Six Crises (31 page)

At the formal White House dinner that night, a very troubled First Lady greeted her guests with superb poise and charm. But talking with me during dinner about the heart attack, the ileitis, and now the stroke, her voice broke as she said, “This really is too much for any one man to bear.” I tried to reassure her of his remarkable ability to recover. He always did better than the doctors' prognoses, I reminded her. We spoke quietly to one another, each of us knowing that no one else at the dinner except Pat realized what truly was going on upstairs.

Early the next morning I drove directly to the White House. The Secret Service man assigned to me was somewhat embarrassed waiting half through the morning at my office in the Senate Office Building, but only my personal secretary had been told where I was going. Foster Dulles, Bill Rogers, Jerry Persons, and some other key officials of the Administration also slipped past reporters to Sherman Adams' office. The tension seemed even greater than at the time of the heart attack.

In contrast to that period in 1955, this was the worst time possible, short of outright war, for the President to be incapacitated. It was a time of international tensions. Only a month before, the Soviet Union had put its first Sputnik in orbit, and the whole structure of America's military might and scientific technology was under suspicion here and throughout the world. The most immediate problem was a scheduled meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Paris on December 16, only three weeks away—a meeting of the NATO heads of state at which President Eisenhower was being counted on to rally our allies. France and Britain were privately complaining of financial difficulties in maintaining their NATO force levels.

On the domestic front, the first signs of the 1958 economic recession were becoming obvious. At the same time, it was equally apparent that we would have to find more money to bolster our missile program. We were having serious budget problems: the fiscal 1958 budget was $71.8 billion, the highest in peacetime history, the government had borrowed up to its legal debt limit, and we had to prepare the fiscal 1959 budget with still higher defense spending. The Administration also had to complete its legislative program, the State of the Union message, the budget and economic messages for the opening days of Congress in January.

The medical report that morning, after the doctors had again examined
the President, contained good news and bad. The President had suffered a “mild” stroke which affected only his ability to speak. His mind and reasoning powers were not involved. There were no symptoms of paralysis (such as struck down Woodrow Wilson). But the bad news was that the doctors said they could not tell whether this might be only the first in a series of more damaging strokes. The doctors prescribed sixty days of complete rest from the pressures of his job, if possible, or an extreme lightening of the work load. The idea, in simple terms, was to free him from any problems which might make his blood pressure rise dangerously.

I am sure that if the stroke had come before the heart attack, it would potentially have been a disaster as far as the orderly operation of the government was concerned. But following the first siege, everyone on the team was experienced in handling this type of crisis. For me, although my actual work load was far greater than it had been in 1955, the burden was easier. My responsibilities and prerogatives were more clearly defined and understood, and my actions more readily accepted. The eggs upon which I had to tread had harder shells.

The very first morning, there was general agreement that I should represent Eisenhower at the December 16 meeting of NATO. No one expected the President to be well enough for so arduous an undertaking. Dulles sent word to Paris asking if the NATO heads of state would agree to meet with America's No. 2 man. The answer was yes. Nor were any eyebrows raised when I participated in defense policy conferences throughout that day with Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, Deputy Defense Secretary Donald Quarles, Missile Director William Holaday, and Presidential Science Adviser James Killian. Nor were there any repercussions when I spoke to the press informally as I was leaving the White House at the end of the day. In fact, Sherman Adams and Jerry Persons urged me to see the press and help straighten out a mix-up in which some of the reporters had misinterpreted the White House announcement of the stroke as meaning the President had had another heart attack.

Jim Hagerty returned from Europe and, at the request of the reporters, arranged my first and the only formal White House press conference I was ever to have. In both meetings with the press, my task was to reassure the nation and the world that President Eisenhower was making a rapid recovery, had no intention of resigning, and that the Administration was carrying on business as usual.

The public reacted quite differently to the stroke from the way it had to the heart attack. A mental illness is somehow more terrifying
than a physical one. During the heart attack, the nation worried if the President would live or die but not about his ability to carry on if he recovered. This was not the case during the stroke. The public seemed to say: okay, he may get well, but will he ever be the same again? I received hundreds of letters evoking the mythology of the dark ages on insanity, mental aberrations, and the like.

A considerable segment of the press, including a cross section of political persuasion, called on the President to resign. Even the New York
Post,
the most anti-Nixon of all newspapers, said editorially: “The issue is whether the U. S. is to have Richard Nixon as President or no President. We choose Nixon.” The Washington
Post,
the Providence
Journal,
and columnist Walter Lippmann said the President should delegate his powers to me temporarily for the period of his convalescence.

The problem of maintaining public confidence was far greater in November 1957 than it had been back in 1955, probably because now the President was sixty-seven years old, had had three major illnesses, and his second term stretched out for three more years. Few newspapers failed to mention the fact that if the President survived he would be past seventy, the oldest President in history at the end of his term of office. Several newspapers, periodicals, and columnists recalled the President's own words on resigning, spoken at a press conference back on March 7, 1956: “I have said unless I felt absolutely up to the performance of the duties of the President, the second that I didn't, I would no longer be there in the job or I wouldn't be available for the job.”

But the President's reaction to the stroke was quite different from his reaction to the heart attack. In 1955 there had been great periods of indecision and despondency when he thought he really wanted to give up, retire, and rest. After the stroke, he fought back. He followed his doctors' advice and took it easy around his living quarters for three days, but on the fourth day, aware of the public doubts about his ability, he escorted Mrs. Eisenhower to church. It was Thanksgiving Day, and I remember it particularly because when I got home for my Thanksgiving meal after seeing Mohammed V off at the airport, I found that Julie, my younger daughter, who was then nine, had made separate place cards for each one in the family. Written on a page from one of my yellow pads, in red crayon, mine read:
BE STRONG—BE WISE—BE THOUGHT—FUL—BE KIND.

Throughout the next two weeks, the President, rather than resting, pushed himself into ever-increasing activity, attended meetings, conferred
with staff and, while many lesser chores were routed to subordinates, reacted belligerently when anyone tried to shield him from an important issue. “Either I run this damn show, or I'll resign,” he said on more than one occasion. But the emphasis always was on his running the “damn show,” not on resigning. Extremely sensitive to any suggestion that he was not able to do the job, the President brushed aside any expressions of sympathy and struggled to avoid giving any impression of weakness or disability.

Now he spoke of “dying with my boots on” and insisted on going to the NATO meeting in Paris. He wanted to hold a press conference before leaving to prove to the press that he was able to carry on, but I joined Hagerty and others in convincing him that the trip to NATO alone would reassure the nation of his health.

Actually the President went through a terribly agonizing period of frustration with his ailment. The problem was that the ideas produced by his ever-active mind were dammed up. He could not think of the words to express them. His cerebral occlusion affected the area of his brain which communicated his thoughts into words. The block scrambled the chain of communication and the words would not match the thoughts. However, the President's attack was mild. Within twenty-four hours there was a noticeable improvement in his speech, leaving only an occasional mix-up of words. For instance, the President might want to say “tomorrow,” but instead, “yesterday” would come out, or he would become temporarily blocked on a particular word. To a man as high-strung as Eisenhower, this difficulty became at times extremely frustrating and irritating, and he had been warned by his doctors that such frustration might aggravate his injury or cause another stroke. This made it doubly frustrating.
¹

Among friends and intimates he could laugh off the occasional blooper, but he was very sensitive about it with others. Normally a fast talker, he was forced now to measure and choose his words.

During this period, those of us around him did our best to help him keep his spirits up. I recall one conversation we had after he had met with the congressional leaders for the first time since his stroke. The meeting had gone extremely well, but I could see that he had been distressed by minor slips in pronouncing words which others around the
table had not even noticed. Consequently I called Ann Whitman and made an appointment to see him that afternoon. I reported to him that the unanimous opinion of the legislative leaders was that he had carried off the meeting with no difficulty. Lev Saltonstall, who sat next to me at the Cabinet table at these meetings, I told him, had arrived late while the President was talking and had leaned over to me and whispered that he was unable to notice any word difficulty whatever.

The President was obviously relieved and pleased to get this report. He had attended this meeting before the doctors' schedule for recovery from the stroke indicated it would be wise for him to participate in such conferences. But he said he had to prove to himself that he was able to do the job. If he had been unable to come to this meeting, it would have been necessary for him to do some “very hard and tough thinking about the future.”

I also pointed out that the columnists and editorial writers who were suggesting that he should delegate duties or should resign, and who were criticizing him on the ground that he could no longer be a full-time, vigorous President, were for the most part in the camp of those who never really had been for him. I said they had simply been waiting for some incident which would give them an excuse for expressing their opposition openly.

He smiled and said that he didn't pay any attention to the columnists because he didn't read what they wrote. But I knew that this was one of his stock statements which was not actually based on facts. Jim Hagerty had told me before I went in to see the President that he had been reading a considerable number of columns and editorials and had been disturbed by the tone they were taking.

I urged the President not to let his critics in the press force him into a course of action which was not in the best interests of his health or of the presidency. I pointed out that he was vitally needed—that the whole country realized how imperative it was for him to make the great decisions affecting our future, and that he owed a duty to keep himself in shape to make those decisions. I suggested that without any public announcement he could talk to his Cabinet and the intimate members of his staff and suggest that they should undertake to process some of the problems before they reached him for final decision. I noted that particularly in the domestic field there was no reason why a Cabinet officer had to come to him every time he had a decision to make.

He told me that he was going to Gettysburg over the weekend and that in his absence he did not feel it was necessary for me or
others on the White House staff to undertake any of the responsibilities of holding meetings. He pointed out that this was in my best interests, too, because of the possible impression otherwise of my stepping in and exerting authority.

As distinguished from the situation during the heart attack, he now wanted no impression whatever to be left either that he was not running the show or was unable to run it. He told me for the first time that he was considering the advisability of writing a letter to me in which he would state expressly what he wanted the Vice President to do in the event of presidential illness. Finally he indicated that looking to the future he was going to watch carefully how he recovered his health and that if he did not progress beyond the point that he currently had reached, he would have to make a decision to relinquish some or all of his duties. The continued frustration of being unable to express himself would create too great a risk of another injury, which would leave the country in very bad shape. Before I left, I pointed out that in his conversation with me, which lasted almost an hour, he had hardly had any noticeable difficulty with his words. I said that he was a man who was greatly blessed in that—clearly apart from his present difficulty—he always had had a mind that worked much faster than his mouth, and that with most people the situation was reversed. He laughed and said that this reminded him of the joke about the politician who could always be counted on to have his mouth open and his mind closed.

The question of delegating authority during a President's temporary disability came up for discussion several times during this period. It had become apparent that the Democratic Congress would not go along with the Administration's or anyone's plan to allow the Vice President to become acting President during the President's disability. Eisenhower had put Herbert Brownell, then Attorney General, to work after the heart attack on a plan of delegating authority, but it got nowhere. After the stroke, Bill Rogers, who had by then succeeded Brownell, went into the problem; legislation was prepared by the Administration and had bipartisan support, but again Congress would do nothing on the subject. The reason was purely political and obvious. The Democratic congressional leaders would not approve any plan which might put Richard Nixon in the White House before the 1960 election. The press had already portrayed me as being on the “threshold” of the presidency; the Democratic politicians wanted no part in carrying me across that threshold.