Cold War
Parisians jeered and shook their fists at Khrushchev as he left their city, but when he landed in East Berlin, there was a tumultuous ovation. On radio, East German leaders had heard his philippic at the Palais de Chaillot: maybe now he would finally sign a separate peace and call them to arms against West Berlin. Ten thousand Party members jammed into Seelenbinder Hall in high anticipation. A huge banner exclaimed, END THE PROVOCATIONS OF EISENHOWER AND ADENAUER.
On stage, Khrushchev put on an angry face and cried, “The American President committed perfidy! I repeat the word—perfidy!” But that was as far as he went. As in Paris, he declared that the “best thing to do” was to reconvene the Summit in six or eight months. In the meantime, he pledged not to “aggravate the international situation and bring it back to the worst times of the Cold War.” Premier Otto Grotewohl was so disgusted by Khrushchev’s timidity that he refused to see him off at the airport.
When Khrushchev greeted airport crowds in Moscow, he drew two frenzied circles in the air, then swung his fist down. Party officials laughed and applauded: at Paris, their leader had yanked the lion’s tail. Khrushchev apparently wished to cast the Summit as a victory over the West and the U-2 as a bad storm which would blow over. Once the Americans had elected a new President and passions had cooled on both sides, East and West could resume progress toward détente.
But not everyone in Moscow seemed eager to forgive and forget. Pravda said, “Yes, we wanted to believe Eisenhower. We wanted to believe him for the sake of peace on earth.… But unlike certain simple-minded persons, we were not exactly moved to enthusiasm by the President’s foggy, evasive statements.” That such an outright condemnation of Khrushchev could be published in the official newspaper did not bode well for his future.
Reporting on the Summit at a nationally televised workers meeting in the Great Kremlin Palace, he issued an extraordinary denial that he was in political trouble: “American propaganda has been spreading the most … silly allegations that the situation within our Party and government is unstable, and that this besets Khrushchev with problems, and that he is being opposed by officers released from the Army in connection with its reduction.… Obviously Allen Dulles’s intelligence service, on which the U.S.A. spends so much of its taxpayers’ money, is not worth a damn if you base your policy on such absurd and primitive fabrications.”
Khrushchev reminded the audience that after Camp David he had warned that no one could know whether Americans favoring an end to the arms race would defeat the Cold Warriors. With its two aerial provocations, the U.S. had given its answer. After May Day, he had “even declared that the President hardly knew or approved of such actions and that evidently the Pentagon hotheads and Allen Dulles were to blame. But Eisenhower did not take advantage of the opportunity granted him and declared that he had approved the spy flights.”
Khrushchev reported that at Paris, he had expected the President to come to see him privately and work out a formula to preserve the Summit: “And yet Eisenhower did not even avail himself of this opportunity! Who should have taken the initiative? It is clear to all that it should have been the person who broke the good relations growing between our two countries. But you see, he expected me to ask for an audience!” Yes, Eisenhower had stopped the U-2 flights, but only as a favor. The Soviet Union no longer took handouts from imperialists.
“I still believe that the President himself wants peace, but evidently the President’s good intentions are one thing and his government’s foreign policy quite another. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that is where Eisenhower will land!… The Americans themselves say their President has two jobs—golfing and being President. Which is the main one? Playing golf!”
Khrushchev professed to have seen Eisenhower’s “weak character” all along: “At Camp David, I gritted my teeth and did not complain about the flights because I knew whom I was dealing with—not because I thought they were any less important than I do now.”
He continued to maintain that Eisenhower had not really approved the flights: better for Khrushchev to have misplaced his trust in a political weakling than a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This transparent contention drew a stinging rebuke from Pravda of the Ukraine: “Everything, absolutely everything was known to the President.”
In the West Wing of the White House, Ann Whitman recorded that since the Summit, Eisenhower “has been almost without exception in a bad humor—with me, that is—but on the surface has managed to hold his temper and control emotions far better than I thought even he could.” At a National Security Council meeting, someone raised the need to “regain our leadership” in world opinion. The President exploded: “We did not lose the leadership.” No one must ever use that expression again: “All failures happen at the wrong time, and the failure of the U-2 on May first was no exception.”
But in his diary, Keith Glennan wrote, “We have been turned up to the rest of the world as just another ordinary nation mouthing platitudes and moralities but indulging in a variety of activities of doubtful character. It is clear on reflection that we might have been taking much more of a chance in sending U-2s over Russia than we were willing to admit. If a Soviet plane were to come over our part of the world, I doubt not that we would have alerted our SAC force and started them on their way. Because they can be recalled this would have been a sensible thing to do. If the Russians had wanted to look at the U-2 as an invader, could they not have been justified in launching missiles toward this country?”
Congressional leaders asked Eisenhower to explain the Summit failure in a speech to a joint session of Congress. The President feared that this would inflate the event. Instead he asked his speechwriter Malcolm Moos to work with Goodpaster on a television address.
Eisenhower often said he could think of “nothing more boring for the American public than to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face.” The actor-producer Robert Montgomery was hired to coach him, but the President never discarded his belief that wearing makeup in front of cameras and hot lights was a sad fate for an old soldier.
Asked for visual aids, the CIA made up boards showing Soviet nuclear, missile and long-range bomber sites. Pictures of Leningrad were set side by side with pictures of San Diego. Montgomery saw them and said, “Spectacular.” But Eisenhower wanted “something the American people will understand.” Montgomery and Hagerty chose a photo of the naval air station at San Diego. At eight o’clock Wednesday evening, May 25, the President sat down at his desk in front of cameras in the Oval Office:
“Tonight I want to talk with you about the remarkable events last week in Paris and their meaning to our future.” He said he had gone to the Summit because a “small improvement” in relations with the Russians had been discernible. Since taking office, preventing surprise attack had been one of his “most serious preoccupations.” In the course of this, “the widely-publicized U-2 incident occurred.”
Why send the flight so close to the Summit? Halting the program might have prevented gathering “important information that was essential and likely to be unavailable at a later date.” Why the false initial cover story? “To protect the pilot, his mission and our intelligence processes at a time when the true facts were still undetermined.” The story had been based on “assumptions that were later proved incorrect.”
At Paris, he had told Khrushchev that he had stopped the flights and offered to “discuss the matter with him in personal meeting” while the Summit proceeded. “Obviously I would not respond to his extreme demands.… In torpedoing the Conference, Mr. Khrushchev claimed that he acted as the result of his own high moral indignation over alleged American acts of aggression.” But Khrushchev had long known of the U-2 flights and had not complained at Camp David.
The U-2’s success had been “nothing short of remarkable.” Eisenhower gestured at the easel at his side: “This is a photograph of the North Island Naval Station in San Diego, California. It was taken from an altitude of more than seventy thousand feet. You may not perhaps be able to see them on your television screens, but the white lines on the parking strips around the field are clearly discernible from thirteen miles up.”
Now what of the future? “In a nuclear war, there can be no victors—only losers. Even despots understand this.” (He would not have called Khrushchev a despot in public four weeks ago.) “Despite the hostility of the men in the Kremlin, I remain convinced that the basic longings of the Soviet people are much like our own.” Americans must not be dismayed by the “zigs and zags” of Moscow.
The Soviet press agency Tass called Eisenhower’s address “the same old bankrupt position.” The Voice of America broadcast the speech in Georgian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Russian, Lithuanian and Latvian, but the Soviets jammed it.
The next morning, the President reminded bipartisan leaders of Congress over breakfast that there was “no glory” in espionage: “If it’s successful, it can’t be told.” Mike Mansfield asked him whether he now endorsed creation of Congressional committees to oversee the CIA. The President said that he wouldn’t mind “some bipartisan group going down occasionally and receiving reports from the CIA” but would “hate to see it formalized.”
William Fulbright lamented that the Summit collapse had revived the old contest between Democrats and Republicans over which party was softer on Communism: “In the end, both parties might find themselves in the position where it would be impossible to renew contacts with the Soviets.” The President agreed. Fulbright went on to say that he did not think Eisenhower should have taken responsibility for sending the U-2 into Russia.
This raised the President’s dander: “Look, Senator, this is modern-day espionage. In the old days, I could send you out or send a spy out and, if he was caught, disavow him. But what do you do when you strap an American-made plane on his back?” No President would want to “put the CIA on the spot” or “disown” its Director. “If anyone were punished, they should impeach me first.”
Sam Rayburn said, “You haven’t got enough time to go for that,” and everyone laughed.
That afternoon, the President told his Cabinet that perhaps the lesson of the U-2 was to “count to ten before saying anything at all.” If critics wanted to say he had committed a blunder, that was their privilege. Caving in to Khrushchev at Paris would have been “unthinkable.” That would have led to more “vilification” and “no accomplishment whatsoever.” He reported de Gaulle’s and Macmillan’s surmise that Khrushchev had “seized upon the U-2” as a means of getting out of his trip to the Soviet Union for fear that the Soviet people might receive him too warmly. Keith Glennan thought Eisenhower looked “tired” and “somewhat haggard.”
Chip Bohlen gave his view that Khrushchev had concluded in March and April that he “would not get at the Summit what he wanted regarding Berlin.” Thus he had used the U-2 to sabotage the conference.
In London, Macmillan told the House of Commons that seldom since the Second World War had Britain been “so united in the face of crisis.” The Royal Air Force was being placed on full readiness. Extension of the military draft was being considered. An Army reduction of fifty-five thousand men was being abandoned.
Hugh Gaitskell, leader of Macmillan’s Labour opposition, rose to ask Selwyn Lloyd if the Americans had consulted Whitehall after the U-2 went down. Could he assure that no British bases would be used for future overflights without Britain’s consent? Had the British been consulted about the U.S. military alert? To the first and third questions Lloyd said no; he refused to answer the second.
In Paris, de Gaulle told his people on television that France accepted the Summit failure with composure: “Yes, international life, like life in general, is a battle.… The purpose is great. The task is hard. But in the midst of world alarms, you can see, women and men of France, what influence French determination can have again.”
Now the scene shifted to the world’s greatest debating society. Since Khrushchev’s first harangue on the U-2, the Russians had vowed to bring the case to the UN for acrimonious debate. An hour after returning from Paris, Eisenhower had asked Henry Cabot Lodge to confer with him upstairs at the White House.
Born in 1902, Lodge was the namesake grandson of the Massachusetts Senator who had almost single-handedly kept the United States out of the League of Nations; he had been raised by the old Senator after his father’s early death. Like his fellow Bostonian Christian Herter, Lodge was not given to the bloviation of electoral politics. After Harvard, he wrote editorials for the New York Herald Tribune and won election to the Massachusetts House. In 1936, he defied James Michael Curley and the Roosevelt landslide to follow his grandfather into the U.S. Senate.
During the Second World War, Lodge left to join the Army and was re-elected on his return. His preoccupation with Eisenhower’s campaign in 1952 had much to do with his defeat by John Kennedy. The new President asked Lodge to be chief UN delegate and raised the post to Cabinet rank. Robert Amory thought that Lodge was “very disappointed” and had “hoped for Secretary of State or Defense,” but Lodge later averred, “Eisenhower told me I could have any Cabinet office. I didn’t take the Secretaryship of State because I couldn’t get along with Senator Taft.”
At the UN, Lodge told friends that he had the “best job in the federal government.” Like almost all foreign policy players under Eisenhower, Lodge had early skirmishes with Foster Dulles: he had known the President longer and, though technically subordinate, held equal status as a Cabinet member. Douglas Dillon complained to Dulles that Lodge was getting “a bit big for his britches,” Robert Murphy that he was turning the New York mission into a “second foreign office.”
In his diary, Eisenhower ranked Lodge just below his brother Milton as an able public servant, although Lodge had “long been in politics and is therefore apt to form judgments somewhat more colored by political considerations” than Milton. After Lodge’s graceful performance in televised UN debates on Suez, Hungary and Lebanon, and his management of Khrushchev’s American tour, he was the front runner to run for Vice President with Richard Nixon.
Upstairs at the White House, the President and Lodge war-gamed the impending debate in the UN Security Council. Lodge should stress that U-2 flights into Russia had been stopped and that Washington was ready to negotiate an Open Skies plan. Eisenhower said he did not want the U-2 flights to be adjudged “aggressive” but was willing to concede that they were “illegal and, in fact, immoral.”
The two men might well have even argued that they were legal. The upper boundaries of a nation’s airspace had never been firmly established by international law. Some defined air sovereignty as the altitude to which human beings could survive without special equipment, others as the height to which an aggrieved nation could shoot an invader down. The Russians had never signed the Chicago Convention of 1944, the most generally accepted air agreement. They had not claimed that satellites violated national sovereignty: when Sputnik was launched in 1957, Eisenhower had applauded the Russians for affirming the “freedom of international space.”
Others rejoined that spy planes were a different case from satellites because they could be used to drop bombs. It was Allen Dulles’s contention that high-level reconnaissance “in no way disturbs the life of the people, does not harm their property. They do not even notice it.” The President and Lodge did not wish to be mired in legal argument: Lodge later said, “If there ever was a case where we didn’t have the law on our side, it was the U-2 case.”
To underscore the importance Moscow attached to the UN debate, Gromyko himself flew to New York and laid out the Soviet argument in the blue and gold chamber of the Security Council: the U-2 must be condemned as aggression. It only took one plane to drop a nuclear weapon. At Paris, Khrushchev had done “everything possible” to save the Summit, but Eisenhower had merely advocated once again the “espionage and sabotage which is allegedly necessary for American security.” Eisenhower’s “perfidy” in planning U-2 flights while Khrushchev was at Camp David was like the Japanese diplomats “smiling in Washington before Pearl Harbor.”
France’s Armand Bernard: “Is there not a flagrant lack of proportion between the May first incident and Soviet actions causing the failure of the Summit and ruining the hopes of all humanity to see the beginning of détente?” Britain’s Sir Pierson Dixon reminded Gromyko that they were no longer in the eighteenth century: the U-2 must be treated as a “symptom of the fear of surprise attack.” They must remove the root cause.
Lodge explained to delegates that Washington had sent the spy planes to defend the Free World against surprise attack by a nation that often boasted of its power to devastate other nations with nuclear missiles. Open Skies would “obviate forever the necessity of such measures of self-protection.” Apparently Khrushchev hadn’t thought the U-2 flights were serious enough in 1959 to complain about them to President Eisenhower at Camp David. Why were the Russians creating tension by raising them at the UN today? Where was the Soviet concern for international law when they “forcibly and brutally snuffed out” Hungarian independence in 1956?
Lodge saved his best volley for last. In 1952, a British radio expert in Moscow had been startled to pick up the sound of Ambassador George Kennan dictating letters in Spaso House. American counterintelligence splintered Kennan’s desk before finding an eavesdropping device inside a U.S. seal on the wall. Lodge reported that his government had found over a hundred such devices in its embassies in recent years, and held up his trophy: “Now here is the seal. I would like to just show it to the Council.… You can see the antenna and the aerial and it was right under the beak of the eagle.”
Delegates guffawed. Gromyko charged that the seal had been fabricated by the CIA. The Soviet motion was defeated seven to two (the Soviet Union and Poland), with two abstentions. Lodge asked Anatoly Dobrynin of the Soviet Foreign Ministry why Moscow had charged the United States with aggression: accusation of trespassing would have “caught us where we were clearly in the wrong.” As Lodge later recalled, Dobrynin replied that the Russian word for aggression was the same as for trespassing.
On May 27, the Turkish government was overthrown. Premier Adnan Menderes, who had secretly approved the U-2 base and many other forms of Turkish-American cooperation, was arrested and later hanged. Thomas Gates called Herter: “It looks like we are about to lose all our communications in Turkey.” The listening posts were all the more vital now that Washington could no longer spy on Russia from the U-2. Herter asked the Ambassador in Ankara to “make strong representations” to the new regime not to interfere with the installation. The new regime agreed.
Even while the President was still in Paris, senators had demanded an investigation of the U-2 and the failed Summit. Mike Mansfield wished to “trace the chain of command, or lack of it” that had set in motion the May Day flight and the “confusing zigzags of official pronouncements.” Barry Goldwater opposed him: “What the CIA has done was something that had to be done.” Eisenhower wished to put the episode behind him, but when the committee unanimously called for secret hearings, he said that he “heartily approved” and would “of course, fully cooperate.”
Fulbright modeled the probe after the hearings on Truman’s firing of MacArthur in 1951. Rhodes Scholar and elegant skeptic, the Arkansan would have been a likely future Democratic Secretary of State but for his orthodox Southern views on race and his Arabist sympathies. After gaveling the first session to order on Friday morning, May 27, he reminded senators that great nations had always been involved in “lying, cheating, murder, stealing, seduction and suicide” for self-preservation: “This is one of the ugly facts of life in this world.”
Christian Herter testified for six hours, with several interjections by Douglas Dillon. What was the lesson of the U-2? “Not to have accidents.” Had the government weighed the risk that the May Day flight would jeopardize the Summit? “That was a risk that we were running in connection with every one of them.… Call it bad luck, if you will. It was bad luck. But if we had tried to adjust these things to particular meetings, it would have been almost impossible for the program to succeed.”
Even at this late date, Herter was still trying to conceal the President’s role in authorizing the ill-fated flight and the false cover stories. When Fulbright asked if there was “ever a time” that Eisenhower approved each U-2 flight, Herter untruthfully replied, “It has never come up to the President.” Fulbright asked if there had been flights between April 9 and May Day. “I can’t tell you, quite honestly.” What was the route of the April 9 flight? “I am ashamed to say I can’t remember.”
Many years later, Dillon conceded that these replies were “just gobbledy-gook”: “That was one of the most embarrassing things I ever went through because we didn’t want to tell a falsehood. On the other hand … our testimony was not totally frank because we were defending—we were trying to hide the White House responsibility for this.”
Richard Helms sat in the hearing room as a censor for the CIA. In 1977, as a former CIA Director, he was convicted of perjury for lying before Fulbright’s committee about the CIA’s efforts to mount a military coup in Chile in 1970. In 1983, he expressed his belief that Herter and others who deceived the committee during the U-2 hearings could have been subject to similar charges: “They were all sworn. So if you don’t come to the same conclusion, then my recollection is bad.… Knowing what they knew and what actually went on, if it isn’t perjury, I don’t understand the meaning of the word. And I’m not against it. I’m simply saying that it’s not the first time officials have perjured themselves in the interest of protecting a President.”
This was another measure of the greater ease with which American intelligence and foreign policy were conducted in the age before public faith in the credibility of the Executive Branch broke down over Vietnam, Watergate and public revelations about the CIA. Had the U-2 testimony been subjected to the standards of the later time, Eisenhower might have ended his Presidency as his Secretary of State and other high officials were indicted for perjury.
Allen Dulles appeared for six hours, occasionally aided by Pearre Cabell. Pictures of Soviet bases, airfields and Navy yards were used to show that the U-2 was “one of the most valuable intelligence collection operations that any country has ever mounted at any time.” The U-2 had revealed that the Soviets had sharply reduced long-range bomber production and recently developed a new supersonic medium-range bomber. It had made the Russians “far less cocky.”
Fulbright asked him why the President had taken responsibility. Although he had privately opposed the decision. Dulles defended his boss: “The fact that I was going ahead on my own authority to do something of this magnitude may not have been widely believed, even if I had asserted and stuck to it.” Why the flight on May Day? “I don’t discuss what the President says to me or I say to the President.”
What were they looking for? “Certain targets that we were afraid we would not be able easily to get at a later time and which we thought were of great value to our national security.” Might Powers have actually landed his plane and defected? “He loved flying, was making good money and was very happy.… If you are going to defect, you don’t fly into the heart of Russia, where you may be shot down anywhere before you get there.” No Senator asked whether CIA malfeasance might have contributed to the May Day downing or the embarrassments that followed. Later CIA directors did not enjoy such kid-glove treatment.
After Dulles’s appearance, Fulbright met reporters and publicly absolved the CIA of “questionable decisions” in the U-2 affair: “political officers” were to blame. Dulles called Herter to say that he was “very disturbed”: “Fulbright is just trying to bolster his own theory that we should have kept our mouths shut.”
Hugh Dryden testified that the U-2 had gone on 199 actual weather flights since 1956. He noted his fear that if the world learned of NASA’s full involvement in the U-2 program, foreign governments would halt cooperation on Project Mercury: “We are regarded in one popular story as a piano player who didn’t know what was going on upstairs. We would like to remain in the position of the stupid—well, of a stupid person.”
Thomas Gates said, “Everyone should be terribly proud of the dignity and character of the President in this Paris meeting. I happened to be sitting next to him and it was the most remarkable performance of strength of character and dignity of any man I have ever seen.” He defended his military alert: “Primarily a measure of checking command and checking communications.” Asked if the CIA or Air Force had flown over China, he dissembled: “I don’t know to my own knowledge that we have.”
Each day, Richard Helms and Chip Bohlen pored over the transcript for information that might damage U.S. interests and censored it before issuance to the press. The complete testimony was locked in a Senate vault for twenty-two years. As the senators argued over the final report, Frank Lausche said that attacking the President aided Khrushchev: “We are serving the Soviet Union and not our country.” Fulbright replied that he resented the insinuation: “We don’t happen to have Mr. Khrushchev here to question him.” George Aiken cried, “Let’s subpoena him!”
Fulbright declared that the “real issue” was Eisenhower’s decision to take responsibility for the U-2. Alexander Wiley said that by telling the truth, the President had “taught the world a lesson” which would “echo down through the years.” Fulbright carped, “It is echoing down through the years already.”
They debated the timing of the ill-fated flight. Homer Capehart said it made his blood boil: “They had been doing it for four years and they had all the information they possibly needed.” George Aiken said it reminded him of the bum arrested for throwing a brick through a window: “It seemed like a good thing to do at the time.” Fulbright supposed that there had been no good reason for flying so close to the Summit: otherwise Dulles and Herter “would have told us.” Aiken wondered who had really made the decision to fly on May Day. Fulbright challenged Eisenhower’s contention that U-2 flights were warranted because the Soviet Union was a closed society: if a man was starving to death, he was justified in breaking into a grocery store, “but we just don’t accept it legally.”
The final report did not fault the U-2 pilot or CIA preparations for the May Day mission: what befell the U-2 had been “just plain bad luck.” But the senators felt that too little heed had been paid to the flight’s possible effect on the Paris Summit. The cover stories should have been more careful and the government better coordinated. All members signed, except Capehart. Lausche and Wiley added their own appendix denouncing Khrushchev for wrecking the Summit and praising the U-2 program and Eisenhower’s performance.
Fulbright was never convinced that he and his colleagues had reached the heart of the matter. In 1960, suggesting that the American government may have intentionally permitted the U-2 to be downed and thereby to wreck the Summit would have been political suicide. But years later, Fulbright said, “I have often wondered why, in the midst of these efforts by President Eisenhower and Khrushchev to come to some understanding, the U-2 incident was allowed to take place. No one will ever know whether it was accidental or intentional.”
In Lubyanka Prison, Powers was “shaken” by the news that the Paris Summit had collapsed and that his mishap was the reason. His captors told him that he would be tried for espionage; he was still certain that he would be shot.
On May 17, they took him to see the U-2 wreckage at Gorky Park; technicians asked for details about the equipment. On May 26, for the first time, he was allowed to write his parents and wife. The letters were edited by the Russians and he was told to copy the revisions:
My dearest Barbara,
I want you to know that I love you and miss you very much. I did not realize how much until I found myself in this situation. Not knowing when, if ever, I will see you again has made me realize how much you mean to me. I have had plenty of time to think since I have been here and plenty of time to regret past mistakes.…
I have been told that there is a lot of publicity in the U.S. papers about me. I was also told that you had returned to the States and that you are presently with your mother. Barbara, tell me how my mother and father are taking this. Is my mother all right? I was afraid that it might be too much of a shock to her.
Well, to get back to me, I am getting along as good as can be expected.… I have been treated much better than I expected. For the first week or so I had no appetite at all but I am doing fine now. When I had to bail out of the plane I skinned my right shin a little and carried a black eye for two weeks. A lady doctor treated them both and they are well now.
That was my first experience with a parachute and I hope I will never have another. I could not use the ejection seat because of the G forces and had to climb out. My chute opened immediately—how I don’t know.… The people here tell me that I am lucky to be alive, but only time will tell me whether or not I was lucky.
Things happened pretty fast after that. Before dark that night I was in Moscow.… It gets pretty lonely here by myself but they have given me books to read and it helps to pass the time. I also get to walk in the fresh air every day that it doesn’t rain. One day I even took a sun bath. It has been a little too cold to do that every day.
On May 2nd I was taken for a tour of Moscow which I enjoyed very much. These people are real proud of their capital city.… Just now a guard asked me if I wanted to walk but I prefer to finish this letter so I said no.
Barbara, I don’t know what is going to happen to me. The investigation and the interrogation is still going on. When that is over there will be a trial.… I was told that if the U.S. government would let any of you come that you would be allowed to see me. I would rather you waited until the trial or after so that I could tell you what the results were.…
I did take a walk after all.… It was getting pretty smoky in here and I needed the fresh air. By the way these cigarettes here are pretty good.
You are on your own now and I don’t know for how long. Just be careful and maybe we can still buy a house some day.… Well, Darling, it is dark outside now and I guess I had better go to bed. Barbara, once again I say I am very sorry for everything. I am sending you, with this letter,
All my love,
Gary
Barbara received the letter in Milledgeville. She read it, wept and, as instructed, sent it to the home address of a CIA man.
The U-2 and the Summit collapse handed Democrats an irresistible campaign issue. Stuart Symington accused Eisenhower of subjecting the nation to a “humiliating disaster.” The Democratic Advisory Council called it more proof of the “lack of competence of the present administration.” Campaigning in the Oregon primary in May, John Kennedy charged that the President had let “the risk of war hang on the possibility of an engine failure”: Eisenhower might have “expressed regret” for the U-2 flight, if that would have saved the Summit.
Kennedy’s Senate office was deluged with angry telegrams: “When one apologizes to Khrushchev, it’s the same as apologizing to the Devil.… Saying or implying Eisenhower goofed at the Summit will breed disgust for you and your party.… YOU’RE UNFIT TO BE PRESIDENT. They need your kind of double-dealers in Russia. Go to Russia.”
Campaigning in the West, Lyndon Johnson told audiences, “I’m not prepared to apologize to Mr. Khrushchev—are you?” Richard Nixon publicly denounced Kennedy’s comments as “naïve.” Kennedy replied, “If Vice President Nixon feels the conduct of this administration at the time the U-2 flights were discovered was commendable, that is his prerogative.”
After winning Oregon, Kennedy called on Adlai Stevenson at his Illinois farm. Afterwards Stevenson wrote their mutual friend Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “He seemed to feel that my reaction to the Summit was correct and that we shouldn’t, either for the country or the party, let this one be buried in maudlin mush. But I will wait to see what he does with interest. He felt that Nixon would take the tough guy with Khrushchev line now, that he had to, and his strategy would be to put us on the defensive as the soft-on-Communism party.”
The President had been scheduled to arrive in Tokyo on June 19 as the coda to his triumphal tour of the Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet tour had been canceled, the White House replaced it with goodwill stops in the Philippines, Taiwan, Okinawa and Korea. A resounding welcome in the Western Pacific might redeem the travesty of Paris.
But Premier Kishi was in grave trouble. When the American security treaty was brought to the floor of the Diet, Socialists staged a sit-in and were removed from the chamber. Liberal Democrats who remained unanimously approved the treaty, unleashing national demonstrations against Kishi’s naked bid for one-party rule, the treaty and America’s presence in Japan. In Tokyo, rioters shouting, “Ike don’t come!” tore open the gates of Kishi’s residence and put up signs: WE DON’T WELCOME IKE! U-2 OUT OF JAPAN!
From Moscow, Izvestia warned that Eisenhower’s goal was to heat up world tensions so that “Kishi and other favorites who have sold their souls to the American devil may be exploited even more fully in their aggressive policy against the Asian peoples.” Someone crudely forged and disseminated a message from the American air attaché in Tokyo advising that “we trick the Japanese by temporarily removing planes from Japan to Okinawa and return them secretly after the hullabaloo over U-2s and the anti-Kishi demonstrations die down.”
Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, nephew of the President’s old boss, cabled Washington from Tokyo that Kishi was “fighting for his political life.” In early June, when he met Jim Hagerty’s advance party at Haneda Airport, hundreds stormed their Cadillac with signs: WE DISLIKE IKE.… REMEMBER HIROSHIMA.… EISENHOWER CAN’T SAVE KISHI.… TAKE BACK YOUR BASES.… GO TO HELL IKE. Rioters pounded the roof and broke windows. Hagerty lit up a cigarette and pretended to photograph the crowds. Only after eighty minutes were they rescued by a U.S. Marine helicopter. Pravda warned that this was “only a dress rehearsal” of what lay in store for Eisenhower. Allen Dulles feared a kamikaze attack.
Kishi promised to clear the entire city and send 27,000 policemen to guard the streets if the President would still consent to come. A vast crowd organized by the left-wing Zengakuren forced their way into the Diet and trampled a woman to death. While Eisenhower toured Manila, Merriman Smith recorded, “The people around Ike remain on pins and needles about Tokyo. More rioting tonight.” Japanese leaders feared for Emperor Hirohito, who was scheduled to ride with Eisenhower through Tokyo. As John Eisenhower recalled, Goodpaster called MacArthur from Manila and said, “Are you so sure that there’s going to be no trouble that you’re willing to put your career on the line?”
Kishi decided to cancel his invitation and resign. Before he relinquished office, he was stabbed five times in the thigh by a right-wing nationalist. In July, Herter informed the President that “we have withdrawn all the U.S. U-2 aircraft from Japan and the Japanese government is very much relieved.”
As Eisenhower’s party sailed for Taiwan, the Mainland Chinese shelled Quemoy and Matsu: Radio Peking reported that as soldiers jerked the lanyards of their cannons, they shouted, “Eisenhower go back!” and “Get out of Asia!” In Okinawa, leftists marched and cried, “Ike go home!” Pravda exulted, “ONE FIASCO AFTER ANOTHER.” As Harrison Salisbury recalled, the Presidential tour of Russia and Japan had turned into a “macabre” journey, a “pretty miserable sort of windup for what had been planned as the great visit of the late twentieth century.”
Returned to Washington, Eisenhower gave a television speech from the Oval Office, blaming the Communists for using “every possible method” to stop his trips to the Soviet Union and Japan: “These disorders were not occasioned by America. We in the United States must not fall into the error of blaming ourselves for what the Communists do. After all, Communists will act like Communists.”
The Washington Post observed that the undertones of disappointment in the President’s speech were especially pointed because he was so near leaving office: “It is tragic for the country as well as himself that the termination has been marked by the collapse of the Summit Conference, the outburst of violence in Japan and a general resumption of the Cold War.”
On June 27, the Soviets walked out of the test ban talks at Geneva.
On July 1, an American RB-47 spy plane took off from its British base and flew along the northern coast of the Soviet Union. Over the Barents Sea, it vanished. John Eisenhower brought the President the grim news at Gettysburg, where he and Mamie were celebrating their forty-fourth anniversary. Might Khrushchev now fulfill his threat to destroy Western bases in the event of another incursion? John thought his father looked as if he had had the wind knocked out of him.
In Moscow, Khrushchev announced that the Soviets had shot down the plane to halt another “gross violation” of their airspace. Two survivors had been rescued. The “new act of American perfidy” showed that Eisenhower’s pledge to stop the spy flights was “not worth a busted penny.” The British should know that lending their bases for “aggressive actions” would bring their people great danger.
American intelligence showed that the RB-47 had been more than thirty miles outside the Soviet frontier: still smarting from the revelation that it had allowed U-2s for years to fly deep into Soviet territory, the Soviet military had probably shot down the plane to enhance its image. When the Russians ascertained that the plane had been downed over international waters, Khrushchev had probably tried to forestall embarrassment by trying to turn the matter into another U-2 case.
At the White House, Eisenhower told Herter that he had gotten to the point where he didn’t trust the Russians “to the slightest degree”: if the United States could prove that the plane was over international waters when downed, it should break relations with the Soviet Union. But revealing this evidence would compromise American tracking stations. Allen Dulles told the President that the Soviets were trying to scare American allies into denying use of their bases. The UN Security Council refused to condemn what the Russians called the “American provocation.”
Western planes flew in international airspace along the Iron Curtain every day. The President told aides that if the Russians kept shooting at them, he would retaliate, and it might start a world war. With spectacularly bad timing, during the UN debate, an American C-47 strayed over the Kurile Islands. The Soviets tried to shoot it down and missed. This proved to be the last major aerial incident during the Eisenhower Presidency.
In August, Gordon Gray secretly suggested to Eisenhower that the Pentagon lure a Soviet plane, submarine or trawler toward American waters. The craft would be forced down, up or boarded without a fire-fight: “We would then claim a violation of territorial waters, whether absolutely technically true or not.” The President could regain the world propaganda offensive by publicizing a Soviet spy case—and demonstrate that Washington dealt with intruders more humanely than Moscow. But Eisenhower declined.
That summer, the CIA and Pentagon were concerned about the loss of U-2 information on Russia. The President’s pledge not to fly into Soviet airspace again had returned Western intelligence to an earlier age. Satellite reconnaissance would not be in full operation for months. Thomas Gates called a secret meeting of the Joint Chiefs and top intelligence officials at Quantico. Some demanded that the U-2 fly into Russia again, no matter what Eisenhower had pledged to Khrushchev.
In U.S. News & World Report, an anonymous American official warned that the Soviets were relocating and camouflaging ICBM sites and building new ones: “The next President will probably wake up to discover that his military commanders cannot guarantee that they know the sites of Soviet missiles and can knock them out. If you don’t know where to strike, your military power is limited.”
Bissell sent a petition to the White House, “disowned by the Director” and “to be destroyed after reading,” proposing a much-reduced and redeployed U-2 operation. It allowed that the President had made a “firm decision” not to fly again into the Soviet Union. But what if the world situation should crumble? Then Eisenhower or the next President might want to change his mind. Hence why not keep the planes flying to complete coverage of vital areas like China?
The President was reserved. He told aides he wished they would pay more attention to world opinion. All his advisers had “missed badly” on the U-2. They had given him no idea what the world reaction to a downing would be. He didn’t want to say, “I told you so,” but recalled that he was “the one and only one” who had ever put much weight on this. When Goodpaster raised a Pentagon-CIA proposal to use RB-47s in the Far East, Eisenhower said they must wait for the “political picture to develop more stability.” Another failure would hand the Presidential election to the Democrats.
The CIA and Pentagon were racing to perfect successors to the U-2. In 1956, Richard Bissell had already begun working with Kelly Johnson on a new plane—ultimately called the SR-71 Blackbird—that would fly much higher and at speeds over Mach 3. In June 1960, the President ordered work to proceed, but “on low priority, as a high-performance reconnaissance plane for the Air Force in time of war.” He thought that there was little chance of using the plane in peacetime.
In 1958, Bissell and Allen Dulles had persuaded Congressional leaders to approve secret funding for the first American spy satellite, code-named CORONA. In February 1959, Eisenhower told the CIA that U-2 flights should be “held to a minimum pending the availability of this new equipment.”
By May Day 1960, the CIA and Air Force had made eleven attempts to launch a satellite, but each time, the rocket, camera or other equipment had failed. In August 1960, one finally made it into orbit, photographing the Soviet Union with a regularity and comprehensiveness that the U-2 could never achieve. These and later pictures would almost certainly reveal once and for all whether there really was a Missile Gap.
The U-2 affair had provided Khrushchev’s enemies in the Soviet Union with an excellent opportunity to tame him. Some demanded to know why he had embraced the American President as a “lover of peace” when all clear-minded Soviet leaders knew that he was merely a captive of the Pentagon and monopolistic aggressive capitalism. In May 1960, on its front page, Pravda ominously reprinted a Walter Lippmann column referring to Khrushchev’s “critics within the Soviet Union.”
In public, Khrushchev distanced himself from Eisenhower, but not with such vigor as to confess that he had been duped. In early June, at a Kremlin press conference, he declared that Eisenhower was “completely lacking in will power” to curb the Cold Warriors: “I think that when the President is no longer in office, we could give him a job as a kindergarten director. I am sure he would not hurt the children. But it is dangerous for a man like that to run a nation.… I say this because I know him.
“I watched him in 1955 at the Geneva Conference and I felt sorry for him.… Whenever the President had to speak, John Foster Dulles handed him notes. In decency, he ought to at least have turned his back while reading the note, but he would take the note, read it and lay it aside.… Well, Comrades, at that point, I was tempted to wonder just who was running the state.… It is just dreadful that such awesome power should be in such hands.… The world situation is strained and yet the President leaves to play golf!… Eisenhower’s Presidency is a time of troubles for the United States and all the world.”
In mid-June, the Kremlin held a large conference on farming. Western analysts noted that Khrushchev was not invited to speak on his favorite topic and that his agriculture minister used the occasion to challenge Khrushchev’s policies. On June 18, he went to Bucharest for a meeting of world socialist leaders. Since May Day, Mao Tse-tung had exploited the U-2 episode to undermine Khrushchev’s dominance of the Kremlin and the socialist camp. Behind closed doors at Bucharest, the Chinese proposed a resolution condemning Khrushchev’s opening to the West. Khrushchev reportedly vilified them as “children” who “mechanically parroted” Lenin’s views on imperialism and wished to start another world war. Khrushchev withdrew twelve thousand technical advisers from China and tore up contracts for further aid.
In mid-July, Western analysts were intrigued anew when Khrushchev did not give the main report to the Central Committee on the Bucharest meeting. Instead it was delivered by Kozlov, who had not even been there. As members went on to discuss the Soviet economy, Khrushchev maintained his uncharacteristic silence. His contributions were reportedly confined to hectoring some of the speakers from his seat.
Domestic problems loomed. Soviet industrial growth was sagging, as was agriculture: Khrushchev’s fabled Virgin Lands idea had by now been proven a failure. It was later said that he might have been thrown out at this moment but for the fact that the world might have taken his firing as capitulation to the Chinese and admission of the failure of Soviet foreign policy. By now, it was probably incumbent upon Khrushchev to show the Kremlin and the world that he was a tough and able leader, that he knew how to stand up to the West and seize opportunities in Cuba, the Congo and the rest of the Third World. Within a year, he scrapped his vaunted plan to reduce the size of the Soviet armed forces.
Years later, just before his death, Khrushchev dated the beginning of his decline in power to the day that the U-2 was shot down: after May Day 1960, he was “never again” able to regain full control of his government. He said that from that day on, he had to share power with those who believed that “only military force” enabled Moscow to deal with Washington.
This contained more than a hint of retrospective self-justification: it was easier for Khrushchev to blame his decline on American “betrayal” and “treachery” than on the failure of his own policies. But to the extent that the U-2 affair undermined his exhortations for closer relations with the West and military reductions, it doubtless served potential rivals.
Eisenhower had expected to be a commanding figure this summer, back from Paris and Moscow with agreements that formed the basis for détente. Perhaps he and Khrushchev would educate the American and Soviet peoples to the benefits of shifting government spending from the arms race to social and consumer needs. In the United States, enthusiasm for détente would run so high that the fall campaign would be largely a referendum on who could best continue Eisenhower’s steps toward peace.
Instead his dreams were turning to sand. Khrushchev’s “vituperation and false charges” now reminded him of Stalin. Americans of all stripes were demanding an increased defense budget. Democrats and Republicans challenged each other on who could best stand up to Khrushchev. Joseph Alsop marveled to a friend that even Chip Bohlen thought that Khrushchev was moving toward a major showdown: “The change of tone in men like Chip impresses and disturbs me almost as much as the change in the Soviet tone. Meanwhile Eisenhower remains the same, like a dead whale on a beach or, rather, like a nice old gentleman in a golf cart.”
One day that summer, Eisenhower told George Kistiakowsky of how he had concentrated his efforts the past few years on ending the Cold War and felt that he had been making big progress. Then the “stupid U-2 mess” came and ruined all of his efforts. He sadly concluded that there was “nothing worthwhile” left for him to do before the end of his Presidency.