Penn's Most Absent-Minded Professor?

As one of Penn's most illustrious profs, David Eisenhower is known for more than being President Eisenhower's grandson who married Nixon's daughter around these parts. He is the beloved professor who teaches "Communication and the Presidency" and who escorts bright-eyed COMPS students to national conventions. He is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the director of the Institute for Public Service at Penn, a member of the editorial board for the Presidential Studies Quarterly and a New York Times bestselling author. Impressive.

He is also apparently a tad scatter-brained. In Ronald Kessler's new book Inside the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect, Eisenhower is painted as, well, an absent-minded professor. Kessler writes that "agents considered [him] the most clueless person they had ever protected." An excerpt from the book can be found after the jump. Wonder what Julie thinks.

Occasionally, Nixon's son-in-law David Eisenhower, grandson of former president Dwight Eisenhower, went with [Nixon golfing]. Agents considered the younger Eisenhower the most clueless person they had ever protected.  One day, the Nixons gave him a barbecue grill as a Christmas present. With the Nixons inside his house, EIsenhower tried to start the grill to char some steaks. After a short time, he told Wunderlich (a Secret Service agent) it would not light.

"He had poured most of a bag of briquets into the pit of the grill and lit matches on top of them, but he had not used fire starter," Wunderlich says.

"Do you know anything about garage door openers?" Eisenhower asked another Secret Service agent. "I need a little help. I've had it two years, and I don't get a light. Shouldn't the light come on?"

"Maybe the lightbulb is burnt out," the agent said.

"Really?" David said.

The agent looked up.  There was no bulb in the socket.

"We did a loose surveillance, or tail, on David Eisenhower when there were a lot of threats on the president, and he was going to George Washington University Law School in Washington," a former agent says. "He was in a red Pinto. He comes out of classes and goes to a Safeway in Georgetown. He parks and buys some groceries. A woman parks in a red Pinto nearby. He comes out in 45 minutes and puts the groceries in the other Pinto. He spend a minute and a half to two minutes trying to start it. Meanwhile, she comes out, screams, and says, 'What are you doing in my car?'"

"This is my car," he insisted. "I just can't get it started right now."

The woman threatened to call the police. He fnally got out, and she drove off.

"He was still dumbfounded," the former agent says. "He looked at us.  We pointed at his car. He got in and drove off like nothing had happened."

Subsequently, Eisenhower bought a new Oldsmobile and planned to drive it from California to Pennsylvania to see his grandmother Mamie Eisenhower, who was code-named Springtime. In Phoenix, the car gave out. Eisenhower called a local dealership, which said it would fix the car the next morning. After staying overnight in a motel, Eisenhower went to the dealership where the car had been towed. The dealership told him the problem had been fixed: the car had run out of gas and needed a fill-up.