Mamie Eisenhower - Later Life

Later Life

In 1961 Mrs. Eisenhower retired with the former president to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, their first permanent home. After her husband's death in 1969, she continued to live full-time on the farm until she took an apartment in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s. She appeared in a campaign commercial for her husband's former Vice President Richard Nixon in 1972.

Mamie suffered a stroke on September 25, 1979, and was rushed to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Ike had died a decade before. Mamie remained in the hospital and on October 31, announced to her granddaughter Mary Jean Eisenhower that she would die the next day. Indeed, she died quietly in her sleep very early the morning of November 1, just a few weeks shy of her 83rd birthday. She was buried next to the president and her first son at Place of Meditation on the grounds of the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas. In 1980 her birthplace in Boone, Iowa, was dedicated as a historic site; Abigail Adams is the only other First Lady to be so honored. One of the east-west streets in Boone (Fourth Street) is now called Mamie Eisenhower Avenue.

Because of her connection with the city of Denver and the area surrounding, a park in southeast Denver was given Mamie's name, as well as a public library in Broomfield, a suburb of Denver.