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The Art of Manliness
The Making of a Supreme Commander — How Eisenhower Became the Leader Who Delivered Victory on D-Day
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- [00:00]
Toyota Trucks Advertiser
The world is full of tours.
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Michel Paradis
But.
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Toyota Trucks Advertiser
You don't choose a Toyota truck to follow the beaten path. You choose it to find the places.
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Brett McKay
In between.
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The detours where each adventure pulls you toward the next and wrong turns turn out right. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota Trucks.
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Brett McKay
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- [02:52]
Michel Paradis
Foreign.
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Brett McKay
Michelle Parody. Welcome to the show.
- [02:58]
Michel Paradis
Thanks so much for having me.
- [02:59]
Brett McKay
So you got a book out called the Light of Battle, which is about D Day. D Day is one of the most studied and written about events in modern history. What do you think gets missed in the books on D Day? And what were you hoping to bring to our understanding of D Day with your book?
- [03:14]
Michel Paradis
No, that's exactly right. There are so many great books about D Day 2 that I definitely knew in starting this one that I couldn't write just another book about D Day, if only because, like, you know, competing with, you know, people like Max Hastings is going to always be impossible. And so, you know, I. To me, I think. I think the thing we missed, to answer your question about D Day, the thing that fascinated me, is not just the actual heroism of the men who hit the beaches, you know, on Omaha or on Juneau, but how much went into it, how much was behind that. We think about those 176,000 men who hit the beach in the first day. You know, obviously, correctly, they are the literal heroes of that story. But, you know, depending on how you count it, about 2 million people made D Day happen. And that kind of collective action, right, that working together for a common goal was essential to D Day's success. And that ultimately is what drew me especially to Eisenhower. And obviously, there's no lack of historical celebration for Dwight Eisenhower, but I also think we almost take him for granted. You know, there's a book a minute about people like, you know, about Churchill, about Patton, about D Day itself, but there are actually very few serious studies of Eisenhower. The last significant biography, certainly covering his wartime experience, is at least about 10, 15 years old now. And I just thought that was amazing. I couldn't understand that because here you are, you have this guy. He comes from the middle of the country, about as far away from anywhere as you can possibly get, which is Abilene, Kansas, and not only comes to the heights of military leadership in the Second World War, he commands the most complicated and I would argue, consequential military operation of that war, which is D Day, and then goes on to be probably one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century, the first president, who we call the leader of the free world. And so many, I think, even admiring takes of Eisenhower sort of look at him as like this inevitable figure or a boring figure at worst, like the, you know, the 50s, the mayonnaise on white bread kind of thing. And to me, I just knew that there was something more going on there. And so in thinking about D Day and thinking about the heroism of the Met on the beach on D Day, I really wanted to just understand how they got there and how they got there in a way to succeed. And that took me to Dwight Eisenhower.
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Brett McKay
And that's what I loved about the book. You get into his personality or try to, because he is kind of an enigma. He's kind of a sphinx character in a lot of ways. Just kind of this affable, smiling guy. And I think that's why he gets overlooked. But you try to paint a picture of him that. No, there's a lot going on with this guy. That's why he was so successful as a commander and later as a President of the United States. So let's dig into Eisenhower, try to figure out, like, how did this guy manage to carry off one of the biggest military invasions in the history of humanity? You mentioned he grew up in Abilene, Kansas. How do you think his Kansas upbringing prepared him for his role in World War II?
- [06:23]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, it's. I mean, he's such a fascinating figure, like, as you say, because he's known certainly in his lifetime, particularly as president, as being, you know, everyone likes Ike. He's this smiling guy. He's sort of almost seen as, again, bland or non threatening. And yet he is probably, you know, responsible literally for the deaths of millions of Germans and one of the most, I think, cunning and in some ways ruthless military and political figures of the 20th century. But it's all concealed around this very sort of bland, deceptively bland, I would say, packaging of smiling Ike. And a lot of that traces to his upbringing in Kansas. And there are a couple of things that I think shape him. You know, he's born in 1890, which is sometimes celebrated as the year the west was closed. And he grows up in Abilene, which had been a, you know, a cow town from the Wild west, but by that point had become a fairly reserved, very religiously oriented community around the River Brethren. And his family, his father's family was a very prominent religious family and farming family, but his own father was, you know, a complicated guy. He wasn't a drinker, but he was definitely abusive. And even for the time, I would say, abusive, you know, late 1800s Kansas. And so Eisenhower grows up in this community in the middle of Kansas, which emphasizes a certain kind of, you know, humility. You know, if you talk to anyone from Kansas, the most important thing they'll let you know is, well, Kansas is nothing to talk about. You know, we're just. We're just humble people from the plane. And so that sense of Eisenhower, of being, in a way, self effacing is, is right out of Kansas. Right. Everyone in Kansas recognizes that. But I think the other things he gets from growing up in his very unique circumstances is one a. A real burning desire to see the rest of the world. I don't know that he travels more than about a hundred miles or so before he ends up enrolling in west point. When he's 19 years old. And as the middle child of a fairly low income, large family, he just has this itch to want to see the absolute rest of the world. And that leads him to cultivate all sorts of mentors, both in Abilene and then really for the rest of his life. It's probably one of his greatest skills as a sort of a man in development is that he looks for people who seem to have figured something out that he wants to know, and he. And he gloms onto them and tries to learn from them in a really intimate way. And in Kansas, one of his first mentors is the publisher of the local Democrat newspaper, the Dickinson News. And he just goes to this guy's newspaper shop, hangs out there after school, typically with some friends. And, you know, this publisher sees in Eisenhower curiosity. And Eisenhower wants to know what's going on in the rest of the world. And so this guy starts just giving Eisenhower books to read. And one of Eisenhower's favorite, or the one that makes the biggest imprint on him is the Life of Hannibal. Now, when I said Eisenhower is the middle child of a very large, low income family that's also a religiously pacifist family. His father and his mother are part of a movement called the Bible Students, which we now know as the Jehovah's Witnesses, but were a much more, how would we say, mystical movement at the turn of the 20th century. And his religiously pacifist mother is not at all impressed when he brings home the Life of Hannibal and in fact confiscates it from him and puts it away in her closet. And as Eisenhower sort of tells the story later, he would wait until she was out in the garden, you know, culling some of the crops, and he would sneak into her closet like he was looking for the Playboy, and read the Life of Hannibal sort of in secret and just became fascinated by, really in love with a kind of military heroism, a kind of manly figure. And the thing he would always say about Hannibal in particular is that he knew from the time he was a young boy that Hannibal was one of the greatest generals in all of history, because he was recounted as such, but only ever by his enemies. There are no extant tracts or histories by the Carthaginians of Hannibal's exploits, only those written by the Romans. And to Eisenhower, the fact that someone could be so compelling as a figure, so powerful as a general, so brilliant, so, so heroic as to go down in history that way, when the only people writing about you are the enemies who fought you in battle, really impressed Eisenhower from a young age. And so that upbringing in Kansas, that combination of, you know, it sounds cliche, but it's true. Small town values, but combined with this real burning itch to get out of Kansas, to see the rest of the world, to be a part of the world, formed Eisenhower's character at a young age in ways that you can see almost to the day he dies.
- [10:57]
Brett McKay
So you mentioned West Point was his ticket out of Abilene. He went to West Point. How did West Point prepare him to be supreme Allied commander, you think?
- [11:06]
Michel Paradis
It's a couple different ways. You know, Eisenhower went to West Point as his, you know, ironically enough, his way of rebelling against his parents and to get his ticket out of Abilene. And he gets there and he's really quite awkward. You know, he. He is a country boy, but he has a sense of this is where he wants to be and this is where he's in a sense, always wanted to be since he was a boy. And so ends up doing two things in his career at West Point that end up, I think, shaping him. And the sort of the Eisenhower we know forever. One is he has this deep concern about his background. He is not the son of a general. He is not part of the sort of burgeoning American aristocracy that is filling the ranks of his classmates. But that gray uniform they all wear at least covers up how sort of shabby and country his clothes are. But the way he talks, where he's from, right. No one's ever heard of Kansas, really, but people have heard of Abilene. That old west sort of history that Abilene carried as being the place where cowboys had shootouts in the town square. Eisenhower fully embraces as part of his personality. And it's where he begins to take on the nickname Ike as well. Because Ike is this sort of typical name for a cowboy in the dime Westerns that you would get, you know, a cowboy who was out on the land all alone, who was his own man, who was always there to do the right thing, even if he was a little uncultured, and really leans into this identity of being sort of from the cowboy town, even though that is not at all consistent with how he actually grew up. But develops this kind of, like, cool, right? It's funny to say Eisenhower was cool, but in West Point, he definitely develops this sense of cool. And devil may care, big smile, you know, always ready for a good time, that cultivates, I think, a very warm kind of friendship and respect between his classmates who go on to be his contemporaries in the army over the next 30 years. The other thing, though, and this is, I think, underappreciated now just given how different we think about sports, but he also was a star football player in his freshman and sophomore years, and not particularly skilled, right? He wasn't a very, very fast runner, but he was a hardcore player, right? He would just throw himself into the opposing line. And so he was known as a bruiser and started, you know, having a lot of success and gaining quite a reputation for himself as a football player, but then blows out his knee. And at the time in West Point, if you had an injury like that, you could get kicked out, not of West Point, but kicked out of the Army. And so Eisenhower is faced, you know, from a young age with the prospect of really not having a military career left just because of his knee injury. But the one thing he does and the one thing the army sees in him is, you know, once he's literally back on his feet, he can't play football anymore, but he can coach it. And he becomes the assistant coach of the football team and demonstrates a kind of genius for the game, a genius for organizing men on the field that just as a practical matter, the army really appreciated back then because people used to play a lot of very competitive football, was kind of the way softball leagues are maybe today. But that, in turn, is what keeps him in the Army. The army always wants a good football coach, and he basically spends the first 10 years almost of his career as like a star football coach in the Army. But that also gives Eisenhower the first real lessons in leadership. And those lessons in leadership of leading a football team, coaching a football team, end up, I think, shaping his understanding of what it means to lead in battle, to lead an army in ways that far surpass anything he actually learns in the classroom, either at West Point or the Command and General Staff School or anywhere else. It's really at West Point. And in that opportunity to be a football coach, that he learns to really be a leader.
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Brett McKay
In this section about his, his role as army football coach and as a player for the team, you talk about this guy, Ernest Graves, he was an army football coach and, and he wrote this book, Ernest Graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive linemen. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I'm going to go find this Ernest Graves book. And I read it in just like one setting. It was really easy to read. But you're right, there's these leadership lessons that I think Eisenhower probably picked up from Graves on how to lead not only a football team, but a, an army, a military unit.
- [15:38]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, you know, spoiler alert. But one of the most climactic moments in the D Day story, and certainly in my telling of it, is when Eisenhower ultimately has to make the call, based on some very unclear weather predictions, about whether to launch this invasion. And launching this invasion is either going to be the grand success that it became or it's going to be a complete, complete and utter disaster. There is literally a hurricane outside the doors as he's making this decision. And when he finally does, the thing he says is, okay, let's go. And that's his famous sort of send off speech for the D Day invasion. And that exact quote is something Ernest Graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before the men were to go out onto the field. He's like, okay, when it's time to go, the coach needs to take control of the situation and say something like, okay, let's go. And again, whether or not that was sort of in the back of Eisenhower's head, whether or not it was just a coincidence, you know, we'll never really know. But yeah, that sense of, okay, it's my job to lead this team and the way to do it is the same way you would lead a football team, I think is totally correct.
- [16:48]
Brett McKay
So he graduates West Point. 1915, World War I is happening, but he doesn't get sent off there. Instead he gets kind of sent off to different training positions and then he becomes sort of this staff officer, not really on the battle grounds. How did those staff positions prepare him for D Day, you think?
- [17:08]
Michel Paradis
I think they prepared him uniquely well. And it gets to something I was saying a few minutes ago, is that, you know, one of Eisenhower's, I think, most important leadership lessons is the importance of followership. And it's the importance, particularly when you're young, particularly when you're coming up to understand that your job is not to be the smartest person in the room. Your job is to figure out who the smartest person in the room is and make yourself as useful as possible to them. Because in doing that, you know, not only are you going to be much more effective than kind of butting heads with the person who actually knows what they're doing with your own ill conceived ideas, but you're going to learn a lot. Right. If you keep a genuinely open mind and pay attention to what that person is doing and how they're making decisions, you're going to learn a ton from them that you can then use as you rise up the ranks. And so for Eisenhower, you know, one of the ways I, I even thought about telling his story is by telling it through his mentors. And I could rattle them off. But the big ones certainly are people, you know, like Joe Howe, who was that newspaper publisher, Fox Connor, who he spends a long and very formative period with in Panama. But then people like General Mosley, who is probably one of the more suspect figures in history, but who has a big influence on Eisenhower. Same thing with General MacArthur and then obviously General Marshall, and then I would even say Roosevelt and Churchill. Right. As Eisenhower rises up the ranks, there's always someone who's the smarter person in the room, and he gets that. But he makes himself as useful as possible to fulfilling their vision and in the course of doing that, learns their skills, learns how they either command an army, how they manage a team, or how they develop and use political power in ways to get things actually done the way Roosevelt and Churchill did. And so it's by having the humility really to be that staff officer, to be the one who helps the leader execute their plans, that Eisenhower really does grow into an incredibly formidable global political figure in his own right.
- [19:13]
Brett McKay
Yeah. One thing I've taken away from Eisenhower's experience as a staff officer is, yeah, that humility and then also patience with your career. I know Eisenhower lamented, like when World War I was over, he's like, is it my military career is over, it's not going anywhere. Like I've gone as far as I can go and I missed it. I missed my chance. And he didn't know he was about to like embark on the biggest part of his military career and it would happen in his 50s.
- [19:41]
Michel Paradis
Yeah.
- [19:41]
Brett McKay
So, I mean, I think it's a great lesson there if for A young guy or even if you're a guy in your 30s or your 40s, you think, man, I missed the boat. This is as far as. This is as good as it's going to get. Maybe not. You could have a whole big giant book of life ahead of you like Eisenhower had after his staff positions.
- [19:57]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, it's definitely an encouraging, encouraging story to anyone who's still not yet in their mid-50s to see that Eisenhower, you know, starts World War II as a colonel and within a matter of three years he's a five star general and again, one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century to boot. And, and yeah, you know, it wasn't just after World War I. There are a lot of false dusks in Eisenhower's career where he thinks he's just finished, it's all over. I've wasted my best years. This is the end. And each time he's proven wrong because there's a new and often greater challenge just waiting, just, just a little bit further down the line that he ends up having to take, take on.
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Brett McKay
So you mentioned one of Eisenhower's mentors during this staff officer period of his career was Fox Connor. This was when he was in Panama. This is one of my favorite sections of the book because you explore the education that Connor gave Eisenhower. This is where really Eisenhower got his education. He didn't get it at West Point. It was when he was in Panama with this Fox Connor guy. So what did that tutelage look like under Connor? Like what did he tell Eisenhower? What did, what did he assign Eisenhower to read? Tell us about it? Because I thought, I think it's really interesting.
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Michel Paradis
Yeah, yeah. Fox Connor, you know, he started just in the past, I would say 10 years or so, maybe 10, 15 years, started to get more recognition by historians. Part of the reason that he hadn't had more previously is that he ordered all of his papers to be destroyed when he died. So it's actually extremely difficult to do any real research in Fox Connor. But yeah, Fox Connor, you know, he's the son of a Confederate wounded veteran, has an army career, a quite distinguished army career in its own right. He's probably the principal military planner of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, where he comes to know George Patton, George Marshall. Like Fox Connor has a pretty amazing repertoire of connections that obviously matter a lot in Eisenhower's life too. And Eisenhower gets stationed with him in Fort Gaillard, Panama. And this is a backwater in a backwater, I got to be honest with you. And one of the Things that I never was able to fully pin down is why Fox Connor got marooned to command this podunk post in the middle of nowhere. It's not obvious, but one of the things that is suggestive though is that Fox Connor was not an easy person to get along with at all. You know, he had a Mississippian sort of rigidity to his personality. He was extremely serious. He inspired very little loyalty, let alone affection in subordinates who saw him as extremely high handed and brusque. And Eisenhower, frankly is no different. I think when he arrives in Panama, Fox Connor basically makes him every day write out these very complicated orders of the day. What does everyone to do for today and how are they to do it? And there's no point in this exercise, right? The Army's job in Camp Gaillard is basically to make sure the camp doesn't fall into the Panama Canal. And that's it. There's nothing going on there. It's the middle of nowhere. Everyone is bored. Most of the enlisted come from Puerto Rico, so they don't even speak English, which creates even bigger morale problems. Camp Gaillard specifically had a sodomy crisis, as the army called it at the time. And there was all sorts of prostitution and gambling and alcoholism that was just rampant because everyone's bored in the middle of nowhere. And Eisenhower is just enduring this initially as the best he can can M. Eisenhower, his wife is there with him and leaves within a few months to have their son back in Colorado. And so Eisenhower is alone working for this very difficult guy. And ultimately though, Eisenhower, you know, kind of getting to what I was saying before. Eisenhower always understood that it was important to just be as useful as possible to the guy in charge. And he understood that he was a staff officer fundamentally. And so he did that. And he would take just all sorts of abuse from Fox Connor about how he was writing out these orders of the day, which again are complete busy work. But Eisenhower was there doing it. And at one point, Fox Connor invites Eisenhower over to his house. And the thing almost everybody who ever met Fox Connor noted about him is that he had this enormous personal library, thousands of books that he would demand the army transport with him wherever he went. So just crates and crates of books. Books. And Eisenhower had never seen one person own that many books and was impressed. And Connor kind of asks him in a friendly way, do you like to read? Do you like military history? And Eisenhower at this point is making Zoo. He loved military history as a boy, right? He loved Hannibal. But when he got to West Point, it was a Very, very dry, dull military education. He didn't get a thing out of it. And Eisenhower had been stationed in Gettysburg during the First World War. And so Fox Connor reaches over and hands him a handful of books, mostly novels in fact, about the battle of Gettysburg. And he says, here, you might like these. Give these a read. And Eisenhower reads these books, reads them pretty fast, actually, and then brings them back to Connor. And Connor, you know, says, what did you think about him? And then they start having a conversation about it. And so I, Fox Connor gives him some heavier reading, right? Some Memoirs of Gettysburg and some firsthand accounts, getting into the heavier nonfiction. And Eisenhower reads those. And Fox Connor says, you know, what did you think about them? Why do you think Lee did this? And they would go out often all day on horseback through the Panamanian countryside discussing things like the Battle of Gettysburg or discussing the Napoleonic wars or the Battle of Luthen. And quickly Eisenhower comes to appreciate that, that he is being given an incredible education, not just in military history, but in the history of being a general. Because those are the questions Fox Connor puts to him. It's like, why are people making these decisions? What are they seeing? What do they not see? Why are they making this mistake? Why are they guessing right about this question? Some of the books that Connor gives them, though, over the course of these tutorials, are not just military histories, but philosophy, literature, Shakespeare, Nietzsche on War by Carl von Clausewitz, which is essentially a theory of war and the use of military power to achieve political ends. And by the time Eisenhower leaves the Panama three years later, he has, you know, a first class education in how to be a general. And it's with that education to include the writing out of the very dull daily orders, orders of the day, that Eisenhower is essentially picked through. Some of the sort of bureaucratic magic Fox Connor can exercise to go take the Army's course in how to be a general, called the Command and General Staff College. It's a course where you learn the principles of generalship and of staff officership so that you can write out orders. And Eisenhower, just like, you know, when he goes to West Point, is very nervous about his skills, right? Does he have the real background? He'd never served in World War I. He hadn't really served in any serious positions to that point. Nothing like the classmates he'd be encountering at the Commander General Staff College. And Fox Connor basically says to him, look, when you were under me, I had you write an order of the day every single day. You're going to find no sense of Inferiority. When you get to the command in General Staff College and sure enough, when Eisenhower gets there, he works a lot harder than he claims to have, but he's first in his class. And it's from then on that Eisenhower's career just takes off.
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Brett McKay
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- [31:15]
Michel Paradis
Oh, that was a real surprise to me. Right? Almost the last person you think about when you think of Fred Eisenhower is Friedrich Nietzsche. But sure enough, you know, I was able to again, one of the real difficult things that as a research matter, but one of the most satisfying in trying to understand Eisenhower was just figuring out what books he read and then reading them. So like what's in his head and where, where can you see these ideas pop up later, if at all? And you know, when I read the, the copy of Nietzsche that Fox Connor had, almost right away I'm looking at, you know, almost Verbatim things Eisenhower says later. And there are a couple of things that are going on in Nietzsche that at least the Friedrich Nietzsche that Eisenhower reads that are incredibly formative to Eisenhower. One is, you know, what we probably would just call basic stoicism, you know, going back to at least Marcus Aurelius. You know, this idea of manhood being about seeing the world as it is in an unsentimental way, and knowing that the truth is always going to matter much more than any ideology or idea or wish for how the world could be. And that anytime you find yourself, as he often did and would, right, complaining about, oh, things aren't turning out the way I hoped, knowing that, you know, shut up, your feelings don't matter. What matters is what is. And as soon as you can reconcile yourself to that, the better. And so that's a big part of Eisenhower's own philosophy. Just being very objective and really quite hostile to ideology, which I think is one of Eisenhower's most important and laudable traits, whether or not it's Nazi fascism or communism or any of the other sort of, you know, however you sort of say it, sort of ideologies or theories of the day. Like, he's always worried and always thinking fundamentally about brass tacks. Okay, how does this really matter? What's really going on? What's really motivating people? Another big thing in Nietzsche that Eisenhower, like, fully embraces is the virtue of toughness and the manly virtues, so to speak, the willingness to fight for something bigger than yourself as a virtue in and of itself. And then the third thing I think that Eisenhower draws directly out of Nietzsche actually quotes it several times without attributing it, but it's right out of Nietzsche, is this idea that human beings all have a fundamental desire to be free. And that when you motivate that, when you can appeal to that individual desire to be free, people are willing to do anything, to fight and to die for their own freedom. And indeed, one of the biggest quotes he often repeats that again is verbatim out of Nietzsche, is the idea that there is nothing more powerful than a motivated democracy. That democracy fundamentally is all about allowing free people to be free. And if you can harness that energy, that drive towards something greater than themselves, that individual desire to be free, to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, that you have harnessed the most powerful force that human beings can muster.
- [34:15]
Brett McKay
So Eisenhower graduates from the U.S. army Command and General Staff College. He's still confined to sort of administrative positions. He's the aide to General Douglas MacArthur. He serves as the chief of staff of the 3rd Infantry Division. He holds various staff positions in Washington, D.C. he's a colonel. When World War II starts. He, he's never led a battle. He doesn't have that, you know, big personality like a MacArthur or Patton, but he still gets the job of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe over George Marshall, who is also in the running. And there's a whole interesting story there, but from the time he takes that command, he's got less than six months to plan Operation Overlord D Day. What kind of physical and emotional toll did the pressure in planning that invasion taken Eisenhower?
- [35:05]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, it's an incredibly compressed time frame. The, the day by day is just stunning. And, yeah, it has a huge toll. It has to. Eisenhower is basically sick the entire time into varying degrees of severity. Like, his cold basically comes and goes. He smokes like a chimney. He's up to three packs a day by the time the D Day invasion launches. I, I, I did the math on that. That's about 11 to 12 hours of smoking per day. He, he begins to drink too much. He sleeps like three to four hours a day. And he really does bear the weight of it internally in ways that you, you know, it's almost difficult to imagine anyone else being able to endure. You know, he's lonely, he misses his family, he misses his son. There's a moment when he, which I recount in the book because it's just so poignant, when he's asked to essentially give the commencement address at Britain's equivalent of West Point and, you know, gives this very solemn speech about how the weight of the world is on these young men who are going to be literally his subordinates in a matter of weeks. And he writes this letter home that's so meditative and it's quite dark, where he says, you know, I just don't understand this human need to destroy and how so many lives are put to waste and how we haven't learned as a species to do better, to be kinder to each other. And I think the poignancy of that moment came not just in the fact that he's looking at these young men who he is confident he ascending to their deaths at some point, or very well could, but they're his son's age. His son John is actually graduating from West Point, ironically enough, on June 6, 1944. And as he's bestowing awards and shaking their hands, they look and act and are exactly like his own son. And that has to occur to him in terms of just like what is really putting put at risk? What are the costs? What are the dangers that these young men who are going to be crossing that beach, what are they confronting and why are they doing it? And he's the one there sending them off. Right. It's his responsibility ultimately, and he, he owns that. And the pressure is insane.
- [37:16]
Brett McKay
So besides smoking and drinking a lot, another thing that helped Eisenhower deal with the pressure of the battle front was spending time with what he called his official family. And this was like his tight inner circle of individuals he was close to. It included Case Summersby, his driver there was his personal naval aid, Harry Butcher, his secretary, Matty Pinette. What role did Eisenhower's official family play in kind of boosting up his morale during this period?
- [37:44]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, yeah, I don't want to overstate. He's not a drunk, to be clear. You know, he basically spends. No, but he spends his nights. You know, he, Eisenhower is very disciplined about organizing his time. It's actually one of the more like, interesting and I think prescient leadership traits that he has is that he knows that like a big part of his job is just making so many decisions day after day, a high consequence, low consequence, just one after the other. And to do that effectively, to make the best decision he can, regardless of how it turns out, he has to keep himself healthy, both physically and mentally as much as he possibly can. And so he's very disciplined ultimately about budgeting out his time. Right. This is an era before smartphones. And so when he goes home basically to the official family, he basically is disciplined from about seven or eight o'clock at night when he can, about turning off the office and playing bridge and, you know, watching movies together and chatting and reciting poetry. It's a really, I think, important opportunity. He has to just like be as human as possible under the circumstances. And this official family is, you know, both his literal aides, right. There are secretaries and drivers and things like that. But I think they're just also the people that he can relax with. These are the people who are not gunning for him. They're not trying to get anything from him. They're not trying to use or manipulate him for their own ends. These are just the people he can trust day in and day out. And he knows he needs that retreat and he needs to take advantage of that retreat and not just constantly be working because otherwise he'll collapse, he'll burn out and he won't be able to make this hard decisions that he has to make.
- [39:16]
Brett McKay
I think it's a Great lesson for even if you're not the supreme ally commander, take your rest time seriously. You got to make time for it. If Eisenhower could have done it during Overlord, you can do it when you've got your 9 to 5 job. Like, you're okay.
- [39:29]
Michel Paradis
That's right. Turn your phone off. Yeah. Hang out with your kids. Have. Have a meal without looking at your phone.
- [39:35]
Brett McKay
Yeah. So you mentioned there's a lot of internal struggles that Eisenhower had. You know, he knew the impact his decisions were going to have. He was going to send lots of young men to their death. I mean, how did he do that and think about the human consequences while not letting it paralyze him? Because I think that'd be really hard. I mean, if I were in that position, I would think, oh, my gosh, I can't even make a decision. I would just freeze. What do you think Eisenhower did to overcome that while maintaining his humanity at the same time?
- [40:05]
Michel Paradis
I think actually the key thing was that he maintained his humanity. You know, we talked a bit about Nietzsche, and this is sort of a Nietzschean idea, or a stoic idea at least, but I think it also comes right out of Nietzsche, is that he never. He never looked away from the consequences of his own decisions. Like he fully embraced them, if only as a corrective to make sure he was making the right decision. And being able to hold those things in his head at the same time, I think was a key part certainly of his ability to lead in crisis and some of the hard decisions he made. And I'll give you just one example of it that almost brings me to tears every time I think about it, is the night before D day launches. He goes around and sees off the 101st Airborne. And there's, you know, probably the most famous picture of Eisenhower addressing these young men who are all painted up and getting ready to jump out of these planes over France. And he had been given an estimate just before that. About half of these guys are going to be lost, like, half. And, you know, he's sending thousands of these young men across the English Channel. So he goes and he goes to see them off, and there's no fanfare, right. This is not a review. He literally just has K drive up as quietly as possible, gets out, and just starts mingling between them and shaking their hands and talking to them. And again, there's this very famous photograph where his hand is forward and he looks like he's very sternly telling them, you know, some sort of great rallying cry to get them over the beaches. And with a little bit of tracking down, we're able to find the. The actual story behind that photo. And the guy he's talking to, he's talking to him about fishing. Because he would just go up to these guys and be like, what do you like to do? Where are you from? What was your job? What's your hobbies? Anyone from Kansas? And this guy said he likes fishing. And Eisenhower is an adamant fisher himself and a fly fisherman on top of that. And he's like, so when you throw a rod, this is how I throw it. And he's demonstrating the throwing of his rod, and the photographer just sort of happened to catch the moment in this way that has this very sort of commanding overtone to it. But what's really going on there is he's just treating that young man like a human being, like his son, like himself. And when he goes around and meets these young men and shakes their hands, he forces himself to look each one of them in the eye when he does it and think about that. Each hand he shakes, he knows that basically every other one is going to die, right? Every other one is some kid who is either his son's age or younger, who's just not going to go home again, who's not going to see his own father again. And Eisenhower made himself do that, not only, I think, to be there for them and to let them know that he saw them and saw them not as soldiers to be sent across the border, but as young men who he cared about, who had their own lives and dreams and interests, but to remind himself of that, too. And when he finishes, he just collapses into the back of his car and just said, well, no one can stop it now. And that's how he ends June 5, 1944. But I also think that's how he does it, because he doesn't numb himself to the costs of what he's doing. He understands it. He internalizes it and owns it. And so that when he has a hard decision to make, such as sending them over there, knowing how many of them are unlikely to ever come home again, he's able to do it because he's weighed the cost, the benefits in a real way that he owns. It's as much about responsibility and owning responsibility as it is, you know, just making the best decision you can.
- [43:37]
Brett McKay
Yeah, I mean, the idea of owning responsibility. Eisenhower famously wrote two memos before D Day happened. And one of them was, if it was a failure, it's like, if this mission failed, I take full responsibility for it, but didn't have to publish that one. But he kept letting me know that. Yeah, he kept it. Yeah. So, okay, this is June 5th. He sent off the men personally. How did he spend the night before the invasion? In the morning, what was he doing?
- [44:04]
Michel Paradis
Smoking. He basically. He stayed up the entire night, best as we could tell, smoking and reading westerns. He was an adamant western reader. He had his guilty pleasures as we all do, and he was very emphatic that he got to enjoy them. And so really from about 2 in the morning when he gets back to base camp to about 7, 7:30 when he finally sort of gets up and meets the day, he's just sitting on his bed, laying in bed, reading westerns and smoking cigarettes and just waiting for the news to come in. Yeah, yeah.
- [44:35]
Brett McKay
You talk about the western he read with. Black John is the name of the story.
- [44:39]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, the czar of Half a Day Creek. Eisenhower really liked good shoot em up westerns. Those were his favorite. Tsar of have Day Creek is not one of those. It has like a sort of more humorous vein to it and there's not a lot of shooting. But it really was apt. It really kind of met the moment very well because it's all about this guy, the czar of Half Day Creek. His name is Black John Smith, who is the kind of the doer in the small camping town in Alaska where he. Or in Yukon country, I think it is actually where he's. He's always up to. He's always up to something, but he's keeping everyone just everything in line. Everyone kind of thinks he's this old hillbilly, but he actually is the guy who's always got the plan is one step ahead. So it was a very apt book for Eisenhower to be reading on D day.
- [45:21]
Brett McKay
Another lesson there from Eisenhower. Don't feel bad about just indulging in a guilty pleasure when you're going through a stressful period. Like he read westerns, it's okay if you want to, I don't know, watch a crappy movie on Netflix. That's okay. As long as it kind of just takes the edge off, that's fine.
- [45:37]
Michel Paradis
No, that's entirely true because one of the things that I found super interesting about Eisenhower, which you don't see on the surface at all, but it's very true, is that he, he thought a lot about how he thought and he understood that, you know, if he was tired, if he was exhausted, if he was overwhelmed, that he was going to make bad decisions and bad decisions didn't mean that those decisions would not turn out the right way. He understood that there was always risk, just like any poker player would. But he wanted to make sure he was always making the best decision available to him based on the information available to him. And so doing things like making time for guilty pleasures, making time for friends, not beating up on yourself too much about your own vices, right, everyone's telling him he's got to stop smoking, otherwise his cold will never get better. And he's like, yeah, yeah, I get it. But he understands that he only has so much energy, only so much sort of self discipline and focus that he can direct. And so prioritizing what you're paying attention to, what you're really investing your emotional and mental energy in, is honestly just as important as any one decision you make. Because your ability to make those decisions is going to be entirely contingent on how focused you are, how clear minded you are, and your ability to just take everything in and decide. And so, yeah, just giving yourself your guilty pleasures and focusing on the things that matter and figuring out what matters is just as important as any one thing that you do.
- [47:03]
Brett McKay
Yeah, that idea that Eisenhower thought about his thinking and he was kind of this master self psychologist. Another thing that I remember reading about him that he did, he, he had an anger drawer. So Eisenhower, he had a temper and he struggled with it his entire life. But he had this tactic whenever someone would piss him off and he wanted just like light him up. What he did instead is he wrote this letter out that you know exactly what he wanted to say, no filter. And then he just put it in this drawer and kind of, it cooled off and he's like, okay, I got it out my system. Now I can approach this with the cool head.
- [47:39]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, no, it, it's as you say, he was his own psychologist because there was no one else around he could trust for that role really, other than maybe K. Summersby or Harry Butcher. And yeah, so he would do those sorts of things. Or if he just was like feeling overwhelmed, just same thing, he was feeling overwhelmed and he was like, if he was having trouble focusing on any one thing, he would sit down and literally just write himself a memoir of all the things he had to think about one after the other and putting down a couple thoughts about each one, just again, put it out on the page, get it out of his body and into something tangible so that he could focus on it more clearly. He's just full of all of these very like specific just habits and techniques for making him like a much better thinker and leader than he Otherwise would.
- [48:23]
Brett McKay
Have been so something that, you know, Eisenhower is known for is his political ability. He was able to manage these big egos. Montgomery, Patton, Marshall, Churchill. De Gaulle did it deftly. I don't think any other person could have done that. But the other thing that impressed me about Eisenhower was his grasp of public relations. Like he knew how to manage the media.
- [48:45]
Michel Paradis
Yeah.
- [48:46]
Brett McKay
How would you describe his approach? I think this is, like, underappreciated about eisenhower.
- [48:50]
Michel Paradis
Oh, yeah, 100. I agree. I think it's totally underappreciated. He got in a very, like, sophisticated way that, like, media had changed a lot and had changed politics a lot by the 1940s. And he understood that there were really two things that he needed to do to be an effective manager of his public Persona, which in turn would give him a much freer hand in dealing with difficult political issues. And one was, you got to be friends with the press. And he made sure that, you know, when he was playing bridge and smoking and drinking, that reporters were always with him just to kind of hang out, you know, with a few exceptions as guys. And having that kind of intimate sort of friendship level relationship with reporters enabled him to know what was going on, what they were going to print and publish before they did. And also gave him opportunities to what we would now call shape the narrative before things hit the press. And that helped him on several occasions, not the least being with people like George Patton. But the other thing, though, and this was so. I mean, it's part of who he is, but it's so prescient that it demands to be remarked upon, is he also understood that as the media was becoming more intimate and celebrity driven, where you had these personalities who were not just on the radio or in newspapers, but actually on film and could be seen that there was a huge value in being seen as ordinary. And I'm not saying he put that on. This is, in a way, who he is. These are his Kansas instincts coming out. But he leaned really hard into it in a way that was certainly designed to conceal the sophistication of his own thinking. In most situations where he understood that being kind of folksy and having this like, oh, I just like going out and fishing and being very seen as not grasping for power in an environment where most politicians, to include Roosevelt, and Roosevelt being the only sort of a marginal exception to this, were still seen as these very, like, stern, statuesque figures, was its own kind of political power. It's where we get the idea of. I like Ike, the idea that a politician should not be only a leader, but likable, more or less draws directly from Eisenhower. And I know this, this again, almost seems too obvious to say now, but it's difficult to. To overstate how revolutionary it was for a general like a major, powerful general to be known broadly in the public for smiling. A smiling general. There's almost nothing more incongruous than that, if you really think about it. And Eisenhower fully leaned into that and had a kind of folksy celebrity that obviously becomes his trademark. And I think in the environment that he's in, particularly with people like de Gaulle, with people like Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt, is crucial to his ability to wield power because none of them understand that yet none of them understand the importance of likability in the media as a kind of political power. And so everyone around Eisenhower just underestimates him all of the time as just being sort of like a smiling nice guy, because they're obviously very much still in the marble statue mold. And Eisenhower both, I think, understands that and uses that to such great effect that now it's actually difficult to think about a politician who doesn't smile all the time, right? Who, where it's not this sort of like, happy, I'm a nice guy. I'm just like you. Whether or not it's, you know, George W. Bush on his ranch and Crawford clearing brush, or Donald Trump, you know, eating a taco bowl, or Barack Obama smiling big and throwing baskets, right? All of our politicians now, we want them in a quote unquote, to be just like us. And Eisenhower kind of sets that mold and sees that that's where society is going way earlier than anybody else does.
- [52:48]
Brett McKay
So after researching and writing about Eisenhower, what's something that stuck with you the most about his life or his leadership?
- [52:57]
Michel Paradis
I think for me, the, you know, in addition to it giving hope to 40 year olds everywhere, that life is not yet over. I think the most, you know, both inspiring and cautionary aspects of Eisenhower's life to me are that he really did come from nowhere to achieve the absolute greatest heights of political power in the 20th century. Like, he, through a combination of, I think, intelligence, luck and ruthlessness, pulled himself up to that height to great, I think, benefit to not only the United States, but to the world. And so the both encouraging but cautionary things that I always think about when I think of Eisenhower is encouraging is that, you know, talent is everywhere. Talent can come from the middle of nowhere, from someone you'd never expect, where it wouldn't even be recognized by most people. You know, until well into their 30s or 40s or even 50s. And the cautionary piece of that that I worry about sometimes is do we still live in that America, right? Do we still live in a society where talent can rise because we have more people than ever? We have more opportunity for more people than ever as well, and fewer barriers based on old lines, whether or not it's gender or race. But do we still have a society that allows the very best to rise? And I don't know the answer to that. I worry about that sometimes because all of the opportunities Eisenhower had have become much more difficult and much stricter and much more tied up in tradition or bureaucracy or sort of other kinds of red tape that I worry we, you know, we, we may not be getting the talent that we have at our disposal to have the kind of leaders that we possibly could have.
- [54:35]
Brett McKay
Well, Michelle, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
- [54:39]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, the book is available anywhere fine books are sold. The Light of Battle. It makes a great gift in time for Father's Day. I'll plug that. And yeah, feel free to always reach out. I'm very easy to find. And so if you had any questions or ideas or thoughts about the book, good, bad or ugly, feel free to email me. I try to respond as quickly as I can.
- [54:56]
Brett McKay
Fantastic. Well, Michelle Paradis, thanks for having it's been a pleasure.
- [54:59]
Michel Paradis
Thank you. It was a lot of fun.
- [55:01]
Brett McKay
My guest name is Michel Paradis. He's the author of the book the Light of Battle. It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can check out our show notes at AOM is supremecommander, where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
- [55:13]
Michel Paradis
Foreign.
- [55:21]
Brett McKay
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website@artofmans.com where you find our podcast archives. And make sure to check out our new newsletter. It's called Dying Breed. You can sign up@dyingbreed.net It's a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until Next Time's Brett McKay remind town. Listen when podcast, but put what you've heard into action.