Mamie Geneva Eisenhower
Mamie Eisenhower viewed her role as First Lady without complication as being simply the wife of the president and the hostess of the White House. Indeed, few First Ladies seemed to better reflect the general role, priorities and values of most middle-aged middle class American women during her White House tenure than did MamieEisenhower in the 1950's: family, home, entertaining, and personal appearance.
With her experience as a high-ranking military spouse, Mamie Eisenhower knew well how to manage a large staff, demanding nothing short of excellence from them yet expressing personal, familial warmth for them. She was famous for not only ordering that the mansion's carpets and rugs be kept meticulously clean and clear of even shoe marks but for also ordering up fancily-decorated cakes for practically every occasion, including the birthdays of the domestic staff member. With her favorite color of pink showing up frequently in her public wardrobe and in the décor of the private quarters of the White House, she helped to make it a popular color for textiles of the early 1950's, one paint company even offering "First Lady Pink" among its pallet. Also copied were her famous bangs, a short hairstyle she adopted in the 1920's at a time when she rekindled her marriage; for sentimental reasons she would not change the look, despite even public letters advising her to do so. Always coordinating her accessories, she was voted onto the nation's best-dressed list for clothing and hats. In the mansion, she spent much time on overseeing flower arrangements using her preferred gladiolas. For holidays like Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day and Halloween, she decorated the state rooms with paper decorations and had seasonal music piped in. Even her personal tastes reflected the majority of the nation: she was an avid television fan of the comedy series "I Love Lucy" and the "Milton Berle Show" and watched them from a porthole television set cut into the wall of the upstairs hall of the private quarters.
Perhaps her most dramatic role as First Lady occurred in the hours and days following the September 24, 1955 heart attack suffered by the President at her mother's home in Denver. Mamie Eisenhower immediately contacted the White House physician and cooperated in helping to keep her husband warm before he was transported to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in a hastily created presidential suite there. For several weeks while he recuperated, Mamie Eisenhower took full charge of the administrative flow of work to the President, reviewing the requests for visitors and meetings, limiting his schedule according to medical advice and strictly managing his diet. She also assumed not only her mail but the President's, responding to citizens and world leaders alike. She played a similar role following his June 9, 1956, emergency ileitis operation, although it was not as dangerous a condition as the heart attack had been. In the days that followed his November 25, 1957, mild stroke, from which he rapidly recovered, Mamie Eisenhower refused to permit the President to attend a state dinner that was scheduled that evening and successfully insisted that Vice President Richard Nixon take his place.
Despite her strict view that married women should not pursue careers outside of the home, Mamie Eisenhower did not equate this with docility. From her own personal experiences, she believed adamantly that women were superior to men when it came to real estate, savings, investment and purchasing decisions, never underestimating the importance of women's economic power. "Your independence," she wrote in "If I Were a Bride Today," an article that appeared in Today's Woman magazine, "depend[s] on you…[the only way] to avoid debt…is for the husband to give his wife the paycheck and let her be responsible for it…If he sets up charge accounts and pays the bills…things are almost certain to get out of hand…" She herself practiced this in the White House. She encouraged the kitchen staff to use boxed cake-mixes and Jell-O for both efficiency and lower cost. Often she scanned the daily newspapers to see what bulk food staples were on sale and prompted the housekeeper to make such purchases for not only her own family but for state entertaining.
In later years, Eisenhower would concede that he often consulted Mamie Eisenhower's view on issues he was facing, calling her "my invaluable, my indispensable, but publicly inarticulate lifelong partner." During an economic conference, he told participants, "Let me try this out on Mamie. She's a pretty darn good judge of things." He further observed, "She is a very shrewd observer. I frequently asked her impression of someone, and found her intuition good. Women who know the same individual as a man do give a different slant. I got it into my head that I'd better listen when she talked about someone brought in close to me." In later years, even Jim Hagerty would concede that Mamie Eisenhower could "argue with him [the President] plenty of times about his policies…" Although she only visited the Oval Office on four occasions, the First Lady learned the names, faces and backgrounds of the support staff that served the President, as well as the Cabinet members and often sought them out with praise after she'd heard of their accomplishments from the President: it helped to lift morale. Other times she would contact the wives of such officials to praise them.
The Eisenhowers retired to their Gettysburg, Pennsylvania farm which they had purchased in 1950.
