Which Ike to like?
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In World War II, he tamed America's allies and conquered its adversaries. As a conservative college president, he defended liberal professors caught in a virulent red scare. As NATO commander, he projected strength without projecting force. In the White House, he presided over the sort of peace and prosperity that today's presidential candidates can't plausibly promise.
Now, Dwight David Eisenhower, seldom the center of contention, is at the nexus of a controversy that raises vital questions about the character of capital memorials, the nature of historical remembrance and the relationship between a national figure's origins and destiny.
All because the design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington includes a statue of him as a barefoot boy from Kansas.
Nobody contests that Eisenhower rose from humble Abilene at a time when its unpaved streets retained a whiff of the Chisholm Trail cow drives, though the saloons and dance halls were sufficiently in the past to allow the town of 3,500 to employ only one police officer. Eisenhower seldom thought of himself as a barefoot boy, perhaps because there actually was, in Ike's time, a Republican known as the barefoot boy. He was Wendell Willkie, the GOP's 1940 presidential nominee from Wall Street by way of Elwood, Ind.
Though the Eisenhowers spent White House evenings in front of tray tables watching Westerns on television, the truth is that the president was shaped more by West Point than by the town that made Wild Bill Hickok famous. Even so, part of the Eisenhower elan was his irresistible mix of the common and the uncommon, so much so that Stephen E. Ambrose opened his two-volume Eisenhower biography this way in 1983:
"His heritage was ordinary, his parents were humble folk, his childhood was typical of thousands of other youngsters growing up around the turn of the century, and most of his career was humdrum and unrewarded. On the surface, everything about him appeared to be average."
This may be why the barefoot-boy image has resonance in some quarters, including among art professionals weary of the sterile style of Washington monuments, particularly the World War II memorial, whose granite pillars and bas-relief panels are a special target of criticism.
First Published February 12, 2012 12:00 am
