Relaxing in the White House living quarters one night last week, the President answered a phone call from an aide in the executive wing. The message: Ike's ailing eldest brother Arthur, 71, who retired from the banking and grain-financing business in 1956, had just collapsed and died of a heart attack in his home in Kansas City, Kans. Moments later, the President's youngest brother* Milton president of Johns Hopkins University, phoned from Baltimore with the same news.
The brothers agreed to wait until Arthur's widow, Louise Grieb Eisenhower, completed funeral plans before deciding what to do. Next morning the President postponed a scheduled press conference and a formal dinner for Chief Justice Earl Warren. But he went ahead with a perfunctory ceremony observing the tenth anniversary of the Smith-Mundt Act permanently establishing the Voice of America. Unintended high point: when South Dakota's irrepressible Senator Karl Mundt produced a ten-year-old picture of General Eisenhower plumping for the bill, burbled, "You haven't changed a bit, Mr. President." Squinting hard at the photo, the President muttered a disbelieving "Oh, bro-ther."
Call the Cops! Afterward, Kansas City called again. Louise Eisenhower wanted the funeral service in Kansas City, the burial in suburban Hartsdale, N.Y. The President asked Milton to come down from Baltimore, join him in a one-day trip to Kansas City on the Columbine.
At 8 a.m., to avoid rush-hour tie-ups on the Potomac River bridges, they boarded a Marine Corps helicopter on the White House south lawn in Ike's first such use of a whirlybird. They touched down 3½ minutes later at National Airport. On the flight out, Columbine Pilot Lieut. Colonel William Thomas learned that the Kansas City Municipal Airport was fogged in, instead put down at the Naval Air Station in Olathe, Kans. Startled Navy officials hastily assembled a motorcade of staff cars, managed to get the President and Milton into a Navy Chevrolet for the 27-mile ride into Kansas City. On the way a motorcycle escort kicked up such noise that an unidentified excitable citizen called a radio station, which soon broadcast that Nebraska Teen-Age Murderer Charles Starkweather (see Crime) was hightailing through town ahead of the cops.
At the Arthur Eisenhower home, a low stone ranch house in the expensive Mission hills district, curious neighbors clustered to see the two Eisenhower brothers, in dark blue overcoats and Homburgs, go up the walk, step inside and give their coats to a maid. Brother Earl, who had planned to meet them at the airport, had arrived ten minutes earlier. After chatting quietly for 25 minutes, the family drove to the Stein & McClure funeral chapel. There, in a curtained-off alcove out of sight of 200 mourners, they heard the Rev. Donald O'Connor of the Kansas City-founded Unity Society of Practical Christianity eulogize Arthur Eisenhower as "mild-mannered, even-tempered, humble . . . one of the top experts in the country in the grain and milling business."