Forty years ago, Indianapolis passed an anniversary that qualifies as a footnote in our city’s history that kick-started a painful memory in my own life. On February 15, 1974 President Richard M. Nixon’s daughter, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, entered an Indianapolis hospital operating room to undergo emergency surgery to halt internal bleeding from an ovarian cyst. The 25-year-old was admitted the previous night (Valentine’s Day) at the Indiana University Medical Center suffering from severe abdominal pain.
Her mother and her husband, David Eisenhower, grandson of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had rushed to her aid via two separate military jet planes. Both wanted to be at her side shortly after the operation. Mrs. Eisenhower recovered in a private, spacious top floor room within the Krannert Pavilion, which occupied the entire sixth floor.
Julie was recovering in one of those luxury suites while the press anxiously awaited details about her condition in the lobby below. Rumors abounded that the “First Daughter” was suffering an ectopic pregnancy, or tubular pregnancy, which had a significant mortality rate. After the surgery, a hospital spokesman read a statement saying Mrs. Eisenhower was experiencing some postoperative discomfort and pain, but was considered in satisfactory condition. Then he added, “She is doing very, very well.” But no further reason for her presence was released, adding to the speculation within the press corps.
The First Daughter was in Indianapolis for an editorial meeting of the Saturday Evening Post, where she was employed as a $10,000 a year assistant editor. Dr. Cory SerVaas, wife (now widow) of Curtis Publishing Co. board chairman Beurt SerVaas, said Mrs. Eisenhower had become ill during the meeting and was taken to their home in the northwest Indianapolis suburbs.
“Julie complained of pain in her lower back,” Dr. SerVaas said. “She spent a restless night at our house and by Wednesday noon she was in extreme pain.” Dr. SerVaas took Julie to Dr. Sprague Gardiner, one of the state’s leading gynecologists, who found the young woman to be suffering substantial internal bleeding. Dr. Gardiner had Julie admitted to the hospital immediately. “At first we thought it was an ectopic pregnancy,” Dr. SerVaas said. “But we found she had a benign ovarian cyst. The cyst was removed and the bleeding was stopped. Everything went well.” Dr. SerVaas added the operation should not affect Julie’s ability to bear children.
Both Dr. SerVaas and hospital spokesman Harrison Ullmann emphasized there was no tubular pregnancy, as was first reported. While Julie underwent emergency surgery, her father anxiously awaited reports at his “Winter White House” in Key Biscayne, Florida. His daughter’s emergency surgery necessitated the cancellation of a planned Valentine’s Day dinner for family and friends. The Thursday night dinner was to include Julie and David, the first lady, daughter Tricia Cox, friend and neighbor C.G. “Bebe” Rebozo and several top aides, all of whom had flown in for a weekend stay.
Instead, President Nixon waited alone at his bayside home for medical reports on his daughter. The President and sister Tricia talked to Julie by telephone before the operation, but things were still very much in limbo at the time. Press Secretary Ron Ziegler said there were no plans for the President to fly to Indianapolis, although it was obviously still an option. After all, Richard Nixon had problems of his own. Just a month before, he had refused to turn over the Watergate tapes, although ordered to by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. That action led to the impeachment proceedings against Mr. Nixon and just a week before Julie’s illness, on February 6, the House impeachment committee had been granted broad subpoena power to compel testimony or production of documents from any source, including the President himself.
Nixon was in the Sunshine State after flying South on what was billed as “a business trip” to include two public speeches, his first outside Washington since the previous November. The President’s speeches, one of which was at a Huntsville, Alabama rally accompanied by Governor George Wallace, drew a mixed reception. Invited guests cheered him heartily while waving hand-lettered placards reading “We Love You” and “Hang In There” hastily written on the backs of their dedication programs. Further away, behind three rows of rope barricades, protesters booed and chanted “impeachment now.”
Meantime, back at the I.U. Med Center, the world was clamoring for news about the “First daughter.” Under increased supervision and security, Julie ventured out of bed Saturday morning to take a stroll down the small hospital corridor outside her suite. The White House doctors relayed word that the President’s daughter was “feeling much better,” had less discomfort and her post-operative condition now was regarded as “fine.”
I.U. Medical Center spokesman Harrison J. Ullman intimated that Mrs. Eisenhower could remain in the hospital for a total of a week to 10 days. When she left, though, Ullman said it was his understanding that Mrs. Eisenhower “would still require bed confinement or anything like that.” He said she would probably be “a bit more fatigued than she has been accustomed to.” The illness would not interfere too much with 25-year-old Mrs. Eisenhower’s busy schedule that included numerous public appearances and many spoken defenses of her father in connection with the Watergate affair.
Hungry for a “scoop,” local reporters discovered Saturday that her boss, Dr. Cory SerVaas, executive editor and publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, had just given the President’s daughter a raise in salary from $10,000 to $15,000 a year. Back in Washington, Mrs. Nixon’s press secretary, Helen Smith, was laying down the law direct from the White House medical corps to staff at the Indianapolis hospital to the news media that they were not permitted to talk with any of the three doctors on the case. Saturday, reporters were told: “I guarantee you are not going to see a doctor while she’s (Mrs. Eisenhower) here. They (the White House and Nixon family) regard this as not within the public’s domain.” Asked if Mrs. Nixon or David Eisenhower would speak to the press at the hospital “and the answer is no.”
So, imagine the electric shock that bolted through the press corps, camped out six floors beneath the American Princess, when a surprise visitor wandered into the cafeteria below. David Eisenhower, who had been at the hospital with his wife since Thursday evening, surprised cafeteria patrons Saturday evening when be strolled down in shirt sleeves, unaccompanied by any security agents, to get some corn chips out of a vending machine. Seemingly defying official White House edict, he reported that things were going well with his wife Julie and said she was reading a book. David looked a bit weary and explained that he was studying hard for his law school courses. He had to send back for some of his books after leaving Washington hastily due to his wife’s sudden illness, David said. But he added the hospital stay was giving him “plenty of time to read.” He said he would be staying at the hospital and gave no indication of an early departure for home.
The medical center’s VIP patient, meanwhile, continued to receive “quite a volume” of get-well messages and flowers. Julie asked that they all be brought up to her sixth-floor room. Among the floral gifts that arrived was a huge basket filled with bright spring flowers sent by the Ambassador of Iran in Washington.
The operation was her first major illness since the Nixons had been in the White House. But she, more than anyone else in the Nixon family, has been plagued with periodic medical difficulties over the previous five years. She and David Eisenhower were married in December and began married life as college students living in a small apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts. While there as a student at Smith College, Julie was hospitalized very briefly in May 1971 at Cooley-Dickinson Hospital for an unknown “minor medical problem.” Two months later, she was in Georgetown University Hospital in Washington overnight for tests to determine the cause of a chronic infection of the urinary tract.
Muckraking Hoosier journalists discovered that Julie, who had a master’s degree in education, got her first job as a school teacher in Allanlie Beach, Fla., in September 1971 while her husband was based there in the Navy. But, on her first day of the job, a book cart toppled over and she suffered a broken big toe on her left foot. The accident resulted in her decision to quit the full-time teaching job, which aroused criticism from fellow teachers who felt she was taking a job away from more needy applicants. Julie’s next bout with illness was July l972 when she came down with viral pneumonia at the young Eisenhower’s rented apartment in Mayport, Florida.
The news-starved local press reported that while recovering in the posh “penthouse suite,” Julie got the happy news that a close friend back in Washington had given birth to her first baby. That word came from Cynthia Milligan, daughter of former Nixon Agriculture Secretary, Purdue Grad and Knightstown native Clifford Hardin. Mrs. Milligan telephoned the news from her hospital room to friend Julie’s suite. Julie was still asleep, but Mrs. Nixon relayed the word. Yep, that was how desperate the local media was for news about our city’s famous guest.
Although Julie was still experiencing pain in her lower back, she was reported to be in satisfactory condition with the hospital reporting that “She spent a restless night but was now on the road to recovery.” The news from Indianapolis was good and four days after her arrival, on February 18, 1974, her father, along with sister Tricia, arrived in Indianapolis to pick Julie, David and the First Lady up and take them back home. Julie was wheeled out of the hospital in a wheelchair by her husband David to a waiting limousine bound for the airport. President Nixon flew in to Indy immediately after his appearance in Huntsville, to give his ailing daughter a lift from Indianapolis to the Capitol via Presidential motorcade, plane and helicopter.
Once back in the White House, Mrs. Eisenhower went right to bed in a second-floor room, with doctors and a nurse from the White House medical dispensary on call if needed. During the hour’s flight to Washington, Julie rested in a bedroom of the presidential jet plane, visiting with members of her family. Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler said Julie was “very weak” on the plane. Indiana University Medical School specialists permitted Mrs. Eisenhower to go home three days earlier than usual after such an operation.
In February of 1974, America was at an apocryphal crossroad: Patty Hearst had just been kidnapped; the Watergate grand jury indicted H.R.Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Chuck Colson, John Mitchell and others on charges of covering up the Watergate break-in and it looked like Nixon was not far behind; Cher files for separation from husband Sonny Bono; “People” magazine hits the newstand, kicking off the age of mainstream bubblegum journalism; Kiss releases their debut album; and Robert K. Preston, a disgruntled U.S. Army private, buzzed the White House with a stolen helicopter. But for that five day period around Valentine’s Day, Indianapolis was the center of the universe and the IU Medical center was the center of my world.
I was eleven years old at the time and my mother, Ruth McDuffee Hunter Pearson, had just been admitted to the IU Medical Center after doctors diagnosed her with terminal bone cancer. While our family was busily comforting our matriarch, American Royalty was “resting comfortably” just yards away. Children my age were not normally permitted up there, but my mother insisted that the hospital make a special exception for me. It was a thrill for an inquisitive pre-teen like me to walk in the footsteps of history and try and catch a glimpse of the First Family of the land. I never saw them, but it was not for lack of trying.
Little did I know that these were the first footsteps I would take on my mother’s slow journey towards death by cancer. She would live another five years. She was, I’m told, the longest living terminal bone cancer patient in Indiana history at the time. She would breathe her last breath in that same building in November of 1979, in fact, in the very same room from which I first chased the whiff of Presidential history. But by that time, although I was only 17 years old, it seemed like a lifetime ago.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
