General Eisenhower: Ideology and Discourse (review)

For people recalling Dwight Eisenhower's 1952 and 1956 campaigns and presidency, this book may be somewhat surprising if not distressingly disconcerting. Substantial scholarship examines Eisenhower's World War II roles as ETO (European Theater of Operations) commander as well as architect of D-Day and the defeat of Nazi Germany; other efforts explore Ike's presidency; and several communication studies scholars explicate rhetorical dynamics of his presidential speeches specifically. Ira Chernus, a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, has written a book whose focal point differs.

After chapter 1 about Eisenhower's wartime ETO role, Chernus focuses upon his sequentially subsequent roles before becoming president: overseer of the occupation of Germany, army chief of staff, president of Columbia University, supreme commander of Allied Powers in Europe, and ultimately presidential candidate. Covering 1941 to 1952, Chernus traces Ike's developing ideology, "fundamental beliefs" that were less the result of "empirical observation" of the world about him and more a "lens through which he made all of his empirical observations" (1, 4).

For an MSU Press series in rhetoric and public affairs, Chernus begins, accordingly, with brief but almost dutiful deference to works by well-known communication studies scholars who have examined Ike's presidential discourse. Then Chernus advances a central thesis: Eisenhower is essentially an "alarmist," a role Ike himself acknowledged in a 1942 letter about taking "a certain amount of smug and mean satisfaction in recalling the name of 'Alarmist Ike' that some of the boys tried to fasten on me almost two years ago" (29).

Are alarmists easily ideological; are ideologists inevitably alarmist? An answer, found in 305 pages of text, is that "alarmist" Ike's discourse offered a "balance . . . between fear and hope," for "he could not speak of one without speaking of the other." Accordingly, his "middle way" never could be defined "with any precision," for "the task was impossible." Nevertheless, he characteristically used this "absolute dualism in public to mask the rather different absolute dualisms of his private discourse." Ike's ideology entrapped him "between genuine global harmony and containment, between stable order and chaos, between hope and fear"; and the resultant "masking" of his alarmist ideology led to Ike's discourse moving America in a "dangerous direction" (302).

Eisenhower's "alarmist" persona is not the one of collective memory, nurtured by a notable campaign photograph of him with an engaging grin and campaign advertising machinations by Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn that promoted an image of an avuncular if not paternalistic presidential candidate. Chernus delved deeply into Ike's personal correspondence to family members such as his brother Edgar and son John. Equally significant are Ike's letters over the years to military peers and close friends of long standing. This archival evidence undergirds a convincing characterization, for Chernus mines a rich repository of significant primary source material about the future president.

For students of communications studies, the most revealing chapter of this book may be about Eisenhower's speeches while president of Columbia University—and Ike's personal commentary in correspondence about what he tried to achieve rhetorically and how his goals would be achieved. Chernus finds evidence—in Ike's own words—that the future president indeed was "alarmist." While fundraising for a Columbia "Institute of War and Peace Studies," Ike believed that "prevention of war seemed to take a distinctly second place to the winning of the next war" by achieving "victory expeditiously, surely and economically" (206-7). Moreover, Ike's private letters then were "marked by a powerful tone of fear for the future of the nation and the world." Accordingly, his alarmist propensity required articulating "his fears by painting frightening pictures of apocalyptic threat" that simultaneously would "avoid precise language that might reveal the contradiction among the various traditions" that comprised his evolving ideological stance when campaigning for the presidency (226-29). Drawing upon those letters and speeches, Chernus advances a convincing characterization of the future president whose "middle way" revealed...