Becoming Eisenhower
How Ike Rose from Obscurity to Supreme Allied Commander
Michael Lee Lanning, Stackpole Books, 2024, 288 pages
Book Review published on: August 22, 2025
The historiography of Gen. and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower is already extensive. Readers might question the utility of another book on this influential man. For the author of Becoming Eisenhower: How Ike Rose from Obscurity to Supreme Allied Commander, a significant gap existed that he aimed to fill. Most biographies of "Ike" focus his years during World War II, when he rose to become the supreme commander of Allied forces in the European Theater, or of his terms as president of the United States. The gap was in charting how this man from a small town in Kansas was able to succeed at the highest strategic levels. The author describes this book not so much as a biography but rather as an account of the people and experiences that developed Eisenhower.
Author Michael Lee Lanning, a retired army officer who has written extensively on military history, became interested in Eisenhower while researching the professional development of George S. Patton. Becoming Eisenhower is largely based on published sources, with Eisenhower's own At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, along with some material from Crusade in Europe but more so from the Eisenhower Diaries as major sources. Lanning has also mined biographies such as Kenneth S. Davis's Soldier of Democracy from 1946 and more recent biographies. The result is a work focused on the career and development of Eisenhower before he became nationally and later world famous.
Lanning starts by examining Ike's boyhood in Abilene, Kansas, in a family of modest means where hard work was expected. From there, Lanning quickly turns to the real focus of the book, the years from when Eisenhower entered West Point with the class of 1915 for the "free" education, through his career until World War II. He traces Ike's experiences in the late 1910s through the '20s and the '30s as he moved through a series of positions that honed his formidable bureaucratic skills and introduced him to mentors who assisted and shaped him.
Eisenhower's career until World War II was a series of frustrations. Ike missed serving directly in World War I when the Armistice led to his cancelled deployment. Instead, he spent the war training soldiers in the tank corps at Camp Gettysburg. Perhaps as damaging to his professional future were some articles he wrote about the future of armored warfare. His early advocacy of the potential of tanks placed him outside of the inner circle of the infantry branch, a stigma he never completely shook. He longed to command troops, and that longing stemmed both from a desire to lead and because leading troops brought respect and promotion in the Army. Much to his dismay, his skill at coaching football teams, first demonstrated after an injury sidelined him at West Point, meant that that many of his early assignments involved coaching rather than leading units. Writing was his other skill that was so valuable to superiors that his requests for command assignments were repeatedly denied.
The chief of infantry did not support Eisenhower and turned down his request to attend the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. Fox Conner, who had mentored Ike extensively while serving in the Canal Zone, had Ike assigned to recruiting duty, putting him temporarily under the control of the Adjutant General branch rather than his basic branch of Infantry. The chief of the Adjutant General corps sent Eisenhower to the Command and General Staff School. Conner's faith was rewarded when Eisenhower graduated first in his class. While that honor did not directly bring the desired assignments, it did mark him as an especially capable officer.
Despite his academic achievement, what saved his career was the impression he made on several mentors and sponsors. The most important was Conner but Douglas MacArthur and John Pershing also played a part. Eisenhower must have left a deep impression on George C. Marshall, who would later select him over many senior officers to function as his "subordinate commander" after Marshall became the Army's chief of staff
Becoming Eisenhower is a useful study of the development and education of Eisenhower. The publisher, Stackpole Books, can be faulted for letting in a few anachronisms, such as Eisenhower's involvement in the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works Administration being interrupted by the Army's response to the Bonus March (p. 155). In a similar vein, readers will be surprised to learn that MacArthur made a visit to the Pentagon in 1937 (p. 176). While no more than minor irritants, these and other errors detract from the authority of the work.
An irony not explicit in the book is that while Eisenhower's career path would not normally bring high rank in the U.S. Army—he believed he might make colonel—Ike was able to reach the heights of positions and rank. He reached that pinnacle despite the system that normally selected officers for key positions and high rank. The same could be said of Marshall, who likewise often served in assignments that were not paths to high rank. In the modern U.S. Army, officers with careers similar to theirs prior to World War II would also likely retire as lieutenant colonels. The massive expansion of the Army for war created opportunities not available in peacetime. Becoming Eisenhower should appeal to readers with an interest in the professional development of Eisenhower, providing an example of how mentors and personal connections can resurrect a seemingly stagnant career.
Book Review written by: Barry M. Stentiford, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas