Traveling Man

Tanned and fit from golf and trout fishing, President Eisenhower made work the week's first order of business and put in a long day and a half in his sunlit oval office. But neither his mood nor his week's intricate schedule would permit him to stay buried in the White House, and from then on for five days in a row he spent few consecutive hours in the same place.

He took his first break by giving a formal luncheon for 19 Senators and Representatives, among them his foremost congressional critic, Oregon's long-winded Deviationist Republican Wayne Morse. ("A delightful lunch, delicious throughout,"

Morse reported afterward, adding that the President had discussed nothing more controversial with him than hornless beef cattle.) After that, the President got into one of a shiny line of White House limousines and set out on an exploring trip: a 60-mile, two-hour journey to Franklin Roosevelt's rustic hideout, Shangri-La, in Maryland's Blue Ridge.

Sense of Debt. The next day he left his desk early again, got in 18 holes of golf at Washington's Burning Tree course. And late the following day--after holding his weekly news conference--he boarded the presidential yacht Williamsburg with Mamie, her mother and a clutch of aides, for a four-day cruise into Chesapeake Bay.

Ike, using the Williamsburg for transportation rather than relaxation, was off at Yorktown Naval Mine Depot the first thing next morning to keep a brace of appointments in Virginia.

The President and his womenfolk were joined by Virginia's Governor John Battle and driven eleven miles to Williamsburg, the old colonial capital. Local citizens, dressed in three-cornered hats, blue coats and knee breeches, brought colonial muskets to present arms as the President left his car; to a roll of drums, he entered the little House of Burgesses, in which the Virginia Resolution for Independence from Britain was adopted in 1776. He spoke briefly: "I think no American could stand in these halls and on this spot without feeling a very great and deep sense of the debt we owe to ... our forefathers." Definition of Freedom. The President's party rode a few blocks more to the green campus of the College of William & Mary. Ike put on cap & gown, received an honorary LL.D. degree, and then, standing on the steps of the Sir Christopher Wren Building (oldest academic structure in the U.S.), addressed a crowd of 4,000 who sat on bleachers and folding chairs in the shade of giant elms.

It was an informal little talk, but newsmen read into it references to taxes ("Great minds will teach young leaders not to say. 'Of course I like liberty, and if you don't charge me more than 15% of my income, I would like to keep it' ") and Joe McCarthy ("The true way to uproot Communism in this country is to understand what freedom means . . . and thus develop such an impregnable wall that no thought of Communism can enter").

The President and his party spent the night back on the yacht, which moved down the York River and anchored after he came aboard. Next day it slid into a dock at Norfolk, while white-clad sailors stood at attention on the flight decks of two flag-dressed aircraft carriers. Ike went ashore again, this time wearing a light, Truman-like Stetson hat to 1) confer with Admiral Lynde D. McCormick, commander of the North Atlantic Treaty naval forces, and 2) play golf at Sewells Point Golf Club, where he turned in an 87.

Order of Amnesty. He got in 18 holes more at the next stop, too--the Naval Academy at Annapolis--but not before attending Sunday chapel and appearing before the brigade of midshipmen, as it gathered at historic Bancroft Hall for luncheon. He didn't, he said, know quite what to say to them on a Sunday afternoon. "If I had taken you from a mathematics or engineering class, there might have been a little different aspect to the case. But today when it is chow time . . .

why. it seems a different story" Then, he added, grinning, that there would be at least a few who would "mark my visit with some satisfaction." He had just ordered an amnesty (a privilege only given Presidents and visiting heads of state) for 260 midshipmen facing punishment for minor infractions of naval academy rules. Said Ike with lifted eyebrows: "I didn't know there were that many offenders in the U.S. Navy." The delighted middies saluted him with a roar of applause.

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