Death of Eisenhower's Firstborn Child

Eisenhower adored his firstborn child, Doud Dwight, nicknamed "Icky". When Ike was stationed at Fort Meade, Icky was a mascot for the soldiers When four year old Icky died, leaving his parents grief-stricken, Mamie once said, "It was as if a shining light had gone out of Ike's life. Throughout all the years that followed, the memory of those bleak days was a deep inner pain, that never seemed to diminish much." Ike sent Mamie flowers every year on Icky's birthday. Thirty-five years later, Ike wrote the following in a letter of consolation to his brother Edgar when Edgar's forty-year-old son Jack died.

From the Papers Of Dwight David Eisenhower: The Presidency

It is, of course difficult to understand why so often the oldsters go on and on into their eighties and nineties, while the younger more vigorous men are cut down in their youth. There is no way to explain it except that is is one of the accidents of living. It happens with the trees and the birds and everything that grows. No individual can have any possible explanation, and therefore it is one of those things which must be accepted and absorbed into the philosophy that a man develops as he goes along.

In spite of all this...I know this it is hard for you to take, yet you owe it to those still around you- your wife, your daughter and your grandchildren - to provide an example that is characterized by hope, faith and optimism. Pessimism, cynicism and defeat will destroy Jack's legacy.

This sounds like preaching - and possibly it is. My justification is that I lost a son of my own many years ago - then only one we had. To this date it is not an easy thing to deal with when it come fresh to my memory but it is something that I had to learn to accept or to go crazy.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower.