In new book, David Eisenhower, wife Julie mine memories of Ike's twilight years
In 1969, Richard Nixon was eager to spend time at the Catoctin Mountains retreat reserved exclusively for the fraternal order he had just joined: U.S. presidents. His daughter Julie accompanied him as he whisked into the secluded sylvan enclave, where a jarringly simple sign announced their arrival in "Camp 3."
What happened to "David"? The disappearance of that name erased a dictate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the GOP general Nixon had served as vice president. It was also a dismissal of the tribute Ike had paid to his grandson, whom Julie Nixon had just married. "I tell ya -- within one hour, they found the shed," Julie recalls over coffee one afternoon with her husband at their suburban Philadelphia home. "My dad got the sign back up." There would be no doubt when future visitors arrived: This place was Camp David.
Nixon's gesture further sealed a unique bond between two presidential families that are still linked four decades later in America's collective memory as a love-locked dynasty. American presidents come and go, but the fascination with their family trees endures. The presidential family diaspora carries with it many obligations, perceived and unperceived, imposed and organic. There are kin who buff legacies and kin who stain them. There are kin who demand attention and kin who disappear.
And then there are the archivists, the accumulators of arcana and tidbits, a particular breed of presidential kin that gathers and collates, often as part of a very public exercise in trying to understand the very non-public selves of their unknowable forebears. These days, David Eisenhower -- a Pulitzer finalist for his 1986 book, "Eisenhower at War" -- and his wife aspire to be this last kind of presidential kin. Julie chimed in three years ago with the book, "Pat Nixon: The Untold Story." And now she has collaborated with her husband in a reminiscence about Ike's retirement years, the just-released "Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life With Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 to 1969."...
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What happened to "David"? The disappearance of that name erased a dictate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the GOP general Nixon had served as vice president. It was also a dismissal of the tribute Ike had paid to his grandson, whom Julie Nixon had just married. "I tell ya -- within one hour, they found the shed," Julie recalls over coffee one afternoon with her husband at their suburban Philadelphia home. "My dad got the sign back up." There would be no doubt when future visitors arrived: This place was Camp David.
Nixon's gesture further sealed a unique bond between two presidential families that are still linked four decades later in America's collective memory as a love-locked dynasty. American presidents come and go, but the fascination with their family trees endures. The presidential family diaspora carries with it many obligations, perceived and unperceived, imposed and organic. There are kin who buff legacies and kin who stain them. There are kin who demand attention and kin who disappear.
And then there are the archivists, the accumulators of arcana and tidbits, a particular breed of presidential kin that gathers and collates, often as part of a very public exercise in trying to understand the very non-public selves of their unknowable forebears. These days, David Eisenhower -- a Pulitzer finalist for his 1986 book, "Eisenhower at War" -- and his wife aspire to be this last kind of presidential kin. Julie chimed in three years ago with the book, "Pat Nixon: The Untold Story." And now she has collaborated with her husband in a reminiscence about Ike's retirement years, the just-released "Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life With Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 to 1969."...