We welcome to the distinguished forum dwight d. Eisenhower president of the United States of america. [cheering and applause] this happy occasion preserves unbroken tradition which began with president Theodore Roosevelt and the great has undressed this audience and tonight we welcome the man whom history will record as [inaudible] of great leader in the worlds hour of greatest needs. [applause] i have in mind communist aggression as millions of people were developed behind the farreaching iron curtain and i have [inaudible] the inflation in our homelands eating up the savings of an and who will be claimed by generations as the man who laid the foundations of peace. [applause] and more he is our president who we love with a deep and abiding affection. [applause] spirit welcome to the club im George Hammond which is put together todays program and along with this staff at the Commonwealth Club. We are happy to put together all these online programs weve done dozens and dozens of them since the covid crisis began and its to my great pleasure to introduce Susan Eisenhower who is a granddaughter of president eisenhower and has written a great book how ike led. Its like a you to spy plane overview of the soul consoles that led his presidency but with a little young girls point view on the man himself and is quite accommodation and combination because its accommodation that lived your life and political analyst et cetera but in addition to that you knew him personally for many, many years. He didnt pass away until you are already in college or around that age, right . Yes. So welcome everybody and we will get started to talk about president eisenhower for those of you who arent familiar with the dates he was president from 1953 until 1961 and jfk was a present right after words and he was the supreme allied commander during world war ii. Susan, first of all, thank you for joining us from afar on our online world that weve all recognized can happen much more easily than we thought. But tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write the book because youve been working in this field for a long time as a political consultant et cetera an advisor and you decided to write about your own grandfathers work and it must have been interesting to try to be objective and subject at the same time but you did it successfully and it cannot have been easy. Well, george, thank you so much for the opportunity at the Commonwealth Club and i had the wonderful opportunity of presenting two of my other books at the club in years past so its great to be back in to talk about this. Yes, i think the question is a very interesting one and maybe as part of the disclaimer for our discussion this evening i should say that as a kid i was really raised to compartmentalize what i knew about his politics and about the period in which he governed about the issues that he dealt with and on the other side our relationship with him as a grandparent. This book is really of a marriage of those two things as you said and its quite an experience for me to put it together in one place because i was continually struck by how we were doing certain things as a family and he was dealing with some of these crises so that was interesting. The impetus for why to do it now revolved around three events, i guess but one is the subject that of the anniversary of the end of world war ii just well, certainly be be a day is about to occur but of course we had the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in europe and back in may of this year. Secondly the eisenhower memorial in washington dc will be dedicated on september 17 in a much more scaledback version of its original self but it will nevertheless be open to the public after that date. And finally, we are going into Election Year and there is always a lot of thinking about the presidency as the most important for your election occurs and so i thought that i can add something to say to us today and i guess thats the reason i put it together. He really did. Obviously you took it from that angle but there are so many different elements that were so interesting today and one applicable is one that i thought was its a small tangent but there were people who said in 1956 that were against him being reelected is saying we will actually be electing Richard Nixon and you will not be electing eisenhower because eisenhower is sick and heart attacks and so on and Richard Nixon will soon be the present but the saving going on today in the Democratic Party people are saying right and never be president in a month or two and youre really electing Kamala Harris and i think that keeps getting thrown out at people. I will not speculate on whether there is a difference in approach but eisenhower is very conscious of what it would be to be a diminished president and we have to remember that president wilson was almost a scandal but people in that country did not know how ill that president was so ike was determined not to find himself in that situation for the good of the country and after he had three illnesses during his presidency and after each one of them he would get himself a very arduous task like around the world trip or a trip to europe that requires lots of meetings and lots of stress and always tells that if i dont perform a toplevel you have to tell me because i will resign. In any case that never happened and he became actually rather adroit at managing his time and managing his stress and generally positioning himself to get through his second term. It was interesting because doctors lied to him about the helium thing so he didnt think it was a serious so that he might have made a did different decision if they had warned him about that and i thought that was interesting. One of the biggest decisions about running for second term, as you point out is 9055 and he had a doctor named Howard Schneider and although they were devoted friends and have come together in one form or another since the war Howard Schneider drove him up the wall because first of all, he hovered and he came up with all sorts of things eisenhower was not allowed to do, including watching the armynavy Football Game because Howard Snyder decided it would raise the president s blood pressure, you know, i really did care about the outcome and i think it was Howard Schneider was part of the team that kind of wasnt actually really very direct with the president about his daily i just situation. Back to his earlier question ike was not going to be a diminished president and so he might well have decided a different way but i think he really at the end of the day my grandmother intervened for the first time i think since the early part of their marriage and encouraged them to run again because she thought that he would probably die of another heart attack watching everything from the sideline. [laughter] thats a tough one. Watch out for that blood pressure. I find it interesting the way your grandmothers decision was much more easy to understand the doctors decision was this was a guide making all the decisions about the war in korea and about this and all these Big Decisions and youre worried about him watching the Football Game so even if you take this too seriously it seemed ludicrous. I told that story in the book in the context of how that often warps the relationship you have with other people and it doesnt mean that it makes them terrible but it does change things and the doctors for some reason and i love this expression, actually tried to handle this man which would only make him more wound up i am sure because seeing one guy who is used to making decisions and looked perfectly capable of facing any difficult news and as a matter fact in his last years of life i saw this so often how brave he was and already he was to take whatever was coming and as a matter fact even volunteered for some rather exotic treatments for his condition because he thought it might help people after he was gone but this wasnt anybody you werent straight forward with. I just want to say that for the record. Yeah, its a good transition because before we get to the big issues that he faced and we can talk about these personal relationships he had in the front gypsy hat and the people that kept him and his family in his own relationship and pictures to show which include pictures of yourself with him when you were younger so we will get those up on the screen. There is the picture we been showing and this is him later on in the world of world war ii. Yes, this is taken in 1945 and during that time he does fifth star and i think i think he looks tired though and i dont know if you would agree but he looks content. If the picture were polling you would see that hes only wearing a single bar of ribbons and he was not one to walk around like a soviet general with metal all the way down to their ways. I like this picture because i think he looks approachable so i would say tired and thats got to be a fairly accurate assessment since its impossible to know how you can be working 100 hours a week or 130 hours a week up all night, up in the middle of the night and not come out for a three year stint like that really, you know, deeply tired. And 45 how old was he, he was born in. He was born in 1890. He was 55 years old. As a matter of fact if you look at pictures when he was president from the university he looks younger than he does in that picture even though it was another five years later. Well, he gave a lot of energy. The next picture is a picture of you. Well this is you as a teenager with a horse, right . Is there a horse in that picture . I cant see it from here. Perfect. I became an amateur photographer and we have in our family collection all sorts of homemade things and what i like about that picture is somebody else took a picture of like taking a picture of me and i dont know but every time i see this picture it makes me smile because of the baldhead of his as my graham mother always said she loved to roll over at night and pat is little baldhead. But yeah, theres a horse in the picture if if its from that standpoint i cant quite see it but i was a horseback rider and so this is a bond we had because he loved horses. The only animals on his farm he indulged in any way, shape or form in he was cattle and he certainly did not like barnyard cats but he loved these horses and i think its a rather sweet picture. You have a short story in your book about when you were 11 and your horse got away and you just put in the putting green and his special putting green and tell that story because it shows your relationship nicely. While, i think the story says a lot about ikes compassion in my lifetime guilt because he just put in a putting green and put the putting green and because he wanted to make some privacy while he makes putting privacy because he had to go to his country club which he enjoyed doing and seeing people but there wasnt actually any privacy because they came out to watch golf and so one evening i was like pad locking the gate and five of the horses on the farm pushed against the gate sort of almost knocked me over and then went running all around the lawn in front of my parents grandparents sitting area where they always sat in the evening and all five of these horses were running around like crazy and circling here and going there and then made a huge sweep across the golf green and i was more than in a state of panic and everybody came out of the field, field hands, secret service, and we were trying to round up these animals. We finally did and then i had to go and face the music. Not only had they ruined my grandfathers golf green but i was late for dinner. [laughter] this was one of those moments in childhood you dont forget. I walked in and he always sat in that swivel chair and he swiveled around and looked to me and said you know what i said to ran mother and ive not seen horses run like that since i was a kid in kansas. Of course, i apologized after that but i never heard of it again and it was a very smart move on his part because the guilt would be lingering. I was careful never to make a mistake like that again. He was very nice not to bring it up or to hold it against me or hope for old over my head because i knew i think he knew i was devastated when do it again. One of those classic experiences in the disney cartoon for turlington that the child makes the mistake of your response fully and in the ones where the parents are good they do what i did and whether they were bad they look like a witch so. George, i would add one more thing that i had the great good sense to apologize profusely and take full response fully and i think that it went down very well and i fear i would had have had a sycophant ongoing lecture about personal account ability had i not done so. But you have not learned that lesson. Here he is and is painting a picture and i assume that youre in that picture. You can see from the postcard he standing that its my mother and three of my four siblings and my youngest sister was born in 1955 after that portrait was painted but it was taken at camp david and i guess one of the helpers at camp david came in and took a picture of him doing that but you know, he took up painting actually after the war and he sort of followed Winston Churchills example and was intrigued by how much painting the Prime Minister did while he was trying to get his head together and then also his own portrait painter gave him some oil paints as a present and ike took it up then and then became early very attached because he found it centered him and while he was concentrating on the painting he was allowing his mind to work through some very difficult problems. Yet, you have a short story of the book about how he led an exhibit at an art museum and told someone that there was only one reason they would be shown here and that was because i was president. Yet, they never gave a guy like me an exhibit for painting that look like this but exactly but he was very modest. Unlike churchill who really took his painting so seriously that he wanted to be regarded almost as a professional ike did it to give away gifts and gave cabinet members paintings of them and he painted all his wartime colleagues and he even painted Prince Charles and princess and for the queen of england and always was full of apologies for their execution but i think he has some talent. We have a picture here of what he did with churchill. The picture of churchill. Thats the next picture. Its quite talented. Its not amateur. Not bad. The other charming thing about this painting is that he actually was able to present it to Prime Minister churchill when churchill when he just stepped down but was visiting in the United States and there is a wonderful picture of churchill looking it over like you know, churchill the painter would. [laughter] ike also painted field Marshal Bernard law montgomery who was one of his, one of the big personalities that he worked with during world war ii and its a lovely, lovely painting that hangs today in the british industry in washington dc. You said its one of the most interesting personalities. They got along but they were enemies too. In the next picture is one he gave to you, the next painting. Theres a story with this one, right . There is a story about this one. I often stood behind him when he was the easel and in addition to his retirement years he always insisted on having a studio somewhere nearby so the white house was on the second floor overlooking Lafayette Park and it was around that time that i was standing behind him admiring his work and this was the landscape i dont know what the scene is and as i said before, he painted usually from postcards and these landscapes he did were always serene and its been noted that theres something ironic about it because probably every brushstroke is full of some kind of turbulence he is trying to make sense of and this painting at the bottom is dated 1957 and in 1957 many things happened but i was intrigued when i looked at the back of it because it says to susan 1958. That means its likely a painting that was done first of all during the little rock crisis when eisenhower said the 100 First Airborne Division to desegregate the Rock High School and to escort nine africanamericans to start school in that september and then right after that of course was sputnik soviet union launched the first artificial satellite or i should say [inaudible] so i look at this painting and think those brushstrokes must have, you know, provided some relief during those times of great controversy and crises. We will go back to that and people talk about october surprises and and 9056 your grandfather certainly got two huge ones but we will look at the pictures and by the way, for the audience if you have any questions send them into the chat room and we will ask and we got yours gary and well get to the korean conflict a little later. Next picture is that is you . Thats me. I look like im terribly thoughtful and he looks very kind and i like that picture because ive always wanted people to know that he has some very, very tough decisions is a very dark times during our history when he think about what he saw and what he had to order during the war but you know he never became hard or cynical. I think is both a Family Member and as an analyst i think its remarkable and it says a lot about his character. It seems to be one of the hardest things to do is to make those decisions and we will get to d date later to know that that is the best so many people will die and at the worst you know you dont even succeed at what youre trying to commish and even more people will die. People who made those decisions for us i think it is wise that they get admired for decades and even centuries to calm because its so crucial and at your grandfather was certainly one of those great next picture. Couple pictures of him, i think. Heres a picture of him as a young man on a Baseball Team so you could see him before he was bald. [laughter] yeah, thats right. I was looking and ive always liked to see that ike had a full head of hair so he, george, maybe you could just describe which one he is because im not sure thats right. Okay. This was the