Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
| Volume 69, Issue 6
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
| Volume 69, Issue 6
Ike was not a leader in the way we customarily “teach” leadership in our country. He was a strategic rather than an operational one. During the war his role was to receive all the inputs—across the entire enterprise: both internal and external, political and practical, fundamental and future oriented. His job was to “strip down” a problem to its essence, prioritize it among many, and ensure that any plan reflected those factors in a coherent form, ready for execution. His decisions were undertaken with the entire enterprise in mind.
Eisenhower had the thirty-thousand-foot responsibilities. In fact, it is noteworthy that his job description, when he was given the supreme command of Operation Overlord, was in essence to invade the mainland of Europe and bring about the destruction of Nazi forces. No other leadership job in the Western Alliance looked anything like his. And the opinion that truly mattered rested with his superiors’ assessment of his performance. Ike, in his own words, described what was expected of him:
Eisenhower’s talent for envisioning a whole, especially in the context of the long game, may explain why he did not necessarily need combat experience to be a brilliant strategic leader. It is also why he never lost the confidence of his superiors during the conduct of World War II, even if his subordinates groused about some of his decisions—many of which, not surprisingly, related to resource allocation and personal authority. Eisenhower’s subordinates simply did not have the same considerations he did.
Ike had to worry about the direction of the war, the assets he had at his disposal, the liabilities he had to mitigate, and a timeline that had to be met. He had finite human and material resources. He also had to scale up a war effort that, for the American cohort alone, began as a small group in 1942 and culminated in a force of more than three million people under his command only two years later. The performance of key subordinates was his responsibility at a time of nationalist tensions within the wartime alliance. And he had to factor in the worthiness of his military options and view them in the context of the political, social, or resource priorities made clear to him by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff (COSSAC). He also had to be adept enough to sense the moment when the plan had to change.
Again, as