Before Dwight Eisenhower became president, Harry Truman imagined the general at the president’s desk. “He’ll sit here,” Truman would say, tapping his desk, “and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”
The remark is quoted in Presidential Power (1960), a book by the political scientist Richard Neustadt.