2 Family Tales by the Eisenhowers : David Writes Ike’s Story; Julie Details Her Mother’s Life

The description dogs him, a kind of family brand. It’s a label that sticks, follows him everywhere, like “tall,” “blue-eyed,” “jug-eared” or (increasingly, these days) “thin-haired.”

“Ike’s grandson,” Publishers Weekly called him right up front, in the first two words of the first major review of “Eisenhower at War 1943-1945.” Wrote his publisher, Random House, in the about-the-author blurb at the end of the 977-page book: “David Eisenhower is the grandson of Dwight Eisenhower and a son-in-law of former President Richard Nixon.”

At 38, author, law school graduate, University of Pennsylvania lecturer and father-of-three David Eisenhower is arguably getting a little old to spend his life being described as somebody’s grandson or son-in-law. On the other hand, he said, “I don’t mind that. . . . I’ll say this: Were I not this man’s grandson, I don’t know whether I could have mustered the energy and concentration to carry this book off.”

‘Really a History’

Added his wife, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, “You know, Dave’s book is really a history. It’s a political history, the war from a political standpoint. It goes so far afield from biography.”

At this point in their publishing careers, biography seems to be more Julie’s turf. Her book, “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story,” is due out from Simon & Schuster on Nov. 10.

Clearly, hers is also a family story. With both Eisenhowers out with books, published within months of each other, it is as if after scanning the literary skies, they landed right at home, right in their own famous-family backyards.

It makes sense, Julie contends. “You have experiences and remembrances and perceptions and insights that no one else does just because you are a member of the family. And if you want to write, certainly at some point in your life, if you are a writer, you want to do something with what you really have as your strongest perceptions, and the most to offer.

“I wanted to write about my mother’s life,” she said, “because it covers a 30-year span in the public eye. I majored in history at Smith. I’m fascinated with history. I wanted to tell an incredible story.” Now Julie sounded intense, almost fierce, reminiscent in her clear-voiced, clear-headed way of the daughter who was President Nixon’s most fervent defender in the last, dark days of Watergate. The Pat Nixon story did not fall to her, she said: “It’s what I chose to do. I really wanted to tell it.

Travels of Pat Nixon

“I mean this is the woman . . . you know, the (Alger) Hiss case, the ’52 election, the stoning in Caracas, the campaign. She’s the most widely traveled First Lady in history: 75 nations. She’s led an incredible life and I wanted to tell that story.”

With their lives entwined since childhood, traces of that story abound in the adult lives of Julie and David. A “Mamie Eisenhower Avenue” street sign, which was “liberated” by one of David’s Navy pals, sits above a window in his study, not far from an old chair of former President Nixon’s. Former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower’s favorite painting, “The Garden at Versailles” (“painted in 1951 by David’s grandfather,” Julie said), hangs in the living room of their rambling brick house, as does an oil painting, which once graced the Nixon White House, of the golden California hills. Because his wife considers it one of his grandfather’s lesser works, a portrait of a gangly young David shooting baskets has been banished to the new author’s study. Another work by former President Eisenhower, a portrait of wife Mamie, earns higher marks and hangs in the dining room.

“We think she looks a lot like Mamie,” Julie remarked as youngest child Melanie, 2, bounced playfully from parent to parent, skipping about on the big Oriental-type rug Pat Nixon bought when her husband was vice president.

‘Cookie Rug’

“My mother called it her cookie rug,” Julie said, “because Tricia and I brought our friends in and ground cookies into it. It’s wonderful! It doesn’t show anything. You literally vacuum it once a week.”

A 1950s-vintage American knockoff of a Persian-style carpet is flowered, like so much of the furniture and extensive knickknacks in the Eisenhowers’ living room. There are beaded flowers in a vase on the window sill, flowers on the ceramic lamps atop the end tables, ceramic flowers in another arrangement on a bookshelf. The two-piece sectional couch is flowered. The teapot is flowered. Little clusters of fresh-from-the-garden flowers sit on nearly every available surface, and a basket of blooming fuchsias hangs above the kitchen table. The above-the-mantle oil painting is a giant burst of flowers, and between the living and dining rooms are sketches of irises, watercolors of primroses . . . flowers, flowers, flowers.

Big, undraped picture windows in the large, sunny living room overlook a circular driveway on one side, a big lawn and garden on the other. Rabbits appear there; so do squirrels, a hedgehog, and one day, a slightly disoriented deer. There is a swing set, a hammock, a sandbox and domed playhouse and, of course, flowers. It would not displease Julie at all, she lets it be known, if the garden were home to still more blossoms.

“That is one thing I wish I had more time for, the garden,” she said. “I’ve been so busy with the children and the book, I just haven’t had the time.”

Julie and David Eisenhower both snared six-figure advances for what was projected to be a pair of family biographies. In David’s case, the contract that was negotiated a decade ago called for a single-volume, 150,000-word examination of Dwight D. Eisenhower by his only grandson. David was 28 at the time, fresh out of George Washington University law school, still reeling somewhat from the shock of Watergate.

Here is how a chain-smoking David recalls how his book came about:

“In our case, I think that what led us to these projects is that the opportunity, a situation where a publisher would give us the chance, untested, coincided with a big change in our lives. That means we were getting out of school for the first time, and that coincided with the end of the Nixon Administration. Everything sort of happened at once.

‘At Loose Ends’

“So we were at loose ends at the right time as far as these projects go.”

Tall and clearly still eligible for the “lanky” category, David conveys a familiar, comfortable kind of quality. He lopes, rather than walks, and crossing his legs as he sits, his chinos and his socks don’t quite meet. He wears blue Oxford-cloth shirts with button-down collars, and combs once-dense hair over a relentlessly thinning pate. While his wife targets questions directly, efficiently, David speaks in broad panoramas, painting verbal landscapes and responding to each topic as if it were a college essay exam. A discussion of California vs. the East leads to a parallel commentary on pre-World War II Europe and its attitude toward the United States. Recollections of their courtship and the early days of their 18-year marriage take him back first to the Eisenhower White House, later to his three-year Navy stint. Talk politics, and David will ruminate on the birth and death of ideology--or ideologies.

His discourse is easy, earnest, fluid, so much so that it is not difficult at all to imagine him delivering World War II lectures to undergraduates at Penn. But at the university, David probably would not be accompanied by baby Melanie playing horsie on his outstretched leg.

Shortly after Watergate and law school, Julie and David picked up and left their two-bedroom apartment not far from the Kennedy Center and relocated to New York. “Washington was growing fast,” David said, “but it felt like a small town. Well, on the basis of our experiences in Washington, we decided that we were city people. So we moved from Washington to New York and found out that we weren’t city people. Not real city people. So we bounced out of New York in about six months.”

Julie was winding up a three-year assignment as an assistant editor with the Saturday Evening Post and the Curtis Publishing Co. Her first book, “Special People,” was scheduled to come out in 1977. David had tried journalism, working briefly as a sports columnist for the old Philadelphia Bulletin, and was balking somehow at the prospect of a conventional career in the law.

“We were completely at loose ends at that stage,” he said, “and the Nixons were anchored in California, and said ‘Come on out.’ And so we just wound up there.”

In San Juan Capistrano, an easy drive from the Nixon compound in San Clemente, David began working on what he thought would be his grandfather’s biography. “I sort of inched up on it,” he said. “I drafted a piece of it day by day.”

For three years he did research and dictated his thoughts. “I realized pretty early on, like when we were in California and when I first started submitting things, that I had bitten off something pretty big.” Before he was anywhere near his grandfather’s presidency, he had sent his editors more than 150,000 words.

“It was awesome to think about,” he said. “The draft just kept mounting up, and mounting up. I would go back and look at it and say, ‘Now, I know I’m going to put this thing out someday.’ ”

Project Expands

“Someday” grew to 10 years, and the “thing” expanded to a trilogy. Volumes 2 and 3 will complete his history of the Eisenhower years. Early reviews have been kind to “Eisenhower: At War,” citing in particular the insight the former President’s grandson has shed on the military hero-turned-politician.

World War II, David insists in Volume 1, was as much a political event as a military endeavor. In fact he goes so far as to posit the European conflict under Gen. Eisenhower’s leadership as the dominant event of the 20th Century: the seed from which McCarthyism, the Cold War and the nuclear arms race all took root.

‘Improvisational’ Living

The research alone, David said, was enormous. There were long hours in the Eisenhower Library; months of poring through documents; interviews with associates of the former President. As a result, life in the Eisenhower household became “an improvisation,” he said, “because, as I say, the second I realized this thing was going to go a lot bigger than 150,000 words, everything became an improvisation.

“I’d say the way we got through this period was that we approached every six months as though these were the final six months before publication, I’d say starting about five or six years ago. Now that means you are constantly going, going, going, and on the brink. But it also means that things are organized around here, and all the activity is very purposeful. And then finally a six-month period came along where that was so, where I was completing something and Julie was completing hers.”

Sitting in a pale-green wingback chair, Julie nodded in agreement. “I put my book aside for a few years because I was very busy with the children,” she said, “and then at the end, we were both finishing at the same time. It just turned out that way, didn’t it, Dave?”

Between these two there is, it seems, an easy understanding. They are “Dave” and “Jule,” and conversations are peppered with frequent phrases of support, much like the little love notes they still leave on each other’s pillows from time to time.

“Dave told some friends he is actually feeling biblical, we’ve been married so long,” Julie said with a smile. She glanced fondly at her husband. “Dave is so easy to live with.”

“I am?” he said.

Married at 20

They married in 1968, hard on the whirlwind of a presidential campaign. “We were both 20,” Julie said. “I felt very mature. Now I look back on it and I shudder.”

Still in college at Amherst and Smith, both had traveled too extensively to engage in the dreamy talks that characterize many youthful marriages. As political children, they were often called on to be little adults. There was no time for frothy glimpses beyond the present.

“You’re living such an intense life then, and also the presidency is such an overwhelming thing to be caught up in that I don’t think we had the normal talks about the future,” Julie said. “It was kind of ‘Let’s get through this problem first and then we can live our lives.’ ”

“The future was going to have to take care of itself, that’s all there was to it,” her husband said. “There was no plan, just that it was going to take care of itself and don’t worry about it.”

A tireless campaigner for her father, outspoken and known for her cool political demeanor, Julie became nearly as recognizable in that era as President Nixon himself. Older sister Tricia was reclusive, but Julie was talkative, opinionated. In the end, as the Administration crumbled to the crisis of Watergate, Julie and David were among the few in the White House inner circle who were in any way accessible.

“Having been brought up in politics myself, I knew what I was getting in for,” she said of that period. “My father was a congressman when I was born. I knew that in the White House years we weren’t going to have a life of our own. But we were in love, and we decided to get married, and make the best of it.

Little Privacy

“But we went into it very realistically. I mean, I knew what Secret Service was like and how you have no freedom. We thought about it as a great adventure. We were going to live through it, and then we would have a life of our own.”

After her father resigned from office in 1974, Julie was quoted as saying that in some ways it was a relief. “Now I can wear hot pants to the supermarket,” she said then.

Now the mere mention of that comment brings quick laughter. “Hot pants?” she said in amazement. “I’d forgotten about them.”

Even if she did remember them, it would be difficult to imagine this proper suburban matron donning anything so undignified. At 38, Julie is still willow-thin, almost fragile-looking. If many of her contemporaries are cringing at encroaching crow’s feet, she boasts pale, clear skin that is bone-china fine and butter-smooth. Her hair is longer than in the White House years, with bangs fringing brown eyes that seem to have gotten larger with the years.

More than her appearance, Julie is marked by inordinate graciousness. She quickly offers coffee, tea or apple juice. “Well, maybe a glass of water?”

She takes pains to introduce the baby sitter and skillfully sees to it that each guest is included in conversation. She asks questions, and seems genuinely interested in the responses. Children run in and out: She acknowledges them, whispers secrets to them, kisses and caresses them, but never loses track of the topic at hand.

“Honey, run and put on a pair of long pants,” she said quietly when 8-year-old Jennie--but for her father’s blue eyes a Julie clone--burst into the room. “Something that matches.” In the child’s wake, her mother deftly swept up a pair of purple socks that had ended up on the cookie rug.

Julie and David said they settled in this area because they wanted to be in the East, they did not want to be in Washington or New York, and Philadelphia was halfway between. Nevertheless, great speculation accompanied their move to this hamlet about 40 minutes outside Philadelphia. Was David plotting a political career? Would Julie run for Congress?

Certainly they have the vital ingredients: famous names, good brains, quick tongues and telegenic looks. They have the right affiliations: for him, a university teaching post; for her, board membership on a foundation that encourages adoption of “difficult-to-adopt” children and a children’s museum in Philadelphia. Though she doesn’t like to talk about it, Julie adds to her credentials a religious conversion of sorts that occurred around the time of Watergate. She cringes at the term born again, but does say freely that she has “let Jesus Christ into my heart.” Five-year-old Alex is in nursery school at the Church of the Good Samaritan, the same nondenominational Christian parish where his family worships.

A Different GOP

But both Eisenhowers feel, perhaps, just slightly out of sync with the current political tenor. “I certainly think that the Reagan Administration is more conservative than my father, or David or me,” Julie said. “It’s a different party.”

Quickly, diplomatically, lest anything she has said be interpreted as a criticism of the present White House residents, she amended her remarks. “I think he (President Reagan) has done a remarkable job. I just think he is a more conservative politician than Eisenhower or Nixon, who are my heroes.”

And as for a political career of her own, Julie shook her head. “I really don’t see that. I really feel that having led 26 years in politics . . . well, it was a political life. I feel that that’s a life I led, and it was very full and it gave me great opportunities and advantages, but it’s behind me, and I really want to do other things with my life. I don’t have Potomac Fever.”

These days, she said, “we’re far enough from the political scene that we’re just interested observers.”

And David? Does he contemplate a run for office? “That is something that we could not consider for a while,” he said.

David looks back on one good thing that came out of “all that chaos in the ‘70s.”

“It gave us an opportunity to make a break, to just decide we were going to reorganize our lives,” he said. “There are advantages to a clean break. I think that you reorganize your life without quite as much confusion.”

Without a great grand scheme for their lives, the Eisenhowers had never really pictured themselves a pair of writers, each holing up at opposite ends of the house, cranking away on separate projects. There were no thoughts of some suburban-Philadelphia-Republican version of Hammett and Hellman, each trading adjectival phrases with the other. Writing, said David, “just popped up over a period of six or seven months, just about the time I was getting out of law school. Just suddenly, these doors were open.”

High School Wish List

“But Dave,” his wife said, “when you did your high school wish list, didn’t you say you wanted to be a writer?” Both laughed: High school does seem centuries away. “And I said I wanted to make documentary films,” she said, “and writing is sort of like that.”

“I aspired to it,” David said, now serious again. “But it felt pretty farfetched for many years. I mean, I had been around enough books as a boy to know it’s not something you just pick up and do.”

Living an itinerant life as an Army offspring, David said his childhood was marked by never-ending dinner-table discussions of history and military strategy. His passion for the subjects continues, reflected in part by bookshelves in his study packed with tomes of history and biography. At her end of the house--”Julie writes in the bedroom,” her husband said, “or else she is besieged by children”--Julie leans more toward fiction and the occasional biography as well.

Several years ago, she decided it was time to try her own hand at fiction. “I still have this folder in my file cabinet that says NOVEL IDEA,” she said. “I’m afraid to look at it.” But someday, “I can see down the road perhaps writing a novel.”

As for the genre, “I don’t think I would write a political novel,” she said. “I’m just very interested in women. It would be how women feel, and change . . . that kind of novel.” And men? Would her novel include them as well? She laughed: “Yeah, there’d be a few men in it.”

Get-Well Letters

Though she felt a special mission to write about her mother, the book is in no way a vindication of a First Lady who may not have been universally adored, or understood. “Now, when my mother had her stroke,” Julie said, “she received a quarter of a million pieces of mail. That was in the papers at the time. That’s a fact. She is truly beloved.

“But she has been out of the public eye for 10 years completely. Just once in a while, twice a year, maybe, there’ll be a picture of her going to a restaurant in New York.”

Just as President Eisenhower was prone during office to remarking, “let the historians take care of it,” Pat Nixon insisted throughout all those years of political life that she would never write her own story. “She said she had no interest in doing an autobiography,” her daughter said. “I think some people are very reflective and some are not. Her personality is just that she’s always very forward-looking, and not reflective. I think that’s one way she’s coped with stress in her life is to live through something and then to put it out of her mind, then move on to the next thing. So that therefore, for her, it would not be a pleasure to go back and to reconstruct all thes momentous and sometimes painful, sometimes life-threatening experiences.”

Of her book, Julie said, “I think people are going to expect an intensely personal book, and that’s what it really is. It’s from her point of view, but there’s a lot of me in the book.”

And there is a lot of her father: “I’ve really told his story through this story,” she said.

She blusters slightly at describing her presidential connections as an asset or a detraction. “It’s neither,” she said. “It’s just what it is.”

About once a month the Eisenhowers pack up in their blue Chrysler station wagon with its recalcitrant reverse gear and head up to visit her parents in Saddle River, N.J. Often, Tricia Cox comes down with her son, Christopher, as well. The family ties are tight.

Now, as he starts in on Volumes 2 and 3 of his historical trilogy, Julie is enthusiastic about helping her husband with the research. “To tell the truth,” she said, “what I really foresee happening the next couple of years, with the children being young and because I am enjoying spending a lot of time with them while they’re so little, I’m planning to help Dave pull together the next two volumes of presidential years because I’m fascinated by the Eisenhower era. I’m really looking forward to that. I’m going to work part-time, and it’s going to be on that.

“Since that’s the next five years or so, I’m not really looking beyond that right this minute.”

‘Write, Write, Write’

“Frankly, what we do right now,” said David, “is we sit around. We don’t ask questions. We just write, write, write.”

David said he had no notion of the enormity of the project when he took on his grandfather’s presidency. “There was no way in 1976 that I could have committed to 10 years,” he said.

And as for questions about his credibility as a political historian, David said he has no concerns at all. “I think that will sort itself out. This is not the last book I’m going to do.”

“While I’m thinking of it, the Churchills all wrote each other’s biographies.

“In this country, we deny that anything can be transmitted from generation to generation.”

Around the house by now there was a pleasant cacophony, with Jennie squealing, Melanie babbling and Alex playing a wooden flute. In spite of it all, Julie seemed almost serene, and her husband seemed equally unfluttered. Someday, “way down the road,” they may collaborate on a history of the Nixon Administration. For now they are busy being parents, being married and, said David, “writing, writing, writing.”