Authors: Jim Newton
Now Eisenhower presented Rockefeller’s grand idea: the United States would give to the Soviet Union complete blueprints of all American defense facilities and would open its airspace for reconnaissance photography. “You can make all the pictures you choose and take them to your own country to study.” In return, the United States demanded the same access to Soviet defense facilities. This approach, he predicted, “will open wide the avenues of progress for all our peoples.”
The proposal was simple and simply presented. Having placed it before the delegates, Eisenhower concluded: “A sound peace—with security, justice, wellbeing and freedom for the people of the world—can be achieved, but only by patiently and thoughtfully following a hard and sure and tested road.”
Those final words still hung in the air when a clap of thunder exploded outside the room. The boom was deafening, and the lights blinked off. In the dark and sudden stillness, Eisenhower quipped: “I didn’t know I would put the lights out with that speech.” Ike’s easy humor tickled the Soviet delegation immensely; its burly leadership burst into laughter, roaring as the lights came back up.
For a moment, annihilation receded, and peace seemed possible. The British and the French responded eagerly to Eisenhower’s proposal, which was quickly dubbed “Open Skies.” “I wish the people of the world could have been in this conference room to hear the voice of a man speaking from great military experience,” Premier Faure of France said later. “They would have believed that something had changed in the world.” Even the Soviets seemed receptive. Bulganin agreed that the idea had potential and suggested that the foreign ministers of the four nations convene to work on details. All four nations joined in that proposal. “I thought we had the makings of a breakthrough,” John Eisenhower recalled.
At the conclusion of that afternoon’s talks, Eisenhower mingled with the Soviet leaders over cocktails and in the buffet line. Khrushchev was among those milling about the room, and Ike sought him out. He seemed amiable, but, as Eisenhower recalled later, “there was no smile in his voice.” “I don’t agree with the chairman,” Khrushchev said, bluntly dismissing the endorsement of Open Skies that Bulganin had just offered. Such open disagreement among the Soviet leadership was remarkable, and Eisenhower recognized what it signaled about the relationships between his counterparts. “From that moment until the final adjournment of the conference, I wasted no more time probing Mr. Bulganin,” he wrote. Instead, Eisenhower lobbied Khrushchev, the beginning of their long and infuriating association.
Eisenhower at first imagined that Open Skies might capture Soviet support—the proposal seemed so transparently balanced, so genuinely innovative—and Bulganin’s initial enthusiasm seemed to portend a “breakthrough,” as John Eisenhower put it. But the follow-up meeting of the foreign ministers confirmed Dulles’s skepticism and dashed Ike’s hopes. Later, Ike would recall the missed opportunity with bitterness. “Khrushchev,” Eisenhower wrote in retirement, “does not want peace, save on his own terms and in ways that will aggrandize his own power. He is blinded by his dedication to the Marxist theory of world revolution and Communist domination. He cares nothing for the future happiness of the peoples of the world … In our use of the word, he is not, therefore, a statesman, but rather a powerful, skillful, ruthless, and highly ambitious politician.”
It mattered little that Eisenhower was right. Open Skies threatened Khrushchev, and so it failed.
In later years, Eisenhower would come to regard Geneva as a tragic disappointment, but the immediate public reaction was overwhelmingly positive, particularly toward him. Eisenhower’s ever-impressive approval rating jumped notably, increasing five points on the eve of the conference and another three in its aftermath. By August 1955, 75 percent of Americans approved of Eisenhower’s performance, compared with just 11 percent who disapproved. As those numbers suggested, Ike was suffused with goodwill. Back home, he met with legislative leaders, greeted the annual Boys Nation event, commemorated a new “Atoms for Peace” stamp, and took in a few rounds of golf at Burning Tree, in Bethesda, Maryland. He replaced Oveta Culp Hobby with Marion B. Folsom, who was confirmed without incident.
He tended to ceremonial functions, posed for a portrait, and bade a happy farewell to the nettlesome Admiral Carney. In August, he decamped for a few days at Gettysburg, where he took the Reverend Billy Graham on a tour of the farm, hunted, played golf, and tended to his cattle. It was, by the standards of the presidency, a quiet few weeks, interrupted only by meetings of the cabinet and the National Security Council as well as the unending parade of visitors, but free from crisis. When Ike arrived in Denver on August 14, he had every reason to expect a relaxing break.
So it was at first—golf at Cherry Hills, fishing with his old friend Aksel Nielsen at Nielsen’s Colorado ranch. Ike was joined there by his grandson, David, always a delight to his granddad. Ike and Nielsen fished in the mornings and evenings, toured the ranch with David by Jeep in the afternoon, and practiced on a casting pond when time permitted. Back in Denver the next week, Ike and his grandson continued to enjoy their summer freedom—David was allowed to invite friends to join them, and they all lunched together after Ike finished a round of golf. Eisenhower flew off to New England to inspect flooding damage, spent a few days in the White House catching up on work, and delivered an address in Philadelphia, where he was followed to the podium by Chief Justice Warren, their relations now confined to pleasantries and little else. But that brief spell of business was followed by a return to Denver and time with family, lunches at the golf course, painting, and manageable public appearances.
On September 19, Ike ventured into the stream at Nielsen’s ranch and emerged with seven trout. He reluctantly left the ranch four days later, celebrating a successful vacation by cooking a final breakfast: corn cakes, eggs, sausage, ham, black-eyed peas, and redeye gravy, then heading back down the eastern slope of the Rockies to Denver.
Once there, he was briefed on world affairs at Lowry Air Force Base, where he kept an office. At the United Nations, Molotov pledged “utmost consideration” of U.S. disarmament overtures, though his comments were undermined by the administration’s release of a letter from Bulganin setting Soviet conditions on the Open Skies proposal. In Mississippi, meanwhile, a Tallahatchie County jury took sixty-five minutes to acquit the alleged murderers of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who had insulted the wife of one defendant and four days later been abducted from his grandmother’s house. In New York, the Yankees clinched the pennant with a win over the Red Sox; Don Larsen got the victory, and the Yankees secured their sixth banner in seven years, the twenty-first in their history.
After briefly catching up on business, Ike departed for Cherry Hills, where, after some practice swings, he set off on the course at noon. He was interrupted twice by calls from Dulles but finished his eighteen holes at 2:00 p.m. He shot an 84, about average for Ike in those days, and enjoyed lunch with his foursome. He ate a sizable hamburger, adorned with thick slices of Bermuda onions, and sipped from a pot of coffee. By 2:15, the group was on the course again, trying to sneak in an additional eighteen holes.
It was then that Ike, so cool in the face of genuine emergency and yet so susceptible to petty annoyances, began to grow anxious. He complained to the club pro about an upset stomach, blaming it on the onions, and fumed when called back to the clubhouse to take another call from Dulles, only to find that the operator had put the call through by mistake and that Dulles no longer needed him. “The veins stood out on his forehead like whipcords,” his friend and doctor Howard Snyder recalled. The group completed just nine holes that afternoon, and Eisenhower returned to his in-laws’ home in Denver cranky and uncomfortable.
At home, Eisenhower and George Allen played a round of billiards, passed on an evening cocktail, and took a walk after dinner to settle Allen’s stomach, which also was bothering him. Afterward, Allen and his wife returned to their hotel, and Ike and Mamie turned in for bed around 10:00 p.m., retiring to their separate rooms. A few hours later, Ike awoke with pain in his chest. He groped for milk of magnesia, and Mamie, who heard him stirring as she returned from the bathroom, got it for him. She could sense that there was something seriously wrong. At 2:54 a.m., she urgently called Snyder, who rushed to the president’s side, arriving at 3:11 a.m.
Snyder’s patient was agitated and at times incoherent, complaining of pain across his chest and shrugging off an oxygen mask. He was sixty-four years old and had a history of ailments, including his health scare in 1949 that prompted him to quit cigarettes after decades of heavy smoking. He was prone to irritation, and he was, after all, president of the United States; to say that he was subjected to stress would be hyperbolic understatement.
Under Mamie’s anxious eye, the doctor said later, Snyder broke a pearl of amyl nitrite and injected Ike with papaverine hydrochloride, which seemed to have no effect. He then injected Eisenhower with heparin, an anticoagulant that would have been called for in the event of a serious heart attack. Eisenhower’s pain was undiminished, and Snyder’s notes indicate that he gave the president two injections of morphine, one soon after arriving and another at 3:45 a.m. Ike’s blood pressure was falling, his pulse was rising, and his skin was turning clammy. A rubdown with warm alcohol did not help, nor did hot water bottles. His blood pressure then “collapsed,” and Ike fell into shock, according to Snyder. Desperate to revive her husband, Mamie got into her husband’s bed at 4:30 a.m. and wrapped herself around him. Ike responded immediately, calming to her touch. He fell asleep, and Mamie remained with him until 7:00 a.m., when she quietly slipped out of his bed.
Snyder let his patient sleep until 11:30 a.m., monitoring his blood pressure and respiration but, curiously, not alerting a cardiologist or the nearby hospital. Not until shortly after noon did the doctor call Fitzsimons Army Hospital, which dispatched its commanding general, Martin E. Griffin, to the president’s bedside (Snyder specifically requested that the general dress in civilian clothes). Griffin administered a cardiogram and immediately concluded that Eisenhower had suffered a major heart attack.
Snyder’s actions during that troubled night were puzzling. If his reconstruction of events is to be regarded as truthful, his eight-hour delay in summoning a cardiac expert to Eisenhower’s side was inexplicably reckless, and his initial comment to Ike’s traveling press secretary that the president had suffered a bout of indigestion was cavalierly deceptive (Snyder justified it later by saying that Ike had in fact suffered from indigestion the day before). There is, however, another explanation, one that emerges from a remarkable reexamination of the episode in 1997. In it, the author Clarence Lasby argued that Snyder doctored his notes in order to cover up the humiliating truth: that he mistook Eisenhower’s heart attack for indigestion. Lasby’s analysis explained much: why Snyder had not immediately summoned expert help, why he misled the press secretary, why he failed to follow up his initial heparin injection (the medication wears off after about six hours, but Snyder did not indicate that he gave the president a second shot), why he failed to tell other doctors about the heparin and papaverine injections, and why Eisenhower’s shock is not reflected in any other notes of the episode. In fact, a second doctor who treated Eisenhower specifically noted after consulting with Snyder that “there has been no period of shock,” adding that “pulse and blood pressure have remained stable.” Those notations directly contradict Snyder’s later recitation of the events. It is possible that Snyder misremembered or simply failed to inform other doctors of the care he had given his patient; it is, however, far more likely that he retroactively adjusted his notes in order to conform to the story that he wanted others to believe—that he had promptly diagnosed Eisenhower’s difficulties and heroically tended to them.
Snyder’s account presented the reassuring image of a president felled by a heart attack but saved by his attentive and responsive doctor and his caring wife. “The hours he slept during that period from early morning until 12 noon were more responsible for the ultimate recovery of the President than the entire remaining course of hospital treatment,” Snyder boasted later. The probable truth was far more unsettling: in the early hours of September 24, 1955, the president of the United States suffered a devastating heart attack and lay for eight hours in the care of a physician who misdiagnosed the event and then lied to cover up his near-calamitous mistake.
Snyder himself did everything he could to discourage inquiry into that possibility. He wrote scores of unsolicited letters to friends and acquaintances—his own and those of the president—explaining that he diagnosed a heart attack and responded appropriately, thereby saving Eisenhower’s life. Those letters themselves are curious documents, invasive of his patient’s privacy, but they helped to squelch second-guessing of Snyder’s actions. Press inquiries were similarly blunted. When a reporter months later gingerly raised the issue of the long delay in summoning a cardiologist, Eisenhower brushed it off. “I understood it was as much as 10 hours,” she persisted.
“It may have been,” Eisenhower responded. “But it probably may take some 10 hours to determine whether a person is suffering from having eaten some bad food or some other cause, I am not sure. I am not a doctor, you are sure of that.”
Of course, Eisenhower’s answer did not conform to Snyder’s own account—that, soon after arriving, he had ascertained that the president had suffered a heart attack—but the discrepancy was lost in the relief at Ike’s recovery.
The administration was scattered when Ike was hospitalized—Adams was returning from Europe; John Eisenhower was on a golf course in Virginia; Brownell was in Spain on vacation; other members of the cabinet were in Washington or traveling. John rushed to his father’s side and found Mamie deeply worried. “I just can’t believe that Ike’s work is finished,” she told her son. Her worry was haunted by an eerie coincidence: Ike suffered his heart attack on Icky’s birthday.