‘Glory’ puts Eisenhower into perspective

“Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969” by David Eisenhower, $28

BERWYN, Pa. — David Eisenhower’s new book, “Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969,” offers many poignant, illuminating stories. This one stands out:

It was Thanksgiving 1967, and he and Julie, both all of 19, had just gotten engaged.

David Eisenhower knew that his grandfather was fond of Julie Nixon — he called the daughter of his former vice president “an angel” — but he also knew that his grandfather thought marriage should wait until David was older and more “established.” After all, Ike had married Mamie at the ripe and seasoned age of nearly 26.

Moreover, Ike was more than “Granddad.” He was General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, two-term president of the United States — principled, disciplined, often stern and forbidding.

For two days, David procrastinated, trying to summon the courage to break the news. On the day David was to return to college, Ike summoned him to his bedroom. Grandfather and grandson made perfunctory small talk but mostly sat in uneasy silence. Thirty minutes passed.

“I choked,” David recalled during a recent interview at his home in Berwyn. “I couldn’t do it.”

Back at Amherst, David received a letter from the five-star general, acknowledging his grandson’s engagement to Julie and registering his delight: “You are both the kind of people who will, throughout your lives, enrich America. Moreover, a love, shared by two young and intelligent people, is one of heaven’s greatest gifts to humanity.”

Ike concluded by declaring: “I’m not only proud that you are my grandson, but my friend as well — to whom I give my deepest affection.”

“A treasure,” David Eisenhower calls the letter today. “My greatest gift.”

Like the book itself, the letter, and the story behind it, “rounds out the picture of a great man whose like we would not see again,” as David writes.

Indeed, the chief problem with Dwight Eisenhower is that his image was indistinct while he was alive, David says, and in death he has become “marbleized,” a hero scrubbed of his humanity.

While Ike may have been formidable and undemonstrative, he could also be compassionate and tender. While he may have been famous for his winning grin and passion for golf, he was also deeply principled and thoughtful. At news conferences, especially after his 1957 stroke, he may have seemed awkward and tongue-tied, but, on paper, he expressed himself with eloquence and was capable of phrases of biblical majesty.

Some books are written from the head; others, from the heart. “Going Home to Glory” (Simon & Schuster, $28), which David Eisenhower composed with ample assistance from his wife, Julie, is both, though it tilts pleasingly toward the latter.

“I grow up, and he grows old,” David says, summarizing the narrative.

“This is a book about a grandfather and a grandson. Politics happens, because Granddad was in politics and surrounded by politics, but the real subject is my grandfather. It’s a character study.”

The title, “Going Home to Glory,” is a line from a hymn inscribed on the tombstone of Dwight Eisenhower’s Aunt Lydia, who died at 17. The book chronicles the years from 1961, when Dwight Eisenhower moved from the White House to his beloved farm in Gettysburg, to 1969, when he died at Walter Reed Army Medical Center after a series of heart attacks.

“Going home to glory means just that,” David says. “What made Eisenhower great is the character I saw, the beauty of that character. When all the temporal things, all the trappings of power are gone, and he faces the essential things in life.

“He just had a proper sense of priorities and a balanced sense of what life is, a sense of what’s important — the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, being an instrument of peace, a light in the darkness, serving others. His wisdom, consideration and courage made an enormous impression on me.”