Eisenhower and Churchill

September 3, 2001
Though Humes was briefly a staffer in the Eisenhower White House, his book is unreliable as fact and as florid as an after-dinner speech. Much more than half the narrative is a compilation of unrelated parallels and coincidences in the lives of his two subjects, who met only after Pearl Harbor. Their relationship materialized when Eisenhower was assigned to lead Anglo-American forces in the invasion of North Africa, a follow-up in Sicily and then the D-Day operation, which Churchill had long resisted. Rather than a partnership, their relationship was one of a veteran politician who fancied himself a strategist, and a shrewd general who was politic enough to organize a collection of egos into executing vast military operations. While Churchill wanted to keep Russia out of what he considered British spheres of influence and to prevent a doomed British Empire from disintegrating, Eisenhower's orders from President Roosevelt were to win the war. Eisenhower's confident serenity and stubborn affability were keys to his success in keeping Churchill focused on common goals. While the subtitle claims much more than Humes (a professor of language and leadership at the University of Southern Colorado and author of Nixon's Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation) delivers, the text is equally flawed, replete with hasty judgments, suspect political bias and numerous factual errors. Eisenhower, for example, did not racially integrate the army: Truman did. Rather, we have FDR's "New Deal crowd" and Truman's "deficit populism." Churchill's support for Eisenhower is claimed to be the reason he was selected to command the North Africa invasion. Names are wrong; anecdotes become fact; Ike even turns to medicine, it seems, having "supervised the recovery" of Churchill from pneumonia. The lack of source notes underscores that no one should take this book seriously as history. Illus. and foreword by David Eisenhower not seen by PW.