Colin Rafferty
KANSAS, SHE SAID, IS THE NAME OF THE STAR (#34)
Eisenhower as Farmhands
He’s whatever we need him to be, plays whatever role we need him to fill. Before he is able to give the orders, he must follow them. After the war, both parties court him as a candidate. At the end, Dorothy looks at the farmhands from her bed: “And you, and you, and you, and you were there.” They laugh, and she concludes, “But you couldn’t have been, could you?”
Eisenhower as Auntie Em and Uncle Henry
There’s no place like home but this, a two-story frame house in Denison, Texas, just over the border from Oklahoma. He is born there, and then his family returns to Kansas eighteen months later. He’ll have no memory of this home, although he’ll return after the war, and again as candidate, and again as former President. Remember: home is a place to which we are always trying to return.
Eisenhower as Professor Marvel
He’s an old Kansas man himself, born and bred in the heart of the western wilderness. Where he grows up, he is as far from water as he can be, an ocean of wheat on either side of him.
Eisenhower as Dorothy
A great war comes. He is a young man, transported from Kansas. To reach the war, the army mobilizes over terrible roads. At night, his bones rattled from potholes and washboards, he dreams of a gleaming system of roads rising above the country, crossing it, linking its cities, a road to follow wherever it might go.
Eisenhower as Tin Man
Another war on the same continent. This time he is in charge, Supreme Allied Commander. When he sends the men to the beaches to fight and die and perhaps succeed, what does he feel? A sorrow? A hope? A heartbreaking? In his headquarters, he waits for the news to arrive, his heart beating faster and faster.
Eisenhower as Scarecrow
He watches over the barbed-wire field, the birds frightened away by his approach. The living here are more scarecrow than he, but they are fallen, empty husks of men. The crows might return to the camp, so he watches, witnesses.
Eisenhower as Wizard
After the war, he drifts for a while—NATO chief, memoirist, university president—before he enters politics and then the White House. Professor Marvel: “Suddenly, the wind changed direction and the balloon floated down into the heart of this noble city, where I was instantly acclaimed Oz, the first Wizard Deluxe. Times being what they were, I accepted the job.” He uses smoke and mirrors to speak to the press and nation. He builds his road. They ask him questions: Russia? Germany? A place called Indochina? He has learned how to answer without answering. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Eisenhower as Cowardly Lion
A new look: NSC 162/2. A report. Build more of them, he says. Enough to destroy a dozen times, a hundred times over. He remembers waiting for the reports from Normandy. He remembers the relief of not invading Japan, the million US lives exchanged for a quarter million of theirs. The bomb is a good. He is not afraid.
Eisenhower as Wicked Witch of the West
“You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is a certainty that it will go over very quickly.”
Eisenhower as Toto
At the end, he understands. In his farewell address, he warns of the military-industrial complex, shows its machinations at work, trying to pull back the curtain. What can one small dog nipping at the heels of giants do? Even he, once a titan, is worn down by eight years. He sees Vietnam. He is predicting here, a map of Iraq, Afghanistan, more for us to discover behind the curtain.
Eisenhower as Glinda
He retires to the battlefield, quiet now, a Gettysburg farmhouse. There’s no place that’s home but this. When he dies, years later, they put his body in a simple soldier’s casket and send it back to Kansas, to Abilene, from which the interstate highway runs, white dashes dividing the lanes, blurring together into a single line as they pick up speed, trying their best to follow it home.
COLIN RAFFERTY teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the author of Hallow This Ground (Break Away Books/Indiana University Press), a collection of essays on monuments and memorials. “Kansas, She Said, Is the Name of the Star (#34)” is one of a series of forty-seven essays on the presidents.
