Ewing Marion Kauffman foundation for supporting the lecture series tonight. Perhaps you are aware that the Eisenhower Foundation is raising money to conduct a comprehensive exhibit renovation. It is the largest Fundraising Campaign in our foundations 73 year history and it is the First Comprehensive exhibit renovation in more than 45 years. The new exhibits will be unveiled this summer. We have been so encouraged by the response that we have received thus far and am pleased to report that we raise 90 of our goal. We want to finish the campaign before june 6 so we can publicly announce this milestone to all of the veterans who join us at the eisenhower president ial library and museum to commemorate the 75th anniversary of dday. Many of our friends have already made a gift to the exhibit renovations and i would like to thank you for your trust and participation in this project. There is still time to participate and i hope everyone will consider a gift so we can reach our goal. It gives me great pleasure to introduce tonights program. Louis galambos is a Professor Emeritus in the department of history and editor of the papers of dwight d eisenhower. He has served as president of the Business History conference and the economic history association. A former editor of the journal of economic history, he has written extensively on u. S. Business history, business Government Relations and the rise of the bureaucratic state. His principle of the Business History group, a Business Consulting organization and has a historical consultant to merck and co. , at t and the world bank group. Here to share his book, eisenhower becoming leader of the free world is lewis galambos. It is very nice to be here. Lets see if i can get this to stand up. Very good. Okay. The library has been very important to me. It was very important doing the paper. Absolutely essential to do the eisenhower paper. It was important in doing the book. Now, i dont know how much most of you know about editing papers. You do it day by day. You read the subject, in this case ike. What ike wrote and then you read what was written to him. Then you read what happened as a result of what he wrote. And you go on day by day doing that. And then you produce volumes that are about that sick. Now, these are like the big biographies that you may read. These are what i call chest crushers. You read them at night when you are going to bed. And you read a few pages and boom, they come down on you. So, that is part of the problem. The other problem is they produce guilt. Because, i dont know how Many Americans but i would guess many more than 100,000 have never finished war and peace. They take it on vacation every year. And it sits there. And then they put it back in the car when they go home. Because they didnt read it. They went to the beach. They were on vacation. So, i decided to avoid that and write a slim book that could be read by a busy person in two or three nights. And if it came down on you it wouldnt hurt you too much. So, i had you in mind in righting the book. And as i said i drew heavily upon the library and their expert assistance in working on that. Now, most of you, i would say many in this audience know a lot about president eisenhower. And you know first that he was president. And you know roughly when that was. And you wont make the mistake that a friend of mine made in righting a textbook in which she had eisenhower taking office and 52. No, i want to tell you you will never make a mistake except about george washington, they always get elected in an even year and they always take office in an odd year. Well, there is a book out there published by a really good publisher that got it wrong. I wont tell you any more about that. But any rate, i wont repeat some things that i know you already know. He was born in 1890. And that day is important. Im not going to give you a whole lot of dates to remember and i didnt bring any blue books so you dont have to worry about a test after this talk. So, he was born in 1890 and that was just when the United States was becoming the leading Industrial Power in the world. The United States was making a transition. We had long been a labor poor and capital poor country. And we were growing. We were growing capital and labor from around the world because we needed it. We had great natural resources. Well, at this point we started to be a capital rich country and labor had a different relationship to what we were doing. So, that was when ike was born. There were no cars. They had horses and wagons. Dirt roads and dirt streets. It was a different world. In particularly a small town world. I associate with that. I was raised in a town that got to 7000 accounting some sheep. They wanted to be bigger than they actually were in southern indiana. But it helped me understand ike. The United States then started to assert its power overseas for the first time. We became as some say created an empire. I asked if some vacationed in puerto rico and noticed that they speak a different language. How did that happen . They look at me with a blank look. So, every once in a while i once asked about when the First World War took place. Some of them had it in the 19th century, some had it around the time of the Second World War. It was a problem. Most of them were International Relations majors. So, i guess they didnt have to do a whole lot of history. Well, that was very important in america in our country and ikes career of course started just about the time of the First World War and reaches a very impressive climax in the Second World War. There is probably no professional of any sort that i can think of for him one event was a fulcrum for his whole career. And that was dday and the decision he made, powerful. Powerful impact upon his career. So, when i started to work on this book the first thing i did was try to go back to his early life. We had edited from the Second World War on. I have done the presidency and the chief of staff and columbia university. We have done all that. But i didnt know that much about ike as a child. And as a young man. So i did a lot of research on that. And i used two ideas. One is identity. Everyone in this room including me has an identity. That is the story you tell about yourself. You tell your story every day to other people, to your wife, husband, daughter. Sons, some people have sons, i have four daughters. You tell that story to the people you work with and work for. So, your identity is that story. Your personality doesnt change much over your lifetime but your identity will change a lot. And ikes changed significantly over his career. The other idea i want to use is reputation. Reputation is the story other people tell about you. Now, there may be a little incongruity between your story and their story. That sometimes causes pain. I like the introduction today but they didnt tell you that i once failed organic chemistry, did they . No. Some of you may have sons or daughters or grandchildren who failed organic chemistry, so take it easy. You can still earn a living in america after you fail organic chemistry. Now, i started to look at his career thinking about identity and reputation. At first he was an indifferent soldier. He was an indifferent professional soldier. He was indifferent at west point. He was really smart. Terrific poker player. But he had a little problem about authority. And i said where did that come from . I associate ike as being the master organizer. Why would he have a hangup about authority . Daddy, daddy was a hangup about authority. And his big brother. His brother brother was called big ike. And in high school he was called little like. And that is a burden to carry around for four years. And who was the captain of the Football Team . Not little like. Okay, you have to suffer through that. You put those two men together, one young and one older. And you get a real hangup about authority. So, ike rejected his father. He started to smoke cigarettes. At dday he was smoking four packs per day. That means you are liking a cigarette off of the cigarette. I do not recommend that for anyone. I have a strong interest in Public Health and believe me my father died of lung cancer and smoked all of his life. I dont recommend that. He rejected his father. He learned to play poker and his father hated cards. He learned to drink and his father hated that. He was turning away from his family in a significant way and they were pacifists. He went to the military academy. Well, okay. He had a hangup about authority. And he got a lot of demerits. A lot of them for smoking. They werent allowed to smoke. He would sneak around and do things. I wondered about that. I thought well, here is a man who became a professional smoker and he doesnt care as much as some other soldiers who were already there at that same time. In the 1920s however, he finally acquired a mentor. And whenever i talked to other groups who were professional military i make a lot of this because it is a tremendously interesting problem. How did the mentor know, how was it that gerald fox connor met eisenhower and discerned that he had that potential. He took him to panama. Educated him he didnt read these boring books once, he had to read them three times. He had to practice riding orders of the day every day. Until it was grooved into his mind. So fox connor converted him and inspired him to look forward to something more than being a retired lieutenant colonel. So, it is an amazing thing number 1 that he recognized it, and number 2 that he would actually do it. And then number 3 that he followed up. Why did he have to follow up . If he had already gone through this conversion experience . Well, there was a bureaucracy of the army. And the army had a fixed view of what eisenhower was capable of. While he was at west point one of the things he did after he blew out his knee was coach. And he was a terrific coach. He was an instinctive leader with small groups. He was good at that. At the platoon level he was always good. He didnt need to be taught nothing about that. He was respected by his peers. And was a good leader at that level. But, the army bureaucracy said he was a good coach and a good man to have around, but he is not going to go to the top. So, they resisted. Bureaucracies dont change their mind overnight. And any of you who have authority over other people, think about this. They were sensitive to what ike was learning and that he was going to go ahead now that he turned his career around. He turned it around in a significant way and he was being maneuvered to get ahead. It took some maneuvering. He got into a with the former head chief of staff of the army and then that was general douglas macarthur. He was army chief of staff in the 1930s. Ike served as a staff officer and he followed macarthur to the philippines. Now, their personalities clashed. As you might imagine. And ike was enormously better about certain things that happened. Four years he showed restraint with general macarthur. But, finally broken the philippines. Because macarthur cheated him. He sent him to the United States and in effect replaced him on his staff. So when ike came back from the United States, all of his jobs had been taken over by somebody else. Where he was sitting and he couldnt do anything. Now, macarthur was he didnt raise a stink with the war department. He just did it very quietly. I call it a machiavellian moment. One of those moments in life, some of you may have had a machiavellian moment when somebody cheated that you respected or you were working with. And you realized how the world operates which for ike was a major machiavellian moment. He was tricked by macarthur. He was better it was the first of two turning point in his career. He learned that sometimes he was going to have to do some things to achieve a major end that he found distasteful. The second came in north africa. In north africa he had thought through his whole career to have command of combat troops. He was dedicated to getting to that point where he would have direct command of combat troops. That was his ambition, major ambition. The british however maneuvered at the casablanca conference in 1943 and cleverly and with terrific staff work, a were very good. They were really good, almost as good as the navy is. The navy is tremendous of achieving their political ends. As were some other people in ikes career. But the british maneuvered. They had brits in between ike and the combat force. Did that hurt him . Yes. He had worked all this time hard to get to that point. He was Supreme Commander in africa. And now he did not have direct command. He had to go through a british officer. You probably already know this, there was a lot of strain within the alliance. The brits were contentious of american troops. The brits were absolutely certain that they had won world war i not us. The brits were absolutely convinced that eisenhower they had no respect for ike and they showed it in a lot of ways. One of the ways he first met a distinguished british officer, monty. The first time he met him ike as i said, he smoked all the time. Particularly he was nervous. If you met with monty you were nervous. Anybody would be nervous meeting with general montgomery. And general montgomery told him to put his cigarette out, he wasnt allowed to smoke. That hurt. When you are in the position that ike was in and it was just an assertion of authority of somebody who thought that was important for the moment. So the british had achieved their end and ike had to put up with it. What is important was at this point he did not throw down the gauntlet. In a career like this people sometimes come to a point where they will tell you if you dont do it my way, i am leaving. And we are going to get to a point where i did that. But not now. In north africa he continued to preserve the unity of the forces. Some of you may remember he sent one officer home because he called a british officer a british sob. He said he can call him a sob but not a british address ob. He put up with monty. All the way through africa, sicily, and italy. And then that brought him to the decision. The big decision which was d day. This is phenomenal when you think back what a giant armada that was and what a narrow window they had and he made that decision to send those people in. And he hated the thought that a lot of them were going to die. He was touched by that. Some military officers are not. General patton in africa told his soldiers the point of all this is to kill them before they kill you. He had a different attitude toward war. He was a terrific officer, particularly on the offense. When you had offensive operations he was great. So, ike made that decision and kept the allies together and he kept the British Working together with americans through all of that time and a difficult time that followed the invasion. Now, by this time he was committed to the concept of unity, unity in war, unity and peace. He thought in a general sense that was how you achieved things. And that had an impact when he went to the chief of staff, went back to washington and became chief of staff for the army. He was upset, enormously upset. This came out later in his farewell address. He was upset by the fact that they couldnt agree on strategy so he couldnt get the services to agree. For years, for several years we didnt have a strategy because the services wouldnt agree on what the strategy was going to be. They each favored one idea. And he looked on the services than as Interest Groups. And he hated Interest Groups. He never adjusted to it. Richard nixon loved Interest Groups, dealt with them and had no trouble at all. Eisenhower hated them and you know why . Because after the decision was made, they kept on fighting. They didnt except the decision that was made. If they lose in congress we will go to the court. If we lose in the court we will go to the people. We wont give up. They paid for doing that relentlessly. So, that irritated ike all the time. When he became president that is the way he ran his cabinet. Everybody had a right to say something. Everybody can get in to the decisionmaking process. After we make the decision, he never left any doubt about who would make that decision, and we join hands and do it together. So, unity was extremely important to him. And he thought in very general terms, not just military but also political. He thought that way about american society. In the postwar period he worked with unity as chief of staff. And that is i think what is part of the military Industrial Complex, that remark. They only read the first part of the speech, he said we must be strong. We must be strong. We have to have a powerful military. But he was worried about the military Industrial Complex in the way the Interest Groups worked in washington and in our government in general. So, he was worried about that from chief of staff on and when he was president of columbia university. He spent a great deal of time on the train going back and forth between washington to try to implement that policy. It was very difficult. He tried to implement that as commander of nato. He worked hard to instill unity to get people to Work Together. People who had been bitter enemies and he wanted them to Work Together to achieve a major objective which by this time was the cold war. Now, the cold war had a great deal to do with his presidency. And again, he tried to unite americans to deal with the cold war and he said if we dont have peace, we dont have anything. From 1946 on, he said that if we have another major war it will not be a great tank battle of the Second World War. It will not be the infantry, heroic as they were in the battle of the bulge. We will not have that. The wa