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Hughes came, wrote speeches, made notes in his diary of confidential conversations, and left. He saw Ike only a couple of more times—although he fired off several letters offering the President advice about how to run the world. At the beginning, Hughes says he had respected Ike: "Toward such a man. all kinds of dissent or doubt could conceivably be directed—except personal disrespect."
The Last Word. Hughes offers some wonderful flashes of Eisenhower. Ike waiting impatiently for Adlai Stevenson's concession of defeat on Election Night 1952: "What in God's name is the matter with that monkey." Ike fretting about riding to his inauguration with outgoing President Harry Truman: "I wonder if I can stand sitting next to him." Ike offering a definition of leadership: "You do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it's usually called 'assault.' not 'leadership.' I'll tell you what leadership is: it's persuasion —and conciliation—and education—and patience. It's long. slow, tough work. That's the only kind of leadership I know —or believe in—or will practice."
But so disgruntled is ex-Employee Hughes that, in his summing up of the Eisenhower Administration, he invokes a unanimity that excludes scores of millions of Americans: "By almost equally unanimous consensus of the national community of intellectuals and critics—journalists and academicians, pundits and prophets—his conduct of the presidency was unskillful and his definition of it inaccurate."
For his own last words about Eisenhower, Hughes quotes Winston Churchill: "The only guide to a man is his conscience: the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so mocked by the failure of our hopes; but with this shield, however the Fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor." Says Hughes: "I know that President Dwight David Eisenhower always believed this. And I believe he will be so remembered."
Churchill, as Hughes acknowledges, was not talking about Eisenhower. It was his eulogy of Neville Chamberlain.