THERE was a refreshing remoteness about life last week at Milestone Plantation, 35 miles south of Moultrie, Ga.: no newsmen, no demanding photographers, no jangling telephones or weighty conferences. By day the good friends played golf or shot quail; in the evenings they played bridge. If there was any shop talk—Berlin, the budget, the missile gap—the talk was initiated by one man, and one man alone; his friends knew better than to broach such subjects of their own accord. And when the brief vacation ended and the friends returned to their homes, not one of them would think of hinting at the one man's golf score or his bridge luck to anyone outside the circle.
Such is the character of Dwight Eisenhower's sternly preserved, jealously pursued privacy that, save for his own family, he feels truly at home only with a small group of friends who have nothing to do with the running of the Government and who enjoy being with him even though he is President of the U.S. Three of them were with Ike on his getaway to Milestone. Host was Millionaire Industrialist (National Steel) and Plantation Owner George Humphrey, 68, who met the President in 1952, when Ike's friend and Cabinet-hunting Talent Scout Lucius Clay recommended him for the job of Secretary of the Treasury; Humphrey has become a close friend only since leaving Washington. The other two inner-circle guests were Barry Leithead, 51, president of Cluett Peabody & Co. (Arrow Shirts), who has known Ike since he was president of Columbia University, and Coca-Cola Co. Board Chairman William E. Robinson, 58, onetime advertising executive and publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, who met Ike when he was in Europe in 1944 on a State Department mission.
The Need. Humphrey, Leithead and Robinson are among the few men who provide the kind of genial company that answers Ike's need simply to be himself. Another is Manhattan Broker Clifford J. Roberts, 65. partner in Reynolds & Co.,* who met Ike at the Augusta National Golf Club (which Roberts helped found), was a big wheel in the pre-campaign Citizens-for-Eisenhower movement. Cities Service Chairman W. Alton Jones, 67, also a New York friend, got to know Ike when he was at Columbia.
One of the best-known members of the circle is bubbly, clowning George Allen, 62, Washington businessman (real-estate, insurance), long-famed crony of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Allen was a wartime Red Cross representative in London when he met Ike, later got the general to buy the Gettysburg farm, near Allen's own place. Of the few other members of the private group, only one is a fellow West Pointer: General Alfred Gruenther, 59, a brilliant military mind (and expert bridge player), who worked with the President when they were on war maneuvers in Louisiana in 1941, later took command after Ike and Matthew Ridgway at SHAPE.