At 8 o'clock on a miserable, sleeting Washington morning last week, a telephone alert went out through the White House. Presidential Secretary Ann Whitman glanced around her desk to make certain everything was ready; ushers and doormen snapped to attention. Down in an elevator from his living quarters, out through a rear door and across the Rose Garden to his office in the west wing came Dwight Eisenhower. The President of the U.S. was working back into a full-time schedule—and hardly had he sat down at his desk than the babble of speculation about his political intentions grew even louder.
For the President, it was clearly a time of testing, as much a part of his medically prescribed regimen as his four weeks of bed rest and his three months of gradual convalescence. He was on a six-hour daily work schedule, with two hours off for lunch and midday rest. Into his office throughout the week paraded a succession of important callers: Secretary of State Dulles (twice alone and once with others), Attorney General Brownell (to discuss the President's upcoming message on changes in immigration laws), Economic Advisers Arthur Burns and Gabriel Hauge, Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss and National Security Aide Dillon Anderson (to talk about getting the President's atoms-for-peace program back on the international track), Defense Mobilization Chief Arthur Flemming, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson and Republican congressional leaders (for an 80-minute conference in which the President urged high priority for his farm-policy recommendations).
"Excellent Condition." There was satisfying evidence of work done. The President appointed an eight-man watchdog committee, headed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology President James R. Killian Jr., to examine and report on the work of the U.S. intelligence agencies. He sent to Congress a message proposing a fiveyear, $2 billion federal aid program for public-school construction. He asked Congress to appropriate $60 million for flood relief. He accepted the resignation of Treasury Under Secretary H. Chapman Rose, who is returning to his Cleveland law practice. He welcomed back Aide Bernard Shanley, who had left the White House staff briefly during the President's illness. Shanley's main duties are to hold down the number of presidential visitors to reasonable proportions and to devise ways of easing the President's workload; e.g., when Ike last week signed documents appointing 155 persons to public office, the lists were consolidated so as to reduce the number of necessary signatures to ten. All in all it was a well-spent week, and the New York Times said happily of the President: "He is giving us the leadership. There is nothing in the messages we have had, nothing in the immediate news from Washington since Mr. Eisenhower returned from Key West, to suggest that we are being governed by a coronary occlusion."
At midweek, in his upstairs study in the White House, President Eisenhower underwent his first cardiographic and blood-analysis tests in a month. Press Secretary James Hagerty reported that the doctors had found that the President's "condition is excellent, and he benefited greatly from the exercise and relaxation" at Key West.