C’est la soupe qui fait le soldat (the soup makes the soldier).
—Napoleon Bonaparte
Dwight David Eisenhower was not a gourmet, and did not care for rich sauces or fine wine, but he was the most accomplished presidential cook. Nicknamed Ike, he was born in Texas in 1890 and raised in Kansas and was the last president born in the nineteenth century. He was the third of seven boys: his father, David, worked at a creamery, and his mother, Ida, was a committed pacifist who insisted that her sons learn to cook, wash, sew, and read history. Ike enjoyed the process of turning raw ingredients into a satisfying meal. “Cooking gave me a creative feeling,” he’d say.
On a small patch of land in Abilene, young Ike grew corn and cucumbers and sold hot tamales to neighbors. When his brother Milton had scarlet fever, Ike was deputized as the family cook while Ida nursed his brother. “I don’t think the family lived too well during those two weeks,” he recalled, “but I learned something about the preparation of simple dishes.” With his mother’s tutoring, he mastered vegetable soup, roast chicken, grilled steak, boiled potatoes, and baked apple pie.
An enthusiastic hunter and fisherman, Ike was mentored in woodland cookery by Bob Davis, an illiterate outdoorsman. On camping trips with friends, Ike was in charge of the grub: once, their supplies ran so low that he and a friend shot and skinned three squirrels; adding their meat to leftover potatoes and beans, Ike stretched the ingredients into a stew. The future politician slyly called it “crow stew,” which sounded less appetizing than squirrel, and persuaded his mates to eat bread instead; the stew was left to Ike and his coconspirator.
Ike recalled the squirrel stew as a valuable lesson: a good cook with limited but tasty ingredients could whip up a decent meal. In the army, he learned the opposite lesson: cooks with decent ingredients but little skill usually produced terrible meals. As an officer, Eisenhower drilled his soldiers on the importance of a balanced diet, nutritious food, and aesthetic presentation. “Food is part of a soldier’s pay, and it is my determination to see that none of his pay is going to be counterfeit,” he declared.
In October 1915, Eisenhower was a twenty-five-year-old second lieutenant stationed in San Antonio, where he met Marie Geneva “Mamie” Doud. She was the spirited, eighteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Colorado family. She was raised with a cook and maid and had a monthly $100 stipend from her father, a meatpacking executive. Ike and Mamie courted over Mexican dinners and married the following July. Moving into a bug-infested, two-bedroom apartment with no electricity, Mamie explained that while she knew how to make fudge, “I was never permitted in the kitchen when I was a young girl….I was a cooking school dropout.”
Ike happily volunteered for KP and liked to say, “I’ve been a mess sergeant since the day I got married….The only way I could get the family away from a diet of steak and potatoes was to make a hobby of cooking….I enjoy it a lot.”
In 1917 Mamie gave birth to a son, Doud Dwight “Ikky” Eisenhower. The boy was a delight, but when he died of scarlet fever at age three, the Eisenhowers’ marriage was strained nearly to the breaking point. Happily, Mamie gave birth to a second son, John, in 1922. Ike spent World War I teaching tank warfare and, after stints in Panama and the Philippines, was promoted to colonel, and kept cooking and eating. He didn’t care for “hifalutin’ gourmet stuff,” recalled his orderly, John Moaney, but produced decent chops, steak, grilled fish, and fried chicken.
In 1942, Eisenhower was promoted to lieutenant general and put in charge of all American forces in Europe. While in London planning the invasion of North Africa, he grew disenchanted with English breakfasts of kippers, cold oatmeal, and weak coffee. Moaney invited his boss into the soldiers’ mess, where infantrymen feasted on eggs, bacon, and strong coffee—rare delicacies in war-strapped Britain. Ike could not have been happier.
In 1943, FDR promoted Eisenhower to supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in western Europe. The job put him in charge of nearly three million Allied troops and the invasion of Normandy on D-day. The move brought Ike into close contact with Winston Churchill. One day, the prime minister requested a lunch of hot dogs and baked beans. Referencing FDR’s 1939 hot dog “picnic that won the war,” Churchill declared Ike’s hot dogs “a delicacy fit for a king, which is why His Majesty enjoyed them so much himself.” But it was Eisenhower’s baked beans—in which he replaced the usual tomato or ketchup base with a slow-cooked molasses, salt pork, and onion sauce that produced a resoundingly deep, rich flavor—that everyone remembered.
In 1944, Eisenhower was promoted to five-star general of the army, a rare accolade. Mindful of Napoleon’s dictum that “an army runs on its stomach,” the general kept his troops’ fitness up by supplying them with reasonably tasty, calorie-packed meals. As the Allies pushed the Germans inland from the French coast, they subsisted on K rations—a packet of dehydrated food (meat, beverage, candy) that could be quickly reconstituted—and C rations, a slimmer package of food carried by troops in combat. Following right behind the front line, General Eisenhower liked to snug his lunch rations next to his jeep’s engine; once the food was heated, he would eat it off the hood, as if it were a picnic table.
After the war, Ike pictured himself living on a farm and teaching history. But in 1948, Columbia University persuaded him to move to New York City and serve as its thirteenth president. It was not an expected career move for a five-star general who lacked a college education but Ike quickly adapted, and made news. When the Eisenhowers arrived on campus, they were asked to contribute a recipe to a cookbook, What’s Cooking at Columbia. Expecting a short note from Mrs. Eisenhower, the student editors were thrilled to receive Ike’s lengthy, hand-typed recipe for “Two Day Vegetable Soup,” a dish he had been cooking since childhood. With a base of homemade chicken and beef stock, a plethora of vegetables (“Your vegetables should not all be dumped in at once….Your effort must be to have them nicely cooked but not mushy, at about the same time,” he wrote), pearled barley, and “a small handful” of diced meat, the soup required hours of slow and patient simmering to get just right. With a culinarian’s touch, the general recommended a peppery-flavored garnish: “In the springtime when nasturtiums are green and tender, you can take a few nasturtium stems, cut them up in small pieces, boil them…and add them to your soup.”
Eisenhower’s “Two Day Vegetable Soup” caused a sensation. Newspapers across the country reprinted the recipe and soon markets were deluged with requests for nasturtium stems, an item most people had never considered food before. Ike marveled that a simple recipe learned from his mother garnered more attention than any other statement he made as the president of an Ivy League university.
At his inauguration in 1953, Eisenhower was sixty-two and Mamie was fifty-six. The White House was their thirty-sixth residence and the first home they would live in for longer than a year since 1916. “At last I have a job where I can stay home nights,” Ike said, “and, by golly, I’m going to stay home.”
From the start, Eisenhower used a series of “knife and fork” meetings to introduce himself to Congress and educate himself about the customs of Washington. Between February and May 1953, he wined and dined 527 senators and representatives (just 4 congressmen did not attend). The lessons he drew from these seemingly simple meetings were, in fact, profound: a relaxed, intimate conversation over a meal with the president made people feel good about him, and themselves, and provided an excellent source of information.
Eisenhower’s congressional dinners were such a success that in June 1953 he began hosting a series of private stag dinners at the White House, to take the pulse of the nation. Each event featured fifteen men from broadly different backgrounds—CEOs from eastern cities, ranchers from western rangelands, scientists from midwestern laboratories, engineers from the Southeast, religious leaders from the Southwest, and soldiers, educators, journalists, artists, and friends from all over. So eager was the president to connect that he hosted a stag dinner nearly every week. Guest lists were drawn up far in advance and seating was carefully arranged so that a fiery union leader, say, was not seated next to an arch capitalist.
On stag nights Ike kept the format uniform and the pace quick. At 7:30 a line of black limousines disgorged their tuxedo-clad passengers at the White House door, where the president greeted each guest. At 8:00, they filed into the State Dining Room and sat for dinner. The president often based his menus on food sent by constituents—steak from Texas, salmon from Alaska, turkeys from Pennsylvania, and the like. Conversation began with light banter, but Ike expected everyone to add something meaningful and grew irritated when the conversation lagged. (Some nervous attendees researched Eisenhowerian topics ahead of time.) Businessmen addressed trade and taxes; cattlemen opined on calves and cows; athletes and army friends focused on golf, fishing, and war stories.
Once word got out about the president’s “secret dinners,” people wanted to be in on the action. But the coveted invitations could not be bought, which made them only more desirable. Those who believed they should be invited took umbrage when they were not. Celebrities clamored to be included, and sometimes they were. And when a group of Republican women objected to being excluded, the president invited them to a series of breakfasts. By April 1955, Eisenhower had hosted more than seven hundred guests at forty-nine events.
At these meals, he floated trial balloons about education and foreign aid, or tested theories about civil rights and inflation, but more often he sat back and listened. This was a management technique he’d honed during the war. The general would ask his staff to present solutions to strategic questions: as each made their case, he’d listen, synthesize their arguments, and make his own decision. In this way, he learned to value others’ input and to trust his own instincts, his gut.
Eisenhower was a good listener. “In conversation he is not a fencer, and he’s never flippant or casual,” one guest noted. Another said, “He can go on with a flow of conversation all evening long.” Ike was amused to discover that good food and drink loosened lips: many guests revealed personal views at odds with their public statements. Intrigued, reporters made much ado about Ike’s “hidden weapon…presidential charm and food.” The stag dinners, they wrote, provided him with a way to build political consensus and spin journalists. That was generally accurate, though the secret weapon occasionally backfired.
When the names of Ike’s guests were published, it caused a stir because it revealed whom he trusted and whom he didn’t. When he decreed his guest lists private, that set off a counter-backlash because many who dined with the president wanted others to know they had. “Why travel thousands of miles to eat at the White House if you can’t talk about it?” they wondered. Further, it left diners feeling “uncomfortably stuffed with both food and secrets.”
The stag nights usually ended by 11:00 p.m., by which point, U.S. News & World Report noted,
Those who have put money and work into political campaigns go away feeling that they have had a hand in shaping national policies. The President of the United States has asked their opinions. Financiers get the feeling that they are a part of the Government. Businessmen glimpse policies in the making. Farm and labor leaders get a chance to speak their minds. Educators tell their problems to the president in person. Editors, publishers, commentators get a sense of being on the inside of news in the making….All of them can go home and tell their friends: “I told Ike…” And some of them did. Or, more often it is: “The President told me…” And it may be that he did….This is tending to give them a personal interest in keeping Mr. Eisenhower in the White House. It helps them forget the money they spent and the work they did to put him there. It softens the blow when they learn that the job or the law that they wanted does not fit into his program. It puts them in a good mood to go out and work for his election again.
Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt or Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower loved being First Lady. Having followed her husband around the world, “Mrs. Ike” could entertain in style and was unfazed by foreign leaders or the intricacies of protocol. And like Dolley Madison, she loved to organize a party and wear fancy clothes. At the inaugural balls thrown on the night of her husband’s 1953 swearing-in, Mamie wore a pink gown that glistened with two thousand faceted rhinestones, pink silk shoes, and long pink gloves. Pink was her signature color, and she applied it to everything from toilet seat covers to the ribbons adorning White House lamb chops. In private, the First Lady suffered numerous ailments, including a heart murmur and inner-ear trouble. She disliked athletics and was sensitive to heat and cold. She would sometimes sleep until noon or spend an entire day in bed, her “big pink office.”
Mrs. Eisenhower was happy to portray herself as an exemplar of the traditional 1950s housewife—with the notable exception of cooking—calling it “the best career that life has to offer a woman.” She frequently hosted women’s lunches, offering light fare such as open-faced sandwiches, tomato pudding, caramel-frosted cake, and cookies, with grape punch, coffee, or tea. And she was thrifty, turning leftovers into dinner salads or the “one-dish wonders”—turkey hash, tuna casseroles, ground meat dishes—then in vogue. Used to running households around the world, the First Lady took command of the Executive Mansion, holding daily conferences with the maître d’, who oversaw the butlers; the chief usher, who oversaw social planning; and the housekeeper, who was responsible for maintaining the building.
Mamie raised staff eyebrows when she ordered a double bed, so that she and Ike could sleep together (as the Roosevelts and Trumans had not), and was, “gay, breezy, open,” recalled assistant chief usher J. B. West. But she had “a spine of steel” and knew “exactly what she wanted.” Upon spying Ike’s lunch menu one day, Mamie snapped, “What’s this?” When the cook sheepishly replied that the president had approved the menu, she said, “I run everything in my house. In the future all menus are to be approved by me and not by anybody else.”
The White House was in excellent shape thanks to the Truman renovation, but Mrs. Eisenhower wanted to stamp it with her own decorating preferences. She “loved quality…rich silks and brocades, and the best china and sterling silver money could buy,” her granddaughter recalled. A devotee of antiques, Mamie dreamed of replacing the Trumans’ reproduction furniture with original pieces. And while she could accept donations from citizens—a mahogany sofa here, a bronze bust of Lincoln there—she was limited by budget, politics, and laws. Mamie was “terribly disappointed that she couldn’t transform the entire mansion,” recalled J. B. West.
Her true passion was for “beautiful tableware.” Mamie ordered service plates with the presidential seal and a gold coin border from Castleton, a manufacturer in Pennsylvania. And she used donations to complete a project started by First Lady Caroline Harrison to have samples of each administration’s china. (Five administrations are not included in the White House collection because they did not commission their own patterns.)
With her “china closet in order,” an observer wrote, Mrs. Eisenhower highlighted the role of First Ladies, and her “activism…was portrayed as an extension of her role as a woman and wife, thereby allowing American women to identify with her.” In this way, Mamie Eisenhower set the table, as it were, for Jackie Kennedy’s more celebrated refurbishing.
Ike understood that his wife’s bright smile, pink dresses, and home decorating made her a relatable “everywoman” and political asset. Yet their relationship had been stressed over the years—first by the death of Ikky, then by the turbulence of army life and World War II. In Europe, General Eisenhower’s personal driver and secretary was a raven-haired former model named Kay Summersby, whom Ike called “Irish” (she was born in County Cork). They were close. The question is, how close? Ike scribbled notes such as “How about lunch, tea & dinner today?” One of those events might have indicated innocent fun, but three meals in one day seemed to indicate something more. Some historians have disputed the notion of an Eisenhower-Summersby romance. But General Omar Bradley said the rumors were “quite accurate,” and Harry Truman said Ike wanted to marry Summersby. In a 1976 memoir, Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower, she wrote, “I suppose inevitably, we found ourselves in each other’s arms in an unrestrained embrace….It was as if we were frantic, and we were.”
But that was the past. In Washington, Ike was a model of decorum, and Mamie endeared herself to the public by throwing euphoric holiday parties. In 1953, she revived the White House Easter Egg Roll, which had been suspended since the Truman renovation. For St. Patrick’s Day, she donned a green brocade dress and hosted an Irish lunch in the Green Room. For Halloween, she decorated the State Dining Room with black cats, Indian corn, and glowing jack-o’-lanterns, in what the press called “the most interesting party ever given in the dignified setting.” At Christmas, she celebrated with a delirium of wreaths, poinsettias, gift boxes, candies, and twenty-seven decorated trees throughout the mansion.
As president, Eisenhower retained his military discipline. He was up at 6:00 a.m. and ate breakfast at 7:00, lunch at 1:00, and dinner at 7:00. The First Couple liked steaks provided by a rancher friend in Kansas, and the president’s hunting provided game birds for Eisenhower’s quail hash. His fishing trips brought fresh trout, which he rolled in cornmeal and fried in bacon fat. Mamie steered the cooks into her file of homey recipes—baked seafood casserole, fluffy turnips, Danish tomatoes, devil’s food cake with seven-minute frosting, deep-dish apple pie, baked caramel custard. With such economy, she was proud to say, they kept their food budget to $100 a month.
The Eisenhowers liked a predinner nip and a glass or two of wine with their meal; he liked to sip scotch afterward. But tradition dictated protocol in the White House. On their first night there, the butler served the president a glass of whiskey and then delivered the First Lady’s drink. Taken aback, Ike said, “Look, in my house the ladies are served first.” The next evening, and the one after that, the same thing happened. “It finally dawned on me,” he wrote. “These boys are teaching me how to be president.”
Mamie liked Scrabble and canasta, while Ike preferred bridge, which he’d play for hours on Saturdays in a foursome. He didn’t care if his tablemates were Democrats or Republicans, as long as they liked to bet and eat takeout. They would start on a weekend afternoon, break for a takeout dinner, then continue into the night. Like Calvin Coolidge, and many other presidents, the Eisenhowers were especially fond of Chinese food. Beginning in the 1930s, Ike frequented Washington’s Sun Chop Suey Restaurant, where he ordered egg rolls, chicken chow mein, fried rice, egg foo yong, roast pork, Chinese vegetables, and almond cookies.
Television was emerging as an exciting new medium, and Ike, Mamie, and her mother liked to eat dinner while watching the evening news. Swanson frozen TV dinners were all the rage, and while “gossips say [the First Family’s trays] contained frozen TV dinners,” the food historian Poppy Cannon wrote, that seems unlikely. Instead, the Eisenhowers probably ate simple dinners of Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and salad, made in the White House kitchen and served on china set on collapsible tables, as the Reagans later did. Ike preferred Westerns, while Mamie was a devotee of soap operas, quiz shows, and comedies—especially As the World Turns, You Bet Your Life, and I Love Lucy. To accommodate their tastes, the Eisenhowers had “his” and “hers” TV sets in the family quarters. When Jackie Kennedy moved in, she noticed two holes in the wall. “What are those portholes for?” she asked. The usher explained that Mr. and Mrs. Ike liked to sit next to each other and watch different shows on their respective sets.
Truman made the first televised White House address, in October 1947—to announce the ill-fated Citizens Food Committee—but Eisenhower was America’s first real TV president. Noticing that public attention was shifting from newspapers and radio to television, his advisers converted the old kitchen in the White House basement into a media center. The space was wired for radio broadcasting and TV cameras; a rug and silk curtains softened the light and sound. The Resolute desk—given to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1880—was stationed in front of a fireplace and bracketed by flags, to provide a commanding stage.
In January 1955, Eisenhower appeared in the first televised press conference from the White House, which the Big Three networks aired in black and white. The public knew his clipped voice from the radio, but now they could see the commander in chief’s lively eyes, gap-toothed grin, and erect bearing while he discussed “Communist China,” unveiled his budget, and deflected “loaded questions” about his policies. Though he shifted about, didn’t look into the camera, and rushed his words, the event brought the president directly into people’s homes in a new way. And with coaching from the actor Robert Montgomery, Ike eventually became comfortable in front of the camera.
He evolved in other ways, too. Over time, the five-star warrior seemed to channel his mother’s pacifism by raging against “this damnable thing of war,” Soviet expansionism, and the French war in Indochina (Vietnam). He endorsed Atoms for Peace, which pushed for the peaceful use of nuclear power. In his televised farewell speech to the nation on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower warned against an arms race and, in a phrase he coined, “the military-industrial complex.”
Eisenhower was proud of his rural roots, and his interest in food and agriculture was both politically expedient and deeply personal. “You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field,” he’d say. In 1950, he fulfilled a dream by purchasing a 189-acre farm near the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania. Equipped with a barn, a tractor, a putting green, and a staff to raise his Eisenhower Farm Black Angus cattle and vegetables (which he froze and proudly brought to the White House), the Gettysburg retreat was a place for Ike to unwind and entertain.
Having lived in every kind of home, “except an igloo,” Mamie decorated the farmhouse—the only home they owned—with collections of silverware and figurines, pink drapes, army-green tiles, and chairs monogrammed “Commander in Chief” and “First Lady.” The kitchen featured the latest gizmos, including two stoves, a plate warmer, a refrigerator with a chilled water dispenser, a dishwasher, a Veg-O-Matic, bright green linoleum counters, and a red plastic cake stand. (The Eisenhowers deeded the house to the National Park Service, and the kitchen remains a time capsule.) Using his position in ways now considered unethical, the president shipped wine from France to the farm duty-free, stocked his liquor cabinet with bottles confiscated by the General Services Administration, and outfitted the property with $300,000 worth of equipment and home furnishings donated by friends with political interests.
Dolores Moaney (wife of Ike’s aide, John Moaney) cooked homey dinners at the farm. They were often served on the porch, and guests included politicians, industrialists, and other leaders. In much the way Jefferson and FDR operated, Eisenhower used these quiet meals to “take the measure of the man.”
But more often than not Ike cooked for family and friends at the farm, where he served homemade chicken-noodle soup, old-fashioned beef stew (made with pepper and paprika), summer succotash, and Mamie’s Million Dollar Fudge. When prime ministers or former generals visited, he would tour them around the battlefield and discuss strategy and tactics. Then he’d prepare one of his famous barbecues: each steak was three or four inches thick; he’d liberally season them with salt, black pepper, and garlic powder, then nestle them directly into the red-hot embers, which produces a delicacy that is charred on the outside and pink on the inside, and known as Eisenhower Steak.
Ike’s gastronomic zeal naturally informed his presidential food policy. A disciple of General George C. Marshall—the architect of the Marshall Plan, who warned that “hunger and insecurity are the worst enemies of peace”—Eisenhower signed the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, better known as Food for Peace, in 1954. It was an outgrowth of Senator Hubert Humphrey’s report “Food and Fiber as a Force for Freedom,” which, like Hoover’s post–World War I food program, argued that aiding distressed nations provided both humanitarian assistance and a powerful foreign policy lever. (America has shipped food abroad since 1812, when James Madison sent aid to earthquake-racked Venezuela.)
To Ike, Food for Peace was a way to spread American “soft power” and to dispose of surplus grain accumulated during the war. In 1954, the United States shipped 3.4 million tons of food, mostly to Europe; by 1956, it had shipped 14 million tons. Today, America remains the world’s largest supplier of food aid, sending some 10 million tons of food worth $1.5 billion abroad annually. As of this writing, Food for Peace has operated for almost seventy years and has fed over three billion people in 150 countries.
At the 1959 World Agricultural Fair in New Delhi, India, Eisenhower described America’s effort to end world hunger as a “genuinely noble war.” He described “food, family, friendship, and freedom” as weapons “mightier than arms and bombs; mightier than machines and money; mightier than any empire that ruled the past or threatens the future.”
Presidential cooks are often anonymous, but many of them—starting with George Washington’s slave Hercules—led adventurous lives worthy of Hollywood. The Eisenhowers’ cook François Rysavy, for instance, was born in Czechoslovakia and orphaned at four years old during World War I. His aunt adopted him and taught him to make pastry, but when she too was killed, Rysavy was orphaned a second time. He apprenticed in a bakery and learned to cook savory dishes at restaurants and hotels across Europe and North Africa, before moving to the United States. Settling in Washington, Rysavy freelanced in FDR’s White House kitchen, and in January 1955 he was named the Eisenhowers’ head chef (the title executive chef was created by Jackie Kennedy in 1961).
Rysavy brought an unusual global repertoire that included dishes such as Moroccan brandied lobster, Viennese veal cutlet, chicken Lafayette, mushrooms Provençal, cheddar cheese mousse, and rum fruit savarin. In researching historical recipes, the chef tried his hand at Washington’s chicken fricassee, bouquet of garden vegetables à la John Adams, Jefferson’s filled pannequaiques (pancakes), and Andrew Jackson’s burnt cream. Rysavy was dismayed that Eisenhower, who had lived in France during the war, never developed a taste for wine and disliked classical dishes made with butter and cream.
Like the general-presidents who preceded him, Ike was a prodigious carnivore. He preferred steak cooked rare, three minutes to a side, and like President Taft sometimes ate a four-ounce steak for breakfast, a six-ounce hamburger for lunch, and an eight-ounce steak for dinner. Yet Ike remained trim, was not especially fond of sweets, and was not a midnight snacker. His physicians provided little dietary oversight, and the president seemed to think he was indestructible.
In 1955, Eisenhower led a global summit in Switzerland focused on easing Cold War tensions. Afterward, he and Mamie took a vacation in Denver. On a Friday in September, Ike fixed himself a hearty breakfast of dark coffee, sausage, bacon, and cornmeal pancakes (using his own blend of meal), which he fried in bacon grease. The food tasted especially good in the crisp, high air of the Rockies. But as the day wore on, it sat uncomfortably in the presidential stomach.
On Saturday, he played golf and gobbled down a hamburger with a double slice of raw Bermuda onion. Again, Eisenhower suffered indigestion. Feeling queasy, he spent the afternoon painting landscapes. For dinner he had leg of lamb with pan-roasted potatoes, then played billiards and went to bed. At 2:30 in the morning the president thrashed about and complained of stomach pains. Mamie gave him milk of magnesia and called the White House physician, who diagnosed a heart attack. When he injected the president with morphine, to relieve the symptoms, Ike’s blood pressure dropped, his pulse rate spiked, and he went into shock. “Shaken,” the doctor asked Mamie to wrap herself around Ike, to calm him. She did, and he drifted into a deep sleep.
The next day, Eisenhower was taken to Fitzsimons Army Hospital, where aides told the press that the president had suffered “digestive upset…twenty-four-hour stuff.” Later, Ike’s condition was updated to a “mild coronary thrombosis.” Then the word “mild” disappeared from the narrative. By Monday, news of the president’s condition had spread around the world and the stock market had lost $14 billion.
Ike was a physically active, mentally sharp, sixty-four-year-old, but he had a quick temper and smoked up to four packs of cigarettes a day. Doctors ordered him to rest quietly for seven weeks. Such forced time off went against every instinct in the president’s body, but he had little choice. The heart attack, “my first serious illness,” he said, left him feeling depleted. In typical fashion, he embarked on a goal of “total rehabilitation.” He “ordered” himself to take midday naps—“I rather resent the inconvenience”—and to stop smoking. But reducing his weight from 178 to 172 pounds on his five-foot-ten-inch frame proved “no small item for a man with my love of food.”
The president returned to the White House in November 1955 and suffered through a “lite” diet. His day began with decaffeinated coffee, soy toast, and stewed prunes. At 11:00 a.m., he had a dish of yogurt or cottage cheese with shredded carrots. Lunch was a cup of vegetable soup, three rye crackers, a small salad, and a glass of water. Dinner might include a cup of turkey soup (145 calories), three Ry-Krisp crackers (60 calories), six trimmed short ribs (195 calories), a medium baked potato (100 calories), one cup of string beans (30 calories), and a sliced pear (65 calories), for a total of 595 calories.
Ike’s light diet was as trying for Rysavy as it was for the president. Preparing a small, lean piece of steak, the chef furtively spread a micro-layer of butter across the top “to give it better color,” he explained plaintively. “It was so juiceless.” Ike spotted the glistening fat and decreed that further steak buttering was forbidden.
Most important, the doctors lectured, Eisenhower must keep his temper in check. It was not the big problems that upset him, but “the little silly annoyances” that spiked his blood pressure. He should avoid “irritation, frustration, anxiety, fear, and, above all, anger.”
With a snort, Ike replied, “Just what do you think the Presidency is?”
Eisenhower convalesced at his Gettysburg farm. It was a calm, green spot, but the very things that made it restorative also made it isolating and boring. Like Gulliver hamstrung by Lilliputians, he struggled against his limitations: he simply could not “eat slowly,” he found, and he woke up early, ready to “attack the future.” But as he began to decompress into a routine of walks, swinging a golf club, and light office work, his spirits lifted.
It was then that he was confronted by an existential question: With the election of 1956 approaching, would he—could he—run for a second term? It was the Question on everyone’s mind. Republican leaders urged him to declare his reelection campaign. His doctors warned against it. The Democrats questioned his ability to lead. Were younger Republicans ready and able to fill his seat?
Eisenhower was not close to his vice president, Richard M. Nixon. Nixon had been chosen to bridge a party divide: while Ike was a famous general and moderate Republican whose policies blurred into Democratic terrain, Nixon was a striving, forty-two-year-old conservative from Orange County, California. The two had little in common and rarely socialized.
Returning to the White House in January 1956, Eisenhower convened a dozen advisers to address the Question over dinner. Because of its sensitive nature, the guest list was kept secret. Only Eisenhower and his secretary, Ann C. Whitman, were privy to the list. It included four from the cabinet: John Foster Dulles, George M. Humphrey, Herbert Brownell, and Arthur E. Summerfield. Five of the president’s staff: Sherman Adams, James C. Hagerty, Jerry Persons, Howard Pyle, and Thomas Stephens. And three advisers: Henry Cabot Lodge II, Leonard Hall, and Ike’s brother Dr. Milton Eisenhower.
It was a shock, then, when the guest list was leaked to the press. Reporters bayed for more detail: Why was Eisenhower hosting a secret dinner? Was it a campaign meeting, a farewell, or something else? Why were some insiders invited but others not?
The president was irate. He trusted Whitman implicitly, and could not fathom how the newspapers got hold of his guest list. Racking his brain, he dimly recalled a meeting with Nixon in December. Ike had shown the vice president the guest list and explained that he would not be invited because he didn’t want Nixon to feel “embarrassed” by frank discussion of other possible running mates. In a flash of insight, Ike realized that the only plausible leaker was Nixon, who, in a fit of pique, tried to derail a meal he was not invited to.
Eisenhower rescheduled the dinner for Friday, January 13. Undeterred by superstition, he and his thirteen guests had a jovial discussion over the meal, before the tone turned serious. “Should I run again?” Ike asked. The Question led to a spirited if lopsided discussion. The most obvious reason not to run was his fragile heart, and Milton argued that if his brother retired, he would still be a valuable elder statesman. But everyone else believed Ike was “the only man” who could check the party’s hard-right wing and defeat the Democrats. Ike kept his thoughts to himself and bade his counselors good night at 11:15.
Over cocktails, John Foster Dulles told Eisenhower he was the most respected leader in the world and was therefore “required” to serve a second term. “I suspect that Foster’s estimate…is substantially correct,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary. Ike, the historian Stephen Ambrose observed, “had come to think of himself as ‘indispensable.’ ”
Mamie pledged to support her husband’s decision, whatever it was. But she was not ready to depart the White House just yet, and warned that “idleness” for a man of Ike’s temperament “would be fatal.”
The question of a running mate remained a dilemma. Nixon was the logical choice, but Ike didn’t trust him. Yet the alternatives were even less promising, and out of pragmatism he stood by his vice. When aides suggested that the First Couple invite Pat and Richard Nixon to Gettysburg as a gesture of reconciliation, Mamie balked: “What on earth would we talk about? We don’t have anything in common. She doesn’t play bridge!”
Nixon, meanwhile, nursed a dark resentment. “General Eisenhower never asked me to see the upstairs of the White House,” he stewed. “It was years before he asked me inside the house at Gettysburg.”
On February 29, 1956, Ike declared he would run again.
On June 7, 1956, President Eisenhower enjoyed a Waldorf salad dinner at the White House, suffered cramps and vomiting, and was rushed to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was diagnosed with ileitis, a painful inflammation of the small intestine. “What a bellyache!” the president griped. After surgery at Walter Reed, he returned to campaigning with the slogan “I Like Ike.”
This time, Rysavy was instructed to make the president’s meals virtually fat-free. The chef “suffered” but did his best. Anticipating the light nouvelle cuisine of the 1970s, Rysavy substituted ingredients: rather than pour melted butter over cooked beans, he used chicken bouillon in vegetable stock to add moisture and flavor. He stopped frying food. He did not butter the steak. Ike complimented the chef, but asked him to add a bit of lean ham to his vegetables, to bump up the flavor.
In November 1956, Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson by an even larger margin than he had four years earlier. Ike celebrated his second inaugural on a Sunday with a small, private affair in the East Room. That night, David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon, both eight years old, met at the dinner of creamed chicken, rice, and peas; they would marry a dozen years later. A well-attended swearing-in and parade was held on Monday, and in a vigorous display Ike stood the entire time. But questions about his health continued to dog him.
A year later, the president was confined to bed by “a chill,” which was in fact a mild stroke, forcing him to miss a state dinner for King Mohammed V of Morocco. Ike recovered and in September 1959 greeted the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, his wife, and their children. It was the first visit by a Soviet premier to the United States. At the state dinner in his honor, Khrushchev brought a food taster, and Mamie sat her guests at a large, E-shaped table for a feast of cold curried soup, roast turkey with cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and green salad. The Soviets reciprocated with dinner at their embassy: caviar and fish fillets (served with vodka); stuffed partridge (more vodka); a choice of perch soup or Ukrainian borscht (wine); flounder in champagne sauce and Caucasian shashlik—a meat and vegetable kebab—with asparagus (more wine); baked Alaska, macaroons, and fresh fruits (champagne).
After a tour of the United States, the premier returned to the U.S.S.R. convinced he had formed a personal bond with the president. But then the good vibrations popped like a soap bubble. On May 1, 1960, the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. Eisenhower was angry and humiliated. Once again, U.S.–Soviet relations slid backward into a cold war.
The chef François Rysavy retired in 1957 and was replaced by Pedro Udo, a U.S. Navy cook from the Philippines. Ike liked Udo because he could bang together a meal competently and quickly, and Mamie liked him because he had a flair for cake decoration. But not everyone was a fan. When representatives of the incoming Kennedy administration inspected the kitchen in 1960, they noted that it was in the basement and the food “must be plenty cold” by the time it reached the First Family on the second floor. They described Udo’s state dinner as “nothing short of awful.” Mrs. Kennedy was already hatching plans to revolutionize the food and entertaining at the People’s House, and clearly Udo wouldn’t do.
Eisenhower was the first president limited to two terms by the Twenty-Second Amendment, but that hardly dampened his incorrigible cooking. In the First Family’s kitchen, he flipped pancakes and basted chickens with homemade barbecue sauce on an electric rotisserie. On the third floor, he grilled meats in the glass-walled solarium, which filled with greasy smoke because it was ventilated only by a window. He set a charcoal grill on the White House roof and used it to roast corncobs in their husks. The press couldn’t get enough of the cooking president and his homespun nostrums—“I find that self-rising flour makes my baking much easier,” he’d say, like a TV housewife hawking Pillsbury. And when it came to pancakes, he’d observe, “I mix my batter at night and let it stand until morning.” Asked about Eisenhower’s obsession, a press aide sighed and said, “You can’t stop the president from cooking.”