Eisenhower and Roosevelt shared one overwhelming quality; they both became father-figures of myth-like proportions, created out of obscure needs and anxieties and hopes, and bearing small resemblance to the men they actually were. Roosevelt was a father-figure in a time of economic frustration; Americans who found comfort in his confident over-ripe voice did not and could not know how little lay behind his glib assurance. Eisenhower has been the father-figure in a time of domestic prosperity and foreign frustration. He, the general who led us to grinning victory over the Axis, would as President lead us to some permanent euphoric plateau where there would be no mess in Washington, no more Korean episodes, and the Russians would behave themselves. To the middle-class voters who had been denied a father-image under the Roosevelt dispensation, Eisenhower at last brought a sense of identification. That man had been replaced by their man. Even four years of fumbling inanition were not enough to convince. It took the Sputniks streaking across the sky to crack the Eisenhower image. Fate was kinder in the exit it provided Roosevelt.
Marquis Childs’ Eisenhower: Captive Hero (Harcourt, Brace, $4.75) is in a sense symbolic of the cracked image, for a nationally promoted antiEisenhower book would scarcely have been considered feasible even as late as two years ago. Mr. Childs writes somewhat diffusely from a Steven- sonian point of view. Yet, if one discounts that, one does find the facts assembled to answer the question: how did Eisenhower, the mediocre soldier for whom even the complexities of his native tongue would remain a mystery, how did he become a General of the Armies and two times President? In the average course of events this somewhat uncouth West Pointer would with luck have ended his thirty years of service as a “chicken” colonel commanding some sleepy brick army post. Events not being average, how did he do it?
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