By Ed Staskus

   “It’s a good day for it,” Dwight Eisenhower said, smiling his disarming trademark smile.

   It was going to be his first full round of golf since June. He had suffered a heart attack last year. Then when this summer rounded into shape, he needed surgery for ileitis. The past week had been filled to the brim with the Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Even though he had been unopposed, no need for a stampede, there had been some hard campaigning trying to get Richard Nixon off the ticket, to no avail.

   Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t overly enthusiastic about being president. He did it because he thought of the work as a duty. “This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign,” he said. Richard Nixon wanted to be president. He didn’t think of it as a duty. He wanted it for himself, himself in the executive’s chair, at the top, giving orders and being obeyed. The conniving public official didn’t think it had anything to do with civil service.

   “Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy,” Dwight Eisenhower told Turk Archdeacon, his caddy standing next to him with a bag of clubs. Turk thought he was simply shifty, but didn’t say so. It wasn’t his place.

   Nat King Cole the Negro singer had spoken at the Cow Palace yesterday, the last day of the convention, to some cheers and more jeers. The president made the speech happen, no matter the carping about it. He knew he had to give in on his second-in-command, who was a hardline anti-Communist, who the rank-and-file supported with cheers and campaign donations. “I don’t want those Commie bastards to be successful,” Richard Nixon always said. But the president knew he didn’t have to give in to Jim Crow, at least not always. He could take the high road and leave the jeering to the dirty tricks gang.

   They drove up to Pebble Beach before the convention ended, before his VP could invite him to dinner. Besides, Richard Nixon’s father was seriously ill. The president urged him to go see him before it was too late. The VP mumbled something and in the end was almost too late. The night he visited his father, Frank Nixon said, “Good night, Dick. I don’t think I’ll be here in the morning.” He died in the morning. Dick wasn’t there. The funeral was three days later at the East Whittier Friends Meeting House. Richard Nixon had to ask for directions. The Quakers had become a lost heritage to him.

  There were three cars full of Secret Service men fore and aft. Charlie Taylor, who’d been at it for many years, was in one of the cars. One night when the president was having trouble opening his safe, and asked for help, his agents told him safecracking wasn’t part of their training. He was beside himself, giving them his ten-pound hammer look. Charlie got the cranky combination to give in without a struggle. He had been an anti-submarine officer during the war. Safes weren’t safe when he got his hands on them.

    “I won’t know whether to trust you, or not, after this,” Dwight Eisenhower told him, glancing at the trim crew-cut man.

   Dwight Eisenhower was driven to his golf outing in a black Lincoln Cosmopolitan. It was one of ten presidential touring cars. They all had extra headroom to accommodate the tall silk hat the president wore on formal occasions. The cars were almost 20 feet long, with Hydra-Matic transmissions, and heavily armored, weighing in at close to ten thousand pounds. One of them, a convertible, a 1950 model built for Harry Truman, had been fitted with a Plexiglas top. The president called it the Bubble Top. Charlie Taylor called it a pain-in-the-ass. Mamie Eisenhower didn’t like sitting under a plastic dome, but she put up with it, like she did with everything else.

   It was a clear day, sunny, the high sky dotted with seashore clouds. A steady breeze blew up from the water. It was refreshing. Dwight Eisenhower nodded at the man standing behind him.

   “It’s a pleasure, Mr. President,” Turk said.

   “Why, that’s fine,” President Eisenhower said.

   Turk had been caddying at Cypress Point since he was nine years-old, from almost 40 years ago. They walked to the practice tee. The president started whacking balls into the distance. He played Bobby Jones woods with his official five-star insignia engraved on their heads. At the putting green he lined up three balls 20-some feet away from the cup. He sank all three.

   “I should quit right here,” he grinned.

   “Yes, sir,” Turk said.

   Dwight Eisenhower had been practicing on a green on the White House grounds, hitting wedges, irons, and 3-woods, sometimes sending balls sky-high over the south fence. Whenever he did, he sent his valet to retrieve them. The squirrels that prowled the lawn dug up his putting green, burying acorns, nuts, and hardtack. When they buried their loot they left small craters behind. One morning the president finally had enough. “The next time you see one of those goddamned squirrels go near my putting green, take a gun and shoot it!” The Secret Service asked the groundskeepers to trap the squirrels, instead, and release them in a park somewhere far away.

   In a week August would be come and gone.  He would be 66 years-old soon. “I’m saving my rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am,” he said, pointing to the rocker in the Oval Office. More days than not, he felt like that day was creeping closer, step by step, and there was no stopping it.

   His birthday was in October. CBS was planning a “Person to Person” TV show the night beforehand. Eddie Fisher was going to sing ‘Counting Your Blessings Instead of Sheep.’  Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel were going to sing ‘Down Among the Sheltering Palms.’ Nat King Cole, with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, was going to sing ‘It’s Just a Little Street Where Old Friends Meet.’ He was looking forward to it.

   In six weeks, he would be throwing out the first pitch for the first game of the World Series. There were five or six teams in the hunt, although the New York Yankees looked like a lock, at least to get there. If he were a betting man, which he was, he would be putting his money on the Bronx Bombers to take the kaboodle. He wouldn’t be at the game in the Bubble Top, either, but in the Cream Puff, which didn’t have a dome. He would be  getting some sunshine and fresh air, at least what there was of it in New York City.

   He liked Cypress Point because it was set in coastal dunes, wandered into the Del Monte forest along the front nine, and then reemerged on the rocky Pacific coastline. The last holes played right along the ocean. He’d played golf on many courses around the world. This was one of the best of them.

   Dwight Eisenhower looked out over the par-5 10^th hole. He had taken off his tan sweater, but still had a white cap on his head. Seven months ago, Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, professional living legends, had taken on the talented amateurs Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward in a white-knuckle not-so- friendly foursome at the same Cypress Point. The same 10^th hole turned out to be the key to unlocking the contest.

   “I bet they can beat anybody,” said San Francisco car dealer Eddie Lowery about the two amateurs, who were his employees. He was talking to fellow millionaire George Coleman. The bet and the match were on in that minute. The bet was in the four figures.

   Harvie Ward was a two-time U.S. Amateur champion. Three months later Ken Venturi came within one stroke of winning the Masters. The cypress-strewn rolling dunes of the course on the wind-swept coast, the deep ravines, knee-deep grass, sand on all sides of the fairways, weren’t redoubtable, not to them.

   Ben Hogan turned the corner on the 10^th when he rolled in a wedge shot for a 3. The eagle and 27 overall birdies testified to the competiveness of the match. The drinks at the bar afterwards rubber-stamped the camaraderie. There were backslaps about made shots and groans about missed shots.

   Dwight Eisenhower was playing with Harry Hunt, the president of Cypress Point, Sam Morse, a one-time football star who had developed Pebble Beach, and John McCone, a businessman who had been the undersecretary of the Air Force. He was partnered with Harry Hunt. They were playing a dollar-dollar-dollar Nassau bet. It was even-steven at the halfway mark, even though the president had stunk up the 8^th hole.

   “Where is it?” he asked getting there, searching for the green on the 8^th somewhere across the dogleg.

   He sliced his tee shot into sand. When he got to it, he hit it less than ten feet further on. Then he hit it fat, the ball limping head-high less than twenty feet, and falling into somebody’s heel print.

   “I’ve had it, pick it up,” he said.

    “Having a little trouble?” Sam Morse asked.

   “Not a little,” he said. “A lot.”

   On the tee of the 17^th hole Dwight Eisenhower lined up his shot. Sea lions on the rocks below him barked. “It’s hard to hit a shot and listen to those seals at the same time,” he complained, but not so either of the Secret Service agents with them could hear him. He didn’t want them taking unnecessary potshots at the seals.

   Dwight Eisenhower was accustomed to having bodyguards around him, during the campaign in North Africa, and later as commander of the Allied Army in Europe. The Nazis had tried to kill him several times. Secret Service agents near his person nearly every minute of the day felt like a second skin. He knew what it took to save his skin. When he moved into the White House he didn’t mingle mindlessly, shake hands in crowds, or do anything foolish.

   “Protecting Ike works like clockwork,” said agent Gerald Blaine.

   Mamie Eisenhower gave her Secret Service men nicknames. One of them, who was a good dancer, was called ‘Twinkletoes.’ He asked Mamie to keep it between themselves. Some of the bodyhuards called her mom. Other bodyguards had never had mothers and called her Mrs. President.

   “You don’t have to worry about me, but don’t let anything happen to my grandchildren,” the president told Secret Service chief U. E. Baughman. The Diaper Detail guarded the four kids. Dwight Eisenhower changed the name of the presidential retreat in Maryland from Shangri-La to Camp David in 1953. “Shangri-La is just a little fancy for a Kansas farm boy,” he said. He renamed it in honor of his 5-year-old grandson, David. When Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union boss man, visited the retreat he said the name sounded like a place where “stray dogs are sent to die.” 

   Dwight Eisenhower looked for the fairway on the 18^th hole. “Where do we aim here?” he asked.

   “Keep it away from the left,” Harry Hunt said. There was a stand of pine trees on the left. “That’s the Iron Curtain. You’ll never get through that stuff.” The president laughed and hit a long drive. His next shot was a 4-iron and he nailed it onto the green, 20 feet short of the pin. He was going out with a bang.

   In 1954 eighty people were convicted of threatening the president and sent to prison or locked away as madmen. In 1955 nearly two thousand threats were made against Dwight Eisenhower’s life. The year before, the Russian KGB officer Peter Deryabin, after defecting, told the CIA about a Soviet plot to kill the president in 1952. “We were preparing an operation to assassinate Eisenhower during his visit to Korea in order to create panic among the Americans and win the war there.”

   Whenever he played golf, bad-tempered men with good eyesight and high-powered rifles took up vantage points on hills, surveying the course with telescopic sights. Other men, dressed in golf clothes, carried guns and ammo in their golf bags as they tagged along. The Queen Mary, a specially outfitted armored car, was their rolling command center.  

   Shortly after Mother’s Day the Secret Service had investigated a threat to plant two boxes of explosives at a baseball park where the president was planning on taking in a game. “Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, and assassination,” Adolf Hitler had said not very many years before. “This is the war of the future.” Dwight Eisenhower and the Allied Army derailed the Nazi night train. No one was going to take him by surprise. He was planning on sitting in his rocking chair one day, rocking back and forth, watching his grandchildren trundle on the carpeting.

   He served in the armed forces from one end of his adult life to the other. After he retired, he was dean at Columbia University, and then president of the country. He was still the president and, he was sure, he was going to beat Adlai Stevenson like he had four years ago. Adlai didn’t know how to get close to folks. He was full of sanctimonious bull.

   Even though he’d commanded millions of men in the last war, Dwight Eisenhower thought war was rarely worth going to war for. He hated it. “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

   “Didn’t you once say that we are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it?” Harry Hunt slyly asked.

   “When we have to, but always remember, the most terrible job in the world is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you’re on the battlefield. There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs. When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it themselves.” 

   The Cold War wasn’t nearly as hot as it had been ever since Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin’s cult of personality earlier in the year, as well as admitting the Man of Steel’s crimes, and the outrages committed against Mother Russia. The iron door had been cracked open. The president had long thought war settles nothing, even when it’s all over. He was worried about the arms race, which was a race towards nuclear catastrophe.

   “You just can’t have that kind of war,” he told his inner circle. “There aren’t enough bulldozers in the world that could ever scrape all the bodies off the streets.”

   “Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative” is what he had written in his daybook and wanted to say at the Cow Palace, but didn’t, not with Richard Nixon and the Red Scare and the military hand-in-hand with industry. He wanted to call it what it was, a military-industrial complex that was always crying “fire” in a crowded theater. But he couldn’t, at least not until after he was re-elected. In the meantime, he planned on speaking softly and carrying a big stick, even if it was only a long shaft wood driver, the biggest stick he had in his golf club bag.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”