Six Crises (24 page)

“How's his tummy?” he asked with a smile. “Ike always used to have trouble with his tummy.”

I had practically forgotten the indigestion story and was checking the baseball averages in the sports section when the phone rang. I walked into the hall and picked up the receiver. “Dick,” said a familiar voice, “this is Jim Hagerty—the President has had a coronary.”

It is impossible to describe how I felt when I heard these words. The news was so unexpected, the shock so great that I could think of nothing to say for several seconds. The pause was so long that Hagerty thought we had been disconnected.

I slowly began to recover my equilibrium. “Are they sure? There are many times when people have indigestion and it is erroneously diagnosed as a heart attack. Doctors can make mistakes. I don't think we should announce it as a heart attack until we are absolutely sure,” I told him.

“No,” he replied slowly, “we are absolutely sure.”

He went on to tell me that the press would be informed of the President's heart attack in about half an hour. His final words were, “Let me know where you can be reached at all times.”

Later I discovered that Hagerty, who was in Washington at the time, had telephoned the news to me just after he had received word from his assistant, Murray Snyder, who was with the President in Denver.

I went back into the living room and sat down again. For fully ten minutes I sat alone in the room, and to this day I cannot remember the thoughts that flowed through my mind. The only accurate description is that I probably was in a momentary state of shock.

I had been completely unprepared for this turn of events. During the three years I had been Vice President, there had never been any reason to worry about the President's health. He had waged a vigorous campaign in 1952, and since his inauguration, despite newspaper criticism of his vacations and his golf, he had maintained a strict schedule of early rising and hard work at his desk. He was, in fact, a superb specimen of a man who believed in keeping himself physically fit. Golf was part of the regimen prescribed by his doctor as the best means of relieving the tremendous tension and strain of the presidency.

Yet now, he was the first of our thirty-four Presidents to have suffered a heart attack during his term of office. As I thought of this I realized what a tremendous responsibility had descended upon me. It was like a great physical weight holding me down in the chair. What I thought of, and what concerned me, was not the awesome problems I would have if I should become President, but how I could best handle my immediate responsibility as a Vice President who was now, more than any of his thirty-five predecessors, “one heartbeat from the presidency.”

With the President of the United States gravely ill, the eyes of the nation and of the world would be focused upon me and what I did. Every word, every action of mine would be more important now than anything I had ever said or done before because of their effect upon the people of the United States, our allies, and our potential enemies. How I reacted to this crisis was infinitely more important to the nation and the world than the way I handled the Hiss case or my fight to stay on the ticket in 1952.

Because of my awareness of this responsibility, my first conscious decision at the time was that I should check everything I said and did in the next critical few hours with someone whose judgment I respected. My thoughts turned to Bill Rogers, who was then Acting Attorney General while Herbert Brownell was vacationing in southern Spain. I thought of Rogers, not because he was the ranking legal officer in the United States, but because he was a friend who had proved during the fund crisis that he was a cool man under pressure, had excellent judgment, a good sense of press relations, and was one to whom I could speak with complete freedom without any concern that what I might say would find its way into the Washington gossip mill.

I dialed his number and when he answered the phone I said, without any preliminary comment, “I wonder if you could come over.”

“Yes, Dick, I'll be right over,” he answered. I knew from the tone of his voice that he had the news; there was no need to spell it out.

As I hung up the receiver, I suddenly realized that Pat was unaware of what had happened and I went upstairs and told her the news. I then telephoned my secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who was still at the wedding reception, and asked her to go to her apartment so that she could handle the incoming telephone calls on an extension of my home phone located there. Pat in the meantime had tried to break the news, as quietly as possible, to the children. But just as I finished the call to Rose, Tricia, who was then nine years old, came running down the stairs crying.

“The President isn't going to die, is he, Daddy?” she asked.

“No,” I tried to reassure her, “he's going to be all right.”

Just then the doorbell rang. I asked her to look through the blind to see who it was because I knew newspapermen might be arriving on the scene at any moment.

“It's Mr. Rogers,” she called back to me.

I went to the door and let Bill in. Before we sat down to talk we pulled the shades on the large picture windows which faced the street. We were just in time. Within minutes after Bill arrived, reporters and photographers were ringing the doorbell. Pat, with perfect poise developed over many years of handling similar situations, told them that I was not at home, that she did not know when to expect me, and while they were welcome to wait outside until I returned, they might be better advised to check with my office for further information. All of them, of course, decided to wait outside until I returned.

This was the first problem that Bill and I discussed. I knew the reporters had their job to do. But I believed that this was one of those rare occasions in which the public interest demanded no statement whatever be made to the press.

There were several reasons for this conclusion. Most important, I did not have the information at hand with which to answer the inevitable questions the reporters would ask. I knew nothing more about the President's condition than they did. In addition, I realized that my own position as Vice President had become extremely delicate; my every move during this period had to be made with caution, for even the slightest misstep could be interpreted as an attempt to assume power. I knew from my study of history how sensitive the members of the President's family, his staff, and for that matter the people throughout the nation, could be when the Chief Executive was gravely ill and his Vice President—or anyone else—did or said anything that smacked of exceeding his own authority.

I realized, too, that my position was even more difficult than that of some of my predecessors who had faced similar circumstances. Hundreds of thousands of words had been written in 1952 about my youth as a vice presidential nominee, questioning my ability to assume the duties and responsibilities of the presidency if required to do so. I had long been the whipping boy for those who chose not to direct their political attacks against Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most popular President in recent history. The nation's attention would be focused on the sickbed in Denver, but many eyes would be watching to see whether I became brash or timid in meeting the emergency. My job was to be neither.

As Bill and I discussed these problems we agreed that it was vitally important that I not only have no press conference that evening, but that I avoid being photographed if possible. Even a camera can misquote or misinterpret a man. An unconscious, unintentional upturning of the lips can appear in a picture as a smile at so grave a moment. On the other hand, too serious an expression could create an impression of fear and concern which would also be most unfortunate.

By this time the press corps outside the house had grown to the proportions of a street-corner political rally. Television cameras had been set up on the sidewalk. Floodlights were trained on the front of the house in the expectation that I might appear. I decided that the only thing I could do was to make myself literally unavailable for comment for the next few hours. I knew it would be impossible to be assured privacy in a hotel. Consequently, Bill and I decided to go to his house, which was well off the main road in Bethesda, Maryland.

Our next problem was getting there. I could not use my car because I would have to walk through the phalanx of reporters to open the garage. Bill had come by taxi. We finally telephoned his wife and asked her to come after us and to park Bill's car on the side street away from the front of the house. Just as she arrived, about fifteen minutes later, we had a bit of luck. Tricia had gone out the front door for a closer look at the TV cameras and had unintentionally drawn the attention of most of the reporters and photographers to herself. Bill and I went out the back door and walked quickly across my neighbor's yard to where Mrs. Rogers was parked in his Pontiac convertible, about a hundred yards down the street from our house.

Fifteen minutes later we were in the sanctuary of Bill Rogers' home, free from all unnecessary interruptions, while the press continued to maintain its vigil outside my house.

We kept in touch with the situation in Denver and Washington through the White House switchboard, making and receiving calls on the only downstairs telephone in the Rogers' home, a wall-type instrument in his kitchen which proved to be particularly uncomfortable for the amount of telephoning we had to do during the night.

I first called Denver to get the latest news on the President's condition. We learned that his personal physician, Major General Howard Snyder, had diagnosed a “mild” coronary thrombosis and that the President was resting comfortably under an oxygen tent in Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. The reports indicated that his chances of recovery were good, but that it was too early to tell for sure. We learned piece-meal
that night what had happened that day in Denver, but it was not until some time later that the story of the President's heart attack became fully known. The events and particularly Dr. Snyder's actions are worth reflecting upon.

•  •  •

Although on vacation, the President had put in one of his typically strenuous and full days. He worked hard and he played hard, too. He was that type of man, and nothing could change him—even after he had recovered from the heart attack. That morning, away on a fishing trip with friends 8600 feet up in the Rockies, he had arisen at 5:00, cooked breakfast for his companions, and then had gone by car eighty-two miles back to Denver, where he put in over two hours of concentrated paperwork at the Summer White House at Lowry Air Force Base.

Then he moved on to the Cherry Hills Country Club, where he played twenty-seven holes of golf. At lunch, after the eighteenth hole, he ate a hamburger with large slices of raw onion on the side (which later was blamed for his “indigestion”). Then he played out the final nine holes, conferred with Secretary of State Dulles by phone, and returned to the Doud home, where he plunged into three hours of work on a painting of a Rocky Mountain landscape. He ate a roast-lamb dinner with Mrs. Eisenhower, Mrs. Doud, and Mr. and Mrs. George E. Allen. Later, after the Allens had left, he complained to Mrs. Eisenhower of indigestion, but not seriously. He went to bed at about ten. Shortly after 2:30 Saturday morning, he awoke with a dull pain in his stomach and chest. Uncomfortable and unable to sleep, he got out of bed, turned on the light, and walked about his room, hoping the pain would pass. Mrs. Eisenhower heard him from the adjoining room and came in to find out what was wrong. When he complained of indigestion she gave him a dose of milk of magnesia and a glass of water, his usual medicine for an upset stomach. He went back to bed, and a few minutes later the full brunt of pain seared across his chest. He called out to Mrs. Eisenhower and told her she had better get the doctor. She telephoned Major General Snyder, his personal physician and a friend of many years. Dr. Snyder arrived a few minutes after 3
A.M.
and he quickly realized that the President of the United States, just twenty days short of his sixty-fifth birthday, had been stricken with a heart attack, or, in medical terms, an acute coronary thrombosis—a blood clot in an artery of the heart.

The President, stretched out on his back in bed, was in great pain.
When I visited him in the hospital two weeks later he told me, “I got this pain in the middle of the night—boy, it sure hurt—I never told Mamie how much it hurt.”

Dr. Snyder administered immediate emergency treatment to counteract the blood clot before it was too late. He gave the President three injections: one to dilate the arteries in the heart, another to increase the liquidity of his blood to prevent clotting, and morphine to ease the pain and shock. This undoubtedly is standard medical procedure in such cases, but then Dr. Snyder faced the crisis of his career. There he was alone, the only person in the world who knew that the heart of the President had been damaged. It was somewhat after three in the morning in Denver, after six in the nation's capital. Should he call for help, summon the heart specialists of the nation, and thus spread the word of the President's bout with death around the world? That would be the easy, routine way—sharing the responsibility. But it would entail the risk of shocking Mrs. Eisenhower and her seventy-seven-year-old mother, and the excitement could even endanger the President's chances for recovery.

Deciding that complete, undisturbed rest was the best treatment for a coronary, Dr. Snyder chose to let the world wait while he did the best he could by himself. He gave the President a second injection of morphine at 3:45
A.M.
to ease the pain. At 4:30
A.M.
the President fell asleep. Dr. Snyder sat by the bedside and waited.

At 7
A.M.
, in line with his decision, he telephoned the press room of the Summer White House and left word for Assistant Press Secretary Snyder that the President had indigestion and would not keep his morning appointments. Thus the doctor allayed the suspicions of the press. The world was given the unexciting news that the President had indigestion. For twelve hours the truth was kept from the world for the President's benefit and at the risk of a career and reputation to his doctor. It was not until President Eisenhower awoke from his drugged sleep at 12:30
P.M.
that Dr. Snyder called Fitzsimmons Army Hospital to have an electrocardiograph brought to the Doud home. It was not until 2
P.M.
that Dr. Snyder's original diagnosis had been confirmed by an electrocardiogram which showed a lesion on the anterior wall of the heart. Only after the President had been moved to Fitzsimmons Hospital did Dr. Snyder telephone the shocking news to Murray Snyder.