Ike's Spies Read Online Free

spent more than enough time with each President to have a genuine insider’s perspective and understanding of how the presidency worked. Second, he knew the armed forces and their ways of doing things, their capabilities and limitations, their personnel, their prejudices, and their traditions.
    He also knew Congress and its peculiar ways of operating, so frustrating to outsiders. Ike knew about Congress as a result of having served MacArthur, in the thirties, as the Army’s chief liaison officer with Congress. Further, his brother Milton was the number two man in the Department of Agriculture during the New Deal, and he shared his experiences with Ike four or five nights a week. Being at the center of one of the New Deal’s most active agencies, and being a sharp observer of the congressional scene, Milton was able to give his brother a priceless education merely by recounting his day. Finally, as Army Chief of Staff after the war, Ike had his own experiences with the inner workings of Congress. For all these reasons he also knew the federal bureaucracy and its standard operating procedures.
    Another asset was his firsthand knowledge of clandestine operations, of what they could and could not accomplish, how to setthem up, how to control them, how to direct these covert actions so that they reinforced policy, how to tie them into a broader program of national action. He was up to date, too, on the state of the art in electronic intelligence gathering, air reconnaissance, cameras, and other devices used in scientific spying. He knew the British Secret Service’s operation almost as well as Churchill or Menzies. He knew the right questions to ask of the spies, and how to ask them.
    A further source of Eisenhower’s strength was his tremendous popularity with the American people. His big grin, his open manner with reporters, his obvious sincerity, his speaking ability (he was a big hit with small groups of influential men, as well as with large audiences; many Britishers, including Churchill, rated Ike’s 1945 Guildhall speech as one of the best they had ever heard), and his image as the leader of the crusade against Hitler all combined to make him trustworthy. Montgomery put it best: Ike, Monty said, “has but to smile at you, and you trust him at once.” 1 Even those who never met or saw the man felt that way, believed that they could trust Ike.
    Crusade in Europe
, his war memoir published in 1948, added to his stature, prestige, and popularity. Often described as the second-best set of memoirs from an American professional soldier—pride of place goes to Ulysses Grant—Ike’s book was an immediate best seller. It was Ike at his best—his common sense, his ability to communicate with different types at different levels, his decisiveness, his leadership capability, his outstanding generalship, his openness to new ideas, new techniques, new methods, all came through in nearly every chapter.
    Small wonder, then, that both the Democrats and the Republicans were anxious to nominate him for the presidency in 1948. He turned them both down, partly because he thought he had done enough for his country, mainly because of Pershing’s example after World War I. Pershing was one of Ike’s few heroes, and he agreed with Pershing that soldiers ought not involve themselves in politics.
    But, like most men, Ike was susceptible to flattery. Republicans began to tell him that if he did not run in 1952, as a Republican, it would be the end of the two-party system in America. It was, they said, his duty to his country to run.
    The key word was “duty.” The Republicans recognized, early on, that Ike, like George Marshall, could not resist that word (Truman had twice persuaded Marshall to give up his retirementby citing his “duty”). One of the Republicans to approach Eisenhower was the defeated 1948 candidate, Thomas Dewey. On July 7, 1949, Ike recorded in his diary,