'Ike: An American Hero' by Michael Korda
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Competence and practical intelligence are strikingly absent from our public life these days, so it's not surprising that Dwight D. Eisenhower's career and reputation are coming in for a well-deserved reappraisal.
By Michael Korda
HarperCollins ($34.95)
At 74, Michael Korda, who probably has edited and written enough best sellers to fill a troop transport, retains the sense of timing that made his 37-year tenure as Simon & Schuster's editor-in-chief so remarkable.
Still, although he has positioned himself squarely in what may well be a new Eisenhower moment, Korda's sprawling new book is more likely to whet than satisfy the reasonably serious appetite.
In part, this stems from the author's mainly synoptic method. His extensive notes indicate infrequent recourse to original or archival material and an essential reliance on previously published material, including memoirs by Eisenhower and biographies by reliable popular historians including Stephen Ambrose, William Manchester and Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Reservations about "Ike" also have to do with Korda's own authorial tics, including a disconcerting repetition of phrases such as, "Mamie must have thought ..." or "Ike had to feel ..."
Clearly, as an author seriously attempting to reconstruct the personalities of fascinatingly complex individuals now dead, Korda faced a formidable challenge. It is, however, this reader's experience that few impulses are as perilously unreliable as the tendency to project a logical inevitability onto the thoughts and feelings of others.
It also should be noted that fewer than 100 of nearly 800 pages are devoted to Eisenhower's eight-year presidency, which is a pity, because those two terms might be the part of his distinguished career most worthy of reconsideration.
His firm but judicious prosecution of the Cold War, his refusal to commit American troops to either Southeast Asia or the Middle East and his reservations about the growing influence of both the "military industrial complex" -- a phrase he coined -- and the intelligence agencies are matters that seem urgently relevant today.
Korda's biography, then, is basically the story of Eisenhower's rise from son of Mennonite (which is to say pacifist) Kansas farmers to Supreme Commander of the triumphant Allied forces in Europe. It's an epic life, and Korda handles it with great verve and skill. In fact, it does his intelligently conversational style no disservice to call "Ike" entertaining -- which it is, even when it frustrates.
First Published August 10, 2007 2:12 pm
