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 until he was in his fifties.
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. We discuss 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 the evening before the invasion to deal with the stress.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM Podcast #641: How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike’s Granddaughter
- AoM series on Eisenhower’s leadership
- AoM Podcast #996: Remembering D-Day 80 Years Later
- The Line Man’s Bible: A Football Textbook of Detailed Instruction by Ernest Graves.
- Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come
- Fox Conner
- The Czar of Halfaday Creek by James B. Hendryx
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Brett McKay: All right, Michelle Paradis, welcome to the show.
Michelle Paradis: Thanks so much for having me.
Brett McKay: 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?
Michelle Paradis: No, that’s exactly right. There are so many great books about D-Day too that I definitely knew in starting this one that I couldn’t write just another book about D-Day. If only because like, you know, competing with people like Max Hastings is going to always be impossible. And so, you know, 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, you know, on Omaha or on Juneau, but how much went into it. How much was behind them? 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.
You know, there’s a book, a minute about people like, you know, about Churchill, about Patton, about D-Day itself, but there are actually very few serious studies of Eisenhower. The last, you know, significant biography, certainly covering his wartime experience, is at least about 10, 15 years old now. And I just thought that was amazing, right? 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 first president 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.
Brett McKay: 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?
Michelle Paradis: 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 is 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. You know, he’s 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, a farming family. But his own father was a, 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 up in this community in the middle of Kansas, which emphasizes a certain kind of, you know, humility. You know, if you talk to anyone from Kansas, the most important thing they’ll let you know is, well, Kansas is nothing to talk about. You know, we’re just humble people from the plains. And so that sense of Eisenhower of being, in a way, self-effacing is right out of Kansas, right? 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 were part of a movement called the Bible Students, which we now know as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but were much more, how would we 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 culling some of the crops, and he would sneak into her closet like he was looking for 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 to the day he dies.
Brett McKay: 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?
Michelle Paradis: A couple of 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 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 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, 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 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. It was 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 that opportunity to be a football coach that he learns to really be a leader.
Brett McKay: In this section about his role 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 alignment. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I’m gonna 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 an army, a military unit.
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D-Day story, and certainly 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 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, well, 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. And this section about his role 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 alignment. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I’m gonna 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 an army, a military unit. Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D-Day story, and certainly 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 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, well, 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.
Brett McKay: So he graduates West Point in 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?
Michelle Paradis: I think they prepared him uniquely well. And it gets to something I was saying a few minutes ago, is that 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, 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. 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, 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 like Joe Howe, who was that newspaper publisher, Fox Connor, who he spends a long and very formative period with in Panama. But then people like General Moseley, 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. As Eisenhower rises up the ranks, there’s always someone who’s the smartest person in the room, and 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 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.
Brett McKay: 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 when World War I was over. He’s like, is it? My military career is over. It’s not going anywhere. 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 embark on the biggest part of his military career. And it would happen in his 50s.
So I mean, I think that’s a great lesson there 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 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.
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, it’s definitely an encouraging story to anyone who’s still not yet in their mid-50s to see that Eisenhower 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, too. And yeah, it wasn’t just after World War I. There are a lot of false dusts 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.
Brett McKay: 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? What did he tell Eisenhower? What did he assign Eisenhower to read? Tell us about it because I think it’s really interesting.
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, yeah. Fox Connor, 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 Gaillard, 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 Connor got marooned to command this podunk post in the middle of nowhere. It’s not obvious. But one of the things that is suggested though is that Fox Connor was not an easy person to get along with at all.
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 Gaillard is basically to make sure the camp doesn’t fall into the Panama Canal. And that’s it. There’s nothing going on there.
He was first in his class, and it’s from then on that Eisenhower’s career just takes off.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You mentioned that one of the books Conor gave him was The Philosophy of Nietzsche, and you talk about the book. That book actually had a big impact, a lasting impact on Eisenhower. How did Nietzschean philosophy influence
Michelle Paradis: Eisenhower, you think? Oh, that was a real surprise to me, right? Almost the last person you think about when you’re thinking about Eisenhower is Friedrich Nietzsche. But sure enough, I was able to, again, one of the real difficult things 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 Connor 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 least Marcus Aurelius, 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, complaining about, oh, things aren’t turning out the way I hoped, knowing that, 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, how would you sort of say it, sort of ideologies or theories of the day. Like 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 like 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 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 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 harness the most powerful force that human beings can muster.
Brett McKay: 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 of 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 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 take on Eisenhower?
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, it’s an incredibly compressed time frame. The day by day is just stunning. And yeah, it has a huge toll. It has to. Eisenhower is basically sick the entire time, to varying degrees of severity. 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 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, 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. 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 6th, 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 putting what 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.
Brett McKay: 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 Case Summersby, his driver. There was his personal naval aide, Harry Butcher, his secretary, Mattie Panette. What role did Eisenhower’s official family play in kind of boosting up his morale during this period?
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to overstate. He’s not a drunk, to be clear. You know, he basically spends, no, but he spends his nights. Eisenhower’s 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, right? This is an era before smartphones. And so when he goes home basically to the official family, he basically is disciplined from about 7 or 8 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? There 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
Brett McKay: 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 and make time for it. If Eisenhower could have done it during Overlord, you can do it when you’ve got your 9-5 job. Like, you’re okay.
Michelle Paradis: That’s right. Turn your phone off. Hang out with your kids. Have a meal without looking at your
Brett McKay: Phone. So you mentioned there’s a lot of internal struggles that Eisenhower had. He knew the impact his decisions were going to have. He was going to send lots of young men to their death. I mean, how did he do that and think about the human consequences while not letting it paralyze him? Because 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?
Michelle Paradis: I think actually the key thing was that he maintained his humanity. You know, we talked a bit about Nietzsche and this is sort of a Nietzschean idea or a stoic idea at least, but I think it also comes right out of Nietzsche, is that he never looked away from the consequences of his own decisions. Like he fully embraced them 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. I’ll give you just one example of it that almost brings me to tears every time I think about it, is the night before D-Day launches, he goes around and sees off the 101st Airborne. And there’s probably the most famous picture of Eisenhower addressing these young men who were 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 gonna be lost. Half! And 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 review. He literally just has Kay drive up as quietly as possible, gets out and just starts mingling 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 some sort of great rallying cry to get them over the beaches. And with a little bit of tracking down, Ribna find 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 are you from? What was your job? What’s your hobbies? 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 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, who’s not going to see his own father again. And Eisenhower made himself do that, not only, I think, to be there for them and to let them know that he saw them and saw them not as soldiers to be sent across the border, but as young men who he cared about, 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 costs, the benefits in a real way that he owns. It’s as much about responsibility and owning responsibility as it is just making the best decision you can.
Brett McKay: 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 he didn’t have to publish that one, but he kept letting me know that. Yeah, the guy took responsibility. 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?
Michelle Paradis: Smoking. 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 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, 730, 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,
Brett McKay: You talk about the Western you read about. Black John is the name of the story.
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, the Tsar of Half a Day Creek. Eisenhower really liked good shoot-em-up Westerns. Those were his favorite. Tsar of Half a Day Creek is not one of those. It has like a sort of more humorous vein to it, and there’s not a lot of shooting. But it really was apt. It really kind of met the moment very well because it’s all about this guy, the Tsar of Half a Day Creek. His name is Black John Smith, who is the kind of the doer in the small camping town in Alaska, or in Yukon country I think it is actually, where 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 guy who’s always got the plan and is one step ahead. So it was a very apt book for Eisenhower to be reading on
Brett McKay: 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. 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.
Michelle Paradis: No, that’s entirely true because one of the things that I found super interesting about Eisenhower, which you don’t see on the surface at all, but is 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 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. 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 had 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, and 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 matters is just as important as any one thing that you do.
Brett McKay: 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 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 light him up. What he did instead is he wrote this letter out, exactly what he wanted to say, no filter. And then he just put it in his drawer. It cooled off and he’s like, okay, I got it out of my system. Now I can approach this with the cool head.
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, no, as you say, he was his own psychologist because there was no one else around he could trust for that role, really, other than maybe Kay Somersby or Harry Butcher. And yeah, so he would do those sorts of things. Or if he just was like feeling overwhelmed, just same thing. He was feeling overwhelmed and he was like, if he was having trouble 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 to, 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 specific habits and techniques for making him a much better thinker and leader than he otherwise would have been.
Brett McKay: So something that Eisenhower is known for is his political ability. He was able to manage these big egos, Montgomery, Padden, Marshall, Churchill, DeGaulle. 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. He knew how to manage the media.
How would you describe his approach? I think this is underappreciated about
Michelle Paradis: Eisenhower. Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. I agree. I think it’s totally underappreciated. He got in a very sophisticated way that 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’ve got to be friends with the press. And he made sure that when he was playing bridge and smoking and drinking, that reporters were always with him just to kind of hang out, with a few exceptions, as guys. And having that kind of intimate 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 to, in 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 the radio or in 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 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 I like Ike. The idea that a politician should not be only a leader but likable more or less draws directly from Eisenhower. And I know 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 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 Marvel statue mold. 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 George W. Bush on his ranch and Crawford clearing brush, or Donald Trump eating a Taco Bowl, or 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.
Brett McKay: So after researching and writing about Eisenhower, what’s something that stuck with you the most about his life or his leadership?
Michelle Paradis: I think for me, in addition to giving hope to 40-year-olds everywhere that life is not yet over, I think the most 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. He, through a combination of, I think, intelligence, luck, and ruthlessness, pulled himself up to that height to great, I think, benefit 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 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 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 more people than ever. We have more opportunity for more people than ever as well, and fewer barriers based on old lines, whether that’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 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 worry we may not be getting the talent that we have at our disposal to have the kind of leaders that we possibly could have.
Brett McKay: Well, Michelle, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Michelle Paradis: Yeah, the book is available 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 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.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michelle Paradis, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Michelle Paradis: Thank you. It was a lot of fun.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Michelle 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 supremecommander. 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 artofmaleness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the podcast. Put what you’ve heard into action.
