I should address myself for a moment principally to the delegates from the Soviet Union, because our two great countries admittedly possess new and terrible weapons in quantities which do give rise in other parts of the world, or reciprocally, to the fears and dangers of surprise attack.
I propose, therefore, that we take a practical step, that we begin an arrangement, very quickly, as between ourselves—immediately. These steps would include:
To give each other a complete blueprint of our military establishments, from beginning to end, from one end of our countries to the other; lay out the establishments and provide the blueprints to each other.
Next, to provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other country—we to provide the facilities within our country, ample facilities for aerial reconnaissance, where you can make all the pictures you choose and take them to your own country to study; you to provide exactly the same facilities for us and we to make these examinations, and by this step to convince the world that we are providing as between ourselves against the possibility of great surprise attack, thus lessening danger and relaxing tension.
Likewise we will make more easily attainable a comprehensive and effective system of inspection and disarmament, because what I propose, I assure you, would be but a beginning….
The United States is ready to proceed in the study and testing of a reliable system of inspections and reporting, and when that system is proved, then to reduce armaments with all others to the extent that the system will provide assured results.
The successful working out of such a system would do much to develop the mutual confidence which will open wide the avenues of progress for all our peoples.
During the translation a blinding flash of lightning filled the room, thunder rolled across the lake, and all the electricity in the Palais des Nations went dead. Ike chuckled. He said, “I didn’t mean to turn the lights off.” They flickered on again, revealing a dumbfounded Russian delegation. The Soviet Union was still in the grip of Stalinist paranoia. Diplomats in Moscow were shadowed, foreign correspondents were limited in their movements, the telephones of foreigners were tapped, and any Soviet citizen seen in conversation with them was closely questioned. The idea of providing the Americans with detailed maps of their military bases and then allowing U.S. photographers to fly over and take all the pictures they liked was stupefying. Khrushchev and his fellow delegates didn’t know what to say. They just stared.
The Europeans were overjoyed. They hailed the proposal as a diplomatic masterstroke. Premier Faure said, “I wish the people of the world could have been in this conference room to hear the voice of a man speaking from great military experience. Had this been possible, they would believe that something had changed in the world in the handling of this question of disarmament. I am sure that this conference has scored its first victory over skepticism.” Next morning newspaper editorials all over western Europe echoed Faure. Opening the skies was something everyone could understand. It was simple and direct, and only a President whose country had nothing to hide could have proposed it.
In practice it was impossible, as out of the question for Americans as for Russians. Ike’s military advisers knew that. They had read the fine print he had skipped in his extemporaneous delivery—Open Skies was described there as a suggestion to “instruct our representatives in the Subcommittee on Disarmament in discharge of their mandate from the United States to give priority effort to the study of inspection and reporting”—and they had concluded that he was talking about a distant goal, something that could become practical only after a great many other agreements had been reached and tested. The Pentagon was not paranoid, but it did have a great many hoops through which anyone must jump before he could look at classified material. A government that withheld data from J. Robert Oppenheimer wasn’t going to turn it over to the NKVD. This was still the McCarthy era. The senator might be discredited, and the country might be willing to forgive the promoters of Peress, but that was a far cry from filling the sky over Los Alamos with MIGs.1
At the end of the conference Bulganin drew the President aside and said, “Don’t worry—this will come out all right.” Ike left Geneva convinced that the Soviet leaders, especially Zhukov, were persuaded that he had been sincere. In the following months they treated Open Skies gingerly, mindful, perhaps, of the enthusiasm which had greeted it elsewhere. As late as March 1, 1956, Eisenhower was writing Bulganin to propose the merger of Open Skies and another plan, for the peaceful use of atomic energy. By then, however, Bulganin was being shouldered aside by Khrushchev, who wasn’t interested in conciliatory gestures. He preferred to deliver speeches about “wars of national liberation.” The Spirit of Geneva was dead. There had been no detente. The conference had achieved nothing that lasted, and is now remembered only for the warmth of Ike’s grin and the density of the ice which it didn’t melt.
Mercifully, disillusionment was slow to emerge. As the President flew home, Geneva was being acclaimed as a thundering success. Gallup reported that 84 percent of the American people could not think of a single thing in the Eisenhower administration that deserved criticism. The Columbine brought the President home in the early hours of Sunday, July 24. It was still dark, the Washington National Airport was drenched in rain. Nevertheless, people were there to cheer him as he descended the ramp, and others lined the roads to the White House. It was a peak in his Presidency, one of the great moments of the 1950s. He had left determined to lessen world tensions, he was returning in apparent triumph, and now he looked forward to a long golfing vacation in Denver.
***
On September 23, 1955, President Eisenhower awoke early on Byers Peak Ranch outside Denver, where he was the guest of Aksel Nielsen, a Colorado banker, and cooked his own breakfast: beef bacon, pork sausage, fried mush, and flapjacks. He stopped off at the stucco administration building at Lowry Air Force Base, spent two intensive hours working with aides, and then drove to the Cherry Hills Country Club for eighteen holes of golf. He shot 84, which was better than it seemed because twice his game had been interrupted by urgent phone calls, one of them from Dulles about the Soviet responses to Open Skies.
The President lunched on hamburger and raw onions, then golfed another nine holes. On the eighth hole he paused, frowning, and rubbed his chest. To the club pro he said, “Maybe I can’t take those onions any more. They seem to be backing up on me. I seem to have a little heartburn.” The rest of his afternoon was spent in the basement of his mother-in-law’s Lafayette Street home painting; he was copying a photograph of an Argentine woman in the July 11 issue of Life. Then George and Mary Allen arrived for dinner. Over roast lamb, potatoes, and vegetables Ike mentioned being troubled by the onions earlier, but then he appeared to forget it. At 10 P.M. he retired to his second-floor bedroom. Mamie’s bedroom was directly across the hall.
She awoke at 2:30 A.M. and heard him tossing about. Crossing the corridor, she found him asleep but restless. “What’s the matter, Ike?” she asked. “Are you having a nightmare or something?” No, he mumbled; he was fine; she left. But he wasn’t fine. And he couldn’t get back to sleep. Suddenly an agonizing pain gripped his chest. He rose and crossed the hall to her. He couldn’t speak; he rubbed his chest to show where it hurt. Remembering the onions, she gave him milk of magnesia. She was troubled. This was something new; he had never complained of a pain there before. Picking up the phone, she called Major General Howard McC. Snyder, the President’s personal physician, at Lowry’s bachelor officers’ quarters four miles away. She told him what was happening and said, “You’d better come over.”
Snyder didn’t need to be told. Those symptoms would alarm any doctor. Flinging his clothes over his pajamas, he told his driver, “Seven-fifty Lafayette Street, and step on it.” They raced through red lights all the way; at 3:12 the doctor was at the President’s bedside. Ike was flushed, sweating, and in extreme discomfort. His pulse was rapid and his blood pressure was high. Listening to his chest w
ith a stethoscope, Snyder reached a diagnosis within minutes. The President had been stricken by a coronary thrombosis. His heart had been damaged; how much, Snyder could not tell. He administered amyl nitrate, papaverine hydrochloride to dilate Ike’s arteries, and morphine for shock. Then he gave him a shot of heparin to prevent clotting. At 3:45 he administered a second injection of morphine. Ike fell into a deep sleep. His crisis was passing, but Snyder decided that for the time being he would tell no one of it, not even Mrs. Eisenhower. There was nothing they could do, and the commotion of an alarmed household would only decrease the President’s chances.
For nearly four hours the doctor sat alone by the bed. A little before 7 A.M., when others in the gray brick house began to waken, he sent for Ann Whitman. The President was indisposed, he told the secretary; it was a digestive upset. At 10:30 this word was given to the press and flashed around the world. By then, however, Snyder knew he couldn’t withhold the truth much longer. He quietly informed Mrs. Eisenhower of it and called the chief of cardiology at Fitzsimons General Hospital, just outside Denver, asking him to bring an electrocardiograph. Ike awoke at 11:45. He was conscious but feeble. The tracing of the electrocardiograph, when spread out on Mrs. Doud’s dining room table, confirmed the diagnosis, and Snyder told Ike what had happened. He said, “We would like to take you to Fitzsimons.” Then he said that an ambulance would not be necessary. The President nodded and asked him to inform the Secret Service. Assisted down the stairs and into a limousine waiting in the driveway, Ike was driven nine miles to the hospital. There a wheelchair took him to a special suite and an oxygen tent.
At 2:30 P.M. a press aide at Lowry told the White House correspondents there: “The President has just had a mild anterior—let’s cut out the word ‘anterior’—the President has just had a mild coronary thrombosis. He has just been taken to Fitzsimons General Hospital. He was taken to the hospital in his own car and walked from the house to the car.”
His last words were drowned by pandemonium.
***
In Washington, where it was 4:30 P.M., Jim Hagerty had returned from vacation that morning. Informed by phone of the heart attack shortly before the announcement to the press in Denver, he immediately put through a call to Vice President Nixon’s white brick home in Washington’s fashionable Spring Valley neighborhood. The Nixons had just returned from a wedding, and the Vice President was reading the Washington Evening Star’s brief account of Eisenhower’s digestive upset. Hagerty asked him, “Dick, are you sitting down?” Nixon said he wasn’t, and then the President’s press secretary, speaking very slowly, told him what happened. He said, “The press will be told about it in a half-hour or so.” Nixon said, “My God!”
Hanging up, the Vice President walked into his living room in a daze and sat down. According to his later recollection, he said nothing for at least five minutes. After the shock had worn off he phoned William Rogers, then deputy attorney general, and asked him to come at once. By the time Rogers’s taxi drew up, the news had been broken in Denver. Nixon’s phone was ringing constantly. Outside, a crowd was gathering: neighbors, reporters, photographers. Determined to say nothing to newspapermen, Nixon remained inside as long as he could. By the time he had finished dinner, however, the din outside had become alarming, and he decided to hide out in Rogers’s Bethesda home. It was like a movie escape. Rogers called his wife and told her to come and park a block away keeping the motor running. Then, while nine-year-old Tricia Nixon distracted the crowd on the lawn, the two men darted out a side door, raced down an alley, and jumped into the car.
***
In Prestwick, Scotland, the weather was cold and drizzly as Sherman Adams, the assistant to the President, checked into headquarters of the U.S. base there with Colonel Andrew J. Goodpaster. Adams had just completed a four-week tour of U.S. installations in Europe; he was meeting General Gruenther for a return flight to Washington that night. Before they could exchange a word the commanding officer of the base darted up and told them that he had just learned the President had been hospitalized in Denver with a heart attack. No details were available. Fleetingly Adams wondered whether Denver’s elevation of five thousand feet would be good for a mending heart. Then it occurred to him that if Eisenhower had to be ill, this was a good time for it. Congress was in recess, Ike had no pending obligations as head of state, presidential duties were at a minimum, and planning for the coming year’s program, then in its early stages, would not require the President’s attention for some time.
Wall Street did not know that. The stock market, which is a kind of fun-house mirror exaggerating ups and downs in the American mood, opened nervously Monday morning as the plane bearing Adams approached the U.S. coast. Then stocks dove. The Dow Jones average plummeted to 444.56; losses were estimated at twelve billion dollars; it was the Street’s worst day since the Crash.
The extent of Ike’s illness was the only topic of conversation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that noon when Adams arrived in time to lunch with Nixon, Rogers, and Jerry Persons. Halfway through the meal a call came from Denver. Dr. Paul Dudley White, the eminent Boston heart specialist, had completed his first examination of the President and was surprisingly optimistic. Ike’s condition was satisfactory, he said, and his morale was good. He would be able to meet a light schedule in two weeks if all went well, and could probably return as a full-time President within a few months. Indeed, Dr. White said, barring the unforeseen, Eisenhower ought to be able to run for reelection. The stock market, delighted with this prognosis, surged back on Tuesday, and administration leaders lunched again, this time in the office of Secretary Humphrey in the Treasury Building, to consider ways of carrying on in the chief’s absence.
All that week Washington buzzed with rumors of mistrust and misunderstandings on the highest levels of the government, and all of them were false. Eisenhower’s much maligned staff system worked smoothly while he himself lay on a hospital bed 1,551 miles away. On Thursday the cabinet met with Nixon presiding. He read the morning bulletin from Denver—the President had had an excellent night, his first one out of the oxygen tent—and after a review of the diplomatic fronts by Dulles, Brownell led a discussion on the delegation of powers. As things worked out in the days ahead, Nixon signed some papers “in behalf of” the President while Adams really ran the office. Once a week during the rest of Eisenhower’s convalescence Adams flew to Denver to report on meetings of the cabinet and the National Security Council. Only urgent problems were brought to the President’s bedside. There were few of those; the one topic of substance was the coming State of the Union message, and that wasn’t due until January.
In Adams’s opinion, “the real key figure in the government” that autumn was Paul Dudley White. By the end of September Dr. White had become the most famous physician in the country. His candid medical briefings reassured the press and the country, and with his encouragement—sometimes, in fact, at his insistence—presidential aides overcame their reluctance to burden the hospitalized chief executive. “Look,” White said to Hagerty, “he’s not so much of an invalid as he is the President of the United States lying in there. He wants to do his job.” On October 14 Ike told Adams he felt fine. “Funny thing,” he said. “If the doctors didn’t tell me differently, I would think this heart attack belonged to some other guy.”
That was his sixty-fifth birthday, and sacks of congratulatory mail were piled high in the hospital auditorium. Over and over the President told visitors how moved he was by them; to Mamie he said, “It really does something for you to know that people all over the world are praying for you.” The White House correspondents gave him his gayest moment of the day. Their gift was a suit of fire-engine red pajamas with five tiny gold stars embroidered on each collar tab and “Much Better, Thanks” embroidered over the breast pocket. To complete the gaudy costume, Merriman Smith of the United Press and Laurence H. Burd of the Chicago Tribune had contributed a 39-cent black cowboy tie tricked out with silver sequins. Ike was delighted. He tol
d Dr. White these were the most marvelous pajamas he had ever owned. The doctor encouraged him to wear them as often as possible. They were more important than they seemed, White privately told the presidential staff; one of the worst aspects of a heart attack was the depression that accompanied recovery.
For a time it seemed that Ike might be spared that. Discharged from Fitzsimons after a fluoroscopic examination, he returned to Washington on November 11 for a long White House weekend, and on November 14 he drove to his Gettysburg farm with Mrs. Eisenhower. Seven thousand Pennsylvanians greeted him there, waving placards saying GLAD YOU’RE HOME, IKE and WELCOME HOME, IKE AND MAMIE. On November 22 he presided over a cabinet meeting, his first since the attack, at Camp David. All of those present noticed that he had lost weight, but his spirits appeared to be fine. He had seen an editorial expressing surprise that the cabinet could work well without him, he said. In fact, he said with a smile, there were hints that it had worked better. Adams noted: “He was quick, decisive, and keen. I could see that the Cabinet liked what they saw. Some of them were openly astonished by the President’s fast recovery and all of them were agreeably surprised.”
Then, back in Gettysburg, gloom struck. December was dark, cold, and wet; the putting green at the farm was brown and soggy. Cooped up indoors, he faced, as Hagerty put it, “the sheer, God-awful boredom of not being President.” For five terrible weeks he stalked around the farmhouse using a golf club as a cane, suffering in that special hell known only to victims of severe depression. In the two months since his coronary neither he nor anyone close to him had seriously supposed that he might run for another term. Now he began to have second thoughts. Paul Dudley White saw no reason why he shouldn’t stay in the White House. It was, the President told those around, something to think about.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 113
