All's Well

Outside the Army's Walter Reed Hospital two little girls, outfitted in matching red coats, slipped away from their mother and pushed their way to the front of the crowd. They got there just in time to meet the President of the U.S. as he strode hatless and grinning out of the hospital door and down the steps. Jovially, he shook the hand of the first, tousled the hair of the second, then stepped into a waiting limousine and was driven away.

The cluster of patients, nurses and passers-by had just seen for itself what news bulletins soon began to tell the rest of the nation: Ike is fine.

The robustness of his health was established last week by a two-day, head-to-toe physical examination conducted by some two dozen of Walter Reed's top doctors and technicians and the President's personal physician, Major General Howard McC. Snyder. At its end, in a startlingly frank and detailed report that more than anything else illustrated Dwight Eisenhower's insistence on the people's right to know, they gave the world almost an organ-by-organ look at what they had found (see next page).

Most interest centered, of course, on the condition of the President's heart. "Well healed," said the doctors. Probably least impressed was the President; during the week before he entered the hospital, he frequently told aides he felt "just fine." and in the hospital, he showed it. Between being pushed, pulled, pinched, pummeled and probed, he padded down the corridors in slippers and wine-red bathrobe, visited cheerily with wide-eyed youngsters in the children's ward, oldtime military acquaintances in their rooms, doctors, nurses and other staff members in the hallways. Far from chafing at the hospital routine, the President turned his two-day stay into a pleasant rest, and while not on his visiting rounds he signed a minimum number of official papers and read his personally inscribed copy of Sir Winston Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

His first official engagement after leaving the hospital: a round of golf at the nearby Burning Tree Country Club.

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