Play the Perfect Courtier: Eisenhower Said “I Need Him.” Ninety-Six Days Later, New Hampshire’s Sherman Adams Was Gone

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Robert Greene’s twenty-fourth law says to learn the rules of the court and never draw the wrong kind of attention. A former New Hampshire governor guarded Eisenhower’s door for nearly six years. Then he became the story.

On Sept. 22, 1958, Sherman Adams flew to the U.S. Naval Base at Newport, Rhode Island, sat down with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and handed in his resignation. Adams had been governor of New Hampshire. For nearly six years he had been The Assistant to the President, the aide who stood between Eisenhower and the people who wanted something from him. The president’s letter of acceptance, dated that day at Newport, called his work brilliant and said he accepted the resignation “with sadness.” At the same time, the White House released the text of a radio and television talk in which Adams explained his departure to the country.

Ninety-six days earlier, Eisenhower had stood before the White House press corps and read a statement about the same man. It ended with four words: “I need him.”

Robert Greene’s twenty-fourth law says to play the perfect courtier: learn the rules of the court you serve in and never draw the wrong kind of attention. Sherman Adams of Lincoln, New Hampshire, is the cleanest test of that law in the state’s record. He followed the court’s hardest rule, absorbing resentment so the master did not have to, and it made him the most powerful aide in Washington. He broke the court’s oldest rule, never become the story, and not even the president’s public need for him could save him.

From Lincoln to the West Wing

Adams was born in East Dover, Vermont, on Jan. 8, 1899, graduated from Dartmouth College in 1920 and served in the Marine Corps during World War I, according to his National Governors Association biography. After college he went to work for the Parker-Young Company, a lumber and furniture concern, and within a few years moved to its headquarters in Lincoln, New Hampshire, Skiing History magazine reported in a 2026 profile.

Politics came next, and fast. The Eisenhower Library’s finding aid for his papers lists the steps: the New Hampshire House from 1941 to 1944, speaker in 1943 and 1944, one term in Congress from the Second District from 1945 to 1947, then the governor’s office. He was elected in 1948 and reelected in 1950. In 1952 he went to the Republican National Convention as a New Hampshire delegate, helped deliver the state’s delegation to Eisenhower and became the candidate’s campaign manager, Skiing History reported. When Eisenhower won, he named Adams his chief of staff.

The gatekeeper

The job had a formal title, The Assistant to the President, and an informal one. He was known as “the Abominable No Man,” Skiing History reported, for his habit of killing the pet projects that people hoped to slip past him to the president. Time magazine, writing in 1958, described him as “next to Ike the most powerful man in the Administration.”

Here Adams seems to break Greene’s law at first glance. Greene’s courtier is graceful, careful with criticism and pleasant to be around. Adams was curt, and he made enemies by the dozen. But the enemies were the point. Every request he refused was a request Eisenhower did not have to refuse. A senator who left angry was angry at the gatekeeper, not the president. That is the courtier’s deepest service: the master stays above the fight because someone else stands in the door.

Read that way, Adams followed the rule that mattered most. The court tolerated his manners because his manners protected the man at the top. The trouble came from a different direction.

The gifts

In June 1958, a House investigating subcommittee made public that Adams had accepted gifts from Bernard Goldfine, a Boston textile manufacturer. Time listed a vicuña coat and about $2,000 in hotel bills among them; later accounts add an oriental rug and name the hotel as Boston’s Sheraton-Plaza. Goldfine had business before federal regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and he sent gifts to people he thought could help him, United Press International recounted in a 1986 retrospective.

Adams testified before the subcommittee on June 17, 1958. He described Goldfine as a personal friend of 18 years, according to EBSCO’s account of the hearing. He said he had placed one call to the SEC to ask that Goldfine’s matter be expedited, and he conceded a lack of prudence, a point Eisenhower would repeat the next day. He denied that the gifts came with strings attached.

The facts were not the worst of it for a courtier. The worst of it was where the attention landed. In 1952, as one reporter reminded the president, his campaign had attacked what it called the mess in Washington. Now his own gatekeeper was the subject of a congressional hearing about a businessman’s coat. A reporter put that point to Eisenhower directly at his next news conference, asking about Republicans who said they would have trouble facing the voters on what the reporter called the Adams-Goldfine issue.

“I need him”

Eisenhower opened his June 18, 1958, news conference by reading a prepared statement about Adams. The transcript, kept by the American Presidency Project, runs 390 words. Eisenhower argued that a gift is not necessarily a bribe, said no one who knew Adams doubted his integrity and conceded that his aide had been careless about how the gifts would look. Then he gave his conclusion. He liked Adams, admired his abilities and respected his integrity. “I need him.”

It was a strong defense, and it was the last long one. At his July 2 news conference, a reporter told Eisenhower that many Republicans, including some congressional leaders, were saying Adams should resign. The president answered in 58 words: his earlier statement stood, he had nothing more to say and he would take no questions while the hearings continued. On Aug. 6, asked again, he answered in 26 words. He had made his statement some time ago, he said, and he was going to say nothing more about it.

The shrinking answers tell the story Greene would expect. A master can defend a courtier once. After that, every question about the courtier is a question the master has to answer himself, and the court starts counting what the defense costs.

The court counts the cost

The bill came from the party. On Aug. 20, Vice President Richard Nixon told Eisenhower that nearly all the Republican nominees for the Senate and House said Adams’s presence was hurting them, Time reported. Republican National Chairman Meade Alcorn said major donors were holding back money until the matter was settled. Eisenhower agreed to let Adams go but would not ask for the resignation himself. He sent Alcorn, an old friend of Adams’s, to deliver the news.

Maine voted first. Its election came on Sept. 8, 1958, two months before the rest of the country. Democrat Edmund Muskie, a two-term governor, took about 60 percent of the vote and unseated Republican Sen. Frederick Payne, according to the U.S. Senate Historical Office. Payne, Skiing History reported, had taken a loan from Goldfine. Time wrote that calls to fire Adams poured in the morning after the Maine results.

Time’s account of the end reads like a manual on how a court removes one of its own. Alcorn took a quiet survey at a party committee meeting in Chicago and found the opinion close to unanimous: Adams had to go. Rep. Richard Simpson of Pennsylvania, who ran the House Republicans’ campaign committee, wanted to demand the ouster in public, and Alcorn talked him out of it. Adams, meanwhile, was fishing in Canada. When he came back to his White House desk, Alcorn was the one who told him he had to go. On Sept. 22 Adams flew to Newport.

The acceptance letter that followed runs 160 words. It praised Adams’s devotion, called his performance brilliant and promised him the president’s complete trust and respect. It did not ask him to stay. The court’s verdict and the master’s affection had come apart, and the court won.

A fair objection

The case against reading Adams through Greene starts with his manners. Greene’s courtier charms. Adams did not, and he lasted nearly six years at the top of the most demanding court in the country. If the law were about grace, Adams would have been gone in a season. A plainer reading is that loyalty and usefulness, not polish, kept him in the room.

The second objection is that Adams did not fall because he misread the court. He fell because of an election calendar. Eisenhower defended him in public and, by Time’s account, still would not fire him himself. It took a lost Senate seat in Maine and a vice president carrying the party’s complaints to move him. That is less a lesson in etiquette than in arithmetic: an aide stays as long as he is worth more to the boss than he costs.

And Adams conceded only a lack of prudence. He said the gifts carried no strings. Eisenhower’s own statement said no one believed he could be bought. A reader can accept every word of that and still see the courtier’s problem. Greene’s law is not about guilt. It is about attention. A courtier who becomes the subject of the hearing has already broken the rule, whatever the hearing finds.

New Hampshire supplied a second test a generation later. Part One of this series followed John H. Sununu, another New Hampshire governor who became White House chief of staff, under President George H.W. Bush. Sununu, too, became the story, and he, too, left with a warm letter from the president he served.

The verdict

Greene’s twenty-fourth law holds, with a correction the record supplies. The perfect courtier does not have to be pleasant. Adams was not. He has to be useful in a way the master can see, and he must never make the master answer for him. For nearly six years Adams took the blows meant for Eisenhower. In the summer of 1958 the blows started landing on Eisenhower because of Adams, and the arrangement ended inside a single season.

Adams went home to Lincoln. By the account of the resort itself, he conceived Loon Mountain in 1958 to diversify the local economy, picked the site on snowshoes and managed its construction himself. Loon opened on Dec. 27, 1966, with Adams as founder, and he ran it as president and general manager for nearly two decades. He died on Oct. 27, 1986, and is buried in Lincoln.

The lesson travels well beyond the White House. Every governor’s office, every agency head and every selectboard in New Hampshire has someone at the door. The ones who last keep the boss out of the headlines. The ones who become the headline find out what “I need him” is worth when the votes start coming in. Part Twenty-Three showed a movement winning by concentrating on one target, and Part Twenty-Two showed the weaker side winning by giving up. Part Twenty-Four is the warning that comes with any seat close to power: the court keeps score.

Next: Law 25, on re-creating yourself, tested against the New Hampshire record.

Fact check

Editor’s note: Commentary and analysis, not legal advice. Eisenhower’s words and the resignation letter come from the American Presidency Project transcripts; word counts are Granite State Report’s. Accounts of the 1958 hearing and the party’s pressure come from Time and later histories and are attributed. RSA 15-B is current New Hampshire law and did not exist in 1958; it is cited for comparison, not as a standard Adams broke. The GSR Power Index is editorial, not data.