Did Eisenhower advise his son to commit suicide?

John S.D. Eisenhower has a NYT op-ed opining that presidential sons should not be permitted to serve in combat duty. He recounts his own experience, as a soldier assigned to combat duty in Korea in 1952, as his father was about to win the presidency:

As the time for my deployment approached, I discussed my intentions with my father. We met at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, just after the Republican convention, and I explained my position. My father, as a professional officer himself, understood and accepted it. However, he had a firm condition: under no circumstances must I ever be captured. He would accept the risk of my being killed or wounded, but if the Chinese Communists or North Koreans ever took me prisoner, and threatened blackmail, he could be forced to resign the presidency. I agreed to that condition wholeheartedly. I would take my life before being captured.

On looking back through the years, however, I now feel that I was being unfair and selfish and that my father was being far too conciliatory in giving me such permission. On the other hand, I don’t think that the Army should ever have given me an option in the matter.

Conciliatory in giving me such permission. There's a phrase. Did Eisenhower advise his son to commit suicide? I'm trying to flesh out that conversation. Ike said he'd have to resign the presidency if his son John were captured and the Chinese Communists or North Koreans threatened blackmail, and John said that since he'd never advance in the military if he turned down a combat assignment, he would promise that if he were ever about to taken prisoner, he would kill himself first. And Ike's response was not, no, you would become a prisoner, with a life no more valuable that that of any other prisoners, but, because the American people will not know whether my love for you is affecting my judgment, I will need to resign the presidency. No, Ike said something like: Okay, then, suit yourself, go to combat, advance your career, but I have the ultimate career advancement here, son, the presidency, and I'm not letting you screw that up for me. You are on the hook, you little bastard. You promised to commit suicide. Don't forget!

Perhaps you would flesh out the Blackstone Hotel scenario differently. Meanwhile, John Eisenhower, who actually knows what was said, pads out his op-ed with material about how the President's son might increase the danger to those who serve alongside him, but this is a matter for military authorities to weigh (as was done in the case of Prince Harry, who mentioned in the article). Eisenhower has no expertise about about these risks and how the military authorities handle them today in Iraq and Afghanistan. His expertise is only about the mind of a one President, over half a century ago, whose relationship to his son is left opaque.

Eisenhower concludes:

No matter what the young person’s desires or career needs are, they are of little importance compared with ensuring that our leaders are able to stay focused on the important business of the nation — and not worrying about the fate of a child a world away.

The fate of a child? We don't send children to war. They are men and women, and all of them -- almost all of them -- have people who love them.

I want the President to have the strength of mind to think of all of them as valuable in the same way their own offspring are valuable. Let the President worry about their fate. If having his actual son fighting makes him reweigh the cost of war, perhaps he lacks the competence to govern. And this is certainly not to say that Dwight Eisenhower lacked the competence to govern. Look closely at that Blackstone Hotel story. It doesn't say that Ike thought his judgment would be skewed. The implication is that Ike worried that his credibility would be questioned, and only in the blackmail situation.

And what, if anything, do John Eisenhower -- and the NYT -- mean to imply about John McCain, who was taken prisoner when his father was a military commander and who considered but rejected suicide?