10

“I Would Like to Resign”

Now it was Saturday, the seventh of May. The President stood on his glassed-in veranda at Gettysburg staring out at the battlefield of General Robert E. Lee’s defeat and digesting the news that Francis Gary Powers had been captured by the Russians alive.

A Rome newspaper cried, “Dio mio! What next?” At the State Department, reporters closed in on Lincoln White, demanding answers to Khrushchev’s latest charges. In West Virginia, Lyndon Johnson told the press, “There is no doubt that a serious international crisis is in the making.”

At ten in the morning, Allen Dulles assembled an action group at CIA headquarters—Richard Bissell and Pearre Cabell from the CIA; Hugh Cumming, Charles Bohlen and Livingston Merchant from State; Andrew Goodpaster from the White House. Dulles offered his resignation: the President could tell the world that his CIA Director had been fired for exceeding his authority by sending a U-2 into Soviet airspace.

“That’s the last thing the President would want,” said Goodpaster. “The President isn’t in the business of using scapegoats.”

Someone suggested a scapegoat at a lower level: perhaps the U-2 commander in Turkey could be fired with great fanfare and later be quietly rehabilitated in another job. This was also rejected. Most of those present felt they should continue to stonewall it. A draft statement was written:

As previously announced, it was known that a U-2 plane was missing. However it has already been established that, insofar as the authorities in Washington are concerned, there was no authorization for a flight of the kind described by Mr. Khrushchev.

It should be noted that his report is based on the purported statements of a pilot who is a prisoner in Soviet hands. It would appear either that Mr. Khrushchev is exaggerating what actually happened with regard to this U-2 plane for his own purposes or that somehow standing instructions to avoid incursions over Soviet territory were, in this instance, not observed.

This statement allowed for the possibility that Khrushchev was able to prove that Powers had deliberately flown deep into the Soviet Union. In that case, they could keep the blame away from the President by saying the flight was unauthorized. Public release of this further deception required the consent of the Secretary of State.

Christian Herter had just returned from his trip to Iran, Turkey and Greece. At two o’clock Saturday afternoon, he convened State Department men in his fifth-floor office—Douglas Dillon, Merchant, Bohlen, Foy Kohler and deputy Richard Davis. Goodpaster sat in for the White House.

Herter had learned of the downed U-2 from a note passed to him during a NATO meeting in Athens. He had been disturbed by the cover stories handed out in Washington on May 3 and May 5: far better to have said nothing than tell tales that Khrushchev could easily disprove. Now that they knew the espionage equipment and U-2 pilot had survived the crash, “we had to make a decision,” as Herter later said. “Were we going to keep on lying about this or were we going to tell the truth?”

Six-foot-five, gaunt, soft-spoken, with kindly eyes under fierce, thick brows, Herter was “everyone’s picture of a Boston Brahmin,” as John Eisenhower recalled. Crippled by osteoarthritis, he moved slowly, always smiling, it was said, through some unspeakable pain. When Herter entered this job, Richard Nixon had asked White House cameramen to honor their old practice under Franklin Roosevelt and avoid photographing Herter’s crutches.

Born in 1895, the fifty-third Secretary of State spent the first decade of his life in Paris, where his parents were painters. After a Harvard degree in fine arts, he dropped out of architecture school at Columbia to join the Foreign Service. Along with other promising young men like Walter Lippmann and John Foster Dulles, he served as an aide to the American delegation at Versailles and then as Herbert Hoover’s assistant in European food relief and at the Commerce Department.

Hoover advised him to get some experience outside of government, so in 1924 Herter returned to Boston, where he edited a small journal, The Independent, and lectured on international relations at Harvard. In 1930, his silk-stocking Boston district sent him to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, which he later served as Speaker. Elected to Congress, he was a postwar national spokesman for collective security and the Marshall Plan. In 1952, he joined the Eastern Republicans who followed Henry Cabot Lodge to Paris and urged Eisenhower to run for President. To aid the Republican ticket, he gave up his seat to make a seemingly hopeless race for Governor of Massachusetts, and won.

In July 1956, Harold Stassen publicly declared his conviction that Richard Nixon would cost the President too many votes and should be dumped in favor of Herter—an idiosyncratic choice, given Herter’s physical condition, his diffident campaign style and identification with the Eastern elite. Eisenhower did not mind waiting to see whether Stassen’s announcement started a movement away from Nixon. It did not, so he asked Sherman Adams to lower the boom. In his frostiest voice, Adams told Herter that if he supported Nixon for Vice President, he might get an important post in foreign policy during the second term. If not, that would be impossible.

Herter did not need the warning. Always the Harvard man, he made Nixon’s nominating speech at San Francisco. After the election, Foster Dulles, wary of promoting a potential rival, offered him Assistant Secretary of State for Europe. Herter thought this an insult and protested. Dulles gave in and made him his deputy. But once in Washington, Herter found himself the “number-two man in a one-man Department.” He told a friend, “I have left this office many nights thinking quite clearly that I should do only one thing—and that was to go home and pack my bags.”

When Dulles resigned in April 1959, Herter was the natural successor, but there was an embarrassing interval while Eisenhower publicly required him to take a physical to show that he could tolerate the rigors of the new job. James Hagerty later said that Herter had “an easier working relationship” with the President than Dulles because he was “a little less arbitrary in his beliefs.” The State Department’s Loy Henderson thought Eisenhower would have preferred “a stronger man as his Secretary.” When Herter came to the Oval Office, Goodpaster and John Eisenhower sat in and took notes, which they never would have dared to do with Dulles.

At a time when the President was making his last great exertion toward a Soviet-American détente, he was satisfied to use Herter less as a tactician in the Dulles manner than as a spokesman and liaison with Congress. Eisenhower once said, “When you just look at him, you know you are looking at an honest man.”

At the meeting in Herter’s office, Douglas Dillon argued that Allen Dulles should resign. As he later recalled, “I liked Allen Dulles. We all did. But, I mean, this was the United States. It was a great big problem.… We wouldn’t have changed our feeling for him. We would have thought he was a greater hero—and a lot of people would have known underneath that he was just taking the rap for somebody higher and would have admired him for it.… Dulles would have gone on and done other things and would have been fine. But our feeling was that if that had happened, the Summit conference would have gone on and Khrushchev would have made some remarks, but whatever was possible would still be possible.”

Kohler disagreed. At this point, he felt it “essential” to issue an honest statement. Reporters were downstairs besieging the press office, ready to punch holes in any further cover-up; the prime witness was in Soviet hands. Someone insisted on informing the public that Soviet secrecy gave them “not only a right but a duty” to spy on the Soviet Union. This angered Bohlen, who said it “might appeal to American prejudices” but would “damage our case with other nations.” He recommended simply telling the press, “No comment.”

Herter overruled him: the time for silence was long past. It was a “very difficult time in our form of society” to say nothing. He had read the statement Cumming had brought over from the CIA and thought it wouldn’t work. They couldn’t “just go on lying forever.” There must be some form of admission that the United States had waged deliberate espionage against the Soviets.

This pleased Goodpaster, who thought that Khrushchev was angling for some sort of confession from Washington: if he did not get it, he might issue shriller and shriller indictments that would poison American-Soviet relations and embarrass the President. Goodpaster thought if they gave Khrushchev a “certain degree of satisfaction,” he might be willing to “cut this thing off.”

Herter decreed a statement that was half-true, half-false. It would admit that the United States had flown espionage missions for four years along the Soviet border and that a U-2 had “probably” flown into Soviet airspace, but deny that the incursion had been authorized in Washington. This might give Khrushchev the satisfaction he was asking for and still protect the President. Perhaps Khrushchev would have an easier time coming to Paris if the U-2 incursion were judged an accident rather than a deliberate insult by Washington.

By telephone, Herter informed Allen Dulles of his decision: he was trying to “get the President off the hook.” Dulles promised to do “anything” to help, but when he put down the receiver, he was very upset. Since 1776, the United States had maintained that it did not spy on other nations. Now Herter was about to expose the border flights—if not the deep penetrations—and claim that the U-2 had flown into Russia without high-level permission. Ultimately this would turn unwanted attention on the CIA and provoke a Senate investigation that might result in the increased oversight that, Dulles believed, could wreck American intelligence.

While Eisenhower golfed with George Allen at Gettysburg, reporters waiting in the lounge of the Gettysburg Hotel were indignant: twelve hours had passed since Khrushchev’s revelation that the pilot was alive, and still no response from the U.S. government. Where was the President? Out on the golf course, fiddling as Rome burned!

In fact, the President was waiting for Herter’s recommendation. The Signal Corps could connect him to Herter as easily on the fairway as in the Oval Office. Amid the gathering storm, Eisenhower did not want to alarm the nation by rushing back to Washington: that would only aggravate the crisis. Late in the afternoon, on the glassed-in porch, Hagerty was warning the President of the public relations damage of his conspicuous sangfroid when the red telephone rang in the den. A Filipino houseboy stepped out: “Mr. President, the Secretary of State is calling.”

Herter outlined the statement he had in mind. Goodpaster got on the line. Eisenhower asked whether another statement was “really necessary.” Goodpaster told him that it had been “very carefully considered” by Herter. They wished to see whether the Russians were willing to cut off the escalation of the controversy. The President thought it “might prove to be a mistake” but agreed that it was “worth a try.”

During the long afternoon, overwhelmed by reporters, Lincoln White had several times burst into the Secretary of State’s office and cried, “I’ve got to have a statement!” All the men in the room turned silent until he departed: White must not know which way their deliberations were heading. Shortly after six, he was summoned and handed the freshly typed announcement.

“W-wait a minute,” he said. “I’ve got to read this.” He asked Bohlen to help him answer questions from the press, but Bohlen said, “You’d better just stick to what’s on the paper.”

Crestfallen, the spokesman walked into the press room. Twenty-nine hours earlier, he had told reporters that there was “absolutely no—N,O—deliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace.” Now he read aloud:

The Department has received the text of Mr. Khrushchev’s further remarks about the unarmed plane which is reported to have been shot down in the Soviet Union. As previously announced, it was known that a U-2 plane was missing. As a result of the inquiry ordered by the President, it has been established that insofar as the authorities in Washington are concerned, there was no authorization for any such flight as described by Mr. Khrushchev.

Nevertheless, it appears that in endeavoring to obtain information now concealed behind the Iron Curtain, a flight over Soviet territory was probably taken by an unarmed civilian U-2 plane.

It is certainly no secret that, given the state of the world today, intelligence collection activities are practiced by all countries, and postwar history certainly reveals that the Soviet Union has not been lagging behind in this field. The necessity for such activities as measures for legitimate national defense is enhanced by the excessive secrecy practiced by the Soviet Union in contrast to the Free World.

One of the things creating tension in the world today is apprehension over surprise attack with weapons of mass destruction. To reduce mutual suspicion and to give a measure of protection against surprise attack, the United States in 1955 offered its Open Skies proposal—a proposal which was rejected out of hand by the Soviet Union. It is in relation to the danger of surprise attack that planes of the type of unarmed civilian U-2 aircraft have made flights along the frontiers of the Free World for the past four years.

Electricity surged through the room. “Linc, why do you say ‘probably’? Is the information about the operation unsure or is Washington not fully informed on what happened?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Was the suggestion that the pilot himself made this decision?”

“Again, I can’t answer that.”

“Linc, there are two things in that statement that bother me. One is either that this pilot or his local superior went off on his own, misinformed NASA about the true nature of his mission—or that the NASA flights mentioned are being used as cover by someone else. Is that the impression you want to leave us with?”

“I have to leave you with what is stated in the statement.”

For the first time since Independence, the United States government had publicly admitted that it had committed espionage in peacetime and deceived the world about it. “Almost instantly you could feel the anger harden,” wrote Richard Strout under his pseudonym as “T.R.B.” in the New Republic. “Newsmen discovered, to their horror, that they had participated in a lie.”

At the National Press Club, the news rattled out of tickers at 6:18 P.M. Valentin Ivanov of the Soviet Embassy, who spent much time there playing chess and gleaning information, dashed out of the building shouting, “Admitted! Admitted! Admitted!” Dean Acheson was lecturing at the National War College, he later recalled, “and a madder, more disgusted group of officers I never saw.”

From Independence, Missouri, Harry Truman wrote him, “It seems to me that the President of the United States ought not to admit that he doesn’t know what is going on. It looks as if we are in a very ridiculous position with our friends. We have always been known for honesty and fair dealing as a nation and I really don’t know how we are going to recover.”

On the West Virginia campaign trail, Hubert Humphrey said, “Mr. Khrushchev has us on the run in a propaganda battle now, making us look sick.” Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania: “We have violated the Eleventh Commandment—Thou Shalt Not Get Caught.” Senator Homer Capehart reported that fellow citizens of Indiana were “beginning to wonder if we in Washington know what is going on in the world. It is about time that the administration … took the Senate and House into their confidence. God knows they need it!”

Sunday, the eighth of May. The new statement dominated front pages from New York to New Delhi. “U.S. CONCEDES FLIGHT OVER SOVIET, DEFENDS SEARCH FOR INTELLIGENCE,” said the New York Times. “KHRUSHCHEV’S STORY PARTLY CONCEDED,” said the Washington Star. “MORAL LEADERSHIP OF U.S. HARMED,” said the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Washington Post declared, “This country was caught with jam on its hands.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch asked, “Do our intelligence operatives enjoy so much freewheeling authority that they can touch off an incident of grave international import by low-level decisions unchecked by responsible policy-making power? There must be an investigation of the circles which placed our country before the world in the light of a barefaced liar.”

“The Americans have made fools of themselves,” said the News Chronicle, London. The Daily Telegraph said, “A secret service must have some secrets from its own government. What it must never do is have more secrets from its own government than from the enemy.” The Daily Mail: “Both America and Russia have been playing this game. Khrushchev is better at it. He can make rings round the honest, likeable but slower-witted soldier in the White House.”

The Sunday Express condemned the “utterly unnecessary and stupidly provocative flight.” The Times warned against the “trigger-happy fingers of a handful of American generals.” The Daily Mirror demanded that Eisenhower punish the “idiots who were responsible.” The Paris Presse found the affair “at once dramatic and farcical.” La Fuistizia, Rome, said, “Every time things appear to be improving, zac! Something happens that spoils everything.”

At an outdoor rally in Peking, a million Chinese were reminded that the United States was “the most vicious enemy of the people of the world.” In Moscow, someone asked an American reporter, “How can such things happen without the knowledge of your President? We did not think your system was so irresponsible.” A Soviet schoolteacher said, “Americans just aren’t fanatics. A German or Japanese pilot—now, he’d have committed suicide.” Another Russian said, “You Americans are bloody fools. Fools to do it, and fools to get caught!”

Max Frankel of the New York Times reported that the U-2 was almost the only topic of conversation in Moscow: “The Soviets have grown accustomed to the freer contacts with the West, cultural interchanges and tourist exchanges and explain that the relaxation of tensions has meant a better standard of life here. It is the reversal of this trend that they appear to fear most.”

Llewellyn Thompson reported to Washington that telegrams received by his embassy noted that the American people “must be as disturbed by the incident as are the Soviet people” and called on Eisenhower “to put a stop to the activities of warmongers, thus drawing the distinction between them and the President.”

American political columnists attacked the man in the White House. In the New York Times, James Reston said, “The heart of the problem here is that the Presidency has been parcelled out, first to Sherman Adams, then to John Foster Dulles, and in this case to somebody else—probably to Allen Dulles, but we still don’t know.” Eisenhower’s “institutionalized Presidency” removed him from key decisions and left “the nation, the world and sometimes even the President himself in a state of uncertainty about who is doing what.”

In the New York Herald Tribune, Walter Lippmann wrote that if some command outside Washington could send a plane into Russia, it must also be able to send a hydrogen bomb: “In denying that it authorized the flight, the Administration has entered a plea of incompetence.” Why had Eisenhower allowed this to happen just before the Paris Summit? “It seems as if the country has been humiliated by absentmindedness in the highest quarters of the government.”

Reading the Sunday papers, Thomas Gates was infuriated by the suggestion that low-level officers under his watch could send spy planes into the Soviet Union without permission. He called Herter and said that somebody had to take responsibility for the U-2: “While the President can say he didn’t know about this one flight, he did approve the policy.” Herter replied that for the moment they didn’t want to say anything, “and we have been trying to keep the President clear on this.”

At Gettysburg, wearing a Mother’s Day carnation, Eisenhower went to Sunday church. Like Gates, he was inwardly rebelling against last night’s statement on the U-2. It galled him to keep silent while Khrushchev hypnotized the world with a “passionate but highly distorted presentation of one particular phase of international espionage”—especially when the KGB was so much more active than American intelligence. He disliked having to lie to the world and say he had not approved the U-2 flight.

He was not priggish about lying for his country. During the CIA’s adventures in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia and elsewhere, he had dissembled and said that the United States did not meddle in other countries’ affairs. As his son put it, “I’ll lie as much as the next guy when my country’s interests are involved—if I have a chance of being believed.” But Khrushchev might go on television again to raise irrefutable evidence that the President had indeed authorized the May Day mission. Some reporter might exploit a leak from someone who knew that the President had approved every single U-2 flight. Then Eisenhower’s credibility would be lost forever: as he once told a friend, when a President lost his credibility, “he has lost his greatest strength.”

His entire training suggested that the man at the top should take full responsibility. When the Allies landed at Salerno, he had noted that a Supreme Commander must “take the blame for anything that goes wrong,” whether the result of his mistake or a subordinate’s. In the famous contingency note for defeat scrawled before D-Day, he declared that “if any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.” As Douglas Dillon said later, “He didn’t like to blame other people.… He felt that more strongly than a civilian leader might have. He had this thing about honesty and that was the military tradition.”

Milton Eisenhower told his brother that he must not take the rap for the U-2. The President barked back that if he blamed a subordinate, he would have to fire him and he would not “be guilty of such hypocrisy.” Not only would this be a “glaring and permanent injustice,” but it would confirm that the President was not in control of his own government. How then could he negotiate with Khrushchev or any other leader? People around the world would fear that a low-level U.S. officer could start World War Three.

After returning from church, the President called Herter and said he had changed his mind: they must issue a new statement admitting that for four years, the U-2 had been deliberately sent into Russia under a broad Presidential order to get “adequate knowledge” of the Soviet military-industrial complex and protect the nation from surprise attack.

He was still not ready to tell the full truth: the statement should say that while the President knew that sometimes “unusual and unorthodox” means were required to do this, he had not been given the details of reconnaissance missions. He wanted “no specific tie” of the May Day flight to him.

By this statement the President hoped to end world concern that a low-level American could start a world war and yet evade specific responsibility for the insult of sending the U-2 into Russia on May Day. Back at the White House, at six that evening, he gave Herter, Goodpaster and Hagerty their orders. All knew that this would be the first time an American President had taken explicit public responsibility for a major act of peacetime espionage.

In London, Harold Macmillan had “no direct news” about the U-2, but thought it a “very queer story.” He advised Robert Murphy of the State Department to have the President follow the British formula and say, “We do not discuss in public our intelligence activities.” But Eisenhower had already made his decision.

At Pound, Virginia, Oliver Powers wrote to Khrushchev as “one coal miner to another,” asking him to “be fair to my boy.” He sent a telegram to the President: “I WANT TO KNOW WHAT ALL THIS IS ABOUT MY SON FRANCIS G. POWERS THAT IS GOING ON AND I WANT TO KNOW NOW. ANSWER.”

In Burbank, Kelly Johnson had been hard at work since the moment Richard Bissell called him from Washington and said, “Three-sixty is missing.” After Khrushchev’s first speech on the U-2, the Soviet trade union paper Trud published a photograph identified as the American “pirate plane,” showing men and women picking over a heap of wreckage. Shards of metal were so twisted that no pilot could have survived the crash: the picture had been clearly intended to trick the Americans into concluding that Powers had been killed.

When Johnson saw the photo, he said, “That’s no damned U-2. I don’t recognize any parts and, besides, the Russians would certainly not allow the U-2 to be handled like that.” Then Khrushchev revealed that the pilot was alive, and Johnson said, “My God, did he just up and land it?” There were already rumors that Powers had been a double agent and been spotted in a Sverdlovsk nightclub.

Bissell and Johnson wanted to find out what had brought down their plane. The Lockheed designer agreed to publicly declare the Trud picture a fake: he would “insult the Russians to the point that they put the U-2 on display.” Then with careful instructions from the CIA on what to look for, Americans in Moscow could discreetly inspect and photograph the wreckage.

Monday morning, May ninth. As Ann Whitman wrote, “The matter of the spy-in-the-sky was uppermost on everyone’s minds.” After breakfast with Republican congressmen, the President arrived at the Oval Office “very depressed.” He said, “I would like to resign.”

At the State Department, Herter, Dillon, Kohler, Bohlen, Gates and his deputy James Douglas worked on a new statement on the U-2 reflecting the President’s change of heart. Chip Bohlen stubbornly opposed implicating the President, but was quickly silenced. This was merely a drafting session.

In Burbank, Kelly Johnson told reporters that he had examined the Soviet photo of the U-2: “I am convinced that the Russians, for some reason, have released the photo of some other airplane crash.… It would be very interesting to know why they have hidden the U-2.”

At noon in Washington, Eisenhower went to the Army and Navy Club for a long-scheduled luncheon with fellow members of the West Point Class of 1915. After one such reunion, Ann Whitman had noted that her boss “was all wound up and very happy—appointments with individual classmates were to be made, he wanted a stag dinner for all of them, etc.” Today by the time the President returned to the Oval Office, she found that he had “bounced back with his characteristic ability to accept the bad news, not dwell on it and so go ahead.”

Goodpaster was waiting with a draft of the new statement on the U-2. Eisenhower changed wording that seemed defensive. He was feeling “anything but defensive.”

Meanwhile Richard Nixon called Herter and said they must “get away from this little-boy-in-the-cookie-jar posture.” They must not be apologetic. “We just can’t say no flights before an international conference because there just wouldn’t be any flights.” Herter told him about the new statement.

At 2:35 P.M., the President convened the National Security Council in the Cabinet Room: “Well, we’re just going to have to take a lot of beating on this—and I’m the one, rightly, who’s going to have to take it.” He ran over the history of the U-2 and explained why he was going to take general public responsibility: “Of course, one had to expect that the thing would fail at one time or another. But that it had to be such a boo-boo and that we would be caught with our pants down was rather painful.” Eisenhower said that from now on, no one but the State Department must comment. “We will now just have to endure the storm.”

As the meeting broke up, several officials stayed behind to ponder whether Francis Gary Powers had been “in cahoots with the Soviets” before May Day.

In the Capitol chamber where Khrushchev had drunk tea with senators the previous fall, Herter and Allen Dulles briefed eighteen bipartisan leaders of Congress on the U-2. The President had asked them to speak “fully but without apology.” Dulles had won Eisenhower’s permission to reveal a few U-2 pictures and demonstrate what had been achieved: “If I can’t show the photos, I would rather not do it at all.”

“Any statement?” newsmen asked Dulles when he arrived. “About the usual,” he said, and they laughed. Once the room was sealed, Herter announced that the President would take public responsibility for the U-2 later that day. Dulles denied rumors that Powers had been a double agent and pronounced the pilot’s record “exemplary.” Turning to Arthur Lundahl, he said, “Mr. Lundahl will now give you a briefing on what we’ve accomplished,” and whispered in his ear, “You’ve got to be good.”

Using one briefing board after another, Lundahl gave one of his best performances as Dulles smoked his pipe approvingly. At the end of the show, there was a standing ovation. Rising from his chair, Dulles dropped his pipe into the lap of his suit. As an aide recalled, Lundahl was torn between accepting the ovation and saving his boss, smiling at his audience as he helped Dulles bat out the embers.

As they left the room, Dulles muttered to Herter, “That was a rough one.”

That evening in Moscow, Khrushchev attended a celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the liberation of Czechoslovakia at that nation’s embassy. In no time, he started on the U-2 and the State Department’s Saturday-night statement: “Here is how they explain the spy plane affair—it is impossible to admit but impossible to deny. It’s like the famous anecdote about the spinster who isn’t a spinster because she has a baby!” All laughed.

“It is said that the U.S. military did this. Was it only the military? What kind of a state is it where the military can do what the government opposes?… If one of our military took such an act upon himself, we would grab him by the ear immediately.… What about Allen Dulles? He certainly knew about everything. He is a member of the U.S. government—and this was Allen Dulles’s airline!”

Khrushchev thought the State Department story “a bit transparent”: “Furthermore it blames us for preventing people from flying over our country, studying our defenses and learning our secrets.… It seems to say that such flights are possible in the future too because the Soviet Union does not reveal its secrets to countries that pursue unfriendly policies toward us.”

He did not want to “heat up passions” against the United States: “Today I declare once again that we want to live in peace and friendship with the American people.” He swung his open hand in the direction of Tommy Thompson: “I respect the U.S. Ambassador and am sure that he had nothing to do with this incursion.… I am convinced of the moral qualities of this man.… I suppose he is feeling very badly about this incident both for himself and for his country.”

Khrushchev raised his glass: “To the end of wars, to the end of provocations, to peace and friendship among peoples!”

Then he cornered the two envoys whose countries had lent bases for the “pirate flight.” To Salman Ali of Pakistan: “Peshawar has been marked on our map. In the future, if any American plane is allowed to use Peshawar as a base of operations against the Soviet Union, we will retaliate immediately.” To Oskar Gundersen of Norway: “You knew about these flights. I can see it in your eyes.”

Watching this scene, someone asked the Turkish chargé, Hamit Batu, “Shouldn’t you be up there?” Batu shook his head: “I feel safer here with you.”

Throughout the evening, Soviet officers had walked up to Ambassador Thompson saying that they wished to smooth things over: they didn’t want a war with the U.S.A. Before Khrushchev left the party, he told Thompson, “I must talk with you,” and took him into a side room for their first private meeting since May Day.

When the door closed, as Thompson recalled, Khrushchev said, “This U-2 thing has put me in a terrible spot. You have to get me off it.”

Thompson pledged to do everything he could. But in Washington, the State Department was about to announce that Eisenhower had personally authorized the flights.

In Washington, it was 3:55 P.M. Lincoln White walked into the press room to read the State Department’s fourth utterance on the U-2 in five days, this time a two-page statement signed by Christian Herter:

Ever since Marshal Stalin shifted the policy of the Soviet Union from wartime cooperation to postwar conflict in 1946 … the world has lived in a state of apprehension with respect to Soviet intentions.… With the development of modern weapons carrying tremendously destructive nuclear warheads, the threat of surprise attack and aggression presents a constant danger.…

I will say frankly that it is unacceptable that the Soviet political system should be given an opportunity to make secret preparations to face the Free World with the choice of abject surrender or nuclear destruction. The Government of the United States would be derelict … if it did not … take such measures as are possible unilaterally to lessen and to overcome this danger of surprise attack. In fact, the United States has not and does not shirk this responsibility.

In accordance with the National Security Act of 1947, the President has put into effect … directives to gather by every possible means the information required to protect … against surprise attack.… Programs have been developed and put into operation which have included extensive aerial surveillance by unarmed civilian aircraft, normally of a peripheral character but on occasion by penetration. Specific missions … have not been subject to Presidential authorization.

The fact that such surveillance was taking place has apparently not been a secret to the Soviet leadership, and the question indeed arises as to why at this particular juncture they should seek to exploit the present incident as a propaganda battle in the Cold War.… Far from being damaging to the forthcoming meeting in Paris, this incident should serve to underline the importance to the world of an earnest attempt there to achieve agreed and effective safeguards against surprise attack and aggression.

The statement implied that there might be future U-2 flights into Russia. Privately the President thought this unlikely, because the program had been compromised. But leaving it open gave him a useful bargaining chip: if it later became vital to make a concession to Khrushchev to save the Summit, Eisenhower could formally pledge not to send the U-2 into Soviet airspace again.

The Associated Press ran a bulletin:

THE UNITED STATES ACKNOWLEDGED TODAY THAT IT HAS SENT SPY FLIGHTS INTO RUSSIA UNDER PRESIDENT EISENHOWER’S GENERAL ORDERS. THE STATE DEPARTMENT DID NOT DISCOURAGE A DEDUCTION THAT SUCH FLIGHTS MAY CONTINUE UNTIL SOVIET LEADERS OPEN THEIR BORDERS TO INSPECTION.

From Washington, James Reston wrote in the New York Times, “This was a sad and perplexed capital tonight, caught in a swirl of charges of clumsy administration, bad judgment and bad faith. It was depressed and humiliated by the United States having been caught spying over the Soviet Union and trying to cover up its activities in a series of misleading official statements.”

In the Herald Tribune, Walter Lippmann noted that “what is unprecedented about the avowal is not the spying as such, but the claim that spying when we do it should be accepted by the world as righteous.… Spying between nations is, of course, the universal practice.… The spying is never avowed and therefore the government never acknowledges responsibility for its own clandestine activities.… We should have abided by that rule.”

Joseph Alsop was delighted to learn that the CIA had been keeping more closely abreast of Soviet ICBMs than he had thought; he entitled his column, “The Wonderful News.” The Wall Street Journal surveyed national reaction to the revelation that the U.S. had sent spy planes into Russia for four years. Findings were summarized in one sentence: “It’s just too bad we got caught.”

Some were less enchanted. The Nation asked how Americans would have reacted had “Sergei Popoff” been shot down while spying over New York and the Russians pleaded their old fear of attack and insisted that they would keep on invading American airspace. A cartoonist for the Daily Sketch, London, showed Eisenhower addressing pilots of the “U.S. Unintelligence Service,” each equipped with a suicide pin. Stockholm Tidningen complained that Washington’s original denials had turned into “an eagerness to confess which knows no limit.”

Harold Macmillan, who had thought Khrushchev might accept either silence or some formal disclaimer, was horrified. At a dinner party in Washington, Allen Dulles said, “We should have kept quiet.” In Peking, Mao Tse-tung declared his hope that the U-2 would wake up “certain people” who had lauded Eisenhower as a “lover of peace.”

Given the news in Moscow, Khrushchev was apoplectic. He had gone out of his way not to accuse the President of sending the U-2. Now this latest statement seemed “as though Eisenhower was boasting arrogantly about what the United States could do and would do.… Here was the President of the United States defending outrageous, inadmissible actions!” To Khrushchev, once again the Americans were showing that “they didn’t give a damn about anyone else, that they would pursue only their selfish goals. They wanted to dictate to us their conditions from a position of power.”

Tuesday, May tenth. At the White House, a CIA man arrived with the latest information on what might have afflicted the U-2 on May Day. As Kistiakowsky wrote in his diary, “It is pretty clear that it couldn’t have been flameout of the engine, but what did happen is difficult to say. The picture of the crashed plane which Khrushchev passed around is not that of a U-2, so it begins to look as if the pilot might have landed it undamaged.

“On the other hand, our information about his maneuvers is strongly against the idea that he was a double agent. At most, he decided to turn ‘state’s evidence’ when under pressure and, at least, he just chickened out. Very depressing.”

In the Oval Office, the President told Herter that he might call on Khrushchev in Paris before the Summit to try to clear the air. But Herter convinced him that Khrushchev might take this as “a gesture of weakness.”

Eisenhower predicted that Khrushchev would “probably try by his deportment to force the conference along the lines he wants.” Perhaps he should “throw” back “clear evidence” of the extreme volume of Soviet spying in the United States. If Khrushchev raised the U-2, the best course might be “to chuckle about it and turn the subject off.” Or perhaps he would let Khrushchev talk as much as he wanted to about the plane “and then quietly suggest that he should come around and talk privately to the President about it.”

Eisenhower asked Herter to try to arrange for Khrushchev to “come around to the American Embassy residence after the first day’s meeting—say, at about four P.M.”

When Herter returned to the State Department, he cabled the Embassy in Moscow to ask Gromyko for an interview with the pilot. If granted, they should “pass on the love and prayers of Powers’s entire family. Tell him that his wife Barbara is waiting and praying for him, that she brought Eck von Heinberg (their German shepherd dog) with her to Georgia, and that his little niece, Tamie Gay, is healthy and well (Mr. Powers’s favorite 9-month-old niece).” They must look for “signs of fatigue, nervousness, pallor or glassy stare.” They should “try to find out what had happened to his plane—particularly whether or not he was shot down (at what altitude?) and the altitude at which the parachute was used.”

Old bureaucratic foes in Washington were savoring the spectacle of egg on the faces of Allen Dulles and the CIA. General Twining felt that the Air Force had been vindicated: “We might have got caught, but we wouldn’t have got caught that way—a disgraceful way.”

An FBI field agent in San Francisco informed J. Edgar Hoover that local people were convinced that the U-2 mess “came about because of the stupidity of CIA and that when the matter has settled down some, there should and will be a big inquiry as to the operations, efficiency and cloak of secrecy of CIA.” The New York Mirror opined that Eisenhower should have given the U-2 program to the FBI.

In Milledgeville, Barbara Powers held a press conference from a lawn chair in front of her mother’s house. Reporters were told that she had broken her leg waterskiing. With red-rimmed eyes, she said, “My husband is not a spy and I fully believe that.… In view of Mr. Khrushchev’s actions in the past in reuniting separated families, I have hopes Gary will be returned to me.”

In Moscow, Khrushchev and the Party Presidium met to decide on Khrushchev’s response to the State Department’s latest announcement on the U-2.

Wednesday, May eleventh. For days, Soviet workmen had been hauling metal debris into the Chess Pavilion of Gorky Park in Moscow. Just as Eisenhower had predicted for years, the Russians were putting the U-2’s remains on display in a carnival of agitprop.

Ten months earlier, Nixon and Khrushchev had opened the American Exhibition in Sokolniki Park. Now Muscovites referred to this display as “the second American Exhibition.” American military attaches in Moscow planned discreet attendance at the show to try and learn what had happened to the U-2. Inside the pavilion, light streamed through tiny windows onto the U-2’s wings and tailpiece at the center of the room. Glass cases bore relics of the Amerikanski samelot (American airplane); one was labeled THIS IS WHAT THE AMERICAN SPY WAS EQUIPPED WITH.

“His genuine documents!” barked a guide. “Everything, comrades, everything! Stop your conversations and move on!” Russians filed past the huge aerial cameras, the infamous ejection seat, the orange-and-white parachute, the package of Kents, the rubles (MONEY FOR GRAFTING RUSSIANS), the notorious suicide pin. A young man ogled a snapshot of Barbara Powers and said, “It must have been hard leaving her!”

The crowds were angry—not at the aggressive United States but the aggressive guards, who cried, “Hurry up, comrades! Three thousand people are waiting to get in!” Near the exit was a guest book called The Book of Wrath. Visitors scrawled their indignation: “Shame, shame, Eisenhower!… Death to Imperialism.… What kind of a friend are you?… Wolf in sheep’s clothing.… We students are glad that the American pirate has been shot down.… Punish the spy with all severity.… We believe that Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev will do everything he can in Paris to see that this will not happen again.”

The hall was cleared at four o’clock. A black Chaika limousine pulled up. Khrushchev bounced out and moved quickly through the front door. Trailed by hundreds of newsmen, he bustled about the hall like a child in a candy store, examining the gold Napoleon francs, a receipt for Powers’s Mercedes, the gold watches and noiseless pistol, collapsible rubber boat, flight maps, pressure suit, ejection seat and destructor unit. A guide played the U-2 pilot’s tape of Soviet radar stations: “Bleep—bleep—bleep …”

“An exchange of technical knowledge!” cried Khrushchev. He stood atop a wicker chair so that all could see him. A Soviet spokesman rounded up straggling newsmen. Someone shouted, “Will this plane incident affect Soviet public opinion when Mr. Eisenhower comes to Moscow?”

“I would not like to be in Mr. Eisenhower’s place. I would not like to be asked the questions which might be put to him when he comes to the Soviet Union. I can only say that the Soviet people are very polite, so there will be no excesses. But questions will be asked, of course.”

Had the State Department’s newest statement changed Khrushchev’s opinion of the President? “It has, of course. I was not aware that this plan was not the caprice of an irresponsible officer. I was horrified to learn that the President had endorsed the acts.” He continued to maintain that Eisenhower had not really approved the U-2 flights beforehand: probably Allen Dulles had blackmailed the President into taking responsibility. “The American militarists have placed me in a very difficult position.”

Khrushchev spared Eisenhower but denounced Herter. Shaking his fist, he cried, “Far from feeling guilty and ashamed of aggressive actions, he justifies them and says they will continue in the future! Only countries which are at war with each other can act this way.… Impudence, sheer impudence!” The Soviet Union would never send a plane over another country’s territory.

“Our country is a strong and mighty state.… If the U.S.A. has not yet suffered a real war on its territory and wants to start a war, we will fire rockets and hit their territory a few minutes later.… We do not live under American laws. We have our own laws … and violators be thrashed!”

“Do you still want President Eisenhower to come to the Soviet Union?”

Khrushchev knitted his brow for fifteen seconds: “What do you want me to say? Come up here and say it for me.… You know my attitude toward the President. I have often spoken about it. I am a human being and I have human feelings. I had hopes and they were betrayed.… You must understand that we Russians always go the whole hog: when we play, we play and when we fight, we fight. So how can I now ask our people to turn out and welcome the dear guest who is corning to us. They will say, ‘Are you nuts? What kind of a dear guest allows a plane to fly over us to spy?’”

“Wouldn’t you prefer President Eisenhower’s visit to be postponed?”

“I do not want to answer this question in front of you journalists. I will discuss this with the President in Paris. We still want to find ways to improve relations with the U.S.A.” Khrushchev announced that he planned to go to Paris two days early. “I like Paris. It’s a nice city.… And if the conference does not take place? We have lived without it for many years and will live for another hundred!”

Khrushchev evidently had second thoughts about his loose tongue. Correspondents telephoning his comments to the West were cut off in mid-sentence by Moscow censors, who did not lift the embargo for twenty hours. When they did, the official transcript omitted his remark that he had been “horrified” by Eisenhower’s endorsement of the U-2 and that this had changed his opinion of the President.

After Khrushchev’s press conference, a Soviet journalist said, “They’ll make it up in Paris. He’ll come. We want him to come. He could not have easily known about the plane.” At an outdoor Moscow café, a Soviet professor said, “Eisenhower will come, but it won’t be the same as before.”

The professor’s wife said, “Ah, what a welcome we’d have given him before this happened.”

It was Wednesday morning in Washington. No one at the White House had yet seen Khrushchev’s comments at Gorky Park. Goodpaster arrived early to draft a statement for the President to read at his press conference, the first Presidential remarks on the U-2. Eisenhower had told him to include the fact that espionage was an “ugly but vital necessity.” Goodpaster changed “ugly” to “distasteful.”

As Goodpaster toiled, the President told Senators at breakfast that he still hoped for “some useful progress” at the Summit: “Khrushchev is much too smart to believe this was the first time such a flight has occurred.” At 9:10 A.M., he joined Goodpaster and Hagerty to work on his statement. Hagerty had told the rest of the staff that the President didn’t need “any advice on how to answer questions on the U-2.”

Before 1950, press conferences had been held at the President’s desk until the crowd grew too large and Harry Truman moved them across the street to the fourth floor of the Executive Office Building. Since 1953, Hagerty had allowed reporters to quote his boss directly, but only after he vetted the transcript for errors and garbled syntax: “It’s not that we want to censor any of his remarks. What we are actually trying to do is to prevent a human fluff that the Communist propagandists can use to good advantage.”

In 1955, angry at charges that Eisenhower had been soft on Joseph McCarthy, Hagerty began allowing press conferences to be filmed for delayed broadcast. “To hell with slanted reporters,” he wrote in his diary. “We’ll go directly to the American people who can hear exactly what the Pres said without reading warped and slanted stories.”

Eisenhower held about two sessions a month, fewer than Roosevelt and Truman. His sometimes awkward usage was an easy target for parodies like the famous Eisenhoverian version of the Gettysburg Address: “I haven’t checked these figures, but eighty-seven years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country …” So were what seemed like astonishing admissions: “You’re telling me something about my own administration I never heard of.” Often he unshyly leaned over and whispered to Hagerty for guidance.

Sometimes Eisenhower’s syntax was genuinely garbled, especially after his stroke. Sometimes he genuinely did not know about the subject raised. “I’m supposed to set the tone,” he once told his son. “Let the other fellows give the details.” But other times, it was pure subterfuge. In 1953, he prefaced a comment on his Iranian countercoup by saying, “I believe I read in the paper this morning …” as if he knew no more than any other reader. At another famous instant, he gave Hagerty one of his wicked grins and said, “Don’t worry, Jim. If that question comes up, I’ll just confuse ’em.”

At 10:29 A.M., the President strode into the Indian Treaty Room—less briskly than normal, someone thought. He stood behind the carved wooden desk with its double stand of microphones. Hagerty took his usual place behind him, against the windows. Reporters knocked back folding chairs to stand up.

“Good morning,” said the President. “Please sit down. I have made some notes from which I want to talk to you about this U-2 incident.” He pulled out typed pages and donned reading glasses. “No one wants another Pearl Harbor. This means we must have knowledge of military forces and preparations around the world.” Intelligence gathering was “special and secret,” divorced from the visible agencies of government and supervised under broad directives.

“It is a distasteful but vital necessity. We prefer and work for a different kind of world and a different way of obtaining the information essential to confidence and effective deterrence.… This was the reason for my Open Skies proposal in 1955.… I shall bring up the Open Skies proposal again at Paris, since it is a means of ending concealment and suspicion.…

“We must not be distracted from the real issues of the day by what is an incident or a symptom of the world situation today. This incident has been given great propaganda exploitation. The emphasis given to a flight of an unarmed, nonmilitary plane can only reflect a fetish of secrecy. The real issues are the ones we will be working on at the Summit—disarmament, search for solutions affecting Germany and Berlin and the whole range of East-West relations.”

As during the tense months of Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum, Eisenhower was trying to muffle the crisis by publicly denying Khrushchev’s complaints. He would not lose his composure, endanger Western unity and thereby give Khrushchev what he apparently wanted on the eve of the Summit. Privately he predicted that Khrushchev’s “recent theatrical behavior” would not set the tone of the meeting; nor would the United States be “encumbered” by the U-2 at Paris.

For four years, more than any of his aides, the President had been the one to warn that sending the U-2 into Russia was a provocation that was nearly an act of war. But today, at this press conference, he would not concede Khrushchev an inch: “I’ll tell you this: the United States and all of its allies that I know of have engaged in nothing that could be considered honestly provocative. We are looking to our own security and our defense and we have no idea of promoting any kind of conflict or war. This is just—it’s absolutely ridiculous and they know it is.”

Thursday, May twelfth. At a White House breakfast, Eisenhower told Republican congressmen that he would not cancel his Soviet trip unless Khrushchev revoked the invitation. In that case, his time could “easily be utilized elsewhere.” After a Cabinet meeting later that morning, he asked Herter and Gates to “call off all activities that might be taken by the Soviets as provocative.” Goodpaster gave the same order to Allen Dulles.

The CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence gave the President an interpretation of Khrushchev’s comments at Gorky Park: in view of Khrushchev’s “deep personal commitment” to the Summit, high-level exchanges and peaceful coexistence, the remarks were probably not intended to cause the President to withdraw from the Summit and his trip to the Soviet Union. “While he certainly intends to extract the maximum political advantage, he does not wish to slam any doors or to upset at the last minute his long campaign to bring the Western leaders to a meeting under what he considers highly favorable conditions.”

The report said that in Khrushchev’s “present mood of arrogant confidence mixed with resentment toward the United States, it probably was difficult for a man of Khrushchev’s temperament and flair for histrionics to suppress an off-the-cuff reaction of this kind.”

Llewellyn Thompson sent a cable to Washington that said almost the opposite. He was convinced that Khrushchev’s comments at Gorky Park were “another indication that the Cold War is on again. I have little doubt that Khrushchev hopes that the President will cancel his trip.” He said the Soviets knew how to organize professional heckling but might not be able to prevent an embarrassing show of friendship if Eisenhower came. “All signs now appear to point to Khrushchev’s intention of trying to extort maximum propaganda advantage from the Summit rather than attempt a serious negotiation.”

Goodpaster brought this message to the Oval Office in the afternoon. The President read it, put on spiked shoes and whacked out golf balls on the South Lawn for an hour. At five o’clock, as Ann Whitman recorded, he went home to the Mansion, “nervous, tense, said his blood pressure was high.”

At his farm in Libertyville, Illinois, Adlai Stevenson was feeling “explosive, barely controllable rage” at how Eisenhower was handling the U-2 affair. For months, he had refused to throw his hat into the Presidential ring. Now he was telling friends that he might have to reconsider. Two days before, John Kennedy had won the West Virginia primary. Stevenson punched a newspaper filled with foreign news and said, “Can he deal with this?”

That evening, at the University of Chicago, Stevenson scrapped a speech on Latin America to speak on the U-2: “Could it serve the purpose of peace and mutual trust to send intelligence missions over the heart of the Soviet Union on the very eve of the long-awaited Summit conference?… Our government has blundered and admitted it. And the blunder has made the President’s task at the Summit meeting more difficult.”

A White House staff member told colleagues that the President’s old rival was trying to “make an issue of the U-2 incident” and had “got himself into the position of the candidate of the Kremlin.”

Friday, the thirteenth of May. For years, Khrushchev had rattled Soviet missiles to scare nations along his border away from collaboration with the United States. “Don’t make me laugh with your pacts!” he once told the Shah of Iran. “You know perfectly well that we could flatten England with seven atom bombs and Turkey with twelve!” This morning, Andrei Gromyko formally summoned the envoys of Pakistan, Norway and Turkey and threatened military attack in revenge for their complicity in the U-2 flights.

Since Khrushchev’s revelation of the U-2 downing, the United States had kept its pledge to conceal its allies’ collaboration. After Khrushchev’s threats at the Czechoslovak Embassy, Lincoln White had declared that it was “typical that the Soviet Union singles out as the objective of its threats those smaller countries of the Free World who bear no responsibility for the recent incident.” He claimed that the United States had used these nations’ territory to launch U-2 missions into Russia without their knowledge or permission.

Armed with this contention, the governments concerned responded suavely to the Soviet threats. A Pakistani spokesman noted that the Russians seemed to have a “pathological conviction” that his country housed secret foreign bases: “We have categorically told them that no such bases exist in Pakistan.” Ayub Khan told reporters, “The Americans are our friends. These planes come and visit our country. How do we know where they go after they leave our country?”

After consulting Washington, the Turks claimed that they too had never given the Americans approval to fly from their soil into the Soviet Union. Norway made the same assertion: for the record, Ambassador Paul Koht lodged an official protest at the State Department. Herter privately assured him that Washington would stick by its promise and claim that Oslo “knew nothing about this flight and was in no way involved.” The Shah denied all knowledge of the U-2, announcing that he was “certain the flight did not originate in Iran” (which no one had ever suggested).

Afghanistan in 1960 was a prime target of opportunity for the Soviet Union. The U-2 affair offered Moscow an excellent chance to spoil Kabul’s good relations with the United States and its troubled relations with Pakistan. To Sardar Mohammed Naim, Deputy Premier of Afghanistan, the Russians gave maps, pictures and other evidence to show that Pakistan and America had conspired to violate Afghan airspace on the U-2’s way from Peshawar into the Soviet Union. Naim was informed that “after arriving in Peshawar from Adana, the pilot remained long enough to be entertained socially by his Pakistani opposite numbers, who knew all about the mission.”

Naim told the Pakistani Ambassador that this violation was “extremely serious.” The Pakistani denied that the U-2 had been launched from Peshawar: even if it had, “the government of Pakistan had no control over what it might have done after takeoff.”

Naim summoned Norman Hannah of the American Embassy and said he had thought that Washington was “fully aware of Afghanistan’s policy of neutrality.” Hannah replied that this “isolated event” must not be allowed to harm their relations: America’s “friendship and desire to help Afghanistan” were as strong as ever. Hannah wired Washington that he was “somewhat relieved” by the moderation of Naim’s protest.

Japan was a different story. The chilly, intense Premier Kishi had been a protégé of the wartime leader Hideki Tojo: after the war, he sat cross-legged, writing poetry, in a prison cell for three years. With the twin menaces of the Soviet Union and China looming to the West, Kishi was determined to keep his nation under the American nuclear umbrella but to rid it of the demeaning constitution of 1951.

The United States was eager to maintain Japan as the Asian bastion of the Free World. A new security treaty was drawn up that would remove American ground forces from Japan: U.S. military bases like Atsugi could remain, but the Tokyo government would have to be consulted on their use. In January 1960, Kishi signed the treaty in Washington. After ratification by the Japanese Diet, Eisenhower was scheduled to stop in Tokyo in June on his way home from the Soviet Union.

But for months, ratification had been in danger. Business leaders disliked being kept from dealing with China; intellectuals, religious groups, labor unions and Socialists feared that the treaty would drag Japan into war.

The U-2 gave them perfect ammunition. Word was put out—perhaps with Soviet help—that U-2s had been flown on provocative missions into Russia and China from Japanese soil. Snake-dancing crowds surrounded the Diet bearing pictures of the U-2 and the legend PATRON OF THE BLACK JETS—THE BLACK-HEARTED KISHI.

Herter cabled the American Embassy in Tokyo: “Should you desire, you may tell Kishi these planes are based in Japan for weather reconnaissance purposes. If Kishi considers a public statement to that effect necessary, the U.S. government will support his statement as feasible and advisable.” At the State Department, Lincoln White told the press, “There is no truth to reports that a U-2 aircraft conducted intelligence missions from Japan. Period.”

But Japan was a problem that would not go away.

At Lubyanka Prison, Moscow, the KGB and military men continued to grill the pilot. As Powers later recalled, he demanded that the American government be informed that he was alive. Finally they showed him the May 8 New York Times, which included the full text of Khrushchev’s speech the day before. Powers read aloud: “We have parts of the plane and we also have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking!” He said, “You could have had that paper printed right here in Moscow.” Then they read him articles about his wife’s flight to Georgia and his father’s plea to “be fair to my boy,” and he wept.

Day after day, his routine was the same. At six, he was up for hot tea, a trip to the lavatory, breakfast, a doctor’s examination. Before the morning interrogation, he was forced to initial the transcript from the day before, although he could not understand a word of the Russian text. After lunch, he exercised on the Lubyanka roof, watched by guards with machine guns. Then afternoon interrogation, supper, lavatory, evening interrogation, lavatory and back to his cell to read Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen while the Kremlin clock tolled and tolled and tolled.

As he later recalled, at one point he cried, “Why should I bother answering your questions when as soon as you have everything you want, you’re going to take me out and shoot me?” One of the jailers said, “There may be another way.” Realizing that he had been invited to defect, he did not raise the matter again.

One morning, his captors shouted, “You lied to us!” Contrary to his claims, the New York Times had reported that all CIA men took polygraph tests. Powers replied, “That may be true of the agents, but we were pilots.” The Russians believed him, but now that his case was being covered so intensively by the world press, he was convinced that he could not deceive them about certain matters forever.

Saturday, May fourteenth, the day of Eisenhower’s departure for Paris. In the morning, he had a haircut in the Oval Office, saw aides, signed letters and received a telegram from Francis Gary Powers’s sister: “PRAY FOR SUCCESS OF MEETING. PLEASE DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE FOR SAFETY AND RETURN OF BROTHER. CONSIDER HIM YOUR SON.” In the afternoon, he went to Burning Tree to watch a golf match.

His helicopter landed at Andrews Air Force Base before dusk. He walked onto the runway where he had greeted Khrushchev eight months before. Microphones had been set up for a pre-Summit statement to the American people, but he ignored them. It was starting to drizzle. He climbed the aircraft steps, faced the crowd of officers, children and spouses, saluted and ducked into the forward hatch of Air Force One.

His trip to Europe on this plane in September had been the first Presidential journey by jet. Eisenhower had found it exhilarating. “Seats far more comfortable than the old Columbine,” wrote Ann Whitman in her diary. “There are four washrooms, and I must say I was impressed by flush toilets!” When the jet passed over Manhattan, she thought the island had never looked more beautiful: “From 29,000 feet, it looked like a tiny jeweled pin set with emeralds and rubies. In another few minutes, we were over Boston, sprawled out and mostly green. Then on to almost deserted Maine and the ocean.”

The President’s plane was equipped with oxygen tanks that had never left his side since his heart attack. (Hagerty concealed this from the press to foreclose rumors.) His cabin was supplied with the latest paperback Westerns. Sometimes he dozed, sometimes he read, sometimes he stared at the stars as the aircraft moved into night over the North Atlantic.

It had been seven days since he stood on his Gettysburg veranda and learned that the Russians had captured the U-2 pilot alive. As James Reston had written in the Times, he had brought about “almost all the things he feared the most. He wanted to reduce international tension and he has increased it.… He glorified teamwork and morality and got lies and administrative chaos. Everything he was noted for—caution, patience, leadership, military skill and even good luck—suddenly eluded him precisely at the moment he needed them most.”

Throughout this excruciating week, the President had kept an almost supernatural composure, except for an epithet or two spoken through clenched teeth and the momentary depression that Ann Whitman noticed. He did not want to alarm Americans or let Khrushchev know he had gotten his goat. In private, he betrayed no sense of mortification to his aides or, it appeared, even to himself: if the U-2 hadn’t gone down, Khrushchev probably would have used something else to embarrass the United States. But on this flight, there was a break in his stoicism.

John Eisenhower came to the Presidential cabin. He loved his father and had been stung by the criticism of the past seven days. His anger focused on Allen Dulles. John rarely gave his father unsolicited advice, but now he told him that Dulles had let him down: Dulles had promised that a pilot would never be captured alive. John said, “You ought to fire him.”

This provoked a Vesuvian explosion. The President cried, “I am not going to shift the blame to my underlings!” As John later said, “He let me know that I was a kid in short pants in no uncertain terms.” The outburst suggested to him that “Dad was fighting a hard battle himself internally about Dulles” and “would like to have canned him.”

This was not far from the mark. The President told Goodpaster and Gordon Gray that he never wanted to see Dulles alone again.

The sun rose over the ocean. Eisenhower awoke, reworked his arrival statement and read over his briefing books. A red carpet and welcoming party awaited at Orly Airport. “There is a dreadful clatter and shaking of the plane every time the landing gear is lowered,” Ann Whitman noted.

Khrushchev had already arrived in Paris. The curtain was lifting on the next act of the drama.