THE PRESIDENCY: Not Far from Gettysburg

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President Eisenhower's medical chart continued to show an upward curve. For the first time, he sat up in a wheelchair and was pushed around the sun-drenched porch outside his room at Denver's Fitzsimons Hospital. His diet became more varied.* He started two paintings. He got back to a part-time, Monday-Wednesday-Friday work week. And once more a stream of officials and friends, dammed up for three weeks, began to pour into Denver and up to the President's bedside.

Bedside Manners. Early last week the presidential plane, Columbine III, droned into the airstrip at Lowry Air Force Base with Defense Secretary Charles Wilson (see below), Admiral Arthur Radford and Milton Eisenhower, the President's brother. On the way to the hospital, Press Secretary James Hagerty briefed Wilson and Radford on proper bedside manners. Yes, it was perfectly all right to shake hands with the President. They should try to sit at the foot of the bed so that Ike could see them without moving his body. Their meeting should last no longer than 25 minutes, even though the President, as usual, would be talking briskly and edging for more time.

Several times during the week the President talked business with other officials. Attorney General Brownell and Security Chief Dillon Anderson stopped in for brief appointments. Often, in the late afternoon, Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams came in with some papers for Ike to sign. For the second time in nine days, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles spent a 25-minute period at Ike's bedside. When Dulles arrived, Ike promptly ordered him to sign his "guest book": a yellow toy dog that he had received for his birthday. Then the two got down to the business at hand: last-minute strategy for the forthcoming foreign ministers' conference at Geneva.

As the signatures on the toy dog's hide grew, Jim Hagerty became infuriated by a New York Times story, which reported that "the most [the President] will be able to get from such visitors to his bedside . . . will be the most superficial and 'pasteurized' summaries of the issues upon which he must make a choice." To the press Hagerty snorted that nothing could be further from the truth. "Dillon Anderson saw the President for 15 minutes today," he said, "and you can take it from me that what they talked about was not pasteurized. It was top-secret security material. Nothing is being held back from him. If there was an emergency on Formosa, or an atom bomb was dropped, we'd tell him. We wouldn't barge right in and toss the news in his face, but we'd tell him."

Thank-You Notes. Along with his business appointments, Ike saw a few purely social callers. During his three days in Denver, brother Milton saw the President often, and Investment Banker Clifford Roberts, a close friend, dropped in for 15 minutes one morning. He was the President's first visitor who was neither a member of the family nor an official. The First Lady, meanwhile, continued to breakfast with Ike each morning and to see him as often as the doctors would permit. When she was away from her husband's side, Mamie spent most of her time in her own room, across the hall, meticulously answering the flood of get-well messages (at last count she had answered 11,000 letters).