Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop. It's a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson, Face the Nation.

During the period between October 1919 and 1955, September, 1955, that is, four of seven presidents either had a heart attack or a stroke while president, Wilson, Harding, FDR, and

Eisenhower. Some presidents, like Eisenhower, had a heart attack and a stroke. It was enough to make

you think the office was too much for one man. That was the question raised when Dwight Eisenhower

had his first ticker hiccup in office in 1955, which brings us to our story today. In our last whistle stop,

I was marveling at how Eisenhower and his administration didn't have to pay attention to the

hurricanes of 1955. It was a pretty bad year for hurricanes, and it was five years after, a really

bad year for hurricanes in 1950. So you might have expected that all national eyes would turn to the man we call the commander

in chief.

But the president wasn't on duty, nor was his government.

It was a local affair, they believed at the time, not a part of the presidential brief.

So in mid-September, as Hurricane Eone was about to hit the East Coast, Eisenhower was off on vacation.

Hurricane Ione, most savage of the seasoned storms, builds up her fearsome force over the Atlantic as a Navy plane flies into the very heart or eye of the hurricane, 15,000 feet above the churning sea.

Sucking up billions of gallons of water and packing 125

mile an hour winds, my own Koreans crazily, aimlessly along the eastern coast. Not only was there

no fuss at the time that he was off on vacation when the hurricane was bearing down on the plywood,

blocking the windows, but it was a subject of some mirth in the

newspapers. Here's a whimsical piece about Vice President Richard Nixon that references the

president's vacation on September 18, 1955, the very day that the hurricane made landfall.

How was he enjoying Mr. Eisenhower's vacation, the piece asked about the vice president?

Fine, Nixon said. We get a little more sleep around Washington. He has the ungodly habit of getting up early.

Nixon was a Navy man and Eisenhower was an army man and somehow this was the subtext in that statement.

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