Eisenhower Read Free Page A

play poker percentages with calculating skill. He assumed his share of responsibility in a working home where the boys made money raising and selling vegetables on a small plot near the house.
    Ida rotated chores weekly to avoid fights. She was, among her many other characteristics, intensely devoted to fairness. Late in life, when her middle son had vanquished Hitler’s Germany and earned the gratitude of the free world, Ida was asked what she thought of her “famous son.” Her reply: “Which son do you mean?”
    In addition to the family vegetable garden, the boys oversaw a small flock of chickens; they milked the family cow, tended the orchard, washed dishes, cleaned clothes. Among the chores as the boys grew older was cooking, and that, too, left a lasting impression on Ida’s middle son. For the rest of his life, Eisenhower would cook to please family and friends—and to calm his nerves.
    Ida would later describe Ike as the most difficult of her six boys, but she handled most flare-ups with equanimity. Problems that reached David were often solved with “the old leather strap,” but Ida “would philosophize … As you thought it over years later, you realized what she had given you.” That was no small feat with young Ike, for the boy manifested at least one outstanding trait: he was magnificently stubborn. One fistfight at age thirteen was destined for the history books not because he won it but because he and his combatant fought to exhaustion; by the time it was over, Ike “couldn’t lift an arm.” And when an infection overwhelmed him and threatened to cost him a leg, even in his delirium, Ike resisted. He enlisted Edgar, Big Ike, to fend off the doctor. Edgar stationed himself at the door to his brother’s room, and Dwight, drifting in and out of consciousness, gritted his teeth and toughed it out. Finally, on what the doctor judged as the last opportunity to save him, they painted the young boy’s body with carbolic acid. Ike screamed, but it stopped the creeping infection. The leg and the boy were saved.
    Eisenhower in those years acquired an enduring and endearing folksiness, one that would ground his achievements in a solid sense of home. Take, for instance, the notes he appended to his final memoir. Among them: his stirring 1945 Guildhall address in London and his recipe for vegetable soup. And Abilene, too, supplied lessons and imagery of the Old West. In his later years, when Ike would visit home, he would often stop by the grave of Tom Smith, the town marshal in its wilder days, axed to death by local outlaws in 1870, just twenty years before Ike was born. Smith, his gravestone reads, was a “martyr to duty … who in cowboy chaos established the supremacy of law.” Eisenhower extended a schoolboy fascination with Smith into a lifelong admiration. He loved the romance, the triumph of order, the paean to duty. From it was born, among other things, a devotion to Westerns.
    An appreciation of history and the outdoors, self-reliance, and ruddy athleticism were among the traits Ike learned in Abilene—along with a fierce will and a clumsy way with women—but what may have most shaped him in those early years were his lessons in moderation, the skill he developed as a boy to navigate between powerful forces, to fight his way past school-yard bullies, and to claim a place in his crowded home of brothers. It is no coincidence that the architect of the “middle way” grew up smack in the middle of six strong boys, their passions channeled by a patient mother.
    Two other memories of Abilene influenced Ike in fact and legend. A battle with a stubborn goose as a five-year-old ended when his uncle armed him with a broom handle. The lesson: “Never … negotiate with an adversary except from a position of strength.” At school, meanwhile, Ike appreciated that students were summoned back from recess with a drum, a system that promoted “quiet, orderly movement … The drum communicates a