Gently in Manner, Strongly in Deed - Timothy Tarkelly

Author's Notes on Second Edition:

Before going to West Point, Dwight D. Eisenhower 

took a job at a local creamery. This was also where his father 

worked as a refrigeration engineer. A portion of his pay went 

to funding his brother's college education, and Ike himself 

was without concrete plans for his future. One day on the job, 

Eisenhower accidentally fell into a large cooling tank filled with 

cold salt water. After his coworkers pulled him out, he looked at 

his saviors and said, "You should have pushed me under."

It's hard to imagine this man years later, pacing the 

grounds of Greenham Common Airfield as the D-Day invasion 

was in full swing. Before he became himself, he was a Kansan 

who drove a battery-operated car designed for women and barely 

managed entry into West Point on football scholarship. He spent 

his time in training dreaming of moving to South America and 

becoming a Cowboy (a fate that almost came to fruition). His 

wife and her father refused to let him become a pilot, so he 

settled for work that propelled him to victory of fascism, the 

presidency, and world wide admiration.

Somewhere in there, he managed to prop up some pet 

dictators in Latin America and seal us into a very long and cold 

ideological war. He was a Republican who created federal jobs, 

favored a 90 percent corporate tax rate, and expanded social 

security. He was a unionist and a man of business. He was a 

soldier who ended his presidency with a chilling speech that 

accurately predicted our future reliance on the military industrial 

complex and shunned war outright as impractical and outright evil. 

Hypocrisy and complexity are two sides of something, 

I'm sure. To be honest, I don't know where to draw the line, nor 

can I guarantee that if one were to venture into the space between, 

that there would be anything worth a second glance. However, I 

am moved by the stories within, and have done my best to stay 

true to my instinctual, though fickle inclinations.

This edition is not much different than the first. It 

features far less commentary and a little more poetry. A few of 

the poems have been edited. The original edition was the raw, 

unvetted text of a Master's thesis. This is something else; this is 

at the very least something new. 

Timothy Tarkelly

March 2, 2023