Robert Hargrove

Ike and Fox Connor

I picked up a book on CD called General Ike and soon found myself listening to a fascinating and intriguing tale. Central to it was an extraordinary man who was mentor to three men who had the biggest impact on winning WWII: Dwight Eisenhower, George C. Marshall, and George S. Patton.

Unlike George Patton, who came from a very wealthy NY family and looked at entrance into West Point as the beginning of a life-long adventure in the military, Dwight Eisenhower came from the wrong side of the tracks in Abilene Kansas and had entered West Point mainly to get a free college education.

One Sunday afternoon in 1921, Patton invited Ike and Mamie over to his house at Fort Meade for a Sunday brunch with a group of people. One person there just happened to be Brigadier General Fox Connor, a man who would become Ike’s mentor and transform his life.

Connor had gone to France with General Pershing of the AEF Headquarters in WWI where he became known as a near genius in his job as Chief of Operations. At the end of the war, he was only 44, but kept his rank as Brigadier General.The work that Ike and Patton were doing with tanks had come to Connor’s attention and Connor seized upon this opportunity to take a look at what was going on. He asked the two younger officers to tour him around Camp Meade and show him their tank training site. This they did enthusiastically, as very few senior officers were giving them encouragement. Connor was impressed with Ike’s game-changing ideas.

General Connor knew that the Treaty of Versaille was flawed and that a second war was inevitable. Yet he knew that the next generation of talented leaders would be needed to fight it. He kept a “Black Book” of talented young officers in the army with the highest potential, and decided to make it a personal mission to help them grow and develop. Amongst these were George C. Marshall, George S Patton, and George C. Marshall who had served under him in the AEF in Europe. It is fascinating to consider that Connor was a mentor to the three men who had the greatest impact on the Allied victory in World War II.

Despite the opposition of the Chief of Infantry and General Rockenbach of Fort Meade, who wanted Ike to remain as a football coach, Connor used his influence to have Ike be appointed his Executive Officer. At the time, Connor was serving as the Head of a Command in the Panama Canal Zone in charge of making sure that the strategic assset could be defended. (Actually the job involved making sure the trails around the command could be successfully traversed by soldiers and pack animals.)

Ike who has become discouraged about his prospects in the military and devastated about the early death of his first born son, Dwight Icky Eisenhower, took on the assignment with relish. Connor had provided an opening to a new world for Ike. Ike arrived in Panama Canal Zone in 1922. The camp was hot and humid and perched over a hill and mudslides were frequent. Living quarters were miserable; Ike described them as awful, flimsy old construction camps with bats and mosquitoes everywhere. His house was like a Turkish bath after every storm.

If domestic conditions were difficult, the relationship with Connor on a professional basis was enormously rewarding. As Ike eloquently said in his personal memoir, At Ease, “Connor was a tall, easy going Mississippian, who never put on any airs of any kind; the most warm, open, honest and ablest man I have ever known.” It was as if Ike had entered a super-accelerated leadership development university with one professor and one student—General Connor and himself—with a curriculum that would last for 3 ½ years.

Ike went on to say about Connor, “He accomplished one profound change in my attitude, almost immediately, with profound and endless results. In asking me casual questions, he discovered that I had almost no interest in history.”

Ike told Connor’s that he had a boyhood desire to be a great leader and had been an avid reader of history as a youth. However, Ike was offended by how history was taught at West Point—an out and out memory course. In the case of the battle of Gettysburg, each student was expected to memorize where every Brigadier was in the battle from hour-to-hour during the days of the battle, with no attempt to explain the meaning of the battle and why it came about. If this was what history was about, Ike wanted no part of it.

General Connor made no comment, but later that night Ike found himself invited to Connor’s quarters and saw that he had an extraordinary library on history, military affairs, and the humanities. The two talked for a while and then Connor offered Ike 2 to 3 historical novels to read. “You might be interested in these,” he said quietly. One was The Long Roll by Mary Johnston, and others were The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard in the Napoleonic Wars, and The Crisis, by the American, Winston Churchill. They were stirring stories and Ike liked them.

When Ike returned the novels, telling Connor’s he liked them, Connor queried, “Wouldn’t you like to know about what the real political and military situation was at the time these books were written?” Ike said he would and Connor then took some other books down for him to read. The long and the short of it was that Ike soon found himself fascinated by power politics, military strategy, and the psychology of human beings.

He read Clausewitz’s On War three times. John Codman Ropes on the Civil War, biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and William S. Sheridan’s memoirs. The two spent many hours studying the campaigns in detail, charting the strategies and details of operations on butcher block paper. The best chance for these conversations was when they were out on reconnaissance on horseback inspecting the trails around the canal to make sure they were passable in the event of needing to defend it.

Usually they were in the saddle eight hours a day, most of it at a walk. General Connor would often tell stories about the characters in the books Ike was reading, weaving a lesson into them. For example, he would start talking about The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard in the Napoleonic Wars, commenting that Gerard’s most notable attribute was his vanity—Gerard was utterly convinced that he was the bravest soldier, greatest swordsman, accomplished horseman, and gallant lover in all France. According to Connor, Gerard was not entirely wrong, since he displayed notable bravery on many occasions, but his enormous ego often undercut his relationship with others whose cooperation he depended upon.

Connor would end such stories told on the trail with a TPOV: “Always take your job seriously, never yourself;” or “Leading an army in battle, is less difficult than leading alliances;” “All generalities are false including this one.” Ike later wrote that it was a pleasure to give credit for these three lines which Connor used thousands of times.

After a long day in the saddle, charting trails on a make-shift map and clearing them, just before dark, Connor and Ike would camp and make supper. It was sitting around a campfire usually between the hours of 6:30 and 10:00 pm that the serious teaching would begin. Connor questioned Ike closely about the books they were reading at the time. What were the conditions, strategies people developed, and the specific decisions made? What did he think would have been the result if people had made the opposite decision?

In order to teach Ike about the psychology of military and political leaders, General Connor also gave him books to read in philosophy and the humanities. He read Plato, Tacitus, Shakespeare, and modern writers such as Nietzsche. Connor didn’t ask Ike to read all of these books, but rather the passages that pertained to the discussion at hand. Connor, the master mentor, was very fond of the bard and could quote him at length by heart in a lyrical way; yet saw practical merit for his protégé in reading his works.

Says Ike, “Now when Shakespeare wrote plays he frequently portrayed soldiers, not fictional ones, such as Julius Caesar, Prince Hal and Richard, taking into account his first hand relationships with some of the leaders of his time and other times. Connor used these tales to illustrate the characters and as well as fatal flaws of great military leaders, which to emulate and which to avoid doing so.”

It seemed to Ike that every time he crossed the compound and arrived at General Connor’s quarters to ask for a book, Connor seemed genuinely delighted that he was there. He not only gave him the book he asked for, but offered another one or two.

“Our conversations continued throughout the three years I served under him in Panama.” Ike could feel himself transforming from a lowly caterpillar to a butterfly with wings under Connor’s tutelage. He transformed from a young officer with a reputation of being a kind of maverick with average performance into an extraordinary leader who would eventually become the Supreme Allied Commander in WWII and President of the United States.

Said Ike, “I can never express all of my gratitude to this one gentleman, for it took years for me to realize the value he had led me through.” And then General Connor was gone. “But in a lifetime of association with great and good men. He is the one more or less invisible figure to whom I owe an incalculable debt.”

More on Fox Connor and Ike in next blog.