Six Crises (30 page)

After Len Hall left my office, I did some intense soul-searching. Would I hurt or help the party and the course of the Eisenhower Administration by being on the ticket? I telephoned the White House the next morning and went to see the President that afternoon. I told him I would be honored to continue as his Vice President and that the only reason I had waited so long in saying so was that I did not want to force my way onto the ticket against his wishes. The President said he was delighted with my decision. He called in Jim Hagerty and arranged for an announcement of the decision to be made from the White House that afternoon.

And so ended the personal crisis involved in my decision to be a candidate for Vice President in 1956. In retrospect, it was a minor crisis, for the outcome really never was in doubt. Yet it was part of the much more serious heart attack crisis for me—the aftermath when my guard was down. I would otherwise not have been as sensitive about Eisenhower's attitude toward my candidacy and would have resolved the situation myself much sooner. The significance, at least for me, once again was that the most dangerous period of a crisis is not the preparation or the battle itself, but the aftermath when one's normal reaction, after having mobilized all one's emotions and physical resources to fight the battle, is to relax. If you cannot take the time off to let your system relax and recharge normally, then you must be alert to the fact that your temper will be short and your judgment less acute than normally. During the trying months when the President had lain ill, I had expended my energies not only in a heavier work schedule
but in treading a tightrope of political diplomacy. Then, before I could recover my equilibrium, I found myself on political tenterhooks and I reacted with less than my best judgment.

As if to prove the fickleness of political life in Washington, there was an aftermath to this crisis. Harold Stassen, the President's adviser on disarmament, came out with an open campaign to “dump Nixon.” His maneuver was a comedy of errors too long to detail here, but it proved a nagging irritant right up to August 22, when the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket was renominated by the Republican National Convention in San Francisco.

Stassen, who had come to see me privately while Eisenhower lay ill in Denver to pledge me his support and efforts in winning the
presidential
nomination, went to Eisenhower on July 20 to report that according to a private poll he had had taken, I would detract from the ticket because I was a controversial figure—while someone else, like Christian Herter, then Governor of Massachusetts, would not. The President noncommittally replied, as he had said before, that he would not dictate the choice to the Convention. Stassen went ahead with his one-man campaign to substitute Herter for Nixon as the Republican candidate for Vice President. From this fracas, I could afford to remain aloof. Although some wishful thinkers lent erstwhile support to it for a brief time, it got nowhere. The upshot was that Chris Herter, who was embarrassed by the whole affair, placed my name in nomination—and Harold Stassen seconded it.

•  •  •

The President's ileitis attack on June 8, 1956, was divulged to me by telephone, once again with Jim Hagerty the bearer of bad news. But what stands out in my mind today is that the surgery focused the President's attention on the legal problems of the disability of a Chief Executive. It demonstrated that generally, where the crisis of physical illness is involved, fighting to get back in action is better for the patient than using the illness as an excuse for leaving the battle to others.

President Eisenhower was stricken late on the night of the seventh with severe stomach cramps, after attending a dinner of the White House Photographers Association. Mrs. Eisenhower called Dr. Snyder, who arrived at 1:15
A.M.
and stayed through the night. The following afternoon the President was taken on a stretcher to Walter Reed Hospital. His case was diagnosed as ileitis, an obstruction in the lower intestines, an old complaint. But when it did not respond to medication through that day and that night, a team of doctors headed by Major General Leonard Heaton, commanding officer of Walter Reed Hospital,
decided on immediate surgery. The President was on the operating table for two hours, from 2:30 to 4:35
A.M.
, while the nation slept.

The President realized the significance to the nation of that operation. On several occasions afterwards, he pointed out to me that for the two hours he was under anesthesia the country was without a Chief Executive, the armed forces without a Commander-in-Chief. In the event of a national emergency during those two hours, who would have had the undisputed authority to act for a completely disabled President?

The President recovered quickly and completely from the operation. Within a few days he began limited activity, which increased as the days stretched into weeks. Although his doctors told him the operation increased his life expectancy, I believe the President became more aware that age was creeping up on him, increasing the possibility of illness and a need to do something about it. He told some of those around him that if ever illness struck again and he felt he could not physically carry on the burdens of his office, he would resign.

His reaction to the ileitis was far different from that of the heart attack. The ileitis was not half as serious, but he suffered more pain over a longer period of time. He looked far worse than he had in 1955. He hobbled about, bent over, during his post-operation convalescence, but he was determined to carry out the responsibilities of his job as he saw them. His illness presented a perfectly valid reason for his not attending a meeting of American presidents in Panama, designed to counteract the increasing Communist activity in South America, but he saw an even better reason for going himself. His personal attendance, following his illness, would demonstrate to our Latin and South American friends the President's and the United States' concern and interest in inter-American affairs far better than if there had been no ileitis attack. For him not to go, on the other hand, would inevitably have caused at least some sentiment that Latin American affairs were not important enough for the President to discommode himself.

There was a sharp disagreement among the President's advisers and friends about the wisdom of his going on the trip so soon after his operation. Some thought it was an unnecessary strain and risk for him from a physical standpoint. But Dr. Snyder, who always saw a close relation between the President's physical condition and his mental outlook, insisted that the trip would do more good than harm. And the President followed his advice.

He sent a message to President Ricardo Manuel Arias Espinosa of Panama saying he would be happy to go if the other presidents would
agree to postpone the meeting until his doctors allowed him to travel. The doctors said full recovery would take four to six weeks, and six weeks to the day, the President flew to Panama. His activities there were extraordinary, considering the fact that he was still recovering from major surgery. He left Washington at five minutes past midnight, Saturday, July 21, arrived in Panama City at 8
A.M.
, went directly to a meeting of eighteen presidents at the home of President Arias, then stood bareheaded at attention in a driving rainstorm at a wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of José Antonio Remón, the past President of Panama who had been assassinated a year before. Throughout the day he made some six automobile tours, standing in an open car and waving to enthusiastic crowds. That night he held four private conferences with Latin American presidents and then attended an evening affair at the Presidential Palace. On Sunday, he signed the Declaration of Panama, pledging all American nations to the principles of freedom and liberty, delivered his first speech since his illness, and then listened to other speakers for almost three hours. The next day, Monday, he held ten separate private talks with other presidents, each lasting about thirty minutes, took a sixty-eight-minute tour of the Canal Zone (again in a drenching rain) and then flew back to Washington—all, six weeks after major surgery!

This was a feat which would make any physician shudder, I am sure, but Dr. Snyder, who accompanied the President, was always an exponent of the President doing more instead of less after each illness. And the proof was in the result. When I met the President at the airport on his return to Washington, I saw a remarkably changed man. He had left looking like an invalid—sick, tired, and in pain—but he returned more the old leader, full of bounce and ready to plunge into work. The trip, despite all of its strain upon his weakened body, renewed his physical vigor as well as his mental well-being. Seeing him that day and observing the terrific pace of his work in the days which followed renewed for me my lifelong conviction that a man should give battle to his physical ailments, fight to stay out of the sickbed, and, except where his doctor otherwise prescribes, should learn to live with and be stimulated by tension, rather than numbing his spirit with tranquilizers. Eisenhower demonstrated a trait that I believe all great leaders have in common: they thrive on challenge; they are at their best when the going is hardest. When life is routine, they become bored; when they have no challenge, they tend to wither and die or to go to seed. While such men might think and often exclaim how nice it would be if they could play golf every
day and take long vacations whenever they wished, in actual fact they need challenges, problems, and hard work to sustain the will to live.

More than anything else, the ileitis attack irritated President Eisenhower. For a man who loved to eat, he was forced to abide by a diet even more bland than the heart attack had required. But while it did cause him considerable pain and discomfort, it did not present any problems for the administration of the government. There never was any question of his ability to carry out the functions of the President. But his third serious illness in office did present a major crisis, not so much for me but for him and the nation—a greater crisis, in a way, than even that of the heart attack.

•  •  •

Seventeen months after the ileitis operation—on November 25, 1957—Sherman Adams called my office in the Senate Office Building late one afternoon. He reached Rose Mary Woods, my secretary, on the direct White House line.

“Is Dick around?” he asked.

“Yes, would you like to speak to him?”

“No, I just need to be sure where he is,” Adams replied. “I may need him in a minute or two.”

Rose told me of the call and remarked that he sounded as though something serious was at hand. Ten or fifteen minutes later, his call came through. Adams, who considered “hello” and “good-by” a waste of time, was, as usual, laconic:

“Dick, could you come down to the White House right away?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I'll be right down.”

Ten minutes later I was in Adams' office in the West Wing of the White House. Speaking, as usual, without visible emotion, he related what at first seemed like a matter-of-fact chronology of what had happened: the President had stood for some time in a raw whipping wind at Washington National Airport that morning to greet King Mohammed V of Morocco, who arrived for a state visit. Upon his return to the White House, the President said he felt a chill coming on, and Dr. Snyder had put him to bed with an extra blanket and hot-water bottle. But later he had gotten up and gone to his office and begun dictating to his secretary, Ann Whitman. Then, suddenly, his words became jumbled and made no sense. Mrs. Whitman telephoned Dr. Snyder and urged the President to go back to bed. He refused. Then he tried to tell her something but could not express himself. Finally, he did go back up to his living quarters in the White House and Dr. Snyder again put him to bed.

Later, when Adams had gone up to discuss that night's scheduled state dinner for Mohammed V with Mrs. Eisenhower, the President had come out in his pajamas, looking for his dinner clothes. He insisted that he intended to go to the dinner. Both Adams and Dr. Snyder tried to convince him not to go. The President, then very distraught, declared: “If I cannot attend to my duties, I am simply going to give up this job. Now that is all there is to it.” With that, he turned and stalked out of the room.

Adams told me all this in even greater detail, going over every important point in the story. Finally I asked him, “How serious is his condition?”

“We'll know more in the morning,” he answered. And then, speaking with all the emotion he had bottled up within him, he said, “This is a terribly, terribly difficult thing to handle. You may be President in the next twenty-four hours.”

He said that Dr. Snyder thought the President had suffered a stroke, and that Dr. Heaton and a neurologist had been called to the White House. He expressed his concern for Mrs. Eisenhower, who was deeply disturbed over the President's health.

Two immediate problems faced us: what to tell the press and what to do about the state dinner for the King of Morocco that night. The problems were intertwined, because the state dinner was set for eight and some explanation would have to be made for the President's absence. We decided first that we should announce only that the President had suffered a chill and that we should withhold any announcement of the stroke until we were certain that Dr. Snyder's original diagnosis was correct.

Then we weighed the factors involved in canceling the dinner against my substituting as host, and whether or not we should ask Mrs. Eisenhower to attend, in view of her distress. Realizing that to cancel the dinner and turn guests away at the door of the White House would alarm the press and therefore the nation, we decided the dinner must be held on schedule. We left the decision on Mrs. Eisenhower's attendance to her and she responded to what she saw as her duty as First Lady. It was perhaps the most difficult assignment she ever undertook in the White House.

At 6:20, a White House bulletin was issued stating that the President had suffered a chill, had taken to bed, and would be unable to attend the dinner or deliver a nationwide television speech scheduled for the following night in Cleveland. Just before I left the White House to change into white-tie and tails, the doctors sent down their diagnosis,
which confirmed Dr. Snyder's opinion: the President had suffered an occlusion of a small branch of the middle cerebral artery on the left side, probably caused by a small blood clot or a vascular spasm. It was a stroke.