John J. Pershing considered Fox Conner class of 1898 to have been “a brilliant solider” and “one of the finest characters our Army has ever produced.” During World War I, General Conner served as chief of operations for the American Expeditionary Forces. Pershing told Conner: “I could have spared any other man in the A.E.F. better than you.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower viewed Fox Conner, as “the outstanding soldier of my time.” In the early 1920s, Conner transformed his protégé Eisenhower from a struggling young officer on the verge of a court-martial into one of the American army’s rising stars. Eisenhower acknowledged General Conner as “the one more or less invisible figure to whom I owe an incalculable debt.”
General Fox Conner: Pershing’s Chief of Operations and Eisenhower’s Mentor,
by Steven Rabalais (Casemate Publishers, 2016) presents the first complete biography of this significant, but mostly forgotten, figure in American military history.