Hero for Our Times

Sharply etched portraits of those prima donnas enliven the narrative. Patton was "eccentric, erratic, vain, deeply emotional, and a full-fledged military romantic, in love with the whole idea of glory." MacArthur was "wealthy, socially and politically well connected, famous, glamorous, eccentric, deeply theatrical, patrician, a shameless old-fashioned snob, a military aristocrat, and a reckless hero. . . . Like one of the more difficult Shakespearean kings, he had a majestic sense of self." Montgomery "was a loner, arrogant, vain, unforgiving, professionally brilliant, and utterly convinced that he was always right."

However, this is more than a military biography. Korda seeks a fuller human dimension. He explores Ike's childhood as the third of six sons of a dirt-poor, stubborn, humorless failed businessman and an independent, outgoing, highly likable mother. The book gives considerable attention to Ike's wife, Mamie Doud Eisenhower, the spirited, pampered daughter of a wealthy Denver businessman, and her tribulations as the constantly moving wife of a soldier who informed her as he left on a new assignment less than a month after their marriage that "duty would always come first."

Drawing on the Eisenhowers' wartime correspondence as well as on the recollections of their granddaughter, Susan, Korda provides a highly sympathetic picture of Mamie throughout the marriage, but especially during the war, when she lived alone in a room in the Wardman Hotel in Washington while her husband as supreme commander resided in fancy lodgings in Europe and became one of the most famous men in the world.

Kay Summersby, the beautiful, Anglo-Irish model and British Motor Transport Corps chauffeur who became Eisenhower's wartime driver, secretary and companion, is an integral part of the narrative. Hedging his judgment about whether they actually had an affair, Korda is frank about the devastating impact such rumors had on Mamie.

Based on comparatively few, although excellent, published sources, this book is not an addition to scholarship. But it is a fresh and engaging characterization. It is enhanced by the author's clear sympathy for his subject, international perspective and charming, urbane style.

The author is a nephew of international film magnate Alexander Korda, who knew many of the characters in the book. Michael Korda was born in England and educated there and in France and Switzerland. Later he was, for more than 40 years at Simon & Schuster, one of the most successful editors in U.S. publishing.

The final section of the book on Eisenhower's presidency seems more like an addendum. Comprising fewer than 100 of the volume's roughly 700 pages, it is cursory and sometimes irritatingly skewed. Korda selectively mines the warehouse of history, and he rides his thesis hard. Once again, he has only praise or justification for Eisenhower, but this time not just for Ike's search for peace, opposition to colonial wars and criticism of the "military-industrial-complex," but even in regard to Ike's generally cautious approach to McCarthyism and racial desegregation.

This section has its value, nonetheless, particularly in light of the current administration. Korda reminds us that Eisenhower preferred to lead by consensus and that one of his great strengths was that "he didn't approach things with a rigid set of political ideas." Instead, as a pragmatic centrist, he accepted solutions from Democrats as well as from liberal, Eastern, internationalist Republicans -- both anathema to the conservative, unilateralist Midwestern wing of his party.

A true leader, Eisenhower believed strongly that a president should take personal responsibility for mistakes (and give subordinates credit for success), and as Korda concludes, that is "a belief that not every president since his time has followed as scrupulously as he did." *

John Whiteclay Chambers II is a professor of history at Rutgers University and editor-in-chief of "The Oxford Companion to American Military History."