December 7th, 1943. In Tunis, Franklin Roosevelt walked into a room to make a decision that would shape both D-Day and the American presidency. Sitting in front of him was Dwight Eisenhower, a general who only a short time earlier had been virtually unknown outside the small world of professional officers.
Roosevelt had just come from Cairo and Tyrron, where Joseph Stalin had pushed hard for a cross channel invasion, and Winston Churchill had argued over when and where such a gamble should be made. Now in North Africa, Roosevelt quietly told Eisenhower that he would command Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Western Europe.
In that moment, the responsibility for the largest amphibious assault in history began to settle on a man with no combat command experience, chosen by a president who understood very well how dangerous it could be when victorious generals later turned into political leaders. This episode is not only the story of how D-Day got its commander.
It is also the story of how that commander ended up in the Oval Office and why Roosevelt thought he could take that risk without putting a general in a position to rule the country. Less than 3 years before that meeting, Eisenhower had been a lieutenant colonel in a small pre-war American army that only a short time earlier had numbered under 200,000 men.
He had never commanded troops in combat at division, core, or army level. What had brought him to prominence was his work on planning problems. In the months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall brought Eisenhower to Washington and put him to work on global strategy questions, including where to concentrate American efforts against Germany and how to move forces across both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Colleagues later recalled Eisenhower working late over maps and outlines, revising plans repeatedly as he tried to balance competing demands. Marshall came to value Eisenhower’s judgment and was willing to promote him on that basis rather than on name recognition. By the middle of 1942, Marshall sent him to London to command United States forces in the European theater and then to lead the first large Anglo-American invasion of the war in French North Africa.
Operation Torch, launched in November 1942, served as Eisenhower’s first real test as a theater commander. In North Africa, he had to manage British and American disagreements in planning meetings, deal with officers from Vichi, France, whose loyalties were not always clear, and make operational decisions that carried political messages to London, Washington, and the various French factions in Alers.
The situation was complicated, but it resembled the kind of coalition and political management that would later be needed on a larger scale in Western Europe. To understand why Roosevelt chose this comparatively new figure for such responsibility, it helps to look at his general concerns about powerful military leaders in politics.
Roosevelt was a serious reader of history and was well aware that figures such as Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonapart had begun as successful commanders and ended as rulers. He also had in mind a contemporary example. Douglas MacArthur already had a major public reputation before Pearl Harbor with a Medal of Honor, service as Army Chief of Staff, and a highly visible role in the Philippines.
In 1932, during the bonus army crisis in Washington, MacArthur had commanded troops, including cavalry, in an operation that drove protesting veterans, out of their encampments, and contemporary accounts indicated that his actions went further than President Herbert Hoover had intended. Roosevelt, then governor of New York and a presidential candidate, observed that episode from outside the administration, and many later commentators have suggested that it contributed to his sense that MacArthur’s approach to civilian authority could be problematic. In the Second World War, MacArthur became a central public figure in the Pacific campaign and was widely covered in the press, including his statements about returning to the Philippines. And some Republicans quietly discussed him as a possible future presidential nominee. All of this meant that when Roosevelt considered which generals to place in the most visible roles, he was weighing not only their military skills, but also the potential political consequences of giving them major command.
Roosevelt and his advisers understood that a highly decorated commander with a strong public image and potential electoral appeal could become a major political force after the war and Douglas MacArthur clearly fit that description. At the same time, Roosevelt needed MacArthur to continue directing operations in the Pacific against Japan, and MacArthur remained in that distant theater while the war there continued.
When it came to choosing the Supreme Allied Commander for the planned invasion of Western Europe, Roosevelt had to weigh a different set of options. Many senior officers in 1943 regarded Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall as the natural candidate to lead the cross channel operation. Marshall had played a central role in designing the wartime expansion of the United States Army from a small interwar force into an organization of millions of soldiers.
and he was widely respected in London, in Moscow, and in Washington. However, Roosevelt judged that Marshall was indispensable in his existing position. As chief of staff, Marshall was coordinating global strategy, managing the flow of men and material to both the European and Pacific theaters, handling relations with Congress, and serving as Roosevelt’s principal military adviser.
Moving him to a field command in Europe risked disrupting the coordination of the overall war effort. Roosevelt therefore decided that Marshall would remain in Washington to direct the global war and that another general, one who did not yet have a strong political profile at home, would be appointed to command in Western Europe.
The name that emerged was Dwight Eisenhower. In early December 1943, Roosevelt approved a message to Joseph Stalin confirming that the Western Allies intended to mount a cross channel invasion in 1944 and that Eisenhower had been selected to command it. Shortly afterward, Roosevelt visited Eisenhower’s headquarters in North Africa, where Eisenhower was already responsible at theater level for operations involving North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and Roosevelt informed him that he would take command of the invasion of Western Europe. This decision placed responsibility for a very large Allied force, including hundreds of thousands of soldiers and extensive naval and air assets, under Eisenhower’s authority. It addressed the immediate question of who would lead Operation Overlord, but also meant that if the invasion succeeded, Eisenhower would inevitably become closely associated with victory in Europe.
At the same time, Eisenhower repeatedly stated that he opposed the idea of pursuing political office while serving as a general. In mid 1943, when a visiting political figure raised the possibility that he might one day be asked to run for the presidency, Eisenhower responded strongly that a serving officer should not involve himself in party politics while the war continued.
As public attention to his name grew, he continued to tell questioners that he had no interest in political office. At one point, using humorous exaggeration to say that he did not want any political job at all. and in another statement he argued that a career soldier ought to stay out of high civil office except in the most exceptional national circumstances.
These comments reinforced his image as a professional military officer rather than a politician. Roosevelt following developments in the Mediterranean could also see that Eisenhower’s role there involved political as well as military decisions. During operation torch in North Africa, Eisenhower agreed to recognize Admiral France Darlong, a senior figure from the Vichi regime as a temporary authority in French North African territories in order to end organized resistance and stabilize the situation. The arrangement provoked
strong criticism in both Washington and London from those who regarded any deal with a Vichi leader as unacceptable. But it did help to bring fighting to a close in that area, reopen ports, and allow allied supply movements to proceed more smoothly. In this way, Eisenhower’s Mediterranean record showed that he was prepared to make politically sensitive compromises when he thought they were necessary for the military campaign.
In planning the invasion of France, Eisenhower again had to deal with political as well as military questions. One major issue was control of the Allied air forces before the landings. He argued that for the invasion to succeed, British and American air assets had to be coordinated so they could focus on targets such as rail lines, bridges, and other transport links that supported German defenses in France.
Some senior air commanders preferred to continue concentrating on bombing targets in Germany itself, and civilian leaders were concerned about the effect of attacks on occupied French territory. The dispute became serious enough that Eisenhower indicated he could not be responsible for the invasion unless he was given clear authority over the use of strategic bombers for the period immediately surrounding the landings.
He also pushed for a straightforward command structure for the operation, preferring a clearly defined chain of authority to arrangements that would have relied on committee style decision-making. These debates illustrated that his role in Europe involved managing the views of different governments and services as well as directing formations in the field.
On the night of June 5th, 1944, Eisenhower visited airborne units preparing to leave for the first wave of the operation. He carried with him a short written statement in which he accepted personal responsibility in case the landings failed. A note he did not ultimately need to release. On June 6th, 1944, more than 150,000 Allied troops went ashore in Normandy under his overall command.
Casualties were significant, but the Allies secured a foothold in France. Over the following months, Allied forces advanced across the countryside. Paris was liberated and the campaign continued toward Germany. During this period, Eisenhower’s public profile increased sharply. His image appeared frequently in the press and he was widely associated with the Western Allied effort in Europe, but he continued to avoid overt involvement in domestic politics.
During Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 campaign for a fourth term, Eisenhower did not endorse candidates and kept his public statements focused on military matters. Roosevelt’s death on April 12th, 1945 brought Harry Truman to the presidency at a moment when fighting in Europe was reaching its final stages and Soviet forces were pushing in from the east.
As vice president, Truman had not been fully briefed on several major wartime programs, including the atomic project. And in his first weeks in office, he received a series of intensive briefings on military and diplomatic issues. In that context, he also met Eisenhower and became familiar with his experience as commander of a large multinational force that had worked with leaders such as Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle.
After Germany’s surrender, Eisenhower returned to Washington as Army Chief of Staff. In 1948, he left that post and became president of Colombia University. And a few years later, he went back to Europe as the first Supreme Allied Commander of the newly formed NATO. These positions kept him in prominent but formally nonpartisan roles.
Surveys of public opinion in the late 1940s and early 1950s indicated that he enjoyed broad popularity and political figures in both major parties discussed the possibility that if he chose to run for office, he might attract support across party lines. Within that context, discussions inside both major parties in the late 1940s and early 1950s often came back to the same possibility that the general who had led the Allied campaign in Western Europe might also be the person to lead the country in peacetime politics. Harry Truman engaged with that idea more directly than Franklin Roosevelt ever had. at the Potam conference in 1945. He later recalled telling Eisenhower in private that if Eisenhower chose to seek the presidency in 1948, Truman would be prepared to support him. Around 1947, when Truman’s own political standing was under pressure, his diary and later accounts indicate that he considered an even more unusual idea in which Eisenhower would be the Democratic nominee for president and Truman would be willing to run as his vice president, especially if the
Republicans selected Douglas MacArthur as their candidate. The reasoning reflected Truman’s judgment that if a general was likely to be in the race, Eisenhower would be a less divisive figure than MacArthur. Through these years, Eisenhower continued to say that he would not enter partisan politics while still in uniform or while holding positions that he regarded as military or quasi military, including his later post at NATO.
And he framed his duty in those periods as service to the country rather than to a party. The situation changed in 1952 after resigning as supreme allied commander in Europe for NATO. And in the face of strong encouragement from political leaders and public opinion, Eisenhower agreed to run for president. He aligned himself with the Republican party, ran a campaign that drew heavily on his wartime reputation and his stance on cold war issues, and defeated the Democratic candidate Adlay Stevenson by a wide margin. During his presidency, he worked with his administration to bring the Korean War to an armistice, supported a generally cautious approach to defense spending compared with some of the more aggressive proposals of the period, and in his farewell address in 1961, he warned Americans about the potential long-term influence of what he called the military-industrial complex on democratic institutions.
After serving two terms, he left office in accordance with constitutional limits and retired to his home near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In later historical analysis, Roosevelt’s view of Eisenhower is often described as cautious but not hostile. There is no evidence that Roosevelt expected Eisenhower to attempt a coup or to use military force against domestic institutions.
Rather, his broader concern, shaped by historical examples of powerful generals entering politics, was that any highly popular commander might be swept into civil office on a tide of public gratitude in ways that could put strain on habits of civilian restraint. Roosevelt’s distribution of responsibilities among his leading generals, keeping MacArthur in the Pacific, Marshall in Washington, and Eisenhower in coalition command, reflected his desire to balance military necessity with those political considerations. In Eisenhower, he had chosen a commander who could manage complex alliances and who publicly treated political office as something a professional soldier should not pursue lightly. When Eisenhower eventually did become president, he carried out his two terms within the usual constitutional framework and stepped down on schedule, which stands in contrast to the more dramatic historical models of military leaders taking power that had worried earlier generations.
