THROUGH THE WAR YEARS, through the time of his service in Washington as Chief of Staff, in New York at Columbia, in Paris with SHAPE, and through the eight years of his Presidency, Eisenhower had fantasized about his retirement. The fantasies had taken different forms—a ranch in Texas, a summer place in Wisconsin, a bit of travel, telling stories to Mamie, fishing with a cane pole and a bobber on a small stream. He thought that perhaps he would write an occasional article on some national issue, play a lot of golf and bridge, but mainly concentrate on taking it easy. After a half century of service to the nation, he was, he insisted, bone tired, and had to have some rest. No more meetings, no more speeches, no more conferences, no more decisions to make. George Washington at Mount Vernon was his model.
Eisenhower’s Mount Vernon was his farm at Gettysburg. Both he and Mamie loved the farm and the area. The climate, except in winter, was temperate. The location was ideal. They lived in a rural setting, but close enough to Washington and New York for occasional trips to those cities, and convenient for their friends to come to them for weekend visits. The farm was on the edge of the battlefield, which enhanced the sense of being a part of the continuity of American history and allowed Eisenhower to indulge himself in the never-ending game of “what if” about the way in which the Battle of Gettysburg had been fought. Because of its location, there were tourists to put up with—every visitor to the battlefield, it seemed, wanted to see the Eisenhower farm too, and most of them hoped to catch a glimpse and take a picture of the former President walking on his land. Eisenhower enjoyed this visible proof that he had not been forgotten. When he went into town, people would take his picture, or ask for an autograph, or assure him that they had voted for him. He complained about it, but immediately added, “Suppose people didn’t like us. That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?”
The farm contained 246 acres; in addition, Eisenhower leased another 305 acres. Eisenhower had purchased it, in part, because he liked the idea of living near the place his ancestors had settled in the eighteenth century, and because he relished the opportunity to restore the soil to the fertility it had possessed in those days. He rotated his crops and pastures, raising hay, corn, oats, barley, soybeans, and sorghum. Hay was the main crop; he used it for winter feed for the hundred or so prize Angus cattle that constituted his principal cash crop. He also had horses for the grandchildren to ride, and dogs for them to play with, and fourteen Holsteins to serve as nurse cows for the Angus calves. He butchered most of the mature Angus, rather than selling them for breeding purposes. He knew that any bull or heifer that he put on the market for breeding would fetch a wildly inflated price, but he could not bear the thought of inferior offspring that would be called “Eisenhower Angus.” So only the best were sold for breeding; most were sold for slaughter.
The home had a colonial appearance on the outside, but all the modern conveniences inside. The glass-enclosed sun porch was perfect for reading or painting. The furnishings were elegant, the pick of the hundreds of gifts Eisenhower had received over the years from heads of state and American millionaires. Mamie had a priceless collection of Boehm porcelain birds in one room, of which she was very proud but about which Eisenhower would only comment, “God, wouldn’t you hate to have to dust them.” Through the presidential years, Eisenhower had hardly seen Mamie during daylight; at Gettysburg, he made up for it by spending long hours with her on the sun porch, overlooking the green fields, reading, watching television, or painting. Eisenhower threw away most of his painting efforts. Soon he discovered that Moaney was retrieving the discarded canvases from the waste-basket, so he began painting a big X over the ones that he decided to reject. But Moaney collected them too, so that his private collection of Eisenhower paintings continued to expand.
When the gang or other guests came for a visit, Eisenhower did the cooking, because the only thing Mamie knew how to make, aside from broiling a steak or baking a potato, was fudge. “I was never permitted in the kitchen when I was a young girl,” she explained. Otherwise, she was a devoted wife, who appreciated Eisenhower’s protective attitude toward her. “For any marriage to be successful,” she told one reporter, “you must work at it. Young women today want to prove something, but all they have to prove is that they can be a good wife, housekeeper, and mother. There should be only one head of the family—the man.” “As for spats,” she told the same reporter, “if a quarrel develops, one should leave the room. It takes two to quarrel.”
John, Barbara, and the grandchildren lived on the farm in a small home of their own about a mile away. Eisenhower was extremely proud of his only son. For all of his adult life, John had carried the handicap of being the child of a world-famous father. There was never the slightest chance that John could live out the dream of most American boys and do better in life than the old man had done. Nevertheless, he had been a success in the Army, in war and in peace, and had made himself into an invaluable aide to his father (and to Goodpaster) during the second term. He handled with aplomb the reporters, the sycophants, the supplicants, the publicity seekers, and the merely curious hero-worshipers who had surrounded him. Tall, strong, good-looking, he had his father’s facial expressions and grin. He was, by nature, a shy man, reserved, unhappy in large groups when he was the center of attention. Eisenhower knew about these characteristics, just as he knew that John had a much more difficult task in finding his own place in life than he himself had experienced, all of which made Eisenhower even more appreciative and proud of how well John had done. There was more than pride—Eisenhower loved his son as he did no one else, save only Mamie. He also enjoyed working with him, as they had done during the second term and planned to do at Gettysburg. John had left the Army and was preparing to help his father write his memoirs of the White House years.
Having John around carried with it the bonus of having Barbara and the grandchildren there. Mamie and Barbara were very close and happy in their relationship; the Eisenhowers related to Barbara as a daughter, rather than a daughter-in-law. But it was David, Barbara Anne, Susan, and Mary Jean who gave them their greatest joy. “I just love having them around,” Mamie declared. “The girls try on my clothes and watch TV with me. We do a lot of talking and laughing.” Inevitably, David was his grandfather’s favorite. “When he was smaller we spent more time together,” Eisenhower told one reporter. “Today, he likes baseball, football, and soccer, like other boys his age, but these are things I can no longer do with him. I do go fishing, skeet shooting, and play golf with him. And often we just sit around and talk seriously.” He was aware of the potential for problems arising from the close proximity of the two families. “Grandparents should be helpful,” he admonished a reporter (and himself and Mamie), “but not busy-bodies. They should help out with their grandchildren’s education if they can, but under no circumstances should they get in the way and become prime ministers for them. That’s the one way to ruin your children’s marriage.”1
The Eisenhower’s were, probably, the best-known family in the world. As one result, they were besieged with requests that they allow their names to be used for this or that cause or purpose. Eisenhower indignantly turned down every offer that had the slightest commercial hint to it, saying that he would never sell his name for his own financial benefit. He felt that any such use of his name would demean the office of the Presidency, and his personal reputation. Besides, he did not need the money.
Mamie too had a strong sense of what was fitting, and what was not. In March 1962, the Kennedy Administration asked her to serve as cochairman with Jacqueline Kennedy of a fund drive for a National Cultural Center. Mamie agreed to do it, but only on condition that Bess Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt be added to the group. She also insisted that it be limited to First Ladies, and specifically said she would not serve if any sister of President Kennedy, or of Mrs. Kennedy, was on the list. She added that “she would not care to serve in a capacity subordinate to Mrs. Kennedy.”2
Eisenhower, for his part, lent his name to various fellowships, scholarships, and similar educational projects, especially if they were designed to provide funds for study abroad for young people. But his favorite project, by far, was Eisenhower College, a small liberal arts, Presbyterian college in Seneca Falls, New York. The project, sponsored by residents of Seneca Falls, began in 1962. Eisenhower agreed to—indeed was flattered by—the use of his name, but insisted that he would take no part in the fund raising. In the event, although he never solicited funds directly, he did write a personal letter of thanks to every contributor, and in countless other ways let his rich friends know that he would be pleased if they could help out.3
They almost never traveled at their own expense; usually a friend, the Republican Party, or a corporation would pick up the tab. Eisenhower did some television commentary for Walter Cronkite of CBS, a man he found he liked as much as he admired. A high point in their relationship came in August of 1963, when the Eisenhowers crossed the Atlantic with Cronkite on the Queen Elizabeth to film a documentary entitled D-Day Plus 20. Eisenhower and Cronkite drove across the Normandy beaches in a jeep (with Eisenhower driving), while Eisenhower explained this or that feature of D-Day. The climax came at the beautiful cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach, where Cronkite asked Eisenhower what he thought of when he revisited the place. In a most revealing remark, the old soldier spoke not of the battle, but of his sorrow whenever he looked at all those graves and thought of the parents of the boys who were buried there, parents who did not have the great blessing he and Mamie enjoyed from their grandchildren.
There were many other trips, beginning immediately after January 20, 1961. In February of that year, the Eisenhowers took a train to Palm Desert, California, where they stayed on the ranch of Floyd Odium and his wife, Jacqueline Cochran, the famous aviator who had played a key role in persuading Eisenhower in 1952 to run for the Presidency. Eisenhower intended to just play some golf and bridge and generally relax, but he discovered that he could not put national affairs out of his mind. Riding his electric cart around the golf course at Eldorado, he turned on the radio and listened to an account of Colonel John Glenn’s around-the-world astronaut flight. Slater felt that Eisenhower was “a little disappointed that the trip hadn’t been made during his administration.” He also confessed that he was terribly unhappy about the “careless spending” of the Kennedy Administration, and its “complete lack of interest in the soundness of the dollar and the disregard of what inflation will do to the savers.” He was also concerned about Kennedy’s “build up of the military, the space scientists and armament industries.” Eisenhower warned that “this combination can be so powerful and the military machine so big it just has to be used.”4
• •
As the quotations indicate, after all those years at the center of power, making the decisions, Eisenhower was finding it difficult to relegate himself to an observer’s role. His major concern, however, was less with shaping the future, more with justifying the past, and specifically his own Administration. Despite the closeness of the 1960 election, and despite the fact that his name was not on the ballot that year, he continued to think that the American people had, by electing Kennedy, repudiated him. He wanted to prove that Kennedy, and the people who voted for him, were wrong in charging him with having allowed a missile gap to develop, wrong in saying that American prestige had suffered under his leadership, wrong in ignoring his insistence on balancing the budget, and most of all wrong in charging that he had been a lazy, part-time President who delegated his decision-making powers to committees and staffs.
“One thing this book is going to demonstrate,” his son declared as the work began, “is that Dad knew what was going on” and was the man in charge.5 John and his secretary, Rusty Brown, started collecting documents and organizing an office in the president’s house on the Gettysburg College campus. They were soon joined by William B. Ewald, Jr., a former English professor at Harvard who had served as a speech writer for Eisenhower and later as an assistant to the Secretary of the Interior. Samuel S. Vaughan, a Penn State graduate and already a senior editor at Doubleday although only thirty-two years old, also became a de facto member of the team. Eisenhower had written Crusade in Europe in a one-hundred-day blitz, dictating every word of it. This time around, he worked from rough drafts produced by his son or Ewald. Eisenhower ordinarily cut these drafts in half, then rearranged paragraphs, sentences, and phrases, often adding long passages of his own.
Despite all the help, writing the presidential memoirs proved to be a much more difficult task than writing Crusade had been. Crusade had been the story of an unqualified success with a definitive and happy ending, but the White House memoirs covered issues that were still ongoing, the outcome of which no one knew—Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, disarmament, nuclear testing, and so forth. The cast of characters in Crusade was relatively limited; in the presidential memoirs, it was endless. Eisenhower found something good to say about almost everyone who appeared in Crusade, even Montgomery, and found little cause for the slightest disparagement of his associates, which was not at all the case in his White House memoirs, but he hated to be critical. Crusade covered three and a half tightly compressed years, as compared to the eight years in the White House. Further, in Crusade he could tell the story of making a decision, then show how it worked in action, but the situation for the presidential memoirs was more a case of describing a decision made, followed by inaction. That is, he decided not to expand the war in Korea, not to enter the war in Vietnam at the time of Dien Bien Phu, not to accelerate the arms race, not to attack McCarthy directly, or support Brown v. Topeka, or dismantle the New Deal, or lower taxes, or support the British and the French at Suez, or intervene in Hungary. The White House memoirs, in short, necessarily had to be negative and inconclusive, while Crusade had been positive and conclusive.
In addition, Eisenhower was more sensitive to criticism as a politician than he had been as a general. In Crusade, he admitted mistakes; for example, taking personal responsibility for the German surprise at the Ardennes counteroffensive. In his White House memoirs, he refused to admit any mistakes, which gave the work a defensive and self-serving style that was not at all like Crusade. For example, Eisenhower did not want to mention McCarthy at all, but Vaughan, representing the publisher, insisted that he had to recount the story of his relationship with the Wisconsin senator. Eisenhower agreed, but then refused to say anything about the Milwaukee incident, when he had excised the paragraph praising Marshall. Again Vaughan, this time joined by Ewald, insisted that the incident had to be covered. Generally, Vaughan wanted Eisenhower, in John’s words, to “bare his soul and admit to more mistakes,” but Eisenhower just would not do it.
Eisenhower insisted that, regardless of who wrote the first drafts, it was going to be his book. When they came to the U-2 incident, for example, John wanted him to put the blame on Allen Dulles. (John, who was intimately involved in that operation, once complained that “the CIA promised us that the Russians would never get a U-2 pilot alive. And then they gave the SOB a parachute!”) But Eisenhower would not put the blame on Dulles, partly because he did not feel a mistake had been made, mainly because he was so sensitive to the criticism that he did not know what was going on in his own Administration, and blaming Dulles for the U-2 would have reinforced that criticism. Still John insisted. Voices were raised. Finally Eisenhower slapped his hand down on the desk and said, “Damn it, John, I’m writing this book.” John replied, “You sure are. Do it your way.”
It was a two-volume work that took almost four years to complete. The overall title was The White House Years. Volume One, which was published on November 9, 1963, was subtitled Mandate for Change, while Volume Two, which came out in 1965, was called Waging Peace. In contrast to Crusade, which had enjoyed rave reviews, Mandate for Change got a mixed reception at best. Many reviewers hinted that they could hardly keep their eyes open, while others pointed to the self-serving and defensive tone of the memoirs. But James Reston gave Mandate a strong, positive review in The New York Times. Doubleday printed a first run of 125,000 copies, and the book started off with strong sales, quickly reaching the second spot on the best-seller list. But two weeks after Mandate appeared, Kennedy was assassinated, and the ensuing national obsession with Kennedy overrode the public’s interest in the Eisenhower Presidency, and sales faltered. Waging Peace never achieved the kind of sales that Crusade had achieved.6
Despite their shortcomings, Mandate for Change and Waging Peace represented a major effort, and they made a major contribution. Neither as salty nor as personal as Truman’s memoirs, they nevertheless did cover all the major and most of the minor issues of the Eisenhower Administration. Despite Vaughan’s and John’s efforts, there were omissions in the treatment of McCarthy and the U-2. Primarily because of security classifications, the memoirs were woefully incomplete on such matters as nuclear testing, covert CIA operations, disarmament policy, and other national-security-related matters. But there were few if any errors of fact, a remarkable achievement in a manuscript of nearly three thousand pages, and a tribute to the thoroughness and accuracy of the research effort. The memoirs did achieve what Eisenhower most wanted them to achieve—he got to explain his side of the story and present his motivation in making this or that decision. They therefore immediately became, as they remain, one of the starting points for any serious study of the politics of the 1950s.
Following the publication of the White House memoirs, Vaughan and others at Doubleday persuaded Eisenhower to write a more informal autobiography, covering those parts of his life not touched upon in Crusade or The White House Years. In preparing the book, Eisenhower reverted to his old practice of dictating personally. He thoroughly enjoyed going back in his mind to his boyhood days in Abilene, his years as a cadet at West Point, and his experiences as a young officer. He paid handsome tributes to Fox Conner, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, to his parents and his brothers, his high-school teachers, and his fellow junior officers. He told some funny stories, and some sad ones, and some revealing ones. He called the book At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, and it received a much warmer reception, and enjoyed far higher sales and more translations, than The White House Years. The New York Times commented that At Ease “serves admirably to flesh out and give life to the image of one of the most durable popular heroes of our time.”7
At Ease contained a chapter entitled “Footnotes for Biographers.” The whole book might have been called by that title. Eisenhower had no false modesty. He was well aware that he was one of the most important men of the twentieth century, and that therefore scores of books would be written about him. Naturally enough, he wanted to guide the authors to conclusions and interpretations that were favorable to him. That was why he was willing to devote so much time to writing about himself and his Administration.
But Eisenhower was far too intelligent, and had far too much respect for the documentary record and the truth, and had so much respect for the craft of writing honest history, to ever suppose that historians would be content to, or should, rely on his memory for their interpretations, narratives, and conclusions. After World War II, as Chief of Staff, he had insisted that the American public had the right to know the full story of the Army’s efforts in the war, the mistakes and errors as well as the successes. In the same way, after his Presidency, he wanted the full record of his Administration made available. When he left the White House, he sent the bulk of his staff files to the library in Abilene; as he completed sections of his White House memoirs, he sent on his personal papers, memoranda, and correspondence. On May 1, 1962, he and Mamie went to Abilene to dedicate the library (he had earlier, in November 1961, paid a visit to the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, to see how it was set up and administered).8
Located across the lawn from the Eisenhower Museum, kitty-corner from his childhood home (already a shrine open to the public) overlooking the Great Plains of North America, the three-story native sandstone and granite building was suitably magnificent. Eisenhower, much impressed, told Nixon that “the Library itself is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen.”9 It was immediately opened to researchers, and immediately set a standard of excellence in archival management and service to scholars that has continued and, indeed, even improved. Appropriately, it is just two miles off Interstate 70, one of the major east-west links in the national road system Eisenhower did so much to bring about. Together with the Truman Library, which by the mileage standards of the Great Plains is just down the road a piece, it has become an obligatory research stop for every person doing serious study of or writing about the Second World War and the 1950s.
• •
When Eisenhower visited the Truman Library, he did not see Truman personally. The old rancor and bitterness from the 1952 campaign were still there; the two ex-Presidents who had worked so closely together from 1945 to 1952 did not see each other at all from the time of Eisenhower’s inauguration to the time of the Kennedy funeral. But if Eisenhower ignored his predecessor, he could hardly escape paying a great deal of attention to his successor. So much so, in fact, both in support and in opposition to Kennedy’s policies, that Eisenhower was very nearly as active in politics during his retirement as he had been in the fifties. So much so that he wrote Churchill, in April of 1961, “I don’t know whether I am relieved to some extent or dismayed to a large extent to discover that there seems to be little cessation from the constant stream of demands upon my time and energy.”10 His dreams of a quiet, Mount Vernon-style retirement were shattered. As he told a reporter who asked him about retirement, “My wife thinks it’s nothing but a word in the dictionary. I think I’ve more demands made upon me than I’ve ever had in my life.”11
Kennedy, of course, had good reasons to court Eisenhower assiduously. Eisenhower’s public support for a Kennedy position or policy might well be decisive, and would certainly always be helpful. Further, for all his self-confidence, the young President was aware that there was much he could learn from the oldest President ever. On the day after the 1960 election, Kennedy responded warmly to Eisenhower’s grudging telegram of congratulations. During the transition, he had nothing but nice things to say about, and to, Eisenhower. And on January 21, his first day in office, Kennedy dictated his first letter from the White House to Eisenhower, thanking him for his help during the preceding weeks of transition.12 On every appropriate occasion, Kennedy made military transport available to Eisenhower, and when Eisenhower asked him privately to promote Colonel Schulz (who had spent the past decade in Eisenhower’s service, and continued to do so at Gettysburg, handling Eisenhower’s appointments and personal affairs), Kennedy did so immediately.
When Eisenhower wrote to thank Kennedy for making Schulz a general officer, he added a personal note. “While it is of course well known that in the domestic field there are governmental proposals and programs concerning which you and I do not agree,” Eisenhower stated, “I assure you that my political views, though strongly held and sometimes vigorously expressed, contain nothing of personal animus on my part.” He assured Kennedy that “any allegation to the contrary that may come to your ears—and I have heard that such a one has—is either untrue or highly exaggerated and would, I hope, be wholly ignored. I am confident that anyone in your position finds—certainly this was my own experience—that some individuals will never hesitate to distort or even falsify in striving for a feeling of self-importance in the limelight that plays about the Presidency.”13
• •
April was planting time, and in 1961 by the beginning of the month the Eisenhowers were back at Gettysburg, preparing for the new season. On the seventeenth, Bissell’s paramilitary force of Cuban refugees, now grown to some two thousand strong, landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Deprived of air cover or reinforcements, operating with inadequate communications equipment, the men were quickly killed or captured by Castro’s armed forces. It was a debacle.
Kennedy called Eisenhower. Could Eisenhower come to Camp David for consultation? Of course, Eisenhower replied, and on April 22 he flew by helicopter from Gettysburg to Camp David. Kennedy met him when he landed, and the two men went to the terrace at Aspen Cottage to talk. Kennedy described the planning, objectives, and anticipated results of the landing, confessed that it had been a total failure, and said the causes of the failure were gaps in intelligence plus some errors in ship loading, timing, and tactics. Kennedy promised a complete investigation, not—Eisenhower was happy to note—“to find any scapegoat, because the President does seem to take full responsibility for his own decision, but rather to find and apply lessons for possible future action.”14
The two men began strolling around the grounds, heads bent, deep in conversation. Eisenhower had the impression that Kennedy “looked upon the Presidency as not only a very personal thing, but as an institution that one man could handle with an assistant here and another there. He had no idea of the complexity of the job.” Eisenhower asked Kennedy, “Mr. President, before you approved this plan did you have everybody in front of you debating the thing so you got pros and cons yourself and then made your decision, or did you see these people one at a time?” Kennedy confessed that he had not had a full meeting of the NSC to discuss and criticize the plans. He seemed to Eisenhower to be “very frank but also very subdued and more than a little bewildered.” He said to Eisenhower, ruefully, “No one knows how tough this job is until after he has been in it a few months.” Eisenhower looked at Kennedy, then said softly, “Mr. President, if you will forgive me, I think I mentioned that to you three months ago.” Kennedy replied, “I certainly have learned a lot since.”
Eisenhower asked Kennedy why on earth he had not provided air cover for the invasion. Kennedy replied that “we thought that if it was learned that we were really doing this rather than these rebels themselves, the Soviets would be very apt to cause trouble in Berlin.” Eisenhower gave him another long look, then said, “Mr. President, that is exactly the opposite of what would really happen. The Soviets follow their own plans, and if they see us show any weakness then is when they press us the hardest. The second they see us show strength and do something on our own, then is when they are very cagey. The failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something that they would not otherwise do.”
“Well,” Kennedy responded, “my advice was that we must try to keep our hands from showing in the affair.” Eisenhower, astounded, snapped back, “Mr. President, how could you expect the world to believe that we had nothing to do with it? Where did these people get the ships to go from Central America to Cuba? Where did they get the weapons? Where did they get all the communications and all the other things that they would need? How could you possibly have kept from the world any knowledge that the United States had been assisting the invasion? I believe there is only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing. It must be a success.”
Kennedy seized on the last sentence. “Well,” he said, “I assure you that hereafter, if we get in anything like this, it is going to be a success.” Eisenhower, pleased, replied, “Well, I am glad to hear that.” The former President then told Kennedy, “I will support anything that has as its objective the prevention of Communist entry and solidification of bases in the Western Hemisphere,” but also gave him a warning: “I believe the American people will never approve direct military intervention, by their own forces, except under provocations against us so clear and so serious that everybody will understand the need for the move.”15
In the weeks that followed, Kennedy’s people—although not Kennedy himself—tried to spread the responsibility for the debacle to include the Eisenhower Administration, charging that the plans for the Bay of Pigs operation had been completed and approved before January 20, 1961. Eisenhower would have none of that. In early May, he flew to Augusta to host a dinner for the men who had put up the money for Mamie’s cottage on the golf course (he had not known who they were, and was only given their names after he left the White House). While there, he indignantly told Slater and the others that the Bay of Pigs “could not have happened in my Administration.” That theme was taken up by his associates, who insisted that if Ike had been President, either the operation would not have gone forward with such inadequate and sloppy planning, or if it had, Ike would have provided U.S. air cover for the invaders.
Eisenhower felt so strongly about the controversy that he did something he had never done before, or would again—he ordered the documentary record changed. He wanted to prove that he had never approved any plans, much less a specific one for the Bay of Pigs, and insisted that the distinction between creating an asset and approving a plan remained sharp and clear. He wrote to Gordon Gray, Goodpaster, and others in his inner circle, asking for their impressions and memories of what had been approved and what had not. He believed that there was no record of his discussions on the subject with them, because he had specifically ordered that no notes be kept.
Gray, however, had kept notes. In June of 1961, as the controversy about responsibility for the Bay of Pigs continued and increased, Gray called Eisenhower at Gettysburg. “Would you like to see a record of all your conversations about Cuba?” he asked. “I think I’d give my right arm to have such,” Eisenhower replied, “but of course there isn’t anything.” Gray told him, “There is.” Eisenhower asked, “Where is it?” Gray said that it was at Fort Ritchie, where the classified material from the White House years was kept while Eisenhower worked on his memoirs. Eisenhower sent John Eisenhower to Ritchie to fetch the papers, then called Gray to Gettysburg to go over them with him.
The two men sat down with Gray’s various memoranda. Eisenhower read them word for word, making such comments as “By golly, that’s right” or “Remember this?” Then he came to one that covered the March 17, 1960, meeting in which he had approved Bissell’s four-point plan for Cuba (see page 578). Eisenhower looked at it, looked at Gray, looked back at the paper, and declared, “This is wrong.” “Well,” Gray replied, “all right, sir, what is it?” Eisenhower indicated that Gray had used the word “planning,” and insisted that he had not given any approval for planning. “We did no military planning,” Eisenhower flatly declared, and insisted again that so long as he was President, there had been no military planning as to where, when, or how to use the paramilitary force. “With your permission,” Eisenhower said to Gray, “I’m going to have this page rewritten to reflect the facts.” Gray said, “That’s fine with me,” and they then agreed to take the word “planning” out of the memorandum.16
Thirteen years later, after the documents had been deposited in the Eisenhower Library, Gray wrote Dr. Don Wilson, the assistant director, to explain the situation. After outlining the story, he wrote: “I agreed with the General that the memorandum [of the March 17 meeting] was misleading and was quite content with the revision made and, of course, signed it. In any event, the memoranda which you now have had his specific approval as to content, and, I might say, that I had his cheerful forgiveness for having violated his instructions [about keeping no notes of discussions about Cuba].”17
Eisenhower’s unhappiness with Kennedy was increased by one of Kennedy’s responses to the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy challenged the Russians to a race to the moon. Eisenhower thought that a terrible mistake, and said so, although only in private. Nevertheless his criticisms got through to the NASA astronauts, and one of them, Major Frank Borman, wrote Eisenhower about it in June of 1965. Eisenhower sent Borman a long, careful reply. “What I have criticized about the current space program,” he said, “is the concept under which it was drastically revised and expanded just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.” Eisenhower gave it as his judgment that the challenge to the Russians to race to the moon was “unwise.” American prestige should not have been put on the line in that fashion, because “it immediately took one single project or experiment out of a thoughtfully planned and continuing program involving communication, meteorology, reconnaissance, and future military and scientific benefits and gave the highest priority—unfortunate in my opinion—to a race, in other words, a stunt.” As a result, Eisenhower said, “costs went up drastically,” while the benefits of the space program were lost.18
• •
However unhappy with Kennedy the former President was, Kennedy nevertheless was the country’s leader, and Eisenhower gave him his support whenever he could. Eisenhower was enthusiastic about Kennedy’s program for trade expansion, and wrote letters to all the Republican leaders asking them to get behind Kennedy on it.19 When Kennedy asked him to use his influence to secure Republican votes for new civil-rights legislation, Eisenhower replied that although he would not presume to tell Republicans how to vote, he was willing to let them know “my personal convictions” favoring new legislation, as well as “the seriousness with which I view the entire problem.”20 After Kennedy fired Dulles and replaced him with John McCone, as head of the CIA, he sent McCone up to Gettysburg on a number of occasions to give private briefings to Eisenhower. In addition, Macmillan, Adenauer, and de Gaulle sometimes asked Eisenhower to pass on to Kennedy their worries and opinions.21 And Eisenhower gave Kennedy his full support in terminating the nuclear test moratorium.22
On October 20, McCone called Eisenhower to ask him to come down to Washington the following morning. Eisenhower agreed to make the trip. When he arrived, McCone gave him a briefing on Soviet missile development in Cuba, then said the government was considering three plans: (I) destruction of the missile sites by bombing; (2) bombing conducted simultaneously with amphibious invasion of the island with overwhelming force; (3) a blockade of the island. Eisenhower listened, asked some questions, discovered that he would not be meeting with Kennedy (McCone had hinted in his phone call that he would), and went back to Gettysburg. The next morning, Sunday, October 22, Eisenhower, Mamie, and George Allen were sitting on the porch at the farm when Kennedy telephoned. He wanted Eisenhower’s views. Eisenhower told Kennedy that he had come to the conclusion that a bombing mission was inappropriate “and would not be useful and would indeed be detrimental to our cause.” He added that he could not choose between plans 2 and 3, because “I am not in possession of all the background . . . that would give me the basis for making any selection.” Eisenhower did say, however, that whatever Kennedy decided to do, he would have Eisenhower’s support. Kennedy said he had decided to put the third plan, a blockade, into effect, and that he was going on national television that evening to announce this action.23
A week later, again on Sunday morning, Kennedy called Eisenhower to inform him about the messages he had received from Khrushchev on the Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev’s basic proposal, Kennedy said, was that he would remove the missiles from Cuba in return for an American promise not to invade the island. Kennedy indicated that he was inclined to accept. Eisenhower concurred, but warned him to be “very careful about defining exactly what was meant by the promise.” In a memorandum he made on the conversation that afternoon, Eisenhower wrote that “I observed, since we make a point of keeping our promises, that the agreement should not imply anything more than we actually meant. It would be a mistake, I said, to give the Russians an unconditional pledge that we would, forever and under all conditions, not invade regardless of changing circumstances.” Kennedy said he understood that point and agreed. Eisenhower then warned him not to allow Khrushchev to drag out the negotiations, but to “hold the initiative that the government had finally seized when it established the quarantine.”24
Some years later, in 1966, in an oral history interview, Eisenhower recalled telling Kennedy “there is one thing you must do.” It was to get Khrushchev’s agreement to allow land inspections of the missile sites. As Eisenhower remembered it, Kennedy replied that Khrushchev had so agreed. Eisenhower then told the interviewer, “Of course, it was never done. And I think that Communists probably concluded he wouldn’t do anything; but I insisted on this land inspection. . . . It was an opportunity we missed not to go in.” Perhaps Eisenhower was as insistent in 1962 as he claimed to be in 1966, but even if true, he did not think the point about land inspection important enough at the time of the event to mention it in his long memorandum written immediately after he finished his conversation with Kennedy.25
By November 5, 1962, Castro had told Kennedy that he did not care what agreements Khrushchev had made, that Cuba was his country and he would not allow American inspection teams on his island. When Eisenhower heard that, he called McCone to tell the head of the CIA that “we owe it to ourselves to (a) First, make certain all missiles are gone, and (b) To assert our right to take such action, at any time, against Castro as would assure Latin America and ourselves protection against subversion, sabotage, etc.” But to the former President’s disgust, Kennedy did nothing.26
When Khrushchev put up the Berlin Wall, Kennedy did not come to Eisenhower for advice. Eisenhower nevertheless called McCone and said, “John, isn’t there going to be any reaction to this, because I read in the papers that they are starting to build a wall.” McCone replied, “I haven’t heard a word about any thought of resistance.” Eisenhower said that in his view the written agreements the Russians had signed on the status of Berlin guaranteed communication between all parts of the city, and that “we had the absolute right to use whatever force was needed to eliminate walls.” But again, to Eisenhower’s expressed disgust, Kennedy did nothing.27
One noteworthy aspect to these Eisenhower-Kennedy exchanges was how belligerent Eisenhower had become. When he was in office, Eisenhower had received a constant stream of advice, whenever there was a crisis with the Communists, whether it was in Korea or Vietnam or Formosa, or Hungary or Berlin, to get tough, to stand up to Khrushchev, to use whatever force was necessary. He had consistently rejected such advice. But out of office, as an outsider and a critic, he was much tougher, much more willing to go the whole route, than he had been when the decision was his responsibility.
• •
Eisenhower was not only a former President, but also the former head of the Republican Party. In addition, he was still—according to every poll taken—the most admired, respected, and popular man in the country. Nixon had carried the banner for the Republicans in the 1960 election, but in the months and years that followed, it was to Eisenhower that Republican candidates and officeholders turned for endorsements, help in fund raising, and general publicity. Initially, he was flattered to be remembered, honored to be invited to dinners, eager to help the cause wherever he could. In June 1961, he and Mamie went to New York for a series of $100-a-plate Republican dinners. While in the city, the Eisenhowers went to the 21 Club for dinner on their own, their first night out as private citizens. The next day they went to Belmont racetrack, where Mamie presented a trophy, and the following evening they went to the theater. After a whirlwind few days, Eisenhower had a box of sandwiches packed up and drove back to Gettysburg.28
The pressure on Eisenhower to participate in more fund raisers was intense and never ending. It was irritating, and it bothered him to have to say no so often, but as he told Slater, “I don’t mind as long as I can be helpful because I figure that when the time comes that a person can’t do some good he might as well die.”29 In the course of the 1962 congressional elections, he visited twenty-one states and made twenty-eight speeches supporting Republican candidates, in addition to attending more than two dozen fund-raising dinners. But he was bothered by the way so many Republicans were drifting farther to the right, and he was distinctly unhappy with the way in which party leaders felt free to call on him for speeches and dinners, but equally free to reject his advice to move toward the middle of the road. In July 1962, he complained to George Humphrey that “all that the Leaders want to use me for is to use whatever value I may have to bring more people to the dinners with their hundred dollars in their hands.”30
In that summer of 1962, Eisenhower tried to take the party leadership away from the Old Guard and the RNC. He helped organize and agreed to serve as honorary chairman of a new group, the Republican Citizens. Back in 1952, and again in 1956, Eisenhower had turned to such a “Citizens” organization to manage his campaign, much to the displeasure of the regulars in the RNC. During his eight years in the White House, he had often entertained the notion of forming a third party, and had tried unsuccessfully to put an adjective such as “Modern” or “Moderate” in front of the word “Republican.” The Republican Citizens idea of 1962 was yet another attempt to broaden and liberalize the party (or, in the view of the RNC, to steal it from its rightful owners). Eisenhower wrote dozens, if not hundreds, of letters asking his business and military friends to support the Citizens group, and from them he got a handsome response. Notably absent was the name of Richard Nixon. Notable in their indifference, if not outright hostility, were Dirksen, Halleck, and the other Republican leaders in Congress. Eisenhower had liked the idea so much that he agreed to give up the services of Ann Whitman, who left Gettysburg in 1962 to take a position with the Republican Citizens. He soon heard a “very distressing report” from her; she said the work was dismal, the response to the Citizens almost nonexistent among professional politicians, and that her morale was shot. Eisenhower wrote to the RNC about Whitman’s report. He admitted that “she is quite a temperamental lady and sometimes gets very easily discouraged and depressed,” but reminded the committee that “her value in the political field and especially her wide acquaintanceship with so many Republican leaders are not to be discounted.” He urged the committee to make full use of her services, and those of the Citizens. Still the regulars in the party remained indifferent.31
In one of his letters, to a businessman in Cleveland, Eisenhower said he was “completely nonplussed” by the way in which Dirksen, Halleck, and the other leaders were reacting to the Citizens. He explained that “what we’re trying to do is build a bridge between the Republican Party on the one hand and the Independents and the dissatisfied Democrats on the other so that these latter people may eventually find themselves more comfortable living with Republican policies and personalities.” But as far as he could tell, the Old Guard would rather have control of a minority party than share power in a majority party.32 If his analysis was correct, the Old Guard got what it wanted out of the 1962 elections—the Republicans remained a distinctly minority party, while the Republican Citizens died.
Following the Republican defeat in 1962, Eisenhower’s attention, like that of every other Republican, turned to the 1964 presidential election. Who would lead the Republican Party? Eisenhower was not enthusiastic about either of the front-runners, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona (who had been one of the leading critics of the Republican Citizens idea) and Governor Rockefeller of New York. Nixon, who had lost a bid to become governor of California and then made things worse with a disastrous postelection press conference (“You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any longer.”), was out of the running. Eisenhower, for his part, clung to the absurd hope that Robert Anderson would be the candidate; if not Anderson, he liked Lodge; if not Lodge, he was impressed by Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania. In meetings with Clay, Brownell, and others, Eisenhower mentioned these names as the kind of men he could get enthusiastic about. He did not mention Goldwater, or Rockefeller—or Nixon.
When Nixon was told about Eisenhower’s conversations, he commented—at a private party—that he thought it “strange” Eisenhower had left his name off the list. Little in politics is really private; a reporter heard about Nixon’s remark and the next day it appeared in the Washington newspapers. Eisenhower saw the story and immediately wrote Nixon. He said he could scarcely believe Nixon could have made such a remark, because “you have frankly told me that you were not available even for consideration,” and because “I have always been careful to point out that in naming any possibilities, I do not mean to limit.” In conclusion, Eisenhower wrote, “It appears that the newspaper people are never going to cease their attempts to make it appear that you and I have been sworn enemies from the very beginning of our acquaintanceship.” That was it—there was no reassurance on Eisenhower’s part that he still loved and supported Nixon, or that he always had.33
• •
On October 14, 1963, Eisenhower celebrated his seventy-third birthday. He had been in and out of Walter Reed a half-dozen times since he left the White House, but never stayed more than a few days, as all the ailments were minor ones. His general physical condition, for a man his age who had suffered a major heart attack, a stroke, and undergone major surgery for ileitis, was excellent. He was playing golf regularly, walking about his farm, puttering in his garden, keeping active. Shortly after Eisenhower moved permanently to Gettysburg, John wrote that he was “shocked and worried at the Old Man’s demeanor.” To John, his father’s “movements were slower, his tone less sharp, and he had time even during the work day to stop and indulge in what would formerly be considered casual conversation. I feared for his health.” But, John soon realized, he was wrong—it was simply that his father was relaxed, more so than he had ever been.34 Ellis Slater thought that Eisenhower “has seldom looked better—[he] seems quite relaxed.”35 He got tired sooner and more often than in the past, but he still had that remarkable ability to bounce back after a good night’s sleep. His mind was as sharp as ever, as was his interest in and concern about public affairs.
His friends were passing from the scene. In March 1962, Pete Jones died. After the funeral, the Eisenhowers flew to Baja, California, with what remained of the gang for some fishing, shooting, and bridge. Eisenhower got up at 5 A.M. each morning in order to be in the ravines when the white-wing doves started flying shortly after sunrise. One day he shot a dozen, the next sixteen, and on the following morning he killed thirty birds, tops in the group. After the shoot, he went marlin fishing, where he was again successful, then spent the afternoons swimming in the pool and the evenings playing bridge. Eisenhower and his gang were well looked after; in addition to Moaney, there was a Mexican manager, a cook, three maids, four workers to handle luggage and other chores, three planes and pilots, two boats with crews, and a platoon from the Mexican Army to arrange for the jeeps to drive to the ravines for the shooting. The pilots flew low over the Gulf of California, at Eisenhower’s request, so that he could observe the whales nursing their calves. Eisenhower stayed in Baja for two weeks; when he was not otherwise occupied, he wrote articles for Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post on the futility of summit meetings and the importance of fiscal responsibility. Taken all together, it was exactly the way he had envisioned his retirement ought to be.36 And, it might be said, exactly the kind of a retirement most Americans thought he deserved and ought to have.
Certainly Eisenhower’s rich friends thought so. Beginning in the winter of 1961–1962, the Eisenhowers took a train each year to Palm Desert, where a home was provided for them by one friend, while Jackie Cochran and Floyd Odium provided the general with an office and made their ranch available to him for entertaining his friends (at their expense). Another friend provided him with a car. The office was appallingly busy. In his retirement, Eisenhower received an average of seventy-five hundred letters a month; he claimed to answer two-thirds of the mail. It proved to be too much for Ann Whitman. He insisted on dictating to her alone—during the White House years, she was the only human being he ever dictated to. Whitman was accustomed to handling the load, but when her boss was the President, she had twelve typists she could call on. At Palm Desert, and in Gettysburg, she had only two, and unlike the secretaries in the White House, they refused to work more than eight hours a day, five days a week, which meant Whitman had to carry an enormous typing load. Cochran commented that “Ann didn’t even take time to eat. I never saw anybody put in the hours that she did in my life.” Eisenhower hardly noticed. He was so accustomed to people knocking themselves out for him that he took it for granted.
There was another problem. During the White House years, Mamie seldom saw Whitman, but at Palm Desert and Gettysburg, they were often together. The two women shared a single obsession, Dwight Eisenhower. He took both of them for granted, but they were competitors for his attention, or so it seemed to Mamie, who resented the way in which her husband relied on Whitman. “There was,” Cochran remembered, “a lot of dissension between Ann and Mamie.” At the end of that first winter in Palm Desert, Whitman went to work for the Republican Citizens, and after that idea died, she joined Rockefeller in New York, which made the general distinctly unhappy. Thereafter, he had little contact with the woman who had given so much of her life to serving him, a woman who had been indispensable when he was President. In 1968 he did write her a short, disapproving note: “I see that your Governor has added Emmet Hughes to his staff of advisers. I can scarcely think of anything that could be less helpful to the Governor, either in the campaign or if and when he became President.”37
• •
By the fall of 1963, conditions in South Vietnam, which had seemed so stable when Eisenhower left office, had deteriorated badly. A major insurgency was under way. Kennedy had committed nearly sixteen thousand American troops to the country, but political intrigue in Saigon continued and intensified. There was a military coup; one result was the assassination of Diem, the man who had generated such enthusiasm in Eisenhower back in 1954 and in the following years. There was speculation that the CIA was involved in the assassination. Eisenhower commented on the subject in a letter to Nixon. “I rather suspect the Diem affair will be shrouded in mystery for a long time to come,” he began. “No matter how much the Administration may have differed with him, I cannot believe any American would have approved the cold-blooded killing of a man who had, after all, shown great courage when he undertook the task some years ago of defeating Communist’s attempts to take over his country.”38
Within the month, there was another assassination, equally mysterious and far more shocking. On November 22, 1963, Eisenhower was in New York for a luncheon at the U.N. when he received the news of Kennedy’s death. (Back in April 1954, when Eisenhower was going to Lexington, Kentucky, for a speech, the Secret Service had asked him to change the route of his motorcade, because several Puerto Rican nationalists demanding independence had been seen in the city the previous day. Jim Hagerty wrote in his diary that Eisenhower took “a completely fatalistic viewpoint—‘If they’re going to shoot me, they’re going to shoot me—so what! There’s nothing you can do about it.’ ”39)
The following day, November 23, 1963, Eisenhower went to Washington to view Kennedy’s casket and to pay his respects to the widow. Then, at the request of the new President, he crossed the street and went to the Executive Office Building for a conference with Lyndon Johnson. Eisenhower promised Johnson his full support during the national emergency, urged Johnson to balance the budget, suggested that he speak to a joint session of Congress, and told him “to be his own man.”40 It was the beginning of an association between the new President and the former President that was to dominate much of the remainder of Eisenhower’s public life.