THE PRESIDENCY: The Youngest Brother

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Furled Sleeves in the Bedroom. Operating under that agreement, Milton Eisenhower moves constantly in and out of the White House. Last week, ready to accompany Ike to a Washington dinner, Milton wheeled his black, air-conditioned Imperial sedan into the White House driveway. Once or twice a week, he makes the 45-minute drive from Johns Hopkins to Washington. Often he stays overnight, and the Upstairs Red Room (so called to distinguish it from the main-floor parlor known as the Red Room) is generally kept ready for him. In the privacy of the presidential bedroom, the brothers can unbend over a drink or two—Scotch and soda for Ike, a bone-dry martini for Milton—furl sleeves, lounge coatless in the easy chairs and talk.

The conversations run the whole range of policy problems and mutual personal interests. Both are ardent anglers, and Milton, who trolls for walleyed pike in Wisconsin's Land O'Lakes district, gives away no points to Ike. "I am every bit as good a fisherman," he says firmly, "as my brother." Both are ferociously intense painters, Ike in oil and Milton in painstaking watercolors. Before a slipped disk took him off the fairways, Milton shot an unorthodox but Ike-worthy game of golf (high 80s). Now and then the brothers get together with friends for an evening of bridge, but Milton, who has never progressed beyond the Culbertson quick-trick count, is admittedly overmatched.

In their policy talks, neither Eisenhower is yes man to the other—although Milton would hardly dream of disputing a presidential decision, once made. The President thoroughly respects Milton's experience and skill, but far from blindly. Once, when Milton was uninhibitedly polishing a presidential speech, Ike took one look and said, gently but firmly: "That's fine. But it's not what I want to say." Again, Milton strongly objected to a pork-barreling rider attached by Congress to the $32 billion defense-appropriations bill in 1955. As a matter of constitutional principle, he advised Ike to veto the bill and "tell Congress to go to hell." But Ike, unlike Milton, has the responsibility of elective office, and he realized that the virtues of the whole bill outweighed the single objection. He signed the bill as it stood, told Milton with a grin: "Sometimes you have to rise above principle."

But even such differences of opinion are the exception in the comfortable personal and working relationship between Dwight and Milton Eisenhower. And out of that relationship has grown the feeling that once led Ike to introduce Milton as "a man of whom I've always been proud to say: 'My brother Milton.' "

Rotating Nursemaids. Milton earned his elder brother's respect the hard way. Back in Abilene, Kans., where he was born on Sept. 15, 1899, the only bonds uniting the latest arrival to his six older brothers, including Dwight, then almost nine, were those imposed by duty and family. Milton was a sore disappointment to David Jacob and Ida Stover Eisenhower, who yearned for a daughter. "My father was sorry he never had a girl," recalls brother Earl. "He used to sit on our front porch and make friends with every little girl that came by. I know he was miserable because Milton wasn't a little girl."