by J. B. West
When the Gettysburg house was finally finished, the Eisenhowers held a celebration in July, 1955, combining a housewarming with their wedding anniversary—an all-day picnic catered by the Navy from Camp David. The Gettysburg kitchen wasn’t big enough to handle all that crowd.
All the White House was invited—carpenters, painters, plumbers, everybody, and their spouses. It was the first time a President had ever entertained like that for all of us. After everybody had trekked through the house, we ate fried chicken on the back lawn, then presented the Eisenhowers a surprise anniversary gift—two folding tray tables like the ones we’d used at the White House, and a silver serving tray, which we’d all chipped in to purchase. Thus, Gettysburg was “launched.”
Whether at Gettysburg, Camp David, or at home in the White House, it always seemed to us that President Eisenhower had everything under tight control, and that Mrs. Eisenhower’s “taut ship” approach to directing activities in the Executive Mansion only reflected the way the General ran the Presidency. It was as if a military command post had been set up in the west wing, with the Executive branch operating under a staff system. Under the next-in-command Sherman Adams, the staff worked from early morning until late at night preparing information for the President’s decision. Everything and everybody who received consideration from the President went through Governor Adams first, although the President’s closest working alliance was with his Secretary of State, the stern John Foster Dulles.
During those first three years of his Presidency, General Eisenhower relied to a considerable extent on Mr. Dulles’ ideas about foreign policy in waging attacks in psychological warfare against the Soviet Union and China, and in building a massive nuclear force.
He said that he would do his utmost to prevent the admission of Red China to the United Nations; that the United States would employ “massive retaliation” with nuclear power (later modified to mean small nuclear weapons) in case our allies were attacked by Communists.
The President, under attack from Senator Joe McCarthy, felt that his own hard line against Communism was plenty sufficient. (During 1953–1954, 8,000 cases of security risks were identified, out of tens of thousands of records examined.) However much he deplored McCarthy’s methods, which whipped the nation into a mood of anti-Communist hysteria and fear, he refused to dignify the attacks by answering them. But the President was especially distressed over the Wisconsin Senator’s attacks on the President’s “own,” the U.S. Army, in 1954. General Eisenhower’s sense of rank and military honor was deeply offended when the issue boiled down to the Senator’s grilling the Secretary of the Army over the matter of a mere private. During these hearings, the President spoke out pointedly about “demagogues thirsty for political power,” and was privately relieved when McCarthy was finally condemned by the Senate in December, 1954.
In 1955, at sixty-four, Dwight Eisenhower still looked physically fit, tall and lean. But the strain of the Army-McCarthy hearings, in addition to the other burdens of his office, were beginning to tell on the President.
In July, just after their anniversary celebration at Gettysburg, he and Mrs. Eisenhower, who he said, “had never completely convinced herself that an airplane flies,” took off for Geneva for a five-day summit meeting with European leaders* —a meeting that had been two years in preparation.
When they returned, both the President and Mrs. Eisenhower looked exhausted. As soon as the Congress adjourned in August, they left for Mrs. Doud’s home in Denver. The President had set up a Summer White House office nearby, and spent his vacation time hunting in the woods and fishing in the Colorado streams.
Mr. Crim had taken a vacation, too, and as things were quiet on Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House staff was going through a general “September slowdown.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Eisenhower telephoned from Denver every day, checking on the staff, on details at Gettysburg, on the coming social season.
On Friday, September 23, 1955, when she called, she mentioned that the President had been out to Byers Peak Ranch in the Rockies. “You should have heard what he cooked himself for breakfast,” she laughed.
The next afternoon, I smiled when I read the little item in the evening paper about President Eisenhower’s “digestive upset.” But the headlines on Sunday’s paper were far more serious. The “digestive upset” was now being described as a “moderate coronary thrombosis.” The President had been taken to Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver with a heart attack.
* Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain, and Premiers Edgar Faure of France and Nikolai Bulganin of the U.S.S.R.
6
I ARRIVED IN THE office within minutes, newspaper still in hand. At 10:00 a.m. the Usher’s office telephone rang. I was startled to hear Mrs. Eisenhower’s voice on the line.
“I wanted to be sure you knew about the President,” she told me. “I wanted to tell you myself.”
Almost speechless, I tried to convey my wishes for his recovery.
“He is resting comfortably now,” she said. “In fact, I’m right here with him, to keep him quiet. I’ve moved into the hospital,” she added, cheerfully.
I was amazed at her even thinking to call us.
Almost every day during the next seven weeks, Mrs. Eisenhower phoned from the hospital, giving reports on the President’s health—“He’s painting a fine Colorado landscape today”—or “He’s out in his wheelchair this morning”—and giving detailed instructions for finishing touches on their Gettysburg home.
“I want to be sure it’s all done by the time we get back,” she told me, “so there are no workmen around.”
I practically moved up to Gettysburg, to supervise the additional work.
On November 11, the President and Mrs. Eisenhower returned from Denver, taking the big, closed limousine from the airport to the White House. (The President had ordered an open car, because he wanted to be able to wave to the crowds, but his doctor, General Howard Snyder, prevailed.) All the staff lined up outside the south entrance to greet him. As he stepped out of the car, he waved to everybody, breaking into a huge grin.
I stood just inside the Diplomatic Room door, waiting to accompany the Eisenhowers upstairs. The President looked healthier, more suntanned and trimmer than I’d ever seen him.
“Welcome home,” I said, and we shook hands.
“Mrs. Eisenhower tells me you’ve been looking after Gettysburg for us,” he said, as we walked toward the elevator.
“I think everything is in pretty good shape for your stay up there,” I replied.
“Some time while I’m there I’d like you to come up, because I’d like to add some bookshelves in my den.”
“Certainly,” I replied, stepping back for the Eisenhowers to enter the elevator. But the President stopped short.
“No,” he said firmly. “General Snyder tells me I should use the stairs,” and to the back stairs he went, slowly but determinedly walking up the white marble steps.
On November 14, Mrs. Eisenhower’s birthday, they moved to the Gettysburg farm to complete the President’s period of recovery.
When they returned to Washington in January, Mrs. Eisenhower immediately canceled the social season and set about to enforce the President’s afternoon naptime, his recreation and relaxation, taking care of him almost like a trained nurse. They didn’t go to Denver again.
The President’s doctors advised him to spend more time painting, playing golf—relaxing. As in every other era, when a Presidential pastime was well publicized, the country followed suit. Men who’d never touched a paintbrush were suddenly advised to paint for relaxation. President Eisenhower gave paint-by-the-numbers sets to all of his staff, and people all over the country turned out landscapes and portraits by the millions. There was also a definite sales boom in golf clubs.
The President and Mrs. Eisenhower spent rest-and-recuperation time in Georgia, in the two-story “Mamie’s Cabin,” a white-columned plantation house, decorated in pink, on the grounds of the Augusta National Go
lf Course, where he exercised by playing twice daily. He also enjoyed birdhunting nearby at Treasury Secretary George Humphrey’s Thomasville plantation.
At the White House, the stag dinners for business and political leaders continued—with the addition of quail, pheasant, and other wild game bagged by Mr. Eisenhower and his hunting party. And at every table setting, we placed a souvenir color photograph of the bird to be consumed.
Although the White House entertaining had been curtailed to lessen strain on the President, Mrs. Eisenhower found an outlet for her talents as a hostess by dressing up the mansion as if it were a giant shopwindow.
On Halloween she held a luncheon for wives of Presidential staff members. The ladies were amazed to find witches and black cats flying around the State Dining Room, and skeletons hanging from the ceiling. In the dignified foyer of the State floor, shocks of corn circled the stately columns, jack-o’-lanterns marched down the halls. Mrs. Eisenhower had stationed ghosts and goblins, owls and witches all over the tables, which were decorated with Indian corn, nuts, gourds, dried leaves, and chrysanthemums.
The White House never celebrated the change of seasons so heartily as it did under Mrs. Eisenhower. For St. Patrick’s Day, she twined the columns with green ribbons and top hats, with shamrocks hanging from the chandeliers, leprechauns in the State Dining Room and green carnations and bells-of-Ireland in the flower bowls. At Eastertime there were butterflies hanging from the chandeliers, artificial birds singing with tape-recorded voices (“Would you please shut off the birds?” Mrs. Eisenhower said to the butler), Easter bunnies hatching from pale blue shells on the mantel, ropes of cherry blossoms climbing the marble columns, and masses of fresh spring flowers throughout the White House.
But at Christmastime, she outdid herself.
Unlike most of the previous First Families, who went “home,” the Eisenhowers spent nearly every Christmas in the White House with their grandchildren, opening presents on Christmas morning underneath the family Christmas tree in the West Sitting Hall.
Heretofore, Christmas decorating had been the province of the White House gardeners and electricians. At about the same time that the President turned on the lights at the giant outdoor Christmas tree on the ellipse every year, they brought in a fresh green tree to the East Room, dressing it with the lights and icicles stored in the electrician’s shop. Another box held the Christmas balls and ornaments for the second-floor family tree that every White House family also requested. In past years, a few fresh wreaths at the windows, holly in the vases—and that was all.
Mrs. Eisenhower, however, spread Christmas throughout the entire White House. Together with her social secretary, Mary Jane McCaffree, the First Lady scoured all of Washington’s department stores for ideas and baubles. In the State Dining Room, they put wreaths on all the candelabra, little Christmas trees on each side of the mantel, hung red ribbons and holly from the chandeliers. Hundreds of poinsettias decorated with white-sprayed branches lined the halls; green roping and big red bows adorned the white columns; giant dressed-up spruces stood in the East Room, the Blue Room, and even outside on the North Portico.
One year she placed a large nativity scene, with piped-in Christmas carols, beneath the East Room tree. Another year a tall Santa Claus stood there. Mamie Eisenhower decked the halls with more than holly.
7
THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY IN 1956, the main concern among Republicans was whether the President would be able to run for office again. While he recuperated at Gettysburg, and during the weeks after his return to the White House, speculation was building up all over Washington.
Then Ann Whitman called to order a top-secret dinner for “eight of the President’s friends” Tuesday, January 10, and Mrs. Eisenhower duly approved the menu. But somehow word got out, and the President personally called to postpone the dinner.
“Make it for Friday the thirteenth. It’s to be an absolutely confidential gathering,” he insisted.
The dinner was so confidential that the President laid out the place cards himself, after his advisors arrived. After dinner in the family dining room, they went upstairs to the oval study, now the President’s trophy room, which had been freshly painted white. There, after everyone* was polled by the President, he later recounted, he decided to run for reelection.
On February 29, the President announced the decision for which a concerned nation had been waiting.
Explaining that “I may possibly be a greater risk than the normal person of my age,” he went on to describe how well he felt, and that he had not the slightest doubt that he could now perform as well as ever all the important duties of the Presidency. Throughout the spring, he held conferences with political leaders, went out campaigning, and, we thought, never looked better.
We were more than a little stunned on June 9, when an ambulance pulled quietly up to the south entrance of the mansion. Two uniformed medical corpsmen rushed in with a stretcher.
The President’s heart attack was so fresh in our minds that we assumed he’d had another. Silently, we waited for the news from upstairs. The entire house was quiet that late afternoon, until my buzzer rang urgently. It was General Howard Snyder, the President’s physician.
“Please send someone to help,” he said. “The stretcher is too big to go on the elevator.”
I immediately sent Ray Hare, one of the ushers. Moments later, a strange procession came down the Grand Staircase: Hare, Dr. Tkach, and the two Army medical corpsmen, bearing the stricken President on a hospital stretcher, followed by Mrs. Eisenhower. They maneuvered carefully down the marble stairs to the ground floor and out the Diplomatic room door, so that press people in the west wing wouldn’t be able to see.
The President’s illness was announced just after he checked in to Walter Reed Army Hospital. It was an attack of ileitis, an inflammation of the small intestine, requiring immediate surgery.
Once again, Mrs. Eisenhower moved into a hospital with her husband—into the special Presidential suite at Walter Reed, where there’s a big living room, a dining room, a separate kitchen, two bedrooms, and two baths. The Secret Service set up shop across the hall.
During the weeks she stayed in the hospital, Mrs. Eisenhower called every day to give us reports on the President’s health, and to check, as usual, on the operation of her house.
Despite two serious illnesses within a year, the President bounced back, and on July 1, reconfirmed his decision to run for reelection. After easily winning the Republican nomination, he and Mrs. Eisenhower opened the campaign on September 12 with a picnic at Gettysburg for 500 campaign workers.
I had nothing to do with the picnic, since it was political.
I did, however, get to take a free ride on a campaign trip.
A few days after the picnic, I noticed on the President’s schedule a trip to Iowa, to the national plowing contest near Mrs. Eisenhower’s birthplace at Boone.
“I wish I could go along, to see my father,” I remarked to Mr. Crim, never imagining there’d be a chance to do so. But Mr. Crim evidently went right to Mrs. Eisenhower, because the phone was ringing within minutes.
“The President and I would like for you and Mrs. West to accompany us on our trip to Des Moines,” the First Lady said. And I accepted immediately. “We leave at two this afternoon,” she finished.
“Pack a bag and get a sitter,” I telephoned my surprised wife. “We’re spending the night in Iowa!”
“But my hair …” Zella protested.
Somehow she got herself together in the four hours we had left, and we drove to Andrews Air Force Base, for our first ride in a Presidential plane. The Columbine, which Mrs. Eisenhower had named for the Colorado state flower, was a four-engine Super-Constellation, piloted by Colonel William Draper, the President’s Air Force aide. It was like a flying apartment.
Somewhere over Indiana, Mrs. Eisenhower called for Zella to join her in her private cabin. All the way to Des Moines, the two women in my life discussed children, hair-dos, and Iowa
.
“She asked a hundred questions about all of our family,” Zella reported. “Is she that interested in everybody?”
She was.
The Eisenhowers spent the night with Mrs. Eisenhower’s uncle, Joel Carlson, in Boone; Zella and I stayed in Des Moines with our relatives. I daresay the Republicans could justify our tagging along. I’m sure there were now a few even more definite votes in Iowa—the West family’s.
It was a mark of President Eisenhower’s immense popularity with the American people that, despite two major illnesses, he won the November election by 27,000,000 votes. He was also helped, the polls later showed, by two sudden developments in international affairs in October and early November, which caused the public to fear a change. The invasion of Egypt by England, France and Israel, and the Hungarian Revolution occurred almost simultaneously, and each could have drawn this country into war. We managed to stay aloof from the Mideast crisis, and sheltered thousands of Hungarian refugees without getting into the fight, and the voters expressed confidence in the President once again.
And the very next day after the election, Mr. Crim had some news that would affect my life.
“I have told President and Mrs. Eisenhower that I am in poor health and cannot carry on the job of Chief Usher any longer,” he said. “I told them I’m scheduled to retire next year anyway, and they said all my work should be turned over to you. And when I do retire, you should take over the job.” Practically speaking, I had been in charge of household details since the Truman Administration, while Mr. Crim had concentrated on fiscal affairs of the White House. But, I thought, things really wouldn’t be that different if I accepted the full work load without the title.
I explained my position to Mr. Crim: “The arrangement you’ve outlined will not relieve you of any responsibility. As long as you have the title of Chief Usher, people will insist on going to you, first. I cannot accept under those circumstances.” I felt sorry to say this, because I knew how much he wanted to retire. His health had been failing for months.