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He had to cram hard, but while much of the subject matter was new to him, the cramming process and the rapid transition was an old story. In July of 1942, he had been a staff major general (permanent rank: lieutenant colonel). By the fall of 1942, he was commanding the highly complex and delicate invasion of North Africa, and a year later he was Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces. He needed and he got plenty of intensive briefing in that period. He had to learn in a hurry how to cope with supply problems beyond all previous military experience, how to integrate the vastly different U.S. and British fighting forces, how to read the totalitarian mind of the enemy.
In January 1951, he made his famous tour of the NATO nations, then came home at the height of the Great Debate on U.S. foreign policy to testify before Congress on whether or not Western Europe had the will and the power to defend itself, i.e., whether it was a sound investment for U.S. military help. Ike's answer was a firm yes. He swung popular and congressional opinion in a way Politician Harry Truman had been unable to do.-
Ike is a highly briefable man, absorbing, digesting, sorting out, modifying and making over information and opinions of others. That quality was the key to his two successes in Europe. It is the key to his experience of the last five months—perhaps the most intensive course any man ever had in U.S. politics.
His most "important teacher was the American people. Ike saw them at a thousand whistle stops from Oregon to Louisiana, crowding the depots, jamming a hundred auditoriums, town squares and courthouse steps. He listened where they cheered and where they were silent, where their faces were grim, and where they smiled. When he spoke about his three main campaign points—Korea, Communism and corruption—Student Eisenhower could gauge the echoes from the crowds. All of Eisenhower's education, military, diplomatic, political, came on top of the basic set of his character—the education of boyhood in a small Kansas town half a century ago. The lessons of a Kansas boyhood were about the land, wide enough for freedom, generous to those who worked (and defended) it; about the astounding program that grew out of individual initiative and unfenced teamwork. Do these lessons still have a meaning in an America that has grown complex and doubtful of itself? To Eisenhower, they do. In his informal homecoming talk at Abilene last June, across the field from the Eisenhower white frame house, he recalled some of the lessons: "I have found out in later years we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn't know it then. All that we knew was that our parents—of great courage—could say to us, 'Opportunity is all about you. Reach out for it and take it ... What are you afraid of?"