Ike Wages War On A Golf Course Tree (1956)

This Day

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

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It's December 21th. This day in 1956, President Eisenhower is on his annual retreat to Augusta National golf course in Georgia -- and he is waging a vendetta against a pine tree that keeps getting in the way of his shots.

Jody, NIki, and Kellie discuss why Ike was so obsessed with this tree, how he went to great lengths to get it removed, and whether this obsession distracted him from, you know, the job of being president.

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Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.
0:10.9	This day, December 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower, is on his annual sabbatical, his holiday leave to Georgia,
0:18.4	and specifically to the Augusta National Golf Course. Ike had just
0:22.7	won re-election and a bit of a landslide, but there were of course many serious issues facing
0:27.0	the country. Rising inflation, the year-long Montgomery bus boycott had just come to a close.
0:32.7	Southern states were increasingly resistant to desegregation efforts. The world was in dire straits.
0:38.6	There's an uprising in Hungary, conflicts in Syria and Iraq.
0:42.8	And Ike is down at the golf course in Augusta, Georgia.
0:45.7	And one of the biggest things on his mind is a tree, a tree on the left side of the 17th
0:51.4	fairway.
0:52.4	Ike went so far as to attend the board meeting of Augusta National
0:56.2	and demand that this tree be cut down. So let's talk about Ike versus the tree. Ike and golf.
1:02.2	And to quote friend of the show Alexis Coe, how presidents are people too. This is, I would say,
1:07.1	a very humanizing moment for Ike, his vendetta against this one tree.
1:14.5	But let's see if Nicole Hammer, Vanderbilt, and Kelly Carter Jackson agree.
1:15.0	Hello there.
1:15.8	Hey, Jody.
1:16.8	Hey there.
1:17.6	Now, wait a second.
1:22.4	We had an episode where Dwight Eisenhower also went to war against a squirrel. Multiple squirrels, and it was golf related because they were invading his.
1:26.4	All right.
1:31.3	I'm just saying he's not going to win environmentalist of the year. I was actually thinking, I was going to bring that up,
	...

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