THE PRESIDENCY: The Youngest Brother

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In two years Milton Eisenhower has already stamped the campus with his own brand. He has raised faculty salaries, as he did both at Kansas and Penn State, re-emphasized the humanities, a point of particular significance at Johns Hopkins, whose undergraduate college had been all but forgotten in the famed brilliance of the medical school. On a campus where no previous president had been observed at any athletic event except the Alumni Day lacrosse match, President Milton won undergraduate hearts by showing up for the first football game of the season, then going down to the locker room to shake hands with the team.

Relaxing by Rote. The unremitting pressures of his life give Milton Eisenhower little leisure for himself or his two children, Milton Jr., 27, a business representative in Istanbul for Pan American World Airways, and Ruth, 20, a junior at Swarthmore, who accompanied him on his recent Central American tour. He organizes his days down to grinding the morning coffee (hand ground from three parts bland lowland bean, one part flavorsome mountain-grown bean). By 8:15 a.m. he has carefully arranged the cut flowers on his desk, by 10 a.m. has tunneled through a mountain of paper work. Appointments, punctually begun and punctually concluded, usually take up the rest of the day. Routine even pervades his evenings; two or three nights a week, Keith Spaulding, his administrative assistant, drops by with pressing university business. On rare free evenings, Milton has a tendency to relax by rote, scheduling so much time for reading, so much for a brisk neighborhood walk, so much to his Hammond organ.

A Corner in Gettysburg. The focal point remains his brother Dwight—and his fondest hopes extend beyond 1960. Milton wants to join Ike on the Gettysburg farm, build a little house of his own, and help Ike in a common cause. "The President," says Milton Eisenhower, "can make a tremendous contribution after he leaves office. He particularly can do a great deal in helping to educate the public to the need for reform in the structure and organization of the presidency and the Federal Government." The brothers have talked of this before and have evolved a plan to shift much of the presidential burden to two appointive Vice Presidents, with delegated powers of decision. "My hope," says Milton Eisenhower, "is that when my brother is no longer President, he can help educate the American public to such changes—and that I can also speak up."