“How’s that British girl?” was probably not the question Dwight Eisenhower wanted to hear from Franklin Roosevelt as the army general and the president flew to a conference of Allied leaders in Cairo in November 1943.
F.D.R. had asked to sit next to Eisenhower’s attractive driver, Kay Summersby, at dinner, shamelessly flirting with the 34-year-old. The next day, as the presidential party drove along the picturesque North African coast, F.D.R. instructed Summersby, “That’s an awfully nice place. Could you pull up here, child, for our little picnic?” The president had heard the rumors about Ike and Summersby. So had Ike’s wife, Mamie, who told her husband not to bother to come home until the war was over.
Eisenhower had to put up with a lot as supreme Allied commander, some problems of his own making (such as Summersby), some stemming from the difficulty of fighting a World War with vexing allies.
In May 1942, British commander Bernard Montgomery was in the middle of giving a briefing to Ike when he suddenly stopped and sniffed through his prominent nose. “Who’s smoking?” the commander demanded. “I am,” Eisenhower confessed. “Stop it,” Montgomery scolded him. “I don’t permit smoking in my office.” Ike, a three-pack-a-day man, dutifully snuffed out his cigarette.
With his affable grin and deep patience (achieved by mastering a purple temper), Eisenhower eventually won over the imperious “Monty.” But by appearing to kowtow to the British, he antagonized his headstrong tank commander, General George Patton, who sneered about his Anglophile boss, “I wish to God he was an American.” When Eisenhower brought Summersby to observe combat operations in Italy, Patton mused aloud that “she must be a most necessary driver.”
Eisenhower saved Patton’s job after he slapped a soldier and again after he denigrated America’s Russian allies with an intemperate speech. Ike was forever having to control his passions when other men could not control their own. He may not have entirely tempered his heart when it came to the divorced Mrs. Summersby (it’s not clear if they were lovers), but his ability to rise above ego and pettiness made him a great supreme Allied commander, as Michel Paradis shows in his compelling account of Eisenhower on the eve of the most famous invasion in history, 80 years ago, on June 6, 1944.
Like any other commanding general, Ike was not insensitive to the charms of glory. Relegated to training troops Stateside, he had missed out on combat in World War I. Brought closer to the action in World War II, he suffered silently when newspaper headlines extolled the boldness and initiative of his combat commanders while lavishing him with faint praise for being a good soldier-politician.
Paradis writes that Eisenhower possessed the “ostentatious” modesty of a Kansan. By that he means that Eisenhower could be a show-off about his humility. In a glowing profile, Life magazine quoted Eisenhower chiding his subordinates for bad paperwork or muddled thinking. “That’s too complicated for a dumb bunny like me,” says Ike. His subordinates may have rolled their eyes. Still, Ike’s aw-shucks manner—matched with a steely look and sureness of purpose—served the great cause.
Paradis writes in a breezy style, overusing the term “bullshit” and oddly referring to Patton by his nickname “Georgie.” But the author (a human-rights lawyer and scholar who also wrote Last Mission to Tokyo, about the 1942 Doolittle Raid) has deeply mined the vast record of Eisenhower’s wartime career, producing an evocative and at times moving portrait of Ike as he masterminds the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Here is Ike, in the moments after he has given the order to proceed with the D-day landings, despite an iffy weather forecast: “Eisenhower found himself alone, amid the empty bookshelves and the awkwardly placed furniture. Rain and wind were still drumming at the window.... There was only one more thing he needed to do.”
Grabbing a pen and a scrap of paper, Eisenhower began to write a message to deliver if the landings failed. “The troops, the air and the navy did all that I asked … ” Eisenhower stopped, realizing that the message could not be about him. Yes, the troops were acting on his orders, but they were the ones bravely taking the terrible risks, not Eisenhower. “So,” writes Paradis, “he crossed out the words ‘I asked’ and finished the thought by saying that these men ‘did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.’”
Paradis concludes, “Bleary eyed he drew a line under it. That was all that needed to be said. And then he scrawled the date, which his sleep deprived fingers wrote down as ‘July 5.’ [It was June 5.] He folded up the paper, put it in his wallet, and headed out in the storm.”
Evan Thomas is the author of several books, including, most recently, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II