Bret Baier - Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower’s Final Mission

To our sons, Paul and Daniel, and their generation. Please allow history to inform your decisions in the future.

CONTENTS

I put the white gloves on as the librarian came over with the gray cardboard box. She untied the cover flap and slowly lifted out the first folder inside. Her movements were deliberate as she placed the folder on the giant wood table in front of me. On cue, I followed suit by slowly removing the papers from the plastic sheeting inside the folder, trying to mimic her movements. It was then, as I held the final draft of President Dwight D. Eisenhowers farewell speech, that I started truly trying to imagine and describe the closing moments of the thirty-fourth presidents term three days before the inauguration of the thirty-fifth.

The typewritten page was clear but it was filled with pencil markings from President Eisenhower: accents, underlines for emphasis, and additional words or phrases that would make it into the teleprompter version. The top of the page read, My fellow Americans: THREE DAYS [capitalized] from now, after half a century [underlined] in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor. THIS EVENING [capitalized] I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen [double underline].

Reading through the speech with Eisenhowers notations, I could imagine him scribbling the final adjustments at the Theodore Roosevelt desk on January 17, 1961, before preparing to deliver the speech from the Oval Office that night. This moment, holding his speech in my gloved hands, had been three years in the making.

Every journalistic investigation begins with a flash of curiosity. That happened for me in the spring of 2013 when I rediscovered Dwight D. Eisenhower in a personal way. I had just come off an exciting but brutal year and a half covering the 2012 presidential election. From my daily show every weeknight, moderating debates through the primaries, covering primary and caucus nights, co-anchoring convention coverage and the general election debatesit all culminated in a long election night that finished with President Barack Obamas reelection by big numbers.

The presidential election every four years can seem to happen in a fishbowl, with an excessive focus on the daily sound bites. Significant historical references give way to the drama of the trail. But Ive always been drawn to the ways our current political debates are informed by the past.

Some people look at our nations history as a series of explosive events and larger-than-life personalities. We easily get sidetracked from the most important stories by the flash, while the true jewels lie undiscovered. So even as I was reporting on the political horse race in 2012, I was thinking about how I could tell a fuller story. And a serendipitous experience a few months after the inauguration opened a door for me.

AN AVID GOLFER, I received the Holy Grail of golf invitations in spring 2013 through a friend who is a member of the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia. It was a welcome break.

With the CBS Masters theme song playing in my head, I drove down the most famous driveway in golf, Magnolia Lane. Pulling up to the clubhouse and checking in, I found out that by random assignment, I would be staying in the Eisenhower Cabin.

Ikes Cabin, near the tenth tee and the start of the most celebrated back nine in golf, is one of ten cabins on the golf course and was built especially for President Eisenhower and his family to use on his frequent visits to Augusta, where the president pursued his passion for golf. Reagan and Bush had their ranches, but for Ike leisure time often involved golf. It was a passion I shared, and I was ecstatic to be at Augusta, and even happier to be bunking in Ikes Cabin. To be accurate, it isnt actually a cabin, in the normal sense of the word. Its a three-story white house (the basement floor was used by the Secret Service during Ikes presidency), with spacious, well-appointed rooms, on an idyllic setting with back views of the legendary par-three course. Surrounded by the most manicured grounds in the country, this was Ikes Augusta White House. A gold eagle sits above the front porch.

Ikes influence is on display everywhere at Augusta. In the pro shop stands an old-fashioned, highly polished cracker barrel, a gift to Ike from his Treasury secretary George Humphrey in honor of the many discussions they had about life and national affairs at the golf course. Humphrey told the president their talks reminded him of the old days, when men sat talking around a potbelly stove with a cracker barrel nearby, from which they would grab handfuls of soda crackers for sustenance. Thereafter, while Ike was president, the cracker barrel at Augusta was fully stocked.

This homey quality, with the ghosts of the past in the air, was resonant in Ikes Cabin. Restless and more than a little awestruck to spend the night there, I poured a glass of wine in the evening and began to wander around the house. I could feel Ikes presence in the cozy, lived-in quality of the place, the personal artifacts and books still on the shelves, and a painting by the president, an amateur artist, that hung above the fireplace, depicting the sixteenth holea par-three where more than one Masters had taken a thrilling turn: Jack Nicklaus drained a forty-foot putt there in 1975 on his way to a win over Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller; Nicklaus stuffed a five-iron to within two feet in 1986 en route to another birdie and his sixth win; Seve Ballesteros four-putted the sixteenth green in 1988 in a failed bid for a green jacket; and perhaps the most famous shot of all at 16 came from Tiger Woods in 2005, when he holed a seemingly impossible chip shot from well off the green while CBS announcer Verne Lundquist made the call as the ball rolled toward the cup, hung on the edge, and then dropped into the holeHere it comes... Oh My Goodness... Oh WOW! In your life have you seen anything like that!?

I know my Masters history, but what I came to realize that night was how much I didnt understand about President Eisenhower. Soon I found myself totally immersed in what I can only describe as the spirit of Ike. This was new for me. Born a decade after Eisenhower left office, I had never given his administration a lot of consideration. Like most of my generation, I thought the world skipped a beat during Ikes years, in its eagerness to move onaccepting JFKs claim of the torch having been passed. By the time I came along, we had turned yet another page and were well into Nixons first term.

My night at the Eisenhower Cabin changed that. It was ironic it happened on a golf course, really the golf course, given all the jokes about Ikes devotion to and even obsession with the sport. What wasnt surprising was that a television news anchor would be drawn to the original broadcast president. Eisenhower held the first televised news conference in 1955 and was the first president to be videotaped and broadcast in color, in 1958.

Thinking about Ike, I sensed there was an untapped wellspring behind the faade. So there I was, getting ready to play what was for me a historic round of golf, where each shot on the course triggered a replay inside my head of a Masters gone by, and I was steeped in another history from more than fifty years ago. I knew there was more to be mined; I just didnt know what.

As I played, I admired the Eisenhower Tree, a sixty-five-foot loblolly pine located on the seventeenth hole. Ike hated that tree because he hit it so many times while playing. He even proposed that it be cut down, a suggestion that horrified the club chairman. Nature eventually did the job for him. Nearly a year after my visit, an ice storm damaged the tree so badly it had to be taken down. Today, a beautiful, glass-encased cross section stands in the lobby of the Eisenhower Library, and another at the members guest area at Augusta National.