During the last week of the 1954 campaign, when I was so tired that I could hardly remember what it felt like to be rested, I decided that this would be my last campaign. I began to think more and more about what Murray Chotiner had said almost two and a half years earlier at the convention in Chicago: I should pretty much be able to write my own ticket after retiring from the vice presidency at age forty-four. By the time I made a nationally televised broadcast on election eve, I had decided not to run again in 1956 unless exceptional circumstances intervened to change my mind.
On Election Day, as we flew back to Washington, I took out my briefcase. A folder on top contained the several pages of handwritten notes I had made for the election-eve broadcast. Chotiner was in the seat next to me, and I handed them to him. “Here’s my last campaign speech, Murray,” I said to him. “You might like to keep it as a souvenir. It’s the last one, because after this I am through with politics.”
THE HEART ATTACK
September 24, 1955, was a hot Indian summer day in Washington. Around 5:30, I sat down to look over the Evening Star, and I noted a small item from Denver on the front page that the President was suffering from a slight case of indigestion. This was not unusual for him, and I turned to the sports pages without giving it a second thought. I was looking over the baseball scores when the phone rang.
“Dick, this is Jim Hagerty,” the familiar voice said. “I have some bad news—the President has had a coronary.”
“Are they sure?” I asked.
“We are absolutely sure,” Hagerty replied. He had no further information, and we agreed that he would call me again as soon as he learned anything more. At the end of the conversation he said, “Dick, let me know where you can be reached at all times.”
For several minutes I sat motionless, absorbing the full impact of the news. Not only was I concerned about Eisenhower’s health; I was going to have to think about my own conduct in an unprecedented national crisis.
I called Bill Rogers, who was Acting Attorney General while Herb Brownell was in Spain, and asked him if he could come over. Rogers arrived just ahead of the reporters and cameramen who had rushed to our house as soon as Eisenhower’s heart attack was announced in Denver. We agreed that we should not let them know I was there. I thought it was important that I not be seen or quoted until I had more information from Denver.
Rogers suggested that I spend the night at his home. He called his wife to pick us up and asked her to park on a side street behind my house. Fifteen minutes later Adele Rogers drove up in her Pontiac convertible, and Bill and I slipped out the side door. We walked quickly through my neighbor’s backyard and piled into the car.
The Rogers house was well off the main road in Bethesda, Maryland. As soon as we arrived, I put in a call to Denver.
For the first time I learned that the attack had been officially diagnosed as a “mild” coronary thrombosis. Chances for recovery were good, but it was still too early to be sure of anything. After long discussions with Rogers and Jerry Persons and telephone conversations with various Cabinet members, it was decided that we would continue carrying on the nation’s business as a united team until Eisenhower was able to return to his duties.
As I lay awake that night, I considered my future course. Assuming the best—that Eisenhower would be back on the job within a few weeks—it would be foolish for me to do anything that the press could in any way interpret as being self-serving. Assuming the worst—that Eisenhower died or was completely incapacitated—there would be no question about my succession to the presidency; and if that happened it would be even more important that my conduct beforehand be above question. In the most likely situation—that Eisenhower would not be able to return for several weeks or months and a determination would have to be made about my taking over some of his responsibilities—it was equally important that nothing I did made it appear that I was seeking his power.
I knew that there would be many attempts to drive a wedge between Sherman Adams and me. Adams, the powerful Assistant to the President who was the White House Chief of Staff, was known as Eisenhower’s most devoted and selfless staff member. The rumor had even spread around Washington that Adams’s first words when he arrived back at the White House were: “It’s quite a surprise to come back here and suddenly find yourself the President.”
By Sunday morning I knew that I could not avoid the press any longer. But a press conference might appear self-serving, so I decided to let the reporters accompany Pat and me to church and then invite some of them home afterward for an informal chat.
We settled down in the living room, and I told them the little I knew about Eisenhower’s condition. I described the team system he had created and said that I expected it to function smoothly until his return.
The reporters, of course, were after hard news, not talk about team spirit. They were looking for a statement about the political implications of Eisenhower’s illness. There had already been speculation about whether Eisenhower would run again in 1956. A Gallup poll at the beginning of September had shown him preferred by 61 percent of the voters when matched up against Stevenson. Another Gallup poll taken at about the same time indicated that if Eisenhower did not run, I was the first choice among Republicans for the presidential nomination. I politely but firmly refused any questions about the political significance of Eisenhower’s illness.
On Monday night Sherman Adams, Len Hall, Jerry Persons, Hall’s press aide Lou Guylay, Rogers, and I met at Rogers’s house to discuss the political aspects of the situation. Adams sat slightly apart from the rest of us. Whenever a question was addressed to him, he launched into a description of the fishing in Scotland. Finally it became clear that either he was determined not to engage in any substantive discussion until he could get to Denver and see Eisenhower’s condition for himself, or else he was in something close to a state of shock.
I said that our main task was to prevent any scramble for the presidential nomination, at least until Eisenhower recovered and had had a chance to express his feelings about running again. Earlier that day Len Hall had flatly told reporters who had cornered him that the 1956 Republican ticket would be the same winning one as in 1952: Ike and Dick. Despite that necessary public show of optimism, I do not think any of us in that room believed that Eisenhower would run again, even if he recovered completely.
During the next two weeks I presided over various meetings in the White House, including the regular Cabinet and National Security Council meetings. I sat in the Vice President’s chair, opposite the President’s, and I was careful to act more as moderator than director. I signed several ceremonial documents “in behalf of the President,” but I continued to work out of my office at the Capitol rather than in the White House. During those weeks I made it a point to visit Cabinet members in their own offices whenever a meeting was necessary, rather than asking them to come to my office. Despite all my precautions along these lines, and despite my determination to have as little to do with the press as I reasonably could, one or two members of the Cabinet seemed to feel that I was seeking publicity.
On October 8, exactly two weeks after Eisenhower’s heart attack, I flew to Denver to see him. I was the first official visitor; after my visit the Cabinet members saw him according to rank. I was startled to see how pale and thin he was. But it was immediately clear that his mind was as sharp as ever, and he was able to talk about his heart attack with great detachment, although he had obviously been through an ordeal. “It hurt like hell, Dick,” he told me. “I never let Mamie know how much it hurt.”
Forty-eight days after his heart attack Eisenhower flew back to Washington. Thousands of cheering people lined the downtown streets in the autumn sunshine to cheer him as he returned to the White House. The country seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. There was no more need to worry—Ike was back.
RUNNING FOR RE-ELECTION: 1956
Since the 1954 campaign I had been considering leaving politics. I knew that Pat wanted to return to Ca
lifornia. The only thing that made me hesitate was the unexpected situation created by Eisenhower’s heart attack. Whereas before I had assumed that he would run again in 1956, now I was not at all sure. If he did not, I would be the next in line for the presidential nomination. A Gallup presidential preference poll after Eisenhower’s heart attack, based on the assumption he would not be a candidate, showed me leading Earl Warren, 28 percent to 24 percent, followed by Dewey and Stassen with 10 percent each.
On December 26, 1955, Eisenhower called me into the Oval Office. He said that he had been giving a lot of thought to the coming election, and he wondered whether I ought to run for Vice President again or whether I might do better to accept a Cabinet post instead. He said that a Cabinet position such as Secretary of Defense would give me the kind of administrative experience, so important for a President, that the vice presidency did not offer. He pointed out that Herbert Hoover had been able to use his position as Secretary of Commerce to build a national reputation and a successful candidacy.
I was taken aback by this suggestion, although he seemed to be making it in a friendly and sincere spirit. He said that he was disappointed that other suitable candidates for the presidency had not emerged from the party during the last few years, and he referred to some of Gallup’s trial heats in which Stevenson beat me by a fairly wide margin. He said it was too bad that my popularity had not grown more during the last three years.
For the first time I began to understand what was behind this conversation. Eisenhower’s staff or his friends had evidently been sowing doubts in his mind, suggesting not only that I might lose if I ran on my own, but that I might be a drag on the ticket if I were his running mate again. It was hard not to feel that I was being set up, since more recent polls than the ones he was referring to showed me doing considerably better.
A few weeks later we had another conversation which covered the same ground. Eisenhower once again expressed his opinion that my own political future would be better served by taking a Cabinet post than by running again for Vice President. He seemed to be expecting a reply, and for a moment I felt as if the clock had been turned back to the fund crisis, when he had paused on the telephone so that I could offer him my resignation from the ticket. I had the same reaction now: as Vice President, I fully accepted that I was his to choose or his to dismiss. But I did not feel that my getting off the ticket would be the best thing for him or for the party, and I was not going to offer to do so.
As in 1952, my silence put the ball back into Eisenhower’s court. Finally I said, “If you believe your own candidacy and your administration would be better served with me off the ticket, you tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. I want to do what is best for you.”
“No, I think we’ve got to do what’s best for you,” he replied.
Any doubts about Eienhower’s motives were removed when Foster Dulles independently initiated the same discussion and suggested that I might be named Secretary of Defense or succeed him as Secretary of State when he resigned. I was sure that Dulles had my best interests at heart.
From the point of view of historical experience, there was considerable merit in Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s suggestion. But neither of them took into account the derogatory way the media would have interpreted such a course or how it would have upset the many Republicans who still considered me Eisenhower’s principal link with party orthodoxy.
Eisenhower had made a remarkable physical recovery, and within a short time after his return to Washington he resumed his regular schedule. But, as with many who have suffered heart attacks, his brush with death left him subject to debilitating bouts of depression. He would sit immobile for long periods of time, brooding silently about the future. Mamie Eisenhower was especially insistent that her husband not run for re-election. Her arguments ranged from the highly emotional to the coldly logical.
By the end of January, however, Eisenhower had in fact reached a tentative decision to run, which was strengthened by an excellent medical report on February 14. I think he decided to run again for several reasons. As in 1952 he felt it was his duty to his country. Also, he could not abide the idea that Adlai Stevenson might be his successor, and he was not confident of the election of any other Republican. I believe too that Eisenhower had a desire to finish what he had begun. He had strong feelings about what the Republican Party should be, and he knew that he had not been able to accomplish much in this area during his first term. He would need another four years to leave a lasting imprint on the party and on the nation.
Eisenhower declared his intention to run at a press conference on February 29. He invited a small group to join him in the Oval Office that night for the televised speech he was going to make announcing his decision. Jim Hagerty, Len Hall, Jerry Persons, Milton Eisenhower, and I sat on the sofas in front of the fireplace while Eisenhower sat at the desk facing the camera. When he had finished we all shook hands, and he invited us up to the Family Quarters for a drink. “I’ll need some moral support with Mrs. Ike,” he said with a sheepish grin.
As we sat in the living room at the end of the West Hall, Eisenhower was in a strangely subdued mood. He was glad that the decision had finally been made and announced, but he did not relish the campaigning that would now begin or even the prospect of four more years of the burdens of the presidency. “At least,” he said, “I can say that I have done my duty.”
Eisenhower had gone through a difficult period reaching his decision, and he had enjoyed the drama of announcing it. But I think the reaction of the reporters took him by surprise. He immediately had to respond to a barrage of political questions, and the first one had to do with me.
Q: Mr. President, since your answer is affirmative, would you again want Vice President Nixon as your running mate?
A: As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t mention the vice presidency in spite of my tremendous admiration for Mr. Nixon, for this reason: I believe it is traditional that the Vice President is not nominated until after a presidential candidate is nominated; so I think that we will have to wait to see who the Republican convention nominates, and then it will be proper to give an expression on that point.
Responding to a follow-up question, he added: “I will say nothing more about it. I have said that my admiration and my respect for Vice President Nixon is unbounded. He has been for me a loyal and dedicated associate, and a successful one. I am very fond of him, but I am going to say no more about it.”
I think that once the question was raised, Eisenhower had three basic reactions to having me as his running mate in 1956. First, his rule of thumb for making all political judgments was understandably never to do anything that would adversely affect his own chances of winning.
Second, while Eisenhower believed that he owed me the loyalty due a staunch and hard-working subordinate, and while he knew that I had supported him in situations that had clearly been against my own political interests, he did not feel that this loyalty required any special future commitment as far as the vice presidency was concerned.
Third, Eisenhower was used to the military system, in which men advanced by taking on the next toughest job and doing it well. He did not think in terms of grooming a successor or having a protégé—that was alien to the general-staff concept that everyone should serve the commanding general with equally unselfish fervor. When Eisenhower said that other candidates would be equally acceptable to him, he meant precisely that.
Further evidence of White House staff intrigue came when Newsweek reported Eisenhower’s suggestion that I take a Cabinet position. I never could positively trace the source of the story, but it had come from a White House insider. It was hard to believe that something so sensitive could leak without Eisenhower’s approval. And if Eisenhower had approved the leak, perhaps I had been misreading him all along—perhaps he was determined to get me off the ticket and could not understand why I had not taken the hint.
The first question at Eisenhower’s next news conference on March 7 concerned th
is Newsweek story.
Q: Mr. President, there have been some published reports that some of your advisers are urging you to dump Vice President Nixon from the Republican ticket this year; and, secondly, that you yourself have suggested to Mr. Nixon that he consider standing aside this time and, perhaps, take a Cabinet post. Can you tell us whether there is anything to those reports?
A: Well, now, as to the first one, I will promise you this much: if anyone ever has the effrontery to come in and urge me to dump somebody that I respect as I do Vice President Nixon, there will be more commotion around my office than you have noticed yet.
Second, I have not presumed to tell the Vice President what he should do with his own future. . . .
The only thing I have asked him to do is to chart out his own course, and tell me what he would like to do. I have never gone beyond that.
“Chart out his own course” immediately became a catchphrase for the columnists during the next several weeks. Everyone had his own interpretation of what Eisenhower meant, but it was generally taken to indicate varying degrees of indifference toward me, or even an attempt to put some distance between us.
By this time my disillusionment with the way Eisenhower was handling the matter and my lack of a burning desire to be Vice President began to affect my own attitude. After Eisenhower’s press conference, I took a page of notepaper and drafted an announcement that I would not be a candidate in 1956. I mentioned it to Vic Johnston, the chief of staff of the Senatorial Campaign Committee, when he was in my office later that afternoon. Within a few hours, he was back with Len Hall and Jerry Persons. They said that if I announced I was withdrawing, the Republican Party would be split in two.
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