The Patient in T-4

On a golfing vacation under Georgia's golden autumn skies, Dwight Eisenhower loafed around the Augusta National Golf Club course and chatted amiably with many old friends. This was his 43rd visit to Augusta, and it seemed comfortably similar to all the rest--until his 15th day there.

After dining with friends, Ike and Mamie returned about 11 p.m. to "Mamie's Cabin," the seven-room house the club built for Ike in 1952, and went to bed. An hour and a half later, the former President was jolted awake by severe chest pains. At his bedside was a buzzer so he could summon a Secret Service agent in an emergency. Within minutes Dr. Louis Battey, an Augusta cardiologist, was at his side. He gave Eisenhower a pain-relieving drug, nitroglycerin tablets to dilate the coronary arteries, and some oxygen. The pains were intense for 30 minutes, then faded away.

Grim Situation. By 2 a.m., Eisenhower had been taken to the white frame Army hospital at nearby Fort Gordon, and was resting comfortably in Suite T4, a special five-room, cottage-like suit: that is always held vacant for him when he is in Augusta. A team of heart specialists was summoned, including Dr. Thomas Mattingly of Washington, who had treated Ike in 1955. Mattingly and Ike's son John were whisked down to Georgia in a White House JetStar.

At the hospital, the situation seemed grim. The patient was 75 years old, his heart scarred from his earlier attack. Doctors put him under an oxygen tent and began a series of intensive tests. First results indicated it was no more than a mild attack of angina pectoris, meaning that there was an insufficient flow of blood to the heart muscle, largely as a result of hardening of the arteries. Ike himself was cheerful. The oxygen tent was removed and he even fed himself a light, low-fat breakfast, later sat up in a chair. Everyone perked up; doctors said the general might be on his feet again in two weeks.

A Definite Attack. Then, about 36 hours after he was hospitalized, Ike suffered a more prolonged and painful wave of chest pains. A new air of gloom swept the hospital. Doctors moved their patient back into the oxygen tent, continued to treat him (as they had from the start) as if he had had "a full-blown heart attack." After another batch of tests, they announced that the general had indeed been struck by another definite heart attack.

At week's end doctors said that Ike had suffered no further pains and was in "excellent spirits." When he was not dozing in his oxygen tent, he sat up in bed reading westerns or chatting cheerfully with John, Mamie and his brother Milton about "everything from education to Black Angus cattle." It had been exactly a decade, Eisenhower recalled on Veterans' Day, since he returned to the White House after suffering his first heart attack in Denver.

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