Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  The “Spirit of Geneva” seemed to introduce a new, more relaxed phase of the Cold War. From 1948 to the summer of 1955, there were war scares on an almost monthly basis, with major fighting in Korea and Vietnam. For the time being, both sides stepped back from the brink. As British foreign secretary Harold Macmillan put it, the summit had made it clear that “all the great nations who were in the nuclear game now accepted that modern war, that is nuclear war, was quite impossible and could only lead to mutual destruction.”24

  Not everyone was pleased. The thaw in East-West relations was serious enough for J. Edgar Hoover to warn a closed session of a House Appropriations subcommittee that the “Spirit of Geneva” was encouraging American Communists to leave their hiding places and make inroads among naïve fellow citizens. Hoover said that for each of the country’s estimated 22,280 Communists, there were ten more Americans being duped.25

  Following his success at Geneva, Eisenhower found himself under increasing pressure to announce his candidacy for reelection. With Ike heading the ticket, the GOP would not only retain the White House, but stood a good chance of regaining the House and Senate as well. With anyone other than Ike, the Republicans had no chance whatever. Public opinion polls showed that just about any Democrat could beat just about any Republican except Eisenhower.26

  As in 1951, the effort to extract a commitment from Ike was led by Lucius Clay. “Clay approached the matter circumspectly and even in roundabout fashion,” Eisenhower confided to his diary shortly after the midterm elections. “But when he once got on to the real purpose of his visit, he pursued his usual tactics aimed at overpowering all opposition and settling the matter without further question.” Clay told Eisenhower that the recent loss of the House and Senate meant that the Republican party had to be revitalized into an “Eisenhower Republican Party.” Although the name troubled him, Ike did not disagree. “The Republican party,” he wrote, “must be known as a progressive organization or it is sunk. I believe that so emphatically that I think that far from appeasing or reasoning with the dyed-in-the-wool reactionary fringe, we should completely ignore it and when necessary, repudiate it.”27

  Eisenhower said the Republican party had been led astray by people such as Robert Wood, New Jersey congressman Fred Hartley, “several of our old generals, two of whom are my classmates, Malone, McCarthy, and Bertie McCormick.e The political strength that these people could generate in the United States could not elect a man who was committed to giving away $20 gold pieces to every citizen for every day of the calendar year! But entirely aside from their political significance is the fact that their thinking is completely uncoordinated with the times in which we live.”

  Eisenhower recognized that Clay was speaking for the group who helped him secure the nomination in 1952.

  Since the men who are associated with Clay both in and out of government are committed to opposing the efforts both of the reactionaries on the one side and the A[mericans for] D[emocratic] A[ction] on the other, it is clear that their efforts would be directed exactly along the lines in which I firmly believe.… I tried to make Clay see that what we must all do is to work for this kind of idea. I admitted that it was probably easier to personalize such an effort and therefore to use my name as an adjective in describing it. But I pointed out that if we focused the whole effort on me as an individual, then it would follow that in the event of my disability or death, the whole effort would collapse.

  Here is where we parted company. Clay said, “I am ready to work for you at whatever sacrifice to myself because I believe in you. I am not ready to work for anybody else that you can name.” He insisted that he did not mean working for me in the personal sense; but he also insisted that he and his friends needed now the assurance that I would not “pull the rug out from under them.” This is exactly the phrase they used on me in 1951, and I well know how such a foot in the door can be expanded until someone has taken possession of your whole house.28

  Eisenhower noted that he was troubled about his age and the need to bring younger men into positions of leadership. The growing complexity of the problems the president confronted also bothered him, as did the two-term limit imposed by the Twenty-second Amendment. Not that Ike wanted a third term, but the amendment, in his view, made any president a lame duck as soon as his second term began. Eisenhower understood the political advantage he retained by keeping his plans to himself. But he was also genuinely in doubt. Earlier he had written to Milton that if he ever showed signs of wanting a second term, Milton should “call in the psychiatrist—or even better the sheriff.”29

  After meeting with Clay, Eisenhower wrote Swede Hazlett that he was troubled by the Twenty-second Amendment, which Ike thought significantly reduced the influence of a second-term president. “The implication of this is that only the most unusual of circumstances should induce any man to stand a second time for the Presidency.”30

  On July 11, 1955, before Eisenhower’s departure for Geneva, fifty-four Republican members of the House issued a formal call urging the president to announce that he would seek reelection. Eisenhower did not reply. Upon his return from Geneva, a delegation of distinguished Republicans from Ohio known as the Bull Elephants Club called on Ike in the White House and presented him with a similar appeal. Eisenhower responded with a rambling, impromptu speech (Ike at his dissembling best) delineating the burdens of the presidency and the need for more young Republicans, but totally avoiding any answer to their request.31 At his news conference on August 4, Edward Folliard of The Washington Post asked the president about his response to the Bull Elephants, and whether the Geneva Big Four meeting had made it more or less likely that he would run in 1956.

  Eisenhower, who evidently expected the question, was ready with his answer. “Eddie, if I were such an infallible prophet that I could understand all about the world situation, the domestic situation, and my own situation, including the way I felt, and possibly with the health and everything else, as of that moment, then there would be no great excuse for deferring the decision. I have not that gift of prophecy.”32

  With speculation rife, Eisenhower departed Washington on August 14, 1955, for a lengthy summer vacation in Colorado. Over the next several weeks the president enjoyed the hospitality of Aksel Nielson at his ranch near Fraser, and spent most of his time ensconced in the rambling home of the Douds at 750 Lafayette Street, known to the press as the “Summer White House.” A habitual early riser, Ike visited his office at nearby Lowry Air Force Base for an hour or two each morning, and then headed for the golf course at the Cherry Hills Country Club, which was one of his favorites. Friday, September 23, was no exception. Ike was in good spirits. His secretary Ann Whitman noted in her diary, “I have never seen him look or act better.”33 Eisenhower raced through his correspondence and dashed off a quick note to Lyndon Johnson, who had recently suffered a heart attack and was convalescing at his ranch in Texas. “I am delighted to have your encouraging report on your recovery,” Ike wrote. “I most earnestly hope that you will not let your natural bent for living life to the hilt make you try to do too much too quickly.”34

  Eisenhower played eighteen holes that morning with the club pro, “Rip” Arnold. The game was interrupted twice by phone calls from Secretary of State Dulles, wanting to discuss matters that Ike thought could have waited. (There were no cell phones in 1955, and Eisenhower had to leave the course and return to the clubhouse to field each call.) Eisenhower was in a foul mood at lunch, wolfed down a hamburger lavishly garnished with raw onions, and decided to play another nine holes with Arnold that afternoon. Again he was interrupted by a phone call from Washington. “At this point his anger was so real that the veins stood out on his forehead like whipcords,” an observer noted.35 The call proved to be a false alarm, no one was calling, and Eisenhower really hit the roof. After eight holes he called it quits, complaining of heartburn, which he attributed to the onions at lunch.36

  Back at the Doud home, Eisenhower painted for several hours and then was join
ed for dinner by George Allen and his wife, who were visiting Denver. Ike and Allen passed up their customary predinner drink, and Eisenhower retired about ten o’clock. He was awakened by severe chest pain at about 1:30 a.m., which he again attributed to the onions at lunch. Mamie, who was sleeping in an adjoining bedroom, heard him stirring and asked if he wanted anything. Ike asked for some milk of magnesia, and she found it and gave him a dose. When Mamie turned on the light and looked at her husband, she decided he was seriously ill and immediately called Major General Howard Snyder, the family physician. Snyder, who had accompanied the Eisenhowers to Denver, was staying at the BOQ at Lowry Air Force Base. He arrived at the Doud home a little before 3 a.m.

  Dr. Howard McCrum Snyder, seventy-five years old, a career Army doctor, had been Eisenhower’s personal physician since 1945. During the war he had treated Mamie at General Marshall’s request, and was soon part of the Eisenhowers’ personal entourage. Tall, handsome, and energetic, he was a frequent bridge and golfing partner for Ike, and his wife was one of Mamie’s canasta regulars. Snyder had accompanied Eisenhower to Columbia, then to NATO, and, like General Gruenther, had become one of Ike’s closest friends. When Eisenhower was elected president, Snyder was appointed the personal physician to the president. Dr. Snyder was a surgeon by training, had served on various military posts during the interwar years, and did a stint as the War Department’s deputy inspector general. He was devoted to the Eisenhowers, but his medical skills were rusty: “an old-time general practitioner,” as one military associate put it.37 In 1954, Lucius Clay, speaking on behalf of Gang members Cliff Roberts, Bill Robinson, and himself, urged Ike to employ a younger, more proficient presidential physician, but Eisenhower would not consider it.38 As the president wrote to the Army’s adjutant general on Snyder’s 1955 efficiency report, “His [Snyder’s] devotion to me and to our family is selfless and complete. I hope he continues in his present post for the remainder of my time here.”39 f

  When Dr. Snyder examined Eisenhower, he concluded that Ike was suffering from acute indigestion and treated him accordingly. An 8 a.m. press release from the president’s office at Lowry announced that Eisenhower had suffered a “digestive upset” during the night, that Dr. Snyder was with him, that the president was still in bed, and that he would not be coming into the office until much later in the day.40 At 12:15 p.m. that Saturday, deputy White House press secretary Murray Snyder, who handled the press chores in Denver, met with reporters in the conference room at Lowry and issued the following statement: “I just talked with General Snyder and he tells me that the president is resting. He said that this indigestion is not serious and he says that it is the same type of indigestion that many people have had. It is not serious. He [Eisenhower] is resting in bed now, and I am not going to predict how long it will take him to shake it off.”41

  There was no cover-up. Dr. Snyder genuinely believed that Ike was suffering from indigestion.g Not until roughly 1:15 p.m. did Snyder realize that Eisenhower’s symptoms more closely resembled those of someone suffering a heart attack rather than a digestive upset. At that point, he called Fitzsimmons Army Hospital to order an electrocardiogram. The equipment was brought to the Doud home by Dr. Byron Pollock, chief of cardiology at Fitzsimmons, and General Martin Griffin, the hospital commander, dressed (at Snyder’s request) in civilian clothes. “At 2:00 p.m.,” according to the report filed by James Rowley, the chief of Eisenhower’s Secret Service detail, “they announced the cardiograph disclosed a coronary thrombosis condition and they all concluded it would be best to move the president to the hospital where all the necessary equipment was available.”42

  Eisenhower was placed in an oxygen tent at Fitzsimmons, the appropriate medication was administered, and Dr. Paul Dudley White of Massachusetts General, the nation’s preeminent heart specialist, assumed responsibility for the president’s care. White met the press almost immediately after examining Ike and briefed them completely on his condition. “Tell them everything,” Ike instructed him. White noted that coronary thrombosis was “the commonest important illness that besets a middle-age man in this country today.” He told reporters that Eisenhower had suffered a “moderate” heart attack—“not a mild one, not a severe one, but something in between.” The president was still seriously ill, said White, but there was good reason to believe that he could make a complete recovery.43 That Eisenhower survived the twelve-hour hiatus between the initial attack and the first accurate diagnosis was a testament to his remarkable constitution. At sixty-four, Ike weighed 172 pounds, only seven pounds more than when he graduated from West Point. His blood pressure was a reasonable 140/80 and his pulse averaged sixty beats per minute. He exercised daily and spent hours out of doors on the golf course. He had the willpower of an ox. And he continued to be just plain lucky. “Divine Destiny,” George Patton had often called him, and on September 24, 1955, Eisenhower’s luck ran true to form.

  If Eisenhower had to have a heart attack, September 1955 was a good time to have one. Congress was in recess, the Geneva Big Four meeting had already taken place, there were no urgent foreign or domestic matters that required his personal attention, and the 1956 election campaign had not begun. On Monday, September 26, the New York Stock Exchange took its worst plunge since the Great Depression, but the encouraging words of Dr. White soon set things straight. In Washington, Vice President Nixon presided over routine meetings of the cabinet and the National Security Council, while John Foster Dulles, as the ranking cabinet officer, handled major policy issues. Sherman Adams and James Hagerty moved their offices to Denver, Attorney General Brownell ruled that no delegation of authority was required, and Ike’s cabinet officers continued to run their departments as if nothing had happened. Nixon, for his part, studiously avoided any attempt to assume command in Eisenhower’s absence. “The policies and programs of the administration as determined and approved by the President are well established along definite lines and are well known,” said a White House press release on September 30. “Coordination of the activities of the several departments … will be continued by the full cooperation among the responsible officers of those departments so that the functions of the government will be carried forward in an effective manner during the absence of the President.”44

  Ike at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, October 14, 1955. (illustration credit 24.2)

  In Denver, Eisenhower’s recovery moved forward without complication. On October 14, 1955, Ike’s sixty-fifth birthday, he was photographed in a wheelchair on the hospital roof looking tanned and healthy. On his shirt pocket, the words much better thanks had been embroidered. With matters running smoothly in Washington, Eisenhower ruled out any return until he could walk into the White House without assistance. If cabinet officers needed guidance, they flew to Denver, and Adams carried Eisenhower’s wishes back to Washington each Friday.

  On Veterans Day, November 11, 1955, Eisenhower and his doctors felt he was sufficiently recovered to return. “I leave with my heart unusually filled with gratefulness,” the president told the assembled staff at Fitzsimmons. “Misfortune, and particularly the misfortune of illness, brings to all of us an understanding of how good people are.”45

  In Washington, a crowd of five thousand well-wishers greeted the president at National Airport. “The doctors have given me at least a parole if not a pardon,” Ike told the happy onlookers. “I expect to be back at my accustomed duties, although they say I must ease into them and not bulldoze my way into them.”46 After a long weekend in the White House, Eisenhower and Mamie drove to Gettysburg for another period of rest and recuperation. He presided over the occasional cabinet meeting at Camp David, and returned to Washington just before Christmas.

  As he recovered, Eisenhower fretted about the 1956 election. If the doctors had doubts about his health, the issue would be settled. He would not run. But if they gave him something approaching a clean bill of health, then he would have to decide whether to seek reelection. The Republican convention was scheduled to
meet in San Francisco in August, and sooner or later he would have to announce his intentions. As in 1951, Eisenhower was undecided. But he also relished the uncertainty that made him the center of attention, and the longer he could hold off making an announcement, the greater was his clout in the White House. This was particularly important if he should choose not to run again.

  Aside from his health, Eisenhower’s principal concern was his successor. If he stepped down, who would take his place? The landscape looked barren. In the Republican party, Earl Warren was the most obvious choice, but it was unlikely that he would resign his post as chief justice. Eisenhower was also skeptical of Warren’s ability to make crisp decisions. The former governor, in Ike’s view, preferred to wrestle with decisions far too long. Richard Nixon was too inexperienced, and Senator William Knowland was “impossible.” Both wanted the job, but neither was presidential timber. Eisenhower thought that either Governor Dewey or Herbert Brownell could handle the responsibility, but they were anathema to Republicans in the Midwest and would split the party. Neither could be elected. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey would make an excellent president, and so would Ike’s brother Milton, but neither could get the nomination. The same was true of Alfred Gruenther and Lucius Clay.