Soldier of Democracy BOOKS BY KENNETH S. DAVIS SOLDIER OF DEMOCRACY A Biography of Dwight Eisenhower IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT Soldier of Democracy A BIOGRAPHY OF DWIGHT EISENHOWER BY Kenneth S. Davis DOUBLEDAY, DORAN COMPANY, INC. Garden Ctiy New York 1945 For Lydia E. Davis and Charles D. Davis my mother and father Authors Mote A NY WRITER undertaking the biography of a living man finds himself at once face to face with insoluble problems. He must pro ceed without benefit of the perspective which time alone can give. He is without access to the abundant documentary evidence which will be available to future historians. There is grave danger that the conclusions he draws from present facts will be falsified by later events. It is even possible, if unlikely, that the essential character of his subject will change as history proceeds I am only too aware that this cannot, in the nature of things., be a definitive biography. Only that which is static can be sharply defined no life is static until it is ended and D wight Eisenhower, at present writing, is intensely alive All that I can do is draw as accurately as possible a portrait of a man in motion, the outlines of whose figure, the very shape of whose character are necessarily blurred somewhat by that motion. Much of the material for this portrait was gathered, and some of the book itself was actually written, several months before I met General Eisenhower. I saw the man at first in somewhat the same way as a future historian might see him for a thousand leagues have nearly the same effect with a thousand years, as Benjamin Franklin wrote to George Washington from France on a March day in 1780. Distance, whether in space or time, serves as a filter through which come only the more salient and lasting features of a personality. Faced with this problem of distance, I necessarily began by seeking out the shadows of the man, the traces of him left on the minds of those who had known him in the past. I sought to reconstruct the living man out of a mass of details which I gathered about him, proceeding with that antlike industry employed by fiction writers of the naturalist school, I had to conceive vfi AUTHORS NOTE character from the outside in, drawing on the objective rather than the subjective. Later, when I lived for several weeks at General Eisenhowers personal headquarters, this objective conception of his character was corrected and supplemented by subjective impressions of his personality. I was enabled to observe my subject from two points of view, and in fusing the two images thus obtained I hope I have given the completed portrait a certain stereoscopic I depth and solidity. A few people who read the present work in manuscript were fear ful that, in the opening sections, too much emphasis was being placed on the early history and general character of the Eisenhower family. Later, after they had read the book as a whole, they con cluded that the early material was not only interesting in itself but essential to an understanding of Dwight Eisenhowers character. The family, as the book makes clear, is remarkably close-knit. Its members, however separated from one another by spatial distance, still think of themselves as a family, deriving much of their individual characters from their family relationship. And this is particularly true of Dwight Eisenhower, whose devotion to the family is both the cause andthe explanation of much that is distinctive in him. Far more than most men, he is explicable in terms of influences which operated on him during his earliest years. Hence the history of those influences is not a prelude to his story but an integral part of it. K. S. D. v Contents AUTHORS NOTE ........... vii BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION ... ..... I BOOK ONE PORTRAIT OF A FAMILY I JOURNEY TO A FAR COUNTRY, ...... 7 II DAVID EISENHOWER TAKES A WIFE ...... 22 III FLIGHT AND RETURN .......... 34 iv THE FAMILY A SOCIETY IN MINIATURE .......
