A Military Move

Wearing a brilliantly patterned bathrobe and a smile to match, Dwight Eisenhower, 75, arrived at Washington's Walter Reed Hospital last week to recuperate from his second heart attack in a decade. The trip from Augusta, where he was stricken during a golfing vacation Nov. 9, had taken 13 hours (at an average 45 m.p.h.) aboard an eight-car Atlantic Coast Line Railroad train with a hospital car equipped with electronic heart-monitoring equipment and staffed by 34 doctors, nurses and military policemen. The odyssey was paid for by the Defense Department because the General's trip was billed as a "military move."

Because doctors were anxious to preserve absolute calm around their patient, Ike's railroad arrival was accomplished under maximum security. Troops with fixed bayonets were stationed at 20-yard intervals along the length of the train to keep spectators away as he was carried to an ambulance. Outside the station a helicopter, heavily insulated against the roar of its rotors, picked up the former President and in eleven minutes deposited him at the hospital twelve miles away. When he got to Walter Reed, Ike said he was "feeling fine," later in the week had a Thanksgiving dinner with his family that included turkey, giblet gravy, candied sweet potatoes, buttered broccoli and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. He should be back on the golf course, said his doctors, early in the year.

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