Against the black background of the atomic bomb, the United States does not wish merely to present strength, but also the desire and the hope for peace. The coming months will be fraught with the fateful decisions, and this assembly, in the capitals and quarters of the world, from the hearts of men everywhere, be they governed or governors, may they be the decisions which will lead this world out of fear and into peace. To the making of these fateful decisions, the United States pledges before you, and therefore before the world. Its determination to help solve the atomic dilemma, to devote its entire heart and mind to find a way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life. Host Richard Striner, that is Dwight Eisenhower and 81950 three speech at the u. N. About an initiative that dominated much of his presidency, and that is the future of nuclear weapons. You have a new book about him called ike in love and war. There are many books about Dwight Eisenhower. What is different about yours . Guest i wanted to do several things. I wanted to write a comprehensive story of his life, but i wanted to explain a lot of the remarkable behindthescenes achievements during his presidency, many of which have only emerged over the past several decades, because he kept them carefully hidden. As i got into the book more anymore, i found myself captivated by the story of his emotional development. I learned a lot about that as i went along, and as i went along i found that my book was telling among other things a tale of tragic love. Host the diaries of Dwight Eisenhower were a major source with you. What kind of diarist was he and was he a reliable conservator of his thinking or was he preserving history . Guest that is a very interesting question. Eisenhower had a very strategic mind. He was extremely calculating. He spoke and wrote for effect, and his diary in particular is mysterious to me, because there were some occasions when i thought he was writing what mightve been bogus entries in the diary for the purpose of creating a misleading impression in the minds of those who read it. I cannot prove it, but circumstantial evidence leads me to suspect it. Host at the end of the book, i will jump to your conclusions. This is what you wrote. He was a strange man, so likable in many respects but so selfish and distant, a man of many moves. The power of analysis was formidable. The emotions that drew him were mysterious. One of the themes throughout your book is his temper, and it is so in contrast to what he presented as himself as a politician and the steadfastness he had during the war. Talk about his temper and how it affected him and the way he worked. Guest one of the greatest emotional challenges of his life. He did have a terrible temper. He admitted it both in private and in public. Most of all in a series of remarkable interviews in his presidency with cbs anchorman walter cronkite, he explained that in the course of his presidency he would go through a calculated ritual. He would invite white house aides into the oval office, and they knew that there duty was to stand while he cursed a blue streak and they would leave and he would think them ever thank them later. He inherited this terrible temper most likely from his father david. Ikes remarkable mother taught him early on to practice the fine art of emotional selfcontrol, and he would struggle all his life to do that. Host two phrases always associated with eisenhowers presidency. One is the hidden hand, and the other is middleweight politics. Middle way politics. Guest the hidden hand was a term coined in a book published in 1982, the hidden hand presidency. The book was a revelation to a great many people, two historical scholars to historical scholars, a lot of people including Adlai Stevenson liberals who had perceived ike as an out of touch duffer long past his prime. Eisenhower was creating that impression deliberately to create Maneuvering Room for himself. He was willing at times to play the fool in order to create Maneuvering Room. That is that extraordinary thing for any politician to do. The only thing close to it that i have seen in my study of the presidency was the way that lincoln interacted with the abolitionists during the civil war. In private he actually encouraged some of them to trash my own reputation. He said i could use that come the pressure that will create. Can you imagine any politician encouraging his allies to diminish his own reputation for tactical effect . The book laid out a compelling case for eisenhower the strategic maneuverer and the deceptive message, and it prompted a great deal of further scholarship, particularly by a historian David Nichols who explored the war behind joe mccarthy, on behalf of civil rights. Very interesting story. As for the middle way, i have been interested in the tradition of centrism in american politics for a long time. In 2010 i wrote a book about it called lincolns way. My own political and ideological tendencies tend in that direction. I am not advocating wishywashy moderation. I admire Decisive Action when needed. It is just that i am an independent thinker, and eisenhower was too. I find myself often repelled by what seems to me the elements of folly that can crop up on the left or the right. I reserve to myself the right to steer my own course and to borrow whatever elements of wisdom make emanate from the left or the right, and eisenhowers presidency, eisenhower became an exemplar. One of the things i seek to do in this book is to explore his ideological development, because his thinking traversed a rather twisty course. He veered back and forth, and one of the most interesting things of all to me was the way his intellectual and ideological Development Related to his underlying emotional development. It is one seamless mental continuing, and i think i have broken new ground in that respect. Host you referenced her career in previous books. How many books this is for you . Guest oh dear. I think over a dozen. Some in my judgment more significant than others. I think this is probably number 15. I have written on all sorts of things. I chose the profession of history for the potential freedom it could give to study not only different subjects into interdisciplinary work, so i have written about economics, architecture film, president ial history, and ive had a wonderful time doing it. Host you also were involved with the Eisenhower Memorial Commission to develop the memorial a couple of blocks from cspans office here. What did you do for them . That was it extremely interesting tour of duty. As a Smalltown College professor, i needed to supplement my income. Living in annapolis, i was within good striking distance of washington d. C. , and i at the time i should find consulting jobs. I was introduced to a most remarkable men, a air force general with a phd in history, quite remarkable. He was the executive director of the de dwight d. Eisenhower memorial commission. Congress voted in 1999 to build a memorial to ike. It took over 20 years to do for lots of reasons, but in my work with carl for the commission, i learned a tremendous amount about eisenhower that i had not known before, and after a biography of lincoln in 2020, worst of all possible years to publish anything with covid, this was my First Venture in biography. I decided i liked biographical work very much, so it was time to do a book on eisenhower. Host lets jump into his biography. You referenced his mother and father and the influences they had. Received born and raised . Guest he was born in denison, texas, but the town he grew up in was abilene, kansas. Host you talk about his fathers temper, which you may have inherited. His mother remained in influence throughout his life. In what ways . Guest it is a remarkable story. Both of his parents had to belong to a german protestant sect called the river brethren, an offshoot of the mennonites. They were committed pacifists. Both of his parents, david and ida. His father was a sorry role model, he was very hard to love. I just been arian, moody, withdrawn, where as eisenhowers mother was quite the opposite. She was witty, sparkling, good humor. I worshiped her ike worshiped her into his old age. Growing up that way, he did not want to become a mamas boy. He began looking around for father substitutes in abilene and found a whole series. Men who taught him the rugged manly arts, including how to shoot. 20 years before ikes birth, abilene had been the epicenter of the wild west. It was a violent and dangerous town, and only the action of lawmen made it as a place for decent people to live. One of ikes mentors was a guy that claimed to be a deputy to wilde hill wilcock. He committed himself to learn and master the fighting arts. He had been interested in ancient military history as a kid, and off he goes to west point. How does he reconcile his life as a soldier, a warrior with the ideals of the mother whom he revered . In my opinion, the template formed in his mind very early. He compromised by mastering the fighting arts but then using them to deliver his mothers fondest wish, peace as the tough lawmen had brought safety and peace to abilene, so here you have the beginning of this story of a career soldier Vice President soldier who as u. S. President gave the United States eight years of uninterrupted abuse. You can find the glimmering seven answer in his childhood. Host also a tragic love story. There were three women involved in this aspect of his life, and i want to spend a minute on each one of them. We could spend an entire program just talking about this. But as a capsule of how these women impacted him, and the obvious one is maime. Gladys harding, mimi dowd, and cates others be kate sotherby. How they affected his life . Guest i did not know about gladys until in the course of preparing my own biography i read all of the other eyes biographies i could get my hands on, and it was a military historian who wrote a semiautobiographical work, because it only covered ikes career through the end of world war ii, but his coverage of ikes childhood and early adulthood were quite remarkable, and he told the story of gladys. As soon as i read it, i thought to myself this is really important, because she was his first love. He had an ardent crush on her in high school, the feelings were reciprocal. When he came back from west point in the summer of 1915, they had a passionate courtship. He proposed to her. She said she loved him but waited before committing himself to very hurt she was a serious musician, and she was not sure that she could live the life of an army wife, and she needed to take her time sorting out her feelings. She left on a concert tour. Eisenhower got his first orders, he was sent to Fort Sam Houston in san antonio, texas, and they were separated and he was absolutely an emotional agony. He loved this woman, and she was not omitting herself, and in san antonio he met this cute, effervescent woman and one thing led to another. They get engaged on valentines day in 1916. How could i have known that Gladys Harding made the decision to give it all up for them . When she heard the decision that he was engaged to someone else, she was so heartbroken that her decisionmaking process went off the tracks, and she said yes to a proposal that she had received earlier from a man that she did not really love. Her marriage was loveless. The story of the documentation behind this, the love letters, it is an interesting story, but ive probably talked too long about this already, but it is a key item, because maime dowd could have been something of an emotional consolation prize. I put it this way in the book. It appears he settled for a pleasant instead of a passionate relationship, because he dated her, they had fun. The relationship worked on its own turns terms and he had to get on with gladys. He paid a price for this. Anyway, the marriage succeeded quite well at first on its own terms, but then there were troubles. First of all and most tragically in 1920 when their first child, a cute little boy, whom maime nicknamed ikey. The little boy died of scarlet fever, and both were devastated. Sometimes shared grief can bring men and women closer together. According to defendants, that is not what happened. They retreated into private worlds of sorrow, and things were never quite the same. Ike was signed to the panama canal. Maime came with them, and the conditions were horrendous. The quarters they lived in, and infested, rickety house. Ike had learned to rough it and enjoy that sort of thing for the manly ruggedness of it. Maime was in purgatory, and she began to consider divorce. They patched things up in washington d. C. Later in paris, the amended things, and had a pleasant social life. In the 1930s, ike was sent to the philippines, and maime refused to come along. This time ike was the one to consider divorce. His marriage to maime was a relationship in which they bore deep grudges. In world war ii he meets this former fashion model, a volunteer driver in the british motor transport corps named kate sothersby. Four years there was gossip about whether Dwight Eisenhower and kate had an affair. In my mind there is no question whatsoever that they did, but where is the controversy has been the sensationalistic controversy over extramarital sex, in my opinion the story was far more transcendent because i believe kate was the love of Dwight Eisenhowers life and vice versa. He had the kind of Emotional Experience he had with gladys. Now he has a second chance, you see. And he gave her up in 1945. Why . I engage in some speculation about that too. I am not sure this was a conscious decision on his part, but he was the former war hero in america from world war ii. He had proven his skill as a warrior, that was only the first half of the Lifelong Mission that it dawned upon him in childhood. He had to prove he could use the fighting arts to keep the peace. How could he do that if he got a divorce from maime i just took life easy with kay sothersby resting on his laurels . Divorce was fatal to president ial aspirations. He had to make this terrible all or nothing choice, and the evidence from the years in between his wartime and president ial careers is so clear, the poor man was absolutely miserable. He was angry, frustrated, fit to be tied. That is the story, he made an excruciating sacrifice, and it was playing out way down deep throughout his president ial years. It is an extraordinary story. Host we have to move on to the most important chapter of his early life, his graduation from west point and entry into the military. I cannot spend a lot of time with these interesting stories, but i was fascinated to find out from your writing that he was a nonconformist at west point and frequently find himself in trouble there . It does not square with the disciplined general and president that we solve it around, so what was that all about . Guest it was all about lots of things. He was an independent thinker, a nonconformist. He was mischievous, and he was rebellious. It was a rebellion against the lofty standards of his mother, rebellion against the lackluster teaching at west point, which bored him stiff, but he had an innate rebellious trait. It was part of his emotional nature, like his anger, but that is what it was all about, and he was almost constantly in trouble at west point. It is a fascinating and funny story. Host he just missed combat in world war i. How did this affect them . Him . Guest he was furious. He wanted very much to get into action. He was denied the opportunity, and he swore at the end of the war that he would in his own words cut a swath from then on to make up for this. It was an understandable feeling in a trained career soldier. You want to take the leadership skills you have been taught and applied those leadership skills in the nation of your profession. It is not necessarily warmongering, though some generals like George Patton did become something along the line of warmongers. Not in the case of ike. He had a Lifelong Mission to keep the peace, but he needed to use those fighting arts. Something of a contradiction, perhaps, but not really. Host yours is a story of important people, especially in the military early on and later in politics who saw something in Dwight Eisenhower and became mentors to propel him along in his success. Someone by the name of Brigadier General foxconn you said changed ikes life. Guest he was a brilliant man. A historical scholar as well as a career soldier, and he became a mentor for ike during the panama canal episode. He gave ike postgraduate instruction consisting of all of the things about the strategy of warfare that should have been taught at west point but were not. He and ike had a wonderful mentorpupil relationship, and he saw in ike potential for high command. A number of people in the 1920s were sought that another world war was likely, and connor appointed himself as something of a talent scout for the next work he knew was coming. She wanted to propel ice an hour into the upper echelons of the military, and he did just that. Host one of person who impacted him another person who impacted and was general Douglas Macarthur, appointed army chief of staffing 1930, and you said about the relationship as someone who worked for him, he was a boss so capricious that ike was led to the brink of emotional and physical breakdown. How did that eisenhower and macarthur relationship work both then and later on . Guest at first when macarthur became chief of staff and he selected eisenhower to become his chief of staff officer, ike was dazzled to macarthurs grandiosity, is procedure. He was a hero in combat in world war i. He was wealthy, clinically wellconnected, and he had this charisma that he used one people were susceptible to it to dazzle people, and eisenhower was dazzled at first, but before very long the insufferable side of Douglas Macarthur took over. He was a fatuous egotist. His personality became more histrionic, or ludicrous, and when eisenhower served under him in the philippines, macarthur, the sheer nonsen