Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990 TAG: 9005130290
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY DAVID LAUTER LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Long
"The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7, 1945."
That telegram announcing the surrender of Nazi Germany's armed forces marked the opening of a new era which, as liberating general, founding commander of NATO and president, Eisenhower did more than any other American to shape.
Today, in the year of the 100th anniversary of Eisenhower's birth, the era that he helped to create is ending. And for the Bush administration and the leaders of Europe who are trying to refashion the European map, his legacy shapes both the issues they confront and the options from which they may choose.
When the "two-plus-four" talks among the leaders of Germany and the four victorious wartime Allies opened in Bonn, West Germany, last weekend, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl pinned an "I Like Ike" button to Secretary of State James A. Baker's lapel, reminding those present that it was Eisenhower who insisted that the United States not accept the division of Germany as permanent.
"History has proven Eisenhower right," said Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti on Monday at Italy's ceremonies in Rome to commemorate Eisenhower.
Curiously, history - the three decades of history since he left the White House - also has caused Eisenhower's reputation among the American public to fade, Princeton professor and Eisenhower biographer Frederick I. Greenstein said in a recent interview.
"Even for those for whom the '50s were a formative period," Eisenhower did not provide the sort of "charismatic presence" offered by Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy, Greenstein said.
In Europe, by contrast, Eisenhower remains "the symbol of the struggle against Nazism and facism . . . the victorious end of the war and the growing closer of American to Europe," Nilde Iotti, president of Italy's Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Italian Parliament, said at Monday's Eisenhower celebration in Rome.
It is a measure of the breadth of Eisenhower's appeal that the audience at the ceremony, including former officials from Eisenhower's administration and members of his family, heard praise for the former president both from Iotti, a leader of her country's Communist Party, and from Vice President Dan Quayle, who represented the United States at Eisenhower commemorations in Europe.
Across the world, the current year will be marked by Eisenhower celebrations, many coordinated by the non-profit Washington-based Eisenhower Centennial Foundation. The Soviets are planning a conference on the lessons of the Cold War. The French, Belgians and Germans plan ceremonies. The Pentagon, along with British officials, will re-enact the D-day invasion of Normandy on the invasion's anniversary, June 6. Japan will host a golf tournament.
Within the Bush administration, too, Eisenhower's memory is very much alive. Bush now presides over the end of many of the processes that Eisenhower set in motion. And on several occasions he has said that he takes Eisenhower as a model.
At one point, that notion might have seemed ridiculous. When Eisenhower left office, historians and political scientists held him in low esteem, reflecting the general public impression that the former general had been a passive president who had delegated most of the work of government to his staff and Cabinet members, particularly his aggressively conservative Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
But as Eisenhower's papers have become available to scholars, that judgment has changed radically, biographer Greenstein said. The papers show Eisenhower to have been a "hands-on" chief executive who carefully manipulated the levers of power, often without the knowledge even of key aides.
Chief of staff Sherman Adams, for example, asserted after Eisenhower's tenure that his former boss disliked dealing with Congress and seldom called powerful figures on Capitol Hill. "He probably died believing that was true," said Eisenhower biographer Stepen E. Ambrose, a professor at the University of New Orleans.
In fact, the Eisenhower papers have shown scholars just the opposite, Ambrose said.
The result has been that historians now frequently rank Eisenhower as among the most effective presidents ever.
Whether Bush will achieve similar effectiveness remains to be seen, but some similarities between the two presidents exist. Some are at a surface level:
Both men were elected president relatively late in life - Eisenhower at 62, Bush at 64 - after long careers in public service. Both picked abrasive former governors of New Hampshire, Adams and John H. Sununu respectively, to run their White House staffs. Both learned to employ a fractured English syntax to hide answers to questions they prefered to avoid.
More substantively, there is a common world view, notes William Rogers, who served Eisenhower as a political aide and deputy attorney general before becoming secretary of state in the Nixon administration.
Bush, like Eisenhower, is a conservative, but one with few ideological passions. And although Bush served as President Reagan's vice president for eight years, now that he is in office, his foreign policy harkens back to the northeastern internationalist wing of the Republican Party - Eisenhower's wing as well as that of Bush's father, Sen. Prescott Bush - rather than the Sunbelt conservative wing Reagan epitomized.
In addition, the careers of both Bush and Eisenhower demonstrate a strong desire to straddle issues that others consider matters of principle. Bush, for example, has several times changed his stand on abortion. Eisenhower drew widespread criticism for his failure as president to take an unambiguous stand on civil rights for blacks.
And Bush, like Eisenhower, displays a deep-seated caution, often using similar phrases to explain why.
Bush, for example, has frequently quoted baseball manager Yogi Berra as saying that he does not want to make "the wrong mistakes." Eisenhower often cautioned aides: "Make no mistakes in a hurry."
Eisenhower was the first of America's six World War II veteran presidents. Bush almost certainly will be the last. And the arc of history that connects the two encompasses the central foreign policy issues of half a century.
The division of Germany and of central Europe largely took place along the line where Eisenhower's armies and the Soviet army met. Eisenhower's decision, for example, to allow Soviet troops, rather than Gen. George Patton's Third Army, to drive the Germans from Prague probably set the stage for the Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia that ended only in the last few months.
Eisenhower took that step, and also insisted that the Red Army be allowed to be the first to clamber over the rubble of Berlin, in hopes of preserving good post-war relations with the Soviets.
Later, as Soviet-American relations deteriorated into the Cold War, he became the first commander of the newly formed NATO alliance and reintroduced American troops to bases from which they are only now being withdrawn. And it was in his presidency that NATO adopted the strategy of using nuclear weapons to deter a conventional war in Europe.
Each of those subjects remain, in Andreotti's words, "the very same topics that are at the center of current negotiations."
And, as Andreotti said, history has vindicated many of Eisenhower's beliefs, particularly his patience.
by CNB