Six Crises (28 page)

To the many suggestions that I step forward as the deputy or acting
President or as the heir apparent, I always answered: “We still have a President of the United States.” Although aware of the future potentiality of my position, I knew that so long as the President lay ill or convalescing, my responsibility was to carry on with my own duties and responsibilities. Throughout the period of his illness and convalescence, I dedicated my thoughts, words, and actions to the crisis at hand: to help carry on the operations of government in the absence or partial absence of the Chief Executive. For any Vice President to politicize his activities during his President's term of office, particularly his first term of office, would be personally reprehensible, I believe, unless that Vice President disagreed fundamentally with the President's policies or truly believed that he could serve the country better. Neither of these conditions applied to me.

The first time that the Republican National Chairman saw President Eisenhower after the heart attack was at his Gettysburg farm on November 28. One of the known common aftereffects of a heart attack is frequent periods of depression, and it was in one of these moods that Len Hall found the President. Before he went in to see the President, he talked with Jim Hagerty and Sherman Adams. They, too, were despondent. “This man isn't going to go,” they told Hall.

Hall, an astute politician, wisely did not ask the President the key question. He again expressed the hopes of the party and the nation for four more years of Eisenhower leadership. He informed the President that the latest polls showed he could be re-elected without a strenuous campaign. The President did not give any hint of an answer to the key question, but he described himself as “an old dodo,” a man for whom the years had caught up. It was a gloomy discussion. But for Hall it brightened at the very end. “Okay,” said Hall, “let's talk about what I'm going to say to the press when I walk out of here. Everyone else who visits you can say that they did not talk politics, but if I said that they'd call me a liar.”

“Go out and say what you think you should say,” replied the President. “I don't want to know what you are going to say.”

Hall went out and said he believed Eisenhower would run again and that I would be his running mate.

For me, as well as the President, this period continued to be one which drained my emotional as well as physical energies, for it was, above all, a period of indecision. As Vice President, my role was to absorb some of the more routine duties of the President, relieving the burden on him, and yet not to appear to be stepping into his shoes.

To understand the President's inner turmoil during this period, it is
necessary, I think, to understand the nature of convalescence from a heart attack. In the aftermath, for anyone, there is first the shock of having been stricken, followed by periods of deep depression when the patient doesn't want to do anything ever anymore—except take care of himself. Next, there comes a period of worrying about one's own condition and chances of another attack—so much so, I believe, that it inhibits a man from making completely rational decisions. Then, finally, when the disease has been fully arrested, there comes the natural human reaction for any active man to continue the battle and not, as he first contemplated, to retire from the arena.

On one of my visits to the White House, the Saturday before Christmas, I found the President in his apartment on the second floor, sitting alone on a bench against a wall, somewhat depressed. I came in with Jim Hagerty, Jerry Persons, and Ann Whitman to present the Cabinet's Christmas gift to him. He told us the doctor had just taken his blood pressure after exercise and found it quite high. Discussing generally the various symptoms of his recovery, he commented that quite possibly the doctors really did not know too much about the aspects of recovery. The uncertainty of it all was what troubled him, he said, for he did not have a high cholesterol count or any of the other usual explicable symptoms of the disease. As a result, he said, his fate was much more uncertain than that of other heart patients who knew what caused their attack and could rearrange their lives to avoid another.

He also told of having what he called “a little spell” after the Christmas party for the White House staff earlier that week. He had moved about the party shaking hands and exchanging greetings, he said, and had not realized how much strength it had taken out of him until he suddenly felt very, very tired. It was that same afternoon, I remembered, that Colonel A. J. Goodpaster, the President's Staff Secretary, had passed me a note that the President might have to leave the Security Council meeting early because he was very tired. But the President had called a recess of five minutes and had come back to finish the meeting.

The President, of course, was not always worried or depressed during this period. At that same White House visit, his expressive face glowed with pleasure when I presented him with a pair of gold candlesticks as his Christmas gift from the Cabinet and gold place settings for eight from the White House staff. And he roared with laughter when I commented that these gifts symbolized his Administration's attachment to the principle of the gold standard. David, the President's oldest and favorite grandchild, provided a pleasant interlude when he came into
the room. Hagerty introduced me as “the Vice President of the United States.” David took a second look and said, “The Vice President, wow!” Then he turned to his grandfather and said, “Ike, I didn't know there were two Presidents.” The President explained that the Vice President had to be ready to step in whenever the President was too sick to perform his job. When David left the room, the President told us that the family tried to keep the children from being conscious of his rank. Only David, the eldest, was aware that he was President and that was one of the reasons they had insisted from the beginning that David continue to call his grandfather Ike, just as he always had.

The day after Christmas, Jerry Persons phoned me and asked if I would mind coming down to the White House to urge the President to take a needed vacation in Florida. His doctors had wanted him to convalesce in the warm climate of Florida when he left the hospital, but then the President had insisted on remaining close to Washington. That morning I found him in a talkative mood. When I explained that he certainly should go to Florida without any feeling that he had to be in Washington when Congress opened or for the State of the Union message, he indicated that he thought so too. But, he said, “my family is kind of sentimental about New Year's and other holidays” and they thought he should be at home for New Year's Eve.

However, one of the reasons he wanted to go to Florida, he said, was to have a chance to talk at length with his brother Milton and others about his plans for the future. He remarked that he wanted me to understand that it would be necessary for him in the next few days and weeks to have conferences from time to time on the political situation without my being present. This was necessary, he pointed out, because I would, of course, be one of those who would have to be talked about.

The President emphasized that the doctors could not say what caused his heart attack and so they probably would not be able to give him any assurance as to what the future would hold. That led up to the inevitable conclusion that, as he put it, he could not see how he could run in good conscience with that “sword of Damocles” hanging over his head.

I tried to convince him, as I had before, that the job need not be nearly so burdensome as it had been before and that many of the duties which were being taken away from him now should have been assumed by others in the Administration long before the heart attack. “As far as meetings are concerned,” I told him, “no meeting should be over two hours.” He laughed at this point and said that one thing he would never agree to was to get up and leave a meeting before it was
over. It would be an affront to treat his “colleagues” in that way, he said.

I brought up this same point with Sherman Adams some time afterwards, arguing that despite the President's much heralded staff system, he sometimes listened to the same paper being read two or three times: once by members of his personal staff, later before the Security Council, and then sometimes again at a full Cabinet meeting. Surely he could excuse himself during the readings or rereadings of papers he had previously heard. But, Adams answered, if the President did not attend, the Cabinet members would not think it an important meeting and some of them might choose not to attend either. Then Cabinet meetings would lose their significance. The same problem arose over having the President's signature on some of the more politically important messages of greetings and proclamations. Every convention and conclave wants a message from the President of the United States, and only his signature will satisfy them.

At that December 26 meeting with the President, he seemed to be seeking some way of avoiding another campaign. He referred to the fact that when he had agreed to run in 1952 he had been told that he could serve for only four years and that by that time the Republican Party would be strong enough to elect another candidate. It was “most disappointing” to him, he said, to see that my popularity had not risen as high as he had hoped it would.

For that reason, he said, it might be better for me in a new Administration not to be Vice President but to be a Cabinet officer. He pointed out that I could hold any position in the Cabinet I wanted, with the possible exception of Attorney General, which he ruled out due to my lack of legal experience, and Secretary of State, which he thought I could handle but to which he thought Herbert Hoover, Jr., then Under Secretary of State, had an inside track. Secretary of Defense seemed to be the position he particularly favored for me in case I did not run again for Vice President.

The conversation was casual, the emphasis was on the possibility of his not running again, and, knowing how the President's mind worked, I did not take the suggestion seriously, just as I knew he was himself “trial-ballooning” the idea of his not running again. With people he knew well and trusted, Eisenhower liked to think out loud. He would sometimes make what would seem to be completely outlandish and politically naïve remarks, just to test them, perhaps even believing in some of them momentarily. He was very bold, imaginative, and uninhibited in suggesting and discussing new and completely unconventional
approaches to problems. Yet he probably was one of the most deliberate and careful Presidents the country has ever had where action was concerned. Because of his military experience, he was always thinking in terms of alternatives, action and counteraction, attack and counterattack. This was true of every problem he handled. I cannot, for instance, imagine him countenancing the plan for the 1961 rebel attack on Cuba without air cover before asking: “What is our position if the landings fail?” He could be very enthusiastic about half-baked ideas in the discussion stage, but when it came to making a final decision, he was the coldest, most unemotional and analytical man in the world.

In his talk with me, the President also expressed great disappointment that Earl Warren had announced he would not leave the Supreme Court to be a candidate. “I don't see why he couldn't just have said nothing,” he remarked, commenting that the Republican Party had dealt with Warren pretty well, and he certainly should have been willing to be a candidate in the event the party found it necessary to draft him. He pointed out that a recent Gallup Poll, asking Republican voters whom they favored for the Republican nomination in the event that Eisenhower did not run, had shown Warren with 14 per cent to 11 per cent for me. He mentioned another poll in which I had run substantially behind Adlai Stevenson. He apparently had not seen a later poll, taken after his heart attack, in which I had run ahead of Warren and in which Stevenson's lead over me had been greatly cut down.

As we talked about polls, he said, “I want you to come in from time to time to discuss the situation with regard to yourself. We might have to initiate a crash program for building you up.” It occurred to me that a pretty effective job had been done on him concerning my recent weak showing in the polls. I told him that in making his decision as to whether he should or should not run again, I did not want him to feel that I had to be the candidate for Vice President.

He shut off talk on that subject promptly, saying he would not hear of it because he felt it would hurt the ticket if he “jettisoned” me at this point. Besides, he said, we could win as handily as we had before.

He tried to reassure me of his satisfaction with my work as Vice President. “There has never been a job I have given you that you haven't done to perfection as far as I am concerned,” he said. “The thing that concerns me is that the public does not realize adequately the job you have done. I just can't understand how any sane-minded person could choose Stevenson over you.”

Leaving that meeting, the strongest impression I carried away was that the President was leaning toward not running, but had not closed his mind on the subject. The idea of accepting a Cabinet post I did not take seriously. I put it in the category of a typical Eisenhower trial balloon, something which someone had suggested to him and that he characteristically was testing out.

Two days later, the President and his brother Milton, accompanied by a small staff, flew to Key West, Florida, for a two-week vacation, and spent most of the time fishing and talking politics. Mrs. Eisenhower and her mother flew down on New Year's Eve to spend the holiday weekend with him. On his last day there, January 8, the President indicated to a press conference that he had reached a “subject-to-change” decision on the all-important political question. The fourteen reporters at the conference were polled for their opinion of the President's remarks. Twelve thought he would not run, two judged that he would.

Soon after his return to Washington, he again brought up the question of whether I could advance my own political career better by seeking an important Cabinet post instead of running for Vice President again, pointing out that no Vice President since Van Buren had ever been elected President. The subject came up at five or six of our private conversations, usually in a casual way, and I always gave the same answer: “If you believe your own candidacy and your Administration would be better served with me off the ticket, you tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it. I want to do what is best for you.”