Spring Vacation

One afternoon last week a shining Lockheed Lodestar settled on to the broad runway at Daniel Field, a wartime bomber base in Augusta, Ga. Out of the plane stepped a smiling man whose arrival three years ago would have brought the whole big base to crackling attention. Gasped an airline stewardess: "It's Ike Eisenhower!"

With Ike were his wife, onetime Democratic Handyman George Allen and his wife, and William E. Robinson, executive vice president of the Republican New York Herald Tribune. They had come to Augusta for a vacation. They stepped into a waiting car and were whisked away.

They sped over The Hill, Augusta's exclusive residential section, to the swank Augusta National Golf Club, built in the early '30s under Bobby Jones's personal direction.

Write a Letter. During the previous weekend, thousands of visitors had been welcomed at the club to watch the famed Masters' Tournament (TIME, April 19). Now, as Ike and George vanished behind the club's waist-high thorn hedge, every visitor was politely turned back at the entrance by a uniformed Pinkerton guard. Anyone who asked to communicate with Ike was told to write him a letter.

The Augusta Chronicle sent a reporter and a photographer to try for an interview; they were not even allowed out of their car. When the Chronicle's Managing Editor Louis J. Harris tried, the Pinker-tons stopped him 50 feet short of the clubhouse. He yelled for the club's manager, who told him that the General was not to be disturbed and ordered him off the grounds.

Major General Raymond O. Barton, a West Point classmate of Ike's, now retired and living in Augusta, got the same treatment when he called to pay his respects. He had to wire for a pass to get through the gold-plated blockade.

Behind the blockade and the club's magnificent stand of magnolias, Ike and his party relaxed. They were quartered in Bobby Jones's white-frame cottage. General Ike got in a few licks at his hobby, oil painting. In the evening, the women slipped downtown to a movie, while the men played bridge with Clifford Roberts, chairman of the club's executive committee, and shot the breeze. One morning Ike gleefully sank a birdie 2 on the short fourth hole, finished the round with a creditable 94.

Run for Food. On the fourth day, Ike relaxed the security sufficiently to allow photographers to take pictures. He posed in a raucous red and black plaid jacket, called it "the Maclke tartan." But he turned down reporters' gambits on politics with a firm: "Not even no comment on no comment." Then, indicating a table being set for lunch, he grinned and cracked: "You can say I'm running for food." Roly-poly George Allen, his spirits dampened by a strict diet, was even more uncommunicative.

At week's end, the curtain clanged down again. Ike had said he would stay at Augusta for another 10 days. Meanwhile, political dopesters buzzed with comment. Was George Allen, who had successfully hitched himself to the coattails of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, getting his grip on Ike's? Had he brought Ike a significant message from Truman? Had the next President of the U.S. been named on the Augusta National Golf Club's 18th green? Or--and this is what set the dopesters' teeth on edge--was it possible that Ike and Georgie had gone to Augusta just to play golf?

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