The Youngest Brother

(See Cover)

The White House servant, tray in hand, tapped on the door of the Upstairs Red Room. Where did the guest want his breakfast served? "Would you take it to the President's room?" asked the guest. Moments later, the guest followed the servant across the hall to the spacious south bedroom occupied by the President of the U.S. He entered and found Dwight Eisenhower in shirtsleeves, already wading through the morning papers and his usual breakfast beefsteak (rare). At sight of the visitor, Ike's face broke into a grin of particular welcome. He waved his guest into one of three overstuffed chairs, and within seconds the two were deep in an informal, give-and-take discussion covering the breadth of U.S. policy.

The special guest was Milton Stover Eisenhower, 58, president of Johns Hopkins University, topflight educator, a governmental pro of 30 years' experience, youngest of the brothers Eisenhower and the man nearest to Ike in all the world.

In Heart & Mind. Dwight Eisenhower's inner circle includes such top aides as recently embattled Assistant to the President Sherman Adams, whose "OK, SA" must still go on every staff paper submitted for presidential decision (TIME, Jan. 9, 1956), and Press Secretary James Hagerty, whose job it is to ken the presidential mind (TIME, Jan. 27). On less official but equally close terms are the American Red Cross's president, General Alfred Maximilian Gruenther, speaking as an old comrade in arms, and ex-Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, for whose economic. views the President has enormous respect.

Yet none of those friends approaches the place held by Milton Eisenhower in the heart and mind of his brother Dwight. The relationship between Dwight and Milton Eisenhower can be traced in part--but only in part--by specific examples of his influence on Ike's political career and presidential administration. Items:

P: Having contributed to Dwight Eisenhower's basic, middle-road political philosophy, Milton helped persuade Ike to run for President in 1952. Again, after the President's 1955 coronary and 1956 ileitis attack, Milton, more than anyone else, helped Ike weigh the pros and cons of standing for reelection. CJ Milton advised and encouraged Dwight Eisenhower to go before the United Nations in 1953 with his historic atoms-for-peace proposal.

P: Milton Eisenhower has contributed heavily to the President's views on foreign economic policy. Says Milton: "There are manifold opportunities for economic cooperation and technical assistance, as opposed to economic support, which will help all nations, including the U.S."

P: Johns Hopkins' President Eisenhower is a key adviser to onetime Columbia University President Eisenhower in the field of education, encouraged Ike to call the 1955 White House Conference on Education, played a part in formulating this year's Administration program to provide U.S. aid to spur scientific education.

P: As the President's personal emissary to Latin America in 1953 and again this summer, Milton Eisenhower has become an expert in hemispheric relations, urged U.S. programs to help Latin America help itself.

P: A veteran Washington hand, Milton is a member of the President's keystone Advisory Committee on Government Reorganization. Even before Russia's Sputnik spun into the sky last October, Milton and Ike were deep in talks leading toward the Pentagon reorganization that passed into law this summer.

Who's Who & Why. By any standard, Milton Eisenhower is well qualified for his role. Eisenhower, Milton Stover, takes up 52 lines of Who's Who, compared to 19 for Eisenhower, Dwight David. President in his time of three schools--Kansas State College, Pennsylvania State and Johns Hopkins Universities--he has also served five Presidents of the U.S.: as Agriculture Department careerman under Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, as wartime troubleshooter for F.D.R., as labor-dispute fact finder and Government reorganizer for Harry Truman, and as Ike's most trusted, trustworthy helper.

Yet despite his credentials, Milton's place in the Eisenhower Administration has been noisily misunderstood. Milton, cried Wisconsin's Joe McCarthy, was "the real President of the U.S." Even Edgar Eisenhower, eldest of the four surviving Eisenhower brothers, has accused Milton of dragging Dwight down the primrose path of overliberalism.*

Such charges miss the mark by miles, entailing basic mistakes about Milton Eisenhower as a man and about his relationship with Ike. Shy, extremely sensitive to criticism, Milton is no man to wear his private character on his public sleeve. The man behind the maroon cover of Who's Who is no heavy-footed bureaucrat ; he plays his part in the Government with the same soft touch that he uses on the pedals of the Hammond organ in his Johns Hopkins residence--in stocking feet. Far from being a doctrinaire ax grinder, he bends over backward to present objective views to Ike. Indeed, he is most reluctant of all to give advice on the subject he knows best and feels most strongly about: agriculture.

Having suffered through the woolly-headed schemes of the New Deal Agriculture Department (he twice submitted his resignation to Henry Wallace, twice got talked out of leaving), Milton Eisenhower agrees with Republican Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson's stand against high, rigid, surplus-producing farm subsidies, has defended Benson against his critics. But not in the White House. "This," he has told the President, "is one thing on which I have definite opinions and strong views. I shouldn't be talking about the job of your Agriculture Secretary."

It is in such striving for objectivity that Milton Eisenhower is most valuable to his brother. "The President," he says, "has vast machinery to get evidence on public problems. But in this lonely job it is good for him to have someone who is a good listener and a sympathetic friend who can serve as a sounding board." By mutual consent, his role as friend and sounding board is not a matter for tabloid parade. "We have an understanding," President Eisenhower has told friends, "that we will keep each other's confidences."

Furled Sleeves in the Bedroom. Operating under that agreement, Milton Eisenhower moves constantly in and out of the White House. Last week, ready to accompany Ike to a Washington dinner, Milton wheeled his black, air-conditioned Imperial sedan into the White House driveway. Once or twice a week, he makes the 45-minute drive from Johns Hopkins to Washington. Often he stays overnight, and the Upstairs Red Room (so called to distinguish it from the main-floor parlor known as the Red Room) is generally kept ready for him. In the privacy of the presidential bedroom, the brothers can unbend over a drink or two--Scotch and soda for Ike, a bone-dry martini for Milton--furl sleeves, lounge coatless in the easy chairs and talk.

The conversations run the whole range of policy problems and mutual personal interests. Both are ardent anglers, and Milton, who trolls for walleyed pike in Wisconsin's Land O'Lakes district, gives away no points to Ike. "I am every bit as good a fisherman," he says firmly, "as my brother." Both are ferociously intense painters, Ike in oil and Milton in painstaking watercolors. Before a slipped disk took him off the fairways, Milton shot an unorthodox but Ike-worthy game of golf (high 80s). Now and then the brothers get together with friends for an evening of bridge, but Milton, who has never progressed beyond the Culbertson quick-trick count, is admittedly overmatched.

In their policy talks, neither Eisenhower is yes man to the other--although Milton would hardly dream of disputing a presidential decision, once made. The President thoroughly respects Milton's experience and skill, but far from blindly. Once, when Milton was uninhibitedly polishing a presidential speech, Ike took one look and said, gently but firmly: "That's fine. But it's not what I want to say." Again, Milton strongly objected to a pork-barreling rider attached by Congress to the $32 billion defense-appropriations bill in 1955. As a matter of constitutional principle, he advised Ike to veto the bill and "tell Congress to go to hell." But Ike, unlike Milton, has the responsibility of elective office, and he realized that the virtues of the whole bill outweighed the single objection. He signed the bill as it stood, told Milton with a grin: "Sometimes you have to rise above principle."

But even such differences of opinion are the exception in the comfortable personal and working relationship between Dwight and Milton Eisenhower. And out of that relationship has grown the feeling that once led Ike to introduce Milton as "a man of whom I've always been proud to say: 'My brother Milton.' "

Rotating Nursemaids. Milton earned his elder brother's respect the hard way. Back in Abilene, Kans., where he was born on Sept. 15, 1899, the only bonds uniting the latest arrival to his six older brothers, including Dwight, then almost nine, were those imposed by duty and family. Milton was a sore disappointment to David Jacob and Ida Stover Eisenhower, who yearned for a daughter. "My father was sorry he never had a girl," recalls brother Earl. "He used to sit on our front porch and make friends with every little girl that came by. I know he was miserable because Milton wasn't a little girl."

Milton lived through a repressed childhood, rebelling vainly under a luxuriance of shoulder-length curls, which his mother finally cut during his fifth year. The older brothers were impressed, in rotating succession, as Milton's nursemaids, a boring duty that Dwight relieved by rocking Milton's cradle with one foot while absorbed in a book. Earl, 19 months older than Milton, was held out of school for a year so that little Milton could enjoy his protective custody.

"Lions! Snakes!" Family life in the roomy, two-story house with the pillared porch flourished on a steady diet of Bible reading and chores, but when these were done, the lusty young Eisenhowers were discharged to tumble in the cavernous hayloft out back, above Uncle Abraham Eisenhower's veterinarian establishment. Milton, frail and spindly from scarlet fever in his fourth year, was a frequent outcast kibitzer, to be seized unawares by mischievous hands and flung bodily into the black haymow amid terrifying cries of "Lions! Tigers! Snakes!"

Some of the effects of Milton's childhood remain evident today. He is extremely sensitive to personal relationships and, says an old Penn State colleague, he "pathetically wants to be liked." Similarly, the butt of his brothers' childhood jokes, he still dreads being laughed at, once suffered for weeks after being unexpectedly photographed at Key West, Fla., with a vacationing Ike, in gaudy shirt and short pants.

"You're Fired." Unable to compete physically with the other brothers Eisenhower, young Milton went after recognition through mental achievement. To his surprise and surpassing pleasure, Milton found himself rising high in the esteem of brother Dwight, who rewarded Milton's scholastic accomplishments with prizes from his own slender wages at the Belle Spring Creamery. "I was tremendously impressed that Dwight wanted me to succeed," says Milton today. An Abilene schoolteacher, Annie Hopkins, was installed in the household to supervise the homework of both Milton and Earl, did such an expert job on Milton that his Latin teacher accused him of using a pony. He bookwormed his way through Abilene High School with 26 "ones"--the equivalent of A's--out of a possible 31, six years later (in 1924) graduated with honors from Kansas State College at Manhattan with a degree in industrial journalism.

Tempted by a standing job offer on the Abilene Daily Reflector, Milton was even more attracted by the promise of a teaching career from Kansas State President William Jardine, who had been vastly impressed by the scholarship of earnest, bespectacled Milton Eisenhower. Milton accepted Jardine's offer--but wound up with another job. A Republican Party fieldworker came to Kansas State to help Milton organize a campus political club, casually suggested that Milton apply for the consular service. Milton did; soon came a telegram offering him a consular post in Edinburgh. Milton uneasily approached Jardine for an honorable exit route from the faculty register. "Well," said President Jardine with a twinkle, "that's the sort of thing you have to figure out for yourself. But you're fired."

Dovetailed Minds. That began Milton Eisenhower's long career in government. Within two years, after due service in Edinburgh, Milton was in Washington as assistant to Secretary of Agriculture Jardine, whom President Coolidge named to his Cabinet in 1925. And shortly after that, along came big brother Ike, then an obscure Army major called to Washington to write a guidebook for the American Battle Monuments Commission.

To Ike, the sight of his kid brother attending White House teas and moving knowledgeably about Washington was a revelation. Milton's home on 24th Street and Massachusetts Avenue was only a short walk from the Wyoming Apartments where Ike and Mamie lived. The brothers fell into the habit of spending evenings together at Milton's dining-room table, locking heads, thoughts and aspirations. They discovered a remarkable community of interests. "We were not only intimate," says Milton, "but we found that we liked to talk over our problems together." Ike has since added: "Our thought processes dovetailed very closely." Over the dining-room table grew their lasting relationship.

Dwight and Milton Eisenhower kept in close touch with each other even as their jobs drew them physically apart. Dwight moved through the Army's glacially slow peacetime promotion list, then burst to five-star status in World War II. Milton moved steadily up the government promotion list, became one of the most highly regarded officials in Washington. Under Henry Wallace, he restored order to a chaotic land-use program that at one point urged some farmers to reduce their cotton acreage, urged others to increase it. At the start of World War II, he was placed in charge of relocating West Coast Japanese in the U.S. interior, carried out a heartbreaking job with personal dignity. At Franklin Roosevelt's request, he undertook a monumental study of all Government information agencies and their relationship to national defense, helped frame the charter for the Office of War Information. And in 1943, even while continuing to serve as a top-level Government consultant, he answered another call: he returned to Kansas State as its president.

"Which One Do You Mean?" By war's end Milton Eisenhower had achieved all the recognition he needed. At an Abilene family reunion, with General Ike just returned from his crusade in Europe, a reporter asked Ida Eisenhower how it felt to have her famous son at home. Her sharp reply: "Which one do you mean?"

From Kansas State, Milton Eisenhower moved to the presidency of Penn State, and there, in 1952, he heard from Dwight, then in Paris commanding SHAPE. Irresistible pressures were building for Ike to make the run for the Republican nomination for President. Inevitably, the final decision would be Ike's own. But in the making of that decision, he wanted Milton's valued advice. Milton's opinion: Ike should run.

During the campaign, Milton, avoiding the scarring, jarring rough and tumble of partisan politics, played only a minor part. But once election was won, he took charge of an exhaustive preparation for office. A management-survey firm was hired, at his suggestion, to draft detailed analyses of each federal department and major agency. This sort of efficient staff work, at which both brothers excel, helped Ike take over in 1953 without any serious administrative hitches.

The Black Notebook. At Ike's side, standing at the summit of government, Milton could easily have carved out a sub-empire of his own. But in the following five years he has placed himself in full command of nothing but the job of easing the President through the toughest job in the U.S. Ordinarily mild mannered, he can be firm in dealing with those who would add unnecessarily to the presidential burden. After Ike's 1955 heart attack, Attorney General Herbert Brownell began collecting Cabinet suggestions for lightening the President's burden. Brownell carefully compiled all the ideas in a little black notebook. "Why don't you give it to the President?" asked Milton. Brownell hesitated; weeks of polishing, he said, would be required. "Herb," Milton persisted quietly, "why don't you give it to him now?" Brownell sat silent for a moment, then handed the notebook to a presidential aide.

Again, in January 1956, Ike summoned his closest advisers to a White House stag dinner. "I have called you together," said he, "to discuss a decision that I must soon make myself." Subject for decision: whether to run for reelection. In the general stampede to urge Ike to run, two guests, privately primed by Milton to present the negative side, forgot their duty. Then Milton stood up. "I was supposed to summarize this discussion," said he. "But since the opinion is unanimous, there is nothing to summarize. Therefore I am going to state both sides of the argument." He did just that--and later, in private talks with Dwight, he could throw his influence on the affirmative side, secure in the knowledge that Ike had been made aware of the negative.

In an official capacity, Milton Eisenhower has been a prime mover on President Eisenhower's three-member Advisory Committee on Government Reorganization. Among its achievements: creation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Small Business Administration, the U.S. Information Agency and the Airways Modernization Board. In his trips to South and Central America, he has served as the President's eyes and ears in a critical area. "In the long view," wrote Milton in a 1953 report that has since become the foundation of Latin American policy, "economic cooperation, extended to help the people of Latin America raise their level of well-being and further their democratic aspirations, will redound to their benefit and to ours."

Following the death of his wife Helen (of cancer) in 1954, Milton, lonely and lost in the 14-room president's mansion at Penn State, resigned in 1956 to become president of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, just 4O-odd miles from the White House and within instant direct-line call from the President.

In two years Milton Eisenhower has already stamped the campus with his own brand. He has raised faculty salaries, as he did both at Kansas and Penn State, re-emphasized the humanities, a point of particular significance at Johns Hopkins, whose undergraduate college had been all but forgotten in the famed brilliance of the medical school. On a campus where no previous president had been observed at any athletic event except the Alumni Day lacrosse match, President Milton won undergraduate hearts by showing up for the first football game of the season, then going down to the locker room to shake hands with the team.

Relaxing by Rote. The unremitting pressures of his life give Milton Eisenhower little leisure for himself or his two children, Milton Jr., 27, a business representative in Istanbul for Pan American World Airways, and Ruth, 20, a junior at Swarthmore, who accompanied him on his recent Central American tour. He organizes his days down to grinding the morning coffee (hand ground from three parts bland lowland bean, one part flavorsome mountain-grown bean). By 8:15 a.m. he has carefully arranged the cut flowers on his desk, by 10 a.m. has tunneled through a mountain of paper work. Appointments, punctually begun and punctually concluded, usually take up the rest of the day. Routine even pervades his evenings; two or three nights a week, Keith Spaulding, his administrative assistant, drops by with pressing university business. On rare free evenings, Milton has a tendency to relax by rote, scheduling so much time for reading, so much for a brisk neighborhood walk, so much to his Hammond organ.

A Corner in Gettysburg. The focal point remains his brother Dwight--and his fondest hopes extend beyond 1960. Milton wants to join Ike on the Gettysburg farm, build a little house of his own, and help Ike in a common cause. "The President," says Milton Eisenhower, "can make a tremendous contribution after he leaves office. He particularly can do a great deal in helping to educate the public to the need for reform in the structure and organization of the presidency and the Federal Government." The brothers have talked of this before and have evolved a plan to shift much of the presidential burden to two appointive Vice Presidents, with delegated powers of decision. "My hope," says Milton Eisenhower, "is that when my brother is no longer President, he can help educate the American public to such changes--and that I can also speak up."

*Just last April, for the first time in years, Edgar had a long, man-to-man talk with Milton, forthrightly confessed that he had been all wrong. "I found out," says Tacoma Lawyer Edgar Eisenhower, "that he is just as conservative as I am--and Lord knows I'm a conservative."

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