"Eisenhower disliked excessively rhetorical flourishes because they betrayed a desire to be ingratiating, or overly persuasive, or too eager for promotion. Fox Conner had drilled him in the army mystique of never seeking or refusing an assignment, and Eisenhower always managed matters so that the assignments sought hum. His gift for being offered jobs he had not asked for would appear almost magical if one did not keep in mind "that alert brain" at work. One of the most tedious and revealing sections of his "diaries" deals with the self-examination he went through to persuade himself to run for President in 1952. Couldn't the man see? the reader keeps asking himself. No, he could not. It was not in his nature to appear to want something; his nature was to be wanted. And so he progressed from obscurity- he first appears in the White House Usher's Diary at two-thirty on February 9, 1942, as "P.D. Eisenhauer"- to greatness. His rise was rocketlike. Within less than two years he went from lieutenant colonel to full general. His exposure to politics in the raw came as rapidly as his promotions. When he was appointed to command the North African expedition, Eisenhower was briefed by Robert Murphy, our diplomatic representative there, on the "bewildering complexities" of the quarrels among not only the French factions but Spanish, Arab, Berber, German, and Russian as well. "Eisenhower listened with a kind of horrified fascination," wrote Murphy, "to my description of the possible complications... The General seemed to sense that this first campaign would present him with problems running the entire geopolitical gamut- it certainly did." What he could not have realized was that it would also place him in the crossfire between two towering political personalities, Franklin Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle. Say this, too, for Eisenhower: He was able to confront himself, in words and on paper, with the harsh unpleasantness of the work that lay ahead. "The actual fact is," he wrote in a note to his desk pad on May 5, 1942, "that not 1 man in 20 in Govt. (including the W. and N. Depts) realizes what a grisly, dirty, tough business we are in!""