Six Crises (26 page)

But contrary to my usual instincts, I knew that the correct course in this crisis was precisely to lean with the wind. As long as the President was seriously ill, this would necessarily be a period of inaction, a period in which I could not act decisively. The crisis not only was different, but it probably would be long and difficult.

My own position as Vice President called for maintaining a balance of the utmost delicacy. On the one hand, aside from the President, I was the only person in government elected by all the people; they had a right to expect leadership, if it were needed, rather than a vacuum. But any move on my part which could be interpreted, even incorrectly, as an attempt to usurp the powers of the presidency would disrupt the Eisenhower team, cause dissension in the nation, and disturb the President and his family. Certainly I had no desire or intention to seize an iota of presidential power. I was the Vice President and could be nothing more. But the problem was to guard against what I knew would be easy misinterpretation of any mistake, no matter how slight, I might make in public or private. The crisis was how
to walk on eggs and not break them. My problem, what I had to do, was to provide leadership without appearing to lead.

At 4:30 the telephone rang. It was Jim Hagerty on his final call of the night saying the situation was unchanged, the President was resting comfortably. I went back to bed and continued to lie awake for the rest of the night thinking of the problems I would face in the morning.

•  •  •

The next morning, I put into action a plan decided upon the night before. I returned home and drove with Pat and the girls to the Westmoreland Congregational Church, about a mile from our house. The newspapermen followed us and also attended the services. We heard the minister, Dr. Philip Gordon Scott, pray that the President be “restored to health and strength and to the power of full life.” It was a somber service, similar to thousands upon thousands of others throughout the world. Eisenhower, the man who had led the Allied forces to victory in World War II, had become a symbol of the hope for peace for people everywhere.

After the services, the reporters crowded around and I invited them to return with me to the house. Eight or ten of them followed us home and we settled down in my living room for a talk. Few, if any, of them realized that this was precisely in line with my plan of action worked out the night before. This first meeting with the press, in which my words, my actions, even my mood, would be reported to the nation, for me was a crisis. I wanted to be prepared for it as best I could. Even the manner of my meeting the press, no matter what I said, could be subject to misinterpretation. If I called a press conference, attracting the whole Washington press and television corps, it would appear as though I were attempting to step center stage in the absence of the President. If I refused to see the press altogether, it might indicate a lack of confidence or even fear—and this would be a reflection upon the whole Administration. The answer was to have a casual meeting with the press, and that is just what this one seemed to be.

With this small group of newsmen, many of whom I knew personally, sitting with me in my own home, I was able to speak frankly and informally. Of course, they had their jobs to do and they fired questions at me, loaded with politics, in their quest for what they call hard news. But I knew perfectly well what I wanted to say and what I didn't. All questions on the President's condition and its political implications for the next year's presidential election, I declined to
answer. “The only comment I can make,” I told them, “is to express the concern that I share with all the American people for the early and complete recovery of the President. In comparison with this, all other questions and problems are not worthy of discussion.”

This did not stop the reporters that day, and others thereafter, from questioning the political implications of every move I made. The Republican National Convention was less than a year away; Eisenhower was known to be reluctant, even before his heart attack, to run for a second term; virtually everyone was counting him out now; and the newspaper pundits seemed to be equally divided between a “wide-open race” for the Republican nomination and Richard Nixon being the “heir apparent.” Somehow no one seemed to want to believe the truth, which was that the “team,” myself included, was concerned exclusively with how to carry on through the present emergency. No one close to the President thought of jockeying for the nomination while he lay ill. It would have been in poor taste, ill-advised, and, as some who tried it discovered a short while later, political suicide. My concern was how to keep politics out of the picture. If a scramble for the Republican nomination broke out at this time it would be tantamount to desertion of the President personally and an irresponsible scuttling of the administration of government. Despite the millions of words written about the political implications at the time, no member of the “team” began to seek the nomination.

Our attention was directed on how to avoid the political maneuvers and how to maintain the balance of power in running a government without a Chief Executive. My first meeting with the press gave me the opportunity of making public the theme that the Administration would carry on the policies and practices of President Eisenhower until he himself was well enough to take over the reins. “The President has set up the Administration in such a way that it will continue its policies, which are well defined, during his temporary absence,” I told the reporters. “The President has always made it clear that the business of government should go ahead. He set it up in such a way that it can go ahead despite the temporary absence of anyone.”

Foster Dulles and George Humphrey, with whom I had conferred by telephone the night before, also told the press that the “team” could and would carry on, thus setting the interim policy in Washington.

Dulles, as the ranking senior member of the Cabinet, bolstered by his sense of history, long experience in government, and force of character, maintained a strong guiding hand behind the scenes upon all the actions of the team. It was he who strongly urged that Sherman Adams
set up shop in Denver rather than Washington when Adams returned from overseas. He preferred Adams at the President's side, serving as a liaison between the Chief Executive and the Cabinet, rather than Hagerty, the press secretary, or anyone else who might try to fill that vacuum. Dulles, in one conversation with me, candidly recalled the difficult period when Woodrow Wilson was paralyzed with a stroke in 1919 and the only ones who had access to his sickroom in the White House had been his wife, his secretary, and his doctor. Neither the Vice President, the Cabinet, nor Congress could find out Wilson's state of health, and the only state papers he saw were those his wife and possibly his secretary chose to show him. For eight months, Wilson was unable to call a Cabinet meeting and when his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, initiated Cabinet meetings in an attempt to carry on the drifting affairs of the Administration, Wilson flew into a rage and demanded (and got) his Secretary of State's resignation. That Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, was John Foster Dulles' uncle.

The word from Denver on Sunday, after Dr. White had consulted with the military doctors, was that the President had had “a moderate attack of coronary thrombosis without complications.” Attention was focused on the word “moderate” because it differed from Dr. Snyder's original diagnosis of a “mild” heart attack. However, the really important words were that the heart attack was “without complications.” The word from Denver, in short, was that the President had suffered a very ordinary coronary, one from which thousands of other men in his age-group had recovered. Barring complications, which could not yet be ruled out completely, the prognosis was that the President would be well enough in two weeks to take on limited duties and to resume normal activity in two months.

The news was heartening and, after spending most of the day on the telephone, I relaxed Sunday night with Bill Rogers and Jerry Persons, talking over the various details which would have to be tended to during the week. We were fairly certain by this time that there was nothing requiring the President's signature or attention which could not be delayed for two weeks. The significance of this was that it became apparent this early that we would not have to solve the thorny problem of a delegation of the President's constitutional powers. Despite all the speculation in the press, that possibility was never taken up seriously within the Administration, and as the President's health continued to improve, the constitutional question itself, aside from the practical considerations, faded into the background.

The next day, Monday, I reviewed matters pending at the White House during a luncheon meeting with the senior staff personnel and then stayed on for a private talk with Sherman Adams, who had just flown in from Scotland. My relationship with Adams was somewhat formal rather than friendly. But we worked well together, with a mutual respect for our abilities and positions in the government. Adams said little in this meeting, but for him that was not unusual or surprising. I stressed the importance of keeping all the Cabinet members informed and up-to-date on everything, and I emphasized the necessity of avoiding any impression that any one clique of Cabinet officers was running the government. Some of the members whom I had not reached by phone the night I had learned of the President's illness had raised this point with me, and I wanted to make sure that no jealousies arose within the Cabinet as a result of my having consulted that evening with Humphrey and Dulles and not with others.

On Monday night, Adams, Len Hall, who was then the Republican National Chairman, and his press aide Lou Guylay, along with Rogers, Persons, and myself, met at Rogers' home to discuss some of the political questions which were bound to arise during the President's illness. During this meeting, which lasted for over four hours, Adams volunteered nothing. As Len Hall later described his actions: “Every time we asked, ‘Sherm, what do you think?' he would talk about fishing in Scotland.” After three or four questions were put to him, we realized that Adams' sole loyalty was to Eisenhower and that he did not want to take part in any action before he knew his chief's inclinations.

The major subject of discussion that night was how to keep the lid on the political cauldron. Len Hall, a man who knew and loved his job, needed no instruction. He already had taken the first step. Caught by reporters that afternoon at a scheduled talk to the Union League Club in New York, Hall came out flatly with his prediction of the 1956 Republican ticket: Ike and Dick. That night I asked Hall to get word to all the Republican State Chairmen and political leaders throughout the country to say nothing which would set off a premature battle for the presidential nomination. I stated flatly that I would do nothing that could possibly be construed as political so long as we had a President who conceivably could run for a second term. No one at that time, it must be admitted, thought that Eisenhower would choose to run again even if he were physically able.

How to provide leadership to the party and to the nation during the President's illness came up as a problem of many facets. I refused
to take any overt leadership, although I was equally determined that things must not be allowed to drift. My problem remained how to exert leadership without seeming to do so.

The next day and all through the next two weeks, I was careful to conduct all my business from my own office in the Senate Office Building. I made it a point to visit various Cabinet members in their offices rather than summon them to mine. I met with Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Herbert Hoover, Jr., Under-Secretary of State, and Dillon Anderson, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, to prepare for the regular Thursday meeting of the National Security Council. I put in several hours with the White House staff and, for the first time since the President was stricken, I signed some non-legal, ceremonial papers. I signed them, of course, with my own name, “in behalf of the President.” My working day stretched from twelve to sixteen hours during the week, but that Wednesday was the opening day of the World Series and I managed to listen to the final three innings of the game.

At the two-and-a-half-hour meeting of the National Security Council on Thursday, attended by twenty-three ranking members of the Administration, we went through the regular agenda of reports and then spent considerable time reviewing and putting somewhat of an official stamp of approval on the course of action for the interim government. It was officially decided, for instance, that Sherman Adams should go to Denver to serve as liaison and administrative assistant to the President, while Jerry Persons would handle the paper work at the President's White House office, routing the documents which the President should see through Adams.

Presiding at the Security Council was not new to me. I had done this before when the President had been away from Washington. I was fully briefed for this meeting, but still there was an aura of tension in the air. I was mindful to preside as Vice President, not as acting President. My role was to see that the items up for discussion were handled effectively and efficiently. I was careful not to express my opinion on any decisions or to cut off the discussion until all the officials present, understandably sensitive about their prerogatives, had their say. Only at the end of the discussion of each subject did I express my own point of view and set forth what I thought was the sense of the meeting as to the decision which should be made.

Despite all my efforts, I was not completely successful in keeping harmony within the Cabinet group. I did my best during this
period to avoid meeting the press, but it was virtually impossible to go in and out of the White House and my office in the Capitol without running into reporters who had the responsibility to cover me. Even though I tried to be completely noncommittal on such occasions, two Cabinet officers called me Thursday evening very upset because they thought I had sought out the press after the Security Council meeting, in violation of our general understanding to have no press conferences during this period.