The nation’s leading heart expert, Dr. Paul Dudley White of Massachusetts General Hospital, arrived at Fitzsimons later that afternoon and lent the authority and credibility of an independent, nonmilitary physician to the team. After consulting with the medical staff and examining the president, White described the heart attack as “neither mild nor serious” but “moderate” and tried to be reassuring about the president’s prognosis. By the afternoon of September 26, White felt comfortable enough to return to Boston, following a detailed and lucid press conference in which he gave the nation a tutorial on heart disease. He expressed his confidence in the “excellent” medical care the president was receiving. These words did little to reassure the financial markets, however; when the New York Stock Exchange opened on Monday morning, it suffered its worst one-day loss since the Crash of 1929. The traders bet that Eisenhower’s time in the White House was coming to an end.33
IV
In the next few days the news out of Denver improved. Eisenhower signed a few papers on September 30 in a carefully orchestrated demonstration that he was still competent. On October 2 doctors reported that the president had made it halfway through the crucial two-week period when heart attack patients might develop complications. In this period only family members, medical staff, and Sherman Adams were allowed to see him. On October 5 the doctors reported him “cheerful” and making good progress. Hagerty even detailed the president’s diet, which on October 7 included grilled trout, vegetable soup, and fresh fruit. The soup was made lovingly by Sergeant Moaney, Ike’s valet, who kept busy by preparing a few of the president’s favorite dishes in the Doud family kitchen. On October 9 Dr. White returned to examine the patient and reported that while Ike’s prognosis was favorable, he would need five more weeks in the hospital before he could be transferred to his home in Gettysburg. White thought it possible the president could be back to work in Washington by the first of January, when Congress was back in session.34
Eisenhower had survived a heart attack but could not function fully as chief executive. In principle Nixon ought to have supervised the government while the president recovered. But Nixon later admitted that he was “completely unprepared” for the shocking news of the heart attack, relayed to him in the early afternoon of September 24 by Hagerty. After putting down the receiver, Nixon sat in a stupor in an armchair in his Washington home. After a while he called his close friend and confidant William P. Rogers, the deputy attorney general, and asked him to come to his house. The two men sat together awhile, talking about Nixon’s next move. But with news of the president’s illness now flooding the airwaves, reporters started to crowd Nixon’s front lawn. Only then did Nixon make his first decision: he and Rogers fled out the back door, crossed his neighbor’s lawn in darkness, and slipped into a waiting Pontiac driven by Rogers’s wife. The vice president then went into seclusion at the Rogers home, staying out of public view until Sunday, when he attended church services with his family. Only then did he speak to reporters. For almost 24 hours after hearing about the heart attack, the president’s constitutional successor refused “even to be photographed” by the press.
Why was Nixon suddenly so publicity shy? Surely his role should have been to reassure the public right away about the continuity of government. Instead he weighed the politics. “Every move during this period,” he calculated, “had to be made with caution, for even the slightest misstep could be interpreted as an attempt to assume power.” Thus, in a moment of grave national crisis, Nixon ran through the political costs to himself of any public statement. When he gave his first press conference, he nonchalantly declared that the Eisenhower “team” would carry on as usual. Any political implications of the president’s illness, he said, were “unworthy of consideration.” Yet on Monday evening Nixon held a four-hour strategy session with Len Hall, the Republican national chairman, to discuss precisely that subject. Adams, who returned from a fishing vacation in Scotland, sat in on the discussion and refused to speak. Nixon grasped why: “Adams’ sole loyalty was to Eisenhower.” He would have no part in discussing a future without him.35
In fact the senior members of the Eisenhower administration quickly moved to limit Nixon’s authority. The vice president did not occupy center stage during the weeks that followed the heart attack. Sherman Adams did. It was Adams who along with Attorney General Brownell (also hastily returned from a European vacation), decided that there was no need to turn power over to the vice president. The president was ill, but still alive and mentally alert. He needed time to convalesce, and the nation needed continuity. Adams and Brownell decided to develop a staff system to shield the president from any burden or worry during what would be a prolonged recovery. In any case, Adams viewed Nixon as far too inexperienced to run the government. The cabinet met on September 30 and, despite Nixon’s initial resistance, decided that Adams would go to Denver on October 1 to take command of the president’s affairs there and act as the “sole official channel of information between Eisenhower and the world.” Nixon stayed behind, and he did not even visit the president until October 9, a day after Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles met in private conference.36
For the next two months the Eisenhower administration was managed by a committee consisting of six men: Adams, Nixon, Brownell, Dulles, George Humphrey, and Jerry Persons. Hagerty was the official spokesman and orchestra conductor. Of these, Nixon was the least consequential. He chaired the NSC and cabinet meetings, as he had done occasionally during the first term. But he had no executive power or authority to speak for the administration. Meanwhile Dulles controlled the State Department, Humphrey the Treasury, Brownell the Justice Department. Most important, Adams, seated at Ike’s bedside, controlled access to the stricken president.
Eisenhower gradually regained his stamina at Fitzsimons Hospital. Daily announcements marked his progress, which was slow. On October 10 the president sat in the sun in a wheelchair for half an hour; the following day he met with Dulles for 25 minutes. But he did not sit upright in a chair until October 15, the day after his 65th birthday. He stood upright for the first time on October 23, a month after the heart attack, and did not take unassisted steps until October 26—and even then, he merely shuffled across his bedroom. He was in fact a seriously ill man. Yet his handlers carefully managed the flow of information to suggest steady improvement, and on October 25 the president was wheeled out onto the sundeck next to his eighth-floor room, where the press was allowed to photograph him. He smiled broadly, looked a bit thinner, and wore deep red pajamas, a birthday gift from the White House press corps. Above the pocket the words “Much Better, Thanks,” had been embroidered in gold thread.37
He stayed in Denver until November 11, then flew to Washington. Arriving at National Airport to the ovation of a large crowd, he quipped that he was sorry his trip to Denver had been “a little longer stay than we had planned.” His limousine drove him to the White House through cheering throngs. He gingerly resumed a light workload but transferred his life to Gettysburg until the end of 1955, with occasional trips to Camp David. There, in the Catoctin Mountain retreat, he met the National Security Council on November 21 and December 1; the discussions were substantive. By December he was meeting daily with advisers and cabinet officials. On the doctor’s orders he went to Key West, Florida, for the New Year holiday, and it was not until January 9, 1956, that Eisenhower returned to the White House to resume his official duties—almost five months from the time he had left the capital in mid-August, yearning for a break from the pressures of the presidency.38
With the president convalescing in the care of attentive doctors, all the talk in Washington turned to the horse race of 1956. A consensus quickly emerged among the insiders: the president was too ill to run again, and without Eisenhower, the Republicans faced a political catastrophe. The 1954 congressional elections had revealed that nationally the GOP remained a minority party. It possessed no leader other than Eisenhower who could unite the country. In fact the Republicans had no one w
ho could even unite their party: the factional disputes between the Old Guard and the moderates had only been masked since 1952.
All the men whose names attracted speculation had serious flaws. Nixon led the pack by virtue of his official position, but most Republican Party elders either did not like him or felt he could not beat Adlai Stevenson in a head-to-head contest (as polls showed). Earl Warren, now happily ensconced at the Supreme Court, steadfastly refused to be drawn into the mix. Senate Minority Leader William Knowland inherited the mantle of Robert Taft but had none of his dignity or intelligence and was loathed by most Eisenhower loyalists, especially Nixon, with whom he had a lifelong rivalry. The president’s brother Milton possessed a winning last name but never showed the least interest in stepping into the political limelight, despite the president’s constant prodding. Treasury Secretary Humphrey, an able public servant, was six months older than Eisenhower. Senator Everett Dirksen had little national standing. And so it went. Things looked so bad that some insiders resurrected the idea of a Thomas Dewey candidacy. In short, the GOP cupboard was bare.
There was something almost Shakespearean about this political scene. The stricken leader lay hidden away in Denver or Gettysburg, screened from public view by a cloak of doctors, observing the junior officers of the party, vying for position in his absence. He almost seemed to be enjoying his position: no one could pressure him now to run again. As his strength recovered he mused frequently about whether to stay in politics or retire. In a late October letter to Swede Hazlett, he revealed that his decision to run hinged on the issue of a successor: “I am vitally concerned in seeing someone nominated who not only believes in the program I have been so earnestly laboring to have enacted into law, but who also has the best chance of election. This is the tough one.” But no one came close to matching his political strength. He had no viable protégé, and he knew it.
When in late November Eisenhower summoned Len Hall to Gettysburg, the GOP chairman desperately hoped he might coax an answer out of the Sphinx of Abilene. But Eisenhower was not yet ready to tip his hand. “Len, you’re looking at an old dodo,” Eisenhower sighed, seeming discouraged. Leaving the president’s side with no clear statement to give to the waiting reporters, Hall improvised. He put on a big smile and told the press that he was “encouraged” by the conversation and thought Eisenhower would indeed run for election. “Ike will run if he is able,” Hall told reporters, although the president had said no such thing. But Hall went all in: Ike was looking well and was sharp as ever. “As far as I am concerned, there is no other candidate.” Hall wanted to project an air of inevitability about the race, though Ike remained silent.39
In private Ike brooded on the problem of running again. Hagerty’s diary recounts an intense period of four days in December when he and Ike discussed little else. Eisenhower said he was “appalled” by the low quality of Democratic aspirants Averell Harriman, Adlai Stevenson, and Estes Kefauver, but, he admitted, “we have developed no one on our side within our political ranks who can be elected or run this country.” The two men spent hours reviewing possible contenders before discarding every name. Hagerty asked Eisenhower point blank if he would run again. His reply echoed 1952: “I don’t want to, but I may have to.” A conversation with Dulles in early January yielded a similar result. As the president summarized the discussion in his diary, the world political situation remained so dangerous—“on the verge of an abyss”—that however much he wanted to retire, he “must try to carry on.” If lesser men should take over, “individuals of less experience, lesser prestige . . . than Foster and I have,” he mused, “what will happen?”40
Eisenhower likely made the decision to run again over the New Year holiday, which he spent in Key West, surrounded by his intimate friends and family, including Bill Robinson, the Kentucky liquor entrepreneur Ellis Slater, the Mississippi Democrat and wise-cracking pal George Allen, Al Gruenther, Mamie, Milton, and his retinue. He returned to Washington on January 9, and on January 13 he held a quiet dinner for his most senior advisers and cabinet members—except, significantly, Nixon. Ike told Nixon that the dinner was to discuss Eisenhower’s future, and “since you are going to be so much the object of conversation, it would be embarrassing to you” to be present. What Ike really meant was that the dinner guests would likely say that Nixon certainly could not replace Eisenhower in 1956.41
Not surprisingly, his advisers—whose status depended upon Eisenhower remaining in the White House—all urged him to run again. Dulles was particularly effusive, declaring Eisenhower to be the only man “in the world” who could guide humanity through the tempestuous crises of the decade and avoid a possible nuclear war. Len Hall argued that Ike needed to secure his political legacy. He had begun to transform the Republican Party but still had work to do: “If you have four more years, I think you’ll make the Republican Party the dominant party in the United States.” Milton sat quietly, taking notes, until Eisenhower asked him to sum up. He had already made the case privately for early retirement, and did so again, basing his argument mainly on health concerns. Ike’s son John (who also urged Ike to step aside) later reflected, “[I] probably will never know exactly how Dad felt emotionally about a second term. Probably he was ambivalent.” But the January dinner “seemed to have the greatest single influence on him.” If he did not run, the Democrats would take back the White House. Only he could save the party and the country from that dreaded fate. John nailed it: “His colleagues were telling him what, by that time, he wanted to hear.”42
As in 1952, Eisenhower chose to run because he had come to believe he was the best man for the job and the consequences of his refusing would be catastrophic for the country. He had the kind of powerful ego that characterizes all men who attain the nation’s highest office. The idea of standing aside as a rookie like Nixon went down to defeat against the Democrats tormented him. He had never been a quitter and he was not going to let a weak heart stop him now. Of course he would run. Was there ever any doubt?
On February 29, when he felt he could not keep silent any longer, he announced in a garbled and rambling statement to a press conference that he had finally answered the great question on everyone’s mind: “My answer will be positive, that is, affirmative.” That evening at 10:00 he went on national television to explain his decision. After much “prayerful consideration” and long discussions with family, friends, and especially his doctors, he had decided to seek reelection. His health was good, he said, although he would do little “barn-storming” during the campaign. More important, his work was not yet done. He remained passionate, he said, about expanding economic freedom, building equal opportunity, and ensuring national security. He would fight on.43
CHAPTER 12
* * *
A Formidable Indifference
“The Republican Party is the party of the future.”
I
EISENHOWER’S DECISION TO RUN FOR reelection posed an awkward question: Would Nixon remain on the ticket in 1956? The answer was not obvious. While the president’s popularity remained high throughout the heart attack crisis—his party and his countrymen fretted anxiously about a future without Eisenhower—Nixon seemed diminished by the whole affair. Instead of acting as a valuable second in command, Nixon had been shunted aside as Adams, Foster Dulles, and Hagerty steered the ship of state during Ike’s convalescence. Nixon drew praise in the press for being a good team player during Eisenhower’s illness, yet it also became clear that he had no serious role to play in the administration. Nixon was superfluous.
Eisenhower, with his sixth sense for picking winners and losers, understood this. During his long recovery he spent many hours wondering if Nixon could fill his shoes. His conclusion: decidedly not. Nixon was able, loyal, hardworking, devoted, but he was not ready to be president. The only way he could hope to emerge in 1960 as a viable presidential candidate was by gaining greater experience in government. Eisenhower viewed the vice presidency as a ceremonial post, not a place to gain executiv
e skills. Even after four years in the job, Ike knew, Nixon trailed Adlai Stevenson in the Gallup poll in a hypothetical head-to-head match. Eisenhower thought Nixon needed a “crash program” to enhance his visibility and prestige. A top cabinet job, like Defense or Commerce, would serve as better preparation for higher office than another four years of being lost in Eisenhower’s shadow. And that is what Ike suggested to Nixon in a conversation in December 1955, the day after Christmas.1
The suggestion to step off the ticket and take a cabinet job seemed to Eisenhower a constructive one. But it came as a shattering blow to Nixon and triggered yet another of his famous “crises.” Nixon knew that a cabinet post would represent a demotion; worse, it would mean “Nixon had been dumped.” Eisenhower asked him “five or six times” to join the cabinet. Each time, Nixon refused; if Eisenhower wanted him “off the ticket,” he should say so, and Nixon would step down. Eisenhower thought he was offering Nixon a chance to improve himself; Nixon considered Ike’s advice a political cyanide capsule.2
While awaiting Nixon’s decision in January and February 1956, Eisenhower mused about replacements. One man he considered was Frank Lausche, the Catholic and Democratic governor of Ohio, known for his independence and bipartisanship. Ike thought the GOP would benefit immensely from putting a Catholic on the ticket. But he told Len Hall that his “first choice” was Robert Anderson, a Texan and nominal Democrat who initially served as Ike’s secretary of the navy and then as deputy secretary of defense (propping up the increasingly unreliable and gaffe-prone Charles Wilson). Anderson was a businessman, an administrator, a moderate, self-effacing, nonpartisan wise man, just the kind of technocrat Eisenhower wanted in government. (Unbeknownst to Ike, he was also an alcoholic.) In fact Ike briefly discussed with Adams the idea of having two vice presidents, one to handle domestic policy and the other foreign matters, men of substance who could handle the heavy burdens of government and bring to the president only the most crucial decisions. Ike did not have Nixon in mind for either role.3
The Age of Eisenhower Page 39
