If we liked Ike then, we'd love him this week

"Eisenhower: This Piece Of Ground" returns to LA's Hudson Theater.

John Rubenstein

In the play “Eisenhower: This Piece Of Ground,” we first see the 34th President pacing irritably around his Gettsyburg, Pa. living room. The New York Times had asked historians to rate the Presidents, and Dwight David Eisenhower was slotted 22nd. Behind Harry Truman and even Chester A. Arthur? An outrage.

His wife Mamie was downtown for most of the day, so Eisenhower was able to call up Kevin McCann, who was attempting to write the President’s biography, and rant and rave and finally settle into a two-act reminiscence of what remains an incomparable American life.

As he does, we realize time hasn’t changed all that much, that the threats of the 50s were just an analog version of what confronts us today. It might be hard to hold Ike down, however, if he were watching the House of Reprehensibles this week.

“Eisenhower: This Piece Of Ground” returns to the Hudson Theater in Hollywood this weekend. Those of us who vaguely remember Eisenhower’s authoritative cadence, coming out of a black-and-white Philco, know that John Rubenstein has put in the time to bring him back. He walks around the living room crisply, wearing a brown winter jacket, his trusty persimmon woods sitting in a golf bag nearby. In playwright Richard Hellesen’s hands, Ike is alternately vain and circumspect, impatient and contemplative. At certain moments he continues to beat himself up, especially for the Russian capture of a U-2 spy plane and for his failure to snuff Sen. Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn before their persecutions tarred and feathered much of America, even Eisenhower’s beloved U.S. Army. “A fascist in a rumpled suit,” Eisenhower called McCarthy.

Nothing haunted Eisenhower more than the death of his first son Doud, nicknamed Icky. He blamed himself for that, too, since he neglected to check a domestic worker for the scarlet fever that killed Icky at age four. That happened in 1921, and Eisenhower sent Mamie flowers on Icky’s birthday for the rest of their days. But Ike wasn’t great at expressing grief, and he walled himself off to the point that Mamie wondered if their marriage would survive. Anytime he was reminded of the tragedy he went into a tailspin, even in 1968. He died of his final heart attack the next year, and Mamie didn’t think it was a coincidence.

Eisenhower had dressed young Icky in an Army uniform and openly hoped he would be a distinguished soldier. But he did not revel in his role as Supreme Commander, the man who tilted World War II, and there’s little in the farmhouse that would indicate he was a general. He saw too many concentration camps to get caught up in the glamour of conquest. In the play, he is aghast that anyone would say that “only 4,000” Allied troops died in D-Day, even though the projections were much higher. In real life Eisenhower, who was President from 1953-61, did not commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, preferring seclusion at Camp David. He rarely discussed it in public and when he did he often lost composure, covering his face at one point.

In Eisenhower’s farewell address he criticized the “military-industrial” complex that he saw coming. Yet he got into politics in the first place because he wanted to head off Sen. Robert Taft and the Republican isolationists who supported him. It was hard for him to believe that America could forget how Hitler grew in the warm soil of Western neglect. He was a fervent Cold Warrior, and the first American fingerprints on Vietnam belonged to him.

At the end of his term, Americans longed for someone young and energetic and turned to John F. Kennedy, who barely defeated Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s Vice President, in 1960. Ike wasn’t enamored with Nixon (and less so with JFK) and, when asked what ideas and accomplishments he had brought to the administration, he replied, “If you could give me a week I might think of one.”

By then Eisenhower was considered an anachronism, and his poor health contributed to that. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, a stroke and Crohn’s Disease during his two terms. He had smoked four packs of cigarettes a day for years. However, he was only 70 when he left the White House. He might be too young today.

Eventually the scorekeepers moved Eisenhower near the top of the Presidential rankings, and this play is a recognition of Ike-nostalgia. He was basically a non-ideological Republican who believed in legislation and progress. He remembered how it took 62 days for a convoy to cross the U.S., back during World War I, and he also noticed how futuristic the Autobahn seemed in Germany. The Interstate Highway System was Eisenhower’s idea and project, and America today is unthinkable without it.

He also established NASA, and he sent Army troops to Little Rock, Ark. to ensure the safety of Black children attending what used to be all-white schools. Eisenhower swamped Adlai Stevenson in both the ‘52 and ‘56 elections, winning 80 out of a possible 96 states.

What comes through, most of all, is the way a President and a conquering mastermind can still be rendered powerless, at least in his mind. Eisenhower’s favorite pastime was golf, the great leveller of all self-esteem. Because Ike was deranged for the game, Americans followed; it’s estimated that the number of golfers doubled during his administration. He was ecstatic when he got his first hole-in-one, at 77. But when his drives at Augusta National’s 17th hole kept bouncing off the same tree on the left side of the fairway, he campaigned for its removal. Club chairman Clifford Roberts refused. Eventually the “Eisenhower Tree” was a victim of an ice storm, and half of it is at Ike’s museum in Abilene, Ks.

“Eisenhower: This Piece Of Ground” is a rich two-act appreciation. It also makes us yearn for the days when Presidents could lead, and Americans could follow.