A year after Dwight D. Eisenhower left the presidency in 1961, he was rated 22nd out of 31 past presidents in a poll of presidential scholars. In recent years, similar polls have ranked him in the top five of the 45 American presidents.
What changed? In part, scholars learned more about Ike’s “hidden hand”: his subtlety in achieving peace and prosperity in the 1950s. But historians have also come to admire Ike’s skillful moderation and his ability to get along with others while getting his way — in other words, his leadership.
In World War II, Gen. Eisenhower had a “genius for fostering a cooperative spirit,” writes Jonathan Jordan in “Ike and Winston,” his vivid and instructive joint biography of Eisenhower and Winston Churchill. Admittedly, some thought that Ike went a little overboard with his British compatriots. Eisenhower’s sullen Anglophobe lieutenants, George Patton and Omar Bradley, would roll their eyes when the supreme allied commander used British terms such as “tiffin” for lunch and “lorry” for truck.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Gen. Eisenhower in 1944. (AP)
Ike’s driver and wartime companion, Kay Summersby, was shrewder about Ike’s ability to befriend — and master — his lordly British allies, including Churchill. “He had an unassuming curiosity that I can only describe as charming,” Summersby remembered of her boss. “If he didn’t know something, he asked questions. There was no pretense at the godlike knowledge many generals seem to believe their rank demands.”
Summersby was also insightful about Churchill. Yes, he had been born in Blenheim Palace, while Ike grew up a poor boy in Kansas. But Summersby saw that Churchill, like Eisenhower, did not need to put on the airs of high rank. The British prime minister, she noted, “always acted on impulse socially, without thought of his dignity — the same characteristic which so many persons found attractive in General Eisenhower.”
Be humble, be unpretentious, don’t huff and puff: useful models for our immodest and insecure age.
Of the two great men, Jordan suggests, Eisenhower was the greater leader, because he was better able to sublimate his considerable ego in the exercise of power. To be sure, self-control did not come easily to Ike. He credited his mother with helping him handle his temper. “She did a lousy job,” recalled one aide.
Gen. Eisenhower and Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery, right, with American soldiers in England in 1944. (AP)
But Ike rose above petty squabbles and refused to get too exercised when others condescended to him. Early in the war, Churchill sometimes treated Eisenhower as an aide-de-camp, but Ike shrugged it off. The general later told a staffer that on military questions, the arguments with his allies “didn’t really matter, because I was the boss.” Eisenhower’s son John once remarked, “He’s very good-natured at home as long as everything goes his way.”
Churchill saw “something cold behind Ike’s reassuring tone and steady grin,” writes Jordan. Though he liked to play the bulldog, the British prime minister was more sensitive and sentimental. Watching a newsreel of Allied bombs bursting in ancient German cities, Churchill asked, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?”
Churchill was especially concerned about Allied planes killing French civilians in air raids meant to weaken German defenses against the Allied invasion on D-Day. But Eisenhower overrode his worries. It was necessary to destroy French rail lines that could carry German panzers to the front, where they would kill Allied soldiers. Eisenhower’s “North Star,” writes Jordan, was duty, and his duty to his mission to win the war overrode everything, even friendship.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/05/13/make-it-make-sense-has-us-lost-iran-war/
Eisenhower nonetheless worked hard to maintain his friendship with Churchill. The prime minister tested that bond when he returned to office in the early 1950s, as Eisenhower was beginning his first term as U.S. president. Churchill repeatedly beseeched Eisenhower to hold a summit (a term Churchill coined) with Soviet leaders to negotiate limits on atomic weapons. Ike wanted to avoid nuclear war as much as Churchill, but he was properly wary about putting on a show that would serve as a vehicle for Soviet propaganda without achieving much of anything.
Eisenhower shakes hands with Churchill in Washington in 1959. (RBO/AP)
Once, as they discussed the question over the phone, Eisenhower found himself yelling at Churchill, who was growing deaf and insisted that he could not hear the president’s suggestions. Later, after giving in to one of Churchill’s proposals, Eisenhower told an aide he suspected that the prime minister was deaf only when he wanted to be.
In the 1960s, when their years of service were over, Eisenhower and Churchill wrote each other admiring letters and took joy in reliving their past. The late-in-life courtship reminded me of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, wary partners and even bitter foes in earlier days, exchanging flattering letters in their dotage. These men were laying down a record of comradeship in a great cause that smoothed over the rough edges. So were the Churchill and Eisenhower movingly portrayed in “Ike and Winston.” And what a record it was.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/05/17/churchill-saw-president-eisenhowers-hidden-virtues/
What changed? In part, scholars learned more about Ike’s “hidden hand”: his subtlety in achieving peace and prosperity in the 1950s. But historians have also come to admire Ike’s skillful moderation and his ability to get along with others while getting his way — in other words, his leadership.
In World War II, Gen. Eisenhower had a “genius for fostering a cooperative spirit,” writes Jonathan Jordan in “Ike and Winston,” his vivid and instructive joint biography of Eisenhower and Winston Churchill. Admittedly, some thought that Ike went a little overboard with his British compatriots. Eisenhower’s sullen Anglophobe lieutenants, George Patton and Omar Bradley, would roll their eyes when the supreme allied commander used British terms such as “tiffin” for lunch and “lorry” for truck.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Gen. Eisenhower in 1944. (AP)
Ike’s driver and wartime companion, Kay Summersby, was shrewder about Ike’s ability to befriend — and master — his lordly British allies, including Churchill. “He had an unassuming curiosity that I can only describe as charming,” Summersby remembered of her boss. “If he didn’t know something, he asked questions. There was no pretense at the godlike knowledge many generals seem to believe their rank demands.”
Summersby was also insightful about Churchill. Yes, he had been born in Blenheim Palace, while Ike grew up a poor boy in Kansas. But Summersby saw that Churchill, like Eisenhower, did not need to put on the airs of high rank. The British prime minister, she noted, “always acted on impulse socially, without thought of his dignity — the same characteristic which so many persons found attractive in General Eisenhower.”
Be humble, be unpretentious, don’t huff and puff: useful models for our immodest and insecure age.
Of the two great men, Jordan suggests, Eisenhower was the greater leader, because he was better able to sublimate his considerable ego in the exercise of power. To be sure, self-control did not come easily to Ike. He credited his mother with helping him handle his temper. “She did a lousy job,” recalled one aide.
Gen. Eisenhower and Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery, right, with American soldiers in England in 1944. (AP)
But Ike rose above petty squabbles and refused to get too exercised when others condescended to him. Early in the war, Churchill sometimes treated Eisenhower as an aide-de-camp, but Ike shrugged it off. The general later told a staffer that on military questions, the arguments with his allies “didn’t really matter, because I was the boss.” Eisenhower’s son John once remarked, “He’s very good-natured at home as long as everything goes his way.”
Churchill saw “something cold behind Ike’s reassuring tone and steady grin,” writes Jordan. Though he liked to play the bulldog, the British prime minister was more sensitive and sentimental. Watching a newsreel of Allied bombs bursting in ancient German cities, Churchill asked, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?”
Churchill was especially concerned about Allied planes killing French civilians in air raids meant to weaken German defenses against the Allied invasion on D-Day. But Eisenhower overrode his worries. It was necessary to destroy French rail lines that could carry German panzers to the front, where they would kill Allied soldiers. Eisenhower’s “North Star,” writes Jordan, was duty, and his duty to his mission to win the war overrode everything, even friendship.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/05/13/make-it-make-sense-has-us-lost-iran-war/
Eisenhower nonetheless worked hard to maintain his friendship with Churchill. The prime minister tested that bond when he returned to office in the early 1950s, as Eisenhower was beginning his first term as U.S. president. Churchill repeatedly beseeched Eisenhower to hold a summit (a term Churchill coined) with Soviet leaders to negotiate limits on atomic weapons. Ike wanted to avoid nuclear war as much as Churchill, but he was properly wary about putting on a show that would serve as a vehicle for Soviet propaganda without achieving much of anything.
Eisenhower shakes hands with Churchill in Washington in 1959. (RBO/AP)
Once, as they discussed the question over the phone, Eisenhower found himself yelling at Churchill, who was growing deaf and insisted that he could not hear the president’s suggestions. Later, after giving in to one of Churchill’s proposals, Eisenhower told an aide he suspected that the prime minister was deaf only when he wanted to be.
In the 1960s, when their years of service were over, Eisenhower and Churchill wrote each other admiring letters and took joy in reliving their past. The late-in-life courtship reminded me of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, wary partners and even bitter foes in earlier days, exchanging flattering letters in their dotage. These men were laying down a record of comradeship in a great cause that smoothed over the rough edges. So were the Churchill and Eisenhower movingly portrayed in “Ike and Winston.” And what a record it was.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/05/17/churchill-saw-president-eisenhowers-hidden-virtues/
