By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Spring 2018

Dwight Eisenhower is David Eisenhower’s grandfather, and Richard Nixon is David’s father-in-law. The son of Brig. Gen. John Eisenhower, David, today a 69-year-old professor and historian at the University of Pennsylvania, spent the first half of his life around the U.S. presidency—he lived in the White House while attending law school at GW—and some of the most powerful and influential people of the 20th century.

David has authored two books about his grandfather, Eisenhower at War 1943-1945 and Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969, and he has studied power and those who wield it. In January, he talked about power and what he’s learned living so close to it. (This interview was edited for space and clarity.)

How has your life, your relationships, your family, your friends influenced how you view power? What is your conception of it?

It gave me an idea of how people in those positions think. One of the things I feel I can do when I look at the Eisenhower papers, for instance, is I can hear my grandfather and I can think with him. When I see the Nixon papers, I can do the same thing. You just learn to think along and you learn what matters to powerful people. The other thing is, it gives you—and this has shaped my life—it gives you a powerful, insatiable curiosity. That is about as succinctly as I can put the impact that that had. The second experience, 1969 to ’74, really turned me into a historian.

You said you learned what matters to powerful people. Can you expound? What did you learn about what matters to powerful people?

In the case of Nixon, I would say practically everything he did as president revolved around a central question, and that was managing and redeeming the Vietnam War. Everything—I mean everything. If you’re talking [Department of Health, Education and Welfare] and [Health and Human Services] policy, it mattered to him as it bore on that central question. I think that’s the way leaders think. I certainly observed that in Nixon. I think leadership is mission-oriented, and that’s something that I absorbed with him. It’s something I feel I can intuit when I’m reading other histories.

When I went to write about my grandfather—which was a major undertaking—essentially, I was able to identify a similar lifelong focus beyond 1943 that shaped practically everything he did as a leader afterward. I applied what I understood about Nixon to Eisenhower, and I found that it worked. That may not sound dramatic, but I think coming to a conclusion like that about a leader or about someone in power is half or three-quarters of understanding what they’re doing.

As a kid, were you aware of other kids that didn’t have grandfathers that commanded the effort to beat Hitler? How self-aware were you?

I was aware of, yes, my grandfather is special, but the reason I was aware of that is that we were an Army family, and the Army people, they are not wealthy. In fact, they’re not even middle class. We lived on an Army base and I understood my grandfather was sort of a super Army officer. But we were Army kids, and what was drilled into us at a very early age is that the Army consisted of a series of duty stations, and the White House was a duty station, which meant that that ended and you went on to something else. I never felt growing up as a kid that anything we were experiencing in the White House was in any way permanent, so I felt that it was special and I knew that I was experiencing something unique for a while and I enjoyed sharing it with friends to the extent that I could. I recognized that my grandfather, for one reason or another, had been really singled out in a big way from his Army colleagues. He was on a very special trajectory.

I think I was conscious as a kid, for some reason, that I was in the middle of a major political national drama. I was at the White House but I always felt a certain detachment from it, meaning, at some level, I was enjoying it and observing it as well as being part of it.

When I was growing up, my dad was a TV sports reporter, and when he would go to my school events—he was on TV and he would cover Super Bowls and things like that—and all of my friends and their parents would want to talk to him about it, and it would annoy me because I just wanted to hang out with my dad. At any point in your life, did—

I can remember one time that did happen to me. I got sent to prep school [in New Hampshire] in the fall of 1962 and I did not want to go. Phillips Exeter Academy is a very tough grind, and right away, it was very hard and I was very homesick. My grandfather was on a political tour. This was the fall of the off-year elections in 1962. He was campaigning across the country and he came to southern New England to campaign for whoever was running for, I believe, Senate in New Hampshire, and that brought him right to campus. So I was going to have time with him. He was a connection to home and he was overwhelmed by, as you can imagine, school, staff, students. The entire student body practically followed him around and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and that bothered me because I was very homesick. That’s the only time I can really think of that happening. I was very rarely around friends and my grandfather simultaneously. That might set you and me slightly apart. My grandfather was not very accessible during that period. The way I shared my experience with friends would be to have them as guests of the White House, swim in the pool or watch movies or play games on the third floor or things like that. I don’t think very many of them actually met my grandfather. He was always off doing something else. He slipped into a few things that I did in Gettysburg— Little League games and so forth. He would slip in occasionally, but he would sit in the car from a distance.

Can you separate him as president/general and grandfather? Or are they conflated in your mind?

They were very conflated—and that was a personality thing. What I knew from being around him was he was hard to capture. He was a dynamo. He was white hot. He was so energetic, but forbidding in many ways. He worked very hard at being a friend and caring and things like that, and I appreciated that, but I was always aware of this: I didn’t know anyone like him. That does have to do with his station.

It’s probably fair to say you grew up with a certain level of privilege, which, in some cases, can lead to arrogance. Did you ever think you were better than anyone?

I don’t think I think I’m better than someone or not, but let me just imagine that I’m not arrogant, and I think I can explain why that is. First of all, we were all taught growing up that the White House was a temporary duty station, and second, most of my experience—most of it by far—is after the presidency. And in those periods, we felt really sort of cast out and we felt vulnerable, and I can’t imagine a better way to come to Earth than to go from Washington, D.C., and the White House to rural Pennsylvania—which is where we went in 1959—and then set loose to make your way with no expectation of ever experiencing anything special again in the future. I actually came to prefer it. I loved the town of Gettysburg. I love where I grew up. I like what I do. I don’t miss the White House or any of that at all. And I think what other people would call a normal way of life is something that I’ve always really valued and I have no real issues with it. I can see how someone who is born into this and then they never really depart it may be arrogant, but I wouldn’t even venture to say or to call anyone arrogant that I happen to know in that position.

Today, Eisenhower is consistently ranked among the top presidents. You go from Eisenhower to Nixon, who resigns. These are completely different experiences with the same office. Did Nixon resigning—

It’s actually not that different of a feeling, to be honest.

How so?

Of course, I’m a very different age. But I never felt things were comfortable in the Eisenhower years. So the discomfort in the Nixon years, well, it just wasn’t that different.

What was different was post-January of ’73 when the Watergate phase began. It felt like 1960. We were leaving office now and it was embarrassing in many ways. It was agonizing. I felt badly for the Nixon family, etcetera, but it was a transition and transitions are tough. The ’60-’61 transition was tough. So I don’t see them as starkly different.

The one thing that would be different would be the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was really a painful chapter. It was difficult. The Nixon presidency was never serene. It couldn’t be because everything was given over to resolving that conflict. This was coming up at the end of the Eisenhower years. The very last conversation that I can remember in the White House as a 12-yearold was our final dinner in the family dining room on the first floor of the White House. I was seated close to my Uncle Milton [Eisenhower] and my grandfather who were talking about the Indo-China War and Eisenhower’s forthcoming meeting with President-elect Kennedy to talk about this situation, and I can remember thinking as a 12-year-old: This does not sound good and this is something that’s going to concern us for a while. And by the time Nixon takes office in 1969, this is a very serious situation.

I never felt that this was something that would ever be resolved in a sunny way or that President Nixon or anybody who had anything to do with the resolution of the Vietnam War ever felt that this was a story that would have a happy ending. I felt that Nixon would do a good job with it and that we would come out of the situation better, but I never felt that it would be in any way happy.

I think what I’m saying here is, looking back on it, you would think there would be a big discontinuity between the two presidents, but I really don’t see it that way. It’s not that stark.

Different ages, different presidencies. How did Nixon influence your view of power?

What I learned around Eisenhower is the significance of [World War II]. The thing that was around throughout Gettysburg and in Washington was the weight of the war. I can remember being in a hospital in Washington, D.C., and seeing people completely disfigured by World War II. We were visited by these heads of state, and as grandchildren, we were all exposed to them and they were all war-significant figures, like Queen Elizabeth or Harold Macmillan, Churchill or Nikita Khrushchev.

My takeaway from Nixon—I saw decisions being made. We actually discussed decisions being made, over dinner. I got a much clearer look at the way power worked in that situation. I would say that I apply those lessons to see how they work elsewhere. Again, what I come back to is that the presidency is a very broad responsibility, and if you approach it that way, I don’t think you can accomplish anything in the White House. What presidents do is, they successively take up major issues, and that is what the Nixon White House was essentially all about.

Has this ever felt annoying to you? I’m sure you’ve answered these types of questions for your entire life, but is it a burden?

No, and I think that I probably encounter this less than you’d expect because of the way my university career has unfolded. I don’t feel burdened by it. I think that what I had at a young age—actually, for the first 26 years of my life—was an amazing treasure trove of experiences which have kindled an interest in history and a desire to know and learn.

I’ve noticed you refer to your grandfather as “Eisenhower.”

I do, yeah. I wrote about him. I also feel a little old to call him “Granddad” now. “Granddad” would be misunderstood. I’m now a granddad myself. But I came to know him that way. When I was writing Eisenhower at War, I came to know him as “Eisenhower”—and I teach the presidency at University of Pennsylvania. So that’s just sort of a habit. There is a human being there and I remember him very vividly, and he was somebody who lived the role. He was the role. There’s not really a private Eisenhower as far as I’m concerned.

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