by Jim Newton
Promptly at 9:00 a.m. on January 19, Kennedy arrived with his senior cabinet designees; he and Ike met privately for a few minutes, then with Christian Herter and Dean Rusk, the outgoing and incoming secretaries of state; Thomas Gates and Robert McNamara, the outgoing and incoming secretaries of defense; and Bob Anderson, the departing secretary of the Treasury, and his designated successor, Douglas Dillon, one of the few Ike aides whom Kennedy retained. Jerry Persons and Clark Clifford, personal aides to the two presidents, attended as well.
Kennedy began by asking about Laos, and Eisenhower warned him of the complexities there. The loss of that country to Communism, he said, would open the “cork in the bottle,” and the rest of the Far East might collapse. Kennedy had been elected on a promise to act, had campaigned on the argument that Eisenhower had been too willing to allow Communism to gain ground. He probed his predecessor for some way to halt another loss of territory, in this case to keep the Chinese at bay. Ike offered little. It was, he said, like playing poker with tough stakes. His commitment to massive retaliation—and his refusal to countenance the use of nuclear weapons to decide limited wars—persisted to his final moments in office.
Many members of Ike’s staff, trapped by the snow overnight in Washington, spent a final night at the White House, bunked in meeting rooms. Bleary the next day, they bade Eisenhower farewell, many with tears in their eyes. Eisenhower shook their hands, praised their service, acknowledged their devotion. Then he joined Kennedy on the Capitol steps to complete the transfer of power that has been an essential symbol of American democracy since Washington handed authority to John Adams. Eisenhower listened as Kennedy delivered an address that was stirring, youthful, and poetic—and unmistakably laced with rejection of his predecessor. “Let the word go forth from this time and place,” Kennedy proclaimed, a sour-faced Eisenhower behind him, “to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
The passage that signaled a more profound reassessment of America’s role in the world was not found in the speech’s triumphalism. Nor was it found in Kennedy’s historic call to service: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Rather, it was in Kennedy’s pledge to all the countries of the world. “Let every nation know,” he said, “whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
For eight years, Eisenhower had fought such grandiosity, had specifically hedged America’s promises and insisted that balance was the linchpin of liberty. Now Kennedy reimagined America as limitlessly in pursuit of that ambition. Henceforth, he argued, the nation would “bear any burden” in defense of American values. Soon enough, Kennedy would learn the full measure of that burden.
Once Kennedy was sworn in, Ike and Mamie attended a lunch in their honor, then quietly slipped away. John was at the wheel. As they approached Gettysburg, students from two nearby schools—the same ones whose youngsters had welcomed him home after his heart attack in 1955—lined the road to wave. The Eisenhowers arrived at the gate, and the Secret Service escort turned around and headed back to Washington. Ike and Mamie dined that night with John and Barbara and their children at the schoolhouse on the edge of the Gettysburg farm. As they sat, John raised his glass in a toast to his father. “I suppose that tonight we welcome back a member of this clan who has done us proud,” he said. Ike was too choked up to speak, joining only as his family sounded “hear, hear.”
After forty-six years of service, President Eisenhower was again Ike. He was a private citizen at last.
Dwight and Mamie retired to Gettysburg, to the home they had rebuilt and the life they had long postponed. They were accompanied by John and Delores Moaney, a congenial black couple who worked as valet and cook. Ike painted and golfed; Mamie enjoyed her soap operas and the sunroom of the Gettysburg porch. Friends arranged for them to have a second place in Palm Desert, California, and thereafter they split their year.
Ike had always enjoyed play—he bounded from his car at Augusta to get to the links—but now that he had time for leisure, he missed work. “Dad was not a happy ex-president,” John recalled. He felt rejected by Nixon’s defeat, and his concern for the direction of the country was exacerbated by Kennedy’s deliberate and sustained repudiation of his presidency. The old had given way to the new, and Eisenhower understood where that placed him.
Nixon’s bitter loss, combined with the party’s exasperating inability to produce a quality leadership core, left the GOP once again without an identifiable leader, so that mantle fell back on Ike. “Damn, they’ve had me busy,” he grumbled to his son after one particularly eventful stretch. “I had more time in the White House to paint than I do now.”
It was mostly time spent in the wilderness, shunned by Kennedy and his new generation of leadership. Maxwell Taylor, whose Uncertain Trumpet was devoted to rebutting Eisenhower’s defense strategy in favor of “flexible response,” was much admired by Kennedy, and Taylor’s return to influence underscored the sharp rejection of Eisenhower’s most considered strategic wisdom. More stinging was Kennedy’s deliberate use of Eisenhower’s leadership as a foil; just as he had during the campaign, Kennedy positioned himself as an emblem of energy and change, devoted to invigorating a Washington that had grown stale under Ike’s aging, inattentive reign. Eisenhower understood the strategy—to friends, he compared it to FDR’s vilification of Hoover—but he was not immune to it. Even the administration’s belated acknowledgment that there was, in fact, no “missile gap” was admitted without apology to Eisenhower.
Eisenhower was wounded, naturally. His views of the “Washington scene,” he confided to an old friend in 1961, “are not particularly flattering.” Kennedy, he said to another, surrounded himself with “men who confuse ‘smartness’ with wisdom.” (In that same note, Eisenhower hinted at his deeper contempt, referring to his successor as “young President Kennedy.”) Still, he remained dutifully at the president’s call, and Kennedy reciprocated with courtesies. When friends of Eisenhower’s secured a bill to restore his rank as a general—a position that gave him back the title he had spent most of his life pursuing and allowed him to maintain a military aide—Kennedy was puzzled but happy to go along. He signed the legislation. Thereafter, President Eisenhower was addressed as “General.”
More substantively, Kennedy sought out Ike in the aftermath of the administration’s first significant blunder, the catastrophe at the Bay of Pigs. The invasion, of course, had long been contemplated by Eisenhower, who had authorized planning for it more than a year earlier. When Kennedy approved the assault, however, he botched the execution: the first strike on the Cuban air force was unsuccessful, and a second was called off when Kennedy feared American involvement would be detected; the landing spot was ill chosen; and the entire enterprise depended on an intelligence assumption that proved false, namely, that the Cuban people would greet the invasion force as liberators and turn against Castro. Instead, the fourteen hundred invaders were easily repelled, all but a few killed or captured. Chagrined, Kennedy sought out Eisenhower. He sent a helicopter to Gettysburg, which picked up Ike and shuttled him to Camp David.
“No one knows how tough this job is until after he has been in it a few months,” Kennedy lamented to Eisenhower.
“Mr. President,” Ike responded, “if you’ll forgive me, I think I mentioned that to you three months ago.”
“I certainly have learned a lot since,” Kennedy conceded.
Kennedy reviewed the planning and execution of the invasion, and Eisenhower gently corrected the flaws in his approach. They parted respectfully, some of the campaign and
early administration rancor behind them, but wary of each other still.
Mindful that his legacy was under attack in Washington, Eisenhower devoted substantial energy in retirement to construction of his own place in history. The mainstay of that effort was his memoirs—two volumes devoted to the presidency, with each roughly tracking his terms. Unlike the hell-bent effort that produced Crusade in Europe in just a few months, Mandate for Change and Waging Peace were constructed more methodically, and Ike’s participation was more supervisory, as he delegated most of the writing to Bill Ewald, who researched domestic issues, and his son, John, who handled national security and international relations. The work began immediately after Ike left office—John and Ewald set up an office at Gettysburg the Monday after Kennedy’s inauguration—and stretched over years.
Although Ewald and John Eisenhower played the dominant role in those works, both had mastered Ike’s writing style, and the books capture both his tone and his approach: dignified and painstaking, if somewhat guarded and occasionally defensive. They admit few errors—never a strong suit for presidential memoirs—but diligently and accurately record Eisenhower’s active management of his own administration, and thus form a persuasive counterweight to the misimpression fostered by Kennedy that Ike was disengaged from his presidency.
At the same time, Eisenhower quietly worked to burnish his reputation in other ways. He rationed interviews, granting them only to those writers in whom he and John saw the promise of careful and favorable treatment. When, for instance, the Associated Press reporter Pat Morin contacted Ike about the possibility of writing a biography, John screened Morin’s work and found it worthy. “I feel sure that the book will be friendly,” he wrote to his father, “since it is being done in the same vein as the Associated Press book on Churchill.” Morin was given access to Eisenhower’s papers and allowed to interview the former president on several occasions.
In addition, Milton urged his brother to organize and quickly make available his presidential papers, which, like his memoirs, would record his active role in his presidency. Milton put the idea to Ike in March 1962. Once he had his brother’s approval, the ten-year project was launched, and a conservative curator, Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr., was hired to manage it. He in turn brought a promising young historian, Stephen Ambrose, to assist. Although Ambrose would later wildly exaggerate his access to Eisenhower, Ike used the historian effectively, dispatching him to contest work critical of his war and presidential records.
Despite their differences, Eisenhower and Kennedy kept up courtesies. In August 1963, Ike and Mamie wrote to express their “profound sympathy” when Patrick Kennedy, born on August 7, died two days later. President Kennedy wrote back for himself and his wife. “Your message,” he said, “was a comfort to me and my family.”
Eisenhower was in New York on November 22, when he was pulled from a meeting that afternoon and told that Kennedy had been shot. He returned to his room at the Waldorf Astoria and headed home to Gettysburg that night.
In the national mourning that followed, Eisenhower was affected, of course. He and Mamie felt for young Jackie and her children. Eisenhower expressed his “sense of shock and dismay” at the “despicable act” and urged Americans to “join as one man in expressing not only their grief but indignation at this act.” And yet Eisenhower also was a bit mystified at the grief that followed President Kennedy’s death. Ike had sent many men to die. He understood sacrifice, demanded it of others, offered it himself. The convulsions that gripped America in those weeks seemed extravagant to a man so deeply imbued with duty to country. He was, his son reflected decades later, “a little bit bewildered as to why all the fuss.”
Johnson was far more solicitous of Ike, and the general now found more enemies within his own party. Barry Goldwater, Arizona’s cantankerous conservative senator, claimed the spiritual leadership of Ike’s party in the aftermath of Nixon’s defeat. Goldwater’s candidacy was explicitly a rejection of Eisenhower’s moderation. Ike spent eight years fending off the forces of extremism. To Goldwater, extremism was no vice.
Ike tried to head off Goldwater during the Republican primaries in 1964, then tepidly supported him once he was the Republican nominee. But he made little secret of his unhappiness. Privately, he was astounded. Goldwater, he confided to his grandson, “is just plain dumb.”
Eisenhower was seventy-four when Johnson won his election, and Ike’s health began to ebb. Visiting Augusta in November 1965, he had his second heart attack, then a third two days later. From that point on, Eisenhower’s retreat from public life accelerated. Still, he stayed active enough to be afraid for his country. Johnson’s halfhearted approach to the war in Vietnam frustrated Eisenhower, who argued that if the United States were to wage a war, it should do so with overwhelming force. Torn by his affection for Johnson and his displeasure over the dominant national security issue of the Johnson years, Ike became cranky and fulminated about “kooks” and “hippies.”
Even Eisenhower’s fabled Farewell Address, by this point claiming the attention it deserved, conflicted its author, especially as it was invoked to denigrate the American war in Vietnam. To former military and business friends, Ike downplayed the significance of the speech, offering that perhaps he had overstated his case or that it would have been more appropriate from another source; to others, he continued to profess pride in his prescient warning.
One exchange in particular captures Eisenhower’s mixed feelings about the most quoted words of his presidency. In 1966, Stanley Karson, a representative of a group called the American Veterans Committee, wrote to Eisenhower to solicit a letter from him on the fifth anniversary of the speech. Ike drafted one in response, thanking Karson for his interest in the speech and describing weapons expenditures as “in essence, futile, costly and deadening so far as constructive progress is concerned.” Before sending the reply, however, Eisenhower shared it with Bryce Harlow, his former aide then working for Procter & Gamble. Harlow warned that the group was “way out” and cautioned against giving aid to its cause. Ike deleted the revealing sentence.
By 1968, Eisenhower had known Richard Nixon for sixteen years, since they formed the Republican ticket in Ike’s first campaign for public office. They had been through travails and misunderstandings. Eisenhower would never quite understand why Nixon had so much trouble connecting with those around him or impressing voters, but he appreciated him. Moreover, Ike saw growth. “He is now even more mature and well-informed than when he was Vice President,” Eisenhower wrote to George Humphrey in 1967.
Now, as Eisenhower faded, Nixon returned, both to the apex of American politics and to Ike’s personal fold. Over Thanksgiving weekend of 1967, David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon announced to their families that they intended to marry (David, afraid that Ike would disapprove of his marrying so young, avoided telling him directly). Eisenhower was delighted at his grandson’s good fortune, and he adored Julie Nixon. But he had vowed to stay out of the Republican presidential campaign in 1968. He was close to Johnson and shadowed by the ugly Goldwater campaign of 1964. Now, as his grandson and Nixon’s daughter prepared to unite their families, Ike recognized that it would be especially difficult on Nixon if he remained neutral in this race. As he weighed whether to violate his self-prohibition on endorsing in the Republican primaries, Ike’s health intervened again.
On April 29, after a labored round of golf in Palm Springs, Eisenhower suffered another heart attack. He recuperated for a time in California and then was transferred to Walter Reed to take up his familiar suite. To the amazement of his doctors, he rebounded. “He is a man of great courage,” one said. “He is a man of great fortitude. He has a fine physical constitution. And he is a religious man.”
As he recuperated, Mamie urged him to make a statement for Nixon, as did John. Friends of both men lobbied, while Nixon himself held back, unwilling to be seen as seeking special treatment on the basis of their soon-to-be family connection. Finally, on July 18, Ike issued the endorsement
that Nixon wanted but could not bring himself to solicit. Ike cited Nixon’s “intellect, acuity, decisiveness, warmth and above all his integrity … I feel that the security, prosperity and solvency of the United States and the cause of world peace will best be served by placing Dick Nixon in the White House in January 1969.”
Ike’s open support helped push Nixon through the final obstacles in the way of his nomination—talk of a Rockefeller-Reagan ticket was squelched—and Eisenhower, again from his hospital room, addressed the Republican National Convention, meeting that year in Miami Beach. On the evening of August 5, a gaunt Eisenhower was beamed into the convention, and he gave a short talk to the delegates. The following morning, he suffered yet another heart attack. Nixon accepted his party’s nomination later that week. “I say,” Nixon urged the delegates, “let’s win this one for Ike.”
Nixon’s victory delighted Eisenhower, and the president-elect did his old boss the courtesy of soliciting his views on forming a cabinet and a government. Barbara Anne was married in November, but Ike could not attend, nor was he able to leave the hospital for David and Julie’s wedding in December. He now was on a steeply downward slope. He still managed to flirt with the nurses, over whom Mamie kept a careful eye. (“He was an old man, but after all he’d survived, you never knew,” she remarked later.) But he tired of Walter Reed and sank further into quiet. An abdominal operation in March weakened him, and by month’s end he was despairing, the famous optimism slipping away.
Ike’s wife, son, and grandson were at his side on the morning of March 28 when Ike barked out an order: “Lower the shades!” He then commanded his doctor and his son, “Pull me up.” They lifted him partway, and he grumbled, “Two big men. Higher,” he added. They did.
