Newt talks with Michel Paradis, author of “The Light of Battle: Eisenhower, D-Day, and the Birth of the American Superpower” which explores General Dwight D. Eisenhower's role in the D-Day invasion during World War II. Paradis highlights Eisenhower's leadership, strategic decision-making, and the immense pressure he faced leading up to the invasion. He also discusses Eisenhower's transition from a military leader to a political figure, becoming the President of the United States. Paradis emphasizes that Eisenhower's success in leading the D-Day invasion was integral to America's rise as a global superpower.
Soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force. You are about to embark upon the great crusade toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you, in company with our brave allies and brothers in arms on other fronts. You will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of NA, security over the obtested peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped, and battle hardened. He will fight savages. But this is the year nineteen forty four. Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of nineteen forty forty one. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeat in open battle manned man. Our air offenses have seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home front have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and police at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned the freemen of the world are marching together to victory. I have food, competence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory. Good luck, and let us all beseech the blessing of almighty Gods upon this break and noble undertaking.
Um by alive sources, of course, says that heavy fighting is a ten place between the Germans and Atration forces on the Normandy Peninsula, about thirty one miles southwest of Lahabra. Another bulletin, also from burrowin radio and unconfirmed, says the pretties American landing operations against the western coast of Europe from the sea and from the air are stretching over the entire area between Cherbourg and Lahoudru.
I just thought of about fifty miles on.
This episode of Newts World eighty years ago today. On June sixth, nineteen forty four, General Dwight David Eisenhower addressed the thousands of American troops preparing to invade Normandy, encouraging them to embrace the great crusade they faced. Then, in a brief moment alone, he drafted a resignation letter in case the invasion failed. He wanted people to know that it was his responsibility and not the responsibility of the thousands of young men and women that he was throwing at Nazi Germany. In his new book, The Light of Battle, Michelle Parodies brings Droit Eisenower to life as he learns to navigate the cross currents of diplomacy, politics, strategy, family and fame, with the fate of the free world hanging in the balance. In a world of giants, Churchill Roosevelt, de Gaul Marshall MacArthur. It was a barefoot boy from Abilene, Kansas who had mastered the art of power and become a modern day George Washington. Parodies reveals how Eisenhower's rise both reflected and was integral to America's rise as a global superpower. Here to talk about his new book and the eightieth anniversary of D Day, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Michelle Parodies. He's a leading human rights lawyer, historian, national security law scholar, and most recently the author of the critically acclaimed Last Mission to Tokyo. He's a partner at the international law firm Curtis Malay Provost and a lecturer at Columbia Law School. Michelle, Welcome and thank you for joining me on Newsworld.
Thank you so much for having me on.
You know, this is the eightieth anniversary of an extraordinary moment when so many landed both by air by sea, and it hung in the balance. It could have collapsed. But I'm curious what led you to decide to focus on Eisenhower.
I think the thing that fascinated me the most about Dwight Eisenhower was the fact that here you have someone who is probably one of the most powerful generals in all of human history, who was raised by religious pacifists in a rural town in Kansas. He from a very young age from boyhood, wants to be a general, but, confronted with the fact that he may not be commissioned in the army, looks to a backup plan of becoming a gaucho in Argentina. He is warned, and this is something I discovered in the course of researching this book. He has warned in a classified briefing that the Nazis are not only developing nuclear weapons, but are potentially going to deploy them against the invasion troops on D Day. But he's told there's basically nothing he can do about it, and he can't even really tell anyone about it, and so he focuses on the things that he can get some control over, such as the weather. And he's just such a fascinating figure. He's just as complex as human and in some ways as contradictory as America itself. And how could you not be interested, right, how could you not want to write about someone like that.
My wife Caloster, who's from a small town Whitehall, Wisconsin, was fascinated because there's an even smaller town nearby called Pigeon Falls, and it actually has Reynolds Toompter, who at one hundred and seven years of age, has gone to Normandy this year. He's at Normandy one of the great moments of his life. He was the oldest surviving member of the Merchant Marine and that was his background. And of course the Merchant Marine played a huge role in making sure we had enough equipment, enough people to Britain, and enough food for Britain to survive. But it really brought home how every single town in America had somebody involved in World War Two, and in that sense, Eisenhower emerged, I think as the quintessential American as somebody who somehow represented the common sense and the decency sort of call me Ike. And yet at the same time, he clearly understood power, and he clearly understood that he was a five star general. So he played both roles at the same time.
He did, and I would say he understood as well that in order to wield power, as much power as he had at his disposal, and in order to wield that power effectively, it was all the more important for him to not forget where he was from, to maintain that common touch, and particularly to maintain and always show that famous Eisenhower smile. I think it was Omar Bradley who said Eisenhower smiles worth ten divisions, and I think that's exactly right, because he had the ability to connect with people at a human level and understand really, you know, because fundamentally, I think he was just a very serious person. He understood the weight that was on his shoulders. He bore that weight, but he never let it stop him from doing what needed to get done as well. Right, He could also, you know, if you pardon the expression, could be a bit ruthless as well, and he knew what had to get done because he was always focused on a mission ultimately larger than himself. And that sort of strength of character in that humility, combined with a real desire to to make real change in the world, not just to put more pretty ribbons on his chest or become a famous celebrity in his own right, but to really make meaningful change and lasting change in the world that.
Would affect people. It's probably both again an amazing testament to his character.
But I also I think, as you said, you know something fundamentally and almost quintessentially American in its outlook.
Years ago I spent time reading Eisenhower's papers because I wanted to understand how his mind worked and how he wrote, and how he put things together. And he has this real knack of boiling things down and ultimately got into how to saying you wanted all decision papers to be one page, that you had the job of figuring out exactly what was at stake and what the pro and con was, and he didn't want you to turn that over and make that his job. His job was to then decide. At the same time, I think behind the smile he was amazingly smarter. It reminds me a little bit of Reagan and the desire to be under estimated. That he was quite happy if you thought he was easy to take. Somebody who wrote a paper of years later when the Liberals wah I had contempt for him, et cetera, and they pointed out that in the thirties, on a very limited salary of an army officer, that Eisenhower played bridge and consistently won. And they said, this is not the guy you think. He is much more there when you look at Normandy itself. Because this is the eightieth anniversary, what comes to mind? What is it you wish people understood about why D Day the sixth of June matters.
I would say two things.
The one thing is that I think most people forget how improbable it was and how close to failure it was at so many different moments, in so many different ways. Even a month before the invasion, Eisenhower's chief of staff in Europe, Walter Bedell Smith Beatle Smith, gave the odds of success at fifty to fifty, which meant that the odds of failure.
Were also fifty to fifty.
And it was a tremendous gamble that took an incredible amount of strain. Aisther how I think, gets up to about three packs of cigarettes a day by the time D Day launches, just under the strain of all the moving parts that he has to keep in place to make it all happen. So that's one thing is that just how difficult it was was not just what those men, those brave men who were gunned down on places like Omaha Beach confronted. It was so improbable. You had almost two million people, in one way or another contributing to this effort that at any moment could have failed. So I think that's one thing, is to remember how close we came to losing, and just as important is how important it was that we won. And I think that's also the very important legacy that D Day fits in the American story, you know, much like Lexington and Conquered. It's this pivotal moment where the United States changes after that. Prior to the D Day invasion, the United States was an increasingly large economy but an untested and unproven military. Certainly, for the first two years of the war, the British were often described as the senior partner in the Atlantic relationship.
And that made a lot of sense.
The British Empire was a quarter of the world, covered about fifth of the world's surface, The Royal Navy was in every ocean, had a port on every continent. And the United States was a deeply divided, highly fractious collection of forty eight states that had gone to war with one another not all that long ago, and there was a real question about whether it could muster all of that energy into being a nation state, a superpower on the world stage. And ultimately, the Day Invasion is that moment because it is the first American led operation of the war of sort of major significance. It's the first time America is directing the strategic direction of the European War over the sort of British preferences, particularly to continue operations in the Mediterranean, and it is done through almost a quintessentially American view of how this new post war world should be conducted. Because you know, if you think about why it was the British Empire was as powerful it was and all the other European empires, it was because that was the way of the world. The imperial rivalry was foreign policy and the idea that you could have multilateral institutions that were organized around things like democracy, freedom, human rights, and decolonization was at best and aspiration and certainly far from proven, and the successive D Days showed the United States really leading the world in a new direction. And had the D Day invasion failed, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how different the world would have been very quickly, and how different and certainly the world would be today.
Somebody once said that D Day really mattered in part because given all of the terrible losses of World War One, we might not have had the nerve to try a second time. That if we had launched an operation this big and it failed, that in fact, we would have sort of been out of business, leaving it to the Soviets and the Germans to fight it out with whatever outcome that led to. What's your sense do you think if it had failed, that it would have been almost impossible for the Allied powers in the West to find the nerve to come back and do it again.
I have no doubt about that.
The British had never really supported Operation Overlord. They had been skeptical of it from its first iterations in nineteen forty two, and up through the Cairo Conference. When the D Day Invasion is officially set to launch in November of nineteen forty three, the British are deeply opposed.
They want to for good and bad reasons.
Let me just preface that, but they want to continue operations in the Mediterranean to essentially strangle the Germans from abroad. They want to use their superior air power to bomb German industry into submission, and they want to use their superior naval power to essentially contain Germany on the European continent. And not for nothing, to contain the Soviet Union's expansion into the eastern Mediterranean. And the United States and Britain almost get into a brawl actually at this summit in Cairo in nineteen forty three, over the choice between the D Day invasion and continued operations in the Mediterranean. Had the D Day Invasion failed, as many and most especially Winston Churchill both feared and predicted it would, the United States would have been discredited before it really had any credibility in the world as a major military power. The Allies would have had to fully commit to the British strategy in the Mediterranean. That would have left the Soviets as the only major rival to Nazi Germany on the European continent. The Soviets, would they have continued to fight all the way to Berlin without US opening a Western front?
Could they have?
I don't know that that's entirely clear. And would the Soviet Union have cut a separate piece, essentially remaking the European continent with Soviet communism in the east and sort of hitlerrite fascism in the West. I think that's a very real scenario. But then you can very quickly even get into real sci fi level hypotheticals, because had the war in Germany ended only three months later, had ve Day been only delayed by three months, the United States would have acquired operating nuclear weapons, and so would the United States have attempted to resolve the European War by using nuclear weapons? Would the United States have abandoned Europe? I think that's a real possibility, because the European War, we remember it, and certainly we remember our victory over fascism in Europe today as one of our nation's great moments of pride. But Roosevelt was up for election in night teen forty four, and the European War was not a popular item on the American political agenda. Most Americans thought the United States should be focusing on the war in the Pacific and defeating Japan, who had attacked US. And Roosevelt's willingness to spend blood and treasure in Europe came at a political cost. Would he have continued to incur that political cost if something like the D Day Invasion, which had committed one hundred and seventy six hundred and seventy seven thousand men to crossing the English Channel and to France, had that faltered, had tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of men been lost or captured by the Germans, would Roosevelt have essentially cut and run from the European theater? Would he have even won reelection? These are questions of great counterfactual history that a great novelist, I think could entertain.
But it's very easy to see.
How the world that we live in today would be so radically different had the D Day Invasion failed.
One of the things that makes it almost mystical is the role of weather. Talk a little bit about that, because it's one of the most fascinating aspects of how Normandy unfolded and Eisenhower's role in decision making all wrapped into one, and the indirect consequence, which we'll get.
To sure, So you know, Eisenhower comes to London in January of nineteen forty four and discovers that there are meteorologists everywhere, and because these are meteorologists like any good weatherman, the predictions are literally all over the map, and the Army has their meteorologists, the Navy has theirs, the British have theirs, and one of the first orders of business once he begins to sort of direct the operation of Operation Overlord is to consolidate all that. And so he gets this Scottish meteorologist. They stuff him in a military uniform and Eisenhower basically makes him James Martin Stagg, the commander for weather, and week after week Eisenhower brings him to the commander's conference where he has to stand and deliver right next to the Naval commander, the Army commander, the air commanders, and Eisenhower asks him to predict the weather each week, and week after week they start just seeing how good James Martin's Stagg is at this job. And it got to the point where Eisenhower, it was said, could read James Martin's Stagg.
Like a poker player. And that mattered.
Because on June third, just on the eve of the launch of the original D Day invasion, which was scheduled for June fifth, Stagg comes to Eisenhower and says, we have reports from out in the Atlantic and a storm is brewing. The clouds will make any air support or any airborne operations completely infeasible. The visibility will prevent the naval guns from doing much good, and the sea is going to boil. And so these landing crews that are going to be trying to take the Normandy shores, if they get to shore, the men on those boats will be, if nothing else, seasick. And Eisenhower calls a meeting of his commanders, and there's some descent about this whether or not they should go as scheduled, because if they delay the operation, they only have a short window in which to launch it up to June seventh, and if they delay it, they're going to have to delay at least by a month, and there are any number of brave consequences that might flow from that. But Eisenhower, against his gut goes with James Martin Stagg's prediction, and I say against his gut, because, as it's described at the time, the weather in southern England, in Portsmouth, where they're convening for the launching of the invasion, is gorgeous. It's loose, gies, it's hot. No one can remember the weather being ever as beautiful in southern England at this time of year. But Eisenhower trusts this general for weather, who he had come to understand and be able to read like a poker player. And sure enough, as June fourth rolls in, the winds pick up, the clouds come in, the rains and the wind meet every one of Martin Stagg's predictions, and then some. It's now some of the worst weather they've experienced in Portsmouth at that time of year in anyone's memory, and it's beginning to look hopeless. But then Stagg comes back and says, there's a gap, based on our detection and our measurements out deep in the Atlantic, there's going to be a brief window from about June sixth to June seventh where the storms that we are now enduring will be pulled back out into the Atlantic and there'll be this brief gap in weather where the invasion will be possible. And again, you know, Eisenhower is put at a conflict between just his gut and common sense and looking out the window and James Martin's stagg and they end up holding a command conference to make the final decision. And it's about five point thirty in the morning in this old manor house called Southwick House, and it's Eisenhower and his top commanders. They all agree that they should go if they can. And the rain is just drumming down on the windows, the wind is howling around this old, creaky mansion, and it's up to Eisenhower and he sits there and people say it felt like it took ten minutes of him just sitting there quietly. In reality, it was probably ten seconds. And he looks in the eyes of all his commanders and then just says, okay, let's go, and that's the call. And in that moment, everyone in that room like jumps like they're a football team running out.
Onto the field.
And there's this brief moment when Eisenhower is just sitting in that room alone, having made the gravest of possible decisions to send this massive armada with so many lives at stake, literally the freedom of the world at stake, out into the middle of a storm.
The thing that makes it, I think even more poignant is the note that Eisenhower then writes and puts in his pocket.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And so having done this, there's nothing else for him to do. He's done everything he can do as the overall commander of this operation. And now it's like setting a machine in motion. But he stops and he writes out a note. And that note is on the expectation or in the eventuality. It's probably a better way of saying it, that the invasion fails. And what's so poignant about this note is, and I spent so much time just looking at it because it's handwritten and there are a lot of crossing outs. But an announcement, it's essentially little more than a press release to basically say, our landings in Cherbourg have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and the troops have been withdrawn. Right, It's an announcement of the failure of this operation. But every time you can see him starting to make an excuse or make it about him, or try and have some explanation for why everything failed, he stops and he crosses it out, and at the end he's simply says that the troops in the air and the navy just did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do, and if any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it his mind alone. And he puts a period on that, puts an underline on it, and puts it in his wallet in case the worst actually does happen. And in reading that letter, and particularly reading his thought process, all the changes he made to make it all about the sacrifices of the men under his command and all the blame, taking all that blame on his own shoulders for posterity, potentially is precisely why the invasion succeeded. It's because the man who wrote that note was the one in charge of the overall operation.
Yeah.
And I've always thought the moral courage to both make the decision and then to make sure before we knew whether or not it would succeed, that if anything went wrong, he personally would carry the burden. I thought it was one of the great acts of moral courage in the twentieth century. Well, there's a secondary consequence, however, Michael, that you have to share with people, because in a funny way, the bad weather actually ends up helping because the bad weather is coming from the west, so it will pass England, and as England is clearing, northern France is getting works. Describe in what way this actually worked out, ironically to great advantage for the Allies.
Well, for all the reasons that anyone looking out the window as Eisenhower made the call to go, would say, no sane person would launch an invasion in this weather, the Nazis looked at the weather and said, no sane person is going to launch an invasion in this weather. And so Irwin Rommel is specifically who was Hitler's general in charge of what was called the Atlantic Wall. And I'm happy to describe the Atlantic Wall more because it's a devious contraption of one hundred and forty million metric tons of concrete and every device to essentially chew any man trying to attempt to breach this great Atlantic Wall into pieces before he even can get his foot on the ground. Irwin Rommel decides, well, since the weather's so bad, I may as well go home and visit my wife for Herbert birthday, and so the German sort of attention, if nothing else is elsewhere. Hitler as actually, as I understand it, based on reports about Hitler's own behavior, is basically high and goes to bed completely stoned, and so it is actually difficult to wake as the invasion is happening, and even when it does, there is a sort of disbelief that the invasion is real. Most of the German High Command were convinced that the ally's main objective was to target Calais, which is a peninsula further west and actually much closer to Great Britain than the Normandy beaches are, and Eisenhower very assiduously fed into this belief by the Germans with a plan called Operation Fortitude that had fake naval traffic between radio operators pretending to be part of a great armada that was on the way to invade Calais, dummy airplanes, dummy camps in England, and probably most important of all, led by the first US Army Group, whose commanding officer was other than George s Patten. And if there was one person who haunted the dreams of the German High Command, it was George s Patten, and so when the first reports of the invasion start coming in despite the weather, the Germans just think it's a faint. They think this is the fake out, and that George s. Patten is just waiting to cross the channel into calay as soon as they move their forces further west, because they just can't believe that Georges Patten is not at the vanguard of this operation. I'll mention this last piece is George s. Patten can't believe it either. He actually offers Eisenhower I think it's something like three thousand dollars a week just to go lead a brigade in Normandy until he has to finally bring over the Third Army about a month later. And Eisenhower doesn't even take the joke, because Georges Patten is pinning down German division after German division simply by being in England.
It's interesting in that sense, how sometimes you can take your own head and project it into a map what Wellington described as the danger of thinking that you know what's on the other side of the hill. In fact you may not. Part of the German arrogance was that they were so sure they understood all this stuff that they didn't have to question themselves. And I think Eisenower in particular had developed a real ability to say, Okay, I think your point about poker. I mean Eisenow was a very good bridge player and a very good poker player because he understood people, and therefore he could measure who he was up against and did so. I think not just in terms of his enemies, but I've always thought that his instinct when he was first assigned to Europe. He's one of the people Marshall believes is capable of playing a big role, and his instinct that the number one job he had when he first got to London was to truly get to know Cher. That if Churchill decided he liked Eisenhower, many other things would become possible. And so the amount of time he spent at dinner with Churchill and he spent playing cards and talking and telling stories and mostly listening. With Churchill, you tended to listen rather than talk. Is instinct for how people operated was remarkable, and.
It is and I would actually ask this question of you as sort of one of the great politicians of the twentieth century. To me, he seems to have an almost preternatural political instinct, you know, the touch for understanding that at the end of the day, relationships are how things get done. And you can have all of the best laid plans, you can have all of the military equipment in the world, but at the end of the day, it's getting people to move in the same direction. That's a fundamentally human endeavor, not a logical or mathematical one.
I say this in part because my dad was a career soldier and I got to spend as a child three years at Fort Riley, not far from where Eisenhow was raised. It may well have been things he learned growing up in small town Kansas. It was something that Bob Dolan I talked about on occasion that there was a in that generation you measured people and they mattered and you spent time on it. And dol of course, was of the generation that revered Eisenhower. You also had the same experience with Dole that one on one relationships really mattered, and that you either were honorable and trustworthy or you weren't, and you either could work together or you couldn't. And from that many other things became possible. And I think that I had that instinct on the other front. People tended to forget that when he was out of the army. During the period after he retired as Chief of Staff of the Army and before he went back in organized NATO, he was president of Columbia, and very few people realize that he actually was translating thucididies from the Greek as a hobby, just keep his mind going. Now. Conversely, you may know this story that the intellectuals all despised him in part because he read a lot of Westerns. He said, if you're making the kind of decisions I'm making every day, you don't need heavy fiction. You need something that lets you just plan, relax. And it didn't bother him because he thought what he was doing made perfect sense. Then I think it did in your mind looking at all this, how would you measure the transition that Eisenhower made from general to being president?
One of the things that I took away, So just give you a quick methodological geek out a second non method and how I wrote this book just because there's so much written about certainly D Day and even Eisenhower, and I felt that some of it did him a disservice in terms of treating him more as an icon than as a person, and really trying to get into how it was that someone from the middle of Kansas was able to ascend the heights and be arrival of someone like Roosevelt and Churchill and all these other major figures of the period. And to do that, I spent a lot of time just basically just sticking to the primary sources throughout his biography. But with respect to the six months leading up to D Day, my main approach was after I found his day planners and his log of visitors, I just tried to individually reconstruct almost every day of his life to really get a sense of the real time concerns he had, what was really taking up his time, And just trying to be a fly on the wall basically was my approach. And I came away from it just feeling so stressed out right, just the number of things on his plate from so many different directions. You know, it hardly surprised me that he developed a cold that never went away, that he started developing a ringing in the ears, a sty formed in his eye right, not to mention all the smoking. So one thing I kind of think, I say in jest, but I think happens to also probably be true. Is I think the presidency was a lot easier for him, certainly than this period, because he had by that point more wisdom, He was older, and I think also he had understood the stakes of all these things, and how sometimes good decisions are going to go the wrong way and bad decisions will go the right way, and that his job ultimately is to make the best possible decision he can based on the best information he can, and that's his only job. And being able to sort of understand his role in that way, I thought was one of the most fascinating things that I could sort of see developing in his character, which certainly in his presidential period I think is there are rife examples where he very carefully thought, Just like with this Westerns point you mentioned, he was very careful about how he thought. He was very meticulous in a way about keeping his mind as clear and as stable as he possibly could, knowing that the hard decisions were just going to keep coming, like there's always going to just be a torrent of noise that he had to be able to see through in order to make the best possible decisions. And so, you know, I think his transition from certainly leading Operation Overlord to the presidency was helped by the maturity and just the practice in being a decider. To borrow a phrase from George W. Bush right, that that is really your job, and the most important thing you can do is having the best possible people in place to do the jobs that you need them to do, and then just keep your mind as clear as possible and able as possible to make hard decisions under ambiguous circumstances right where you don't know what the right answer is and the only thing you can do is make the best answer. And so I think that was a big difference. I think one of his you know, in reading about the period of his transition, I think one of the things he did have to adjust to in political life was celebrity, because he hadn't really been much of a celebrity until the start of Operation over Lord. A lot of generals had gotten famous, but he had to slowly learn that he no longer had privacy, and I think that was really hard on him because he was a fairly contemplative guy despite some of the barbs that got thrown at him, and so he learned to take himself not all that seriously as a way of dealing with fame, and he has I think a pretty wry sense of humor about himself as well that he then took into the presidency and probably kept him saying. The last thing I'll say about his transition, and maybe these are a little slightly more specific, is a lot of the lessons he is forced to learn and the lead up to Operation Overlord, And this, to me was one of the more fascinating pieces of this story. Echo the hard decisions he has to make as president, and that runs the gamut I mentioned nuclear weapons. He's the first president to be known as the leader of the free world, and on his shoulders during that time is the shift towards a nuclear armed world. And so these are issues that he's now had to think about for ten years, and think about in really quite stark terms. Civil rights is an issue that we don't often think about in the context of the Second World War, but it took up an inordinate amount of his time and attention even during the D Day landings. They'd good Marshal in fact, actually writes him a nasty cable like a day or two after the D Day landings, based on essentially the handling of some cases involving some black soldiers, and so he has to sort of navigate these really touchy, difficult problems of civil rights the military industrial complex. This often comes up, particularly in the context of the debate over the use of air power in the Second World War, and he begins to see the dangers that accrue when you have a essentially ideologically driven part of the military that believes that it is at the vanguard of the future and really enjoys gloating its budgets up without really thinking historically about what the military needs, how wars are actually won. I think that's an interesting lesson that he very much takes forward into the presidency. And then also, just as you said, that human touch, that understanding that relationships are one on one, because all of the major figures he ends up dealing with in the nineteen fifties in one way or another, are people he met or got to know in oftentimes in this period of six months, whether or not that's Joseph Stalin, whether or not that's other Russian generals like General Zukov, certainly Winston Churchill or Anthony Eden. On the British side, Charles de Gaull plays a very large role, as you know in this story, in the continuing sort of saga of France in the nineteen fifties and then sixties. So I don't want to overstate this, but one of the things that made this a real joy to write and research even more than to write, was just the sort of portrait of a president you get as a young man, right how you see him growing from this very competent, very able, very admirable military figure into being the kind of person who is, as you said, something like a modern day George Washington.
I share your affection and admiration for President Eisenhower and for the extraordinary achievements, and certainly D Day is a pretty good time to remember what an enormous contribution they made. Michelle, I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book, The Light of Battle Eisenhower, D Day and the Birth of the American Superpower is available now in Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. I think it's an incredibly important book. I encourage everyone to get a copy and to remember on this eightieth anniversary of D Day, what was at stake and the courage it took.
Thank you so much.
Thank you to my guest Michelle. You can get a link to buy his new book, The Light of Battle Eisenhower D Day and the Birth of the American Superpower on our show page at newtworld dot com. News World is produced by Ganglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingers three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns at gingrichthree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.