From Jan. 20, 1961—the day that Pres. Dwight David Eisenhower relinquished the reins of power to the newly elected John F. Kennedy—until Eisenhower's death on March 28, 1969, his grandson had a front-row view of the former president's life. Often he was at center stage.

This was David's coming-of-age time, from age 12 to 20—impressionable years in which he was privileged to watch and interact with "Granddad" in the roles of loving grandfather and esteemed policy maker.

Whether readers are most intrigued by the complex world of politics or an intimate view of family life, this memoir offers colorful, rich details.

David and Julie Eisenhower spoke with The Best Times from their home in Pennsylvania. We will present the interview in two installments—in this issue and in December's.

Ike as Granddad

David, you open your memoir with this evocative statement:

"In the late afternoon of Inauguration Day, January 20, 1961, Ike and Mamie Eisenhower drove north to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the 1955 Chrysler Imperial that Mamie had purchased for Ike on his sixty-fifth birthday. … There was an eerie loneliness about the absence of motorcycle escorts and caravans of Secret Service and press cars."

I think your opening sets the mood for the entire book, which explores how a war hero and two-term president copes with the wrenching shifts that occur when formal power pretty much evaporates.

David: Yes, that's exactly the point. There's a very barren feeling about this ride home from Washington. In our many talks with Mamie, that came through in her description. And by coincidence, I had a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, published in late spring of 1961, in which Dwight Eisenhower describes his drive home, and that confirmed this. I think this is true for all presidents. I think the loss of authority is a shock, and the question is how you build a life going forward.

And that's something that average citizens don't think about. We imagine that the president will continue being swept up with continued credibility and authority.

David: You've put your finger on a central point of the book, which is that he goes through a series of phases. One is rendering up power, and a huge adjustment is required. Then he begins to lose ground physically in late 1964 and early '65.

During a welcome ceremony held for Ike at Gettysburg, you watched your grandfather as part of a crowd for the first time. Observing the adulation, you wondered whether you had fully appreciated him before.

David: Right now, I can still see his face illuminated. It was very dark, this was late-late afternoon, and I think it was the first time I'd ever seen him in a crowd with peers, watching my schoolmates dress up in uniforms to play in the band to serenade him as a president. It was a little jarring! I'd always known he was very special, and being his grandson had set me apart in school, but to actually see my friends dress up and rehearse put it in an entirely different light.

Ike and Mamie moved into a former schoolhouse on their Gettysburg farm—land they had purchased in late 1950, and the first home they had owned after 33 Army moves. Was there ever any question that they would settle there?

David: I think it was something that they really didn't think through. George Allen [a political operative and White House intimate] was the fellow who came up with the idea of settling in Gettysburg and insisted that they look there. I think that Dwight Eisenhower, at that time, wasn't even thinking about acquiring a place. There's very interesting correspondence, I think from the 1930s, between Dwight Eisenhower and his mother-in-law. The suggestion is that, but for World War II and the sudden assumption of tremendous responsibility, the Eisenhowers might have retired to Colorado or perhaps Arizona. They loved the West. I don't think Gettysburg was on his mind. But when Allen proposed it, that seemed to awaken something in Granddad. His family had been from that area, and it was a familiar place—a place that was sort of meant to be. He really took to it, and became a professional farmer.

You do a great job of making life at Gettysburg real, describing the skeet and trap shoot range, the putting green, the steak barbecue hut, the peach and cherry orchards, the rusty Civil War pump. It sounds like a truly idyllic spot.

David: In my mind it was! I've been back several times, even in recent months, and I can see now, at my age, the problems that they must have been aware of in running it. This doesn't work, that doesn't work, maintenance… There must have been some drudgery. But as far as I'm concerned, it was a kind of Shangri-la, an idealized place, and they were able to enjoy it, though it was not a permanent place.

Julie: I spent a lot of time at the farm. I visited several times while President Eisenhower was still alive, and of course Mamie lived on for 10 more years and that was her home. You know, the farm is run by the National Parks Service and is open to the public. It's all preserved there. If you open up one of the cigarette boxes on the sun porch, there are Mamie's unfiltered cigarettes!

Readers might be interested in visiting www.nps.gov/eise.

David: One more point about why Gettysburg was meant to be: Julie and I were out in the Salina area giving a talk, and my way of offering amenities was to say, "It's nice to be among neighbors. We're just a long block away. From my house in Pennsylvania, drive a block to Route 30, bear left on I-70, and then hang a left at Abilene and go one block!"

There's something about the I-70/I-80 corridor that Julie and I have in common. Her family moved west along the same corridor. It's just sort of home ground.

For many summers you worked for your grandfather as a farm hand, weeding the vegetable garden and painting fences—and you started out at 30 cents an hour. So as a laborer, you definitely weren't coddled!

David: No! It was hard work! It's not that they were making a point with me, it was just a no-frills operation. Over the years I've had occasion to answer questions about Dwight Eisenhower's leadership. Even when I knew him as a teenager, he was my idea of a leader in the way he ran that farm. It was fun to be part of it, and it was challenging. The key to it, in retrospect, is that he took the farm operation very seriously. He knew horses. He'd studied crops and crop rotation. He knew his business. That's why the operation worked as well as it did. But no coddling, no way!

Julie: David even got fired!

David: That's the big exception! His firing me and hiring me back the same afternoon was, I would say, a chink in the armor, where the mask fell away.

Ike was deeply interested in your future and had clear ideas about what it should look like. He had you exercise your bare feet with marbles so you could get into West Point, for example. Did you feel at all free to design your own future?

David: I'm conscious that I don't weigh in with my side of this in the book, because I don't think I would have been articulate about it and I don't think it was an important part of this story. But looking back and interpreting my actions, probably the boldest step I took to claim my future was to get engaged to Julie. A married man is somebody who is responsible for himself.

And Granddad became so converted to Julie when he was in the hospital. He saw why I had done what I'd done in asking her to marry me, and he accepted it completely. Toward the end of the book, the real agreement that he and I reach is that I certainly did the right thing there, so maybe I'd get other things right in the future!

Ike's favorite nighttime reading was historical biography or Western pulp fiction, and the books he read couldn't have women in them. "No 'goo,'" you write. You also quote Mamie as saying that "Ike never had the slightest notion how to live with women."

David: Yes, she's sort of teasing him about that, and we could not resist relating that. I can still see Julie, Mamie, and me sitting on the sun porch and having that conversation. On the other hand, he was tremendously popular with women.

Julie: All the women who worked for him adored him, my mother adored him. He was very engaging and he treated you like an equal. But he was just so unsentimental; he didn't want any sentiment in his Westerns or his movies.

David: He was not a big man but he was physically imposing, sort of a gunslinger! This is the Western background, and something he developed in the Army through his training.

Ike and Mamie set up housekeeping at a second home, in Palm Desert, Calif. You poetically say that "He loved the desolate beauty and serenity of the desert" and "felt secure as one feels secure in a large ship during a storm." What was that about?

David: I talked to his doctors and I talked to his ministers, and chance comments that came through in practically every conversation I had would be something to the effect that "The general felt safe."

I'm sure that the terrain must have reminded Dwight Eisenhower of North Africa, of Morocco, places where he met his very stern tests as a new general. And there's something about the compound at Eldorado, the ambience of the place, the architecture of it and the surrounding terrain—it's a sanctuary. And it reminds you of the stakes of venturing off this sanctuary.

About your grandfather's war experiences, you write, "I learned what I knew from books in his library and documentaries I had seen on television." Why didn't he talk with you about the war?

David: The reason he didn't talk about the war, I think, is that it meant so much to him. If he looked back on his role in the war and his management of it, regardless of how successful he appeared to be, he would privately have regrets of all kinds. He simply could not look back on that casually; he could not talk informally about it.

That's what created my interest in World War II. I wanted to know about it. We look back on World War II as the scene of heroism for the Greatest Generation, as a war everybody agreed about. But the close-in story of that war is the most stunning story I've ever looked at. I won't say it was miraculous, because the Allies organized their resources and were superior to the Axis, but the day-to-day story, the sacrifices of it, the sadness, the strain…

My dad and I were talking the other day and he said, "You know, David, the only thing that really mattered is that things went forward on June 6. That's all that mattered."

That era is the core of Ike's public and historic life, and it carries on into his presidency. He's a very effective president, but he's dealing with issues that stem from World War II. So it's something he didn't want to talk about casually, in the way a child would raise a question. He didn't want to give simple answers if he was going to give answers at all.

You're candid in describing how hard it was to have a close relationship with your grandfather, but you describe that easing a bit as he aged. You write, "To me, Dwight Eisenhower had always been imposing and at times unapproachable, and I had never understood why people thought of him as so genial. But the onset of old age revealed a warmth and humanity in his features that had not been obvious to me before..."

David: That's why I wrote this book. What I saw were the elements of character that had always been there and always made him unusual. I saw tremendous courage; it was the first time I'd seen anything like that—his equanimity in the face of what must have been dire verdicts from doctors. That's the great equalizer. No matter how successful he's been in life, he's facing the same question we all do—and he faced it with such equanimity; it was the most impressive thing I saw of him. That is something I wanted to relate in this book. I felt that his character was coming through. I just hope that we meet the challenges that lie ahead of us in the same spirit.

To be continued

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