Psychological Breakthrough

At Treasury Secretary George Humphrey's Georgia plantation Dwight Eisenhower went about his holiday exertions with the cheerful equanimity of a man who has already made his big decisions. On two successive days the President shot 18 holes of golf, and, although his game was not up to its pre-coronary level, his good humor remained unruffled. "You are going to hear a heck of a lot of laughter today," he told Glen Arven Country Club Pro Johnny Walter at the start of the first 18. "My doctor has given me orders that if I don't start laughing instead of cussing when I miss those shots, he's going to stop me from playing golf. So every time I miss a shot you're going to hear a haw, haw, haw." Ike's only real complaint was about his "football knee," a relic of his West Point days. "You know," he told Walter, after walking six holes, "my knee twinges now and then . . . First time in years."

When he was not golfing, Ike went hunting with George Humphrey. Shooting well, the President bagged a wild turkey, regularly came close to the legal limit of twelve quail daily. For the news photographers Hunter Eisenhower was a somewhat unsatisfactory subject. After an initial protest ("That would be silly") he finally agreed to pose with his shotgun slung over his shoulder, but a photographer's request that he pose sighting his gun near Humphrey's mule-drawn hunting wagon met with scandalized refusal: "What? Right over the mules? Let's not be corny."

The Feminine Touch. Before the vacation was over, Mamie too got in a bit of hunting--feminine style. Driving into Thomasville with Mrs. Humphrey, the First Lady (who often gets her clothes from Designer Mollie Parnis) stopped off at Steyerman's Department Store and bought nine dresses--linens, cottons and silk prints (size 14) in small, muted patterns. On impulse Mamie also tried on some of Steyerman's new over-the-fore-head hats. The upshot, familiar to many a U.S. husband, was that she emerged from Steyerman's with the same black pillbox she had been wearing when she left the Humphrey plantation.

Three days later, in time to reach Washington for Secretary Dulles' 68th birthday party, Ike and Mamie boarded the Columbine III at Moultrie's Spence Field. As Ike walked up the ramp to the airplane, a woman in the watching crowd shouted, "Now stand right there, and tell us you're going to run." For a moment Ike hesitated and newsmen gawked. Then he burst into laughter and ducked inside.

Peculiar Intensity. Throughout his stay in Georgia Ike had thrown himself into all of his activities with a peculiar intensity. There was a strong and probably conscious parallel between the physical exertions of his next to last full day at the Humphrey plantation and the day he had spent in Denver exactly five months earlier--the day before his heart attack. (In Denver, on Sept. 23, Ike shot 27 holes of golf. On the next to last day of his Georgia vacation he shot 18 holes of golf, hunted for two hours, sat up till 12:30 playing bridge.) There was an almost clinical detachment in his behavior on the golf course, where, ignoring his doctors' recommendation that he stick to the electric cart, he regularly turned to his companions to say, "Now let's walk a bit." The only possible conclusion was that the President was testing himself.

All signs were that the results of the test were positive. Said Mamie to a friend: "That ten days really did something for him." What it had done was pretty clear. Through his vigorous vacation in the Georgia sunshine, Ike had shaken off the worst of the psychological aftereffects of his heart attack. But this psychological breakthrough, though it may have been Ike's main achievement last week, was by no means his only one. In addition, the President:

P: Invited Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and Mexican President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines to a meeting in Washington next month. (Both St. Laurent and Ruiz Cortines accepted, the latter subject to approval of the Mexican Congress.)

P: Appointed as chief justice of the Hawaiian Supreme Court 69-year-old Republican Philip L. Rice, now an associate justice of the court.

P: Named to the permanent rank of major general 14 Army officers, including famed Airborne Specialist James M. Gavin, who already has the temporary rank of lieutenant general.

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