this invasion is either going to be the grand success that it became, or it's going to be a complete and utter disaster.
There is literally a hurricane outside the doors as he's making this decision.
And when When he finally does, the thing he says is, okay, let's go.
And that's his famous sort of send -off speech for the D -Day invasion.
And that exact quote is something Ernest Graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before the men were to go out onto the field.
He's like, okay, when it's time to go, the coach needs to take control of the situation and say something like, okay, let's go.
And again, whether or not that was sort of in the back of Eisenhower's head, whether or not it was just a coincidence, we'll never really know.
But yeah, that sense of, okay, it's my job to lead this team.
And the way to do it is the same way you would lead a football team, I think is totally correct.
So he graduates West Point 1915.
World War I is happening, but he doesn't get sent off there.
Instead, he gets kind of sent off to different training positions.
And then he becomes sort of this staff officer, not really on the battlegrounds.
How did those staff positions prepare him for D -Day, you think?
I think they prepared him uniquely well.
And it gets to something I was saying a few minutes ago is that, you know, one of Eisenhower's, I think, most important leadership lessons is the importance of followership.
And it's the importance, particularly when you're young, particularly when you're coming up, to understand that your job is not to be the smartest person in the room.
your job is to figure out who the smartest person in the room is, and make yourself as useful as possible to them.
Because in doing that, you know, not only are you going to be much more effective than kind of butting heads with the person who actually knows what they're doing with your own ill conceived ideas, but you're going to learn a lot, right?
If you keep a genuinely open mind and pay attention to what that person is doing, and how they're making decisions, you're going to learn a ton from them, that you can then use as you rise up the ranks.
And so for Eisenhower, are, you know, one of the ways I even thought about telling his story is by telling it through his mentors.
And I could rattle them off, but the big ones certainly are people, you know, like Joe Howe, who was that newspaper publisher, Fox Conner, who he spends a long and very formative period with in Panama.
But then people like General Mosley, who is probably one of the more suspect figures in history, but who has a big influence on Eisenhower.
Same thing with General MacArthur, and then obviously General Marshall.
And then I would even say Roosevelt and Churchill, right?
As Eisenhower rises up the ranks, there's always someone who's the smarter person in the room.
He gets that, but he makes himself as useful as possible to fulfilling their vision.
And in the course of doing that, learns their skills, learns how they either command an an army, how they manage a team, or how they develop and use political power in ways to get things actually done the way Roosevelt and Churchill did.
And so it's by having the humility, really, to be that staff officer, to be the one who helps the leader execute their plans, that Eisenhower really does grow into an incredibly formidable political figure in his own right.
right one thing I've taken away from Eisenhower's experience as a staff officer is yeah that humility and then also patience with your career I know Eisenhower lamented like when World War One was over he's like it's it my military career is over it's not going anywhere like I've gone as far as I can go and I missed it I missed my chance and he didn't know he was about to like embark on the biggest part of his military career and it would happen in his 50s yeah so I mean I think it's a great lesson there if for a young guy or even if you're a guy in your 30s or your 40s you think man i missed
the boat this is as far as this is as good as it's going to get maybe not you could have a whole big giant book of life ahead of you like eisenhower had after his staff positions yeah it's definitely an encouraging uh encouraging story to anyone who's still not yet in their mid -50s to see that eisenhower you know starts world war ii as a colonel and within a matter of three years, he's a five -star general.
And again, one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century to boot.
And yeah, it wasn't just after World War I.
There are a lot of false dusks in Eisenhower's career where he thinks he's just finished.
It's all over. I've wasted my best years.
This is the end. And each time he's proven wrong because there's a new and often greater challenge just waiting just a little bit further down the line that he ends up having to take on.
so you mentioned one of eisenhower's mentors during this staff officer period of his career was fox connor this was when he was in panama this is one of my favorite sections of the book because you explore the education that connor gave eisenhower this is where really eisenhower got his education he didn't get it at west point it was when he was in panama with this fox connor guy so what did that tutelage look like under connor like what did he tell eisenhower what What do you assign Eisenhower to read?
Tell us about it because I think it's really interesting.
Yeah, yeah. Fox Connor, he started just in the past, I would say, 10 years or so, maybe 10, 15 years, started to get more recognition by historians.
Part of the reason that he hadn't had more previously is that he ordered all of his papers to be destroyed when he died.
So it's actually extremely difficult to do any real research with Fox Connor.
But yeah, Fox Connor, you know, he's the son of a Confederate wounded veteran, has an army career, a quite distinguished army career.
in its own right. He's probably the principal military planner of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, where he comes to know George Patton, George Marshall.
Fox Connor has a pretty amazing repertoire of connections that obviously matter a lot in Eisenhower's life too.
And Eisenhower gets stationed with him in Fort Guyard, Panama.
And this is a backwater in a backwater.
I got to be honest with you.
And one of the things that I never was able to fully pin down is why Fox Conner got marooned to command this podunk post in the middle of nowhere.
It's not obvious, but one of the things that is suggestive, though, is that Fox Conner was not an easy person to get along with at all.
You know, he had a Mississippian sort of rigidity to his personality.
He was extremely serious.
He inspired very little loyalty, let alone affection in subordinates who saw him as extremely high -handed and brusque.
And Eisenhower, frankly is no different, I think, when he arrives in Panama.
Fox Connor basically makes him every day write out these very complicated orders of the day.
What is everyone to do for today and how are they to do it?
And there's no point in this exercise, right?
The army's job in Camp Gallard is basically to make sure the camp doesn't fall into the Panama Canal.
And that's it. There's nothing going on there.
It's the middle of nowhere.
Everyone is bored. Most of the enlisted come from Puerto Rico, so they don't even speak English, which creates even bigger morale problems. Camp Gaillard specifically had a sodomy crisis, as the army called it at the time.
And there was all sorts of prostitution and gambling and alcoholism that was just rampant because everyone's bored in the middle of nowhere.
And Eisenhower is just enduring this initially as best he can.
man, Mamie Eisenhower, his wife, is there with him and leaves within a few months to have their son back in Colorado.
And so Eisenhower was alone working for this very difficult guy.
And ultimately, though, Eisenhower, kind of getting to what I was saying before, Eisenhower always understood that it was important to just be as useful as possible to the guy in charge.
And he understood that he was a staff officer fundamentally.
And so he did that, And he would take just all sorts of abuse from Fox Conner about how he was writing out these orders of the day, which, again, are complete busy work.
But Eisenhower was there doing it.
And at one point, Fox Conner invites Eisenhower over to his house.
And the thing almost everybody who ever met Fox Conner noted about it was that he had this enormous personal library, thousands of books that he would demand the army transport with him wherever he went.
So just crates and crates of books.
And Eisenhower had never seen one person own that many books and was impressed.
And Conner kind of asks him in a friendly way, do you like to read?
Do you like military history?
And Eisenhower at this point is making do.
who he loved military history as a boy.
He loved Hannibal. But when he got to West Point, it was a very, very dry, dull military education.
He didn't get a thing out of it.
And Eisenhower had been stationed in Gettysburg during the First World War.
And so Fox Connor reaches over and hands him a handful of books, mostly novels, in fact, about the Battle of Gettysburg.
And he says, yeah, you might like these.
Give these a read. And Eisenhower reads these books, reads them pretty fast, actually, and then brings them back to Connor.
And Connor, you know, says, what did you think about him?
And then they started having a conversation about it.
And so Fox Connor gives him some heavier reading, right?
Some memoirs of Gettysburg and some firsthand accounts getting into the heavier nonfiction.
And Eisenhower reads those.
And Fox Connor says, you know, what did you think about them?
Why do you think Lee did this?
And they would go out often all day on horseback through the Panamanian countryside discussing things like the Battle of Gettysburg or discussing the Napoleonic Wars or the Battle of Luthien.
And quickly, Eisenhower comes to appreciate that he is being given an incredible education, not just in military history, but in the history of being a general.
Because those are the questions Fox Connor puts to him.
It's like, why are people making these decisions?
What are they seeing?
What did they not see?
Why are they making this mistake?
Why are they guessing right about this question?
Some of the books that Conner gives them, though, over the course of these tutorials are not just military histories, but philosophy, literature, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, On War by Karl von Clausewitz, which is essentially a theory of war and the use of military power to achieve political ends.
And by the time Eisenhower leaves the Panama three years later, he has a first class education in how to be a general.
And it's with that education to include the writing out of the very dull daily orders, orders of day, that Eisenhower is essentially picked through some of the sort of bureaucratic magic Fox Conner can exercise to go take the army's course in how to be a general called the command and general staff college.
It's a course where you learn the principles of generalship and of staff officership so that you can write out orders.
And Eisenhower, just like, you know, when he goes to West Point, is very nervous about his skills, right?
Does he have the real background?
He'd never served in Mobile 1.
He hadn't really served in any serious positions to that point.
Nothing like the classmates he'd be encountering at the command and general staff college.
And Fox Conner basically says to him, look, when you were under me, I had you write an order of the day every single day, you're going to find no sense of inferiority when you get to the command and general staff college.
And sure enough, when Eisenhower gets there, he works a lot harder than he claims to have, but he's first in his class.
And it's from then on that Eisenhower's career just takes off.
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And now back to the show.
You mentioned that one of the books Connor gave him was the philosophy of Nietzsche.
And you talk about the book, that book actually had a big impact, left a lasting impact on Eisenhower.
How did Nietzschean philosophy influence Eisenhower, you think?
Oh, that was a real surprise to me, right?
Almost the last person you think about when you think about Eisenhower is Friedrich Nietzsche.
But sure enough, you know, I was able to, again, one of the real difficult things that as a research matter, but one of the most satisfying in trying to understand Eisenhower was just figuring out what books he read and then reading them.
So what's in his head and where can you see these ideas pop up later, if at all?
And when I read the copy of Nietzsche that Fox Conner had, almost right away, I'm looking at almost verbatim things Eisenhower says later.
And there are a couple of things that are going on in Nietzsche, or at least the Friedrich Nietzsche that Eisenhower reads, that are incredibly formative to Eisenhower.
One is what we probably would just call basic stoicism.
Going back to at at least Marcus Aurelius you know this idea of manhood being about seeing the world as it is in an unsentimental way and knowing that the truth is always going to matter much more than any ideology or idea or wish for how the world could be and that anytime you find yourself as he often did and would right uh complaining about oh things aren't turning out the way I hoped knowing that that, you know, shut up, your feelings don't matter.
What matters is what is.
And as soon as you can reconcile yourself to that, the better.
And so that's a big part of Eisenhower's own philosophy, just being very objective and really quite hostile to ideology, which I think is one of Eisenhower's most important and laudable traits, whether or not it's Nazi fascism, or communism, or any of the other sort of, you know, how would you sort of say sort of ideologies or theories of the day.
He's always worried and always thinking fundamentally about brass tacks.
Okay, how does this really matter?
What's really going on?
What's really motivating people?
Another big thing in Nietzsche that Eisenhower fully embraces is the virtue of toughness and the manly virtues, so to speak.
The willingness to fight for something bigger than yourself as a virtue in and of itself.
And then the third thing I think that Eisenhower draws directly out out of Nietzsche, actually quotes it several times without attributing it, but it's right out of Nietzsche, is this idea that human beings all have a fundamental desire to be free.
And that when you motivate that, when you can appeal to that individual desire to be free, people are willing to do anything, to fight and to die for their own freedom.
And indeed, one of the biggest quotes he often repeats that, again, is verbatim out of Nietzsche, is the idea that there is nothing nothing more powerful than a motivated democracy.
That democracy fundamentally is all about allowing free people to be free.
And if you can harness that energy, that drive towards something greater than themselves, that individual desire to be free, to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, that you have harnessed the most powerful force that human beings can muster.
So Eisenhower graduates from the U .S. Army Command and General Staff College.
He's still confined to sort of administrative positions.
He's the aide to General Douglas MacArthur.
He serves as the chief of staff at the 3rd Infantry Division.
He holds various staff positions in Washington, D .C.
He's a colonel when World War II starts.
He's never led a battle.
He doesn't have that, you know, big personality like a MacArthur or Patton, but he still gets the job of supreme allied commander in Europe over George Marshall, who is also in the running.
and there's a whole interesting story there but from the time he takes that command he's got less than six months to plan operation overlord d -day what kind of physical and emotional toll did the pressure in planning that invasion taken eisenhower yeah it's an incredibly compressed time frame the the day by day is stunning and yeah it has a huge toll it has to eisenhower is basically sick the entire time and to varying degrees of severity um like his cold basically comes and goes he smokes like a chimney he's up to three packs a day by the time the d -day invasion launches i i did the math on that that's
about 11 to 12 hours of smoking per day he begins to drink too much he sleeps like three to four hours a day and he really does bear the weight of it internally in ways that you, you know, I mean, it's almost difficult to imagine anyone else being able to endure.
You know, he's lonely.
He misses his family.
He misses his son. There's a moment when he, which I recount in the book, which is so poignant when he's asked to essentially give the commencement address at Britain's equivalent of West Point and, you know, gives this very solemn speech about how the weight of the world is on these young men who are going to be literally his subordinates in a matter of weeks.
And he writes this letter home that's so meditative and it's quite dark where he says, you know, I just don't understand this human need to destroy and how so many lives are put to waste and how we haven't learned as a species to do better, to be kinder to each other.
And I think the poignancy of that moment came not just in the fact that he's looking at these young men who he is confident he is sending to their deaths at some point or very well could but they're his son's age his son john is actually graduating from west point ironically enough on june 6 1944 and you know as he's bestowing awards and shaking their hands like they look and act and are exactly like his own son and that has to occur to him in terms of just like what is really being put at risk what are the costs what are the dangers that these young men who are going to be crossing that beach?
What are they confronting and why are they doing it?
And he's the one there sending them off, right?
It's his responsibility ultimately.
He owns that. And the pressure is insane.
So besides smoking and drinking a lot, another thing that helped Eisenhower deal with the pressure of the battlefront was spending time with what he called his official family.
And this was like his tight inner circle of individuals he was close to.
It included did Kay Summersby, his driver?
There was his personal naval aide, Harry Butcher, his secretary, Maddie Panette.
What role did Eisenhower's official family play in kind of boosting up his morale during this period?
Yeah, yeah. I don't overstate.
He's not a drunk, to be clear.
No, but he spends his nights.
Eisenhower was very disciplined about organizing his time.
It's actually one of the more interesting and I think prescient leadership traits that he has is that He knows that a big part of his job is just making so many decisions day after day, high consequence, low consequence, just one after the other.
And to do that effectively, to make the best decision he can, regardless of how it turns out, he has to keep himself healthy, both physically and mentally as much as he possibly can.
And so he's very disciplined, ultimately, about budgeting out his time.
This is the era before smartphones.
phones. And so when he goes home, basically to the official family, he basically is disciplined from about seven or eight o 'clock at night when he can about turning off the office and playing bridge and watching movies together and chatting and reciting poetry.
It's a really, I think, important opportunity he has to just be as human as possible under the circumstances.
And this official family is both his literal aides, right?
They are secretaries and drivers and things like that.
But I think they're just also the people that he can relax with.
These are the people who are not gunning for him.
They're not trying to get anything from him.
They're not trying to use or manipulate him for their own ends.
These are just the people he can trust day in and day out.
And he knows he needs that retreat and he needs to take advantage of that retreat and not just constantly be working because otherwise he'll collapse, he'll burn out, and he won't be able to make the hard decisions that he has to make.
I think it's a great lesson for, even if you're not the Supreme Allied Commander, take your rest time seriously you gotta make time for it if Eisenhower could have done it during overlord you can do it when you've got your nine to five job like you're okay that's right turn your phone off yeah hang out with your kids have have a meal without looking at your phone all that yeah so you mentioned there's a lot of internal struggles that Eisenhower had you know he knew the impact his decisions were going to have he was going to send lots of young young men to their death.
I mean, how did he do that and think about the human consequences while not letting it paralyze him?
I think that'd be really hard. I mean, if I were in that position, I would think, oh my gosh, I can't even make a decision.
I would just freeze.
What do you think Eisenhower did to overcome that while maintaining his humanity at the same time?
I think actually the key thing was that he maintained his humanity.
You know, we've talked a bit about Nietzsche and but I think also comes right out of Nietzsche, is that he never looked away from the consequences of his own decisions.
He fully embraced them, if only as a corrective to make sure he was making the right decision.
And being able to hold those things in his head at the same time, I think was a key part, certainly of his ability to lead in crisis.
And some of the hard decisions he made, and I'll give you just one example of it that almost brings me to tears every time I I think about it is the night before D -Day launches, he goes around and sees off the 101st Airborne.
And there's, you know, probably the most famous picture of Eisenhower addressing these young men who are all painted up and getting ready to jump out of these planes over France.
And he had been given an estimate just before that about half of these guys are going to be lost. Half.
And, you know, he's sending thousands of these young men across the English Channel.
So he goes and he goes to see them off and there's no fanfare, right?
This is not a of review he literally just has k drive up as quietly as possible gets out and just starts mingling uh between them and shaking their hands and talking to them and again there's this very famous photograph where his hand is forward and he looks like he's very sternly telling them you know some sort of great rallying cry to get them over the beaches and with a little bit of tracking down we're able to find the um the actual story behind that photo and the guy he's talking to he's talking to him about fishing because he would just go up to these guys and be like what do you like to
do where you're from what was your job what's your hobbies uh anyone from kansas and this guy said he likes fishing and eisenhower is an adamant fisher himself and a fly fisherman on top of that and he's like so when you throw a rod this is how i throw it and he's demonstrating the throwing of his rod and the photographer just sort of happened to catch the moment in this way that has this very sort of commanding overtone to it but what's really going on there is he's he's just treating that young man like a human being, like his son, like himself.
And when he goes around and meets these young men and shakes their hands, he forces himself to look each one of them in the eye when he does it.
And think about that.
Each hand he shakes, he knows that basically every other one is going to die, right?
Every other one is some kid who is either his son's age or younger, who's just not going to go home again.
He's not going to see his own father again.
And Eisenhower made himself do that, not only, I think, to, you know, be there for them and to let them know that he saw them and saw them, you know, not as soldiers to be sent across a border, but as young men who he cared about and who had their own lives and dreams and interests, but to remind himself of that too.
And when he finishes, he just collapses into the back of his car and just said, well, no one can stop it now.
And that's how he ends June 5th, 1944.
But I also think that's how he does it because he doesn't numb himself to the costs of what he's doing.
He understands it. He internalizes it and owns it.
And so that when he has a hard decision to make, such as sending them over there, knowing how many of them are unlikely to ever come home again he's able to do it because he's weighed the cost the benefits in a real way that he owns it's as much about responsibility and owning responsibility as it is you know just making the best decision you can yeah i mean the idea of owning responsibility eisenhower famously wrote two memos before d -day happened and one of them was if it was a failure it's like if this mission failed i take full responsibility for it but didn't have to publish that one but uh
he kept that yeah he kept that as well yeah so okay this is june 5th he sent off the men personally how did he spend the night before the invasion in the morning what was he doing smoking he was he basically he stayed up the entire night best as we could tell smoking and reading westerns he was an adamant western reader he had his guilty pleasures as we all do and he was very very emphatic that he got to enjoy them.
And so really from about two in the morning when he gets back to base camp to about 7, 7 .30 when he finally sort of gets up and meets the day, he's just sitting on his bed, laying in bed, reading Westerns and smoking cigarettes and just waiting for the news to come in.
Yeah. Yeah, you talk about the Western you read with Black John is the name of the story.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Czar of Half a Day Creek.
Eisenhower really liked good shoot-'em -up Westerns.
Those were his favorite.
Czar of Half a Day Creek Creek is not one of those it has like a sort of more humorous vein to it there's not a lot of shooting but it really was act it really kind of met the moment very well because it's all about this guy the czar of Half Day Creek his name is Black John Smith who is the kind of the doer in the small camping town in Alaska where he or in Yukon country I think it is actually where he's he's always up to he's always up to something but he's keeping everyone just everything in line everyone kind of thinks he's this old hillbilly but he actually is the a guy who's always got the plan that's
one step ahead so it was a very apt book for eisenhower to be reading on d -day another lesson there from eisenhower don't feel bad about just indulging in a guilty pleasure when you're going through a stressful period like he read westerns it's okay if you want to i don't know watch a crappy movie on netflix that's okay as long as it kind of just takes the edge off that's fine no that's entirely true because one of the things that i found super super interesting about Eisenhower, which you don't see on the surface at all, but it's very true, is that he thought a lot about how he thought.
And he understood that if he was tired, if he was exhausted, if he was overwhelmed, that he was going to make bad decisions.
And bad decisions didn't mean that those decisions would not turn out the right way.
He understood that there was always risk, just like any poker player would.
But he wanted to make sure he was always he's making the best decision available to him based on the information available to him and so doing things like making time for guilty pleasures making time for friends not beating up on yourself too much about your own vices right everyone's telling him he's got to stop smoking otherwise his cold will never get better and he's like yeah yeah i get it but he understands that he only has so much energy only so much sort of self -discipline and focus that he can direct and so prioritizing what you're paying attention to, what you're really investing your
emotional and mental energy in is honestly just as important as any one decision you make, because your ability to make those decisions is going to be entirely contingent on how focused you are, how clear minded you are in your ability to just take everything in and decide.
And so, yeah, just giving yourself your guilty pleasures and focusing on the things that matter and figuring out what What matters is just as important as any one thing that you do.
Yeah. That idea that Eisenhower thought about his thinking and he was kind of this master self psychologist. Another thing that I remember reading about him that he did, he's, he had an anger drawer.
So Eisenhower, he had a temper and he struggled with it his entire life, but he had this tactic whenever someone would piss him off and he wanted just to like light them up.
What he did instead is he wrote this letter out that exactly what he wanted to say, no no filter.
And then he just put it in this drawer and it cooled off and he's like, okay, I got it out of my system.
Now I can approach this with the cool head.
Yeah. No, it's, as you say, he was his own psychologist, um, because there was no one else around who you could trust for that role really other than maybe Kay Summers or Harry Butcher.
And yeah, so he would do those sorts of things.
Or if he just was like feeling overwhelmed, just same thing.
So he was feeling overwhelmed and he was like, if he was having trouble focusing focusing on any one thing.
He would sit down and literally just write himself a memo of all the things he had to think about one after the other and putting down a couple of thoughts about each one.
Just again, put it out on the page, get it out of his body and into something tangible so that he could focus on it more clearly.
He's just full of all of these very like specific just habits and techniques for making him like a much better thinker and leader than he otherwise would would have been so something that you know eisenhower is known for is his political ability he was able to manage these big egos montgomery padden marshall churchill de gaulle did it deftly i don't think any other person could have done that but the other thing that impressed me about eisenhower was his grasp of public relations like he knew how to manage the media yeah how would you describe his approach i think this is like underappreciated
about eisenhower oh yeah Yeah, 100%.
And I agree. I think it's totally underappreciated.
He got in a very like sophisticated way that like media had changed a lot and had changed politics a lot by the 1940s.
And he understood that there were really two things that he needed to do to be an effective manager of his public persona, which in turn would give him a much freer hand in dealing with difficult political issues and one was you got to be friends with the press and he made sure that you know when he was playing bridge and smoking and drinking that reporters were always with him just to kind of hang out you know with a few exceptions as guys and having that kind of intimate sort of friendship level relationship with reporters enabled him to know what was going on what they were going to print and publish
before they did and also gave him opportunities opportunities to, you know, what we would now call shape the narrative before things hit the press.
And that helped him on several occasions, not the least being with people like George Patton.
But the other thing, though, and this was so, I mean, it's part of who he is, but it's so prescient that it demands to be remarked upon is he also understood that as the media was becoming more intimate and celebrity driven, where you had these personalities who were not just on on the radio or newspapers, but actually on film and could be seen that there was a huge value in being seen as ordinary.
And I'm not saying he put that on.
This is, in a way, who he is.
These are his Kansas instincts coming out.
But he leaned really hard into it in a way that was certainly designed to conceal the sophistication of his own thinking in most situations where he understood that being kind of folksy and having this like, oh, I just like going out and fishing and being very seen as not grasping for power in an environment where most politicians, to include Roosevelt, and Roosevelt being only sort of a marginal exception to this, were still seen as these very stern, statuesque figures, was its own kind of political power.
It's where we get the idea of the idea that a politician should not be only a leader, but likable more or less draws directly from eisenhower and i know this this again almost seems too obvious to say now but it's difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was for a general like a major powerful general to be known broadly in the public for smiling a smiling general there's almost nothing more incongruous than that if you really think about it and eisenhower fully He fully leaned into that and had a kind of folksy celebrity that obviously becomes his trademark.
And I think in the environment that he's in, particularly with people like De Gaulle, with people like Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt, is crucial to his ability to wield power because none of them understand that yet.
None of them understand the importance of likability in the media as a kind of political power.
And so everyone around Eisenhower just underestimates him all of the time as just being sort of like a smiling, nice guy, because they're obviously very much still in the marble statue mold.
behold and eisenhower both i think understands that and uses that to such great effect that now it's actually difficult to think about a politician who doesn't smile all the time right where it's not this sort of like happy i'm a nice guy i'm just like you whether or not it's you know george w bush on his ranch and crawford clearing brush or donald trump you know eating a taco bowl or you know barack obama smiling big and throwing baskets right all of our politicians now, we want them to, quote unquote, to be just like us.
And Eisenhower kind of sets that mold and sees that that's where society is going way earlier than anybody else does.
So after researching and writing about Eisenhower, what's something that stuck with you the most about his life or his leadership?
I think for me, the, you know, in addition to it giving hope to 40 -year -olds everywhere that life life is not yet over.
I think the most, you know, both inspiring and cautionary aspects of Eisenhower's life to me are that he really did come from nowhere to achieve the absolute greatest heights of political power in the 20th century.
Like he, through a combination of I think, intelligence, luck and ruthlessness, hold himself up to that height, to great, I think, benefit to to not only the United States, but to the world.
And so the both encouraging but cautionary things that I always think about when I think of Eisenhower is encouraging is that, you know, talent is everywhere.
Talent can come from the middle of nowhere from someone you'd never expect, where it wouldn't even be recognized by most people, you know, until well into their 30s or 40s or even 50s.
And the cautionary piece of that, that I worry about sometimes is do we still live in that America?
Right? Do we still live in a society where talent can rise because we have have more people than ever, we have more opportunity for more people than ever as well, and fewer barriers, you know, based on old lines, whether it's gender or race, but do we still have a society that allows the very best to rise?
And I don't know the answer to that.
I worry about that sometimes because all of the opportunities Eisenhower had have become much more difficult and much stricter and much more tied up in tradition or bureaucracy or sort of other kinds of red tape that i i worry we you know we we may not be getting the talent that we have at our disposal to have the kind of leaders that we possibly could have well michelle this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book in your work yeah um the book is available and anywhere fine books are sold the light of battle it makes a great gift in time for father's day i'll
plug that and yeah feel free to always reach out i'm very easy to find and so if If you had any questions or ideas or thoughts about the book, good, bad, or ugly, feel free to email me.
I try to respond as quickly as I can.
Well, Michel Paradis, thanks for your time.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you. It was a lot of fun.
My guest today was Michel Paradis.
He's the author of the book, The Light of Battle.
It's available on Amazon .com and bookstores everywhere.
You can check out our show notes at aom .is slash Supreme Commander.
We find links to resources.
We delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmalice .com where you can find our podcast archives.
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Until next time, this is Brett McKay.
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