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When the campaign was over (short of Berlin, not in it) it was Ike who best expressed the meanings in his Guildhall speech in London. "To preserve his freedom ... a Londoner will fight. So will a citizen of Abilene." And as he looked one way across the rubble at the Soviets and the other way to Mamie and home, Ike finished World War II as he had fought it, in total tune with his men. "Aside from disappointment in being unable to solve in clean-cut fashion some of the nagging problems," he wrote, "I just plain miss my family."
While Harry Truman was in Germany for the Potsdam Conference, he offered to help Ike win "the presidency in 1948." But Ike firmly declined. He came home to become Army chief of staff and to get an acrid noseful of the seamier side of statecraft when he fought for interservice unification. He did not want any political post, he snapped angrily to a reporter in 1946, "from dogcatcher to Grand High Supreme King of the Universe." But the following year he wrote to his old chief of staff Bedell Smith more thoughtfully: "I do not believe that you or I or anyone else has the right to state, categorically, that he will not perform any duty that his country might demand of him . . . Nathan Hale accepted the order to serve as a spy with extreme reluctance and distaste. Nevertheless he did so serve."
But" the process took time and it was well for the bogged-down U.S. that Ike was working out his own political philosophy and amassing some more civilian and diplomatic qualifications. From his job as president of Columbia University (1948-50) President Truman recalled him to command and to fuse the forces of NATO, the heart of U.S. and Western European foreign policy. There Ike began to hear the mounting summons of Republicans and independents ("What a mess our blessed nation is in," the dying Senator Vandenberg had cried, adding hopefully, "Thank God for Eisenhower") urging him to come home and run.
Tke Urge to Complete
The next step came in January 1952 when Ike let it be known that he was available for a draft. Then he had to learn the hard way that his duty lay within the democratic procedure of competing and campaigning; he also had to suffer the election campaign doubts of those who feared that he might be, after all, a gladhander, a straddler, a man who could be led around, or swayed by the plaudits of the crowd. But when, after nomination and election, the prospective Eisenhower Cabinet approved the draft of his inaugural speech somewhat unctuously, Ike said sharply: "I read it far more for your blue pencils than for your applause."
Increasingly and almost imperceptibly Ike has become and is becoming less the briefed and more the briefer; always he is developing new interests, new knowledge, about the kaleidoscopic facets of his job. As of now, for example, he is fascinated by the electoral mechanism of democracy at the precinct level; as of now, Ike, aware that his party is as short on expounding its theory as it is long on pragmatic accomplishment, is prodding and stimulating the thinkers of dynamic conservatism, specifically including himself. "It is what I do," he says of all his energies and activities. "I always put everything I have got into what I do."