Dwight David Eisenhower was a career officer in the US Army who was essentially a nonentity until President Roosevelt put him in command of the US Army's forces in North Africa in 1942. He was also in charge of the D-Day landings and the progress of all the Allied forces across France and into Germany. Thereafter, a national hero, he was elected president for two terms, 1952 to 1960. The name "Eisenhower" means "hewer of iron" but he was never that mighty and aggressive a figure. His talent lay not in combat with his enemies but in tact, patience, organization, and pursuit of a clear goal. It was a steep learning curve, both militarily and politically but he mastered it.
One of the more admirable features of this series is that it doesn't simply unroll the familiar scenario in which a leader rises through the deployment of his skills to dazzling heights of popularity. If the guy makes a mistake, the program makes note of it. It tries objectively to dispense kudos and gigs. Another respectable aspect of this entire series is that it actually refers to some of its sources and includes quotes from such modern historians as John Keegan and Stephen Ambrose, and it does so without interrupting the flow of the narrative. These are talented writers.
This program follows Ike's career from his birth in a small house in Kansas, which I visited and found to be genuinely SMALL, touches on his performance as president with regard to Civil Rights, which was subdued but opened the doors for later reforms by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. It cites Eisenhower's warnings against the military/industrial complex -- a term he coined -- that is a powerful economic apparatus that's with us still. The defense industry now is probably the greatest government-funded jobs program the country has ever known. But Ike was always concerned about the expense of waging war, given to musing about how many bushels of wheat an artillery shell or a bomb might cost.
I think the time line of events in Ike's career is sometimes confused in this episode. Not that it matters much but Montgomery wrote his apologetic letter to Eisenhower after the Battle of the Bulge was over, not before, and the reasons for it are not made very clear, to Montgomery's advantage.
At any rate, he dislike politics but was persuaded to run as a Republican when the apparent candidates of the early 50s were a bombastic Senator named Joseph McCarthy who saw communist spies everywhere, and a Senator named Taft who disliked NATO and embraced isolationism. Ike envisioned a quieter and more active political atmosphere. He was practically given the office of president. One of his greatest achievements was the building of the forty-two thousand mile Interstate Highway System, which he viewed from a military perspective as a quick way of moving supplies and equipment from place to place. (It had socioeconomic effects far beyond that and was one of the things that led to the flight to suburbia and almost to the death of some cities.)
In the end, Ike was a fine leader indeed, modest and effective. Not perfect, of course, because who is perfect? But he effectively managed many competing interests as both general and president and, if nothing else, he kept the US out of war for eight critical years.
