This week marks the 75th anniversary of the Allied forces landing on the Normandy beaches during World War II, the largest amphibious military assault in history. This year is also the 20th anniversary of my father’s death. Like many veterans, he rarely talked about his combat experience, but he was wounded by German shrapnel as part of the first wave landing on Utah Beach. The convergence of those two anniversaries made me recall a family Thanksgiving some years before he died.
As far back as the New Deal, everyone in our family was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. My mother and uncle’s side of the family came from the poor Jewish neighborhood in Chicago along Roosevelt Road, fondly remembered by thousands of Jews as the “Great Vest Side.” My father’s family came from the even poorer Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn, notorious in the 1930s as the home of the organized crime contract killers known as Murder Inc.
Besides being almost exclusively Jewish and poor in the 1920s and 1930s, both neighborhoods had something else in common: They routinely turned out a Democratic vote of nearly 100% for local and national candidates, especially during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years. Interestingly, decades later when both neighborhoods turned from Jewish to African American, one thing remained constant — the staunchly Democratic voting bloc of the constituents.
Flash-forward many years to a Ronald Reagan landslide presidential victory. At our suburban Thanksgiving dinner table the talk turned to politics. One of my cousins asked if anyone had voted for Reagan; no one had. Then he asked if anyone in the family had ever voted for any Republican for president. For a moment, the room went silent, then my father, usually taciturn at family events, said “I have.”
Heads turned, and my cousins examined him as if he were some kind of rare bird. A Republican? They asked whom he voted for.
“Eisenhower, twice, 1952 and '56.”
This was not mere treason, it was tantamount to an act of family heresy. Fifty years of Democratic voting and he voted for Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson? Stevenson was a liberal hero and close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, the nearest thing in many Jewish households to a saint.
“What could you possibly be thinking by voting for Eisenhower over Stevenson?” they demanded to know, almost derisively.
My dad turned serious and did not answer the question directly. Rather, he told the family a story I had never heard about Eisenhower and the Normandy invasion.
“It was about five days after the Normandy beachhead was established, word came down that Gen. Eisenhower was coming to visit our company and talk to our chief officer in his tent. Sure enough, on the appointed day, he came with a retinue that was surprisingly small.
“I was using a crutch but as third in command I stood with my superior, a major, outside the tent as our men stood at attention. When Eisenhower approached the tent, everyone saluted but before he entered, the private assigned to guard the entrance stopped him and asked for his identification — he was asking the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe for identification.
“Before the general could do anything, the major standing next to me exploded.
“ ‘Private, do you know what you are doing?’He was about to ream out the poor private in front of everyone standing there.
“At that moment, Eisenhower came over to the major and spoke to him quite softly. Because I was standing next to the major, I could hear what the general was saying.
“ ‘Major, that’s OK. He was just doing what he was trained to do. There’s no problem.’
“Then Eisenhower turned to the private, showed him some sort of identification, smiled at him and said, ‘Good work private. Doing your job’.
“What was so impressive was that not only did the general defuse an uncomfortable situation, but he did it without embarrassing either the major or the private in front of the rest of us.
“Eisenhower disappeared into the tent, emerged a half hour later, shook our hands and departed. That was the only time I ever saw him in person, but I will never forget it.”
Then he answered my cousin’s question.
“Adlai Stevenson was a good man, but I voted for a Republican. Dwight Eisenhower was my commanding officer on D-Day.”
For a moment, no one said a word, and the conversation quickly moved on to something besides politics.
Cory Franklin is a Wilmette physician and author of the book “The Doctor Will See You Now.”
[ Read more: Celebrating the 75th anniversary of D-Day, near and far ]