National Affairs: Gettysburg Address

The White House is not a home, but the Gettysburg farm, 81 miles away, more than fills the bill. Spreading below Seminary Ridge, steeped in the spent passion of a great battle, the farm’s 496 acres are a haven where Dwight Eisenhower can peacefully convalesce only 25 minutes by air from the capital.

From the Gettysburg post office, Ike will direct the affairs (though not the panoply) of state—but he will spend as much time alone on the farm as he can. There, aside from watchful Secret Service men, only Mamie, Master Sergeant John Moaney (Ike’s valet) and Mrs. Moaney will share his privacy. The farm remains the quiet refuge Ike envisioned in 1950 as his first permanent home.

Black Angus, White Fence. Then it was a tired, 189-acre dairy farm, worked for 30 years by Allen S. Redding. Sight unseen, Ike paid $23,000 for Redding’s house and land. He split operating costs with famed Presidential Jester George E. Allen, who owns a nearby 80-acre farm, then left for Paris to command NATO. Until he returned to become President, the farm, its topsoil worn away in supporting Redding’s 42 milch cows and heifers, was a losing proposition. Ike sold his share of the operation to Allen, who switched it to grassland cultivation and replaced the milch cows with Black Angus cattle. Allen employs retired Brigadier General Arthur Nevins, who served Ike as a World War II staff planner, to man age operations; work is done by Farmers Ivan Feaster and Dale Newman.

As President, Ike expanded his retreat to get more privacy, bought two more farms and two smaller plots that brought his property, now worth more than $250,000, to the battlefield’s western edge. Using profits from his book, Crusade in Europe, he renovated the drafty, 100-year-old, nine-room house by adding two wings. It emerged as a 14-room air-conditioned mansion, surrounded by a whitewashed fence and sentry boxes at the gate for uniformed White House guards.

Putting to Pickett. Farmer Redding’s original red brick house, now painted white, contains the dining room and a modernized version of the big, old-fashioned kitchen that delighted Mamie when she first saw it. In the new north wing living room is a white marble fireplace brought to the White House by President Pierce in 1854, junked by President Arthur in 1882 and tracked down through the Smithsonian Institution by White House aides, who secretly installed it at Gettysburg. Upstairs are six bedrooms and a studio in which Ike can paint as he looks out over the Blue Ridge. His other hobbies are served by a new putting green and a pond freshly stocked with bass.

In the new fieldstone southwing is Ike’s home workshop. A small office contains a well-thumbed set of Winston Churchill’s memoirs, a telephone directly connected to the White House, a portrait of Lincoln. Adjoining is Ike’s beam-ceilinged study, a null room with a masculine air: soft leather lounge chairs, an old Dutch oven, a pine cabinet built from discarded White House timbers. On one wall is a reproduction of a cyclorama (TIME, July 5, 1954) of the Gettysburg battlefield, showing locations of men, guns and horses on July 3, 1863, when Pickett charged toward Cemetery Ridge, just over two miles from Ike’s windowsill.

After Pioneering. Four miles northeast of Ike’s new address (Route 10, Box 218 Gettysburg) is sleepy Gettysburg (pop. 7,046) and the little Presbyterian Church which Lincoln visited after he spoke. There Ike’s presidential office, newly daubed a pale green, has been fashioned from a first-floor room at the post office, usually occupied by Town Postmaster Lawrence Oyler, who has moved into the mailroom. Ike’s Sherman Adams and staff will work on the second floor, confining presidential business to the post office and respecting Ike’s passion for privacy on the farm. Facilities for Cabinet and National Security Council meetings are at Ike’s Catoctin Mountain retreat at Camp David, Md., 20 miles away.

Adams and staff will live at the 30-year-old Gettysburg Hotel, which has spent $20,000 converting an adjoining basketball court into a bright new press headquarters for 60 reporters. In the town’s small Annie M. Warner Hospital, one room with an electric-lift bed has been set aside for Ike by his physician. Major General Howard Snyder, in the event of any emergency.

In these restful yet well-equipped surroundings near where one Nicholas Eisenhower, an ancestor of the President, established a farm in 1753, and one Captain Dwight Eisenhower commanded a World War I tank unit at Camp Colt, the President this week settled down to bringing himself and his Government back to the condition of vigor and motion in which he left for Denver long weeks ago.