I was overtired the other night when it was due and in my haste to slap a few sentences together and get it up I made a sloppy posting. I was (probably) especially unfair to David Eisenhower, whom I described as an unmanly prig. In truth his account of himself as a young person reminded me of myself, if my grandfather had been the president and I had been as a general result of that association a few rungs higher on the privilege ladder. As a result of this I actually have some sympathy for him, as I am sure whenever he has had to engage with really accomplished or powerful men even from an early age, that they have taken their measure of him largely by way of comparison with his grandfather, by which he could not help but come off lacking. In pictures of him as a young man he comes across as an unthreatening, slightly dorky, rather complacent guy, which also irritated people. His wedding to Julie Nixon, it is sometimes claimed, inspired the angry Creedence Clearwater Revival rock hit "Fortunate Son". Most of the people I knew growing up (apart from my grandparents) despised Richard Nixon, in some ways on a more intimate and impassioned level than that of the hatred that people feel for the candidates in the current presidential race, and as such young David Eisenhower's connection with that family, in addition to his blandness and lack of a distinct and strong personality, I would imagine negatively affected his popularity and esteem as well, especially with the more rebellious element of the 60s generation.
Dwight Eisenhower, the President, comes across here mainly as an old guy who is used to being surrounded by people whose existences revolve around doing what he tells them to do, which of course is what he was. It's all very matter of fact, there are no complicated intellectual motivations or gymnastics involved beyond the circumstance that Dwight Eisenhower assumes leadership and the giving of directions in his interpersonal relations and assumes that the other person will fall in line. I would be curious to know more about his upbringing in Kansas, because in addition to himself two of his brothers achieved substantial success as well, the one being described as a millionaire and the top lawyer in Tacoma, while the other was a college president (Johns Hopkins) and foreign policy expert who held significant positions in politics during Franklin Roosevelt's administrations. The family is always described as being poor, yet these three sons rose to positions of great eminence. How does this happen?
Oh dear, I am getting tired again. President Eisenhower was pretty old-fashioned in his beliefs, He certainly did not believe, for example, that as a general rule women were capable of running affairs and governments.
David Eisenhower, as noted above, married Richard Nixon's cute daughter Julie in December, 1968, about a month after my parents, who are also roughly the same age, Unlike my parents, David and Julie are still married now, and even appear to still like each other, which would make them the only young-married Baby Boomer couple of that era that I am aware of to have achieved that distinction. Here is some footage of the wedding:
Apropos of nothing, here is the report of the wedding of their nephew (and Richard Nixon's grandson) in 2010. Besides themselves, among those on the guest list were Henry Kissinger, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Rendell, and the ubiquitous Hillary Clinton. Despite their notoriety, the 1968 wedding looks to have been a fairly modest and low key affair--Julie even looks like she went light on the makeup, which especially for a Republican is astounding. I assume that Dwight Eisenhower earned a decent income by the time he left the Presidency, but, having been a military officer most of his life, he certainly never developed extravagant spending habits, and other than wintering in Palm Springs, his retirement routine on the farm in Gettysburg strikes the modern follower of politics as almost banal. David Eisenhower went to Exeter Academy and Amherst in the 60s but apart from this his mode of life did not seem that removed from that of middle class people of the time. My point being that all of these people of this class either seem to have a lot more money now, or they are employing it more shrewdly to distance themselves from the mainstream of American life. Probably both are at work here.
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