We like Ike, but which one?

In World War II, he tamed America's allies and conquered its adversaries. As a conservative college president, he defended liberal professors caught in a virulent Red scare.

As NATO commander, he projected strength without projecting force. In the White House, he presided over the sort of peace and prosperity that today's presidential candidates can't plausibly promise.

Now, Dwight Eisenhower is at the nexus of a controversy that raises questions about the character of capital memorials, the nature of historical remembrance, and the relationship between a national figure's origins and destiny.

All because the design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington includes a statue of him as a barefoot boy from Kansas.

Nobody contests that Mr. Eisenhower rose from humble Abilene at a time when its unpaved streets retained a whiff of Chisholm Trail cow drives. But he seldom thought of himself as a barefoot boy.

The president was shaped more by West Point than by the town that made Wild Bill Hickok famous. Even so, part of the Eisenhower elan was his irresistible mix of the common and the uncommon. That may be why the barefoot-boy image has resonance in some quarters.

It is true that Mr. Eisenhower was like many others of his time and place. But that's ultimately why the barefoot-boy motif seems so discordant, so at odds with our notions of decorum in civic statuary.

He was, after that boyhood, not at all like any other American of his time or any other time. The reason we celebrate him is not that he was unremarkable. We celebrate him because of what he did with that ordinary heritage, with the lessons of his humble parents and the childhood that was so typical.

David Eisenhower, a University of Pennsylvania historian and biographer, said the family is proud of his grandfather's heartland roots.

"There are 3,000 ways you can do an Eisenhower memorial," he said recently. "Combining a military career of that stature and a two-term presidency is no easy task."

But the younger Mr. Eisenhower, his sister Anne (a professional designer), his sister Susan (an expert on Russian-American relations), and their father John (the president's son) are united in arguing that the memorial should reflect President. Eisenhower's extraordinary record more than his ordinary roots.

After all, here was a man at the center of American and world politics in the center of the American Century -- the personification first of our innocence and ingenuity and then of our power and prerogatives from World War II through the first third of the Cold War.

In his time, and in part at his bidding, the United States moved from a peripheral to a principal role in big-power politics. At the same time, it harnessed its industrial might to produce a consumer economy and confronted its past to reconcile its soaring ideals with its sordid racial reality.

Through it all, he possessed an alluring self-confidence that his countrymen came to share. His carefree air pervaded the nation at home even as tensions simmered abroad. His managerial mien suited the times or, just as likely, shaped the times.

"He appeared to be performing less work than he did because he knew instinctively which matters required his attention and which could be delegated to subordinates," Jean Edward Smith wrote in a biography to be released next week.

"His experience as supreme commander taught him to use experts without being intimidated by them," he said. "He structured matters so that he always had the last word … The lines of authority were clear, the national interest was broadly defined, and there was no buck-passing."

For a long time -- even in his own time -- Mr. Eisenhower was the subject of ridicule. The consensus, especially among the opinion-makers who preferred the sometimes serious and sometimes sardonic Adlai Stevenson, who lost two elections to Mr. Eisenhower, was that the 34th president's speech was plain, his vision uninspiring, his style unengaged, his personality lacking flash and finesse.

But for all that, he is regarded as a successful chief executive and his record is admired by his successors and historians alike. He helped to win World War II and to preserve the peace. A career without peer deserves a memorial that matches the man and his achievements.

"We're not speaking to ourselves right now," Susan Eisenhower said. "We're speaking to future generations. So we need to think about what Eisenhower meant to this country."

He lived his past as a barefoot boy in Abilene. But with his signature American confidence, in both flip-flops and wingtips, he helped create the future we now tread.

David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Contact him at: dshribman@post-gazette.com