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Opening the Door. For his fight to balance the budget. President Eisenhower had a new team working with him. To help him formulate policy, there was Treasury Secretary Anderson, a strong man who, unlike Humphrey, would not consider undercutting the President's program. To help the President sell his program to Congress, there was Major General Wilton B. ("Jerry") Persons, a genial, Scotch-sipping and thoroughly efficient Alabaman who succeeded flinty Sherman Adams as chief of the White House staff. Where Sherman Adams had long been a congressional cuss word, Jerry Persons was a longtime congressional favorite. Where Adams had let the merest handful of visitors get past him to see the President, Persons began opening the door. "This place is becoming a madhouse,'' said one White House staffer—but the result was to let the warm personality of Dwight Eisenhower take wider and greater effect on his influential visitors. Persons also began sending Republican Senators lists of all available patronage posts —and party morale took a quantum leap.
On Capitol Hill itself, there was another new team. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen succeeded California's obstructionist William Fife Knowland as Senate Republican leader, and Knowland had been as inept a leader as was ever inflicted upon a President. In the House, Indiana's Charles Halleck, with White House blessings, ousted Massachusetts' aging Joe Martin as Minority leader, soon proved himself a whiplashing, gut-fighting leader who would go down the line for the Administration.
With Anderson, Persons, Halleck and Dirksen giving him incalculable aid, Ike adeptly forced his balanced budget upon the overwhelmingly Democratic 86th Congress. His sharpest instrument was his veto power; five times so far this year, the President vetoed measures he considered extravagant, and each time he made his veto stick. By mid-session, even as Senate Democratic Leader Lyndon Johnson was grumbling about "vetoes, vetoes, vetoes," the Democratic congressional leadership threw in the towel, began working for legislation close enough to the President's own spending recommendations to escape the veto. At that point, the Eisenhower budget battle was won.
Man of Habit. That victory could hardly have been achieved by the enfeebled sort of fellow that Ike was still pictured, in some circles, as being. In fact, allowing for the natural increment of years, he was the Dwight Eisenhower of the days before his heart attack. His weight stood at 174 Ibs., just 2 Ibs. over his best football weight at West Point. His blood pressure held at a healthy 140/80. He continued to take anticoagulant drugs, held to a low-fat diet, but felt free to wander into the kitchen of his Gettysburg farm to order "nice fresh corn" for lunch. His habits, too, were those of the same old Ike. He arose at 7 or 7:15 each morning, showered, shaved, had a small steak for breakfast, and was at his desk by 8 or 8:15. After lunch, he took an hour-long nap, then worked until 5:30, downed a Scotch highball before dinner, often returned to his work at night. Usually in bed by 10:30, he often relaxed—as he had during the days of World War II decisions—with western novels, preferably those of Red Reeder, Luke Short and Max Brand, to "shut off the mind and stop the thinking process."