Continued from November 2010

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.

David and Julie Nixon Eisenhower have released a new book about those years, titled Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969. They spoke with The Best Times from their home in Pennsylvania. This is the second of two installments from that interview.

Ike as Elder Statesman

Very quickly after resuming civilian life, Ike asked Pres. Kennedy to restore his five-star rank. This meant he wouldn't be known as "Mr. President" but as "General." What was behind that?

David: (Laughs) Good question! It's a mystery to me, and it baffled Kennedy.

Ted Clifton [senior military aide to Pres. Kennedy] gave me a great description of it and I presented that in the book, and I presented my dad's explanation, but I don't find it wholly convincing. I'm not quite sure why he did it, because he did regard the presidency as a supreme experience.

Something we did not include in this book is a comment Lucius Clay [deputy to Gen. Eisenhower in 1945] made to me. I went through all the song and verse of criticism and discounting of his presidency in the mid-1970s—the discounting is as hurtful as the criticism—and I asked Gen. Clay, did Dwight have regrets about going into national politics as far as you could see? His reply was, "The presidency was something he would not have traded for all the tea in China." So he was very proud, and he venerated the presidency.

You could argue that the most powerful position he held was Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, from about December 1944 through May 1945. That's the most powerful position he ever held, because he was jointly accountable to Roosevelt and Churchill, who could override him if they disagreed. He had, essentially, full authority to do whatever he wished with the armies of five nationalities under his control, facing the approaching Red army and determining the shape of post-war Europe.

So, using his highest rank in protocol, it could be that five-star general in World War II during those months was the most powerful position he ever held.

In summer 1961, New York Times Magazine reported a poll by Arthur Schlesinger Sr. that ranked presidents in order of greatness. Ike stood at 28th. That wounded him deeply, but he had clear ideas about why.

David: Yes. I think our popular imagination is fired by adversity, and a great story narrative has elements of conflict. But the mission of the Eisenhower presidency, what he felt he owed the American people, was a respite, a period of relative tranquility so the United States could consolidate its tremendous gains coming out of World War II and help improve conditions everywhere else. This is not the kind of thing that lent itself to heroic narrative. I think he was aware of that, and I think he knew he was going to be penalized.

I think he had regrets, because he was ambitious, like any president. So when he saw confirmation of this in the Schlesinger poll, he was wounded. But he wouldn't have done it differently.

He had to wait for people, over a period of time, to appreciate him, and I think that has happened. I think the view of the Eisenhower years—at least in the eyes of academics and the people who write presidential history—has gone way up. But there is that missing element in the Eisenhower presidency of grand personal drama—not because the drama isn't there, but because they were downplaying it and trying to restore a sense of normalcy in the country.

But then in January 1968, seven years after that last discouraging survey, the Gallup poll showed Ike as the man most admired by the American people. You write, "Somehow, Eisenhower's basic optimism and his confidence in the future…was appreciated…and Americans were beginning to look back on the peace and prosperity of the 1950s with nostalgia and affection."

David: That's one thing I wanted to convey—that for reasons that even puzzle me, he was just this tremendously popular figure in his lifetime. In fact, I read a recent article about Gallup "most-admired" popularity, and the author said there have been two phenomena since the poll started in the 1930s. One was Billy Graham, who's on every list; the other is Dwight Eisenhower.

As Lyndon Johnson struggled with the Vietnam War in 1967, he communicated almost daily with Ike. You write, "The link Johnson sought was spiritual and historical. He wanted the comfort of communicating with someone who could comprehend the unique pressures of the presidency."

David: When I first looked at this subject, in the late 1970s, I did not fully appreciate the Eisenhower-Johnson partnership, which extended from the late 1950s. I had to work my way backward to that. I didn't realize they had worked as closely as they had back then. I vaguely remember Johnson, and allusions to Johnson, when I was 11 and 12, and the connection resonated with me because Johnson winds up on the ticket in 1960, and I would occasionally hear about some piece of information forwarded to Ike from Johnson. But I didn't grasp their friendship.

Vietnam dominated and confounded America in the 1960s. The way our country resolved Vietnam was very complicated, a product of popular impulses and leadership combining to create an outcome—pretty amazing in hindsight. It was a different kind of war.

Eisenhower had views about that war, but he deferred to Johnson and did everything he could to create space for Johnson. He was one of just a few people who tried to do that; I think Richard Nixon was another. I think they recognized that there was something different about this war. It's encapsulated in my mind by the Nixon slogan in 1968 about Vietnam, which was a riddle. He ran for president on a slogan of "ending the war in Vietnam to win the peace." America always wins wars to win the peace, but he was campaigning to end the war and win the peace.

And it's a recognition, it seems to me, that Vietnam was a major transition from one era to another, and Ike at some level understood that. So, despite his misgivings about the way the war was being conducted, he was unwilling to make things difficult for Johnson.

Your own dad helped coordinate your grandfather's memoirs. You write: "One day Dad interrupted Granddad, who was busily redrafting a five-year-old document. He said, 'What's the matter, can't I misquote myself?'"

David: Actually, he doesn't misquote himself at all, but there are some omissions in his memoirs. In fact I think I understated that to a certain extent. There were portions of the Eisenhower memoir that were really shaped by current events. The Indochina section, for instance, is much shorter than the one that was originally drafted. The reason it was slashed is that it was sensitive, and they did not want to prejudice the president, narrow his options in any way, or become part of the debate. So they slashed a relatively long section of the book into something relatively small. For a scholar, that's a huge opportunity somewhere down the road, because the Indochina Eisenhower story in 1953-54 is a big one.

Julie: That was really the right thing to do in his memoirs. He was trying to help Kennedy, who was trying to make a decision, who wasn't sure, who had committed troops to Vietnam.

David: There are two somewhat contradictory positions. One is that he simply declined to introduce troops in 1954: France wanted American forces to enter the conflict, and there was discussion with Churchill, but he declined.

Second, the first Indochina War ends with a line drawn along the 17th parallel. Behind that line is a government that we support. A historian would say that Eisenhower drew that line. But when the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy occurred, the question was whether the Democratic successor was going to respect that line and view it as being as important as Eisenhower did. As president, Eisenhower took the line drawn in Germany very seriously and he took the line drawn in Korea very seriously—and these were lines drawn by Truman. The question was whether the Democrats were going to respect the line, and the importance of the line, that Eisenhower had drawn.

So I think the effect of cutting down the Indochina sections of his memoir was to eliminate some of the friction the Eisenhower administration had over the question of ground intervention, and to make it unmistakable that Dwight Eisenhower regarded the fate of South Vietnam as being equally important to the fate of South Korea and of West Germany, and that it was a line to be held. The question was, how do you hold it?

Johnson wanted to hold it, but he was also surrounded by advisers who felt that Asia simply didn't matter, that it was a secondary theater to Europe and that it could safely be given up.

Johnson wrote a letter to [Washington journalist] Drew Pearson in 1968 saying that the issue between himself and his advisers is simple: He believes that the American interest runs to Southeast Asia; the advisers do not. That was the rub. Eisenhower did not want the ins and outs of a complex decision made in 1954, ultimately successful, to be used to justify abandonment of the South Vietnamese government in the 1961-63 period.

Can each of you describe a lasting lesson from Ike that nobody else could have taught you?

Julie: I have to go back to the whole issue of personal courage and spirit, a person who radiates good will.

To me, the epitome of Dwight Eisenhower's spirit was toward the end of the 1968 campaign, when David and I walked into his hospital room at Walter Reed. He's propped up in bed on two pillows, wearing a hospital gown, and he's so thin. But his face just lights up because his grandson has come in. And he whips open his hospital gown, and there, on the electrodes attached to each side of his chest, he has stuck a Nixon-Agnew sticker! All just to make spirits soar. It was remarkable.

David: I would say the same thing. The title "Going Home to Glory" says that it's really his journey, from the presidency to the end. And the reason we did a book on it is that his journey made such an impression on us.

Even at the end, look at the way he wants to make sure Mamie's all right when she has her tests in early 1969; that's the very last entry he writes from the hospital. He thought of others, and he faced this infirmity with the same character that he brought to all of his challenges in public service. He did not hold himself above others. He simply faced life as it presented itself to him, with great courage.

What have each of you missed most about him since his death?

David: I don't think he's ever quite gone away, to be honest! I've gotten to know so much more about him in the years since his death—working on Eisenhower: At War, the book I wrote about his years as supreme commander. He's never gone away in that sense.

I think Julie would agree that he was a very powerful presence, with extraordinary energy and vitality, and that presence is missed. And we could say the same thing about her dad and other figures we've known. They're irreplaceable.

Julie: I think that's a beautiful way of putting it. All that I would add is that he was a grandfather figure to me—not in the sense that I knew him well as a child, because I only met him a few times. But it was his presence in my parents' lives. They would be campaigning or going to countries around the world representing him. He was like a daily presence when I was growing up. And I watched my father anguish when Pres. Eisenhower died, because he had so much respect and admiration and affection for him. This was a major father figure for him, so his loss was felt very much in our family.

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