Ike at leisure in Gettysburg. (illustration credit 28.1)
Lower the shades. Pull me up. Higher. I want to go. God take me.
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER,
March 28, 1969
Eisenhower and Mamie departed Washington immediately after John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ceremony on January 20, 1961. They drove to Gettysburg in the 1955 Chrysler Imperial that Mamie had given Ike on his sixty-fifth birthday, followed by a lone Secret Service car. At the entrance to the farm the car honked, and the agents waved and made a U-turn to head back to Washington. In 1961, ex-presidents were not entitled to Secret Service protection.
Eisenhower settled in easily to Gettysburg. He taught himself to drive again, passed the Pennsylvania test for a driver’s license, and learned to use a dial telephone. He was given an office at Gettysburg College, and his classified papers were housed in a vault at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland.
Before leaving Washington, Eisenhower let it be known that he would like to be restored to his five-star rank as General of the Army, an action that required congressional legislation.a President Kennedy was mystified. Why would Ike want to relinquish the title of “Mr. President” to be called “General”? he asked his military assistant, Brigadier General Ted Clifton. As best he could, Clifton explained to Kennedy that Eisenhower was a military man at heart. The term “Mr. President” applied to Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, and Kennedy himself, but General of the Army was an independent title, something Ike had worked for all of his life. “Besides, if he is a five-star general, he needs no favors from you or the White House.”1 Kennedy saw the point, and the bill was passed unanimously in March 1961.
Eisenhower devoted himself to writing his presidential memoirs—a two-volume collection commendable for its completeness and documentation but scarcely bedtime reading for the uninitiated. Unlike Crusade in Europe, which was written personally by Ike in twelve-to-sixteen-hour days, Mandate for Change and Waging Peace, dealing with his first and second terms, were initially drafted by his son John and former White House speechwriter William Ewald. Eisenhower reviewed the drafts and retooled the manuscripts, and the prose is serviceable. But the books, which have set the tone for subsequent presidential memoirs, lack the elegance of Grant’s memoirs or the feistiness of Harry Truman’s. Ike eschewed high drama in the interest of historical accuracy. He is circumspect, befitting an elder statesman, and more than evenhanded when dealing with adversaries such as Joe McCarthy. The books received mixed reviews. As Eisenhower wished, they provide an indispensible guide to his eight years in the White House and are essential for scholars of the period. Later, Ike wrote the commendable At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, an informal, almost random, look at the events of his life before the presidency. Eisenhower dictated these reminiscences in the evenings at Gettysburg, and his portraits of old associates such as Fox Conner, Douglas MacArthur, and George Patton are frank and uninhibited.
Ike at leisure in Gettysburg. (illustration credit 28.1)
Eisenhower’s daily schedule at Gettysburg varied little from his time in the White House. He rose at six or so, read the daily papers as he ate breakfast, and was in his office by seven-thirty. He returned home for lunch at noon, took a short nap, and then either returned to the office or headed for the golf course. Back home at five, he showered and changed clothes, enjoyed a scotch before dinner, and invariably ate alongside Mamie on trays set up in front of the television set. If a quorum could be mustered, there was often a bridge game. He was usually in bed well before ten.
In the fall of 1961 Eisenhower and Mamie took up winter residence at the Eldorado Country Club in California’s Coachella Valley, midway between Palm Desert and Indian Wells. For the next seven years they would spend five months a year at Eldorado, Ike finding the dry desert air more agreeable than the humidity at Augusta, and the company just as exclusive. After sending troops to Little Rock in 1957, Eisenhower’s welcome at Augusta was also not as warm as it had once been. At Eldorado, the Eisenhowers lived in a home on the eleventh fairway recently constructed by Texas oil baron Robert McCulloch for their exclusive use. Ike established his office at the Cochran Ranch in nearby Indio, and found the seclusion at Eldorado much to his liking. Unlike Gettysburg, where the Eisenhowers lived on a place open to the public, Eldorado was a gated, heavily protected community for the cream of society in the California desert.
Other than writing his memoirs, Eisenhower played little role in national politics. He supported Nixon for governor of California in 1962, never warmed to Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid in 1964, and strongly endorsed Nixon’s effort four years later. In his role as elder statesman, he buttressed Kennedy at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and refrained from criticizing Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam.2
At the state funeral of President Kennedy, he and Harry Truman once again found common ground. Protocol dictated that as former presidents the two would ride in the same limousine from Blair House to Arlington National Cemetery. Making a virtue of necessity, the two decided to share a glass of whiskey at Blair House before leaving. Perhaps the whiskey had a mellowing effect, after the saying in vino veritas. The two former presidents forgot their past animosity and began to chat affably, trading observations and stories about former colleagues. Among other things, they agreed that their actions as president sometimes had a rationale that few others would understand. Perhaps it was best left that way. “We know what we did,” said Truman.
“We surely do,” Ike replied.3
It was after President Kennedy’s funeral that Congress passed legislation to provide full Secret Service protection to former presidents. In the summer of 1965 a detail of agents returned to Gettysburg and staked out the positions they had used when Eisenhower was president. Ike was ambivalent about the protection. “Life for me personally would be much happier if I had less of this so-called ‘protection,’ ” Eisenhower wrote his son John. Ike said one man with a six-shooter—“possibly reinforced by one in my own pocket”—should be sufficient for his own security, but he worried about “cranks” targeting the family, particularly the grandchildren.4
Eisenhower was seventy-five. His health was failing. At the Augusta National in November 1965 he suffered a second near-fatal heart attack. He began to lose weight, and his interest in the farm diminished. The Angus herd was disbursed in 1966. Nevertheless his hold on American public opinion continued unabated. In January 1968, with disaster looming in Vietnam, the Gallup poll named Eisenhower the man most admired by the American people—an honor he had previously won in 1950 and 1952.5 Ike and Mamie went to California as usual, and Eisenhower spent as much time on the links as possible. On February 6, 1968, he presented the Eisenhower Trophy to the winner of the Bob Hope Classic—his good friend Arnold Palmer. The following day he shot a hole-in-one at the Seven Lakes Country Club—the first he had ever shot, climaxing, as it were, his lifetime devotion to the game.6
On Monday, April 20, 1968, Ike was again on the course at Seven Lakes but quit after nine holes complaining of chest pains. He went home, but was soon rushed to the hospital with what doctors initially diagnosed as a mild heart attack. He was placed in intensive care at nearby March Air Force Base, but failed to respond to treatment. After four weeks he was flown to Washington and installed in the presidential suite at Walter Reed. Mamie moved in next door. For the next ten months, from May 1968 to March 1969, Eisenhower remained hospitalized, gradually losing ground to a series of follow-on heart attacks. On March 27, Ike instructed his son John to remove him from the life support system to which he had been attached. “I’ve had enough, John. Tell them to let me go.”7
At 12:35 p.m. the following day, Dwight David Eisenhower died, surrounded by his family and the doctors who had treated him. Eisenhower’s body lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, resting in a standard-issue eighty-dollar Army coffin, clad in his Ike jacket, unadorned with metals or decorations other than his insignia of rank. After the ceremony his flag-draped casket was placed in a railroad car of a funeral train for the trip back to Abilene. Forty hours later Eisenhower was laid to rest on the grounds of the home in which he grew up. It was a simple ceremony, closed to all but family and friends.8
De Gaulle renders a final salute, in the rotunda of the Capitol. (illustration credit 28.2)
Several years later, a young David Eisenhower asked his grandmother Mamie whether she felt she had really known Dwight David Eisenhower.
“I’m not sure anyone did,” Mamie replied.9
a On March 4, 1885, former president Ulysses S. Grant, in dire financial circumstances, was restored to his rank of four-star general by unanimous vote of both houses of Congress. The legislation had been originally introduced by Joseph E. Johnston, the former Confederate general who now represented Virginia’s Third Congressional District.
In Grant’s day, former presidents did not receive pensions, but as a general his salary would be restored. Eisenhower did not benefit financially by regaining his rank, but as a General of the Army he was permitted to retain the servies of his driver, Leonard Dry; his valet, Sergeant Moaney; and his aide, Colonel Robert Schulz.
For Grant, see Jean Edward Smith, Grant 622–25.
