Word: ike
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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...
...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...
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...
Though the transcripts usually offer summaries and not verbatim reports of Ike's conversations (the whereabouts of the actual tapes today are unknown), they do shed fascinating light on his opinions of Nixon and the game of politics. Eisenhower pointedly omitted Nixon's name when discussing those he considered good future Republican presidential material. And in a late 1954 conversation with U.P.I. White House Correspondent Merriman Smith, Ike complained that the worst part of his job was ''accommodating yourself to values and considerations that fundamentally you can't fully accept...
...Ike requested such a machine and then used it so sporadically is unclear. He did like to keep written synopses of most Oval Office meetings; but he almost always either had an assistant take notes or dictated his recollections afterward. Whitman, who transcribed many of the tapes, points to the machine's deficiencies. After typing the first summary in 1953, she typed at the bottom that ''large portions of the tape were completely garbled.'' Five years later, when Queen Frederika visited the Oval Office, the recorder was still not cooperating: the transcript simply notes that...