Nation: Quiet First Lady

• Share

Mamie Eisenhower dies at 82

Almost everywhere the campaign train stopped in the fall of 1952 crowds chanted: "We want Mamie." Nobody was more startled by the cheering than Mamie Doud Eisenhower, the quiet, self-effacing woman who lived for her famous husband and had no appetite for public life. "Ike fights the wars," she said. "I turn the lamb chops."

As First Lady for eight years, she scarcely changed her lifestyle. She still delighted in pink ruffles, wore her trademark bangs, smiled continually and said little. She received thousands of letters imploring her to cut her bangs or to speak out on some issue. But she never did. "I think Ike speaks well enough for both of us," she explained. Ike, in turn, described Mamie as "my invaluable, indispensable but publicly inarticulate lifelong partner." In later years, Mamie responded to women's liberation by saying: "I never knew what a woman would want to be liberated from." A lifetime of stern inner discipline and outward amiability ended last week when Mamie died at 82 after a stroke.

Born in Boone, Iowa, Mamie seemed destined for a quiet life. Though she attended finishing school, she persuaded her father, a prosperous meat packer, not to send her to college. While wintering in Texas in 1915, she met Ike, then an Army second lieutenant. Nine months later, the pair were married. For an Army wife, there was never a permanent home. "I have kept house in everything but an igloo," Mamie once said. "I long to unpack my furniture some place and stay forever." Their first child, Doud Dwight, died at three of scarlet fever. A second son, John, has had an Army career.

The Eisenhowers were inseparable until Ike was named Supreme Allied Commander and went to England to direct the invasion of Europe. He allegedly had a brief romance with the WAC who served as his driver, but after the war he was reunited with Mamie. When Ike finished his second term, the couple retired to a farm in Gettysburg, Pa., near the battlefield. After Ike's death in 1969, Mamie withdrew even further from the public eye. Asked last summer how she would like to be remembered by Americans, Mamie replied, as "just a good friend."