Ike and Dick by Jeffrey Frank

Author:Jeffrey Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

CHAPTER 19

The Good Life

1

It would have been natural for Nixon and Eisenhower to go their separate ways after January 20; that was the custom of the men who held those jobs. The Eisenhowers intended to live on the farm in Gettysburg and, during the cold months, in Palm Desert, California; Ike would have an office in nearby Indio at a ranch owned by the aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran and her husband, Floyd Odlum, an investor who had made his fortune during the Depression. There he would work on his memoirs (two volumes were planned for Doubleday) and otherwise sort out life as one of America’s three surviving ex-presidents—a distinction that didn’t seem to mean all that much to him. He hadn’t had much to do with the other two; he hadn’t spoken to Harry Truman, now seventy-six, since the 1953 inaugural (not counting a brief handshake at George C. Marshall’s funeral in the fall of 1959), and Herbert Hoover, who was eighty-six, was becoming ever more calcified. At Eisenhower’s request, Congress passed a special bill that restored his rank as a five-star general, and that was how he preferred to be addressed for the rest of his life. He intended to stay connected with his circle of friends and looked forward to playing more golf and bridge in Gettysburg, Augusta, and California at the Eldorado Country Club in Indian Wells ( where he now socialized with people like Bob Hope, Freeman Gosden, and Lawrence Welk), and having the time simply to live the way many retired Americans lived, although Eisenhower, at seventy, was considerably better off and better connected than most retired Americans.

The future was not so clear for Nixon, who, on January 9, observed his forty-eighth birthday and who, at that point, could only count on practicing law again, probably in Los Angeles. He’d been a lawyer when he’d run for Congress in 1946, but he’d also been thirty-three years old and returning to that life in middle age was not an inviting prospect. His annual birthday greeting from Ike could not have helped his mood:

I am sorry that as I send you my warmest felicitations . . . I could not have the privilege of addressing you as “Mr. President.” But all that is past and done, and I hope that you and Pat and your lovely daughters will find Southern California much to your liking. I hope, too, that I shall see you when Mamie and I are there. With warm regard, and Happy Birthday!

Nixon had wanted nothing more than to stay in public life at the national level, and yet suddenly, although his résumé was most impressive, he appeared to be blocked. Kennedy would surely run again in 1964, and incumbents tended to win unless, like William Howard Taft in 1912, they got into third-party difficulties or, like Hoover twenty years later, they were blamed for a nation’s economic collapse. Eight years hence, Nixon could seem like used, unwanted goods. It is easy to see why he

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