A Book for ChristmasMark TooleyDecember 22, 2010
The following article appeared on the American Spectator website and was reposted with permission.
In a mere 116 pages, Philip Terzian's Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century (Encounter) powerfully paints FDR and Ike as partner statesmen who shrewdly ushered a "stricken" world into one where democratic America was dominant. The Hudson River patrician and the Midwestern creamery worker's son were from different regions, economic backgrounds, and political parties. But they shared a devotion to expanding American ideals, confident those ideals could defeat totalitarian evils and also replace fading European imperialism. Thanks to FDR and Ike, America became a benign empire that protected Western culture from aggressive enemies.
Harry Truman, the president in between FDR and Ike, is barely mentioned in Architects, despite Truman's own decisive role in solidifying America as postwar global hegemon. Architects presumably means no slight to Truman, but did not want to distract from the unique partnership between FDR and Ike. Truman was FDR's vice president for only the few weeks of his uncompleted fourth term. As senator from Missouri, and even as vice president, he knew FDR only fleetingly. His selection as FDR's veep was the decision of Democratic kingmakers, to whom a war-focused FDR deferred. In contrast, it was FDR, at the urging of his trusted Army chief of staff General George Marshall, who plucked Ike from obscurity as a prewar colonel. Under FDR's confident patronage, Ike led the Anglo-American invasions of North Africa and France, congealing the Western Alliance and rising to five-star general.
Ike gloriously ended the war in Europe as America's most admired man, only weeks after his great patron had died at the height of his powers. FDR had already envisioned and organized the postwar world of American dominance that Ike would adeptly perpetuate. Truman, at times misunderstanding and resenting his predecessor and successor, was prototypically frank and transparent, viewing indirection as dissimulation. FDR and Ike were both masters of indirection, of poker faces, and of practicing the hidden hand. They inspired national and even global confidence in their goodwill even as they sometimes ruthlessly advanced their own, and America's, interests.
Architects offers brief but somewhat contrarian biographic sketches of FDR and Ike. FDR was never the superficial socialite before his crippling bout with polio, as often portrayed. In worldview, ambition, and discipline, he was the same man as before. FDR was shaped in adolescence by the Anglican clergyman and Groton schoolmaster Endicott Peabody, who pushed FDR toward public service and strengthened his WASP assumption of American exceptionalism. The other decisive political influence was FDR's distant cousin, and uncle to his wife, Eleanor, President Theodore Roosevelt, whom he called "the greatest man I ever knew." FDR successfully followed his plan to follow Uncle Teddy's career path from assistant Navy secretary to New York's governor to president. He also heeded Teddy's boundless devotion to America's global power.
Ike from the start shared FDR's outward affability, hiding an inner complexity. But Ike's persona was more sternly simple. Unlike FDR, he rose from obscurity initially without wealth, status, or patrons. Like FDR, he was decisively shaped by his strong and doting mother, though Ike shared his with a large family. As Groton shaped FDR, so West Point, offering free education to a modest working man's son, shaped Ike. Ike's talents were widely recognized by his Army superiors, but his ability to rise was constrained by the U.S. military's intra-war smallness, and by Ike's frustrating absence from combat in World War I. Descended from German immigrants, Ike would eventually smash Hitler's Germany, and felt special revulsion over Germany's crimes.
A jealous General Patton sarcastically complained that Ike was "the best general the British have." Ike assiduously cultivated America's wartime alliance with Britain, no less than did FDR. But while FDR's WASP roots naturally disposed him toward Britain, Ike's own Germanic and isolationist Midwestern background offered more contrast. Ike became a committed internationalist, crafting a web of Cold War international alliances. Like FDR, the preservation of American power was always foremost. FDR rescued wartime Britain but exploited the British Empire's implosion to advance America. Ike nurtured the special relationship with British premiers he knew from the war. But he coldly humiliated Britain's Suez adventure, believing the intervention at odds with America's interests.
Neither FDR nor Ike was captive to sentiment at the expense of the national interest. FDR developed nukes and unhesitatingly would have used them. Ike was wary of war, and for this reason threatened nukes against North Korea and, by implication, the Soviets. Waging war, or practicing brinkmanship in defense of peace, FDR and Ike, whatever they privately felt, still exuded public serenity, reassuring their nation and inspiring international regard.
Architects notes that FDR is remembered for the welfare state and Ike for his warning against the military-industrial complex. But both were primarily "patriots who consecrated themselves to the service of the United States and guided their country in its methodical embrace of global responsibility." Democratic success and capitalist prosperity can foster a dangerous complacency. FDR and Ike, both shrewd realists, knew the world was often hostile to American ideals. They strove for a world in which those ideals could survive and thrive.
There is a minor error in Architects. FDR's World War I boss, Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels, was a "teetotaling" Methodist, not a Baptist! That aside, Architects is an all too brief but wonderful essay on the FDR/Ike partnership that shaped America for the last 70 years. (Disclosure: Architects author Philip Terzian is literary editor for the Weekly Standard, where he graciously and occasionally publishes my reviews.)