Six Crises (27 page)

Foster Dulles must have been aware of the great tension under which I had been working. The next morning, Friday, I presided over the meeting of the Cabinet. The Cabinet meeting went almost exactly like that of the National Security Council. I presided from my own chair opposite the empty seat of the President. The meeting was opened with a prayer for the recovery of the President, and I again took care to preside rather than to conduct the meeting. At the end of the two-and-a-half-hour session, Foster Dulles gave my morale a much needed boost when he said, “Mr. Vice President, I realize that you have been under a very heavy burden during these past few days, and I know I express the opinion of everybody here that you have conducted yourself superbly. And I want you to know we are proud to be on this team and proud to be serving in this Cabinet under your leadership.”

As I had expected from the very first, my road continued to be straight and narrow. I had to move ahead, realizing that any misstep could bring disaster. While some Cabinet members feared I was doing too much, others told me I was not doing enough. Typical of the latter attitude was a wire I received from Styles Bridges, the senior Senator from New Hampshire: “You are the constitutional second-in-command and you ought to assume the leadership. Don't let the White House clique take command.”

In Washington, there has always been a sort of continuous rating system, an intangible popularity poll, which fluctuates with the supposed importance and influence of each member of the government. In the Executive branch, the measure usually goes according to who has the ear of the President. In the absence of President Eisenhower, this rating system shifted gears in quest of someone who could be considered to be filling the huge gap left by the President's forced absence.

This even affected the Washington press corps. Some reporters who had known me since I had come to the Capital as a freshman Congressman
changed their form of address from “Dick” to “Mr. Vice President.”

The most noticeable effect was, of course, on the large group of sundry politicians, businessmen, and lobbyists who can always be counted on to “play the winner.” Men who had hardly cloaked their antipathy before, now paid me courtesy calls or sought to give me sagacious advice about my brilliant future. A bandwagon of sorts had started the very first week, but I knew how fickle that sort of support could be. I was not surprised to note that as President Eisenhower's health improved, these new camp followers drifted off to different roads.

In Denver, the President regained his strength day by day. After a week in the hospital, he put his signature on two documents—primarily to reassure the nation of his recovery. A few days later he wrote me a letter, made public to put his stamp of approval on my activities: “Dear Dick, I hope you will continue to have meetings of the National Security Council and of the Cabinet, over which you will preside in accordance with the procedures which you have followed at my request in the past during my absence from Washington.”

Pat and I were able to keep track of the pace of the President's recovery by the diminishing number of reporters who maintained a twenty-four-hour vigil at our home. The first two or three nights after the attack, when his condition was touch and go, this group numbered ten. As the reports got better during the week, one by one they drifted away to other assignments until ten days later only Bill Blair of the New York
Times
was on hand to greet me when I left my home for the office. He stayed on duty for three more days, and since he was the only one, I was able to give him a ride to the Capitol each morning.

But it was not until two weeks after the heart attack that the tension in Washington was eased. Although it was hardly mentioned, I am certain that many of us realized that our team-government would be inadequate to handle an international crisis, such as a brush-fire war or an internal uprising in a friendly nation or a financial crisis of an ally. The ever-present possibility of an attack on the United States was always hanging over us. Would the President be well enough to make a decision? If not, who had the authority to push the button? This two-week period was critical in the health of a heart patient, his doctors said. It was the period in which a recurrence or “complications” were most likely, and everyone in Washington was aware of
the possibility. When that two-week period ended and the scar tissue in the President's heart had formed—for we had all started our course in becoming lay heart specialists—only then did we feel that the crisis had ended. Eisenhower would be well enough to handle the powers and duties which were vested by the Constitution in him alone.

•  •  •

I flew to Denver to see him for the first time since his attack with Dr. White and the President's son, John, on October 8, exactly two weeks after the heart attack; and Dr. White, an articulate and sophisticated physician, lectured me vigorously on his favorite theme: heart patients should not be treated as invalids. Once their recovery is complete, they should resume their previous normal activities. For President Eisenhower this would mean a renewal of his strenuous life, hard work, and plenty of exercise. One of the doctor's heart patients, I remember his telling me, was in his eighties and still played golf regularly.

I was the first of the visitors permitted to see the President after the “critical period.” The Cabinet members followed according to rank. It was obvious that in Denver they were as mindful of protocol as I had been in Washington.

President Eisenhower looked startlingly thin and pale, but seemed in good spirits. His mind was agile and he roamed over various subjects, including his heart attack and problems of government. I told him he needn't rush to get back to his office, that the team was carrying on his policies without “one iota of jealousy” among us.

The President walked out of Fitzsimmons Army Hospital on Veterans Day, November 11, delivered a genial thank you and good-by to the people of Denver, and flew home to Washington, where he received a tumultuous welcome. The nation watched on television. He could have left the hospital a month earlier, his doctors said, but he preferred to walk out of the hospital rather than be carried out a month sooner.

The official family's welcome-home was given at a meeting of the National Security Council on November 21 and at a Cabinet meeting the next day at the presidential retreat at Camp David, high in the Maryland mountains some twenty-five miles from the President's Gettysburg farm, where he was continuing his recuperation. Fourteen of us were flown there from Washington in three separate helicopters after the Secret Service vetoed the idea of so many government officials flying in one craft.

The two days with the President at Camp David, so close to Thanksgiving 1955, passed quickly and pleasantly in an aura of warmth and good feelings among the “team” with the boss back at work again. At the Cabinet meeting he thanked us all for our “perfect” performance during his absence. But to my knowledge, he did not thank anyone personally. He felt that all of us, no matter how hard we worked, were merely doing our duty, what was expected of us under the circumstances.

This was characteristic of Eisenhower. Only when he believed someone had gone beyond what the job called for did he express personal appreciation to that individual. I remember him thanking me personally for representing him in defending the Administration's labor policy before a cold and hostile A.F.L. Convention in St. Louis in 1953, later after I campaigned cross-country in the congressional elections of 1954, and again after Secretary James Mitchell and I were successful in settling the steel strike in 1959. He had also spoken or written to me personally of his appreciation after each of my trips abroad. But after this most difficult assignment of all—treading the tightrope during his convalescence from the heart attack—there was no personal thank you. Nor was one needed or expected. After all, we both recognized that I had only done what a Vice President should do when the President is ill.

•  •  •

The personal crisis for Dwight D. Eisenhower was not the heart attack per se, because he had no control over that, but the decision of whether or not, after such a brush with death, to run for re-election in 1956. The basic considerations which went into this decision were the same before and after September 1955—with the exception of the heart attack—and I believe it was the heart attack itself which, more than anything else, helped convince him to become a candidate for re-election.

Eisenhower frequently had told his associates that he wanted to be a one-term President. He thought that in four years he could substitute his concept of a moderate federal government, a free economy, and a balanced budget for what he considered the Democratic Party's drift toward a welfare state. He wanted to build up the Republican Party into a moderate, responsible majority party, and then turn over the reins to a younger man. He intended to put this concept of a one-term President into his first inaugural address, but at the last minute he was talked out of that. However, this did not stop him from discussing the idea from time to time.

Despite his remarkable ability to present a public image of unfailing good cheer and optimism, Eisenhower in private can be a man of rapidly changing moods. He would go into a momentary tailspin of frustration, for instance, when a Republican he admired voted against one of his projects in Congress. The Eisenhower legislative record was as good as, if not better than, that of any President. But that made little difference to him. His temperament was so volatile that those who knew him well often checked with Tom Stephens, his Appointments Secretary, on how the boss was feeling before they went in to see him. Tom, who knew him better than most, might say, “You'd better not see him on that today; he's wearing his brown suit,” for Tom always insisted the President had a certain brown suit and one particular sports jacket he would wear when in a “Monday mood.”

He was not in office much more than a year when he began to tell associates from time to time of his intention to retire at the end of his first term. Usually these outbursts were recognized as temporary sentiments of the moment, reflecting a recent setback of one kind or another. But as 1956 approached, they were regarded more and more seriously.

When he moved his office to Denver, August 14, 1955, the political pressures on the President to run again in 1956 had reached a crescendo. The Republican National Convention was just a year off. The respite from urgent government business at Denver was seen as a time when the President could reach the all-important political decision on a second term. At Denver, before the heart attack, Eisenhower seemed particularly testy, easily irritated, and on edge. He kept putting off those who wanted to talk politics with the exclamation that he was in Denver to fish and play golf.

Two weeks before the heart attack, following a meeting of Republican State Chairmen, Len Hall visited Eisenhower in Denver to press upon him the party's and the nation's need for him to run for re-election. The President listened and paced the floor, and told the party Chairman what he had told others: “What more do they want from me? . . . I've given all of my adult life to the country. . . . What more must I do? . . .” He then went on to list five or six names, mine included, of men he said were younger than he and just as able to carry on the Eisenhower mode of government.

Hall left that meeting discouraged, but not convinced that the chances of Eisenhower's running were hopeless. Hagerty, Adams, myself, and others in the Administration had heard the President speak of retirement, but we knew that the nature of the office always leaves
important unfinished business at the end of a President's term of office, and that few real leaders can turn their backs on such a challenge. We knew that Eisenhower was not a quitter—that he liked to finish a job which he had started. Our arguments to him stressed that he was the best if not the only man who could accomplish the undone work which lay ahead.

If I had bet at that time, I would have wagered that he would seek a second term. Incidentally, my judgment of what Eisenhower would do was not based on any theory that a man in power loves power for its own sake. The office of President of the United States carries an aura of responsibility which transcends the personal power the office holds. It demands a dedication and devotion which is greater than any personal consideration of the man who occupies the office. No leader of men who has occupied that office and devoted his being to it can turn away when his work is still incomplete. To a lesser extent this holds true for leaders in other walks of life, who carry on despite great financial and physical problems.

After the heart attack, of course, there was a decided change in the odds on the question of the second term. The medical opinion was given by Dr. Paul Dudley White: “Many things are possible that may not seem advisable. It is up to him to make the decision. He may or may not have complete recovery. . . . If I were in his shoes, I wouldn't want to run again, having seen the strain.” Later, he added: “If the President has a good recovery as he seems to be establishing, and if he desires to continue his career, which would of course be to the benefit of this country and the world at large, I would have no objections whatever to his running again. But that remains for the future to decide.”

The Washington press corps was polled and 88 per cent said Eisenhower would not run. This fairly reflected the thinking in Washington at the time, and it set off the expected wave of political activity, despite all my efforts to avoid a scramble for the Republican nomination. On the very same day that the President's heart attack was reported, this typical story appeared on the front page of the New York
Times:
“Vice President Richard M. Nixon today fell heir to one of the greatest responsibilities and political opportunities ever presented to so young a man in the history of the Republic. The general feeling here (Washington) was that the 42-year-old Californian was in a better position than anyone else to get the Republican nomination, if, as seems almost certain, the stricken President retires at the end of his first term.”