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Such confidence in Eisenhower the President—as opposed to Ike the friend—had been strangely long in coming. Only a few weeks ago, much of the European press—and especially the British press—was still painting Dwight Eisenhower as a weak President, racked by illness, sapped by age and barely able to carry on. Indeed, long after it should have known better, part of the U.S. press had been describing Ike in similar terms. The dismal picture of President Eisenhower had its basis in the three major illnesses he suffered in three successive years, illnesses that could only detract from his energies and subtract from his performances. But the image of the sick and dispirited Eisenhower lingered on long after the reality of dramatic recovery.
How strongly—and how quickly—President Eisenhower came back from that low period is a fact of history only recently achieving general recognition.
Down to Milestone. It was in September 1955, with the U.S. economy flourishing and the nation filled with a confidence he had helped create, that Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. In June 1956, not long back on the job, he underwent surgery for ileitis. The months after that must have seemed to Ike just one damn thing after another. Overwhelmingly reelected, he had no sooner presented his program than his respected Treasury Secretary George Humphrey undercut him by publicly blurting out fears about a "hair-curling" depression; Ike failed to rebuke Humphrey, and the year's legislative battles were fought on the Humphrey, not the Eisenhower line. At Little Rock the President had the sad duty of sending federal troops into a state capital. And in those crowded days of September-October 1957, Sputnik I cast a dark shadow across the whole range of U.S. life, from national defense to scientific education. To cap it all off, in November the President suffered a minor stroke, and there were flat suggestions that he resign from office.
Briefly, the President rallied: less than three weeks after his stroke, he flew to Paris to attend a NATO conference. In a strong State of the Union message, he mobilized the nation to meet the challenge of Sputnik. But now the recession was coming closer to home—3,400,000 unemployed in December; 4,500,000 in January; 5,100,000 in February. Wearily, Dwight Eisenhower flew to George Humphrey's Milestone Plantation in Georgia, sat before a fire for the best part of seven days, made no pretense at performing presidential functions (TIME, March 3, 1958). It was the low point of his career.
But Milestone Plantation was also the turning point—upward. The President still had his share of troubles, including "the most hurtful, the hardest, the most heartbreaking'' decision of all: asking the resignation of his staff chief, Sherman Adams, who had accepted hotel hospitality and gifts, including a vicuña coat, from finagling Boston Industrialist Bernard Goldfine. But in much more important areas, he returned from Milestone Plantation ready, as he had not been since his heart attack, to follow the creed of Theodore Roosevelt: "Here is the task. I have got to do it."