The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

In the fall of 1929, Eisenhower was assigned as an aide to Brig. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley, then serving as executive assistant to Frederick Payne, assistant secretary of war. After a delightful but marginal assignment in France, Eisenhower was able to observe and participate in the making of national defense policy. “Except for the fact that I do not like to live in a city,” he confided to his diary, “I am particularly pleased with this detail. The General is alert and energetic and certainly enjoys a fine reputation for accomplishment in the Army. I am also looking forward to the opportunity of learning something about the economic and industrial conditions that will prevail in this country in the event of a major war.”16 For two years Ike studied the problems of industrial mobilization in wartime, the start of a lifelong concern with the problem of America’s military preparedness. In the late 1920s the U.S. Army was in dreadful shape, with barely 120,000 men. (By comparison, Eisenhower would have three million men under his command in Europe at the close of World War II.) Congress had slashed the army’s budget, and as a consequence the links between industry and the military procurement process had withered.