Mostly, though, they were just so doggone comfortable to be with that Winnie and I almost couldn’t get enough of their company—a welcome counterpoint to the public fervor that was surrounding our young family’s attempt to have a normal private life in my peak years between ’58 and ’66. The girls, Peg and Amy, though mere toddlers when they first met him, were particularly fond of the president, as well.
One special day in September of 1966 stands out among many cherished memories. It was my thirty-seventh birthday and a pretty Saturday morning. I had planned to spend a relatively low-key day playing golf at the club, maybe practicing and building a new set of golf clubs in my workshop, followed by dinner with Winnie and friends later at Latrobe.
That was my plan. Others had something else in mind.
A friend of ours from Palm Springs named Molly Cullum just “happened” to stop by for a visit, and I greeted her on my way out the door to the workshop, but every time I attempted to leave, Winnie dragged me back into the kitchen. Frankly, this routine was getting pretty irritating. Finally, I walked Molly outside to say goodbye and was telling her how excited I was about my new aircraft, a Jet Commander, my first jet, when I heard a familiar roar, glanced up, and saw a jet making a wide approach for a landing at the Latrobe airport. “As a matter of fact,” I said, pointing to it with surprise, “my plane is exactly like that one.”
As a matter of fact, it was mine—transporting a very special passenger.
A few minutes later, I was once again ready to head to my workshop when Winnie insisted that she needed me in the house for “one more thing.” I’m pretty sure I complained loudly that she was ruining my perfectly nice birthday morning, but I finally gave up and followed her inside one last time. A short time later came a gentle knock at the screen door, and I went to see who was coming by this time. I was startled to discover President Eisenhower standing on our porch clutching a small overnight bag.
“Say,” he said, with that quiet photogenic smile of his, “you wouldn’t have room to put up an old man for the night, would you?”
A host of folks had been in on the scheme: Winnie and Mamie, who planned the surprise get-together (Mamie, who was almost deathly afraid of flying, was being driven up from their farm in Gettysburg by the Secret Service); my pilot, Darrell Brown, who flew the plane to York Airport to fetch the president (the only time one of my planes went anywhere without my knowledge); Doc Giffin, who had somehow helped the Secret Service secure our place for the president’s visit without being detected, and even set up a field base of operations in my club workshed on the property.
One of the nicest weekends of my life followed, characterized at least as much by what we didn’t do as what we did. We sat for hours talking until Mamie arrived, and we then drove to Rolling Rock, another fine club at Ligonier, for that dinner with Ben Fairless and George Love. Then we came back to the house and the women watched the Miss America pageant on TV while the president and I disappeared into the master bedroom to catch the end of a college football game on the other set. For my birthday, he presented me with something I treasure: a small oil painting he’d done of a barn on his farm in Gettysburg. We hung it on the wall of our dining room, and it’s there, one of my most cherished items, to this day. The next morning, a sunny Sunday, we got up early and ate a big country breakfast at the kitchen table, refilled our coffee cups, and sat idly talking for several more hours.
I can’t tell you exactly what we talked about, but in my memory it was a little bit of everything—presidents and history, the new space program and old military campaigns, lots of family tales and laughter. The conversation went on a long time, and we never even moved from the table. I recall that we managed to even talk a little bit about golf, though we somehow never got around to swinging a golf club that weekend.
Quite frankly, I don’t know when I’ve had a better time.
I wish I could say I played golf with President Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy. I heard from a number of different sources of different political persuasions that he could really hit a golf ball and could have been an excellent player if his time—and his injured back—had permitted.
Kennedy’s opponent in the famous televised presidential debates of 1960 was another example of a president who had a strong natural interest in golf, but for reasons mostly political in nature refused to indulge his passion. Richard Nixon was a member of Baltusrol Golf Club during President Eisenhower’s presidency and, despite his professed interest in the game, gave up his membership in the club because he feared the consequences at the polls if the public saw him on a golf course.
I liked Richard Nixon, despite his quirks and apparent lack of warmth. He was smart and engaging, and though, as I recall, we actually played golf together only once—nine holes somewhere—I think his decision to abandon golf for political purposes revealed something fundamental about the dark side of his character, or maybe his deep social insecurities, that Mr. Nixon never permitted himself to examine. Maybe, on the other hand, I’m just indulging in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis of the man—whom I never really knew very well. I do think golf fascinated Richard Nixon, though, and in his heart he wished he could have attacked it with the relish and joy his old boss President Eisenhower had. But, for one reason or another, that wasn’t his style.
President Eisenhower hadn’t cared a bit who saw him or who knew he was chasing the golf ball around Augusta or Eldorado (he just didn’t want anybody to know his handicap, which was far worse than he would have liked—hence the bloody elbow). I think that attitude represented the fundamental honesty of President Dwight David Eisenhower. He wasn’t going to put on airs for anybody or pretend to be something or somebody he wasn’t. He took the heat and looked you in the eye, and even with a bad looping slice off the tee, he was the ultimate presidential straight shooter.
In Nixon’s defense, it may have been the seriousness of the times that helped color his decision to abandon golf. After all, with thousands of young American men and women dying in Vietnam and the college campuses of this country exploding with antiwar demonstrations, it probably wouldn’t have sat well with the parents of those young people to know the commander in chief had taken the afternoon off to beat the ball around Congressional or Burning Tree.
At the end of the day, I have no way of knowing what was in the man’s complex mind, but I do know that on at least one occasion, surprisingly, Nixon wanted to know what was on mine. And I told him. It happened one year while I was playing in the Desert Classic. President Nixon summoned Bob Hope and me to fly to his San Clemente home for what somebody later called a “mini-summit” meeting. I wasn’t exactly sure what the subject of discussion was going to be, but you can bet I was highly interested in going to find out. It’s not every day that the son of a small-town golf professional gets invited to sit in on a presidential meeting, with cabinet officers and other senior advisers present. So I was raring to go even before the U.S. Marine helicopter picked us up in the desert and flew us over the mountains to San Clemente. There we found the president, his friend and adviser Henry Kissinger, Vice President Gerald Ford, and several other national security people huddled in Nixon’s living room, with cold beverages, waiting for us to arrive.
It seemed that the president wanted to pick our brains, of all things, about how to end the war in Vietnam. You could see the burden of it was seriously weighing on him, and I suppose he reasoned that because I’d been close to President Eisenhower and was even occasionally mentioned in the press as a possible political candidate myself I might have something useful to say on the subject.
No matter why I was included, I do remember the lengthy discussions about various strategic approaches, potential national security consequences, impact with allies and adversaries, and so forth, including the idea of bombing Hanoi back to the Stone Age to try to finally end the miserable, protracted war in Southeast Asia. When it finally came my turn to express an opinion, everyone looked at me.
“Well,” I started, a touc
h reluctantly, “if the decision were mine to make, I guess I wouldn’t pussyfoot around. Let’s get this thing over as quickly as possible, for everyone’s sake. Why not go for the green?”
They all had a good laugh at that. My remark seemed to provide some much-needed levity. But as I later said to Bob Hope, I really wasn’t trying to be funny.
It wasn’t that I’m such a political hawk. On the contrary, I’m a confirmed moderate thinker and as I’ve aged, I’ve learned the great value of diplomacy and seeking an honorable peace. But part of that wisdom is knowing when to fight, and another part is knowing when to fight even harder—a lesson I learned as far back as the streets of Youngstown. It seemed to me that the only smart and moral thing to do was to get the war over and bring our boys home as swiftly as possible. Whatever it took to do it, that’s what I’d do.
I suppose that kind of decisiveness had a certain appeal to some people. A couple of years later, about the time Nixon’s presidency was embroiled in the Watergate scandal, I was pulled aside at an outing for Chase Manhattan Bank in Houston by a wealthy oil man and invited to come meet a group of “interested friends” in a private meeting room. Waiting there was a group of true heavy-hitters from the business and financial worlds, and it was quickly explained to me that if I was willing to toss my golf visor into the public arena of high public office, these men would be “very interested” in providing the kind of political clout and financial wherewithal I would surely need.
I thought about it a moment and thanked them, explaining that I was genuinely flattered. I suppose in their minds my popularity as a sports figure and commercial spokesman, combined with the integrity inherent in the game of golf, made me irresistible candidate material at a time when the public opinion ratings of almost all politicians, owing to the war or the evolving Watergate scandal, were at an all-time low.
I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit that the thought of running for office had crossed my mind before, probably on several occasions. As far back as my first Masters win I could remember fans holding up signs saying “Arnie for President,” and on more than one occasion back home in Pennsylvania I was the object of grassroots campaigns to convince me to run for governor.
I liked politics, or more accurately the idea of performing the kind of public service that men like President Eisenhower performed so well. But as Pap had drilled into me from day one, I also knew myself well enough to know that in more ways than I cared to think about, I was really unsuited for a life in the political arena. For one thing, I’m prone to say what’s on my mind without worrying about the consequences, and I really have no taste for the intense partisanship you see poisoning the political process these days. Besides, I probably have too many close friendships on both sides of the political aisle to ever throw my own hat into the ring. Golf is political enough without adding professional Democrats and Republicans into the mix!
At any rate, I smiled and thanked those men in the Houston meeting room, and admitted I was flattered but basically not interested in their offer. I may have even told them what my Pap used to say—that a smart man learned early what he did best and kept on doing it. Golf had made me what I was, and I intended to keep on playing it.
Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, had no hang-ups about being seen on a golf course. He adored golf and didn’t care a bit who knew it. I liked that about him. For such a strong man with an athletic background, Ford’s game was frankly a bit of a puzzlement to me. In a nutshell, he should have been better than he was, and no president ever tried harder at the game than Gerald Ford. His reputation for beaning spectators at golf tournaments like the Hope was perhaps overstated a bit, but you clearly had to give the man points for daring to be so public with his golf game. His passion for the game was a joy to watch. One indication of his passion is that if you tried to give him a putt, he would never take it but insist on trying to make it. That’s a true gamer, in my book.
I’m proud of the fact that during his term of office, President Ford and I together inaugurated the USGA’s highly successful Associates (now Members) Program, aimed at getting the average golfer to support the amateur game. The day President Ford left office, he flew to California to play in the old Crosby tournament at Pebble Beach, arriving late and joining me on the third hole. I remember how hard he tried that day, and how errant some of his shots were. But that’s Gerald Ford, as golfer and president. He may not have been a natural at either game, but he threw himself honorably into the fray at crucial points in history, did very good things for this country and his favorite game, and is still out there trying.
In his spare time Ronald Reagan preferred riding horses and chopping wood to playing golf, but Winnie and I were fortunate to get to know the Reagans pretty well during their years in office. Nancy and Winnie particularly hit it off, and some of my fondest memories of those years came out of the many state dinners we got invited to and attended.
There’s nothing like a state dinner at the White House to grab your attention. I was a nervous wreck at the first one Winnie and I attended one cool spring night in 1968, shortly after Richard Nixon took office. I don’t even remember in whose honor the dinner was given, though Frank Sinatra and a few other glamorous stars of his magnitude were there, causing the press photographers to go crazy and making me feel a little bit shy and wide-eyed, like a big kid. Winnie and I had flown up for the evening from Greensboro, North Carolina (where, as usual, I was in contention before I self-destructed in front of a lot of my old Wake Forest chums—I never managed to win that tournament, by golly, and always dearly wanted to). All I could think about during the actual dinner was my table manners, wondering whether or not Pap would have my head for the way I handled the presidential silverware. He was such a tyrant about “proper table manners,” I felt deep relief when Winnie, sensing my high anxiety, reached over, patted my arm, and assured me that my table manners, thus far at least, were impeccable.
Speaking of wrecks, maybe my favorite story about attending a presidential state dinner concerns one that took place during the Nixon years and involved a car that only looked as if it had been wrecked. One night President Suharto of Indonesia was in town and had specifically requested that Mr. and Mrs. Palmer attend the dinner. (By the way, that’s how you get your name on a state dinner invitation list—the guest of honor asks to have you present.) We were staying with my sister Cheech and her husband, Ron, at their place in Alexandria, and they graciously met us at the airport and offered to drive us across the Potomac to the dinner.
I used to joke that Ron and Cheech really ran the United States government, because for many years, Ron, a slow-talking Carolinian with a deadpan wit, was in charge of the navy’s computer operations at the Pentagon while Cheech served as an assistant inspector general for the U.S. Army. That didn’t cut much mustard with the Secret Service, I’m afraid, when we joined the queue of sleek black limousines and rolled up to the entrance portico of the White House in Ron’s beloved 1964 Buick Wildcat, a bit of a rambling wreck that had seen better days. The stares we got from the Secret Service and the press photographers were pretty amusing—as if they were watching Ma and Pa Kettle arrive for the big night out on the town.
If Ron was bothered by their reaction to his heap, he didn’t let it show. “Nixon invited us tonight, too, you know,” Ron drawled at us as we prepared to step out into the glamorous setting and all those popping flashbulbs. “But I told him to go to hell.”
If I’m smiling in any photos of that night, it’s probably due to Ron’s disarming remark. I still laugh when I recall that the Secret Service made sure that Ron and Cheech safely left the White House property.
State dinners are fun, but not half as much fun as playing golf with a man who loves the amateur game almost as much as I do.
Such a man is George Herbert Walker Bush, whose grandfather founded the Walker Cup matches in 1922. During the Bush years in office, Winnie and I were fortunate to be invited to the White House several times (the experien
ce, by the way, never became any less nerve-racking for me) for state dinners. President Bush and I played many times at a host of places, including his club in Houston or at Kenne-bunkport in Maine, Burning Tree, Pebble Beach, and once at the Tournament Players Club at Avenel—the place where I had back-to-back holes in one on the same hole on consecutive days in 1986. What you’ve heard about George Bush the golfer is true: he plays fast and takes no prisoners.
But like President Eisenhower, he will take a putt if you give it to him. Whether his ball was two inches or four feet from the cup, if you said, “That’s good, Mr. President” to President Eisenhower, he wouldn’t hesitate to slap the ball and pick it up, ready to move on. I never saw any president who hated to part with a buck more than Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
Unless, maybe, it’s George Bush.
I feel comfortable calling him by his first name, I suppose, because we are close in age and he and his wife Barbara are so comfortable to be with and so warmly down-to-earth they make you feel as though you’ve known them forever.
Anyway, he will also take a gimme, and the flattering similarities between him and President Eisenhower, in my view, go far deeper than their golf games. In terms of personal values and the way he looks at the world and treats other people, George Bush reminds me more and more of President Eisenhower. He has the same easy grace, keen mind, and unpretentious charm. He is also driven by a deep sense of honor, a strong New England sense of frugality, and has in his wife Barbara, in the shared view of Winnie and me, the greatest former first lady in the history of the presidency for a spouse.
If he worked on it, he could be a far better than average player in golf. He has a once limber athletic baseball swing and can knock down putts like you wouldn’t believe when he’s playing at a pace slightly less than warp speed. But with President Bush, I’ve come to realize after many enjoyable rounds, it isn’t the scores he’s after—it’s the pleasure of the round’s companionship that matters most to him.
A Golfer's Life Page 18
