ON NOVEMBER 25, after his lunch, Eisenhower went to his office, sat at his desk, began to sign some correspondence, and suddenly felt dizzy. Shaking off the feeling, he reached for another paper. He had difficulty picking it up, and when he did he discovered that the words seemed to run off the top of the page. Frustrated, bewildered, angry, he dropped his pen. Finding himself unable to pick it up, he got up from the chair, suffered another wave of dizziness, and had to grasp the back of the chair for stability.
He collapsed back into the chair and rang for Ann Whitman. When she came in, he tried to tell her what had happened, only to discover that he could not talk intelligibly. Words came out, but not the ones he wanted to say. Nor were they in any order that made sense. Whitman, of course, was stunned to find the President in the Oval Office talking gibberish. She called for Andy Goodpaster. He came in from his adjacent office, assessed the situation, and took charge. Grasping Eisenhower’s arm, he helped him out of the chair and led him toward the door, saying, “Mr. President, I think we should get you to bed.” Eisenhower had no difficulty walking with Goodpaster’s support, nor did he feel any pain. When they got to his bedroom, Goodpaster helped him undress and lie down. Dr. Snyder was there in a matter of minutes. His patient was comfortable, and turned over to take a nap.1
Snyder called in two neurologists, while Goodpaster called John Eisenhower, and Whitman told Mamie what had happened. The initial medical diagnosis was a minor stroke. Snyder speculated that the President may have had a spasm in one of the small capillaries of his brain. Sherman Adams joined the group in the living room. He said he had called Nixon both to alert him and to ask the Vice-President to replace the President at a state dinner that evening. To their collective horror, the door opened and there stood the President, in bathrobe and slippers, a big grin on his face, expecting to be congratulated on his quick recovery. As he sat down, Mamie gasped, “What are you doing up, Ike?” Softly and slowly, he replied, “Why shouldn’t I be up? I have a dinner to go to.” Snyder, Mamie, John, and Adams all protested simultaneously that he would do no such thing. “There’s nothing the matter with me!” he said. “I am perfectly all right.” Mamie explained to him that Nixon would take over at the dinner, and warned that if he went, she would not. Again Eisenhower began to insist that he would go, and to discuss the activities scheduled for the rest of the week that he did not intend to miss. But his words were still jumbled and mispronounced. Aware that he was making no sense, Eisenhower’s anger swelled up in him. Mamie turned to Adams in dismay. “We can’t let him go down there in this condition,” she said. They finally convinced him to go back to bed. As he left the room, he mumbled, “If I cannot attend to my duties, I am simply going to give up this job. Now that is all there is to it.”2
He slept comfortably, with John and Snyder sharing a night watch at his bedside. In the morning, the doctors found his pulse normal. He continued, however, to have difficulty with words. Pointing toward a watercolor on the wall, he tried to say its name, but could not. The harder he tried, the more frustrated he became. He thrashed about on the big double bed, beating the bedclothes with his fists. John, Snyder, and Mamie shouted any word that came to mind, until Mamie finally remembered the title: “The Smugglers,” she blurted out. Eisenhower shook his finger at her, demanding a repeat. But even after hearing it a second time, he could not say it. He sank back into the bed, exhausted. Later that day, he did some painting of his own. Adams and Nixon came to see him. Nixon said that the state dinner had gone well, and that he was planning to substitute for the President at a NATO conference, scheduled for mid-December.
The following day, November 27, a Wednesday, Eisenhower worked in his rooms on various papers; on Thanksgiving, he and Mamie attended church services, then drove on Friday to Gettysburg for the weekend.3 His speech seemed completely recovered, to everyone but himself. Always very clear and precise in his pronunciation of words, it bothered him thereafter, until the end of his life, that occasionally he would reverse syllables in a long word.4 But in private conversations or public speeches, few if any listeners ever noticed.
What did bother the American people was the news that the President had suffered his third illness in two years. At sixty-seven years old, the chances of his completing the three remaining years of his second term appeared to be poor. More immediately frightening, especially to insiders who were aware of his dizziness and speech difficulties, and to reporters who heard garbled accounts of what had happened, was the prospect of his becoming incapacitated either physically or, worse, mentally. What would happen if the President was in such bad condition that he was unable to recognize his own incapacity and therefore unable to delegate power to Nixon? What if he went clear out of his mind? What if . . . The list was endless. The Constitution was silent.
That Sunday morning, at Gettysburg, the newspapers the President read were full of suggestions. Walter Lippmann recommended that Eisenhower delegate his powers to Nixon; many other editors and columnists urged him to resign. The effect on the President was to strengthen his determination to take up his full duties on Monday morning, thereby proving that he had enjoyed a complete recovery and could do his job.
Eisenhower’s resolve frightened his aides, who wanted him to rest for at least a few more days. Jerry Persons called Dulles at 1:45 P.M. to tell the Secretary about the President’s decision to return to work. Dulles said “that itself is a very bad sign, the fact that he does not realize that he needs rest.” Then Dulles told Persons, “Someone must get control of the situation.”5
Dulles was the senior member of the Cabinet, the man closest to Eisenhower. He was also the nephew of Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who had tried to take control of the government when Wilson was incapacitated in 1919, and had been ousted as a result. At 2 P.M., Dulles called the one man in the world more directly and personally affected by the crisis than he was, the Vice-President. Dulles said, “We are liable to run into a situation where the President is incapable of acting and does not realize it.” He was “very much disturbed about the situation.” Persons had told him that Eisenhower intended to attend a Cabinet meeting on Monday, a Republican leaders’ meeting on Tuesday, an NSC meeting, and so on. Nixon said, “It looks like his judgment is not good and the people around him are not able to exercise judgment or control.” Inevitably, on both men’s minds was the question, Should we declare him incompetent? Dulles told Nixon that “for the first time” he had the “impression the President was sensitive about the Vice-President.” He complained again about the “lack of judgment” of Persons and the other aides, but pointed out that if he and Nixon tried to overrule the decision and prevent Eisenhower from returning to work, then “that is a reproduction of the Wilson problem, jealousy and usurpation of power.” Dulles concluded by telling Nixon that he had just heard Drew Pearson on the radio appealing to Eisenhower to resign.6
Hanging up, Dulles called Gettysburg, this time talking to one of the Army doctors who had accompanied Snyder to Pennsylvania. The doctor told Dulles about Eisenhower’s irritation at the newspapers; calls for his resignation “deeply affected him; he is feeling too well.” Further, the doctor said, it was not such a bad idea for Eisenhower to return to work, because “continued frustration” would be worse than “active participation.” Still, he wished the President would rest a few more days. Dulles said he “detected bad judgment; if the President were thinking right, he would see that he should accept medical advice.”7
Dulles then got Hagerty, also in Gettysburg, on the phone. The Secretary asked Hagerty whether his presence and appeal might sway the President to rest. Hagerty said “he is beyond any appeal, however we would like to try.” Dulles repeated that “this looked like bad judgment, that he understood the President was upset about some newspaper article.” Hagerty said it was not the editorial, “it was the President himself, he wanted to come.”8
Dulles’ genuine concern for his friend’s health, and his official concern for the continuity of government leadership, lasted less than twenty-four hours. Neither he nor Nixon made any further attempt to keep Eisenhower in Gettysburg, much less an attempt to declare him incompetent, and when they saw him at the Cabinet meeting on Monday, they were satisfied that his health was good. Following the one-and-a-half-hour Cabinet meeting, Dulles met privately with Eisenhower for another hour. They talked about the agenda for the Republican leaders’ meeting, about MSA appropriations, about various diplomatic functions, and about the NATO meeting. Eisenhower said he wanted to go. Dulles had earlier protested strongly against this, but now he “urged that the President should take all possible care of himself so as to be able to go.” Eisenhower, not Dulles, was the one who brought up a possible resignation. The President said that if, three weeks after his attack, he was not able to go to Europe, “it would in his opinion raise a serious question as to whether he should not then ‘abdicate.’ ”9
Like Dulles and Nixon, and indeed almost everyone else, Eisenhower too worried about presidential succession. He talked to Nixon about it, to the Attorney General, to others. He could imagine all sorts of scenarios—“What if I was in an automobile accident and in a coma?”—and cast about for ways in which a committee could be formed that would decide when he was disabled and when he was ready to resume his duties.10 Eventually he decided that in lieu of a constitutional amendment, his only choice was to make a commonsense agreement with Nixon that would not be binding on his successors. Accordingly, on February 5, 1958, he sent Nixon a letter outlining what they had already agreed to in conversation. If the President were disabled, and aware of it, he would inform Nixon and Nixon would take over. But if the President were so disabled he was incapable of recognizing it, Nixon would be “the individual explicitly and exclusively responsible . . . You will decide.” Eisenhower expressed the “hope” that Nixon would consult with Dulles, Adams, and the doctors before acting, but emphasized that “the decision will be yours only.” By the same token, “I will be the one to determine if and when it is proper for me to resume . . .”11
Nixon never had occasion to test this remarkable grant of power, but there must have been times in the next few weeks and months when he thought he might have to do so. Not that Eisenhower ever again lost control of his speech as he had on November 25 and 26, but the President was, in the winter of 1957–1958, noticeably more irritable and short-tempered, and complained about his job more than he ever had. The Presidency had begun to take its toll. From the time of Suez onward, as Eisenhower had told Swede, his life had been a succession of crises. They did not bother him so much as did the swelling criticism of his Administration. Although few Democrats were ready to go after General Ike personally, many columnists were, especially on such specific issues as the Middle East crisis, Hungary, Little Rock, and, most of all, Sputnik. Critics were questioning his leadership abilities, and pointing to the botched “Battle of the Budget” of 1957, the inept attempt to put through a civil-rights bill with some meaning, and the recession as examples of his failures. The charge that hurt the most was that he had “lost” the space race and had neglected the nation’s defenses. Implicit in all the criticism was the idea that he was too old, too tired, too sick, to run the country.
Furthermore, the strong men in his Administration, except for Dulles, had left the team. Humphrey resigned on July 28, 1957; Wilson on October 8; Brownell on November 8. All three men had told Eisenhower, in early 1956, that he had a duty to serve a second term. And he had told them that if he had to stay four more years, so did they. But within a year of the election, all three had quit. Eisenhower could not prevent their going and did not try to; it is possible that he was glad to see them go. Although his personal friendship with Humphrey was intact, Humphrey’s “curl your hair” depression phrase and his single-minded doomsday approach to the budget (balance it or lose everything) made him expendable. Wilson had been a liability since the day he was nominated and said he would not sell his General Motors stock, and he had never taken control of the Pentagon as Eisenhower had hoped he could. His managerial talents were suspect at best; certainly he had never turned out missiles the way he had turned out automobiles. Brownell was a liability in the South, and in any case he had become more insistent on integration than Eisenhower wanted him to be. But whatever their shortcomings, they were the three men—along with Dulles—who did almost all the talking at Cabinet meetings, and who were capable of talking back to the President, telling him he was wrong, or cracking jokes with him, or really touching him with their infrequent, but thus more sincere, praise. He would miss them all.
The effect of the breakup of the team, and of the political criticism, and of the strain of the job in general was clear to the professional observers of the Presidency. At press conferences, reporters asked him on a number of separate occasions about his health, his mood, his temperment, his job. Andrew Tully, among others, commented on his displays of irritation and said that they were signs that the strain of the office was beginning to tell. Eisenhower denied it. He said the job was no more difficult than he thought it would be when he took over, and that he was more than capable of carrying on.12
Mamie had her doubts. In February, they went down to George Humphrey’s plantation for some quail shooting, but the weather was cold and Eisenhower spent all his time indoors. He took frequent rests, and while he was in bed, Mamie told the gang she was terribly disturbed about his health. Slater mentioned talking to him that morning about a library he wanted to add to the Gettysburg place. Mamie quietly remarked, “I’m not so sure we’re ever going to be able to live in Gettysburg.” She said the enlarged arteries in his temples frightened her; Slater pointed out that they had always been there and said in his opinion Eisenhower looked a bit better today than he had yesterday.13
• •
One of the things that most bothered Eisenhower during this low point in his Presidency was his relationship with John Foster Dulles. By late 1957, except for the President, the Secretary seemed to have no defenders left anywhere, while he faced a veritable army of critics. He was blamed for the debacle at Suez and in Hungary, for the failure to achieve disarmament or to halt nuclear testing, for all the shortcomings of American foreign policy. In addition, Dulles was widely regarded, in Eisenhower’s words, as “legalistic, arrogant, sanctimonious, and arbitrary.”14 But Dulles’ personality, objectionable as it was to most people, was not the real issue. His policies, or what people thought of as his policies, were. According to his critics, he was too rigid in his anti-Communism, too simplistic, too moralistic. Actually, he was no more so than Eisenhower himself. The truth was that Eisenhower, not Dulles, made the policy, as anyone who knew anything about the inner workings of the Eisenhower Administration realized. But it was easier, more convenient, more profitable to blame Dulles, rather than Eisenhower, for specific failures. Thus Eden and Mollet blamed him for their failure at Suez; Nasser blamed him for the withdrawal of the Aswan Dam money; Khrushchev blamed him for the inability to achieve disarmament; Hungarians blamed him for the revolt in Budapest; Asia-firsters blamed him for the loss of North Vietnam; and so on. In general, critics regarded him as much more bellicose than Eisenhower. The contrast was too sharply drawn, but it was true that having Dulles available to serve as a lightning rod served Eisenhower’s purposes and helped maintain Eisenhower’s popularity.
Dulles was not overly sensitive to the criticism. He was concerned about the effect for his country. The day after Christmas, 1956, he had a meeting with James Reston. The Secretary charged that The New York Times was not “doing a good job of reporting the foreign policy of the United States,” and put part of the blame on antipathy toward himself. He told Reston, “I knew that plenty of people would not like me personally. I did not ask to be liked.” But he did object when the top people on the staff of the Times were quoted as having “an avowed purpose to get me.”15
But the Times was by no means the only critical voice. In the months after Suez, Democrats contended that Dulles’ policies had been disastrous to the British and the French allies. John Scali asked Eisenhower, at a January 30, 1957, news conference, if he agreed that Dulles’ actions had “contributed to our present international difficulties.” Eisenhower’s answer was that Dulles “has never taken any action which I have not in advance approved.” (That was a standard reply that Eisenhower perhaps overused; people got the impression that he protested too much, and that the truth must be otherwise, else Eisenhower would not feel it necessary to say it so often.) Eisenhower went on to praise Dulles. The Secretary, he said, had “studied and acquired a wisdom and experience and knowledge that I think is possessed by no other man in the world.” (That too was standard, and was too much an exaggeration, and said too often, to be believable.) Eisenhower concluded by admitting that mistakes had been made, but insisted that they were his mistakes, not Dulles’.16
The Eisenhower-Dulles team got through 1957 without any crises to compare to Hungary and Suez of 1956, but no progress was made on achieving disarmament. The day after Christmas of 1957, Dulles talked to Eisenhower about this failure. He said “that it was quite obvious that the Soviets from Khrushchev down were trying to make it appear as though I personally was the principal obstacle to a peaceful accommodation and that perhaps quite a few people were coming to believe that.” Certainly many Democrats were already making that charge. Dulles therefore offered to resign in February 1958, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. But Eisenhower was “very emphatic” that Dulles “should stay on.” Dulles noted that Eisenhower said “he really could not think of anyone who could adequately take my place.” Dulles therefore decided to stay at his post.17
A week later, Republican Congressman Walter Judd told Eisenhower that there was an organized attack on Dulles from within the government. Eisenhower said it was the first he had heard of such activity, and asked Judd to name names. Then he expressed his “total confidence” in Dulles, telling Judd: “Dulles’ traits of character—as well as his intellectual honesty and diplomatic knowledge—all make him as nearly indispensable as a human ever becomes.”18
As the barrage against Dulles intensified, Eisenhower had had to respond with more effective support. Cy Sulzberger wrote a piece about the Secretary in The New York Times in which he called Dulles a “tragic-comic figure.” He said Dulles was too ideological, too inclined to see the world in terms of black and white. Eisenhower wrote a long rebuttal and sent it to Al Gruenther, who was a close friend of Sulzberger’s, asking Gruenther to “find the time and the inclination to send Cy a letter to tell him just how stupid he is beginning to appear.”19 The same day, January 15, at a news conference, Michael O’Neill asked Eisenhower about rumors that Dulles would shortly resign. Eisenhower asked him where he got his information. O’Neill said, “It was in the newspapers.” “It was?” Eisenhower responded. “Well, then, I would say, I would class it as trash.” Dulles was the last person he would want to resign, the President continued, before going into another of his exaggerated descriptions of the Secretary. Dulles, Eisenhower said, “is the wisest, most dedicated man that I know. I believe he has got greater knowledge in his field than any other man that I know.” The President pointed out that he personally knew most of the leading statesmen of the world, and claimed that they all shared his high opinion of Dulles.20
Privately, however, Eisenhower was beginning to worry a bit about Dulles. He complained to Slater about Dulles’ “excesses” in his frequent denunciations of Communism. It was not that the President disagreed with Dulles’ analysis, but that he could not see how denunciation was going to get anyone anywhere.21 Furthermore, Dulles followed a frantic schedule—Dulles must have logged more flight hours in the fifties than any man living—and tended to get too involved in the details of foreign problems, rather than seeing the bigger picture. In 1957, Eisenhower had explored with Dulles the idea of bringing C. D. Jackson down from New York to take up the slack by becoming Eisenhower’s adviser on Cold War matters, with an office in the White House. What the President had in mind was something like the role Henry Kissinger later played as Nixon’s National Security Adviser. But Dulles was unalterably opposed—he would brook no rival, especially not one as influential with Eisenhower as Jackson—so Eisenhower had quietly dropped the idea.
Then in January 1958, he revived it, in reverse form. Eisenhower asked Jackson to explore with Dulles the idea that Dulles become Special Assistant and Adviser to the President, while Jackson took over the State Department.22 Jackson did talk to Dulles, and on January 17 reported to Eisenhower. Jackson claimed that Dulles “is eager for some kind of solution which would give him time to think about the incredible problems which face our foreign policy . . . Furthermore, if he were to step out of his present title it would relieve a certain amount of tension here and abroad.”23 But Jackson either misunderstood Dulles or heard what he wanted to hear. Dulles talked to Eisenhower, who then wrote Jackson to offer him a position, but not that of Secretary of State. Eisenhower said he wanted Jackson to take a position “under Dulles in the State Department as Under Secretary of State.” Eisenhower said that his “duties would be to head up the Cold War effort,” but Jackson realized that such a grant of power would be impossible so long as Dulles was his boss. He turned it down.24
So Dulles stayed on, his powers undiminished, and he continued to resist any changes in the rigid American position on disarmament, and to warn Eisenhower against making any more trips to the summit (Bulganin was calling for a meeting). On January 24, Eisenhower complained to Goodpaster that Dulles had “a lawyer’s mind. He consistently adheres to a very logical explanation of these difficulties in which we find ourselves with the Soviets and in doing so—with his lawyer’s mind—he shows the steps and actions that are bad on their part; and we seek to show that we are doing the decent and just thing.” Eisenhower said Dulles’ approach put the President in the position “of becoming a sort of international prosecuting attorney in which I lay out all of the things that I intend to prove before the jury.”25 To Dulles himself, Eisenhower practically pleaded for some “new ideas” to help reduce tensions in the world. He said he knew that Bulganin’s letters asking for a meeting were “monotonous” because they always contained the same charges against the Americans, but “I am ready to admit also that our replies are necessarily hammering away on exactly the same keys.” He hoped that “possibly we can ignore some of their arguments or do anything else that may have the appearance of something new.”26
Dulles did not change, however, because he could not believe there was any possibility of a relaxation of tensions between the implacable enemies. At bottom, Eisenhower agreed with that assessment; he often said that there could be no genuine peace until the Soviet system changed internally. But he did want propaganda victories, which was the motive for his search for new ideas. Failing to get any from Dulles, he came up with one of his own. In February 1958, he proposed asking some ten thousand Russian students to come to the United States, at the expense of the U.S. government, to spend a year in American colleges. The idea was not altogether a propaganda stunt—Eisenhower was a great believer in promoting international understanding through exchange of students. In a handwritten draft of a letter to Bulganin proposing the idea, he declared, “For if history teaches us anything, it is this: Nothing but evil has ever come of misunderstanding. And nothing but good has ever come of genuine increased understanding between fellow human beings.”27
But Eisenhower’s main concern was propaganda, and he told Dulles so. Dulles’ initial reaction, typically, was negative. He was alarmed at the thought of all those young Communists roaming freely across the United States, and warned Eisenhower that Bulganin would take the opportunity to introduce additional spies into the country. Eisenhower asked J. Edgar Hoover about the danger; Hoover thought that “the security dangers, which the FBI would have to handle, might be increased somewhat, but that it was well worth it.”28 Eisenhower then told Dulles that although the idea might not be “completely sound, we need some vehicle to ride in order to suggest to the world that we are not stuck in the mud.” He explained that “our public-relations problem almost defies a solution. The need always for concerting our views with those of our principal allies, the seductive quality of Soviet promises and pronouncements in spite of their unreliability, the propaganda disadvantage under which we operate because of the monolithic character of Soviet News broadcasts . . . all serve to make us appear before the world as something less than persuasive in proclaiming our peaceful purposes and our effectiveness in pursuing them.” But the State Department staff, after studying Eisenhower’s proposal, convinced Eisenhower that Bulganin would never let that many young people come to the United States and would therefore denounce the idea. The idea died.29
• •
In March, Eisenhower had another sharp disagreement with Dulles, this one over oil import policy. Since 1951, the percentage of imported crude oil as part of the nation’s total supplies had climbed from 6 percent to more than 12.6 percent. The cheap foreign oil was a source of profit for the major refiners, but Eisenhower was alarmed at America’s growing dependence on the Middle East sources of that oil. In 1957, Eisenhower had tried voluntary quotas, but they were not working, and he was leaning in the direction of making the quotas compulsory. There were serious problems involved in such a move, including the antitrust implications. The Justice Department was attempting to prosecute the major importers of oil for establishing a cartel; to enforce mandatory quotas would force them to share the market between them in outright violation of the antitrust laws. Eisenhower’s Texas oil friends told him they wanted no part of cutting back imported oil in any case, as what little profit they made came from it. “Some of these oilmen are coming into my office,” Eisenhower told the Republican leaders on March 4, “and saying, ‘Gosh, man, my third Cadillac is two years old!!’ ”30 But despite Sid Richardson and the others, Eisenhower thought mandatory quotas were necessary. At a March 21 Cabinet meeting, he said he was going to impose them. Dulles objected. He said that he believed voluntary quotas had “worked very well.” “I don’t,” replied Eisenhower. Dulles said that a compulsory system “will end in socializing the whole industry. Besides, it violates six or eight treaties. There are far-reaching implications.” Eisenhower shook his head; he said a voluntary program would not work. Dulles shot back, “It has worked.” “Not as far as I’m concerned,” Eisenhower replied.31 The following year, Eisenhower did impose mandatory quotas.
Eisenhower and Dulles agreed that disarmament was their most important problem, but they could not find ready agreement on how to approach it. The American position, that the United States would cease testing nuclear weapons only when the Soviets simultaneously accepted a ban on further weapons production, had been consistently turned down by the Russians. Instead, Bulganin proposed, on December 10, 1957, a two- or three-year moratorium on nuclear tests. When Eisenhower went to the NATO meetings a week later, he discussed a test ban with the British and the French. They were unalterably opposed; Britain had tests scheduled, and the French were striving to perfect their own atomic bomb. The Western nations decided to stall by proposing disarmament talks on the Foreign Ministers’ level. The British and the French also agreed to accept American IRBMs on their soil when the missiles were operational.
Not until January 12, 1958, did the President respond to Bulganin’s call for a summit meeting and his offer of a moratorium. Eisenhower said he was willing to meet with Bulganin (and Khrushchev, who was the real power in Russia), but only after meetings at the Foreign Ministers’ level. He could not agree to a moratorium that was not linked to a cutoff in nuclear weapons’ production. Bulganin rejected the proposal.
Harold Stassen was disappointed by Eisenhower’s rigidity. As the President’s Special Adviser on Disarmament, he felt a need for more flexibility, and suggested that Eisenhower test out Soviet sincerity by meeting with Khrushchev and accepting a moratorium, without insistence on linking it to disarmament. On January 6, at an NSC meeting, Stassen made his presentation, complete with an array of charts and graphs. Henry Cabot Lodge supported him; from his experiences in the U.N., Lodge knew what a terrible propaganda beating the United States was taking on the test-ban issue. Robert Anderson also supported Stassen; as Secretary of the Treasury, his concern was with the costs of the arms race. But Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy and General Twining opposed on military grounds. So did Strauss. After a lengthy discussion, Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to table Stassen’s proposal.32 A month later, Eisenhower asked Stassen to resign as disarmament adviser and take another position in the Administration. Stassen instead left federal service altogether to make an unsuccessful bid in the governor’s race in Pennsylvania.
Neither Strauss nor Dulles had ever liked Harold Stassen and they had resented his presence among Eisenhower’s advisers, especially so since he was advising the President on matters that Strauss and Dulles thought were their exclusive responsibility. With Stassen out of the way, both men felt freer to come up with their own ideas on disarmament, and both made proposals to the President.
Strauss came first. He advised the President to take the initiative by offering a three-part program, calling for (1) a three-year moratorium, (2) ceasing production of all fissionable material, and (3) cannibalizing existing weapons to provide fissionable material for power and other peaceful needs. Eisenhower was intrigued, but he had some questions. What would happen to the AEC organization? Strauss said he could keep it intact. Could this arrangement be properly supervised? Strauss said it would be more easily inspected than earlier proposals. Eisenhower then pronounced it a “fine idea, of great promise, and worthy of full-scale further study and evaluation.”
Strauss’s extreme, all-or-nothing approach may have been designed to satisfy the President’s oft-expressed desire that something be done about real disarmament, but it had the appearance of just a propaganda stunt that he felt certain the Russians would reject. Strauss wanted to leave his obviously unacceptable proposal as his legacy, as he expected to be leaving the AEC shortly. He reminded Eisenhower that his term as chairman expired on June 30. Eisenhower said he would simply renominate him. Strauss asked the President to “weigh this very carefully, since he had accumulated a number of liabilities, including most of the columnists in the Washington press.” Eisenhower joked that he shared the same liabilities, but Strauss insisted that Eisenhower think some more about it (and, in June, Strauss did step down).33
While Strauss’s proposal was being studied, Eisenhower had to respond to Bulganin’s offer of a moratorium, and to the growing worldwide opposition to further testing. As always, Eisenhower was of two minds—he wanted nuclear testing stopped and disarmament begun, but he insisted on staying ahead of the Russians. He tried to brush aside the fears of radioactivity, saying they came from only Senator Hubert Humphrey and a few others. He thought of the British and the French and their desire to test. He could hardly agree to a moratorium.34
That was on February 5. Six weeks later, Eisenhower had changed his mind. He called Strauss to his office and handed him a statement: “After reviewing and confirming the plans for nuclear testing in the Pacific next summer [the Hardtack series], President Eisenhower announced that he did not intend to authorize any additional testing of nuclear weapons.” Strauss was greatly alarmed. Forgetting all about his own more extreme proposal, he threw questions at Eisenhower. “What becomes of clean-weapon development?” “What about our antimissile work, which is enormously important?” He said the reports of genetic damage from radiation resulting from the tests were wildly exaggerated, and warned once again of Russian cheating and spying. Eisenhower broke before the onslaught. He never released the statement.35
He did not, even though Dulles strongly recommended that he do so. On March 24, the Secretary, his brother, McElroy, Quarles, Strauss, Twining, and Goodpaster met with the President at Dulles’ request. Allen Dulles reported that the CIA had learned that Khrushchev was going to announce a unilateral suspension of testing upon the conclusion of the Soviet’s current series of tests (the Russians had exploded eleven bombs in the past two weeks). Hardtack was scheduled to start in ten days and run until September. Foster Dulles was visibly upset. He predicted that while Hardtack was going on, “We will be under heavy attack worldwide. The Soviets will cite their test suspension and their call for a summit meeting while we continue to test.” The result would be a major propaganda loss for the United States.
Foster Dulles wanted to beat the Russians to a unilateral test-ban announcement. He advised Eisenhower to make “an immediate announcement . . . that following [Hardtack] he would not thereafter order new tests during his term in office.” Dulles said he was aware that such a statement would represent a major shift in the American disarmament position, since it would not be linked to inspection systems or a stoppage of weapons’ production, and that critics would therefore charge “that we are giving in to the Soviet line.” But, he continued, “I feel desperately the need for some important gesture in order to gain an effect on world opinion.”
Dulles was proposing almost exactly the announcement Eisenhower had told Strauss he wanted to issue, and he ran into exactly the objections Strauss had made to Eisenhower, plus some new ones. Speaking for DOD, Quarles said the suspension of tests would be disastrous for America. Specifically, he was concerned about defense against nuclear attack. Although Eisenhower had often said that the only defense was retaliation, the Pentagon was still searching for some way to blunt the effect of a Soviet missile attack. The current favorite was an antiballistic missile (later called an ABM). The idea was to develop an extensive radar system to give early warning, then explode a small atomic bomb in the path of the incoming Soviet ICBMs. Quarles said that perfecting the ABM depended on “tests yet to be conducted, even after the Hardtack series.” (No one present at the meeting pointed to the logical fallacy in the argument—civilian scientists, not connected to the AEC, had pointed out that the vulnerability of Soviet missiles to an ABM was based on the fact that the Soviets had not yet learned how to shield them from such radioactivity, but if testing continued, they would discover how to do it.) Quarles added the other standard arguments against a test ban—America would not be able to build a clean bomb, and progress toward lighter, smaller atomic weapons would end.
Strauss took the floor. “Testing does not result in any significant health hazard,” he declared. The “real hazard today is nuclear war, which our weapons’ development helps to prevent.” Completely contradicting what he had told Eisenhower on February 5, Strauss said that a test suspension would have a “severe” effect on the AEC. The atomic scientists “would lose tone, impetus, and personnel.” He urged Eisenhower to stick to the original American position, linking a test ban to a suspension of production. Dulles interrupted to say that “we could not do this without agreement of our allies in advance, whereas we could state unilaterally that we are not intending to test in the next couple of years.” He predicted that France and Britain would never agree to a suspension.
Then Dulles undertook a fundamental critique of the DOD-AEC position. According to Goodpaster’s notes, “He went on to say that Defense was approaching the problem in terms of winning a war. State must, however, think in terms of all means of conducting the international struggle. He said that we are increasingly being given a militaristic and bellicose aspect toward world opinion, and are losing the struggle for world opinion.” Strauss interjected that the tests were “a trivial threat,” that the weapons themselves were “the real threat.” Dulles told him that “we are open to the charge of not being completely sincere, since we have in fact put impossible conditions on disarmament.” He also pointed out that Strauss’s proposal to dismantle existing stockpiles as part of a disarmament package was a mere stunt, because “we would not, in fact, agree to give up weapons,” and Strauss knew it.
For the first time, Eisenhower entered the debate. He told Dulles that “he thought we would do so [dismantle the arsenal] if we could be sure that all had done so.” What worried him was that for the first time in its history, the United States was “scared,” and this was “due simply to these tremendous weapons.” The argument continued for some two hours. At one point, Eisenhower seemed ready to make a factual statement that after Hardtack “we have no more tests scheduled for the next couple of years,” but DOD and the AEC were unwilling to go along, nor would they accept a limitation of tests to underground explosions only. Eisenhower commented that it was “intolerable that the United States . . . seeking peace, is unable to achieve an advantageous impact on world opinion.” Strauss said that the search for a clean bomb should satisfy world opinion as to American sincerity; Eisenhower said that was not realistic, as the world had been made to believe that radioactivity was evil, and that therefore any tests were dangerous. On the other hand, however, Eisenhower feared that an American unilateral test suspension would allow the Democrats to charge that “this is our Munich.”
Eventually, a weary and disappointed Secretary of State said that he thought, “in light of the discussion, perhaps the best course of action would simply be to pass up his proposal. He said he wished to tell the group, however, that if we cannot act along lines such as this, ‘we are going to get licked.’ ” Allen Dulles then suggested a one-year moratorium. McElroy liked that idea. He said the AEC could not hold the scientists for two years, but they would stay on the job if it was a one-year suspension. “The President said that he thought scientists, like other people, have a strong interest in avoiding nuclear war.” But neither DOD nor the AEC would budge.
At the end of the meeting, Eisenhower asked the group, rather wistfully and helplessly, “to think about what could be done to get rid of the terrible impasse in which we now find ourselves with regard to disarmament.”36 Two days later, he sent Dulles a private note, expressing his personal commitment to ending the arms race. “To my mind,” he wrote, “this transcends all other objectives we can have. Security through arms is only a means (and sometimes a poor one) to an end.” He vowed not to stop “searching for ideas to stem and turn the tide of propaganda success.”37
While the Eisenhower Administration debated, the Soviets acted. On March 27, Bulganin resigned, making Khrushchev the Russian dictator in name as well as in fact. On March 31, Khrushchev announced that Russia was unilaterally halting all further tests of nuclear weapons. The overwhelmingly positive worldwide response made Eisenhower and his advisers furious, because they felt it was so transparently insincere. The Russians had only just concluded their most extensive series of tests ever, and they knew that Hardtack was just about to begin. Especially infuriating was the Russian statement that if the United States and the United Kingdom did not stop their tests, “the Soviet Union will, understandably, act freely in the question of testing atomic and hydrogen weapons.” It would be some months before the Soviets could prepare for a new series of tests in any case; Khrushchev’s shrewd maneuver gave him a built-in excuse to resume testing without disruption in the Russian nuclear program, and to put the blame on Hardtack.38
On April 2, at a news conference, Eisenhower responded to Khrushchev’s move by dismissing it as “just a side issue.” He said, “I think it is a gimmick, and I don’t think it is to be taken seriously, and I believe anyone that studies this matter thoroughly will see that.”39 The editors of The Nation commented, “If all this is a ‘gimmick,’ one can only wish to God that our statesmen could concoct such gimmicks once in a while.”40
In April, a new group entered the debate. In the wake of post-Sputnik demands that the President have a full-time scientific adviser, Eisenhower had created the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee (PSAC) and put Dr. Killian at its head. Killian and his people, especially physicists Hans Bethe and Isidor Rabi, undertook a thorough review of American policy. They concluded that an inspection system could be created that, although not absolutely foolproof, could detect any nuclear blast down to as low as two kilotons. Dulles then telephoned Eisenhower to recommend that the President write Khrushchev, accepting an earlier Soviet offer to undertake technical talks on a possible test-ban inspection system. Eisenhower said that was fine, then added, “Our position is that we want to look on testing as a symptom rather than a disease.”41
The closer the President came to accepting a test ban, the more frantic Strauss became. He repeated endlessly all his arguments against a ban. His position, however, was steadily weakening, partly because in March he had handed in his resignation, effective at the end of June, and was now a lame duck, partly because Eisenhower was getting advice from physicists other than Lawrence and Teller. On April 17, Killian told the President that the PSAC had concluded that “cessation of testing, in the judgment of the group, would leave the United States in a position of technical advantage for a few years, which would otherwise be lost.” The PSAC had therefore decided “it would be to our overall advantage” to agree to a test ban. Killian also pointed to a factor previously not discussed—the Soviets were ahead in missile testing, and if there were no ban on testing weapons, there would soon be a worldwide demand that missile as well as weapon testing cease. That would be damaging to the United States. Killian thought that “an early announcement on nuclear testing would reduce the danger of pressures on us for cessation of missile testing.” Eisenhower confessed to Killian that “he had never been too much impressed or completely convinced by the views expressed by Drs. Teller and Lawrence that we must continue testing of nuclear weapons.” Killian resisted whatever temptation he may have felt to point out that Eisenhower had nevertheless always before given in to their arguments. He merely reported that the AEC and DOD were opposed to a ban, primarily because they wanted to develop the ABM.42
With Eisenhower beginning to lean toward a ban, Dulles decided to add a push of his own. On April 26, at his home, he met with Gruenther, Robert Lovett (Truman’s Secretary of Defense), Bedell Smith, and John J. McCloy. It was a carefully selected group—Eisenhower had great admiration for each member of it, and would be impressed by a recommendation from such men. Dulles gave them a full briefing, then got their assent to advise Eisenhower to take the initiative in seeking a test-ban agreement. With their backing, Dulles wrote a draft of a letter from Eisenhower to Khrushchev, repeating his earlier proposal for technical talks on an inspection system, and saying, “Studies of this kind are the necessary preliminaries to putting political decisions into effect.” In other words, Dulles wanted to take a decisive step and divorce production of future weapons from a nuclear test ban. That marked a fundamental change in the American disarmament position. To Strauss’s consternation, and Dulles’ delight, Eisenhower accepted the recommendation and on April 28 sent the letter to Khrushchev. Three days later, Eisenhower told Dulles he had made the historic shift in position because “unless we took some positive action we were in the future going to be in a position of ‘moral isolation’ as far as [the] rest of the world is concerned.”43
Eisenhower had decided that the political advantages outweighed the military risks. One reason, unmentioned but obvious, was Hardtack’s success. Beginning on April 28 and continuing until August, Hardtack was the most extensive series of tests yet held. There were some thirty-four tests of different types of weapons. Strauss wanted still more series scheduled, but on June 30 he left the AEC, and by then Khrushchev had accepted Eisenhower’s proposal for technical talks that began, at Geneva, in early July.44 For the first time in the nuclear age, the superpowers were engaged in serious disarmament talks that offered some prospect of success. Ironically, the man most responsible for convincing Eisenhower to accept the inherent risk in agreeing to such talks, John Foster Dulles, was the man who got most of the blame for the long delay.
• •
By 1958, Dulles had softened considerably on the question of spending for national defense. During Eisenhower’s first term, the Secretary of State had been the leading proponent in the Cabinet for more funds for DOD. He had insisted that America had to maintain a clear lead over the Russians in order to have an effective foreign policy. But in the greatest crises of his career, Suez and Hungary in late 1956, Dulles had learned that American military strength was irrelevant in Eastern Europe, where he had hoped for so much, and equally irrelevant in the Middle East, where American economic pressure, not military force, had compelled the French, British, and Israelis to withdraw. After those experiences, and with George Humphrey out of the Cabinet, Dulles became the leading proponent of less spending by DOD.
Not that Eisenhower had lost his concern over defense spending. In the wake of the post-Sputnik hysteria, the President had stood firm against emergency appropriations and crash programs. When on January 28 the Republican leaders told him that the demands for more B-52s was “irresistible,” he complained that “we do things in defense that are just so damn costly,” and pointed out that he could not conceive of any Russian attack that was so successful “that there wouldn’t be enough bombers escaping to go do their job. If six hundred won’t do it,” Eisenhower continued, “certainly seven hundred won’t.”45 But on March 20, in a meeting with Killian, Eisenhower authorized the production of more B-52s at the rate of five per month for the next year, plus some millions of dollars for an accelerated missile and ABM program. But he also told Killian, when informed that the Pentagon was asking for $10 billion in new money, that “he found it hard to retain confidence in the heads of the services when they produce such proposals as these.” The most he would approve of was $1.5 billion in new money.46
At an April 25 NSC meeting, Eisenhower continued to complain about the exorbitant cost of defense. He said that every time there was a test firing of a Titan missile, “we are shooting away $15 million.” At that price, “he hoped there would be no misses and no near-misses!” After the DOD people gave a spirited defense of their program, and justified its costs, Eisenhower commented that “we are now beginning to think of aircraft as becoming obsolescent, and so it is also with first-generation ballistic missiles.” He thought it a mistake to “go ahead full steam on production,” and predicted that the B-52s would remain usable long after the early missiles were obsolete. To attempt to mass-produce both more bombers and new missiles “will create unheard-of inflation in the United States.”
Dulles then entered the discussion. To everyone’s surprise, he thought even the President was going too far in defense spending. Dulles raised fundamental points about the arms race. He reminded Eisenhower that the President had often quoted to the NSC George Washington’s words on “the desirability that the United States possess a respectable military posture.” In his view, Dulles said, “The United States should not attempt to be the greatest military power in the world, although most discussions in the NSC seemed to suggest that we should have the most and the best of everything.” He wondered if “there was no group in the government which ever thought of the right kind of ceiling on our military capabilities?” Dulles suggested that a “respectable military posture,” not overwhelming superiority, was the proper goal. “In the field of military capabilities,” Dulles said, “enough is enough. If we didn’t realize this fact, the time would come when all our national production would be centered on our military establishment.” He wanted the Russians to “respect” the American military, not be frightened to death by it.
Eisenhower was startled. Since Taft’s death, he almost never had to defend his Administration from charges that it was spending too much on defense; it was usually the other way around. And he had not anticipated that Dulles, of all people, would advocate spending less, not more. He therefore replied to Dulles’ basic critique that saving money was, of course, “one of the great preoccupations of the JCS.” Dulles interrupted to say “that he was not at all sure that this was so.” He recognized that it was the business of the JCS “to recommend military capabilities which would provide the utmost national security. He did not blame them for this. It was right and it was their job.” But there was another side to the problem, and he complained that it never came out in NSC discussions.47
Allen Dulles and the CIA provided some support for the Secretary of State’s position. The CIA was, at this time, a source of discomfort to the President. The Russians were protesting vigorously against continuing U-2 flights. On March 7, Eisenhower told Goodpaster that he should inform the CIA that the President had ordered the flights “discontinued, effective at once.”48 A week later, Bobby Cutler brought in the CIA’s latest “Estimate of the World Situation,” pronouncing it “a very superior piece of work.” Eisenhower did not agree. He told Cutler that it “could have been written by a high-school student.”49 But in June, the CIA brought in its latest estimates on Soviet bomber and missile production, and although the report admitted that the Agency had previously grossly exaggerated the scope of the Soviet effort, Eisenhower was pleased with the new conclusions, as the report indicated there was not so much to worry about after all. For example, in August of 1956 the CIA had estimated that by mid-1958 the Russians would have 470 Bison and Bear bombers and 100 ICBMs. But in June of 1958, the estimate was that the Soviets actually had 135 bombers and no operational ICBMs.50 Eisenhower commented that “the Soviets have done much better than have we in this matter. They stopped their Bison and Bear production, but we have kept on going, on the basis of incorrect estimates and at a tremendous expense in a mistaken effort to be 100 percent secure.” Secretary Dulles heartily concurred.51
With such strong backing from the CIA and the State Department, Eisenhower was able to hold off the political demands for more military spending. At a Republican leaders’ meeting on June 24, he declared flatly that he did not want any nuclear carriers, because “they would be useless in a big war” and were not needed in a little one. As for more missiles and B-52s, the President said he “just didn’t know how many times you could kill the same man!” Senator Saltonstall said the country needed more Army reserves, more National Guard, and more Marines. “The President wanted to know why.” He said he had “great admiration” for the Marines, but pointed out that “he had made the two largest amphibious landings in history and there hadn’t been a Marine in them. To hear people talk about the Marines, you couldn’t understand how those two great landings were ever accomplished!”.52
• •
No matter how often the President assured the country that America was well ahead in nuclear delivery systems, few people would believe him until the nation had put a satellite into orbit. In December 1957, amidst extensive publicity, the United States had tried with a Vanguard rocket, but it had caught fire, fallen back to earth two seconds after takeoff, and was totally destroyed. Such an embarrassment might prove as costly to the budget as to American pride. Knowland, on January 7, warned Eisenhower that if the United States did not get a satellite into orbit soon, the demands on the budget were going to go “hog-wild.”53
Nelson Rockefeller, running for governor of New York, was one of those who thought there was no limit to the amounts of money available for every conceivable project, including flying to the moon. On January 16, he told the President that if the United States used nuclear explosions for propulsion, it could launch a satellite that could reach the moon and return, and predicted that it would be “the most notable accomplishment of our time.”54 Eisenhower was dubious. On February 4, he told Republican leaders that “in the present situation, he would rather have a good Redstone [IRBM] than be able to hit the moon, for we didn’t have any enemies on the moon!”55 But the idea of flying to the moon was too exciting to pass up. On February 25, at a meeting in the Oval Office, Killian and Quarles proposed a nuclear aircraft, and expenditures of $1.5 billion over the next few years in order to send a nuclear-powered rocket to the moon.56
Eisenhower was not convinced. He regarded such talk as Buck Rogers fantasy, unrelated to reality. On March 6, he announced that he was rejecting any proposal to build atomic-powered airplanes, holding that such a prestige effort was a waste of scarce resources and talent. Scientists were critical. Eisenhower ignored them, except to complain to the Republican leaders that when a scientist got before a TV camera, he “got excited” and said the damnedest things. “Last night, for example,” Eisenhower said, “I heard one of them talking about a shot to the moon.” Yet, “We haven’t even put up a full-size satellite.” He was aware of the pressures, but thought that space “was certainly an easy subject to make a speech about, but hard to do anything about.”57
On January 31, the United States had put its first satellite into orbit, but it was almost as much of an embarrassment as Vanguard, because the satellite, named Explorer I, weighed only thirty-one pounds. In March, the Navy finally got a Vanguard rocket to work, but the satellite it put into orbit weighed only three pounds. The embarrassment deepened in May when the Russians put Sputnik III into space—it weighed three thousand pounds.
Eisenhower’s basic approach to missiles and satellites had been to let each service develop its own program and hope that one of them would score a breakthrough. The result had been failure. The generals and admirals squabbled with one another, made slighting remarks about their fellow services’ efforts, and ignored the Secretary of Defense. In January 1958, Eisenhower proposed a reorganization of the Pentagon, to give more power to the Secretary and to keep the service Chiefs away from congressional committees (where they always said that the Eisenhower Administration was not giving them enough funds to carry out their missions). But Congress was extremely reluctant to give up its power to appropriate separately for the services, and some of Eisenhower’s critics charged that he was trying to create a Prussian General Staff. Others pointed out that Eisenhower was asking for centralization at the top, but ignoring the real problem, which was waste and duplication in the space program; they wanted him to put all space activities into one super agency, outside the Department of Defense.
Eisenhower was opposed to the creation of a separate Department of Space. He feared it would put its priority on satellites, while he wanted to keep the priority on missiles. He regretted not putting all space activities into the office of the Secretary of Defense in the first instance, but thought it was too late now. As he told Killian, “Personal feelings are now so intense that changes are extremely difficult.” But he wanted nothing to do with any moon shots, or other prestige operations, because he did not want to “put talent etc. into crash programs outside the Defense establishment.”58
At a February 4 meeting, Nixon warned the President that the pressure to create a civilian space agency was already great, and it was growing. He told Eisenhower that the space program had to have some nonmilitary component, and that the scientists would join the Democrats in demanding that it be done. Eisenhower replied that he would not get into a “pathetic race” and called a lunar probe “useless.”59
But the President could not hold his ground in opposition to nearly every Democrat, most Republicans, and a majority of columnists, and scientists. On April 2, he retreated. He asked Congress to establish a National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). It was not a surrender; the bill gave NASA control of all space activities “except those that the President determined were primarily associated with national defense.”60 At a press conference two weeks later, James Reston said he had “often wondered why” it had taken the President five years to get around to establishing NASA. “I think the answer to that is I have had plenty of troubles over the five years,” Eisenhower snapped back. He then became completely incomprehensible. Even after the editors of his transcripts had smoothed out his reply, it read: “. . . it did not seem that that was a big factor that we should advance in an argument that, to my mind, has become very, very important.”61 But jumbled syntax or not, and Eisenhower’s misgivings notwithstanding, the United States had a civilian space agency.
• •
Eisenhower also took a licking on another post-Sputnik demand, that of federal aid to education. Eisenhower’s position was that the federal government ought not make direct grants to the states or schools. Nor should it provide help to students in general fields, only to those studying science or math who could not otherwise afford to go to college. The education Establishment, and most Democrats and many Republicans, wanted a much larger program than the one Eisenhower recommended in a January 27 special message—more scholarships more widely spread out, with a means test eliminated, and much larger and more direct grants to the states and schools for education. But Eisenhower was determined to keep the program down to ten thousand scholarships, all based on need and subject, and to relatively small matching grants to the states to help them employ more science and math teachers. At that, he was proposing more than he wanted to; at a long session with Killian and the Republican leaders, in December of 1957, when discussing the education bill, Eisenhower had tried to insist that there be no grants, however small and whether matching or not, to the states. The politicians convinced him that he had to offer something.62
Still, some of the ideas being proposed frankly horrified him. One was a tax rebate for parents who were sending their children to college, regardless of their income bracket. Eisenhower mused, “I can’t understand the United States being quite as panicky as they really are.” When his Secretary of HEW, Marion Folsom, pressed him to be more generous, Eisenhower changed the subject to curriculum. He said he wished the high schools would concentrate on math, foreign languages, and English. Folsom said he wanted $15 million to support medical education; Eisenhower replied that the medical schools ought to lower the number of years of preparation and thus turn out more doctors without raising costs. Folsom spoke up for direct grants, which led Eisenhower off into a discussion of “where socialism will stop.”63
The House, meanwhile, had eliminated federal scholarships altogether, substituting long-term, low-interest loans instead. The bill did retain graduate fellowships. It also authorized grants to improve instruction in science, math, and—to a much lesser extent—foreign languages. It called for expenditures of about $1 billion over the following seven years. Eisenhower signed the final bill, with some reluctance, on September 2.64 The National Defense Education Act was law.
Its impact was relatively slight. Indeed, the truth is that NDEA represented a great opportunity wasted. Eisenhower could have used the post-Sputnik hysteria to vastly strengthen the educational system in the United States. It was at this time, in the late fifties, that virtually every Japanese and German student began an intensive study of English, for example. At the same time, the Germans and the Japanese—and the Russians and others—improved their curriculum not only in math and science, but in the liberal arts as well. In the decades that followed, they reaped the benefits, while American education languished, with incalculable results. It is ironic that Eisenhower, who was a fanatic on the subject of international understanding, was the man who spurned the chance to make every educated American speak a foreign language.
• •
Eisenhower’s severe limitations on spending for education were part of his overall program of balancing the budget and avoiding inflation. That program, however, had run afoul of a major recession, the first since the Korean War. It began in August 1957, and by April 1958, unemployment was up to 7 percent, while corporate profits were down more than 25 percent. Democrats demanded a tax cut to stimulate the economy, and massive public-works projects to put people back to work. Even Arthur Burns, who had been the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President during Eisenhower’s first term, advised Eisenhower to cut taxes. “I realize that to be conservative in this situation,” Eisenhower wrote Burns in reply, “can well get me tagged as an unsympathetic, reactionary fossil.” Nevertheless, he was dead set against public-works programs, because they took years to get under way, and against any “slash-bang kinds of tax cutting . . .” He said he did support accelerating those public-works projects already under way, and promised that if the economy got worse he was prepared to pump more money into it, but insisted that the proper response to the recession was to wait for the business cycle to go into an upward phase.65
In the face of Eisenhower’s unalterable opposition, the Democrats were unable to pass a tax cut. They did, however, pass a public-works project—the Rivers and Harbors Bill, which authorized appropriations for rivers, harbors, and flood-control projects of $310 million. “I cannot overstate my opposition to this kind of waste of public funds,” Eisenhower said in his veto message.66
Farm state Republicans, meanwhile, had joined with the Democrats to offer a 1958 farm bill that maintained high federal price supports for one year. Delegations of Midwestern Republicans came to the White House to urge the President to support it. One declared passionately, “It’s high time the Republicans gave better evidence they’re in the farmers’ corner.” Another delegation, the congressmen from Nebraska, warned Eisenhower that if he did not support the bill (and in the process fire Secretary Benson, who was firmly opposed to it), it would cost the Republicans from twenty to thirty seats in the 1958 elections. Eisenhower told the delegation that “he was in thorough accord with the program Secretary Benson is advocating and he feels that the farmers will be better off if they are freed from government domination and regulation.” Eisenhower also insisted that firing Benson would cost seats.67
In late March, nevertheless, the bill passed both houses of Congress. On March 28, five Midwestern Republican senators called on Eisenhower to urge him to sign it. They argued that if he did not do so, “the Democrats will pick up fifty or sixty House seats, and we will get radical Democrats who will spend us into bankruptcy.” Eisenhower gave them a lecture on the free marketplace. Later that morning, he took up with his aides the bill itself. He said he “hated to veto the bill,” because “his action would be taken as ‘kicking the farmer in the teeth.’ ” Eisenhower complained that he was “unhappy and irritated over his position,” but in the end his principles overrode his politics, and he reluctantly signed a veto message.68 There was a predictable storm of protest.
• •
All in all, the first four months of 1958 had been a terrible time for Eisenhower. His problems with the stroke, with Dulles and disarmament, the space race and Congress were well-nigh overwhelming. His only escape came in late February, when he managed to spend ten days at Humphrey’s place in Georgia. The shooting was great—Eisenhower and his gang put up thirty-six coveys in one morning—but for the most part it was too cold for hunting or golf, so Eisenhower played bridge endlessly—a total of 140 rubbers.69