Remembering Dwight David Eisenhower on D-Day*

June 6, 2024 marks the eightieth anniversary of the most important military operation in American history.  The greatest amphibious landing in world history—D-Day—took place on the beaches of Normandy, France on June 6, 1944. The anniversary should be remembered with veneration for the brave soldiers who stormed the entrenched Nazi fortifications on the beaches of Normandy, and for the American General who was in command of the massive invasion, Dwight David Eisenhower.  As the Supreme Allied Commander of the joint U.S. and British forces, Eisenhower had to weigh the advice and information from his top officers, coordinate all of the planning and action, and make the final decision on whether to launch an attack on the heavily fortified German installations in France.

On May 30, 1944, just six days before the D-Day invasion was scheduled to take place, British Air Chief Marshal, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, spoke to Eisenhower about his apprehension that the invasion plan would not succeed.  According to Val Lauder, Leigh-Mallory bluntly asserted his belief that 75 percent of the eighteen thousand paratroopers who were to parachute at night over Nazi-occupied France would be killed or wounded in the operation.[i] If Leigh-Mallory was correct, Lauder notes, those losses would imperil the entire D-Day invasion since the paratroopers were charged with seizing and holding the causeways necessary to prevent the Germans from reinforcing the beaches. Eisenhower later said that it “would be difficult to conceive of a more soul-racking problem.”[ii] The British air commander’s alarming prediction forced Eisenhower to reevaluate the months of planning that had already taken place, but with the window of opportunity closing, Eisenhower let his decision to go forward stand. He resolved to his satisfaction that the potential casualty rate among paratroopers would not be as bleak as Leigh-Mallory predicted. (The casualties among paratroopers, killed and wounded, ended up being 22 percent, considerably lower than Leigh-Mallory expected).

Eisenhower, however, faced another factor that weighed heavily on his final decision—the inclement weather that was forecast for the precise day of the invasion, June 5, 1944. With a meteorologist present, the top commanders listened to a bleak forecast.  Winds would be high leading to significant waves and overcast skies—but by June 6th, it appeared possible that there might be clearing for as much as 36 hours. Pondering this ominous forecast, Eisenhower paced the room, asking his generals for their opinion.  Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsey adamantly opposed going, Air Marshal Leigh-Mallory still leaned against the operation, but British General Bernard Montgomery, and American Major General Walter Bedell Smith were among those who thought that it was a risk worth taking.  Eisenhower listened patiently and then announced, “We’re going.”  Ike wisely chose to delay the invasion by one day, which was just enough time to take advantage of the forecast for a brief window of good weather while the tides, moonlight, and other factors involved in making the mission a success were still favorable. Eisenhower had spent weeks going over logistics and strategy, now it was time to act.  Operation Overlord, as it was called, involved launching 11,590 aircraft, 18,000 paratroopers, and 156,000 troops on board an armada of over 5,000 ships and landing craft, across the English Channel and onto the beaches of France.  Eisenhower had the final say in launching the largest invasion in history. 

Eisenhower would never again face a decision as momentous as D-Day, not even as President of the United States. That is not to say he did not face tough choices during his presidency. Before being sworn in as President, Eisenhower flew over Korea in a small observation aircraft, near the thirty-eighth parallel, and witnessed, firsthand, the entrenched artillery of the Chinese in the rugged mountainous terrain. Several weeks after this fact-finding trip, Eisenhower decided to seek an armistice to end the war, an action that was opposed by hawks in his own party and even some members of his National Security Council. The following year, he made the difficult decision not to send American troops to Vietnam during the Dien Bien Phu crisis of 1954 when the French pleaded for US reinforcements. And one year after that, Eisenhower formulated a strategy to deter the Chinese from moving on Formosa (now Taiwan) during the Quemoy-Matsu crisis of 1955.

During the peak of Cold War tensions, he skillfully steered the nation away from war with the Soviet Union, particularly with regard to the issue of Berlin. Eisenhower had already been tested in the crucible of war in ways that made him uniquely qualified for leading the nation during some of the most perilous years of the Cold War.

Eisenhower had achieved such great eminence in his illustrious service to the nation as the supreme commander of Allied forces during the war that the office of President of the United States was, in a historical sense, a step down for him. Indeed, Eisenhower turned down overtures from both parties to run for president in 1948.[iii]

The qualities that we commonly associate with successful leadership, such as dignity, prudence, patriotism, and integrity, were ingrained in Eisenhower very early in his career. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the egotistical British commander who had a competitive relationship with Eisenhower that might be described as strained, was, nonetheless, flattering in his own assessment of Ike, saying: “He has the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him as a magnet attracts the bits of metal. He merely has to smile at you, and you trust him at once.”[iv] In selecting Eisenhower to serve as supreme commander of the Allied forces, Franklin Roosevelt told his son James that “Eisenhower is the best politician among the military men. He is a natural leader who can convince men to follow him.”[v]

Michael Korda, a former member of the Royal Air Force, notes in his brilliant biography

Ike: An American Hero:  

Ike somehow inspired people: civilians and ordinary soldiers of both nations, even cynical political figures and the always troublesome French. Something about his big grin; his long-limbed, loose American way of walking (the Kansas farm boy grown to a man); his easy, familiar way of speaking to everybody from King George VI down to privates in both armies; his lack of pretension; his evident sincerity; and his willingness to accept unimaginably heavy responsibility made people like Ike. They were willing to be led by him. They were willing to have him command their sons and husbands in battle. They trusted him. They were willing to die for him. It is hard to imagine Alan Brooke or George Marshall winning people’s confidence, affection, and trust the way Ike did, apparently without effort or design, and it was typically astute of that supreme master of politics Franklin Roosevelt to see that quality in Ike at once, and to recognize, however much he admired Marshall, what a formidable weapon it was. And why not? It was one he and Ike shared.[vi]

A British officer, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, who worked closely with Eisenhower during the war, offered his impressions of the general in a postwar interview:

I liked him at once. He struck me as being completely sincere, straightforward and very modest. In those early days I rather had the impression that he was not very sure of himself; but who could wonder at that? He was in supreme command of one of the greatest amphibious operations of all time, and was working in a strange country. . . But  it was not long before one recognized him as the really great man he is—forceful, able, direct and far-seeing, with great charm of manner, and always with a rather naive wonder at attaining the high position in which he found himself.[vii]

Sir Cunningham’s description of Eisenhower’s almost naive wonderment at his position as supreme commander of the Allied forces attests to his humility. Eisenhower was not a power-seeking or ego-driven individual. There was nothing false about his modesty, yet he always had a sense of confidence in his ability to make important decisions. Eisenhower’s decision to move ahead with the Normandy invasion, despite inclement weather and reservations among some key subordinates at the time of the decision, was made without equivocation.

Complementing his modesty and confidence, Eisenhower also possessed the trait of unqualified integrity. Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose writes that “scrupulous honesty was an integral part of Eisenhower’s character. . . He saw and experienced the payoff of trust.”[viii] When President Roosevelt pressured Eisenhower “to get tough with the local French” during World War II, Eisenhower refused, saying, “My whole strength in dealing with the French has been based upon my refusal to quibble or to stoop to any kind of subterfuge or double-dealing.” Eisenhower’s scrupulous honesty in dealing with the French, Ambrose notes, garnered respect and trust. A French official said to Eisenhower: “I have found that you will not lie or evade in dealings with us, even when it appears you could easily do so.”[ix]

Beyond the qualities of character that resonated in his personal demeanor, Eisenhower rigorously adhered to a belief that discipline itself is a cornerstone of effective leadership. Former presidential speechwriter William Bragg Ewald states: “To George Washington, Eisenhower’s supreme hero among American presidents, discipline was the soul of an army. To Eisenhower it was also the soul of public service. Specifically, it was the means of constraining and subduing and directing the power of individual personality to the purposes of a hierarchy of organizations and causes greater than oneself, from Army to party to administration to nation.”[x]

Eisenhower’s sense of discipline and loyalty reinforced what General George Marshall called the “cardinal attribute of a successful officer: selflessness.”[xi] True to the West Point motto, Eisenhower put duty, honor, and country ahead of his concern for his own career advancement. “It is trite indeed,” Eisenhower noted, to suggest that discipline is “a matter of leadership, but evidence of failures along this line are so common in military experience as to warrant the continuous and earnest attention, even of very senior officers.”[xii] In Eisenhower’s view, morale was “the most highly important of any military attribute.” And morale “could never be obtained through pampering the men, but rather through self-respect, intensive training and adequate leadership.”[xiii]

Discipline was not just for subordinates. Eisenhower realized that his reputation was based in part on how well he presented himself to his troops, and later to the nation in his capacity as president. He sought to carry himself in public service with the same dignity and decorum that he had practiced as a five-star general.

Eisenhower’s public persona reflected a combination of conscious study, careful role-playing, and innate force of personality. Throughout the presidential campaign of 1952, Ambrose notes, Eisenhower “strengthened his image as a fair-minded, decent man, highly intelligent but with a common touch, accustomed to keeping his head in a crisis, experienced, a born leader. He also preserved his image as a man who was accepting the responsibility of the Presidency because it was his duty to do so, rather than a man who was seeking a job for ambitious personal reasons.”[xiv]

Eisenhower went to great lengths to mask his political astuteness by keeping much of his political leadership behind the scenes and out of the public eye. He sought to distance himself publicly from traditional images of politics and politicians, realizing that he had great capital with the public as an individual who had not been a career politician. As presidential aide Robert Murphy notes, Eisenhower “had that ability to dissimulate that I’ve seen on so many occasions, putting on that bland exterior and saying, ‘Well, I’m just a simple soldier, I don’t know anything about politics.’ If he said that once, I’ve heard it a dozen times, and he did have good political instincts and a certain knowledge that was very helpful to him. . . But this was very useful as a sort of pose. . . Lots of people believed that he was a nice simple man. But Eisenhower had a very definite shrewdness and purpose to it all.”[xv]

Reinforcing this view, Andrew Goodpaster, who served Eisenhower as his staff secretary in the White House, noted that it was no accident that Eisenhower “gave the appearance of being above politics. He wanted to ‘disguise politics,’” Goodpaster suggests, “so that he would have a ‘freer hand’ in exerting influence over political affairs while avoiding the stigma of being a professional politician.”[xvi] So effective was his “hidden-hand” presidency that many in the press and the academic world misjudged his effectiveness as a leader. The reality, as Princeton political science professor Fred Greenstein demonstrates, was much different from the caricature. Drawing on scores of declassified documents from the Eisenhower Library, Greenstein concluded: “Eisenhower was politically astute and informed, actively engaged in putting his personal stamp on public policy,” and very effective in quietly implementing “a carefully thought-out conception of leadership to the conduct of his presidency.”[xvii]

Eisenhower strove to maintain the dignity of office as chief of state while providing adept administrative and political leadership as chief executive of the federal government. With regard to the chief of state role, Eisenhower believed that the president should exhibit a “respectable image of American life before the world.”[xviii] Harvard University professor Richard Neustadt, an early critic of Eisenhower, acknowledged after reflection that Eisenhower’s contributions to the enhancement of the dignity of the presidency deserved more notice than he and other scholars had previously given them. In the Cook lectures at the University of Michigan, Neustadt said: “Prestige seems to have been always on the mind of at least one modern president, Eisenhower. In light of subsequent events, this is an aspect of his presidency which I, among others, find more attractive now than I did then. As a national hero from the Second World War, he lent the office his own aura, and was conscious that he did so.”[xix]

Temperament

The strength of character and the attention to decorum that made Eisenhower so impressive as a leader was marred by one defect. He possessed a stormy temper that was occasionally unleashed with great effect. One aide suggested that Eisenhower’s temper was like a “Bessemer furnace.”[xx] Journalist Theodore White noted that Eisenhower’s rosy public smile “could give way, in private, to furious outbursts of temper.”[xxi]

One such outburst is colorfully depicted by Stephen Ambrose in his account of Eisenhower’s leadership during World War II. After a particularly weary and trying week that ended with a seven-hour rain-soaked trip to the front in Italy, Eisenhower invited his chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, to dinner. Smith, who had accompanied Eisenhower on the trip, declined. According to Ambrose, Eisenhower’s reaction was stormy: “He snapped that Smith was discourteous, that no subordinate, not even the chief of staff, could abruptly decline his commanding officer’s invitation to dinner. Smith cursed, told Eisenhower he wanted to quit. Eisenhower said that would be just fine with him. ‘By God,’ he thundered, ‘I’ll do what Churchill wants and leave you in the Mediterranean.’ ‘That suits me,’ Smith growled. The two men then settled into a sullen silence. After a bit, Smith mumbled an apology. Eisenhower did too, and they agreed to forget the whole thing.”[xxii]

Eisenhower did learn to control his fiery temper in most public settings. A striking example of forbearance, Greenstein suggests, involved Eisenhower’s working relationship with the caustic British field marshal Bernard Montgomery during World War II. Eisenhower told General George Marshall that he had sized up Montgomery and was therefore able to curb his own animus toward him.[xxiii] Eisenhower explained to General Marshall that he “reasoned with” Montgomery when necessary, “gave him his way when he felt it appropriate, but had no hesitation about overruling him.”[xxiv]

But he also realized that his reputation for having a temper may have worked to his advantage on occasion. Consistent with Machiavelli’s dictum, Eisenhower seemed to instinctively know that in some circumstances it is better for a leader to be feared than loved. As Ambrose writes, “Anger that is contrived, that is put on for show and a purpose, an actor’s anger, can be an effective tool of leadership. It was one Eisenhower used often.”[xxv]

Undoubtedly, Eisenhower acquired many skills in his career as an officer in the U.S. Army, but he possessed a substantial reservoir of innate talent and a healthy dose of virtue long before his service in the Army or his election to the presidency. He cherished honesty, and his own straightforward manner garnered broad support and loyalty. The sense of dignity and decorum that were hallmarks of Eisenhower’s service to the nation instilled lasting respect, even reverence, in those who were privileged to serve under him.  As Ambrose notes, Ike was viewed by his troops and other contemporaries as a natural, “born” leader. He struggled to control his temper, but temper seems not to have been a liability and may well have been an asset on occasion. If nothing else, his fierce temper conveyed a very human aspect of leadership. The gravitas that Field Marshal Montgomery and Franklin Roosevelt saw in Eisenhower was rooted, above all else, in character. In Part Two, we will elaborate on how Eisenhower transferred these qualities of character to his leadership as President of the United States.

FEATURE IMAGE

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the order of the day, "Full victory, nothing less" to paratroopers somewhere in England just before they board their planes to take part in the first assault of the invasion of France. England. June 6, 1944.

NOTES

*Phillip G. Henderson, Ph.D. the University of Michigan, is the author of Managing the Presidency: The Eisenhower Legacy. Portions of this essay are excerpted from his chapter, “Dwight David Eisenhower’s Leadership,” in American Statesmanship: Principles and Practice of Leadership, edited by Joseph R. Fornieri, et al, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2021.

[i] Val Lauder, “Eisenhower’s ‘Soul-Racking’ D-Day Decision,” CNN.com, June 6, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/05/opinion/lauder-eisenhower-d-day-anguish/index.html.

[ii] Lauder, “Eisenhower’s ‘Soul-Racking’ D-Day Decision.”

[iii] A Gallup poll in 1948 found that Eisenhower was the public’s first choice for president regardless of his party affiliation, which was still unknown. In a steadfast refusal to run, Eisenhower said on January 22, 1948: “It is my conviction that the necessary and wise subordination of the military to civil power will be best sustained, and our people will have greater confidence that it is to be sustained, when lifelong professional soldiers, in the absence of some obvious and overriding reasons, abstain from seeking high political office.” Historian Stephen Ambrose suggests that it is only slightly an exaggeration “to say that Eisenhower, in 1948, turned down the Presidency of the United States.” See Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower, Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890–1952 (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1983),413, 463–465.

Photo courtesy of the National Archives. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the order of the day, "Full victory, nothing less" to paratroopers somewhere in England just before they board their planes to take part in the first assault of the invasion of France. England. June 6, 1944.

[iv] Montgomery, quoted in Ambrose, Eisenhower, 273.

[v] Quoted in Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 64.

[vi] Michael Korda, Ike: An American Hero (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 430.

[vii] Quoted in Ambrose, Eisenhower, 179.

[viii] Stephen E. Ambrose, “Dwight D. Eisenhower: 1953–1961,” in Character Above All: Ten Presidents from FDR to George Bush, ed. Robert A. Wilson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 63.

[ix] Ambrose, “Dwight D. Eisenhower: 1953–1961,” 63.

[x] William Bragg Ewald, Jr., Eisenhower the President: Crucial Days, 1951–1960 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 319.

[xi] Ewald, Eisenhower the President, 319–20.

[xii] Eisenhower, as quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 60.

[xiii] Ambrose, Supreme Commander, 61.

[xiv] Ambrose, Eisenhower, 570.

[xv] Robert Murphy, Oral History Interview #224, 14, Eisenhower Library.

[xvi] General Andrew Goodpaster, interviewed by Phillip G. Henderson, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Virginia, October 7, 1983, in Phillip G. Henderson, Managing the Presidency: The Eisenhower Legacy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 22.

[xvii] Fred I. Greenstein, “Eisenhower as an Activist President: A Look at New Evidence,” Political Science Quarterly 94 (Winter 1979–1980): 577.

[xviii] Eisenhower to Henry Luce, August 8, 1960, as quoted in Fred Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 19.

[xix] Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976), 10.

[xx] Quoted in Greenstein, Hidden-Hand Presidency, 43.

[xxi] Quoted in Greenstein, Hidden-Hand Presidency, 16.

[xxii] Ambrose, Eisenhower, 275.

[xxiii] Greenstein, Hidden-Hand Presidency, 44.

[xxiv] Greenstein, Hidden-Hand Presidency, 44.

[xxv] Ambrose, “Dwight D. Eisenhower: 1953–1961,” 80.

By Phillip G. Henderson

Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the Catholic University of America.

Related Essays