What If D-Day Had Failed? With Michel Paradis

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1:27Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. you know I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:01Anyways, let's get to it.

2:10Michelle Parody joins me today to talk about his incredible book, The Light of Battle, which discusses the life and legacy of Dwight Eisenhower. Set in the months leading up to D-Day, the book takes us through Ike's growth from a respected general to one of the singular figures of American history. Now more than ever, we need to be learning from the man who made the leader of the free world the mantle of the American presidency. Let's go to the conversation.

2:47So joining us now on Open Book is Michel Paradis. He's a leading human rights lawyer. He's an historian. He's an acclaimed author, and he's written a bestselling book. And I will tell you, because I am a World War II buff, and this is my favorite part of American history, this is my favorite book of 2024 thus far. The title of the book is The Light of Battle, Eisenhower D-Day, and the Birth of the American Superpower. It's also a brilliant article in The Atlantic written by Mr. Parity. So welcome to the show. I appreciate you coming on. Before we get into the book, tell us a little bit, introduce yourself to our viewers and listeners.

3:27Tell us a little bit about your background. Sure. So I grew up in and around basically Allentown, Pennsylvania, if anyone knows that. Moved to New York when I was 17. Went to college and law school here. Then initially was planning on being a big time Wall Street lawyer, which I started doing before I had a good quarter life crisis, as they call them now, and went off and got a PhD at Oxford as a way of running away with the circus. And while there, I actually was a lawyer. And so while I was working on my PhD, I started doing a lot of international human rights work. And that in turn got me into all sorts of interesting places, interesting cases.

4:07Some of my sort of more, I think, larger contributions, if I can call them that, were in the Guantanamo litigation, where I was ultimately hired by the Department of Defense to represent a number of detainees, which is, you can imagine, is an extremely difficult, strange, complicated job all by itself. Yeah, no kidding. And so from there, I continued on. I've written a couple books now. And yeah, the most recent is about Eisenhower. So what drew you to Eisenhower? I think, you know, the thing that drew me most to Eisenhower, I heard a quote, actually, from the other day that basically said, art is there to tell us and show us the things we overlook and tell us about the things we overlook.

4:48And, you know, Eisenhower is someone who as prominent as he is, right, he was even on the coins when I was a kid. I think it's often overlooked. He's, you know, probably one of the most powerful generals in all of human history, yet he is raised by religious pacifists in Kansas. He comes from basically nothing to the highest, you know, echelons of power, not only in the United States, but in the world. He commands probably the most complicated, intricate military operations of, again, all of human history. Yet in his time in the army, he always has as his fallback plan, I'm going to go off and become a gaucho, basically a cowboy in Argentina.

5:27You know, he's just such an interesting person and his public image is almost deliberately boring. And that, you know, as a writer, just for me became utterly fascinating because he's as complicated and in some ways as contradictory as America itself. And he's a quintessential American figure. And so to me, that understanding him, getting behind that received iconography that we have about Eisenhower was really what drew me to the project more than anything else. So it's interesting because a lot of Americans don't realize this because, you know, we see history, of course, with all of this great 2010 vision.

6:06I don't think hindsight is 2020, by the way. I think it's 2010. I think it's way more clear than 2020. And so we go back through history. We see these things as inevitable. But as you write in the book, his rise is anything but inevitable. He hurts his knees playing my alma mater, Tufts University. and he hurts himself at West Point. It's not clear how he's going to progress there. He goes to work for MacArthur. He's the antithesis of General MacArthur in terms of his personality. But then he's very good friends with people like George Patton, another guy that he's very different from, Omar Bradley, who I think is probably most similar to Ike.

6:44But how does he rise? How does he rise? Yeah, it's a great question, and it's what I was fascinated by. I was like, how does that actually happen? And how do you get from the middle of Kansas to to where he was? And I think a couple of different things. An important one is he really knew how to cultivate mentors. And that's an underappreciated skill, particularly for young people. But the idea that, you know, there are people who have because of their life experience, because of what they've accomplished, because of their education, any number of things are going to know more than you. And you have to always look for what can this person teach me?

7:23and have the humility to come to people and really, you know, be, and this is something that's taught in the military, but I think is rare outside of it is, you know, a followership, right? The idea that your job is to help someone else get their job done. And Eisenhower understood that really well and always did look for mentors who he could learn from something from. And also, I think had the basic humility of that he looked at everybody as someone he could learn something from. And so he accumulates ideas, ways of behaving, you know, styles of leadership, just even, you know, ticks and expressions from people over time.

8:00And one of the great sort of joys of the research of this book was trying to really put his life together and figure out how he collected all of these ideas. And as you said, it's everything from, you know, the gridiron playing football, but I think probably even more important, coaching football, because after he blows his knee out, you know, he can't play football anymore, he might not even stay in the army after that because he's injured. But one thing he realizes that he's quite good at, and certainly something the army really appreciates is someone who can coach a winning football team, particularly against Tufts.

8:30And so they have, you know, he develops, you know, a philosophical sense from one of his mentors in Panama. So he reads, you know, great thinkers going, you know, well back, not just in military history, but in philosophy. And you can see him sort of picking up these ideas from people as diverse as Carl von Clausewitz and Nietzsche. And he understands, I think, you know, fundamentally that, you know, the world is better off if we approach it trying to solve people's real problems. And one of the, I think, most admirable traits, and the book is not hagiography, right? I try to present him more to all, but I think one of his most admirable traits is a aversion to people who are way too certain about anything.

9:16Right. He has that. He's not only humble himself, but he projects that onto other people so that when people are fanatical about ideologies, particularly, he is suspicious of them and he and he thinks carefully and he understands that that's something to be avoided. And I think that's why he is, you know, the 20th century figure who fought the two great fanatical ideologies of the 20th century, fascism in Europe and Soviet communism after that. And so that I think is how he learned to become the kind of person he was, particularly where he was from, was through humility and really looking to learn from others with a truly open mind.

9:54So you're correct. It's not a hagiographic book. And I'm going to pay you a huge compliment, Michelle. You write like a fiction writer. I feel like I'm inside the brains of these people and you're also exposing their flaws. So who are some of your favorite fiction writers that you've been drawn to who you, whose writing style has influenced you? For me, um, the ones I often, I'm probably basically stealing, um, like Tom Wolfe. Uh, I, I just, I drank, I remember when I first read Tom Wolfe and I know a lot of people have had this experience. You just read it and you just can't believe you're reading something that clear with that much insight that just has so much energy behind it.

10:34Which of his books do you like the most? Honestly, The Right Stuff. I've read that book probably now twice. I love all his books. Don't get me wrong. There are a lot, and I can even rank them for you if you want to go deep on Tom Wolfe. But I remember the first time I read The Right Stuff, and there's that opening chapter where he's talking about basically just how dangerous it is to be a fighter pilot. And he has this almost poetic sort of device that he uses where he says they take the bridge coats out and all the little men line up and then they start talking about, oh, well, he should have, you know, pulled the injection cord faster.

11:08Everyone knows they're supposed to look for their bolts. And just in that very, very short opening passage, you not only just have, again, gorgeous, gorgeous writing, but you just get into the heads of these people so quickly and so fast and you see the world the way they do uh even though they don't realize you know i mean their own sort of narrow view of the world and that's what's so brilliant i think about tom wolf as a writer he really um you know captures people um as they are um you know warts and all but that makes you love them too because they're they're fascinating so tom wolf is obviously a huge influence on me uh tony morrison i read i remember reading her and in a similar kind of thing i remember it was the bluest eye was a book i read when i was in college and i still remember it.

11:48Just like just sometimes like prose just wash over you in a way that, you know, really transforms you and makes you just think about the world in an entirely different way. Who else do I like now? There's a guy now who's a novelist who's really interesting. By the name of Bernard. No, no. I'm going to scrub his first name. But his last name is Labatute. He's a Chilean writer, who's been translated into English. He just wrote a biography, a novelistic biography called The Maniac of von Neumann. And, you know, he writes these books, basically about 20th century scientists. So it's like heavy, heavy stuff that I'm often like holding on with my fingernails in terms of like the science he's talking about.

12:32But it's this just utterly humane portrait of these really strange scientific and mathematical figures. He did another book a couple of years ago called When We Cease to Understand the World that was just riveting. I'd never read anything like it. Well, I appreciate you giving me that detail because when I read your book, I said, this man is a man of letters and this is a guy that's read a lot because you're bringing that type of writing style into a nonfiction book, which often you don't get. Eisenhower is a very complex guy. Some people view him as a lightweight, including Franklin Roosevelt.

13:12What's interesting, though, is Eisenhower views Roosevelt as a lightweight, and Roosevelt views Eisenhower as a lightweight. And the irony is neither one of them are actually lightweights. But they figure it out. And of course, he's belittling Eisenhower privately. And then, of course, he goes out and gives this big speech endorsing him, sort of like a sports owner endorsing the manager before he's about to fire him, right? He says he's raised by Kansas pioneers. This is our guy, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a 20-year-old. Marshall is another figure here. Mr. Stoicism himself. He never shows you his cards.

13:50And so what did Marshall think of Eisenhower? I think the most important fact about Eisenhower and Marshall's relationship is that Marshall really trusted Eisenhower because Marshall did not trust a lot of people. He had been in Washington way too long. He had been in the highest echelons of the military for decades at that point before becoming the Army Chief of Staff. He even kept like a little book. I can't remember if it was black or red, where he'd write the names of up and coming officers. And then if they did something to sort of displease him, he just crossed their name out, sort of permanently burying them and ensuring that their careers were basically over.

14:27And Eisenhower gets onto his staff. They don't know each other. They know some of the same people like Patton, and they have a common mentor and a guy named Fox Conner, who I write a lot about. But they don't know each other at all. And the only thing Marshall really knows about Eisenhower, other than some nice reviews he's gotten, is that he was MacArthur's guy throughout the 1930s, which is probably something that ordinarily would have crossed him clean out of Marshall's book. George Marshall and MacArthur are probably the most different military figures America has ever. They're literally antipodes, of course.

15:01Truman uses Marshall's help. They come up with a plan, which they ultimately call the Marshall Plan, due to Marshall's popularity. But he fires. He fires MacArthur. So we have these very different, very strong personalities. Have you ever read In the Age of the Americans by David Fromkin? Oh, no, I haven't. If you haven't read that, it's a great book about these neo-Victorian men. They're born in the late Victorian era. They become neo-Victorians, and they rise to power together, and there's an obligation. They have a public service obligation about themselves where they're willing to subordinate themselves to the greater good of what they perceive to be going on.

15:40Of course, they go on and build the post-World War II era. You've got access to material that's never been seen before. So tell us about that material. How did you get access to it? How did it influence your writing and your narrative in this book? Yeah, a lot of it. You know, this book, writing anything about D-Day, Eisenhower certainly, but D-Day especially, you know, you're dealing with a fire hose of information. There's been so many great books written about D-Day that, you know, if you're going to write something that's centered around D-Day, you better have something new to say. And the main things that were really new and interesting came from kind of approaching it fresh, actually.

16:17because there's so much literature. My approach was basically to say, I'm just going to avoid reading as much of that as I can, as I write this book. And instead, one of the things I found in Eisenhower's archives, which, which hadn't really been explored interestingly enough, because they only came into the Eisenhower library in the past 20 years, were his day planners, literally his diaries of who he's meeting with, oftentimes the occasional sort of remarks about what's going on. And I basically used that to reassemble, you know, the six months of his life from November 1943 up to June 1944 and almost treated the project as if like I'm just a fly on the wall.

16:56I just want to see what he's doing every day, all day, and then sort of tell you as the reader what I'm seeing go on. And the consequence of that, because I ultimately did obviously read a lot of the rest of the D-Day books and the great ones and the not so great ones, as well as the Eisenhower biographies, is there's a whole lot of stuff that is just not part of the standard narrative of D-Day and even Eisenhower's biography that that you would only know if you sort of just sat there with him, particularly the stuff that ends up not mattering. I think the biggest one and the biggest revelation in the book that I spent a lot of time unpacking, which was very difficult, was he gets he's warned not two months before the invasion that the Nazis are developing nuclear weapons and that there is reason to believe they might actually use at least radiological weapons on the D.A.

17:47beaches. And he's told this by a major that George Marshall just sends over to give him essentially a secret briefing. And he's told there's really nothing you can do about it, buddy. and you can't tell anyone really either. And he just has to sit with that and figure out how to use this information. And one of the fascinating things I found was this oblique letter that he writes to Marshall just a couple of weeks before the invasion, paraphrasing a little bit, but basically saying, hey, I met with that guy a couple of weeks ago. Anything to worry about? Anything you can add? And Marshall never says anything.

18:19And so when he's sending those men into the storm on June 5th to launch the D-Day invasion, he has no idea if the Nazis are basically going to start using nuclear weapons or something they had never heard of. Right. They're all of these like that was really the the the fun of the book was to really be there in 1944 before everyone knows how it's going to turn out. And really, when they all think it's going to be a disaster. Right. They at one point, Eisenhower's chief of staff, and this is a couple of weeks before the invasion, says he thinks there's a 50 50 chance of success. and a 50-50, you know, that's a 50-50 chance of catastrophic failure, you know, of the worst kind, world-altering failure.

18:58And so to be in that moment, in that pressure cooker where there's so much going on that ended up maybe not mattering or didn't because we won, but was what was on Eisenhower's mind and understanding Eisenhower, right? How did he deal with all of that? How did he deal with the problem of civil rights? How did he deal with the problem of, you know, the fall of the British Empire. All of these things are all going on. Yeah, the Suez crisis when he's president. But you say something in the book that I want to get your reaction to in person. The plan is to have 80 ,000 troops to go, what eventually becomes Operation Overlord.

19:36But Ike thinks it's not enough troops. And he goes to Bernard Montgomery. And I'd like you, if you don't mind, to give us a little bit of Bernard Montgomery's personality with his various peccadillos. And he flatters him and he tells him, listen, I got to get 160 ,000 troops. You can run it. Okay. And this is a classic lesson about the way you gain power is by giving power away. And Ike understands this intuitively. And of course, Montgomery, this plays to his ego. He goes back to the British forces and he helps I get the troop count up to 160 ,000. Tell us about that relationship. And for those listeners that don't know, we have a lot of young listeners who Bernard Montgomery is.

20:21Tell us a little bit about him. Yeah, yeah. Bernard Montgomery is, you know, to this day, one of the most celebrated British generals and certainly the most celebrated British general of the Second World War. He leads Great Britain's major successful campaigns in North Africa. He comes to get the Namdegar Montgomery of El Alamein after his greatest victory. And he is often described as so much like George Patton as to explain why they hated each other so, so much, because he's a completely ungovernable subordinate. He is an astounding prima donna. He's quite brilliant, actually, as a strategist, as a military strategist.

21:00And he's beloved by the men under his command. And he and Patton hate each other. They actually, in the invasion of Sicily, essentially get into a race to see who can get to the capital fastest, which they which they always lord over one another, essentially. But Eisenhower and Montgomery, despite Eisenhower and Patton being actually quite great friends, Eisenhower and Montgomery never like each other, maybe with the single exception of the sort of month leading up to D-Day when they begin to warm to one another. You know, if the cliche is that everyone likes Ike, Montgomery does not like Ike.

21:36They they get off to the wrong foot when they first meet, when Montgomery sort of scolds him for smoking during a briefing. Eisenhower is and remains basically a chain smoker at this point. And so when Eisenhower and also and this is I think it just is an important point. He does not want Montgomery in this job. He asks for a different general, a British general that he had worked very closely with in North Africa. and was very eager to have be the lead of at least the British portions of Operation Overlord. That request gets overruled, and he's essentially assigned Bernard Montgomery against his will in an act that he almost thinks is sabotaged by the British.

22:16Because the other fact that why he gives Montgomery this bear hug when he needs to enlarge the invasion is because the British don't want to do the invasion, right? The British are opposed to Operation Overlord for some good reasons, but some less good reasons like dealing with their own empire. Yeah, some of it's empire centric, right? And they have resources and bases in the Mediterranean that they're trying to preserve and they want America's help to keep the empire going. Of course, Roosevelt wants none of that. He has disdain for the British empire. People forget that Roosevelt lived many years as an adolescent in Germany.

22:51He speaks fluent German. He's listening to Hitler's speeches in German, and he understands the danger that Hitler represents. But he also doesn't like the British Empire. But he's a charming guy, right? What did Churchill say about him? Meeting him for the first time is like opening a bottle of champagne. So they get together. But Monty is an interesting guy to me because he's loved by the troops. You point out that the victory in El Alamein is one part him, but he also got a lot of air support. He also got a lot of other people helping him to get to that victory. But here we are with these characters and we're about to assault this beach.

23:31And of course, as you know, my uncle, who I'm named after, was part of that assault. He was one of the first guys off a Higgins boat in Omaha Beach. Interestingly enough, he survived, as he told us the story, because of where the boat landed and where it was positioned relative to the pillboxes with the machine gun fire. They happened to be next to a decoyed minefield. A couple of these guys nervously ran into the minefield. My uncle said, OK, those guys are going to get blown up by these mines. But it turned out there weren't any mines. The Germans were trying to push the infantry into the pillboxes.

24:07They had run out of cement and rebar and so forth. And so they discovered by accident that they could come up around the Germans where they had landed. because of this decoy minefield. That's how he survived on the beach. That's incredible. That's a great story. Yeah. Well, I teased it at him. He never wanted to talk about it. It was after Private Ryan. He talked about it. He talked about what happened on that beach. But you've done a beautiful job in this book. I guess I got a couple more questions for you, if you don't mind. Okay. Yeah, of course. You brought these people to life. It was not clear that this was going to be a success.

24:47When I read your book, I tried to take it from that point of view. And so take us through what would have happened had it not been successful, because you did research on that as well. So what's the alternative history? They fail on the beach. Then what? Possibly the communists, possibly Stalin, got to deal with Hitler at that point, right? For sure. Right. Because you got to remember, the United States was not, you know, the superpower that it is today. The United States hadn't led a major military operation in the world to that point. And certainly one of Roosevelt's big reasons for pushing Operation Overlord as hard as he did over British objections was both a show of strength to the Soviets, as well as to help the Soviets to take the pressure off the Eastern Front, where about 75 to 90 % of the German army, depending on how you count it, was in bitter, bitter fighting.