The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

Nixon later admitted that he was “completely unprepared” for the shocking news of the heart attack, relayed to him in the early afternoon of September 24 by Hagerty. After putting down the receiver, Nixon sat in a stupor in an armchair in his Washington home. After a while he called his close friend and confidant William P. Rogers, the deputy attorney general, and asked him to come to his house. The two men sat together awhile, talking about Nixon’s next move. But with news of the president’s illness now flooding the airwaves, reporters started to crowd Nixon’s front lawn. Only then did Nixon make his first decision: he and Rogers fled out the back door, crossed his neighbor’s lawn in darkness, and slipped into a waiting Pontiac driven by Rogers’s wife. The vice president then went into seclusion at the Rogers home, staying out of public view until Sunday, when he attended church services with his family. Only then did he speak to reporters. For almost 24 hours after hearing about the heart attack, the president’s constitutional successor refused “even to be photographed” by the press.