August 2020

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:

Editor's Note: After serving in the Navy during the Vietnam War, Ed Offley reported on naval issues for three decades for The Ledger-Star in Norfolk and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and was Editor-in-Chief of Stars & Stripes. He has written five books, including a favorite of ours, Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon. We are delighted to publish a two-part report on the dramatic history of the battleship USS Nevada (BB-36), which survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and went on to serve in the Aleutians, on Atlantic convoy-escort duty, in the Allied liberation of Normandy and southern France, and the climactic battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Editor's Note: Stephen Bates teaches First Amendment law, writing, and other subjects at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. His latest book is An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press (Yale University Press), from which this essay was adapted. 

Editor’s Note: Since writing his first novel, A Time to Kill, in 1989, John Grisham has become the best-known author of legal thrillers – his 44 books have sold over 300 million copies worldwide. Grisham supports the work of innocence projects that help individuals who claim they have been wrongfully convicted of serious crimes – sometimes, receiving the death penalty. Last month, Doubleday published When Truth Is All You Have by Jim McCloskey, “dean of the innocence advocates,” with moving stories of innocent prisoners sentenced to death or life in prison who were set free by Jim’s efforts. Portions of this essay by John Grisham appeared as the introduction to the book.