THE PRESIDENCY: This Is What I Want to Do

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Down the Great West Road from London Airport, on 417 through Hounslow, Chiswick, Hammersmith and South Kensington, the dove-grey, open-top Rolls-Royce rolled into the heart of the great grey city. A small Stars and Stripes fluttered from the left fender; the license plate read “U.S.A. 1.” From hundreds of thousands of Londoners thronging outside rows of semidetached brick houses, leaning out of town mansions, tumbling out of pubs, standing six deep in Hyde Park, the shouts went up: “Glad to see you, Ike,” “Welcome,” “Good for you, Ike.” As the Rolls-Royce rolled into Grosvenor Square, from which General Eisenhower had directed his victorious World War II armies (G.I.s called the square “Eisenhower Platz”), a husky, shirtsleeved man said: “We like him because we remember him from the war—that’s why.” As President Dwight Eisenhower stood West Point straight, arms spread high and wide above him, an old lady said: “My, he looks better—after being so sick and all.”

That was London. Germany, in the previous 24 hours, had poured out its emotions, too. There the President’s car had been a Mercedes-Benz 300, and his greeting came from towns—Troisdorf, Plittersdorf, Bonn—that had been conquered by the U.S. First Army. But in old foe Germany, as in old ally Britain, the crowds made plain their confidence in Dwight Eisenhower as the free-world leader best qualified to quest for peace based upon strength and principle. Everywhere, the banners proclaimed, WE TRUST YOU and WE RELY ON YOU.

Basic Acceptance. At 68, in the seventh year of his Administration, President Eisenhower was winning one of the greatest personal ovations ever given by Europeans. In Great Britain the outpouring was in a large sense a heartwarming welcome to an old, tried friend. In West Germany the turnout was for a onetime conqueror who had become a stout ally, boosted German pride and self-respect, assured U.S. support, guaranteed that Germany’s new-found democratic freedom would sot be traded off in big-power parleys. In France this week new tumults awaited Dwight Eisenhower, not only as the liberator of 1944 but as a statesman willing to help France realize its aspirations for a return to national greatness.

For Eisenhower, the return to Europe was an occasion of deep sentiment, and more than once, newsmen thought they saw the trace of tears in his eyes. But the meaning of Ike’s trip went far beyond his personal feeling for Europe, or its feeling for him. In the very shouts and cheers lay a basic acceptance of the President’s ability to deal with Nikita Khrushchev during their coming exchange of visits. That acceptance came from the realization of Dwight Eisenhower’s achievements and stature as President of the U.S.

Such confidence in Eisenhower the President—as opposed to Ike the friend—had been strangely long in coming. Only a few weeks ago, much of the European press—and especially the British press—was still painting Dwight Eisenhower as a weak President, racked by illness, sapped by age and barely able to carry on. Indeed, long after it should have known better, part of the U.S. press had been describing Ike in similar terms. The dismal picture of President Eisenhower had its basis in the three major illnesses he suffered in three successive years, illnesses that could only detract from his energies and subtract from his performances. But the image of the sick and dispirited Eisenhower lingered on long after the reality of dramatic recovery.

How strongly—and how quickly—President Eisenhower came back from that low period is a fact of history only recently achieving general recognition.

Down to Milestone. It was in September 1955, with the U.S. economy flourishing and the nation filled with a confidence he had helped create, that Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. In June 1956, not long back on the job, he underwent surgery for ileitis. The months after that must have seemed to Ike just one damn thing after another. Overwhelmingly reelected, he had no sooner presented his program than his respected Treasury Secretary George Humphrey undercut him by publicly blurting out fears about a “hair-curling” depression; Ike failed to rebuke Humphrey, and the year’s legislative battles were fought on the Humphrey, not the Eisenhower line. At Little Rock the President had the sad duty of sending federal troops into a state capital. And in those crowded days of September-October 1957, Sputnik I cast a dark shadow across the whole range of U.S. life, from national defense to scientific education. To cap it all off, in November the President suffered a minor stroke, and there were flat suggestions that he resign from office.

Briefly, the President rallied: less than three weeks after his stroke, he flew to Paris to attend a NATO conference. In a strong State of the Union message, he mobilized the nation to meet the challenge of Sputnik. But now the recession was coming closer to home—3,400,000 unemployed in December; 4,500,000 in January; 5,100,000 in February. Wearily, Dwight Eisenhower flew to George Humphrey’s Milestone Plantation in Georgia, sat before a fire for the best part of seven days, made no pretense at performing presidential functions (TIME, March 3, 1958). It was the low point of his career.

But Milestone Plantation was also the turning point—upward. The President still had his share of troubles, including “the most hurtful, the hardest, the most heartbreaking” decision of all: asking the resignation of his staff chief, Sherman Adams, who had accepted hotel hospitality and gifts, including a vicuña coat, from finagling Boston Industrialist Bernard Goldfine. But in much more important areas, he returned from Milestone Plantation ready, as he had not been since his heart attack, to follow the creed of Theodore Roosevelt: “Here is the task. I have got to do it.”

“Send ‘Em In.” Major 1958 tasks came in the field of foreign policy. But by standing firm on the principle of preserving the peace by deterrent power, the President and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles defended the free world’s defense perimeter from Lebanon to Quemoy. Always the final decision and responsibility were Ike’s, and he measured up. “All right,” he said sharply as the U.S. Marines were poised to move into Lebanon, “we’ll send ’em in.”

At home, the President moved aggressively to push his program through the Democratic Congress, laid down three legislative “imperatives”: defense reorganization, an extension of reciprocal trade, and an adequate foreign-aid program. He got them, and he got them by fighting for them. On Pentagon reorganization he deployed his personal prestige —”It just happens that I have got a little bit more experience in military organization than anyone else on the active list”—and at the same time took care to court the House Armed Services Committee’s recalcitrant Chairman Carl Vinson, several times inviting Vinson to drop by the White House for a down-to-earth talk. On reciprocal trade and foreign aid, he received public support from Democrats Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, himself wrote to influential business, political and civic leaders around the country, enlisting their backing.

“I Am Going to Fight.” Even while fighting and winning the battles for his legislative imperatives, Ike was fighting and winning an even greater battle. The enemy: economic recession. At the first signs of recession, liberal Democrats had begun demanding that the President take the easy way out, initiate spending programs and cut taxes so as to shock the economy back to life. As the recession deepened, even some of those in high Administration councils got fidgety; at various times. Vice President Richard Nixon, Labor Secretary James Mitchell, and Interior Secretary Fred Seaton all talked in terms of tax cuts as an economic spur. The President stood firm in his belief in the basic strength of the U.S. economy; beyond recommending a stop-gap expansion of federal-state unemployment compensation and approving long-needed highway construction, he determined to ride out the recession.

It was perhaps the greatest gamble of a life filled with gambles. If he had been wrong in his estimate of the economy, if the nation had indeed fallen into the mire of depression, he would have suffered obloquy as had few Presidents before him. But he was right. In May 1958 he announced: “There is ground to believe that the worst of the recession is behind us.” So it was, and from then on the economy righted itself, until by year’s end there was good reason to talk of boom.

The year 1958, after the Milestone Plantation nadir, was a remarkably successful Eisenhower year. But in the fall congressional elections, Dwight Eisenhower suffered his most humiliating political defeat. Many of the President’s moves to preserve the peace, to push through his legislative program, and to combat the recession had been made behind the scenes, out of view of the general public. The image hung on of the weary man at the Milestone Plantation fireside, and that image had more than a little to do with the landslide that saw the Democrats winning the Congress by staggering majorities: 64-34 in the Senate, 283-153 in the House.

With such lopsided Democratic control of Congress, it seemed logical to suppose that 1959 would be a year in which Eisenhower, far from taking the offensive, would be desperately hard put to hold his own. But on the very morning after the elections, he did seize the offensive, laid out the battle line on which the key domestic issue of 1959 would be fought. He strode into his press conference, wasted few words on election post mortems, and threw out his challenge to the Democratic 86th Congress: “We have got to stop spending if we are going to keep further dilution of the dollar from taking place. I am going to fight this as hard as I know how.”

Who’s for What? Following up, Ike spent weeks in conference with Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, who had succeeded George Humphrey, and Budget Director Maurice Stans, then announced that he would present a balanced budget of $77 billion for fiscal 1960. With fiscal 1959 already moving toward a deficit of some $12 billion, Ike’s balanced-budget notion seemed a grand joke. “Unrealistic . . . bookkeeping exercise . . . wishful thinking,” scoffed Democratic leaders. But President Eisenhower held his ground, missed no chance to expound his economic philosophy in speeches and at press conferences. “When I was a boy,” the President said, “it was thought that we could live our lives on a little piece of ground in the West and the older folks could live in the same house after their days of hard work were ended. Today we have become dependent for old age security upon pensions, insurance policies, savings bonds and savings accounts. These are the people that are particularly hurt by the depreciation of the dollar.” To criticism that his stand was essentially negative, the President replied: “I could ask some of my opponents what they are for —because I know what I am for. I am for a sound dollar.”

Opening the Door. For his fight to balance the budget. President Eisenhower had a new team working with him. To help him formulate policy, there was Treasury Secretary Anderson, a strong man who, unlike Humphrey, would not consider undercutting the President’s program. To help the President sell his program to Congress, there was Major General Wilton B. (“Jerry”) Persons, a genial, Scotch-sipping and thoroughly efficient Alabaman who succeeded flinty Sherman Adams as chief of the White House staff. Where Sherman Adams had long been a congressional cuss word, Jerry Persons was a longtime congressional favorite. Where Adams had let the merest handful of visitors get past him to see the President, Persons began opening the door. “This place is becoming a madhouse,” said one White House staffer—but the result was to let the warm personality of Dwight Eisenhower take wider and greater effect on his influential visitors. Persons also began sending Republican Senators lists of all available patronage posts —and party morale took a quantum leap.

On Capitol Hill itself, there was another new team. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen succeeded California’s obstructionist William Fife Knowland as Senate Republican leader, and Knowland had been as inept a leader as was ever inflicted upon a President. In the House, Indiana’s Charles Halleck, with White House blessings, ousted Massachusetts’ aging Joe Martin as Minority leader, soon proved himself a whiplashing, gut-fighting leader who would go down the line for the Administration.

With Anderson, Persons, Halleck and Dirksen giving him incalculable aid, Ike adeptly forced his balanced budget upon the overwhelmingly Democratic 86th Congress. His sharpest instrument was his veto power; five times so far this year, the President vetoed measures he considered extravagant, and each time he made his veto stick. By mid-session, even as Senate Democratic Leader Lyndon Johnson was grumbling about “vetoes, vetoes, vetoes,” the Democratic congressional leadership threw in the towel, began working for legislation close enough to the President’s own spending recommendations to escape the veto. At that point, the Eisenhower budget battle was won.

Man of Habit. That victory could hardly have been achieved by the enfeebled sort of fellow that Ike was still pictured, in some circles, as being. In fact, allowing for the natural increment of years, he was the Dwight Eisenhower of the days before his heart attack. His weight stood at 174 Ibs., just 2 Ibs. over his best football weight at West Point. His blood pressure held at a healthy 140/80. He continued to take anticoagulant drugs, held to a low-fat diet, but felt free to wander into the kitchen of his Gettysburg farm to order “nice fresh corn” for lunch. His habits, too, were those of the same old Ike. He arose at 7 or 7:15 each morning, showered, shaved, had a small steak for breakfast, and was at his desk by 8 or 8:15. After lunch, he took an hour-long nap, then worked until 5:30, downed a Scotch highball before dinner, often returned to his work at night. Usually in bed by 10:30, he often relaxed—as he had during the days of World War II decisions—with western novels, preferably those of Red Reeder, Luke Short and Max Brand, to “shut off the mind and stop the thinking process.”

In his renewed vigor, Ike pitched zestfully into the business of politics. To pleased Congressmen came an increasing number of invitations to stop by the White House for drinks and chats, or to ride with the President in his plane. To Capitol Hill came many a warm letter, thanking legislators for help, that was signed “D.E.” Arizona’s conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, who alone in the Senate had voted against the relatively mild labor-reform bill sponsored by Massachusetts Democrat John Kennedy, was tickled pink when Ike confided: “If I’d been in the Senate, I’d have voted with you.” Last month, when labor-reform legislation was at bitter issue in the House, Ike went on radio and television to urge a strong bill. He immensely enjoyed going over the drafts of his speech, and he took special pleasure in trying to outfox the Democratic opposition: he deliberately inserted a statement that, since he was barred from seeking reelection, he could only be speaking in the public interest. Behind that statement was the idea of foreclosing to the opposition the free and equal network time required for answering political speeches. It was in this same spirit of paying attention to political niceties that President Eisenhower, on the eve of his departure last week, called New Hampshire’s Republican Senator Styles Bridges. “This is the President,” he said. “Be good to [Under Secretary of State] Doug Dillon while I am gone. I’ll appreciate your helping him all you can on foreign aid.”

Standard-Bearer. It was the announcement of Dwight Eisenhower’s European trip, to be followed by his exchange of visits with Khrushchev, that brought a tide of praise for the “New Eisenhower” —a phrase used to describe the Eisenhower who had in fact been around for quite a while. And in its every phase, the trip was a tribute to the presidential recognition Ike had been so long in winning.

In his Air Force Boeing 707 jet, accompanied by Chris Herter, the President left Maryland at 3:57 one morning last week, touched down in Newfoundland for a refueling and coffee stop, swept on across the Atlantic to land at Cologne-Bonn’s Wahn Airport at 6:30 p.m. Bonn time. Bundeswehr artillery fired a 21-gun salute; a band played The Star-Spangled Banner and Deutschlandlied. Old Chancellar Konrad Adenauer, erect and brisk, stepped forward to greet the President, hailed the U.S. as “the standard-bearer of freedom.” The President replied: “The name Adenauer has come to symbolize the determination of the German people to remain strong and free.”

Standing side by side in an open-top black Mercedes-Benz, the statesmen rolled off on the 22-mile drive into town. It took them 1 hr. 40 min. Church bells pealed, car horns honked, railroad whistles shrieked. Boys in Lederhosen, overalled factory workers, student nurses in starched blue uniforms, black-clad seminarians, tens of thousands of flag-waving schoolchildren shouted dozens of greetings, all meaning “I Like Ike.” Eastward through the summer-evening haze, the President could make out the Hotel Petersberg, opposite Bad Godesberg where Neville Chamberlain stayed while conferring with Hitler on the road to Munich, 21 years before; northward lay the black cathedral spires of the city of Cologne that the U.S. First Army had smashed into smithereens 14 years before. Placards said: THE CITY OF PORZ GREETS EISENHOWER —TROISDORF WELCOMES YOU—GERMANY TRUSTS EISENHOWER. Mixed among them were placards pleading for help in regaining Germany’s lost Oder-Neisse territories, now held by Communist Poland: MILLIONS ARE FREE, MILLIONS ARE NOT FREE. The President waved to everybody, said again and again, “Thank you, thank you. O.K. O.K.”

“He’s Decisive.” Next morning Ike and Adenauer entered into their “formal” talks; actually, they were warmly informal. The U.S. President and the West German Chancellor kept interrupting one another like old friends. Ike was hugely amused when he put on the earphones over which simultaneous translations were to be made, and got only static; West German Ambassador to U.S. Wilhelm Grewe had dripped fruit juice onto the wiring, causing a short circuit. Eisenhower more than satisfied Adenauer that he was not about to bargain away West Germany’s rights in his talks with Khrushchev, that he meant rather to convince Khrushchev of free-world strength and free-world purpose.

Later at a press conference, the President was asked about a summit conference after Khrushchev’s visit to Washington. The President said: “Any summit meeting would be a grave mistake unless there was confidence among all of us that real progress of some kind could be achieved.” German reporters, long fed on Washington punditry about the “sick” Ike, were impressed by the President’s mastery of his topics. “He’s firm,” said one. Another reporter said: “He’s decisive.”

Into the Highlands. That evening the President left Bonn, sent a farewell message over his jet’s radio to Konrad Adenauer: DEAR FRIEND—I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW GRATEFUL I AM. An hour and a half later, he was at London Airport, shaking hands with Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. In an off-the-cuff arrival speech that brought murmurs of appreciation from the crowd, the President said: “I must say my deepest reaction and sentiment at this moment is that of extraordinary pleasure and true enjoyment for being back once again in this land which I have learned so much to love.” And as he rode into town with Macmillan, the President saw about him a London that would not change—jodhpur-clad girls riding in Rotten Row; jocular types with pints of bitter outside the Fox and Hound, the Three Kings, the Bunch of Grapes; the predictable athlete pumping along main roads in Kensington, eyes down, elbows high, oblivious to the motorcade.

Next day the President’s trip took him to Aberdeen’s Dyce Airport, thence to Balmoral Castle, where Queen Elizabeth II was waiting. It was a drizzly day. The fragrance was on the heather. Fat Black Angus cattle grazed on the rolling hills. Trout-filled streams gurgled cheerfully. U.S. reporters rolling out into the Highlands with the President and Prince Philip, who had met him, were surprised that so few Scotsmen wore kilts. But when they got to the gates of royal Balmoral, the Americans got the full treatment—bagpipes howling fiendishly, Royal Highland Fusiliers crashing to attention:

“Sir, the guard of honor is formed up and ready for your inspection. Sir.” A murmur was running through the crowd: “Oooooooh, the Queen.” There stood Elizabeth, pregnant and officially out of sight, yet slim and pretty in a baby blue, three-button suit and a small white straw hat. The royal family whisked the President off to the great castle, then to a picnic tea beside shining Loch Muick. When Elizabeth whispered something in the President’s ear, he said: “Oh, wonderful. Wonderful.”

“I’ll Do Anything . . .” Up early next morning, Ike had a leisurely breakfast in his three-room suite on Balmoral’s ground floor, met the royal family in a drawing room for a final chat, then with Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, walked out of the castle onto the closely cropped lawn. As a group of reporters and photographers (admitted to the grounds under a pool arrangement) approached, Ike put his hand on Princess Anne’s blonde head. Asked he: “Are you going to learn to cook?” The Queen answered for her daughter: “I’ll send you some samples.”

Laughed the President of the U.S.: “If you don’t I’ll be bombarding you with letters.” Moments later, after fond farewells, the President’s car drove slowly from Balmoral’s grounds.

His next stop was Chequers, in the green vales of Buckinghamshire just 40 miles northwest of London, country home of British Prime Ministers since 1917. Opened briefly last week to newsmen for the first time, Chequers, as Harold Macmillan said, is “a good place to work and a good place to rest.” Dwight Eisenhower and Harold Macmillan did both, at one point using Presidential Physician Howard Snyder as their range pole for golf shots on Chequers’ broad lawns, at other times going behind closed doors for serious talks.

As with Konrad Adenauer, it was the President’s purpose to convince Harold Macmillan that he was not going to enter into two-way talks with Nikita Khrushchev that would shut U.S. allies off from taking part in whatever decision making might eventually result. “Harold,” said the President, “I want you to know that I mean it when I say I have no intention of ‘negotiating’ with Khrushchev.” Macmillan replied that his government understood this quite well and had perfect confidence in Ike.

That purpose had been explained by Dwight Eisenhower before he embarked on his journey. Said he to close friends: “I’ll do anything to achieve peace within honorable means. I’ll travel anywhere. I’ll talk to anyone. This is what I want to do.” And it is just what he was doing, backed by the strength of his nation and his own achievements as President.