Eisenhower at his easel. (illustration credit 27.1)
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER,
January 17, 1961
On October 4, 1957, with the news that the Soviet Union had successfully launched the world’s first man-made satellite, the nation’s attention shifted abruptly from Little Rock and civil rights to outer space and the arms race. The Russians called the satellite Sputnik, a word artfully translated as “fellow traveler.” It was a small aluminum alloy sphere, 22.8 inches in diameter, weighing 184 pounds, and equipped with two radio transmitters sending continuous signals back to earth. Sputnik orbited the earth, 560 miles up, traveling at a speed of eighteen thousand miles an hour. Shortly afterward came Sputnik II, launched on November 3, six times larger than its predecessor, with an orbit even higher.
Neither Sputnik nor Sputnik II had any direct military application. They carried no weapons systems or scientific equipment. But the technological breakthrough represented by the launch and the size of the thrust required to propel the satellites into orbit caught the world by surprise. American reaction varied between measured anxiety and total hysteria. The Joint Chiefs clamored for massive increases in the defense budget, civil defense officials mounted an urgent drive to construct bomb shelters nationwide, the academic community pressed for more funds for scientific research, and the Democrats—believing that they had found a chink in Ike’s armor—ballyhooed the missile gap and America’s unpreparedness.
Eisenhower refused to panic. As at Little Rock, he responded calmly and deliberately, and kept the issue in perspective. Ike was peppered at his news conference on October 9 about the Soviet launch. Charles von Fremd of CBS wanted to know whether the Strategic Air Command was now a museum piece, as Nikita Khrushchev claimed. Absolutely not, Eisenhower replied. Any change in weapons systems would be evolutionary over a long period of time. Robert Clark of the International News Service asked whether we had made a mistake in not recognizing we were in a race with Russians. No, said Ike, the satellite program is a scientific program unrelated to national security. “I don’t know why our scientists should have come in and urged that we do this before anybody else.” May Craig wanted to know whether the Soviets could launch rockets from the satellites. “Not at this time,” Ike replied. They might be able to transmit photographic data back to earth, but that was still under development. Eisenhower carefully distinguished between launching a satellite and firing an intercontinental ballistic missile, where accuracy and guidance were of paramount importance. There was no reason to assume the Russians had any advantage in that respect.
The key question was put to Eisenhower by Hazel Markel of NBC:
Q: Mr. President, in light of the great faith which the American people have in your military knowledge and leadership, are you saying at this time with the Russian satellite whirling about the world, you are not more concerned nor overly concerned about our nation’s security?
EISENHOWER: So far as the satellite itself is concerned, that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota. I see nothing at this moment, at this stage of development that is significant in that development as far as security is concerned.1
Eisenhower’s resolute assurance calmed the nation’s jitters. His manner that afternoon exuded confidence. It was not bravado on Ike’s part, nor was he playacting. His assurance rested on iron-clad evidence provided by extensive CIA surveillance flights over the Soviet Union mounted by the agency’s U-2 spy planes. When Eisenhower assumed office in 1953, he was troubled by the lack of accurate information about Soviet military activity. The possibility of surprise attack loomed large. Russian secrecy also contributed to American anxiety, ratcheting up the pressure to spend more and more on potentially useless weapons systems. Aerial surveillance seemed the answer. Eisenhower had pressed for “Open Skies” at Geneva, but the Soviets were uninterested. When MIT president James Killian, who was Ike’s science adviser, and Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, suggested development of a plane that could overfly Soviet airspace at altitudes above Russian antiaircraft defenses and produce highly accurate photographs of the ground below, Eisenhower signed on immediately. His one stipulation was that he did not want uniformed Air Force pilots violating Soviet airspace. That meant it would be a CIA project.2
The resulting U-2 surveillance aircraft, designed by America’s most talented airplane designer, Kelly Johnson, was built in a supersecret area (the Skunk Works) at Lockheed’s sprawling Burbank, California, facility in 1955–56. Based originally on the Air Force’s F-104 but longer, lower, and lighter, with a wingspan of eighty feet, the U-2 was more of a glider than a jet and could stay aloft for eleven hours with a range of 4,750 miles. It flew at 70,000 feet (soon 80,000), and its cameras could capture the smallest objects on the ground some fourteen miles below. The first reconnaissance flights were made from England in July 1956. They flew over Eastern Europe, and Eisenhower was shown photographs from the missions. Ike was stunned at the clarity of the photos. You could see not only a parking lot fourteen miles below, but you could even see “the lines marking the parking areas for individual cars.”3 In terms of intelligence work, the U-2 was a breakthrough of gigantic proportions. As one high-ranking CIA official put it, “Photography became to the Fifties what code-breaking was to the Forties.”4
On July 4, 1957, the first flight into Soviet airspace took off from a West German airfield, crossed Eastern Europe, flew over Russian Air Force bases in the Ukraine, then up to Leningrad. The next day a second flight crossed southern Ukraine and went on to Moscow. Eisenhower was shown the photos several days later and was again astounded at the clarity. The photos also depicted Soviet fighters rising to challenge the U-2 but flaming out at 50,000 feet and tumbling back to earth until the pilots could restart their engines.5
On July 10, the Soviet Union filed a formal diplomatic protest pertaining to the overflights, including an accurate description of what the U-2s had done and where they had gone. The State Department rejected the allegations. John Foster Dulles personally wrote out the reply that no military plane had violated Soviet airspace.6 The Russians, for their part, chose not to go public with their protests about the U-2 flights because they did not want to admit to the world that their military was powerless to stop them. Eisenhower recognized that each U-2 flight was a provocation and insisted on approving the flights personally. The risk was small—Allen Dulles had assured the president that if the Soviets ever did shoot down a U-2, the pilot could not survive the crash—but Eisenhower demanded direct control. A former pilot himself, Ike often plotted the routes for the U-2 on flight maps with CIA deputy director Richard Bissell.7
The U-2 photographs not only provided convincing evidence that there was no missile gap, but that the Soviets had yet to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile. During the Sputnik crisis, John Foster Dulles urged the president to tell the country about the U-2 flights to reassure the public that the United States retained the strategic edge over the Soviets. Eisenhower declined to do so. If he revealed the flights, Ike believed he would come under intense Soviet pressure to halt them. Moscow might even declare that the next flight would be considered an act of war. Rather than take that risk, Eisenhower kept the flights secret, so important was the information they obtained.
The crises over Little Rock and Sputnik took a toll. In both instances Eisenhower’s steady hand reassured a nation in doubt. But the emotional cost was high. Ike kept his personal feelings bottled up—as he always did—but he suffered for doing so. On Monday, November 25, 1957, Eisenhower welcomed King Mohammed V of Morocco to Washington in a brief ceremony at National Airport, then returned to the White House for a light lunch and a brief nap. Returning to his office in the early afternoon, he suddenly felt dizzy. He had difficulty reading the papers in front of him, could not pick up his pen, and slumped in his chair, unable to get up. He buzzed his secretary Ann Whitman. When Whitman came into the room, Eisenhower tried to tell her what had happened, only to discover that he could not speak intelligibly. His words were slurred and jumbled. “It was impossible for me to express any coherent thought whatsoever. I began to feel truly helpless.”8
Ann Whitman was alarmed to find the president talking gibberish and immediately summoned General Andrew Goodpaster, Eisenhower’s staff secretary, who occupied the adjacent office. Goodpaster assessed the situation quickly and concluded Ike had suffered a slight seizure. “Mr. President, I think we should get you to bed.”9 Eisenhower had no difficulty walking with Goodpaster’s support, nor did he feel any pain. Goodpaster helped Ike undress and got him into bed. Dr. Snyder arrived shortly afterward. “Having resigned myself to bed, I spent no time worrying about the source of my trouble,” Eisenhower recalled. “I just turned over to take a nap.”
When the president awoke, two of the nation’s leading neurological surgeons conducted an extensive examination and concluded that Eisenhower had experienced a minor spasm in one of the small capillaries of his brain. The problem was temporary, the doctors agreed, and they predicted a full recovery in a matter of days.10
Encouraged by the doctors’ prognosis, Eisenhower got up and began to dress for the state dinner that evening honoring King Mohammed. Mamie, John, and Dr. Snyder objected strenuously. Vice President Nixon had already been tapped to substitute for the president, and they insisted that Ike remain in bed. The discussion became heated. Finally, Mamie said that if Eisenhower insisted on going to the dinner, she would not. “It soon appeared to me that a retirement in good order was called for,” said Ike. “I went back to bed.”11
The following morning Eisenhower was much improved but not yet fully recovered. He was unable to identify a famous William Turner watercolor hanging on his bedroom wall (The Smugglers), one of his favorite pictures, and his words were still slightly garbled. After two additional days of bed rest, the doctors pronounced Eisenhower fully recovered. He and Mamie attended church services in Washington on Thanksgiving, and then drove to Gettysburg for the weekend.
The doctors were satisfied, but Eisenhower was unsure. This was his third serious illness in three years, and he did not want to cling to office if he was incapable of fulfilling his duties. The memory of Woodrow Wilson’s last year as president troubled Ike, and he was especially sensitive to the possibility that he might not recognize his own disability. Against much high level advice, Eisenhower decided to test himself. The NATO conference of heads of government was due to convene in Paris in mid-December. Dulles suggested that Nixon attend in Ike’s place, but Eisenhower saw it as a test. “If I could carry out this program successfully and without noticeable damage to myself, then I would continue in my duties. If I felt the results to be less than satisfactory, then I would resign.”12
The trip was a complete success. The president’s motorcade from Orly Airport was greeted by thousands of cheering Parisians, Eisenhower stood in an open car for almost an hour acknowledging their welcome, and his introductory remarks at the Palais de Chaillot went off without a hitch. Ike paid an unscheduled visit to his old NATO headquarters and spoke extemporaneously to the assembled staff and their families. “The talk was short, but to me it represented another milestone. I felt that my recovery was progressing satisfactorily.”13 For three days Eisenhower participated in the NATO meetings with no apparent loss for words. On the flight back to Washington, Dr. Snyder confided to Ike that he was much improved. “As he spoke, I realized that I already had abandoned my doubt concerning my physical capacity to continue my duties; during the remaining three years of my Presidency no question of the kind again occurred to me.”14
One of the aftereffects of Ike’s stroke was a little known undertaking by him to step down in the event of any future incapacity. In an exchange of letters revealed for the first time with the publication of his memoirs in 1965, Eisenhower carefully laid out for Nixon the circumstances under which the vice president would assume the power and duties of the presidency. If he were disabled, and aware of it, Ike said he would inform Nixon and Nixon would take over. But if he were disabled and unaware of it, Nixon would be exclusively responsible for determining when he should take over. “You will decide.… The decision will be yours only.” Eisenhower said that if medical experts agreed that his disability was permanent, he would immediately resign. By the same token, “I will be the one to determine if and when it is proper for me to resume the powers and duties of the Presidency.”15 Eisenhower’s undertaking was almost a decade before the ratification of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for presidential disability.
Eisenhower at his easel. (illustration credit 27.1)
As Eisenhower’s second term progressed, his principal assistants fell by the wayside. Like a football team with a comfortable lead in the fourth quarter, the starters came off the field. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, perhaps the most powerful member of the cabinet, resigned on July 28, 1957. Defense Secretary Charles Wilson left on October 8, and Herbert Brownell, in many ways Ike’s most trusted adviser, departed after Little Rock. John Foster Dulles was crippled with cancer, and though he briefly returned to office, he resigned the following year. The loss of the four was a serious setback for Eisenhower. Humphrey, Wilson, Brownell, and Dulles were powerful figures of independent judgment. They were intensely loyal to the president, but could be counted on to speak forcefully when they disagreed. But the most serious loss Ike suffered in his second term was that of Sherman Adams. Adams was by no stretch of the imagination the deputy president. But as White House chief of staff he kept the administration in step and coordinated—just as Bedell Smith had done at SHAEF during the war.
The parallel between Sherman Adams and Bedell Smith is striking. Both were brusque, austere administrators capable of making on-the-spot decisions that freed Eisenhower of countless details. When generals in Europe were disappointed in decisions made at SHAEF, they usually blamed Bedell rather than Ike. So, too, in Washington. Politicians of both parties focused their ire on Sherman Adams when their requests were denied by the White House. Both Smith and Adams were scrupulously honest. Yet both had curious blind spots. In 1945, as the Allies overran Germany, the German gold hoard fell into American hands. Bedell Smith suggested that part of it be used to strike gold medals for the victorious generals. Eisenhower and Clay dismissed Smith’s suggestion out of hand, yet Smith had meant well. He simply failed to understand why it was inappropriate.16 Sherman Adams’s difficulty was much the same.
Adams’s problem arose out of his long friendship with New England industrialist Bernard Goldfine. The friendship between the Adams and Goldfine families dated to the early 1940s, when Adams had been Speaker of the New Hampshire General Court (the state legislature) and Goldfine had played an active role in financing textile mills in the state. The families sometimes vacationed together and often exchanged small presents on festive occasions. Goldfine retained an apartment in a downtown Boston hotel that was often used by visiting friends and business associates. When Adams went to Washington in 1953, Goldfine invited him to stay in the apartment whenever he was in Boston, and to sign Goldfine’s name on hotel bills for room service and other incidentals. Goldfine also gave Adams a vicuña coat from one of his mills, and loaned him an oriental rug for his Washington home. Adams, for his part, once gave Goldfine a gold watch, and Rachel, Adams’s wife, had given him a painting—all of which seemed innocent enough among old friends.
The Adams-Goldfine relationship surfaced in June 1958 during a congressional investigation into Goldfine’s financial dealings. The hotel bills signed by Adams were discovered among Goldfine’s records, and legislators assumed there had been a quid pro quo. On his own initiative Adams asked to testify. There was no subpoena, but he wanted to set the record straight. Adams had made two routine phone calls to the Securities and Exchange Commission to obtain information on Goldfine’s behalf, but there had been no effort to influence the commission. Like Bedell Smith and the German gold, Sherman Adams failed to perceive how a phone call from the White House would be interpreted. Adams said that in retrospect he should have acted more prudently, but insisted he had done nothing wrong. The public perception was otherwise.
At his news conference the following day Eisenhower undertook a staunch defense of Adams. “Anyone who knows Sherman Adams has never had any doubt of his personal integrity and honesty,” said the president. Perhaps mindful of the largess he had often received from his friends in the Gang, Ike told the newsmen that “a gift is not a bribe. One is evil, the other is a tangible expression of friendship.” Eisenhower acknowledged that Adams might have acted imprudently, but “I believe with my whole heart that he is an invaluable public servant doing a difficult job efficiently, honestly, and tirelessly.”17
On August 13, 1958, the House of Representatives cited Goldfine for contempt of Congress because of his refusal to answer some twenty-two questions during his testimony. Democrats were prepared to give Adams a pass, but congressional Republicans clamored for his scalp. It was an election year, and the GOP campaign committees viewed Adams as an anchor who would pull down Republican candidates nationwide. The appearance of influence peddling, valid or not, was an unnecessary burden in what was shaping up as a vintage year for the Democrats.
Eisenhower initially stood by Adams. “Completely convinced of his innocence, I refused to ask for his resignation.”18 As the White House hunkered down, the calls for Adams’s resignation on Capitol Hill mounted daily. Nixon reported that the vast majority of Republicans in the House and Senate thought Adams should go. Meade Alcorn, the RNC chairman, repeated the message, as did Winthrop Aldrich, a friend of Adams whom Ike consulted.
The state of Maine always holds its statewide and congressional elections in September, six weeks or so before the rest of the nation goes to the polls. When the results in Maine were tabulated in 1958, the Republicans lost in a landslide—which many attributed to the negative publicity pertaining to Adams’s relations with Goldfine. At that point Eisenhower realized that whether justified or not, Adams had become too much of a liability to retain. “How dreadful it is that cheap politicians can so pillory an honorable man,” the president told Ann Whitman.19 On September 17, Eisenhower asked for Adams’s resignation. The chief of staff stepped down the following week, but it was too late to reverse the headwind blowing against the Republicans.20 In the November elections, the Democrats picked up fifty seats in the House and fifteen in the Senate. Adams was replaced as White House chief of staff by his deputy, retired major general Wilton B. “Jerry” Persons, an old friend of Ike’s. At Treasury, Humphrey was succeeded by Robert B. Anderson; Neil H. McElroy replaced Wilson at Defense; William P. Rogers, Nixon’s old friend and associate, took Brownell’s place as attorney general; and former congressman Christian A. Herter of Massachusetts became secretary of state. Persons, Anderson, McElroy, Rogers, and Herter were competent executives, but scarcely of the caliber of the cabinet officers they replaced.
In the summer of 1958, Eisenhower’s attention was drawn once more to the Middle East. In the aftermath of the Suez affair, Eisenhower had asked Congress for blanket authorization to use military force to preserve the independence of the countries of the region if requested to do so. As with the Formosa Resolution, which Congress had adopted in 1955, the administration’s proposal left the final decision to the president and was deliberately vague as to the circumstances that might trigger it. Known subsequently as the Eisenhower Doctrine, the proposal was approved in March 1957.21 “The existing vacuum in the Middle East must be filled by the United States before it is filled by Russia,” Eisenhower told members of Congress.22
The Eisenhower Doctrine was framed in the Cold War context and had little immediate application. Like the Formosa Resolution, it was hortatory, designed to dissuade the Soviets rather than a call to action. Nevertheless it was a blank check, and in the summer of 1958 Eisenhower chose to cash it—not in relation to the Soviets, nor to combat Communist expansion, but to maintain stability in Lebanon.
Lebanon was nominally an Arab country and a member of the Arab League, although a slim majority of its people were Maronite Catholic. The president and the Army commander were traditionally Christian, while the prime minister and speaker of the legislature were Muslim.23 This uneasy equilibrium was threatened in the aftermath of the Suez War by the influx of thousands of Arab refugees from Palestine. There was brief street fighting in the spring of 1958, although order was quickly restored. But on July 14, 1958, the situation changed dramatically following the violent overthrow of the British-installed monarchy in Iraq by radical Iraqi nationalists. The royal houses of Jordan and Saudi Arabia were threatened, and in Lebanon, President Camille Chamoun immediately asked Eisenhower for American troops to maintain order. The fear was revolutionary Arab nationalism, a decidedly secular movement sponsored by Egypt and Syria, not to be confused with Muslim religious fundamentalism. Eisenhower responded on July 15 with the dispatch of three battalions of Marines from the Sixth Fleet, followed by two airborne battle groups from Germany, a total of some fourteen thousand men. “You are doing a Suez on me,” joked British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who sent a battalion of paratroopers to Amman to bolster the regime of King Hussein.24
The Marines landed without incident; there was no fighting of any kind and no casualties. The troops were withdrawn four months later. The intervention in Lebanon was the only time during Eisenhower’s eight years in the White House that American troops were dispatched to a foreign country, and as in Little Rock, Ike chose to use overwhelming force. The reason for doing so, which Eisenhower never doubted, was to ensure the stability of regimes in the Middle East favorable to the United States, and to demonstrate Washington’s ability to deploy troops in the area on a moment’s notice. The whole affair, Eisenhower noted in his memoirs, brought about “a definite change in Nasser’s attitude toward the United States.”25
No sooner had the crisis in Lebanon eased, than the uneasy standoff in the Formosa Strait fell apart. Against Washington’s advice, Chiang Kai-shek had recently deployed more than one hundred thousand troops—over a third of his army—on the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Beijing considered the move provocative and demanded the troops be withdrawn. When Chiang refused, the Chinese commenced a sustained shelling of the islands. Eisenhower was momentarily caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, there was no possibility that Chiang’s forces could mount an invasion of the mainland, and his increase in the size of the garrisons had been unquestionably provocative. On the other, Chiang was America’s ally and the United States was committed to the defense of Formosa and the offshore islands as well in certain circumstances. What Eisenhower worried about was that Chiang might escalate the crisis to draw the United States into a war with mainland China. “The Orientals can be very devious,” he told Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles. “If we give Chiang our full support he would then call the tune.”26
Eisenhower dispatched two additional carriers to the region and ordered the Seventh Fleet to convoy Chiang’s supply ships on the high seas, but not within the three-mile coastal limit. The mainland Chinese responded by holding their fire until the Nationalist vessels came close to shore. As resupply problems for Quemoy and Matsu mounted, Dulles and the Joint Chiefs suggested that the commander of the Seventh Fleet be authorized to use tactical atomic weapons against the Chinese without reference to Washington. Eisenhower refused. An attack on the mainland “could be ordered only with my approval,”27 said the president. The crisis simmered into early September. On September 4, 1958, Dulles issued a statement reaffirming the intention of the United States to protect the offshore islands, but including a thinly veiled offer to negotiate, which Eisenhower insisted upon.28 Two days later, Chou En-lai responded positively. Shortly thereafter U.S. and Chinese diplomats resumed discussions over the conference table in Warsaw, discussions that had broken off the year before. The Joint Chiefs also revised their position. On September 11, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy told Eisenhower that the chiefs had concluded that the offshore islands were not necessary for the defense of Formosa and should be vacated. That evening Eisenhower went on national television to address the crisis. “There is not going to be any appeasement,” said Ike, but “I believe there is not going to be any war.”29 Both sides got the message. Chiang accepted in principle the need to reduce the garrisons on the offshore islands, and the Chinese announced that they would fire on the Nationalist convoys only on the odd days of the month, permitting resupply on the even days. “I wondered if we were in a Gilbert and Sullivan war,” Eisenhower later noted in his memoirs.30 The crisis passed. Quemoy and Matsu remained in Nationalist hands, the size of the garrisons was reduced, though not nearly so much as Eisenhower wished, and the firing ceased. Ike had remained cool throughout the crisis and once again war was avoided.
The most serious foreign policy issue Eisenhower confronted in 1958 concerned Berlin. The city of Berlin, still technically under four-power occupation from World War II, was located 110 miles within what had been the Soviet zone of occupation, now the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The three western sectors of the city (British, French, and American) were consolidated and governed as “West Berlin”; the Soviet sector—“East Berlin”—was integrated into the GDR. Simply put, West Berlin was part of the democratic West and NATO; East Berlin was part of the Communist East and the Warsaw Pact. This uneasy situation had prevailed for over a decade. West Berlin was linked to West Germany by three air corridors, three autobahns, and three rail lines. The Russians had attempted to block access in 1948 during the Berlin blockade, but the Allied airlift had kept West Berlin supplied, and the Russians eventually backed down. A tacit understanding pertaining to access gradually evolved and was no longer at issue. What was at issue in 1958 was the precarious state of the German Democratic Republic and the desperate Soviet need to ensure its survival.
The military boundary between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was for all practical purposes the boundary between the two Germanies. It was heavily fortified and impenetrable. Churchill called it an “iron curtain.” No commerce passed through; there was no civilian traffic or access of any kind—save for the corridors to West Berlin. The situation in Berlin was entirely different. Although divided between East and West for governmental purposes, and possessing different currencies, movement within the city was unimpeded. There were no border controls between East Berlin and West Berlin, streets ran through, as did the U-Bahn, the S-Bahn, and city buses. One could travel freely anywhere in the city. West Berlin was cordoned off from East Germany, but not from East Berlin. And East Berlin opened into East Germany. There were no border controls since East Berlin was the capital of the GDR.
That was at the root of the problem in 1958. Disaffected East Germans could travel freely to East Berlin, and then simply cross over to West Berlin, ask for political asylum, and be flown out and resettled in West Germany. What had begun as a trickle of refugees in the early postwar years had reached mammoth proportions by 1958. The population of the former Soviet zone (now the GDR), which numbered close to twenty million in 1945, had shrunk to seventeen million by 1958, and those who were leaving often represented the most productive elements of East German society.31 This extraordinary emigration of professionals and skilled workers was more than the Communist regime of East Germany could endure.
The most obvious way to halt the population drain was to plug the escape route in Berlin. At the end of October 1958, Walter Ulbricht, the head of the East German government, commenced the effort by charging that the continued presence of Allied forces in Berlin was illegal. According to Ulbricht—and with patent disregard for the relevant quadripartite agreements—all of Berlin belonged to the GDR.32 One month later the theme was picked up by Nikita Khrushchev. In separate notes to the United States, Britain, and France, Khrushchev demanded that the Allied occupation of Berlin be terminated and that West Berlin be converted into a demilitarized “free city.” Khrushchev gave the Western powers a six-month ultimatum. If the Allies had not accepted his proposal within that time, the Soviet Union would conclude its own agreement with the GDR and end the occupation unilaterally.33
Khrushchev’s ultimatum hit the West like a bombshell. In West Berlin, Mayor Willy Brandt pointed out that Berlin was only part of the larger struggle between East and West and that there was “no isolated solution.”34 Eisenhower, who was taking time off for a much needed rest at the Augusta National, issued a terse statement dismissing the Soviet note out of hand.a At Ike’s direction, General Henry I. Hodes, the commander of American forces in Europe (USAREUR), paid a highly publicized visit to Berlin to demonstrate U.S. resolve, and German chancellor Konrad Adenauer made one of his rare trips to the city. West Berlin elections were scheduled for the following week, and in an unusual display of unity Brandt and Adenauer campaigned together. “The clouds have darkened over this city,” said Adenauer, “but we shall not be frightened.”35 Brandt was reelected handily, and the Communists’ high hopes were dashed when they received just 31,500 votes out of the 1.7 million votes cast.
Buoyed by the West Berlin election results, the Western powers girded to hold their ground. Dulles, joined by his British and French counterparts, issued a formal statement announcing the intention of their governments to remain in Berlin, the NATO Council stated it would not yield to threats, and in Washington the government issued a lengthy document spelling out the legal status of Berlin.36 At the end of the year the United States, Britain, and France delivered their official replies to the Soviet demand. In identical notes the three governments told Moscow that they had no intention of relinquishing their rights in Berlin, and that they continued to hold the Soviet Union responsible under the relevant wartime agreements. The Russian proposal to convert West Berlin into a “free city” was unacceptable. Eisenhower, ably supported by Macmillan and de Gaulle, was determined to hold firm. Ike also recognized the need to give Khrushchev a way to back down gracefully. At his suggestion, the Allied replies noted that Berlin was simply a part of the larger question of Germany, and offered to commence negotiations on that subject. Those negotiations, of course, could not take place under threat of an ultimatum.37 It was Eisenhower at his best: a carrot and a stick.
Khrushchev got the message. On a whirlwind unofficial visit to the United States, Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan said his government’s six-month ultimatum related only to the beginning of discussions, not to a settlement of the dispute. Khrushchev told the East Germans much the same. Speaking to the Ninth All-German Workers Conference in Leipzig on March 7, Khrushchev told the East Germans not to hurry. “The wind does not blow in your face. The conditions are not ripe as yet for a new scheme of things. Each fruit has its season.”38
On May 27, 1959, Khrushchev’s ultimatum came and went. Nothing happened. In Berlin it was business as usual.b Thanks to Eisenhower’s determination the crisis eased. Two years later, as East Germany continued to hemorrhage, Khrushchev took the measure of another American president and decided to risk it. After meeting John F. Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961, Khrushchev flashed Ulbricht the signal to go ahead. On August 13, 1961, the East Germans closed the border between East and West Berlin and began construction of the Berlin Wall—action they had declined to take with Ike in the White House. Kennedy affirmed America’s commitment to West Berlin; Eisenhower defended the quadripartive status of the entire city.
In the early summer of 1959, Khrushchev let it be known that he would like to visit the United States. Eisenhower thought it would be a good idea. “This will take the crisis edge off the Berlin situation,” Ike wrote Harold Macmillan.39 After a brief exchange of notes it was agreed that Khrushchev would come to the United States in mid-September, with Eisenhower paying a return visit to the Soviet Union the following year. Before receiving Khrushchev, Eisenhower thought it best to visit Europe and touch base with Macmillan, Adenauer, and de Gaulle—all of whom were understandably nervous about a one-on-one meeting between the American and Soviet leaders.
Ike’s meeting with de Gaulle was memorable. Recalled in 1958 from the political wilderness to handle the crisis in Algeria, de Gaulle had been the last premier of the Fourth Republic, the author of the constitution of the Fifth Republic, the first president of France under the new regime, and the exemplar of national reconciliation, bridging the historic divide between Left and Right. In 1959, de Gaulle was at the height of his power. “I at once sensed important changes since I had last seen him,” said Eisenhower. “He now appeared a more benign, less forbidding individual than the fiery division commander who had made himself the symbol of French resistance in World War II.”40
De Gaulle for his part was effusive in welcoming Eisenhower to France. “Whatever may come in the future, whatever may happen in the years ahead, you will for us forever be the generalissimo of the armies of freedom.”41 On the second evening, after the formal program concluded at the Château de Rambouillet, the summer residence of the presidents of France, the two heads of state, who were spending the night at Rambouillet, sat before the fireplace in Ike’s apartment in their bathrobes and began to reminisce. “Isn’t it curious,” observed de Gaulle, “that we are two old generals who have written our memoirs and we have never carped or recriminated at the other. Roosevelt thought that I took myself for Joan of Arc. He was wrong. I simply took myself for General de Gaulle.”42
The discussion that evening was wide-ranging, covering the major issues confronting the West, including France’s effort to develop its own nuclear weapons program—which de Gaulle put in perspective. “You, Eisenhower, would go to nuclear war for Europe because you know what is at stake. But as the Soviet Union develops the capability to strike the cities of North America, one of your successors [may not]. When that comes, I or my successor must have in hand the nuclear means to turn what the Soviets may want to be a conventional war into a nuclear war.”43 It was precisely that perception of Eisenhower—that he would not flinch from launching a nuclear war if necessary to protect the West—that made the United States so formidable.
As for Khrushchev, Eisenhower had indicated that in addition to the public tour, he wanted to meet privately with the Soviet leader at Camp David. This threw the Kremlin into a tizzy. What and where was Camp David? Was it an internment facility? Perhaps a quarantine station? Was the Russian leadership to be held hostage? Frantic messages to and from the Soviet embassy in Washington soon clarified that Camp David was an American version of a Russian dacha that Roosevelt had built as a weekend retreat. An invitation there was a signal of honor. “We never told anyone at the time about not knowing what Camp David was,” Khrushchev confessed in his memoirs. “I can laugh about it now, but I’m a little bit ashamed. It shows how ignorant we were in some respects.”44
Khrushchev arrived in Washington on September 15, 1959, stayed thirteen days, and visited seven cities. The trip was a media circus, and Khrushchev made good copy, whether he was sparring with hecklers at banquets, hurling ears of corn at reporters on the Iowa farm of Roswell Garst, or giving his wristwatch to a worker on an assembly line in Pittsburgh. He was accompanied throughout by the urbane Henry Cabot Lodge, for whom Khrushchev developed a fondness. Lodge had a sense of humor, which Khrushchev appreciated. “He was a pleasant companion to pass the time with during the many hours we spent on planes and trains. We tried to avoid talking business if possible. There was no need to get ourselves all worked up talking politics.”45
Eisenhower and Khrushchev met for three days at Camp David. Ike also took the Soviet leader to the farm at Gettysburg and presented him with a young Angus bull that Khrushchev had admired. When Khrushchev returned to Moscow he reciprocated by sending Ike a small forest of birch trees to be planted on the farm. In the evenings they watched Westerns, which Khrushchev also enjoyed.c The talks between Eisenhower and Khrushchev were substantive, covering the full range of issues, but ultimately unproductive. No solutions were forthcoming, but the fact that the meetings were held helped lower the temperature in East-West relations. In effect, Ike and Khrushchev agreed to disagree, and found they had more in common than met the eye.
1959 Herblock Cartoon, copyright by The Herb Block Foundation (illustration credit 27.2)
At one point Eisenhower asked Khrushchev about military expenditures. “Tell me, Mr. Khrushchev, how do you decide on funds for the military?” Before Khrushchev could answer, Ike volunteered to tell him how it was in the United States. “My military leaders come to me and say, ‘Mr. President, we need such and such a sum for such and such a program. If we don’t get the funds we need, we’ll fall behind the Soviet Union.’ So I invariably give in. That’s how they wring money out of me. Now tell me, how is it with you?”
“It’s just the same,” Khrushchev replied. “Some people from our military department come and say, ‘Comrade Khrushchev, look at this! The Americans are developing such and such a system. We could develop the same system but it would cost such and such.’ I tell them there’s no money. So they say, ‘If we don’t get the money we need and if there’s a war, then the enemy will have superiority over us.’ So we talk about it some more, I mull over their request and finally come to the conclusion that the military should be supported with whatever funds they need.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Eisenhower. “You know, we really should come to some sort of an agreement in order to stop this fruitless, really wasteful rivalry.”46
On Berlin, the meetings at Camp David cleared the air. Eisenhower and Khrushchev discussed the issue at length on September 26, with no one present except their interpreters. Eisenhower pointed out that Berlin was simply a part of the larger problem of a divided Germany and said the Soviet ultimatum had created a very difficult situation. Khrushchev replied that “the Soviet Union did not want to take any unilateral action and that he wanted to solve the German problem together with the United States in the friendliest manner possible.”47 As Eisenhower wrote later, Khrushchev “realized he had a bear by the tail on the Berlin issue and was relieved to have found a way out with reasonable dignity.”48
Khrushchev’s explicit withdrawal of his Berlin ultimatum at Camp David paved the way for the Paris summit. The issues on the agenda were Germany and disarmament. Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan, and de Gaulle agreed to meet in Paris on May 16, 1960. De Gaulle would be host. An agreement banning nuclear testing appeared in the offing, and the Berlin issue had moved to a back burner. Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev wanted to reduce military expenditures, and Macmillan and de Gaulle wanted to participate in the process. “Never in the Cold War did agreement seem closer,” wrote one historian of the period.49 Eisenhower planned to visit the Soviet Union after the summit, and an itinerary had been worked out with the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Mikhail Menshikov. For Eisenhower, as the end of his presidency approached, the world appeared far safer than eight years before. The Cold War was not over, but U.S.–Soviet relations had rarely been better. Domestically, America had never enjoyed greater prosperity. Ike’s final budget would be balanced; the national debt, which stood at 100 percent of the nation’s GDP when Eisenhower took office, had been reduced to 56 percent; unemployment had shrunk to little more than 5 percent; and desegregation in the South was proceeding “with all deliberate speed.” Everything seemed to be coming nicely to fruition as Ike contemplated another trip to Paris.
On May 1, 1960, Eisenhower’s proverbial luck ran out. Russian surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) finally succeeded in shooting down an American U-2 spy plane, this time 1,200 miles inside the Soviet Union near Sverdlovsk (formerly known as Yekaterinburg). And it happened on May Day—the most festive day on the Communist calendar. For the next two weeks the world was treated to a comedy of errors as Washington attempted to cover up, while the Soviets released the evidence piece by piece. Khrushchev and his colleagues may not have known where or what Camp David was, but they surely knew how to exploit an American miscue.
By 1960 it had become clear that the U-2 was fast becoming obsolete. Soviet missiles were improving in range and accuracy, and it was only a matter of time before a plane would be shot down. The United States had developed a highly secret satellite program (Corona) to replace the U-2, but it was not yet operational. And so in the early spring of 1960, the intelligence community requested permission to mount several additional U-2 flights to fill in “gaps” in the coverage. Eisenhower was reluctant. Khrushchev, the president said, had outlined Soviet missile capability at Camp David, and “every bit of information I have seen from the overflights corroborates what Khrushchev told me.” According to the notes of the White House meeting kept by General Goodpaster, “The President said that he has one tremendous asset in a Summit meeting [and] that is his reputation for honesty. If one of these aircraft were lost when we were engaged in apparently sincere deliberations, it could be put on display in Moscow and ruin the President’s effectiveness.”50
Despite his initial reluctance, Eisenhower granted the CIA permission to launch a flight on April 9, 1960. The flight took place without incident, and photographs revealed no new missile sites. The CIA asked for another flight. Eisenhower agreed, providing it took place within the next two weeks. Weather intervened and Allen Dulles asked the president for an extension. Again, Eisenhower agreed, this time for one more week. “After checking with the President,” wrote General Goodpaster, “I informed Mr. Bissell that one additional operation may be undertaken, provided it is carried out by May 1. No operation is to be carried out after May 1.”51
On the morning of May 1, the weather cleared and Francis Gary Powers, a veteran U-2 pilot who had flown missions over the Soviet Union for the past four years, took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, heading for Bodø, Norway. The flight would require nine hours and would cover 3,800 miles, passing over suspected Russian missile sites en route. Ironically, it was to have been the last flight of the U-2.
Moscow initially made no announcement of having shot down the plane. Late in the afternoon of May 1, Goodpaster informed Eisenhower that the U-2 was missing, but that triggered no alarm since it was assumed that the plane would be destroyed on impact and the pilot would be dead. Additional reports that day indicated that Powers had spoken of an engine flameout, but that, too, caused no upset. Eisenhower thought it best to ignore the incident, hoping that Khrushchev might do the same in the interest of harmony at the summit. Those hopes were dashed on May 5 when Khrushchev, in a lengthy speech to the Supreme Soviet, announced they had shot down an American spy plane deep inside the Soviet Union. Khrushchev blamed “Pentagon militarists” for the act. Eisenhower was not mentioned nor was the fact that Francis Gary Powers was in Soviet custody. “I went out of my way not to accuse the President,” Khrushchev wrote later.52
In Washington the cover-up began. NASA issued a press release that one of its U-2 meteorological research planes had been missing since May 1, “when its pilot reported he was having oxygen difficulties over the Lake Van, Turkey area.” Presumably the plane had strayed off course and been shot down by the Soviets. The State Department issued a similar denial. “It is entirely possible that having failure in the oxygen equipment, which could result in the pilot losing consciousness, the plane continued on automatic pilot for a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet airspace.”53
Two days later Khrushchev sprang the trap. Speaking once again to the Supreme Soviet, the chairman announced that he not only had the wreckage of the plane, but the pilot and the film. “The pilot’s name is Francis Gary Powers. He is thirty years old and works for the CIA.” Khrushchev then displayed some of the photos showing Soviet air bases with fighters lined up on the runway. “The whole world knows that Allen Dulles is no weatherman,” said Khrushchev.54
In Washington, Eisenhower exploded. For years he had been assured by Allen Dulles that no U-2 pilot would fall into Soviet hands alive. Now Khrushchev had irrefutable proof that the United States had systematically violated Soviet airspace. Nevertheless, the cover-up continued. “As a result of the inquiry ordered by the President,” said a State Department press release, “it has been established that insofar as the authorities in Washington are concerned, there was no such authorization for any such flight as described by Mr. Khrushchev.”55 The story did not hold water. The press was skeptical and Eisenhower himself soon had second thoughts. After attending Sunday service in Gettysburg on May 8, the president telephoned Secretary Herter and instructed him to issue a new statement acknowledging that for the past four years U-2s had regularly been sent into the Soviet Union under orders from the president to obtain knowledge of the Soviet military-industrial complex.56 Milton Eisenhower, now president of Johns Hopkins, told his brother that he must not take the rap for the U-2. Ike disagreed. He said he would not blame subordinates for his decisions. It would be a “glaring and permanent injustice.” John suggested his father fire Allen Dulles. Again Ike said no. “I am not going to shift the blame to my underlings.”57 The following day, Monday, May 9, Eisenhower told a meeting of top officials in the Oval Office, “We will now just have to endure the storm,” meaning that he personally would be the one who did the enduring.58
Eisenhower’s decision to accept personal responsibility for the U-2 flights may have been the finest hour of his presidency. Rather than force Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell to walk the plank for reasons of state, Eisenhower acknowledged his own culpability. FDR would not have done so; Ronald Reagan was shielded from Iran-Contra, and nobody knows what Reagan’s successors might have done. John F. Kennedy announced his personal liability for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but except for dimming the luster of the New Frontier, little damage was done. In Eisenhower’s case the president, by taking direct responsibility, doomed the Paris summit, scuttled an impending nuclear test ban treaty, blew the chance to reduce defense expenditures, and forfeited the possibility of progress on the German question. “I had longed to give the United States and the world a lasting peace,” Eisenhower said later. “I was able only to contribute to a stalemate.”59
Ike was always his own harshest critic. In May 1960, his essential decency and personal sense of responsibility had carried the day. “He had this thing about honesty,” said Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon. “That was the military tradition.”60 d Cynics would argue that such sentiment is out of place in the Oval Office. But it was not out of place for Eisenhower. Ike knew the difference between right and wrong, and tried to apply that knowledge to politics and diplomacy. That is why the country always trusted him.
The Paris summit convened on May 16, 1960, in the high-ceilinged conference room of the Palais de l’Élysée, only a few rooms removed from de Gaulle’s own office. As host, the French president presided. After calling the conference to order, de Gaulle recognized Eisenhower to speak first. Since he was the only head of state (other than de Gaulle), it was strictly protocol that Ike should speak first. Khrushchev heatedly objected. All delegation chairmen were equal, he insisted, and he demanded to speak first. De Gaulle shot a glance toward Eisenhower, Ike shrugged, and de Gaulle recognized Khrushchev. For the next forty-five minutes Khrushchev lambasted the United States and the U-2 overflights as though haranguing a party rally in Red Square. At one point Ike passed a mordant note to Christian Herter: “I think I’m going to take up smoking again.”61 When Khrushchev, having lashed himself into an oratorical frenzy, pointed to the ceiling and shouted, “I have been overflown!” de Gaulle had had enough. “I too have been overflown,” the French president interrupted.
“By your American allies?” asked Khrushchev.
“No, by you,” de Gaulle replied drily. “That satellite you launched just before you left Moscow to impress us overflew the sky of France eighteen times without my permission. How do I know you do not have cameras aboard which are taking pictures of my country?”
“You don’t think I would do a thing like that?” asked Khrushchev.
“Well,” replied de Gaulle, “how did you take those pictures of the far side of the moon?”
“That one had cameras.”
“Ah,” said de Gaulle, “that one had cameras. Pray continue.”62
Khrushchev resumed reading his prepared text with increasing venom. He closed by announcing that unless Eisenhower personally apologized for the overflights, the conference could not continue. Almost as an afterthought, Khrushchev rescinded the invitation for Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union. “How can I invite as a dear guest the leader of a country which has committed an aggressive act against us?”63
Eisenhower replied briefly, pointing out that the U-2 flights involved no aggressive intent, were only gathering information to guard against surprise attacks, and in any event had been permanently discontinued.64 At that point the Soviet delegation rose and left the conference room. The other delegations looked at one another. De Gaulle said he would stay in touch with the Russians, and everyone got up to leave. De Gaulle walked over to Eisenhower and took him by the arm. “I do not know what Khrushchev is going to do, nor what is going to happen, but whatever he does, or whatever happens, I want you to know that I am with you to the end.”65
Eisenhower was deeply moved. As he walked down the stairs of the Palais de l’Élysée he turned to Colonel Vernon Walters, who had overheard de Gaulle’s remarks. “That de Gaulle is really quite a guy,” said Ike.66
Eisenhower played only a minor role in the 1960 election. He declined to endorse any candidate prior to the GOP convention, briefly tried to coax Robert Anderson, then Oveta Culp Hobby, into running, and accepted Nixon’s nomination as inevitable. Nixon had served Ike loyally for the past eight years, yet Eisenhower was still not ready to concede that his vice president was capable of taking command. If the alternative was Nelson Rockefeller, Ike preferred Nixon. But it was a Hobson’s choice. When Eisenhower addressed the Republican National Convention in Chicago on July 26, he devoted his entire speech to the accomplishments of the past eight years and never once mentioned Nixon, although Nixon by that point was the only candidate in the race.67 e
Nixon, for his part, wanted to prove that he could win in his own right and was content to keep Ike in the background. Perhaps the president could put in a good word or two at his press conferences, but Nixon did not want Eisenhower barnstorming the country. The press conference strategy proved a disaster. Asked on August 10 whether he intended to give Nixon a greater voice in the administration “in view of his responsibilities as the nominee of the Republican Party,” Eisenhower replied that he alone would make the decisions. He would continue to consult Nixon, said Ike, but “I’m going to decide according to my judgment.” Charles Bartlett of the Chattanooga Daily Times asked if there were any differences between Nixon and the president on nuclear testing. “Well,” Eisenhower responded, “I can’t recall what he has ever said specifically about nuclear underground testing.”68
It got worse. At Ike’s next news conference, Sarah McClendon asked Eisenhower to “tell us some of the big decisions that Mr. Nixon has participated in … as Vice President?” The president was almost gruff in his reply. “No one participates in the decisions.… No one can make a decision except me.… I have all sorts of advisers, and one of the principal ones is Mr. Nixon.… When you talk about other people sharing a decision, how can they? No one can, because then who is going to be responsible?”
Charles Mohr of Time wanted to know more. Nixon’s experience had become an issue in the campaign, he said. The Republicans claimed that Nixon “has had a great deal of practice at being President.” In light of the president’s answer to Ms. McClendon, asked Mohr, “would it be fair to assume that what you mean is that he has been primarily an observer and not a participant in the executive branch of the Government?” Eisenhower, whose command of the English language was always impeccable, particularly at news conferences, and especially when he wanted to evade a question, tried to work his way out. “I said he was not part of the decision-making. That has to be in the mind and heart of one man.” But every leader has to consult, said Ike. And for the past eight years the vice president has participated in every consultative meeting that has been held “and has never hesitated to express his opinion.”
MR. MOHR: We understand that the power of the decision is entirely yours, Mr. President. I just wondered if you could give us an example of a major idea of his that you had adopted in that role, as the decider and final—
THE PRESIDENT: If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” said Jack Bell of the Associated Press, terminating the news conference.69
Not surprisingly, relations between Eisenhower and Nixon, which were tepid to begin with, cooled further as the campaign progressed. Eisenhower believed that Nixon was becoming too partisan and was driving away independents and conservative Democrats who had voted for Ike in droves; Nixon chafed under Eisenhower’s shadow and resented playing second fiddle. At the end of August, Eisenhower paid a highly publicized visit to Nixon at Walter Reed—Nixon was in the hospital with an infected knee. Afterward, Ike told Ann Whitman, there was “some lack of warmth.” According to Whitman’s notes, “He [Eisenhower] mentioned again, as he has several times, the fact that the Vice President has very few personal friends.” As Whitman saw it, the difference between Ike and Nixon was all too obvious. “The president is a man of integrity and sincere in his every action. He radiates this, everybody knows it, and everybody loves and trusts him. But the Vice President sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.”70
1960 Herblock Cartoon, copyright by The Herb Block Foundation (illustration credit 27.3)
Nixon insisted on making all of the important campaign decisions himself. Ike’s advice was not sought, and when offered was rarely heeded. Eisenhower suggested Nixon not debate Kennedy on television because Nixon was much better known, and there was no reason to give Kennedy so much free exposure. Nixon rejected the advice on the grounds that he was a much better debater than Kennedy. The first debate was an unmitigated catastrophe. As Ted Rogers, Nixon’s television adviser said, Nixon’s eight years of experience as vice president was “wiped out in a single evening.”71
The election was a cliffhanger. With a 64.5 percent turnout, Kennedy received 34,221,463 votes to Nixon’s 34,108,582—a difference of 112,881 out of the more than 68 million ballots cast.f In the electoral college, Kennedy carried twenty-three states with 303 electoral votes; Nixon carried twenty-six states with 219 votes. (Mississippi cast its electoral vote for Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia.) A shift of only 4,500 votes in Illinois and 28,000 in Texas would have given Nixon the election.72
As Eisenhower’s term drew to a close, Norman Cousins, the longtime editor in chief of Saturday Review, suggested to Ike that he give a “farewell address” to the nation—a parting testament after fifty years of public service. Eisenhower at the time was the oldest president to occupy the White House, and would be the last to be born in the nineteenth century. John F. Kennedy, at forty-three, was the youngest ever to be elected. Eisenhower liked Cousins’s suggestion. George Washington had warned the country against entangling alliances; Ike wanted to warn against the perils of ever-increasing defense expenditures and the garrison state.73
Eisenhower worked on the speech for more than a month, aided by his brother Milton and speechwriter Malcolm Moos, a young political science professor on leave from Johns Hopkins. At eight-thirty on the evening of January 17, 1961, Ike spoke to the country from the Oval Office. After briefly sketching the larger issues of war and peace, Eisenhower warmed to his theme. “Our military organization bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime.” Until World War II, “the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could … make swords as well.” But now, because of the Cold War, “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend more on military security than the net income of all United States corporations.”
Eisenhower’s voice continued with somber intonation. “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new to the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.” Then, in the most widely quoted passage, Ike said: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Eisenhower’s fear of the garrison state also manifested itself in his warning against excessive government influence in the world of scholarship. “The free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” Eisenhower cautioned against “the domination of the nation’s scholars” by the power of federal money, which he said was a danger “to be gravely regarded.”g
Then, in a timeless warning for the future, Eisenhower said America “must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”74
a “The United States will not enter into any arrangement or embark on any course of conduct which will have the effect of abandoning the responsibilities which the United States, with Great Britain and France, has formally assumed for the freedom and security of the people of West Berlin,” said Eisenhower. White House Press Release, November 30, 1958, EL.
b I was stationed in Berlin at the time as a junior officer in the 6th Infantry Regiment. Throughout the entire six-month crisis I do not remember that we did anything out of the ordinary. Never for a moment did we think anything would happen—although we were prepared to meet every contingency. As I look back on it, I believe the fact that we did not do anything out of the ordinary provided great reassurance to the Berliners.
c According to Khrushchev, Stalin liked Westerns as well. “When the movie ended, Stalin always denounced it for its ideological content. But the very next day we’d be back in the movie theater watching another Western.” Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament 407, Strobe Talbott, ed. and trans. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). Also see Khrushchev Remembers 297–98, Strobe Talbott, ed. and trans. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).
d Eisenhower put it somewhat differently. Speaking later to Gang member Ellis Slater, Ike said it was absolutely essential to create a feeling of confidence and trust among people working for government. “His [Eisenhower’s] philosophy is that by cajoling, by assurances, by backing up and by sharing responsibility, he can insure people staying in government service.… Hence, if errors had been made in the U-2 or other cases, honest mistakes, unavoidable perhaps—he felt that D[wight] E[isenhower] should assume responsibility.” Ellis D. Slater, The Ike I Knew 229 (Ellis D. Slater Trust, 1980).
e Arizona nominated Barry Goldwater, but Goldwater immediately withdrew. He received ten votes from Louisiana on the first ballot, and then Nixon was nominated by acclamation.
f American voter turnout is always reported as a percentage of the population twenty-one years and older. In Canada, Great Britain, and in western Europe, turnout figures are reported as a percentage of registered voters. That is why European and Canadian turnout figures are always so much higher. It’s apples and oranges.
g Eisenhower also warned against the growing power of a “scientific-technological elite.” Herbert F. York, an academic physicist who served Eisenhower as director of defense research and engineering, explained that Ike had in mind what had happened during the forty months from the launching of Sputnik to the end of his administration: “The people who irritated him were the hard-sell technologists who tried to exploit Sputnik and the missile gap psychosis it engendered.… They invented all sorts of technological threats to our safety and offered a thousand and one technical delights for confronting them.” Eisenhower understood both “the necessity of having a military-industrial complex and … the problems and dangers it brought with it.” Herbert F. York, Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist’s Odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva 126 (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
