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1 Introduction One pitfall in writing a biography is the risk of becoming too immersed in the topic. You spend so much time with the historic figure you begin to feel like you know the person and those in his or her circle. This project has consumed me—with varying degrees of intensity—since 1982. I first encountered Beetle Smith when acting as Merle Miller’s researcher for his biography of Dwight Eisenhower, Ike the Soldier: As They Knew Him. Smith’s career as Eisenhower’s chief of staff became the subject of my dissertation; then I worked the dissertation into a book, published by Greenwood in 1991. As a first book, it was not without some merit—it received some solid reviews and commendation by Choice—but its publication left me with no sense of closure. Blame it on a callow academic too eager to publish his first book, but I fell victim to the temptation of uncritically accepting received wisdom—in this case, the “good cop” (Eisenhower)–“bad cop” (Smith) school. Basically, I took the easy way out and followed a well-worn path, merely inserting Smith into the story. During my first month as a PhD student at Kansas State, my mentor, Professor Robin Higham, invited D. Clayton James, then a scholar in residence at the Command and General Staff College, to present a talk on his experiences writing the biography of Douglas MacArthur. “Some days I wake up and think MacArthur was the greatest general who ever lived,” he recounted. “Others, I concluded he was the biggest SOB who ever lived.” With Smith, it proved all too easy to accept his reputation as a one-dimensional SOB, because that was precisely the persona he labored so hard to project. But his friend Hastings Ismay knew better, noting that Smith “was never the terrible Beetle in [Harry C.] Butcher’s book” My Three Years with Eisenhower, based on the household and headquarters diaries of Eisenhower’s naval aide and confidant. The truth is I did not know Smith very well in 1991, and my first book did him an injustice—albeit completely unintended. As it turned out, there were several facets to Beetle Smith. He was much more than advertised, and his boss, Eisenhower, considerably less. 2  BEETLE This book’s structure is unorthodox. Instead of following a chronological format, I begin with a section on Smith’s postwar career serving two presidents: as ambassador to the Soviet Union and director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Truman, and as undersecretary of state and government adviser in the Eisenhower administration. Smith’s contributions as ambassador in Moscow when American-Soviet relations entered the deep freeze, as founding father of the CIA, and as number two to John Foster Dulles, especially the parts he played in the Iranian and Guatemalan coups and the Indochina portion of the Geneva conference of 1954, are themselves worthy of serious interest. Essentially, this work is a military biography, and for that reason, I resorted to the device of front-loading Smith’s postwar career. Whether this works must be left to the reader’s judgment. Aside from providing an account of Smith’s remarkable career and his contributions to the Allied victory in Europe as Eisenhower’s chief of staff, this volume has two other objectives. American military biographers tend to shy away from controversial topics; reflecting public tastes, they prefer to cast their subjects in bronze. Political scientists and political historians have engaged in a healthy discourse on Eisenhower and his leadership style virtually since his inaugural, but nothing similar exists in the military history literature. Biographies of Eisenhower still constitute something of a cottage industry. The title of the latest, Michael Korda’s Ike: An American Hero, perfectly sums up the popular view: Eisenhower as American Everyman, the poor boy who grew up to be president after first liberating Europe from the scourge of fascism. Even the best of them, Carlo D’Este’s Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life, portrays Eisenhower warts and all, but it still leaves the reader with the image of Ike as Frank Merriwell, the all-American boy. There is a good reason for this: Eisenhower personified a whole array of cherished American ideals . Another reason is that Eisenhower remains an elusive subject. Eisenhower’s detractors—both during the war and after—portray him as a mere chairman of the Allied corporate board, who, though binding the alliance together and achieving victory in Europe, never wielded...

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