In November, 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower was mulling a matter that he mulled with some frequency: the effects of age on someone in a stressful, non-stop job like his. He’d been President for nearly two years and, in his diary, wrote down some of the reasons why seeking a second term might be a bad idea: “The greater likelihood that a man of 70 will break down under a load than a man of 50,” a need for “younger men in positions of the highest responsibility so as to symbolize the youth, vigor and virility of the Republican Party,” and, perhaps above all, the “growing severity and complexity of problems that rest upon the President for solution.” As far as he knew, he was in good shape, but intimations of mortality shadowed him, and he thought a lot about the next political generation. At a White House political dinner a few days before Christmas, he said, “We have got to begin right now, at the state level and at the precinct level, to see to it that the Party puts up the right kind of young man to run in ’56. All the programs in the world, and all the Eisenhower prestige, cannot elect some revolting old Republican hack against a youthful, able, and personable Democrat.”
Modern readers will note a certain gender bias in phrases like “a man of 70,” “the right kind of young man,” and “virility,” and should know that these somewhat depressed observations came soon after the midterms, in which Democrats took control of the Senate and House, by majorities that the party would keep for decades. Eisenhower’s worries became far more intense several months later, in late September, 1955, when he suffered a major heart attack.
This is a roundabout way of getting to the sensitive, impolite subject of when, if ever, a candidate might be too old for the Presidency. It is a question whose premise, in an era when the word “ageism” is embedded in the language, many are inclined to reject, in part because the motives for asking it tend to be suspect. The thuggish wing of the talk-radio community uses the age question to undermine Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, who will be sixty-eight in October. That makes her more than a year younger than Donald Trump, although age is the least of many concerns about him. Age should certainly count a lot less than the goofy ideas and inexperience demonstrated by too many Republicans. But the curious absence of a new political generation should concern Democrats, and a party whose other poll-leading 2016 candidates, declared and not, are Bernie Sanders, who is seventy-four, and Joe Biden, who will be seventy-three in November. (Barely registering in the polls are Jim Webb, who is sixty-nine, and Martin O’Malley, a relative teen at fifty-two.) Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Huckabee are in their early sixties, but, for better or worse, Republicans also have half a dozen contenders in their forties and fifties. The distinct problem for the Democrats isn’t the presence of elders; it’s the absence of young women and men with the potential to be credible national candidates.
Apart from Ronald Reagan, who at sixty-nine was the oldest President ever to be elected, Americans have tended to choose younger men for the office. Franklin D. Roosevelt was fifty when he won his first term; John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were in their forties. Even Eisenhower, grandfatherly affect and all, was only sixty-two when he won the White House for the first time.
In the early winter of 1956, as the next Presidential cycle began and Eisenhower recovered from his heart attack, he wrote to his childhood friend Edward E. (Swede) Hazlett to say, “We all know that when advancing years and diminishing energy begin to take their toll, the last one that ever appreciates such a situation is the victim himself.” In another letter, to a doctor who’d recently examined him and thought that he was healthy enough to run again, Ike expressed still more doubts. In “contemplating my own future duty,” he compared his job to that of a quarterback: “He may have all of the wisdom to be derived from years of experience in the game. But when the need arises, he has to throw himself unreservedly into the play…. If we merely needed a brain on the field, a quarterback could play if he had to be in a wheelchair; but that isn’t true in his case, nor is it in the Presidency.”
At the end of February, 1956, a month after sending that letter, Eisenhower announced that he would indeed seek a second term, though he planned to let Vice-President Richard Nixon do most of the campaigning. Ike went on to win reëlection in a landslide. But his health was shakier than his doctors were willing to say, and he suffered two more serious medical alarms—ileitis, an intestinal condition, in the summer of 1956, and a minor stroke, in the fall of 1957. In October, 1960, he marked his seventieth birthday, which, until the Reagan era, made him the oldest President ever to serve.
The country fifty-five years ago was lucky that it all turned out as it did. It was also another reminder, just ten years after Roosevelt’s death, that choosing a Vice-President is a serious matter. During the 1956 campaign, the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, made an issue of Eisenhower's health—and the possibility that Nixon, deeply hated by Democrats, might become President. Democrats, without a successor generation in clear view, may get lucky in 2016, especially facing a Republican field whose contenders include people who say, inexplicably, as they did in last week’s debate, that George W. Bush left the country safer (Jeb Bush), or that vaccines may cause autism (Trump), or that it’s worth shutting down the government to defund Planned Parenthood (Ted Cruz, Chris Christie). Sixty years ago, Eisenhower was willing to consider the nation’s welfare ahead of personal ambition. That was an impulse rarely glimpsed in last week’s Republican debate.
