What I Saved from the Fire

Ike Dress

Surely I would grab my vintage Ike Dress from the fire. The Eisenhower presidential campaigns of 1952 and 1956 featured some of the best paraphernalia. Like the man himself, his campaigns were comparatively larger-than-life and infused with charisma and excitement; though a mediocre president, the General understood a good campaign.

More importantly, this dress was a gift to me from David Garth, one of the founders of the political media business, whose own outsized personality was infused with the spirit of a good fight, a sense of historical adventure, and the creation of dramatic moments full of wit and imagination, punctuated with high dudgeon, and, in all, just plain fun. Garth became my mentor as I was just starting out; as a young man he had worked for Adlai Stevenson in his second race against Eisenhower.  In a way, then, Ike was a beginning for him and his gift of the Ike Dress to me reminds me of my own start.

So, in the beginning of the 21st century, I must say that in some ways I pine for the 20th – for campaigns like Ike’s full of naive spectacle; for scrappy, lively people like Garth; for optimism and a belief in civic virtue in which, though politics and life might soil from time to time, any cynicism remains but a temporary reaction.