A Reluctant Strategist.
In December 1941, Dwight Eisenhower was ordered to report for duty at the War Plans Division (OPD) of the War Department in Washington and thus began his ascent to the pinnacle of American strategy. Like many soldiers, this was not a journey he approached with enthusiasm. Eisenhower felt that having missed
combat in World War I hindered his career, and so found assignment to the War Department "a hard blow."1
But despite a plea to Brigadier General Haislip, Chief of the Personnel Division, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall insisted Eisenhower was the proper man for the job. "By General Marshall's word," Eisenhower feared, "I was completely condemned to a desk job in Washington for the duration."
Eisenhower's anxiety did not come solely from careerism. He knew that his training and experience only partially prepared him for the complexity, subtlety, ambiguity, and frequent confusion
of high-level strategy. Though confident of his soldierly skills, he was not so automatically sure of his ability in a realm where political acumen and horizontal leadership mattered more than vertical command relationships. Confidence there would come later.
During his first week in Washington, a frustrated Eisenhower wrote in his diary: "There are lots of amateur strategists on the job, and prima donnas everywhere. I'd give anything to be back in the field." This says much about Eisenhower's personality and his rather peculiar path to positions of strategic leadership and power. This reluctant strategist never exhibited the uninhibited, Nietzschean quest for power that propelled an
Alexander, Napoleon, or Hitler. He was not "driven by a ruthless daemon" like Marlborough. Eisenhower's life was devoid of the noblesse oblige and sense of historic destiny seen in Churchill, Metternich, or Franklin Roosevelt. And, Eisenhower was not a Kissinger, drawn first to the theoretical intricacies of strategy, its abstract architecture and attractions, and then later tempted into the corridors of power. Why, then, did he
become a strategist?
