Books, Arts & Manners: Casey Stengel at War

Eisenhower at War, 1943-1945, by David Eisenhower (Random House, 977 pp., $29.95)

David Eisenhower’s study of his grandfather during World War II should have been a cracking good book. The idea was sound enough: After considerable research toward a work on Ike’s Presidency, David concluded that the Presidency could not be understood without a thorough grasp of the wartime experience, in which Ike was less a soldier than a combined diplomat and bureaucrat, responsible for reconciling the conflicts between allies who saw the war from entirely different perspectives, between British and American generals, and among subordinate generals who respected him but thought (with some justice) that he knew next to nothing about being “a real military commander.” The research effort was stupendous: To become able to comprehend the vast number of decisions that Ike had to make in such circumstances, the author pored over stupefying numbers of reports, messages, and minutes of conferences, in addition to studying the voluminous and often contradictory memoirs and secondary accounts of the war. Besides all that, because he is who he is, young Eisenhower had access to a treasure trove of interviews that have not been available to others.

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Forrest McDonald

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Eisenhower at War, 1943-1945, by David Eisenhower (Random House, 977 pp., $29.95)

David Eisenhower’s study of his grandfather during World War II should have been a cracking good book. The idea was sound enough: After considerable research toward a work on Ike’s Presidency, David concluded that the Presidency could not be understood without a thorough grasp of the wartime experience, in which Ike was less a soldier than a combined diplomat and bureaucrat, responsible for reconciling the conflicts between allies who saw the war from entirely different perspectives, between British and American generals, and among subordinate generals who respected him but thought (with some justice) that he knew next to nothing about being “a real military commander.” The research effort was stupendous: To become able to comprehend the vast number of decisions that Ike had to make in such circumstances, the author pored over stupefying numbers of reports, messages, and minutes of conferences, in addition to studying the voluminous and often contradictory memoirs and secondary accounts of the war. Besides all that, because he is who he is, young Eisenhower had access to a treasure trove of interviews that have not been available to others.