ONE morning last week a group of White House correspondents and photographers trooped into President Eisenhower's office to wish him well on the occasion of his 70th birthday. "Around next January 18 or 19," a smiling Ike told them, "we'll all have to get together for a farewell party." One of the reporters who knew that he would not be around for that party asked to spend a few minutes with the President for an early farewell. The reporter: Charles Mohr, TIME'S White House correspondent since December 1957, who will soon leave for India to become the TIME-LIFE New Delhi bureau chief.

At Mohr's request, the President autographed two Eisenhower covers (Sept. 7, 1959; Man of the Year, Jan. 4, 1960) on which Mohr had done most of the reporting. Looking at the Sept. 7 cover, a portrait for TIME by the distinguished American painter, Andrew Wyeth, the President recalled that it had been criticized by some of his staff and remarked: "You know, I'm one of the few people around here who liked that portrait."

After a brief chat with the President about his new assignment, Charlie Mohr left the White House in a reminiscent mood. He wrote:

"I was struck by the realization of how intimately a White House correspondent's life is tied up in that of the sitting President. While, properly, the President is only occasionally conscious of the press, the White House regulars are day and night as conscious of Ike as of a close member of their family. His health, in fact, is one of their primary concerns. His travels are the anvil on which their personal lives are bent and twisted. They learn to remember key dates in his life better than he does. Except for Richard Nixon's kitchen debate with Khrushchev and the tremendously moving Warsaw crowd that greeted Nixon, all of my most vivid Washington bureau memories, I realized, were associated with Eisenhower. And of those, the two most vivid involve a dinner at the White House and the tenth tee of the Eldorado Golf Course at Palm Springs, Calif.

"At a no longer secret dinner for 14 'regular' White House correspondents last year, we were given the necessarily rare privilege of a social evening with the President and a chance to talk to him with a minimum of strain and formality. By the luck of a draw, I was seated to his immediate left.

"At Eldorado I suffered the terrifying experience of jamming the shoe on the other foot. Having often watched the patient President tee off, my foursome of reporters found itself in the position of being watched by Ike, who had stepped over from the 13th green to watch our drives. This was all right for the other three, all better-than-average golfers. Since I have never broken 100 and have been known to endanger spectators no more hazardously placed than at right angles to my line of fire, my vision blurred, my knuckles went white, my breathing became irregular, and I was unable to look in the President's direction. Some how I hit the ball about 170 yards and happily lurched down the fairway, content with the greatest social triumph of my White House days."

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