Transcripts For CSPAN2 Susan Eisenhower How Ike Led 20240712

We welcome to the distinguished forum dwight d. Eisenhower president of the United States of america. [cheering and applause] this happy occasion preserves unbroken tradition which began with president Theodore Roosevelt and the great has undressed this audience and tonight we welcome the man whom history will record as [inaudible] of great leader in the worlds hour of greatest needs. [applause] i have in mind communist aggression as millions of people were developed behind the farreaching iron curtain and i have [inaudible] the inflation in our homelands eating up the savings of an and who will be claimed by generations as the man who laid the foundations of peace. [applause] and more he is our president who we love with a deep and abiding affection. [applause] spirit welcome to the club im George Hammond which is put together todays program and along with this staff at the Commonwealth Club. We are happy to put together all these online programs weve done dozens and dozens of them since the covid crisis began and its to my great pleasure to introduce Susan Eisenhower who is a granddaughter of president eisenhower and has written a great book how ike led. Its like a you to spy plane overview of the soul consoles that led his presidency but with a little young girls point view on the man himself and is quite accommodation and combination because its accommodation that lived your life and political analyst et cetera but in addition to that you knew him personally for many, many years. He didnt pass away until you are already in college or around that age, right . Yes. So welcome everybody and we will get started to talk about president eisenhower for those of you who arent familiar with the dates he was president from 1953 until 1961 and jfk was a present right after words and he was the supreme allied commander during world war ii. Susan, first of all, thank you for joining us from afar on our online world that weve all recognized can happen much more easily than we thought. But tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write the book because youve been working in this field for a long time as a political consultant et cetera an advisor and you decided to write about your own grandfathers work and it must have been interesting to try to be objective and subject at the same time but you did it successfully and it cannot have been easy. Well, george, thank you so much for the opportunity at the Commonwealth Club and i had the wonderful opportunity of presenting two of my other books at the club in years past so its great to be back in to talk about this. Yes, i think the question is a very interesting one and maybe as part of the disclaimer for our discussion this evening i should say that as a kid i was really raised to compartmentalize what i knew about his politics and about the period in which he governed about the issues that he dealt with and on the other side our relationship with him as a grandparent. This book is really of a marriage of those two things as you said and its quite an experience for me to put it together in one place because i was continually struck by how we were doing certain things as a family and he was dealing with some of these crises so that was interesting. The impetus for why to do it now revolved around three events, i guess but one is the subject that of the anniversary of the end of world war ii just well, certainly be be a day is about to occur but of course we had the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in europe and back in may of this year. Secondly the eisenhower memorial in washington dc will be dedicated on september 17 in a much more scaledback version of its original self but it will nevertheless be open to the public after that date. And finally, we are going into Election Year and there is always a lot of thinking about the presidency as the most important for your election occurs and so i thought that i can add something to say to us today and i guess thats the reason i put it together. He really did. Obviously you took it from that angle but there are so many different elements that were so interesting today and one applicable is one that i thought was its a small tangent but there were people who said in 1956 that were against him being reelected is saying we will actually be electing Richard Nixon and you will not be electing eisenhower because eisenhower is sick and heart attacks and so on and Richard Nixon will soon be the present but the saving going on today in the Democratic Party people are saying right and never be president in a month or two and youre really electing Kamala Harris and i think that keeps getting thrown out at people. I will not speculate on whether there is a difference in approach but eisenhower is very conscious of what it would be to be a diminished president and we have to remember that president wilson was almost a scandal but people in that country did not know how ill that president was so ike was determined not to find himself in that situation for the good of the country and after he had three illnesses during his presidency and after each one of them he would get himself a very arduous task like around the world trip or a trip to europe that requires lots of meetings and lots of stress and always tells that if i dont perform a toplevel you have to tell me because i will resign. In any case that never happened and he became actually rather adroit at managing his time and managing his stress and generally positioning himself to get through his second term. It was interesting because doctors lied to him about the helium thing so he didnt think it was a serious so that he might have made a did different decision if they had warned him about that and i thought that was interesting. One of the biggest decisions about running for second term, as you point out is 9055 and he had a doctor named Howard Schneider and although they were devoted friends and have come together in one form or another since the war Howard Schneider drove him up the wall because first of all, he hovered and he came up with all sorts of things eisenhower was not allowed to do, including watching the armynavy Football Game because Howard Snyder decided it would raise the president s blood pressure, you know, i really did care about the outcome and i think it was Howard Schneider was part of the team that kind of wasnt actually really very direct with the president about his daily i just situation. Back to his earlier question ike was not going to be a diminished president and so he might well have decided a different way but i think he really at the end of the day my grandmother intervened for the first time i think since the early part of their marriage and encouraged them to run again because she thought that he would probably die of another heart attack watching everything from the sideline. [laughter] thats a tough one. Watch out for that blood pressure. I find it interesting the way your grandmothers decision was much more easy to understand the doctors decision was this was a guide making all the decisions about the war in korea and about this and all these Big Decisions and youre worried about him watching the Football Game so even if you take this too seriously it seemed ludicrous. I told that story in the book in the context of how that often warps the relationship you have with other people and it doesnt mean that it makes them terrible but it does change things and the doctors for some reason and i love this expression, actually tried to handle this man which would only make him more wound up i am sure because seeing one guy who is used to making decisions and looked perfectly capable of facing any difficult news and as a matter fact in his last years of life i saw this so often how brave he was and already he was to take whatever was coming and as a matter fact even volunteered for some rather exotic treatments for his condition because he thought it might help people after he was gone but this wasnt anybody you werent straight forward with. I just want to say that for the record. Yeah, its a good transition because before we get to the big issues that he faced and we can talk about these personal relationships he had in the front gypsy hat and the people that kept him and his family in his own relationship and pictures to show which include pictures of yourself with him when you were younger so we will get those up on the screen. There is the picture we been showing and this is him later on in the world of world war ii. Yes, this is taken in 1945 and during that time he does fifth star and i think i think he looks tired though and i dont know if you would agree but he looks content. If the picture were polling you would see that hes only wearing a single bar of ribbons and he was not one to walk around like a soviet general with metal all the way down to their ways. I like this picture because i think he looks approachable so i would say tired and thats got to be a fairly accurate assessment since its impossible to know how you can be working 100 hours a week or 130 hours a week up all night, up in the middle of the night and not come out for a three year stint like that really, you know, deeply tired. And 45 how old was he, he was born in. He was born in 1890. He was 55 years old. As a matter of fact if you look at pictures when he was president from the university he looks younger than he does in that picture even though it was another five years later. Well, he gave a lot of energy. The next picture is a picture of you. Well this is you as a teenager with a horse, right . Is there a horse in that picture . I cant see it from here. Perfect. I became an amateur photographer and we have in our family collection all sorts of homemade things and what i like about that picture is somebody else took a picture of like taking a picture of me and i dont know but every time i see this picture it makes me smile because of the baldhead of his as my graham mother always said she loved to roll over at night and pat is little baldhead. But yeah, theres a horse in the picture if if its from that standpoint i cant quite see it but i was a horseback rider and so this is a bond we had because he loved horses. The only animals on his farm he indulged in any way, shape or form in he was cattle and he certainly did not like barnyard cats but he loved these horses and i think its a rather sweet picture. You have a short story in your book about when you were 11 and your horse got away and you just put in the putting green and his special putting green and tell that story because it shows your relationship nicely. While, i think the story says a lot about ikes compassion in my lifetime guilt because he just put in a putting green and put the putting green and because he wanted to make some privacy while he makes putting privacy because he had to go to his country club which he enjoyed doing and seeing people but there wasnt actually any privacy because they came out to watch golf and so one evening i was like pad locking the gate and five of the horses on the farm pushed against the gate sort of almost knocked me over and then went running all around the lawn in front of my parents grandparents sitting area where they always sat in the evening and all five of these horses were running around like crazy and circling here and going there and then made a huge sweep across the golf green and i was more than in a state of panic and everybody came out of the field, field hands, secret service, and we were trying to round up these animals. We finally did and then i had to go and face the music. Not only had they ruined my grandfathers golf green but i was late for dinner. [laughter] this was one of those moments in childhood you dont forget. I walked in and he always sat in that swivel chair and he swiveled around and looked to me and said you know what i said to ran mother and ive not seen horses run like that since i was a kid in kansas. Of course, i apologized after that but i never heard of it again and it was a very smart move on his part because the guilt would be lingering. I was careful never to make a mistake like that again. He was very nice not to bring it up or to hold it against me or hope for old over my head because i knew i think he knew i was devastated when do it again. One of those classic experiences in the disney cartoon for turlington that the child makes the mistake of your response fully and in the ones where the parents are good they do what i did and whether they were bad they look like a witch so. George, i would add one more thing that i had the great good sense to apologize profusely and take full response fully and i think that it went down very well and i fear i would had have had a sycophant ongoing lecture about personal account ability had i not done so. But you have not learned that lesson. Here he is and is painting a picture and i assume that youre in that picture. You can see from the postcard he standing that its my mother and three of my four siblings and my youngest sister was born in 1955 after that portrait was painted but it was taken at camp david and i guess one of the helpers at camp david came in and took a picture of him doing that but you know, he took up painting actually after the war and he sort of followed Winston Churchills example and was intrigued by how much painting the Prime Minister did while he was trying to get his head together and then also his own portrait painter gave him some oil paints as a present and ike took it up then and then became early very attached because he found it centered him and while he was concentrating on the painting he was allowing his mind to work through some very difficult problems. Yet, you have a short story of the book about how he led an exhibit at an art museum and told someone that there was only one reason they would be shown here and that was because i was president. Yet, they never gave a guy like me an exhibit for painting that look like this but exactly but he was very modest. Unlike churchill who really took his painting so seriously that he wanted to be regarded almost as a professional ike did it to give away gifts and gave cabinet members paintings of them and he painted all his wartime colleagues and he even painted Prince Charles and princess and for the queen of england and always was full of apologies for their execution but i think he has some talent. We have a picture here of what he did with churchill. The picture of churchill. Thats the next picture. Its quite talented. Its not amateur. Not bad. The other charming thing about this painting is that he actually was able to present it to Prime Minister churchill when churchill when he just stepped down but was visiting in the United States and there is a wonderful picture of churchill looking it over like you know, churchill the painter would. [laughter] ike also painted field Marshal Bernard law montgomery who was one of his, one of the big personalities that he worked with during world war ii and its a lovely, lovely painting that hangs today in the british industry in washington dc. You said its one of the most interesting personalities. They got along but they were enemies too. In the next picture is one he gave to you, the next painting. Theres a story with this one, right . There is a story about this one. I often stood behind him when he was the easel and in addition to his retirement years he always insisted on having a studio somewhere nearby so the white house was on the second floor overlooking Lafayette Park and it was around that time that i was standing behind him admiring his work and this was the landscape i dont know what the scene is and as i said before, he painted usually from postcards and these landscapes he did were always serene and its been noted that theres something ironic about it because probably every brushstroke is full of some kind of turbulence he is trying to make sense of and this painting at the bottom is dated 1957 and in 1957 many things happened but i was intrigued when i looked at the back of it because it says to susan 1958. That means its likely a painting that was done first of all during the little rock crisis when eisenhower said the 100 First Airborne Division to desegregate the Rock High School and to escort nine africanamericans to start school in that september and then right after that of course was sputnik soviet union launched the first artificial satellite or i should say [inaudible] so i look at this painting and think those brushstrokes must have, you know, provided some relief during those times of great controversy and crises. We will go back to that and people talk about october surprises and and 9056 your grandfather certainly got two huge ones but we will look at the pictures and by the way, for the audience if you have any questions send them into the chat room and we will ask and we got yours gary and well get to the korean conflict a little later. Next picture is that is you . Thats me. I look like im terribly thoughtful and he looks very kind and i like that picture because ive always wanted people to know that he has some very, very tough decisions is a very dark times during our history when he think about what he saw and what he had to order during the war but you know he never became hard or cynical. I think is both a Family Member and as an analyst i think its remarkable and it says a lot about his character. It seems to be one of the hardest things to do is to make those decisions and we will get to d date later to know that that is the best so many people will die and at the worst you know you dont even succeed at what youre trying to commish and even more people will die. People who made those decisions for us i think it is wise that they get admired for decades and even centuries to calm because its so crucial and at your grandfather was certainly one of those great next picture. Couple pictures of him, i think. Heres a picture of him as a young man on a Baseball Team so you could see him before he was bald. [laughter] yeah, thats right. I was looking and ive always liked to see that ike had a full head of hair so he, george, maybe you could just describe which one he is because im not sure thats right. Okay. This was the Abilene High School and he was on the Baseball Team and was a very good baseball player but i think his real passion was football and he lost his wife for a little while when he broke his knee and was unable to continue playing football at west point because he had played against jim thorpe, as a matter of fact in the army versus carlisle game and he was regarded as a very fast effective Football Player and that was very discouraging for him and he had to learn how to snap out of that downer after taking up cigarettes, of course. Well, there is one tangent and i wasnt planning on going there but i thought its interesting you mentioned that all leaders are people who just but he was a kind of bad boy but certainly got himself in trouble when he was at west point for it he did not even go there to become a soldier but went there for the Free Education and another very interesting tange tangent. Well, he shared that with Ulysses S Grant and a lot of great leaders turned out to be civilians who would never imagine themselves as soldiers. I think george, one thing that is worth mentioning, especially in the context of west point is that he grew up in a very religious household and the eisenhowers were pacifists. They were godfearing pacifists. There wasnt an eisenhower who fought in the civil war so they named ikes uncle Abraham Lincoln eisenhower because they wanted to express their views but they were Conscientious Objectors so you can imagine the family feelings when ike goes off to west point because he cant wait any longer for his younger brothers to put him through college. Fascinating. More details in the book but the next picture. The meeting with chris jeff. Your grandfather had an interesting idea and we mentioned it earlier and i dont think many people know about this but when he was talking about the decisions between what was going on during the cold war and it wasnt a matter of capitalism versus socialism or even communism but yes, he says that in the speech to the Commonwealth Club that it really is about, its really about openness and democracy versus authoritarianism. Currently threatening the United States with punitive action over berlin and if it is turned into war there would be no way to defend berlin with conventional weapons, so it might have turned nuclear. Today we have those kind of standoffs, but eisenhower actually invited khrushchev to come to the United States and he was here for ten days. During that time, the soviet premier was subjected. And all i can say is that the future of the world hung in the balance of whether we were going to be well behaved that afternoon. They apparently managed for the first and last time. We shouldnt make jokes about this. It was a very serious time after the trip the soviets did lose the ultimatum with some agreement to continue to talk about it. We were going to do it later but let me do it now. What is fascinating about what you said is how much information president eisenhower had about with the russians actually had done and then he knew everybody was lying about the missile gap and other stuff driving the cold war it was clear that they didnt have a force we needed to worry about at that time because they had the information so maybe say a little bit about what happened. Its intriguing and sputnik is tied up in this because we have the dawn of the spaceage and there were no rules for outer space at all. It was undecided legally whether or not the airspace would extend all the way out to the outer space and so through an agreement to the United States and the soviet union agreed to launch satellites in 1957. Though the Eisenhower Administration there was no surprise about that. The point of the free access to space is what eisenhower strongly endorsed and hand to make it possible for the use of satellites in orbit and the reason they were so important is because it would help to avert a surprise attack and before the satellites could be launched into free access to space, he proposed flights to fly the aircraft over each countrys territory to assure that there wouldnt be a Surprise Nuclear attack. The administration knew they were going to launch the satellite and as a matteroffact sort of encouraged them to go first behind the scenes but they were hoping the soviet union would go first so that they would establish the precedent. We could tell from space quite precisely with the soviet military buildup looked like. Nevertheless sputnik opened the way for the opposition to the Eisenhower Administration and preparation for the campaign turned into a scandal known as the missile gap and the democrats were accusing the Eisenhower Administration of failing to keep up with what they had allegedly had. It turned out to be a fiction we were way ahead of the soviet union and the only way we could tell that is the programs they initiated and the Satellite Program for these purposes. Your version of the story you must have had some good lawyers on the team advising if you do it this way let the soviets go first then this is going to set the precedent to get what we want and if we go first they say we are trying to dominate and it wont work. A. We had proposed the open skies treaty added t at the gena summit in 55 and the soviet union absolutely rejected. But they didnt want this mutual overflight business because they thought we were going to use it for targeting purposes. You could imagine they would have accused us of going into space for doing what its meant to do. Its a complicated story but its what i call playing a long game. Took a big political hit when sputnik went up but in the end it is what began to establish the framework that allows all of the development to take place without conflict. The other thing that was interesting about your book is because he had so much dealing with the russians during world war ii and so on and so forth, he was in a good position to have an idea about the what they were up to. It was one of the biggest intelligence conclusions of the 1950s and my late father said the soviets were not really christian monitors and the assessment was the soviet leadership wanted to stay in power and so thats a very big difference between wanting to launch a preemptive strike. Thats a big analytical difference. You just mentioned your father. Great story about the conversation he had with president eisenhowers father. He wanted to go to korea and back with his troops and thats pretty serious you didnt find out about that when you were young. Did you find out when your father was alive . The story to summarize when general eisenhower becomes general eisenhower becomes president eisenhower now he is not just a five star general. As a matter of fact he gave up his Army Commission to run for president because we dont have general president s of the United States. So, he suddenly is the commanderinchief and he is my father who is a graduate of west point and stationed in korea comes back for his fathers inauguration here is the deal if you go back to korea. Promise me its an order and that you will never be taken as a hostage or be in a situation you could put the president in the United States in any jeopardy so what that adds up to is if my father agreed to commit suicide if you were in a situation where he was going to be taken hostage, and it sounds like by that time my father and mother already had three kids. I was the third of the group. As i say, my sister came along in 1955 and this was several years before. We think that the leaders ought to be sending their kids overseas but the potential and to the president of the United States in a position that would undermine the security of the United States is not acceptable for those Army Officers and my father agreed. Thankfully he lived to the age of 91. He came home without having to take such a drastic and tragic step. Such a telling detail about the time and place and what they had already gone through with the depression and the war that this father and son could make this deal and understood that thats the only thing that you can do. They were both military men and its called doing your duty because the Mission Always supersedes any individual desires or however youd like to put it and i think its moving. To understand, he was a strategic leader and somebody that was highly self disciplined. He didnt like over emotionalism. He believed in selfdiscipline and process and process for him was extremely important because he didnt want to support the freelancing and he certainly didnt want to make any incredulous decisions and that is all training that comes out of a lifelong experience especially at the highest levels. Great stories about how he dealt with the whole weaponry issue making three different commissions he kind of did it in this elaborate way. But lets move onto the next question or the next picture. So, here he is talking to the soldiers. He had several Great Stories not only at the time during world war ii, but after ten years afterwards i think. It was the group they were meeting with and its interesting because i dont think people realize how he made this and how difficult that must have been to do that. This picture was taken june 5th when the paratroopers were about to take off to the normandy coast and part of the reason i think this particular picture is wonderful is to look at how hes smiling at these boys. I think its particularly noteworthy because his decision about the airborne drop was probably the toughest of that whole normandy enterprise and the reason for it is rather simple. His technical experts responsible for the 24,000 paratroopers who dropped warned him about a week before the dday assault that he thought that the paratroopers should be canceled and he thought it was dangerous and between 50 to 70 of the paratroopers. He decided against that recommendation because they were central for opening a number of pathways off of utah and omaha beach. I think what is moving about this picture is having made that decision a week earlier and having written a note that said if the landings fail the responsibility is mine and mine alone. He goes out and looks these paratroopers in the eyes thinking in his mind that his technical experts had between 50 to 70 of these boys not coming home. Another thing i think you detail is the fact that the original plans when he got his hands on then he changed them and increased to the double size of the plan about the paratroopers landing and fortunately the advisor wasnt right that it was for a person that died and a 10 were wounded or Something Like that. But not at all and he succeeded soon that without that, the overall it could have been an overall disaster. They were the linchpin of the operation. I can tell you pretty much what eisenhower was saying at that point because it is the 101st airborne. We know it because a number came back and told us what was being talked about and he was asking them about home. He wasnt giving a talk about getting on a plane and dropping behind the lines in normandy. I once asked my father why would he do that and my father says they know what they were about to go do and they were probably scared half to death, so imagine that a smile. A man that had the courage to look them in the eyes before they took off and they say dont worry, general, we are going to win hitler and you know, the great exchange. Very moving. A lot of moving details in your story of your grandfather. I think the next picture is thats him at a dday amendment years later. 75. It was dday plus 20 years the picture was taken. He gave an interview to Walter Cronkite and they drove through the normandy coast line and of course this is the American Cemetery before it had been completely finished. It was a long process to put it together but this was the first time that he had come back. During the anniversary in 1955 when he was president and he did not want to politicize the hollowed ground so he sent gifts to the people of normandy and then spend the day in seclusion but here he comes back and is talking to Walter Cronkite and says look at the pain in his face. All of those kids who didnt make it and he was responsible for the decisions that may have crossed some of those people their lives. So, then Walter Cronkite says what do you think when you sit here and im very moved by this. He said they gave us another chance. He said the question is what are we going to do with that chance. And in a way, i think we are at a crossroads today we have to ask ourselves what are we going to do with the chance we have when we move beyond this crisis are we going to be a more United Country or are we going to allow our division to separate us as a people. That is a great segue. We have audio of president eisenhower. He spoke at the Commonwealth Club as you know and i have a little clip maybe about three minutes long where everybody can hear his voice. I know a lot of people are not aware. The way he says what he says is almost as important and i think its relevant for today. So as soon that gets started we will listen to it. I find it fascinating as we were saying earlier, this generation of men. My father was in the war, dropped off in north africa and went through italy and sicily. Im glad to be here this evening to sustain the perfect score happening with every president of the United States since this club was founded. [applause] sorry we dont have live audiences right now. [inaudible] [laughter] developed out of experience, the organizer of the globe advised a noble and necessary purpose, better government in their state. There was an energizing spark was the belief that, and i think these words from the document at the time, california suffers greatly because the best elements of the population failed to cooperate for the common good as effectively as they cooperate for equal purposes. The dedication of that group and the unrelenting efforts of the members to pursue the course for the almost six decades. The word commonwealth signifies a group united but equally significant is the fact that in the political realm that has mrn association based upon free choice. Tonight i shall try to apply to some aspects of the world of International Affairs the founding people of this organization that this state suffered because of the failures of some elements to cooperate as effectively for good as others did for evil. No matter how wellintentioned can cooperate unless they first establish a basis of common understanding. The founders of the club recognize by noting as one of the great difficulties was the different groups in california did not know each other. They were separated at that time by wide areas and they also distrust each other. Just as the california of 1903, the year the club was founded, was a far cry from the commonwealth of today, as we turned into the 20th century as scarcely recognizable as the ones we know in 1960. The same issues are here and as you said, can people cooperate. One of the big issues that you talked about in the book in several places is that your grandfather wasnt a democrat or republican, so he was a moderate and worked together quite often in fact in his cabinet he had Democrats Join as used to be done and it seems to me he was worried about the extremists at both ends and those extremists at the time on the right there was the john birch society, there was the mccarthy anticommunist and on the left there were the communists and people were trying to help the soviet union to succeed and other groups that were extreme. He tried to run through the metal and he was of course criticized for not moving fast enough and by going too fast for the other groups but he definitely went right up the middle, and ive often thought its interesting because its almost like without knowing, they shot themselves in their own food by gerrymandering all the congressional districts. They did it not to because what happened back in the 1980s but to ensure that they all got reelected. What that is made the primary elections, the actual elections because their group was always going to win as a result of which it pushed towards the extreme because the primaries were not for extremists and we can undo that process. And both parties it seems to me ought to be interested in that but if they dont get interested in it, we could use another president eisenhower that says what about getting the democrats that are moderate and the republicans moderate to Work Together and do that instead because i think about 60 of the voters it seems from the polling is right in that situation so its interesting and i think that is a nice framework for the different issues he covered. We have a couple of questions, so theres plenty of things we are going to cover, so many issues that he did. But lets ask the questions like what was the strategy to prevent a flareup of the korean conflict. There was a stalemate going on in korea and he came on as a general and people thought he will win the war for us but that isnt how he went about doing it because he was very realistic about that and about the iron curtain countries and maybe you can talk a little bit about how he dealt with that. Of course it is a long story. They always are. I think if you were to look at his let me start by saying after he was elected president , he went to korea as he promised during the campaign and he actually took a helicopter ride over the terrain. He got pretty close to the front as a matter of fact if he wasnt right on the front which i would have thought was rather dangerous for a newly elected president , but he wanted to see the terrain and the lay of the land firsthand. I think that already it worried him a lot especially given the editions of the both sides and he thought this just is not a winnable war unless it becomes a big war and big weapons are used. He just didnt think that it was going to succeed and he was very much against that it would bleed the economy and energy and attention and he said about working out of negotiation negot led to the armistice. But this later became a great point of contention as you know between those who were in favor of making the world safer, america to engage in small wars versus eisenhowers view that small wars start small but can get big. They can get big fast if your adversary is losing and in this particular case of course later the big adversary was the soviet union that had weapons to match their own including the Hydrogen Bomb that developed just before coming to the presidency. So yes they manage and it turned out that there was not just the United States but there was flexibility that seemed to be present among our enemies in that fight and so its still in play and i guess thats the last chapter of the situation is what are we going to do and are we going to stay for ever be able to negotiate some kind of proper end of that war. Another big issue he dealt with after was how to deal with germany and we wont go into a lot of detail about that because theres so many things to cover but he did Say Something interesting i will consider the policy towards germany successful and 50 years later its a thriving democracy. 1995 which was 50 years after he said that it was only a couple of years after germany reunited as all one country and certainly as a thriving democracy so whenever his longrange strategy, that one was right on point and its amazing the chinese we are told to look lood hundred years and we have had president s that have done that and they cannot keep the policies in place if somebody takes them away but if it is that they make enough sense people continue them and i think a lot of those were done. I just want to say i think that of course he was a strategic leader during the war and he was always looking for Sustainable Strategies and i like the idea of a sustainable strategy because its a good strategy if it stays in place and meets the needs of a longer period of time. Somebody that thinks today like a one term halflife and then it can go on for longer than that of course but then the corrections have to be made and i think that actually the accomplishments hold up pretty well over the decades. He was playing a long game anyway when he liberated that concentration camp and he was horrified by what he saw. So shocked he said he still couldnt find the words and he was a very articulate writer. His first reaction is what are people going to say and 50 years . Are they going to say the holocaust never happened unless we chronicle it now so he said everybody including my father into those camps to photograph it and the congressman came from the United States. That was all on his orders. The other element we were talking about trusted seem truso me that you have a problem in our trying to come to an agreement with each other today. Everybody has their own point of view which has always been true. We are getting used to democracy. Some people are very mad at the educated elite for trying to run things based on principles and so on and so forth. Its against the way they would want to do it. So you need to have a persuasive argument about it and then you take all the groups and say what is it we have in common. I think one of the things we have learned over the years is that, you know, its all right if we educate women. Its not going to be the end of society. In fact, our society is better. Its more productive. Its not bad. All kinds of people. Everybody should be educated although anybody that doesnt want to be, thats another argument. They dont want to be educated, thats fine. But you have a certain element of what it is we can have in common and say if that is our goal and we all agree, not all that like 70 agree on those goals, then we can trust each other if we stick to those goals. And then the rest of it is people and politics want to promise what they are going to accomplish and nobody can promise what they are going to accomplish because theres a whole bunch of people you have to get to agree to you. That is absolutely true. Eisenhower once said i think at the beginning of the administration when he was describing a problem he said he described it as the fear in the hearts of men. I think he understood that what underlines a lot of this lack of trust so its the role of the responsible leader to put into perspective the fear we may have versus how dire things are and weve gotten to the point in this country now where everything is a threat. Im sorry but not all threats are equal. This is one thing a reader might get from the book is the way a true strategist thinks about these things is to understand what the fundamental questions are because nobody is effective if they take on absolutely every issue but what are the ones that are going to what is the one that is going to keep it from collapsing . And the people who missed that dont realize that its coming down. The idea about the fear is right. One of the reasons we were successful after world war ii is the level of confidence in america. Look what we had just accomplished. Yes there were big scary things going on. The Nuclear Weapons were a big scary thing from our childhood as you certainly remember and several other things but there was still the confidence that we can meet our problems and overcome them because we overcame bigger problems already in world war ii so why cant we do these and i think the amount of fear that has been generated since 9 11 about this and the next thing and the next thing, even though there were plenty of terrorism in the 70s and 80s in europe and america but it didnt scare people as much. A certain amount of political exploitation. Some of the people in washington say that if you want to get anything done on capitol hill or the white house, you have to say Financial Security threat and i have one cynical friend who calls the threat of marketing whatever the case is you see the early beginnings of that with the missile gap in the story that ive written and certainly we should be vigilant and alert at all times but we have to also understand the state of our economy, the moral authority we have both domestically and internationally. All these things that were critical to our own National Security and military capability, sure but that wasnt the only thing that was part of our National Security. And because i dont think human nature will change too much, i accept that the politicians will use this to get ahead but what i would hope for is they would at least do like john kennedy did, once he won that he would say it isnt as bad as we thought. To get it back down again. I understand its like a game so they are not at the top of their game so you win the game. In the way it shows a lack of confidence that you can win but we wont talk about that because that is the way all games are mostly played but it would be nice if the politicians would then say i was just kidding or not i was kidding but now that im here and i found out all the information, its not as bad as i said and so we can all go back to feeling a little bit more comfortable because that level of fear is the thing that dissolves society. There is another fear that is probably contributed as part of the result of social media and a whole bunch of cultural factors. People are very afraid of being seen as weak or as a winner and a loser and these are kind t i dont think my grandfather would understand that at all. He believed in Second Chances and if you believe in Second Chances then you dont believe in the whole winter loser accusations. But these are attacks on peoples motives and personalities and i dont think it helps at all. It doesnt help because then people might make ill informed decisions because they seem to be doing something where they are studying the issue, looking at the background and thinking about the longterm consequences. Your grandfather certainly embodied that. Everyone is a winner losers or e just with more patients. We have one more question here how did he find it different to be a leader in the military versus the role of politics and government in which one was more difficult. Im so happy for that question. There is no question. First of all one of the differences is when you are a fivestar general, you outrank everybody. The military is organized in a way that is pretty evident of the books. He was remarkably flexible and he wasnt like his former boss who was tough on troops and addicted to the attention he received. In any case, i think he described it during the chief of staff years where he said the biggest job in the military as commander or Supreme Commander is to think through how he views things and what his strategy is going to be and to bring other people along. I noticed from being in washington making up your own mind on something is only the beginning of the problem. Then he outlines the problems. You dont know who is connected to whom and its a very funny passage and particularly because he wrote it in his diary that he never thought would get published for all of us to read and enjoy. But you know, he saw some early hiccups in the campaign and later well, mostly in the campaign. But he picked up the algorithm of it pretty quickly and i can just say if we dont understand some of those hiccups like his staff releasing his speech during the mccarthy encounter in minnesota, then we are missing the adjustment he had to make. I think probably anytime any leaks or staff didnt do what they were told to do this was a big problem with him because it is what you do in the military so he ran a tight ship in the white house and believe it or not, his associates were tremendously respectful of it. I knew many of his associates and they liked the fact that they were given a lot of leeway. He was a very good person at delegating. But they understood that they had to be personally responsible for the decisions that they were making. I should add to that of course he had a pretty good sense of the ranks and who he could give more latitude to. But its a fascinating question. Thank you so much for asking because we tend to study eisenhower the president or the general but we dont really put the two of them together as much as we should because this adjustment was a real one starting with the chief of staff of the army. And going on from there. The skills of dealing with so many generals including the really big test he had to deal with them the patent and douglas macarthur. Thats one thing but with politicians he had to learn a whole new set of buttons to push or whatever to understand these people. What drives them, certainly not trying to win a war. An election but anyway i thought you did a wonderful job of showing both sides of that and much more detail. Get it, and enjo enjoy it and iy you are all at home and have time to read it but there it is a great idea for anybody that wants to go back to that period of time. Thank you for explaining your book and the great pictures of your grandfather and of yourself from your childhood and so ends another event with its 118th year of enlightened discussions. And the creation of the american nation. Id like to start by reading from the opening paragraph the spike into the map at the farm and extend the other leg of the compass so that it reaches out to 60 miles and draw