Newspapermen raised the question on January 8, 1956, at a Key West press conference. Ike had flown down for a few days of work and exercise. After a thirty-minute stroll he faced the reporters and was asked about his political future. He replied: “All the considerations that apply to such things are complicated. Naturally I will want to confer with my most trusted advisers.” He noted that the Presidency was probably the most tiring job in the world but that “it also has, as I have said before, its inspirations.” Afterward newsmen asked one another what that had meant. By a margin of nearly five to one they concluded that Ike would retire at the end of this term.
The minority wasn’t so sure; they were picking up persistent rumors that the President was scheduling a meeting to weigh that very question. It was true, and the meeting was held that same week. Puckishly Ike called it for the evening of Friday, January 13, and made out place cards for exactly thirteen men. Mrs. Eisenhower joined them for dinner in the Mansion’s state dining room and retired when they withdrew into the second-floor Trophy Room. Sitting with his back to the fireplace, Ike explained that he wanted each of them to speak out frankly on the question of whether he should try for another term and why. There was, of course, little doubt about which way the wind would blow. As Adams dryly observed afterward, “I don’t imagine that the President expected to get a cross-fire of pro-and-con arguments from a group like that one…. If Eisenhower was looking for cogent reasons for leaving his office, he would have hardly sought them from his own appointees.”
Adams, Humphrey, Dulles, Hagerty, Summerfield, Lodge, Persons, Len Hall, Brownell, Howard Pyle, Tom Stephens—one by one they told him how indispensable he was. Then Milton Eisenhower, who didn’t want his brother to run again, summed up the arguments on both sides. The President made no decision then. He appeared to be undecided as late as February 13. That morning he reminded a cabinet meeting that he had wanted to put into his inaugural address his intention of remaining in office for only one term. He had been dissuaded, he said, and now he regretted it. Adams, however, was already proceeding on the assumption that they would be in the White House for another four years. While the President had been in Key West his chief assistant had called in government carpenters to shorten the office of the presidential appointments secretary, thereby creating a small room adjacent to the office large enough for a cot and a lounging chair—a retreat where Ike could rest before lunch, as Paul Dudley White had recommended. Adams counted on continuing strong support from the doctor for a second term, and he wasn’t disappointed; on February 14, in his last medical briefing, White was able to remove the last traces of doubt about his patient’s stamina. X-rays of his heart now and before the attack were almost identical, showing that there had been no enlargement of it since he had resumed normal activity in January. If the President ran again, White said, he would vote for him.
The following day the President flew to Secretary Humphrey’s Georgia plantation and tested his strength golfing and hunting. He felt fine, and that convinced him: he was going to run. At 4 P.M. Tuesday he told Adams, Nixon, Persons, and Hall, and at 10:37 A.M. on Wednesday, February 29, he announced the news to the press in the Indian Treaty Room. If asked to make the race again, he said, “My answer will be positive, that is, affirmative.”
The radio networks broadcast their first bulletin at 10:52, and in the next moment a House Armed Services subcommittee was given a startling glimpse of the postwar revolution in communications. A witness there was reciting a long list of statistics. Congressmen were dozing, reporters doodling. Only Chairman F. Edward Hebert of Louisiana was bright-eyed. Suddenly he whacked his gavel and cried, “Gentlemen, the President has just announced his candidacy for reelection!” After the excitement had died down a colleague from Illinois asked Hebert how he had known. The telephone hadn’t rung, no notes had been passed, no one had entered the room. Shamefacedly, Hebert confessed; instead of listening to the witness he had been tuned into one of the tiny new transistor radios, tucked inside the pocket of his coat and hooked up with an earphone that looked like a hearing aid.
In a telecast that evening from the oval office Ike told an audience estimated at 65 million: “I wanted to come into your homes this evening because I felt the need of talking to you directly about a decision I made today after weeks of the most careful and devoutly prayerful consideration…. I have decided that if the Republican party chooses to nominate me I shall accept the nomination. Therefore, if the people of this country should elect me I shall continue to serve them in the office I now hold. I have concluded that I should permit the American people to have the opportunity to register their decision in this matter.”
Beforehand, he had been chatting with television adviser Robert Montgomery when a network assistant asked him about an inch-high plaque on his desk bearing the Latin motto Suaviter in Modo, Fortiter in Re, and the translation “Gently in Manner, Strongly in Deed.” The President chuckled and said, “Maybe I’d better hide that; it proves I’m an egghead.”
The country’s ranking egghead was also in a witty mood. Asked about the President’s decision, Adlai Stevenson said, “The real reason Eisenhower is running again is that he can’t afford to retire to his farm at Gettysburg while Benson is Secretary of Agriculture.”
***
In the high summer of 1956 the corn stood tall from Mount Rushmore to the panhandle. America seemed to have returned, momentarily at least, to the frivolous 1920s, to wonderful trivia, hot music, placid politics, glamorous athletes, and automobile worship. General Motors president Harlow Curtice was Time’s Man of the Year. The compact Rambler was Detroit’s current success; Republicans were wondering whether George Romney of American Motors might make a future President.
President Eisenhower’s contribution to the American landscape, the interstate highway system, was just getting under way; ultimately it would provide 41,000 miles of new roads—high-speed, limited access, nonstop travel arteries. It was going to be the biggest public works project in the nation’s history; the cost was expected to run somewhere between 33 and 41 billion dollars. (It came to 76 billions.) Landlocked cities in the Middle West would be opened to new commerce. The driving time between Chicago and Indianapolis alone would be cut from six hours to three. Roadside services would become a billion-dollar industry, and people and goods would move quickly and safely across the country on well-engineered ribbons of concrete.
It was appropriate that in 1956 Oregon miler Jim Bailey was clocked at 3:58.6, the first under-four-minute mile run in the United States. Americans were not only moving toward new horizons; they could hardly wait to get there. The Gross National Product was 400 billion dollars’ worth of goods and services that year, and inflation was still negligible, though a warning of what lay ahead came when, after a quarter-century of unchanged postal rates, first-class mail went from three cents to four and airmail from six cents to seven.
Businessmen pointed with pride to the increase in productivity, and sermons and editorials viewed with alarm the frantic pace of American life. Popular misconceptions to the contrary, however, America did not lead the world in suicides. According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. suicide rate was 10.8 per 100,000 (16.1 for men and 4.3 for women), which put it far down the list, below Denmark (24.1), Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Sweden, West Germany, Finland, France, and England and Wales. Of course, psychiatric help was now more available for Americans, and beginning in 1956 jittery executives could find peace with meprobamate, an exceptionally effective tranquilizer better known by its trade name, Miltown. Time called Miltown “Don’t-Give-a-Damn Pills.” Their first big markets were Madison Avenue and Hollywood. In Hollywood, a drugstore at Sunset and Gower pasted a huge red sign across its display window: “Yes, we have Miltown!” Milton Berle said, “I’m thinking of changing my name to Miltown Berle.” It was a poor year for humor.
Popular athletes of the 1940s were entering the cruel twilight of their trade: Joe DiMaggio was in his forties, and now that Floyd
Patterson was heavyweight champion, Joe Louis, overweight and slow, was stumbling into the oblivion of professional wrestling. Jackson Pollock died and Liberace arrived, accompanied by his ubiquitous mother. Grace Metalious and Françoise Sagan also emerged, edifying nobody, and so did a new minstrel of youth whose voice seemed to be everywhere, singing, “Hi luh-luh-luh-luv yew-hew,” or
Awopbopaloobop! alopbamboom!
Tutti Frutti! Aw rutti!
Tutti Frutti! Aw rutti!
Elvis Aaron Presley made his movie debut that fall in Love Me Tender. He sang four songs in a secondary role, and his curious amalgam of rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass, and boogie dominated the show. All year he toured the South and West, fighting off hysterical teen-agers in pedal pushers and boosting his first LP album—it went straight to the top of Billboard’s weekly ratings—and such singles as “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Heartbreak Hotel,” each of which sold over a million copies.
Presley shocked the parents of young girls. Drape-suited and tight-panted, his petulant eyes glassy and his pouting lips hanging open, he would grip the microphone, crouch, and then buck his hips against his dangling guitar. Television producers refused to show him below the waist. They called him lewd, and they were right; that was the secret of his appeal. Teen-aged girls carved his name on their forearms with pen knives while older women bestowed gifts upon him and tried to lure him away. In Amarillo a reporter asked him if he was contemplating marriage. He replied, “Why buy a cow when you can get the milk through the fence?”
Offstage Presley could be refreshingly straightforward. Unlike Liberace, Presley had no musical pretensions. He recalled that he had been given a guitar when he was twelve. “I beat on it for a year or two,” he said. “Never did learn much about it.” Tired of driving trucks, he had taken the guitar to a recording studio. “It sounded like somebody beatin’ on a bucket lid,” he said, “but the engineer at this studio had a recording company called Sun, and he told me I had an unusual voice, and he might call me up sometime.” When Presley records started to sell, he acquired a manager who said, “He may not sound like a hillbilly, but he gets the same response.”
The pervasive vulgarity of Elvis the Pelvis was part of his appeal. He liked to spend hours at amusement parks riding dodgem cars, wore $10,000 gold lame suits, and bought a fleet of Cadillacs painted in pastels. Obsessed with his hair—it was turning prematurely gray—and guarded by a rat-pack of muscular young men who doubled as companions, he settled down in a garish estate ringed with sentry boxes. When he wanted to go night-clubbing word would be phoned ahead, so that precautions could be taken. Like royalty, he carried no cash. Then, like G. David Schine, he was drafted. In Germany, where he was stationed, he received much attention from the local press, in which he was identified as a symbol of American culture.
Presley in the flesh wasn’t much different from the comic opera roles he played on the screen. In this he was supremely a man of the time. There was little room in the ambiance of 1956 for genuine tragedy. Sober events were ignored or externalized. It is significant that on July 20, 1956, one of the most important dates in American history, headline writers were enthralled by the fact that Eisenhower had at last balanced a budget. None noted that on that day, according to the Geneva agreement of 1954, free elections were to be held in Vietnam. The failure to hold them would produce the Viet Cong, civil war, and American intervention; but commentators had no time for its implications then.
The catastrophes that did attract attention were explicit, obvious; the kind that tabloids feed on. It was a time of sensations. Victor Riesel, a New York labor columnist, was blinded by a man who threw acid in his face. Dr. Jesús de Galíndez disappeared outside a Manhattan subway station; presumably he was kidnapped by henchmen of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, and murdered. On Parris Island, South Carolina, a Marine Corps drill instructor led 74 recruits into a treacherous tidal stream; six of them drowned. In Boston the FBI solved a $2,775,000 Brink’s robbery, and the great Hungarian uprising was encouraged by Radio Free Europe in an act of criminal irresponsibility.
***
In June of 1956 Phyllis Brown, an editor at the Research Institute of America, entertained Wisconsin bankers at their annual convention with a charming little talk on the innate frailties of her sex. Never tell a woman she is being illogical, she said: “The average woman starts off on the premise that the way she feels about something is itself a most compelling argument.” Miss Brown further recommended that they praise women more than men and remember that women always take things personally.
Time reprinted this Aunt Tom’s remarks with a manly good humor. In another issue Time’s editors put a woman of intellectual pretensions in her place by reporting that “Like many of her sisters in what she bitterly refers to as the Second Sex, France’s Simone de Beauvoir would rather talk than eat.” Women’s magazines, edited by men, treated their subscribers with similar condescension. A Ladies’ Home Journal editor explained to a writer, “If we get an article about a woman who does anything adventurous, out of the way, something by herself, you know, we figure she must be terribly aggressive, neurotic.” At the peak of feminine achievement the Journal introduced to its readers a Texas housewife who had her face made up an hour after breakfast and could say, “By 8:30 A.M., when my youngest goes to school, my whole house is clean and neat and I am dressed for the day, I am free to play bridge, attend club meetings, or stay home and read, listen to Beethoven, and just plain loaf.”
There were signs, for those who could read them, that not all of her sisters were satisfied with bridge or club meetings. In 1956 McCall’s published an innocent little piece called “The Mother Who Ran Away” and was dumbfounded to find that it drew more readers than anything they had ever carried. Later Redbook ran an article on “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped.” Young mothers who felt that way were encouraged to write in—and more than twenty-four thousand of them did. But the notion that a woman should aspire to become something other than a fetching housewife was too heretical to take hold. The altar remained the only acceptable destination for single girls, and those who managed to reach it with a prize groom in tow became celebrities. Memorable brides of 1956 included Mrs. E. Clifton Daniel Jr., née Margaret Truman, and the former Odile Rodin, who became the fifth wife of Porfirio Rubirosa. (Her predecessors were Danielle Darrieux, Doris Duke, Barbara Hutton, and the daughter of Rafael Trujillo.) The ultimate prize, however, was won that year by a pretty actress from Philadelphia who, after being wooed by dress designer Oleg Cassini and actor Jean-Paul Aumont, hooked the most eligible bachelor in Europe: Prince Rainier III of Monaco. How Grace Kelly did it was a secret to be pondered by the wives of America as they loaded their automatic washing machines and scoured the blades of their husbands’ electric carving knives. All her father would say was: “Grace met him when she was on the French Riviera. She went there to make a picture called To Catch a Thief—and look what she came back with.”
The father, a Philadelphia contractor and politician who had been national sculling champion and therefore something of a catch himself, recalled that when the prince first called at the Kelly mansion, “I was under the impression he was going to stay just a couple of hours. But he stayed and stayed and stayed.” Kelly was wary. (“I don’t generally approve of these oddballs she goes out with.”) Then Rainier asked for Grace’s hand. This being too important a matter for her, she was sent off while the menfolk conferred. In a speech which might be memorized by every American tycoon whose daughter is being courted by a sovereign, Kelly warned Rainier to beware the occupational weaknesses of his class: “I told the prince that royalty didn’t mean a thing to us. I told him that I certainly hoped he wouldn’t run around the way some princes do, and I told him that if he did, he’d lose a mighty fine girl.” Mrs. Kelly sold her as-told-to memoirs to Hearst (My Daughter Grace Kelly, Her Life and Romances). The Chicago Tribune, in an allusion to Monaco’s Monte Carlo, complained, “She’s too well-bred a girl to
marry the silent partner in a gambling parlor.” Aristotle Onassis, who virtually owned Monte Carlo and would continue to pay no French taxes if Grace presented her husband with an heir, cried, “I am mad with joy,” and gave the Monaco Red Cross a million francs.
The Kelly-Rainier wedding was an MGM press agent’s dream, one reason being that the MGM publicity department had a hand in it. On April 12 the American Export liner Constitution hovered off the French coast and set Grace on the deck of the Prince’s white yacht Deo Juvante II. Accompanying her were 80 wedding guests, 24 columnists, four trunks, 20 hatboxes, 36 other pieces of luggage, and the bride’s black French poodle, Oliver. Overhead, an aircraft from Onassis’s private squadron bombarded the yacht with red and white carnations. From the shore came a din: klaxons, sirens, rockets, and cannon firing 21-gun salutes. The dock was literally black with newspapermen—1,500 of them from all over the world, more than had covered the Geneva summit the year before. Ashore and with Grace beside him in his green Chrysler Imperial, Rainier discovered that his way was temporarily blocked by fifty photographers. Everyone seemed to be in Monaco except the ones the couple most wanted: Europe’s more famous crowned heads. Elizabeth II had declined to come, and other members of European royalty had followed her example. England was represented in Monaco by a minor diplomat and Randolph Churchill, who yelled in a moment of pique, “I didn’t come here to meet vulgar people like the Kellys.”
If Elizabeth was wary of being exploited by the world press, others with famous names didn’t mind at all. President Eisenhower was represented at the wedding by Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate. The Aga Khan was there with his begum. Somerset Maugham led Monte Carlo’s literary contingent, and former King Farouk of Egypt, now obese and besotted, distressed the wedding marshals by waddling up the central staircase of St. Nicholas Cathedral, supposedly reserved for the bridal party. He was whisked aside and the principals arrived. Grace said “Je veux,” thereby becoming twice a princess, four times a duchess, nine times a baroness, eight times a countess, four times a marchioness, and once a viscountess. Her wedding gifts included a quarter-million dollars in diamonds alone. Pickpockets at the festivities made off with $150,000, but to Onassis, who kept picking up tabs, it was all worth it. In August Rainier disclosed that his wife was pregnant. Monaco celebrated the announcement with fireworks, trumpets, bonfires, and dancing in the street and the New York Daily Mirror used a line it had been saving almost a year: MONACO WEATHER FORECAST: A LITTLE RAINIER IN FEBRUARY.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 114
