Books reviewed by Carol Van Strum:
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand, 2010. Random House hardcover, $27.00.
Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight David Eisenhower, 1961-1969, by David Eisenhower with Julie Nixon Eisenhower, 2010. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, $28.00.
“ANDREA: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!”
GALILEO: No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.”
— Bertoldt Brecht, Galileo
Sometimes a book becomes a best seller not by PR hype and talk shows, but on its own merits, its exceptional qualities, and its readability. Really, it does happen — rarely, but it happens. Such was the case ten years ago with Laura Hillenbrand’s first book, the biography of a horse called Seabiscuit. Few predicted its phenomenal success, which was well deserved. Seabiscuit brought alive not only an extraordinary horse, but also the three men who loved and believed in him against all odds. A symbol of hope for millions during the bleakest years of the Great Depression, the knobby-kneed, ungainly horse who came from nowhere overcame crippling injuries and setbacks to beat the greatest racehorses in the nation.
Ten years later, Hillenbrand does it again with her second book, Unbroken. At first glance, such a title suggests another horse story, but this one is Seabiscuit’s human parallel: the story of a man named Louis Zamperini. Like Seabiscuit, Zamperini had an unprepossessing beginning. From early childhood, his greatest joy was in stealing whatever he could, just for the thrill of it. By adolescence he seemed headed for prison or worse, until in desperation his older brother turned Louis’ speed at running from the cops into an asset and began training him for track.
By the age of 16, Louis was a young phenomenon, qualifying for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where his stunning last lap in the 5,000 meter finals drew admiring attention from Jesse Owens and even Adolph Hitler. After stealing everything not nailed down in both Berlin and the luxury liner returning home, Louis spent the next four years training for the 1940 Olympics in Tokyo, coming within a hair of running the four-minute mile and confident of success.
When war forced cancellation of the 1940 Olympics, Louis, like many athletes, went to war. Ironically, after his bomber ditched in the Pacific, he made it to Japan after all, not as Olympic runner but as a prisoner of war, enduring two years of unspeakable filth, starvation, disease, and relentless torture that systematically destroyed his ability ever to run again. Louis survived — and kept others alive — by exercising his childhood skills at thievery, stealing food and supplies from under the hostile guards’ noses.
“Hope is an action,” Chris Hedges wrote recently. “Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and the more potent hope becomes.”
Louis Zamperini’s ultimate act of rebellion was to survive torments that would continue to tear his soul apart long after war’s end. His final triumph over such pain culminated in his return to Japan at age 85 to carry the Olympic torch through the site of his last POW camp. A decade later, he was still active, teaching delinquent boys the joys and terrors of extreme sports. Nearly a century after the four-year-old who loved to steal jumped from a moving train just for fun, Louis Zamperini comes full circle, connecting with the rebel in today’s adolescents. Truly, as Dwight D. Eisenhower once remarked, “one cannot always read a man’s future in the record of his younger days.”
Like Louis Zamperini, Eisenhower, too, had a mischievous childhood. “I never fully reformed,” he said late in life, recalling the prodigious disciplinary record of his West Point days, where he finished 125th in discipline out of 162 students. Also like Louis, Ike saw his life’s dream of an athletic career shattered by a knee injury that would plague him life-long. From such unlikely beginnings would emerge years later two heroes of World War II.
Some twenty years ago, David Eisenhower wrote an exhaustive account of his grandfather Ike’s war years in Eisenhower At War, 1943-45. David, for whom Eisenhower named Camp David, was Ike’s only grandson, and grew up not so much in his famous grandsire’s shadow as under his wing. Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969 is David’s account of Ike’s “retirement” years following his eight years as President.
David was 12 years old when Eisenhower relinquished the burden of the presidency to John F. Kennedy, and his book evokes the awe and occasional diffidence of a child toward a belovéd but powerful adult. With fond embarrassment he describes a 1962 trip to Europe with his grandparents to visit historic World War II battle scenes and famous heroes like Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, a trip endured by David and his sister with ill-concealed teenage boredom.
More than a warm-hearted memoir, Going Home to Glory offers vivid glimpses backstage in the halls of power throughout the turbulent 1960s. Here is Eisenhower explaining his 1954 refusal to send troops to Vietnam in support of French forces “that had proven themselves unable to pacify the region in five years of war.” Here also are Eisenhower’s passionate, behind-the-scenes championing of civil rights and his quiet, forceful efforts to keep the Republican party from slipping over the edge of right-wing fanaticism. Here are one succeeding president after another, regardless of party or politics, seeking the advice and wisdom of a revered elder.
For anyone who lived the wartime years, for all who survived the civil rights and anti-war battles of the ’60s, and for those today seeking a better model for our nation’s leadership, David’s memoir of his grandfather is a loving and invaluable resource. Its title reflects not the glory of war, which Ike deplored, but the glory of heaven, taken from the old hymn Ike recalled from his aunt’s gravestone:
And now in Christ believing,
the Father too can say
I am going home to glory
A golden crown to wear
O meet me, meet me over there
Little coincidence, then, that although Ike and Louis Zamperini never met, these two 20th Century heroes were linked through their friendship with the Rev. Billy Graham, who visited Ike at his deathbed in Walter Reed Hospital. Many years earlier, a young Billy Graham had rescued Zamperini from his postwar descent into alcohol, violence, and despair.
In a land bereft of heroes, Unbroken and Going Home to Glory offer tantalizing glimmers of hope.