FRIENDLY IKE: A MAN OF FEW FRIENDS

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.

The Chasm. To a great extent, Ike's military career accounts for the personal loneliness from which he seeks escape in the company of a few close friends. After 1941, when General George Marshall called Brigadier General Eisenhower to Washington and thrust fame and command of the North African campaign into his hands, Ike crossed a chasm, leaped from an easygoing social life with his contemporaries into the solitary life of high command and growing professional stature. He has told associates that he found it practically impossible "to talk to anybody but my military staff ... I used to go to bed hoping I wouldn't talk in my sleep." After V-E day and Supreme Allied Command, he was even more of a big public figure with a world-known nickname, an infectious public smile; soon he was clearly presidential timber in full leaf--and more than ever before, he was uncomfortable with the public image of himself and lonely in his private life.

The Tonic. The image fal's away whenever he relaxes with his friends. They demand nothing of him, never preach, never press, never talk outside. None could be classed as a brilliant intellectual with Kitchen Cabinet pretensions. As topflight businessmen (dubbed "Ike's Millionaires" by the White House press corps), most are readily mobile, can usually drop into Washington from any place in the country to fill out a foursome on a few hours' notice from Ike. His every word is a confidence, their only purpose quiet, old-shoe congeniality.

Thus,.after four days of this tonic at Milestone, when Dwight Eisenhower returned at week's end to Washington, he was ready to assume the image of the public figure--cordial, somewhat distant--grateful for one of the brief journeys back to himself.

*For other news of Reynolds & Co., see BUSINESS.

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