Eisenhower Read Online Free

took his duties seriously.
    He was nonplussed when the wife of a major interrupted his rounds and called him over to introduce him to a young woman. At first, Eisenhower brusquely declined. But she persisted, and within moments Ike was face-to-face with a sparkling brunette, still a teenager, daintily feminine in a pair of beige lace-up boots and equipped with what Eisenhower would later describe as “clear blue eyes that were full of impertinence.” Despite her uncomfortable shoes and distaste for walking, Mamie Geneva Doud joined the strapping young officer on his rounds. The attraction was immediate for both. They had dinner that night and again about ten days later.
    Dwight Eisenhower in 1915, the Eisenhower whom Mamie Doud met that fall, was at a juncture familiar to many young men. Newly graduated into the world, he was ambitious and alert to his potential. He craved adventure, imagined himself a leader, was groomed for command. And yet he also was a bit of a prankster, and having grown up with six brothers and been educated at West Point, he was barely accustomed to the company of women.
    Ike had managed to be both average and memorable at West Point. He was a modest student, and his athletic career, highlighted by a briefly successful effort to shut down the great Jim Thorpe, ended with a knee injury suffered during a 1912 football game against Tufts. He was disconsolate after the injury, bored with his studies, lethargic. “The fellows that used to call me ‘Sunny Jim’ call me ‘Gloomy Face’ now,” he wrote in 1913. He considered dropping out, but friends convinced him to stay. He took up smoking, to his later regret.
    And his stubbornness cost him. Try as they might, Army bosses could never convince Ike of the importance of a tidy barracks. He racked up his share of demerits, more than his share in fact, as he qualified as one of the school’s legendary “century men,” so named because he spent more than a hundred hours marching off penalties for various infractions. They ranged from messy rooms to showing up late for parades or meals to “smiling in ranks at drill after being corrected” to violating Special Order 106, the section proscribing inappropriate dancing. Still, after his freshman year, he ranked fifty-seventh overall in his class under the “Order of General Merit,” with an especially high ranking in his best subject, English, where he ranked tenth. That was a respectable showing in a class of 212. As the class dwindled, Ike’s ranking fell, drawn down by his demerits—he finished sixty-sixth overall in a class of 168—and he managed to finish an unimpressive 125th in terms of conduct.
    As his class standings made clear, Eisenhower was not preoccupied with his studies, nor was he committed to exemplary behavior. He was, however, a gregarious classmate, a solid athlete, and a joker. He developed a parlor trick that took advantage of his physical strength: he would bend his elbows and place his hands inches in front of his chest, then pitch face forward to the floor, stopping himself just before his nose crashed to the ground. Generations of soldiers would be treated to Ike’s gag.
    Ike completed his studies in early 1915, graduating as part of the “class the stars fell on,” because so many of its graduates went on to become generals. His yearbook entry, prepared by a classmate, pokes fun at Eisenhower—weirdly, it calls him “the terrible Swedish-Jew” and teases him about his self-image as “the handsomest man in the Corps.” In contrast to the serious encomiums to his classmates, Ike’s entry reads as one playfully ribbing a man who can take it. On February 17, 1915, Eisenhower was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He requested to be stationed in the Philippines, the only member of his class to ask for that exotic posting, but instead was assigned to Fort Sam Houston. Before shipping out, Ike detoured home for the summer.
    Through his West Point years,