After bacon, eggs, and toast, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower finished their coffee and walked out of the large two-story house on the quiet street and shook hands with Joel Carlson and his wife. “Thanks for having us,” Dwight Eisenhower said. The First Couple had spent the night in their guest bedroom. At the end of the driveway a man waited with three ballerina dolls in his arms. Dwight Eisenhower looked at the man. He looked at another man in a dark suit standing next to him. The unsmiling man in the dark suit was keeping an eagle eye on the dolls.

   “John Krajicek, from Ames,” the Secret Service agent said. The plump ruddy-faced man holding the three dolls gave them to Mamie Eisenhower.

   “Thank you so much,” she said, squeezing his fatty arm.

   John Krajiceks’s face lit up. “It is my pleasure,” he said, glowing.

   The President and Mrs. Eisenhower were in Boone, Iowa, on a Friday. It was the last day of summer. The next day was the first day of fall. It was a clear crisp Midwestern morning. They were on their way to a memory. Once in their car they were driven to Carroll Street, to the house Mamie had been born in sixty years earlier. Mrs. Beatrice Smiley, Mrs. Myrtle Douglas, and Mrs. Awilda Stranberg, the three of them dressed in their best, in a huddle, waiting with bated breath, greeted them on the front porch. They presented Mamie with a photograph of the stone and memorial plaque that had recently been placed on the lawn of her birthplace. Mamie was slightly unnerved by the God’s green acre look of it, like it was a memorial garden.

   Looking down at the plaque, after reading the inscription, Dwight Eisenhower noticed a shiny penny in the freshly mowed grass. See a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

   Adlai Stevenson was coming to nearby Newton the next day to give a speech about farm problems. “We’ve got the Truth Squad ready,” Joel Carlson had said over breakfast. Dwight Eisenhower rolled the penny between his fingers. The truth was he didn’t care about the Truth Squad. He had Adlai Stevenson in his pocket, right where he wanted him. The Gallup Poll didn’t lie, even though they got it wrong in 1948. He wasn’t worried. He wasn’t Tom Dewey, who had been a worried man singing a worried song.

   It was a few minutes before eleven when the Eisenhower’s arrived at the National Field Days and Plowing Matches near Colfax. In the past two days the president had traveled hundreds of miles through central Iowa, made speeches, held impromptu klatches, waved his hands, shook hands, shook more hands, and flashed his trademark smile to more than 300,000 people, half of them lining Walnut Street in Des Moines. They were eight and nine deep on both sides of the street. Schoolchildren ran alongside his limousine and kids on bicycles rode behind the police motorcycle escorts.

   “There’s never been anything like this here before,” Governor Leo Hoegh said, whistling through his gap teeth in admiration and satisfaction.

   Eight years earlier, when Harry Truman had been campaigning in Iowa, he got sick and tired of hearing “We Like Ike!” from hecklers. “Why don’t you shut up and you might learn something,” he retorted at one whistle stop, veering from his prepared speech. When he did, he became the target of eggs and tomatoes. But Dwight Eisenhower didn’t run in 1948 and Harry Truman got the last laugh the morning the Chicago Daily Tribune declared in a front page banner headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” The monarchical blab sheet didn’t bother apologizing.

   As they drove up the dirt road off Highway 6 to the entrance of the Field Days, Dwight Eisenhower glanced at the cardboard signs at the side of the road. Not all of them were on his side. He wasn’t the challenger anymore. He was the incumbent. He was the man in the Oval Office with a record to defend. It made campaigning both easier and harder.

   “10-cent corn. The same as 1932.” 

   “Ike Promised 100 Per Cent Parity 1952. Didn’t Happen. What Promise in 1956?”

   “Ike’s Peace Like Neville Chamberlain’s Peace.”

   At the entrance to Field Days a short round man held up a crayon lettered sign stuck on the end of a mop stick. “Adlai and Estes, The Bestest.” The man felt that was all that needed to be said. When the town librarian tried to correct his use of the word best, he turned his back on her.

   “Mr. President,” Herb Plambeck said. “I’d like to introduce our twenty-seven champion plowmen and our one and only champion plow woman, Mrs. Pauline Blankenship.”

   Dwight Eisenhower shook hands with them all, taking the woman’s hand lightly, even though her hand was bigger and stronger than his. He shook hands with Frank Mendell, chairman of the National Contour Plowing Match, and Dale Hall, chairman of the National Level Land Plowing Match. In the lunch tent he met Kay Butler, Queen of the Furrow, and ate sitting between Mamie and Governor Hoegh. Mrs. Jet Adams supervised the dozen ladies serving lunch. She was a whirlwind of orders and instructions. Mamie waved her over. “You’re doing a wonderful job,” she said. After that, Mamie had Mrs. Jet Adams eating out of her hand and got seconds without even asking.

   When lunch was over Senator Hickenlooper introduced Dwight Eisenhower to the crowd, but not before introducing himself. “Most of you know me, and I’m sure have voted for me often,” he said. There was a ripple of good-natured laughter. “For those of you who don’t know me, and aren’t sure how to pronounce my name, my friends just call me Hick.” There was another ripple of laughter, longer and louder.

   “When I was child, my mother sent me to the drug store to get a nickel’s worth of asafetida for her asthma. The druggist just gave it me without writing it out, because he didn’t want to have to write out my full name, which is Bourke Blakemore Hickenlooper. “

   “Just take this home to your mother, Hick,” the druggist said.

   B. B. Hickenlooper had been a United States Senator since 1944. He wore black frame glasses at the front of a pinkish bald pate and was one of the most conservative and isolationist lawmakers in Washington, D. C.. He hadn’t lost an election ever since as lieutenant governor of Iowa almost twenty years ago he made headlines by saving a Cedar Rapids woman from drowning. She later told her friends she hadn’t needed saving, but that her savior had insisted. Hick knew a hick state and its values when he saw one.

   Dwight Eisenhower’s speech was broadcast live on local TV and radio. He stayed local, steering away from anything controversial, the bland leading the bland. After the address he presented scrolls and trophies to the champion plowmen and champion plow woman. Henry Steenhock, the owner of the land where the Field Days was held, didn’t think much of the outing. “I like Ike, but I don’t think I’ll vote for him, even though I’ve been a Republican all my life,” he said. “Flexible price supports have got to go. We’re not looking for a handout, but we deserve price protection. Other businesses are subsidized. Ezra Benson? He’s got to go. Vice-President Nixon? I don’t like his attitude, period. Estes Kefauver, I like him, he’s like I am, straight-forward.”

   He called corn a cash crop, no more, no less, and a spade a spade. He was a small wound-up man, urgent and upright in his beliefs. He went to church on Sundays and went to work every day except Sundays. “In this corner, still undefeated, Henry’s long-held beliefs,” was what his wife liked to say.

    Dwight Eisenhower and Mamie were at the Des Moines Municipal Airport by mid-afternoon for their flight back to the capital. He greeted and answered questions in the new terminal from more than a hundred weekly state newspaper editors and met with two-dozen state Republican Party officials. He was escorted to the Columbine by sixteen Eagle Scouts formed as an Honor Guard.

   Once inside the plane an aide sat down across from him. “Mr. President we have a report that Anastasio Somoza, the president of Nicaragua, has been shot today.”

   “Is it serious?” 

   “The report isn’t entirely clear, but it said, yes, serious, shot in the chest, point-blank, and it might be life-threatening.”

   “Where have they taken him?” 

   “He’s been taken to the Panama Canal Zone Hospital.”   

   “Good, best place for him. He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but Tacho’s our son-of-a-bitch, so tell them to do everything they can to save him.”

   “Yes, sir.”

   “Who shot him?”

   “A poet.”

   “Well, goddamn it. A poet, you say?”

   “A poet, yes, sir, a local writer and musician, played violin in a band. He was shot dead, riddled to pieces, on the spot.”

   “A writer with a popgun, mightier than the pen.”

   The plane touched down at 9:35 PM, taxied to the MATS Terminal, and the Eisenhower’s were in bed by 10:45 PM. They slept long, recharging their batteries. The next day the president stayed in the Mansion while it rained all day, only seeing the Secretary of State for a few minutes. Dwight and Mamie attended the Sunday morning service at the National Presbyterian Church, and like the day before spent the rest of the day in the Mansion. Sunday night some of Ike’s Gang came to dinner, and over drinks started planning their next stag trip to the Eisenhower Cabin at the Augusta National Golf Club.

   When he was there, which was as often as possible, Dwight Eisenhower worked mornings in the three-story seven-bedroom cabin, played golf with his friends in the afternoon, and got serious after dinner. That was when he played bridge. His friends weren’t his friends at the card table, except his partner, and then not always even him. Dwight Eisenhower had cut his teeth playing poker while a cadet at West Point. He made out like a bandit. He had to learn how to purposely lose sometimes, so as to not arouse envy and suspicion.

    “How was the Iowa trip?” one of his gang asked.

   “The same as all the others, except it didn’t rain, and the food was better,” he said. “I got an eyeful of field corn, shook a lot of hands, and gave speeches to the faithful. I got them to want to come out on election day, vote for me, and save the country.”

   “We heard you’re going to New York for the World Series, since the Yankees are a lock.”

   “You bet I am,” he said. He was looking forward to going out to the ballgame and throwing out the first pitch. It was a job for the Kansas Cyclone, which he had once been, no matter that he had been a football man. He was sure he could throw a strike, not like most of his predecessors, who were always throwing curves.