Eisenhower,president of the United States of america. [applause] this happy occasion preserves unbroken, a tradition which began with president theodore roosevelt. The great and the near great have addressed this audience. And tonight we welcome the man whom history will record as preeminent among World Leaders in our of greatest need. [applause] i have in mind the rapid ascension of communist aggression as millions of people were enveloped the hide of farreaching iron curtain. I have in mind the stalemate of futility in korea, the rampaging inflation in our homeland which was eating up the savings of the many and troubling thevoters of our Free Enterprise economy. Here then is the man trained in war who will be acclaimed by future generations as the man who laid the foundation of peace. [applause] and more, he is our president whom we love with adeep and abiding affection. [applause] [music] welcome to the Commonwealth Club, im George Hammond chair of the Humanities Forum that put together todays program along with the staff at the Commonwealth Club, the staff had something to put together all these online programs. Weve done dozens of them since the crisis began and its my great pleasure to introduce Susan Eisenhower who is here with us today. She is the granddaughterof president eisenhower and shes written a great book, how i lead. Its like a spy plane view of the principles that led his presidency but with a young girls point of view on the man himself and its really quite accommodation and its a nice combination because its also the combination that you live your life because youre a political analyst etc. , youve lived your life this way but in addition to the to that you know him personally for many years. He didnt pass away until you were already in college or around the age, right . So welcome everybody and were going to get started to talk about president eisenhower. For those of you who are familiar with the dates he was president from 1953 until 1961. Jfk was the president afterwards and he was the supreme allied commander during world war ii so susan, first of all thank you very much for joining us from afar in our online world that we all recognize can happen much more easily than we thought. But tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write the book. Youve been working in this field for a long time as a political consultant etc. And advisor and you decided to write about your own grandfathers work. It must have been interesting to try to be objective and subjective at the same time. You did its successfully but it couldnt have been easy. First of all let me thank you so much for the opportunity to be back at the Commonwealth Club. I had the wonderful opportunity of preventing resenting two of my other books at the club in years past so its great to be back and to talk about this and yes, i think the question is an interesting one. Maybe as part of the disclaimer for our discussion this evening i should say that as a kid i was really worried to compartmentalize what i knew about his politics. About that periods in which he governed, about the. He dealt with and on the other side our relationship with him as a grandparent so this book is really a marriage of those two things as you said and it was 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 crisis so that was interesting. The impetus for y to do it now revolved around three events i guess. One isthe 75th anniversary of the end of world war ii , certainly vj day is about to occur but we had of course the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in europe. Back in may of this year. Secondly, the eisenhower memorial in washington dc will be dedicated on september 17th in a much more scaledback version of its original self but it will nevertheless be open to the public after thatdate and finally , were going into an Election Year and theres always a lot of thinking about the presidency as the most important for your election occurs. And so i thought that i had, ike had something to say tous today and i guess thats the reason i put it together. I found that i, obviously you took it from that angle but there were so many different elements that were so interesting today. One of them that i thought, this is a small side tangent but there were people who said in 1956 that were against him being reelected saying youre going to actually be electing Richard Nixon, youre not going to be electing eisenhower because eisenhower is sick, hes had a heart attacks and so on and pretty soon Richard Nixon will be president. Same thing is going on in the democratic party. People say biden will never be president for more than a month or two so youre really electing Kamala Harris and im interested that keeps being thrown out at people im not speculating whether theres a difference in approach but eisenhower was conscious of what it would be to be adiminished president. We have to remember president wilson was really almost a scandal but people in the country didnt 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 give himself a very arduous test, like around the world trip or a trip to europe that required lots of meetings and lots of stress and he always would tell his advisors if i dont perform at the top level, you have to tell me becausethen ill resign. In any case, that never happened. He became actually rather adroit at managing his time, managing his stress and generally positioning himself to get through his second term. It was interesting, also a small tangent but that the doctors lied to him about the ilium thing so he didnt think it was as serious andhe kind of thought he made have made a different decision if they had warned him about it. I thought that was interesting. One of the biggest decisions about running for second term as you point out is he had a heart attack in 1955 and he had had a doctor named general Howard Snyder and although they were devoted friends and they been together in one form or another since the war, Howard Schneider actually drove granddad up the wall. He does first of all, he hovered. He came up with all certain things eisenhower wasnt allowed to do including watching the armynavy Football Game because Howard Snyder decided it was going to raise thepresident blood pressure. Ike really did care about the outcome of that game. And so it was, i think Howard Snyder was part of the team that kind of wasnt actually very direct with the president about his iliitis situation and ike was not going to be adiminished president so he might well have decided differently. 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 encouraged him to run again because they thought he would die of another heart attack watching everything from the sidelines. You got to watch out for the high blood pressure. I find it interesting the way your grandmothers decision was more easy to understand. The doctors decision, this was the guy was making all thosedecisions about the war in korea. All these Big Decisions and youre worried about him watching a Football Game. Even if he takes it too seriously it seemed a little bit ludicrous. I told that story in the book in the context of how an extraordinary amount of power, how that often warps the relationship you have with other people. It does not mean that it makes them terrible but it does change things and the doctors for some reason, i love this expression actually tried to handle this man which would only make him more wound up im sure because he was a guy who was used to making Big Decisions and was perfectly capable of facing any difficult news. As a matter fact in his last years of life , i saw this so often how brave he was and how ready he was to take whatever was coming. As a matter of 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 he was straightforward with, i want to say that for the record. Its a good transition because before we get to the big issues that he faced, i think it would be good to talk about these personal relationships that he had. The friendships that he had, the people that kept him grounded, his family and your own relationship with him and you have pictures to show which include pictures of yourself with him when you were younger so will have to get these up on the screen. Theres a picture weve been showing. This is him right around the end of world war ii, right . This picture was taken 1945 but by that time he had had his fifth star and i think its, i think he looks tiredthough. I dont know if you agree but he looks content. If the picture were fulllength, you would see that hes wearing only a single bar of ribbons and five stars on his shoulder. He was not one to walk around like a soviet general with metals all the way down to their waist. And 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 he could be working 100 hours a week or 130 hours a week sometimes, up all night, up in the middle of the night and not come out of a threeyear stint like that really deeply tired. And at 45, how old was he . He was born in 1890. He was 55 years old. If you look at pictures when he was president of Columbia University he looks younger than he does in that picture even though it was another five years later. He gave a lot of energy so the next picture is a picture of you. Yes. This is as a teenagerwith him and a horse. Is there a horse in that picture, i cant see it from here. Perfect. Well, ike became an amateur photographer and we have in our family collection all sort of these homemade things. What i like about that picture is somebody else took a picture of ike taking a picture of me and i dont know, every time i see this picture it makes me smile because of this bald head of his as my grandmother always said she loved to roll over at night in bed and pat his little bald head. But yes, theres a horse in the picture from this standpoint i cant quite see it but i was a family horseback rider and so this is a bond we had because he loved horses. They were the only animals on his farm that he indulged in in any way shape or form. He was for cattle and he certainly didnt like barnyard cats and he loved his horses. So i think its a very sweet picture. You have a short story in your book about when you were 11 and the horses got away and he had put in a putting green. His special putting green, you might tell that story because it shows your relationship nicely. I think the story says a lot about ikes compassion and my lifetime guilt because he just put in aputting green and he put the putting green in because he wanted to have some privacy while he practices putting. Other worse, hed have had to go to thegettysburg country club which he enjoyed doing and seeing people but there wasnt actually any privacy in those events. People came out to watch him golf. So one evening i was padlocking a gate and five of the horses on the farm pushed against the gate, sort of almost knocked me over and 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 thesehorses are running around like crazy and circling here and going there. And then made a huge sweep across his golf green. And i was more than in a state of panic. Everybody came out of the field. The old hands, secretservice, everybody and we were trying to wrap up these animals. We finally did and i had to go in and face the music. Not only had they ruined my grandfathers golf green but i was late for dinner. This was one of those moments in childhood you dont forget. I walked in, he always sat in a swivel chair and he swiveled around and looked at me and said you know what i said your grandmother western mark i havent seen horses run like that since i was a kid in abilene kansas and of course i apologized after that but i never heard of it again and it was a very smart move on his part to cause the guilt would be lingering. I thought never to make a mistake like that again but he was very nice not to bring it up or to hold it against me or hold it over my head because i think he knew i was devastated and wouldnt do it again. Its one of those plastic experiences that is in a disney cartoon for children that the child makes that mistake of irresponsibility and in the ones where the parents are good, they do what ike did and when their bad look like a witch. I had one more thing, i had the great sense to apologize profusely and take full responsibility and i think that went down very well. I would have had a significant ongoing lecture about personal accountability had i not done so. But youd already learned that lesson. I learned that one already. Is, hes painting a picture. I assume youre inthat picture. You can see from the postcard hes standing in front of. Its my mother and three of my four siblings. 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 in camp david came in and took a picture of him doing that but he took up painting actually after the war, he sort of went to churchills example. He 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 i took it up then and then became really very attached this past time because he found it centered him. And while he was concentrating on the painting, he was rallying his mind to workthrough difficult problems. You have a short story in the book about how he had and it exhibited an art museum and he told somebody theres only one reason theyre being shown here andthats because i was president. They never give a guy like me and exhibit or paintings that look like this. Exactly, he was verymodest. Not like churchill really took his painting so seriously that he wanted to be regarded as a professional. I did it to give away his gifts and he gave his cabinet members paintings of them. He painted all those wartime colleagues. He actually even painted Prince Charles and princess and for the queen of england. And always was full of apologies about their execution but he had some talent i think. We have a picture here of one of churchill, the picture of churchill. Thats the next picture. Its quite talented, is not amateur. Not bad and the other charming thing about this painting is that he actually was able to present it to Prime Minister churchill when churchill, he had just stepped down that he was visiting in the United States and there was a wonderful picture of churchill sort of looking it over life churchill the painter would. Actually, ike also painted field Marshal Bernard montgomery who was one of his , one of the big personalities he worked with during world war ii and its a lovely, lovely painting that had today in the British Embassy in washington dc. You said is one of his interesting personalities, hes sort of a friendly. They got along but they were enemies do so in the next picture is when he gave to you, the next thinking. Theres a little story with this one. Theres a story about this one area i often stood behind him when he was at the easel. He had in addition to his entire years, he always insisted on having a studio where nearby so in the white house it was on the second floor overlooking lafayette park. And it was around that time that i was standing behind him admiring his work. This is a landscape, i dont know what the scene is but as i said before, he painted usually from postcards. And they were these landscapes you were always serene. And its been noted that theres something ironic about it because probably every brushstroke is full of some kind of turbulence hes trying to make sense of. This painting at the bottom is dated 1957. And in the 1957, many things happened but i was intrigued when i looked at the back of it that it says to susan, 1958 so that means its likely a painting was done first of all during the little rock crisis when eisenhower sent 101st Airborne Division to desegregate Little Rock High School and escort nonafricanamericans to start school in september. And then right after that of course was sputnik, the soviet union launched its first artificial satellite or i should say the worlds first artificial satellite into space so i look at this painting and i think wow, those brushstrokes must have provided some relief during those times of great controversy and crisis. Going to go back to people talk about october surprises and i mean, in 1956, your grandfather certainly got to really huge ones but lets finish the pictures and then we will go ahead and by the way, for the audience if you have any questions just send them in through the chat room area and we will ask them and we got yours gary and we will get to the korean conflict a little bit later so next picture is, yes. And thats you. I look like im terribly thoughtful and he looks very kind and i like that picture because i want, ive always wanted people to know that he had some very very tough decisions and some very dark times during our history. When you think about what he saw and what he had ordered during the war, but you know he never became hard or cynical. And i think as both a Family Member and as an analyst, i think its remarkable, it says a lot about hischaracter. It seems to be one of the hardest things to do is to make those decisions and we will get the dday later to know that the best romany people will die and at the worst, you dont even succeed at what youre trying to accomplish and even more people die. The people whove made those decisions for us i think is why they get admired for decades and e