Dwight (Ike) Eisenhower grew up as a farm boy in small town Kansas, with a strict father and a religiously devout but loving mother, alongside 6 brothers.
He was an ill-tempered kid when one Halloween evening he was forbidden to go trick-or-treating with his elder brothers he got into such a rage he went pounding his fists against the trunk of an apple tree in the front yard, scraping the skin off and leaving his hands bloody and torn.
He went to West Point primarily for the free tuition and was academically mediocre and behaviorally defiant and rebellious. He graduated in 1915, lobbying furiously to be sent to the World War I and finally received the order to ship out to France on November 18, 1918, one week after the war ended.
He spent the next 20 years training troops, coaching football, and doing logistics in the US. By his 40's, he was easily the least accomplished of the boys in the Eisenhower family. Nobody expected great things of him.
But he settled in and learned the secrets of thriving within the military organization. He learned to master procedure, process, teamwork, and spot and elevate the right ideas from people: "When I go to a new station I look to see who is the strongest and ablest man on the post. I forget my own ideas and do everything in my power to promote what he says is right."
He was appointed personal assistant to General Douglas MacArthur, a man he disliked for his aristocratic air and above-institution attitude but served him loyally for 8 years, as he did for all other superiors he'd been assigned to.
As the supreme commander of World War II allies, he suppressed his own frustrations in order to keep the international alliance together. As President, he hid his private thoughts, and wore a costume of affability, optimism, and farm-boy charm in public to lead the country.
He once told his grandson that his smile “came not from some sunny feel-good philosophy but from getting knocked down by a boxing coach at West Point. ‘If you can’t smile when you get up from a knockdown,’ the coach said, ‘you’re never going to lick an opponent.’"
To tame his underlying anger, he took the names of the people he hated, wrote them down on slips of papers, and tore them up and threw them in the wastebasket.
He was a master of army expletives, but almost never cursed in front of women and would walk away from a dirty joke; a 4-pack-a-day heavy smoker at the end of WW II but quit it cold turkey one day.
"Freedom," he would say in his 1957 State of the Union speech, "has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline."
He wrote that "It's all my fault if Normandy invasion failed" note but also a curt and emotionless letter to his war time chauffeur/secretary and rumored lover at her dismissal at the end of the war.
After his death, his vice president, Richard Nixon, recollected, "Ike was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of these words. Not shackled to a one-track mind, he always applied two, three, or four lines of reasoning to a single problem... His mind was quick and facile."
"He was honorable but occasionally opaque, outwardly amiable but inwardly seething," added his recent biographer Evan Thomas.
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"Take a bucket, fill it with water,
Put your hand in — clear up to the wrist.
Now pull it out; the hole that remains
Is a measure of how much you’ll be missed….
The moral of this quaint example:
To do just the best that you can,
Be proud of yourself, but remember,
There is no Indispensable Man!"
-- Anonymous poem carried in Ike's pocket
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