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One of the greatest thrills of my life was when I met and shook hands with Eisenhower at a private military reception after he had retired. I was an 18-year-old not-bad-looking young woman at the time. He was wearing his General's uniform. When he gave me that piercing eagle-eye contact, I thought I'd faint.

The way the press and liberals treated him was almost as bad as what they did to Reagan and to Bush during the past 8 years; they just didn't have as many communications tools at their disposal then, and it was still a frankly Christian society, so it never got as low-down and dirty. But the whines and lies were all the same: he's stupid; he takes too many days off to play golf; he's so old he's losin' it; he will plunge us into war like Hitler; his wife is a drunk; he's a "do-nothing".

That last one used to rankle me totally. You give people peace and prosperity after the horrors of the World War and Korea, you take no s*** from Democrat segregationists and just integrate the schools at the point of a gun, you institute a national highway system that will lay the path for a huge surge in commerce for the next 50 years, and you do it so efficiently and without fanfare that you're like the ice skater who looks so effortless (but who only had to practice 8 hours a day for the past 8 years and suffer several broken bones and injuries to look that way), and everyone complains you're not doing anything.