For Eisenhower, 1955 opened beneath portentous skies. He and Mamie were in Augusta to golf and relax, but he woke on New Year’s Day to rain and wind across his favorite course. He shuffled all day between the residence and the office, hoping for a break in the weather, getting none.
The coming weeks would deepen the foreboding of New Year’s Day. Churchill resigned the prime ministership. Einstein died in April. Ike wrote movingly of Einstein’s contribution to the modern world, but losing Churchill as a colleague was especially sad. Eisenhower had known Churchill first from the perspective of a subordinate and later as a peer, had chuckled over his idiosyncrasies, and had been awed by his command of language and his bellowing truculence. The prime minister’s departure from high office left Eisenhower as the last of the world’s great leaders during the war that formed them all. When Churchill warned Ike that he was preparing to step down, Eisenhower’s reply brimmed with shared memories and common affections: Churchill had taught Ike the quiet satisfaction of painting, as Ike recalled. Admitting to a wave of nostalgia, Eisenhower reminisced about the early, perilous weeks of the war and recalled the effect Churchill had on him: “I still remember with great admiration the fact that never once did you quail at the grim prospect ahead of us; never did I hear you utter a discouraged word nor a doubt as to the final and certain outcome.”
Churchill’s departure was especially poignant because it emphasized the contrast between leaders of his stature and those surrounding Ike in 1955. Knowland, in particular, continued to irritate the president, even though the latest triggering event was relatively minor. The Senate Republican leader had annoyed Eisenhower in late 1954 with his vote not to condemn McCarthy (he voted, he said, as a member of the Senate, not as its Republican leader, a distinction that mattered to no one but Knowland). “In his case,” Ike wrote of Knowland in January when the senator angered him again, “there seems to be no final answer to the question, ‘How stupid can you get?’ ”
Ike could joke about the senator but not about China, which was again stirring. The latest eruption in that relationship occurred in the early hours of January 18, when the White House awoke to the news that China had launched a full-scale invasion of Yichang, a volcanic rock near the Tachens and under Nationalist control. Russian jets provided air support, and Chinese forces scaled cliffs as the Nationalist defenders broke ranks. Andy Goodpaster, a trusted adviser on national security matters, glumly observed that the Chinese were “growing up and getting tougher.” And more strategic, too. The remoteness of the island—and the nature of the conflict between Chinese Communists and Nationalists—were enough to give China confidence that it could engage in aggression without fear of American nuclear retaliation. The Communists believed those factors would protect them from what Ike described just weeks earlier to Republican leaders as “the ability to blow hell out of them [any American enemy] in a hurry if they start anything.”
The Chinese invasion was deliberately provocative, timed just as Eisenhower was attempting to build public and political support for a reduction in American armed forces—part of the New Look strategy that envisioned a long struggle against Communism, not a short and decisive war. That approach was integral to the administration’s strategic planning and an outgrowth of the Solarium Project—with its multifaceted approach to containing and rolling back international Communism through nuclear deterrence, sound budgets, and covert action. But Ike continued to encounter resistance to New Look, particularly from defense hawks, including some leading Republicans, who were suspicious that its emphasis on reduced conventional forces marked a retreat from confronting Communism. Some military leaders accepted the change in course reluctantly, mindful of its implications for their turfs and budgets. The Army’s chief of staff, Matthew Ridgway, who had earned Eisenhower’s admiration during the Korean War—and especially as a welcome relief from MacArthur’s megalomania—now emerged as an outspoken critic of the president’s strategy. Ridgway complained that he was being asked to make irresponsible cuts—“I felt I was being called upon to tear down, rather than build up,” the nation’s fighting capacity, Ridgway wrote later—and warned that the Chinese action in the Taiwan Strait was proof of his fear. Only American ground forces, he insisted, could defend the Nationalist Chinese islands. Eisenhower was incensed and considered sacking Ridgway, only to be talked out of that idea by Dulles, though Dulles too complained of subordinates who “carry their dissents beyond privileged boundaries.” Ike relented for the moment about firing Ridgway but stood fast on New Look and Taiwan. “I have no intention of putting American foot soldiers on Quemoy,” he told Admiral Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “A division of soldiers would not make any difference.”
But if threatening the use of nuclear weapons would not deter Chinese adventurism, and Eisenhower was unwilling to commit American troops, what response was left? Ike knew that America’s nuclear arsenal offered an option, not merely as deterrent, but as weapon of retaliation. Indeed, use might enhance deterrence, as it would prove the seriousness of the threat, precisely the argument advanced on behalf of a nuclear strike against North Korea in 1953. Eisenhower was unwilling to fight for remote volcanic rocks, but if China determined to take islands of greater consequence, including Quemoy and Matsu, Ike was ready to go to war. On March 6, Dulles reported from a trip to the region: “I said I did not think that as things now stood we could sit by and watch the Nationalist forces there be crushed by the Communists.” Ike accepted that and acknowledged, too, the grave implications of such a commitment. According to Dulles, “I said that this would require the use of atomic missiles. The President said he thoroughly agreed with this.” So, yet again, the administration faced the abyss, determined to deter by its willingness to engage. Eisenhower authorized American assistance in evacuating Yichang, then turned to the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Would China now force the next move?
War seemed so imminent that Admiral Robert Carney, whom Ike had appointed as chief of naval operations in 1953, blurted an off-the-record comment at a dinner with reporters, saying he believed that China would attack within weeks—specifically, he predicted China would invade Quemoy and Matsu by April 15. Such a bald prediction from a senior member of the military was reckless, and it compounded Eisenhower’s frustration. “By God, this has got to stop,” he exclaimed to Hagerty. Ike recognized that Carney expressed a widely held view within the administration, but it was one thing to discuss that fear among colleagues, another to say it to a room full of reporters. Moreover, Charlie Wilson, Eisenhower’s malaprop-prone secretary of defense, was publicly suggesting that the loss of Matsu or Quemoy would not significantly alter the international equation. Ike pulled Wilson aside after an NSC meeting to urge him to watch his tongue. Later, Eisenhower marveled in his diary at how Wilson “seems to have no comprehension at all of what embarrassment such remarks can cause.”
Amid such confusion, Eisenhower was immediately forced to answer for Carney’s prediction. A reporter opened Ike’s news conference on March 30 with a question about the admiral’s comments. Eisenhower roundly disavowed them. “I do not believe that the peace of the world, the tranquility of the world, is being served at this moment by talking too much in terms of speculation about such things,” he said. Then, trying to end the matter, he added: “I think that is all I have to say about it.” Reporters kept pressing him, asking whether Carney was irresponsible to discuss the enemy’s plans so openly. Ike almost delivered a more direct rebuke, then pulled back when asked if Carney would be reprimanded for his comments. “Not by me,” he replied brusquely. That ended the matter publicly, but by the rules in those days the White House cleared comments for publication. The president’s remarks in the section of the conference that were not approved for quotation were even sharper. “I want to make clear that he does have a right to his personal convictions,” Eisenhower said. “But he cannot utter them properly, in my opinion, if he is going to create difficulty for his administration … because then he doesn’t belong as a member of the team.” Carney knew he was in trouble. He halfheartedly expressed his regret to Eisenhower—Ann Whitman said the admiral had “apologized,” which she put in quotation marks—and then all concerned waited anxiously as Carney’s predicted date approached. The strain on Eisenhower was unmistakable. “Foster and I live 24 hours a day with that one,” he told the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn. “That is the most difficult problem I have had to face since I took office.”
April 15 came and went, and the islands remained in Nationalist hands. Strategic clarity, tactical ambiguity, military strength, and nuclear capacity succeeded where Truman’s uncertain commitment toward Korea had failed. Ike deterred aggression and avoided war. Once the crisis had passed, Ridgway retired in June, followed by Carney in August. Wilson remained. Dulles was ebullient. “Of all the things I have done, I think the most brilliant of all has been to save Quemoy and Matsu,” he confided to Emmet Hughes in 1956. Hughes was repelled: “I felt an almost physical reaction before the icy breath of his self-esteem.”
Even as events roiled Asia and kept rival ideologies in the region at sword’s point, the Cold War’s dynamic—in which capitalism and Communism dispatched soldiers to one region and diplomats to another, where threats of obliteration were accompanied by pledges of cooperation and common pursuit—simultaneously encouraged conflict and negotiation. In 1955, those forces produced a growing public and political clamor for a four-power conference that would include Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The initial impetus came from Britain, where Churchill’s former foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, now served as prime minister. Eager to demonstrate his new position and convinced that a summit could help reduce international tensions, Eden wrote to Eisenhower in early May proposing the meeting. “I do hope you will be willing to try this,” Eden continued, almost pleadingly. “The hopes of so many people, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, have been raised and a kind of mystique surrounds the idea. This may be foolish, but it is human.”
As Eden suspected, Eisenhower was skeptical, not to mention slightly nonplussed to discover that Eden had hatched the proposal without first discussing it with his American counterparts (Ike was miffed when reports of the British intention to propose a summit leaked in London and reached him through the press before Eden’s formal note). But Churchill urged Ike to go along, and Eisenhower responded with an open mind, suggesting that if such a summit were to take place, it should neither revolve around a detailed agenda nor be an entirely open and unstructured conversation. Rather, Eisenhower proposed that a summit should tackle three general subjects: nuclear arms reduction, limitation of forces and arms in Europe, and reunification of Germany. Although mindful of domestic opinion and concerned about angering “die-hard opponents of any contact with the Communists,” Eisenhower clearly signaled that he was open to a summit under the right conditions.
Over the next several days, Dulles, checking in frequently with Eisenhower, met with British and French officials in Paris and then Vienna to draft language inviting the Soviet Union. The allied governments circulated a draft on May 10 that read, “Believe that the time has now come for a new effort to resolve the great problems which confront us. We, therefore, invite the Soviet government to join with us in an effort to remove sources of conflict between us.”
Addressing reporters the following day, Eisenhower described the plans as exploratory but acknowledged that his initial resistance to a gathering had softened. His answer was not a model of clarity—it was one of those circumlocutions that earned him a reputation for rambling—but it did capture his hopes for the gathering. “This business of trying to reach a clarification of issues,” he said, “if such a thing is possible, is so important that you can’t stand on any other principle except, ‘Do your utmost,’ as you preserve your own position of strength, as long as you are not sacrificing it, as long as you are not expecting too much. Don’t be just stubborn in your refusal to expect anything, but go ahead and see what you can find out about it.” If it seemed Eisenhower was talking to himself, well, perhaps he was.
Two days later, in Vienna, foreign ministers of the four powers met over a Saturday evening dinner. Dulles pressed his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, a scheming old Stalinist and survivor of many intrigues, to lay down rules for a summit. Molotov was receptive, yielding on what Dulles thought would be an insistence that China attend as well. The Russian proposed Vienna as the site for the gathering, but Dulles resisted, worried that holding the affair there would seem to reward Austria for adopting a position of Cold War neutrality in exchange for casting off Soviet occupation. Such a signal might encourage Germany to try to do the same. Instead, Dulles suggested Switzerland; Molotov warned Dulles privately that anything but Vienna might encounter resistance from the Soviet leadership—the Soviets favored Vienna for all the same reasons that the U.S. resisted it—but added that if the conference were held in Switzerland, the Soviets would prefer Geneva, where they had a consulate, to Lausanne. And so the principals circled in on a place. As for a date, Eisenhower preferred to wait until Congress adjourned for the summer. Molotov seemed flexible.
With plans coalescing for the summit, Eisenhower enjoyed strong popular support for his participation. Through 1955, his job approval rating rarely dipped below 70 percent, extraordinary numbers for a president moving into the second half of his term. Nearly eight out of ten Americans trusted him to lead a successful conference with the Soviets. Support was similarly strong in Germany and Italy, though the United States was generally viewed far more skeptically by the French and the British—indeed, in Britain, more of those surveyed expressed warmth toward the Soviet Union than toward the United States. Reviewing the data, Nelson Rockefeller, acting as a special assistant to Ike, concluded that the conference “is regarded as beginning a long process of easing world tensions.”
Rockefeller in 1955 was a forty-seven-year-old comer, a pointy-elbowed, cocksure politician in training, heir to a family name synonymous with power and fortune. Rockefeller joined the administration early, initially at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, but moved to the position of special adviser for foreign affairs when C. D. Jackson returned to Time magazine. Dulles was suspicious from the start. Rockefeller’s position encroached on Dulles’s turf, and Rockefeller lacked Jackson’s subtlety for internal politics. Although Rockefeller could count on Sherman Adams for some protection—the two Dartmouth alumni were fond of each other—Dulles eyed Rockefeller’s moves warily, and Rockefeller responded by removing himself almost entirely from Dulles’s scrutiny, an awkward position given that Rockefeller’s mandate was foreign affairs. Dulles and his brother viewed Rockefeller as brash and shallow; when, for instance, Rockefeller offered up an idea for a political warfare school, the Dulles brothers chortled. Out of his earshot, they derided it as “amateurish” and “dangerous.”
Dulles was wary of the summit to begin with but had reluctantly come to advocate it. Rockefeller, by contrast, was a full-bore enthusiast. He gathered advisers and experts at the Quantico Marine Corps Base to draft what he hoped would be a dramatic peace proposal to unveil at the conference. They worked in secret, to Dulles’s consternation. “He’s got them down at Quantico,” Dulles groused to Adams one day. “And nobody knows what they’re doing.” By late May, Dulles and Rockefeller were feuding openly. Dulles told the president he had heard that Rockefeller was trying to chart policy for the summit; Rockefeller complained that he was so frustrated working with the State Department that he was considering a transfer to Defense. Ike saw the strengths in both men and refused to intervene.
Meanwhile, Dulles fenced with Molotov over the summit’s arrangements. They met in Vienna and outside San Francisco. They jousted over Molotov’s address to the United Nations and his planned appearance on American television; Dulles advised him to keep his speech short, Molotov agreed. They sounded each other out regarding progress over the release of the American airmen. They reached no agreement. Regarding the summit, now definitely set for Geneva, Molotov indicated that the Soviet leadership would want to discuss disarmament, European security, and economic cooperation. Dulles countered with disarmament and German reunification. The two agreed that Germany and European security were “interconnected,” and they chalked that up to progress. But when Dulles suggested that the United States might also raise “the status of Eastern European nations,” Molotov huffily replied that “the position of the Soviet Union had been made abundantly clear.”
The American agenda firmed up over those weeks, guided by Dulles and Eisenhower as they assembled a list of American ambitions and tallied where they enjoyed French or British support. As late as July 6, just nine days before Eisenhower was scheduled to depart, Dulles’s list of goals for the summit included no reference to the work of Rockefeller’s group.
Before leaving, Ike had to tend to a sad duty: on July 13, he accepted the resignation of Oveta Culp Hobby. Over her thirty months in the Eisenhower cabinet, Hobby had resumed the work habits that drove her to exhaustion during World War II. Ike tried to persuade her to ease up. He gently urged her to take a long weekend at Thanksgiving in 1953. “I would deem it a very great personal favor,” he implored after informing her that he himself was heading for Augusta. She declined. After meeting with her two months later, Eisenhower worried that Hobby was “nearing the end of her rope.”
The demands on Hobby had grown more intense, not less. Her husband, the former Texas governor, was fighting ill health, and she was frantically overseeing the completion of the Salk vaccine for polio and its promise to halt the terrifying disease. Once known as infantile paralysis, polio was a global scourge that first devastated the United States in 1916, when twenty-seven thousand people were paralyzed after being felled by the virus; six thousand died. Year after year, the virus spread and grew in alarming epidemics. In 1952, the year Eisenhower was elected, more than fifty-seven thousand Americans were infected. Parents kept children out of school, forbade them to swim in public pools, prohibited them from mingling in public places.
Jonas Salk’s breakthrough vaccine was subjected to an extraordinary field test during the early 1950s. On April 12, 1955, the tenth anniversary of the death of FDR—himself a victim of polio—scientists confirmed its efficacy. Americans flocked to get the vaccine. Hobby’s department, HEW, oversaw its distribution and early release, thrusting Hobby into the middle of an experiment of nearly unimaginable promise.
With the announcement of the vaccine’s successful field test, families pleaded for access to it. HEW selected six manufacturers that produced the vaccine under provisional rules and then were granted licenses. Distribution began immediately, but on April 26 six children who had been vaccinated were diagnosed with polio. Cutter Laboratories, which had produced those vaccines, recalled its product from the market, but by early May the number of infected children had grown to fifty-two. Although that must be considered in light of the five million who had been vaccinated over those weeks, the whipsawing of public hope and fear was agonizing to the administration and Hobby. HEW called for a halt to vaccinations on May 6 and intensively examined the vaccine and the labs producing it; the interruption was brief, and vaccines soon resumed.
But the stress of that episode, added to her worry for her husband, pushed Hobby to her limit. On July 13, she submitted her resignation, citing “personal reasons of a high order” and explaining that nothing less “could persuade me to leave your Administration.” Eisenhower knew this was coming, but he was saddened nonetheless. “All who knew you as a dedicated, inspired American leader will miss your voice and counsel in Government,” he wrote back the same day, in what he described as “one of the hardest letters I have ever had to write.” “None will miss you more,” he added, “than Mrs. Eisenhower and myself.” When Hobby’s resignation was made public, it was George Humphrey who most memorably captured the administration’s loss. “She is,” Humphrey said, “the best man in the Cabinet.”
It was at that sad instant that Ike packed his bags for Geneva. Before leaving, he spoke briefly to the American people. He was going, the president explained, because no effort in the service of peace could be wasted. “We want peace,” he said. “We cannot look at this whole situation without realizing, first, that pessimism never won any battles, whether in peace or in war.” He was going not to compromise with Communism but rather to exercise tolerance, “to try to see the other fellow’s viewpoint as well as we see our own.” He did not guarantee success but promised to try to change the tone of international relations. “I say to you, if we can change the spirit in which these conferences are conducted we will have taken the greatest step toward peace, toward future prosperity and tranquility that has ever been taken in the history of mankind.” Closing, Eisenhower asked his 165 million fellow Americans to pray for peace that coming Sabbath, to demonstrate to the world that America was a nation not of conquest but of sincerity. “That,” he said, “would be a mighty force.”
The Eisenhower family watched from the second floor of the White House, as did several close friends—Bill Robinson, Bob Woodruff, George Humphrey and his wife, Gordon Moore and his. Ike joined them immediately after his address and could see in their faces, some streaked with tears, the anticipation and hope that surrounded Geneva. Less than an hour later, Ike, Mamie, and John departed for Europe. They stopped in Iceland to refuel and were given an elaborate luncheon; although it was just 7:00 a.m. Washington time, the guests opened the affair with martinis. Mamie and John passed the flight playing Scrabble; Mamie won. As they neared their destination, she fretted about spending the nights at a high altitude, but John checked and discovered, to their surprise, that Geneva was only twelve hundred feet above sea level.
Their stay was a blur of administrative details and important conversation, set in the elegant, ordered streets and plazas of the pleasant Swiss city. As the summit drew near, Eisenhower met with his British and French counterparts for a two-hour discussion at the American headquarters, the “Geneva White House,” as it was known. The European delegations had made their reservations earlier and snapped up all available hotel space in Geneva; the Americans were extricated from an embarrassing homelessness by a Swiss-Scottish couple who agreed to rent their fifteen-room lakeside château to the delegation because “we could hardly refuse to offer it to the President.”
The conversation that Sunday morning featured Eisenhower at his most commanding, conversant on a wide range of details, relaxed but guarded, thoroughly in control. Ike urged the French prime minister, Edgar Faure, to edit his remarks to emphasize the importance of German unity, and the leaders reviewed such mundane details as the seating chart for the discussions. A French proposal to cut military expenditures and devote some portion of the savings to an international development fund received exhaustive attention, despite Eisenhower’s clear skepticism. Ike then countered with his thoughts on weapons inspection. The meeting segued into lunch, followed by smaller conversations between various leaders and, finally, a private conclave with an old friend, Sir James Gault. Ike and Gault talked about the war, golf, and fishing as Eisenhower permitted himself a moment of quiet before the rush of the summit; the two retired to dinner alone.
The following morning, quiet Swiss crowds welcomed the delegates as the sun glinted through haze across the blue waters of Lake Geneva. Inside the hall, the participants took their places beneath high ceilings that once sheltered the League of Nations. The Western nations had agreed that Eisenhower would chair the gathering, so he spoke first. His remarks revealed little but stressed both his skepticism of past conferences and his flickering hope that this might be different. “I trust that we are not here merely to catalogue our differences,” he said. “We are not here to repeat the same dreary exercises that have characterized most of our negotiations of the past ten years. We are here in response to the peaceful aspirations of mankind to start the kind of discussions which will inject a new spirit into our diplomacy; and to launch fresh negotiations under conditions of good augury.”
The American delegation regarded the opening remarks as a prelude to the day’s main event, a supper for the six-member Soviet delegation—Nikolai Bulganin, Nikita Khrushchev, Molotov, Georgy Zhukov, Andrei Gromyko, and an interpreter—at the Geneva White House. Eisenhower hosted and surrounded himself with his most trusted aides: Dulles, Hagerty, John Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur (Dulles’s aide, not the general), along with Ambassador Bohlen and a few others. Mamie joined the group for a drink, then, by prearrangement, slipped out. For the Americans, the evening’s chief fascination was to lay eyes on a mysterious enemy, one whose rhetoric and actions suggested obdurate hatred for American government and society. There was profound uncertainty about this enemy; two years earlier, Stalin was the sole recognized force in Soviet life. With his death, power had dissipated into shadowy corners. Who, Ike wondered, was his genuine counterpart that evening?
Deprived of any meaningful intelligence into the workings of the Soviet government, Eisenhower naturally imagined that Zhukov held power. Ike and Zhukov had met in the rubble of Berlin, and Zhukov in those years occupied a place of stature in Soviet society not unlike that which Eisenhower held in the West: both victors carried the gratitude of a triumphant people. But Ike had returned to a free nation, while Zhukov returned to Stalin’s yoke. Ike had risen to his nation’s presidency, while Zhukov for a time disappeared. Many in the West, including Ike, feared him dead.
When the Russians arrived, they were pleasant but notably careful and somewhat nervous. “They were jumpy as hell,” John Eisenhower remembered. They drank “very, very little indeed,” he added. Zhukov had only orange juice, Khrushchev was “most abstemious and proper.” The Soviets exuded, if not exactly warmth, at least manners: “Even Gromyko managed by dint of much effort to smile a couple of times.”
Sizing up the Soviet leaders, John Eisenhower demonstrated the acuity that made him such a valuable adviser to his father. Zhukov, he quickly surmised, “appears frightened and worried.” So depleted did he seem that John Eisenhower wondered if he had been tortured: “Whether he was the physical receiver of actual rubber hose or whether he was only put in fear is, of course, not known.” But Zhukov’s presence was mandatory, so much so that he was forced to miss his daughter’s wedding. He was the icebreaker with Ike and wasted no time reminding Eisenhower of their common history, “the bond of truthfulness between soldiers.” John Eisenhower summed up the rest of the Soviet delegation: Bulganin appeared genial but restrained, “being driven and used principally by someone else”; Molotov as opinionated but stifled; Gromyko, notwithstanding his attempts at a smile, as “sour and fanatic.” It was Khrushchev whom Eisenhower’s son spotted as different, “extroverted and on this occasion pleasant. To the casual observer he is unimpressive, but to underestimate this man would be the gravest of errors.”
The evening passed mainly with small talk. Toasts were exchanged, along with pleasantries and compliments to Mamie. The Soviets “left most decorously at approximately eleven o’clock,” and John Eisenhower eagerly sought out Goodpaster to compare notes on the evening. Shrewdly, the young major spied humanity in his country’s adversaries while recognizing the solid, imposing front that the Soviet leaders presented. “I think the fact of contact does serve to remind each side that the other side has problems,” he added. And of his father, John noted: “Unquestionably Dad dominates a meeting between them.”
Appraising the Soviets was an essential aspect of the summit, but the underlying purpose was to intimidate or cajole them into easing world tensions. Eisenhower believed that the best chance lay in the unveiling of a bold proposal—one sufficiently imaginative to capture the world’s interest and sufficiently inoffensive to coax Soviet agreement or, at a minimum, to expose Soviet intransigence. Rockefeller’s secret group had been at work on such a stroke for weeks. Now, as the summit participants parried ideas, the young aide rushed to Geneva, arriving on July 20.
Ike met that morning over breakfast with Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden and lunched with Zhukov. Remembering that the conference had forced Zhukov to miss his daughter’s wedding, Ike and Mamie presented him with a pen set and a portable radio, to be given to his daughter in honor of her marriage. “Zhukov was visibly and I am sure genuinely moved,” recalled John, who attended as well. As for the proposal he was now prepared to present to the summit, Ike still said nothing.
The moment arrived at the afternoon session on July 21. Ike was at ease, relaxed from hitting golf balls that morning with John. He was well briefed by Goodpaster and Radford, among others. The Soviet representatives cycled through their proposal on disarmament, a suggestion that all nations renounce the use of nuclear weapons, knowing that the United States would never agree, both because Americans were convinced the Soviets would break any such agreement at will and, more important, because nuclear deterrence was the cornerstone of Eisenhower’s New Look defense strategy. To renounce that threat was to concede Cold War defeat. The Americans listened patiently but without enthusiasm. Finally, it was Eisenhower’s turn.
Ike spoke not from a prepared speech but from notes. He ticked off general topics for a few minutes, then paused. “Gentlemen,” he began again, “since I have been working on this memorandum to present to this Conference, I have been searching my heart and mind for something that I could say here that could convince everyone of the great sincerity of the United States in approaching this problem of disarmament.”
Now Eisenhower presented Rockefeller’s grand idea: the United States would give to the Soviet Union complete blueprints of all American defense facilities and would open its airspace for reconnaissance photography. “You can make all the pictures you choose and take them to your own country to study.” In return, the United States demanded the same access to Soviet defense facilities. This approach, he predicted, “will open wide the avenues of progress for all our peoples.”
The proposal was simple and simply presented. Having placed it before the delegates, Eisenhower concluded: “A sound peace—with security, justice, wellbeing and freedom for the people of the world—can be achieved, but only by patiently and thoughtfully following a hard and sure and tested road.”
Those final words still hung in the air when a clap of thunder exploded outside the room. The boom was deafening, and the lights blinked off. In the dark and sudden stillness, Eisenhower quipped: “I didn’t know I would put the lights out with that speech.” Ike’s easy humor tickled the Soviet delegation immensely; its burly leadership burst into laughter, roaring as the lights came back up.
For a moment, annihilation receded, and peace seemed possible. The British and the French responded eagerly to Eisenhower’s proposal, which was quickly dubbed “Open Skies.” “I wish the people of the world could have been in this conference room to hear the voice of a man speaking from great military experience,” Premier Faure of France said later. “They would have believed that something had changed in the world.” Even the Soviets seemed receptive. Bulganin agreed that the idea had potential and suggested that the foreign ministers of the four nations convene to work on details. All four nations joined in that proposal. “I thought we had the makings of a breakthrough,” John Eisenhower recalled.
At the conclusion of that afternoon’s talks, Eisenhower mingled with the Soviet leaders over cocktails and in the buffet line. Khrushchev was among those milling about the room, and Ike sought him out. He seemed amiable, but, as Eisenhower recalled later, “there was no smile in his voice.” “I don’t agree with the chairman,” Khrushchev said, bluntly dismissing the endorsement of Open Skies that Bulganin had just offered. Such open disagreement among the Soviet leadership was remarkable, and Eisenhower recognized what it signaled about the relationships between his counterparts. “From that moment until the final adjournment of the conference, I wasted no more time probing Mr. Bulganin,” he wrote. Instead, Eisenhower lobbied Khrushchev, the beginning of their long and infuriating association.
Eisenhower at first imagined that Open Skies might capture Soviet support—the proposal seemed so transparently balanced, so genuinely innovative—and Bulganin’s initial enthusiasm seemed to portend a “breakthrough,” as John Eisenhower put it. But the follow-up meeting of the foreign ministers confirmed Dulles’s skepticism and dashed Ike’s hopes. Later, Ike would recall the missed opportunity with bitterness. “Khrushchev,” Eisenhower wrote in retirement, “does not want peace, save on his own terms and in ways that will aggrandize his own power. He is blinded by his dedication to the Marxist theory of world revolution and Communist domination. He cares nothing for the future happiness of the peoples of the world … In our use of the word, he is not, therefore, a statesman, but rather a powerful, skillful, ruthless, and highly ambitious politician.”
It mattered little that Eisenhower was right. Open Skies threatened Khrushchev, and so it failed.
In later years, Eisenhower would come to regard Geneva as a tragic disappointment, but the immediate public reaction was overwhelmingly positive, particularly toward him. Eisenhower’s ever-impressive approval rating jumped notably, increasing five points on the eve of the conference and another three in its aftermath. By August 1955, 75 percent of Americans approved of Eisenhower’s performance, compared with just 11 percent who disapproved. As those numbers suggested, Ike was suffused with goodwill. Back home, he met with legislative leaders, greeted the annual Boys Nation event, commemorated a new “Atoms for Peace” stamp, and took in a few rounds of golf at Burning Tree, in Bethesda, Maryland. He replaced Oveta Culp Hobby with Marion B. Folsom, who was confirmed without incident.
He tended to ceremonial functions, posed for a portrait, and bade a happy farewell to the nettlesome Admiral Carney. In August, he decamped for a few days at Gettysburg, where he took the Reverend Billy Graham on a tour of the farm, hunted, played golf, and tended to his cattle. It was, by the standards of the presidency, a quiet few weeks, interrupted only by meetings of the cabinet and the National Security Council as well as the unending parade of visitors, but free from crisis. When Ike arrived in Denver on August 14, he had every reason to expect a relaxing break.
So it was at first—golf at Cherry Hills, fishing with his old friend Aksel Nielsen at Nielsen’s Colorado ranch. Ike was joined there by his grandson, David, always a delight to his granddad. Ike and Nielsen fished in the mornings and evenings, toured the ranch with David by Jeep in the afternoon, and practiced on a casting pond when time permitted. Back in Denver the next week, Ike and his grandson continued to enjoy their summer freedom—David was allowed to invite friends to join them, and they all lunched together after Ike finished a round of golf. Eisenhower flew off to New England to inspect flooding damage, spent a few days in the White House catching up on work, and delivered an address in Philadelphia, where he was followed to the podium by Chief Justice Warren, their relations now confined to pleasantries and little else. But that brief spell of business was followed by a return to Denver and time with family, lunches at the golf course, painting, and manageable public appearances.
On September 19, Ike ventured into the stream at Nielsen’s ranch and emerged with seven trout. He reluctantly left the ranch four days later, celebrating a successful vacation by cooking a final breakfast: corn cakes, eggs, sausage, ham, black-eyed peas, and redeye gravy, then heading back down the eastern slope of the Rockies to Denver.
Once there, he was briefed on world affairs at Lowry Air Force Base, where he kept an office. At the United Nations, Molotov pledged “utmost consideration” of U.S. disarmament overtures, though his comments were undermined by the administration’s release of a letter from Bulganin setting Soviet conditions on the Open Skies proposal. In Mississippi, meanwhile, a Tallahatchie County jury took sixty-five minutes to acquit the alleged murderers of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who had insulted the wife of one defendant and four days later been abducted from his grandmother’s house. In New York, the Yankees clinched the pennant with a win over the Red Sox; Don Larsen got the victory, and the Yankees secured their sixth banner in seven years, the twenty-first in their history.
After briefly catching up on business, Ike departed for Cherry Hills, where, after some practice swings, he set off on the course at noon. He was interrupted twice by calls from Dulles but finished his eighteen holes at 2:00 p.m. He shot an 84, about average for Ike in those days, and enjoyed lunch with his foursome. He ate a sizable hamburger, adorned with thick slices of Bermuda onions, and sipped from a pot of coffee. By 2:15, the group was on the course again, trying to sneak in an additional eighteen holes.
It was then that Ike, so cool in the face of genuine emergency and yet so susceptible to petty annoyances, began to grow anxious. He complained to the club pro about an upset stomach, blaming it on the onions, and fumed when called back to the clubhouse to take another call from Dulles, only to find that the operator had put the call through by mistake and that Dulles no longer needed him. “The veins stood out on his forehead like whipcords,” his friend and doctor Howard Snyder recalled. The group completed just nine holes that afternoon, and Eisenhower returned to his in-laws’ home in Denver cranky and uncomfortable.
At home, Eisenhower and George Allen played a round of billiards, passed on an evening cocktail, and took a walk after dinner to settle Allen’s stomach, which also was bothering him. Afterward, Allen and his wife returned to their hotel, and Ike and Mamie turned in for bed around 10:00 p.m., retiring to their separate rooms. A few hours later, Ike awoke with pain in his chest. He groped for milk of magnesia, and Mamie, who heard him stirring as she returned from the bathroom, got it for him. She could sense that there was something seriously wrong. At 2:54 a.m., she urgently called Snyder, who rushed to the president’s side, arriving at 3:11 a.m.
Snyder’s patient was agitated and at times incoherent, complaining of pain across his chest and shrugging off an oxygen mask. He was sixty-four years old and had a history of ailments, including his health scare in 1949 that prompted him to quit cigarettes after decades of heavy smoking. He was prone to irritation, and he was, after all, president of the United States; to say that he was subjected to stress would be hyperbolic understatement.
Under Mamie’s anxious eye, the doctor said later, Snyder broke a pearl of amyl nitrite and injected Ike with papaverine hydrochloride, which seemed to have no effect. He then injected Eisenhower with heparin, an anticoagulant that would have been called for in the event of a serious heart attack. Eisenhower’s pain was undiminished, and Snyder’s notes indicate that he gave the president two injections of morphine, one soon after arriving and another at 3:45 a.m. Ike’s blood pressure was falling, his pulse was rising, and his skin was turning clammy. A rubdown with warm alcohol did not help, nor did hot water bottles. His blood pressure then “collapsed,” and Ike fell into shock, according to Snyder. Desperate to revive her husband, Mamie got into her husband’s bed at 4:30 a.m. and wrapped herself around him. Ike responded immediately, calming to her touch. He fell asleep, and Mamie remained with him until 7:00 a.m., when she quietly slipped out of his bed.
Snyder let his patient sleep until 11:30 a.m., monitoring his blood pressure and respiration but, curiously, not alerting a cardiologist or the nearby hospital. Not until shortly after noon did the doctor call Fitzsimons Army Hospital, which dispatched its commanding general, Martin E. Griffin, to the president’s bedside (Snyder specifically requested that the general dress in civilian clothes). Griffin administered a cardiogram and immediately concluded that Eisenhower had suffered a major heart attack.
Snyder’s actions during that troubled night were puzzling. If his reconstruction of events is to be regarded as truthful, his eight-hour delay in summoning a cardiac expert to Eisenhower’s side was inexplicably reckless, and his initial comment to Ike’s traveling press secretary that the president had suffered a bout of indigestion was cavalierly deceptive (Snyder justified it later by saying that Ike had in fact suffered from indigestion the day before). There is, however, another explanation, one that emerges from a remarkable reexamination of the episode in 1997. In it, the author Clarence Lasby argued that Snyder doctored his notes in order to cover up the humiliating truth: that he mistook Eisenhower’s heart attack for indigestion. Lasby’s analysis explained much: why Snyder had not immediately summoned expert help, why he misled the press secretary, why he failed to follow up his initial heparin injection (the medication wears off after about six hours, but Snyder did not indicate that he gave the president a second shot), why he failed to tell other doctors about the heparin and papaverine injections, and why Eisenhower’s shock is not reflected in any other notes of the episode. In fact, a second doctor who treated Eisenhower specifically noted after consulting with Snyder that “there has been no period of shock,” adding that “pulse and blood pressure have remained stable.” Those notations directly contradict Snyder’s later recitation of the events. It is possible that Snyder misremembered or simply failed to inform other doctors of the care he had given his patient; it is, however, far more likely that he retroactively adjusted his notes in order to conform to the story that he wanted others to believe—that he had promptly diagnosed Eisenhower’s difficulties and heroically tended to them.
Snyder’s account presented the reassuring image of a president felled by a heart attack but saved by his attentive and responsive doctor and his caring wife. “The hours he slept during that period from early morning until 12 noon were more responsible for the ultimate recovery of the President than the entire remaining course of hospital treatment,” Snyder boasted later. The probable truth was far more unsettling: in the early hours of September 24, 1955, the president of the United States suffered a devastating heart attack and lay for eight hours in the care of a physician who misdiagnosed the event and then lied to cover up his near-calamitous mistake.
Snyder himself did everything he could to discourage inquiry into that possibility. He wrote scores of unsolicited letters to friends and acquaintances—his own and those of the president—explaining that he diagnosed a heart attack and responded appropriately, thereby saving Eisenhower’s life. Those letters themselves are curious documents, invasive of his patient’s privacy, but they helped to squelch second-guessing of Snyder’s actions. Press inquiries were similarly blunted. When a reporter months later gingerly raised the issue of the long delay in summoning a cardiologist, Eisenhower brushed it off. “I understood it was as much as 10 hours,” she persisted.
“It may have been,” Eisenhower responded. “But it probably may take some 10 hours to determine whether a person is suffering from having eaten some bad food or some other cause, I am not sure. I am not a doctor, you are sure of that.”
Of course, Eisenhower’s answer did not conform to Snyder’s own account—that, soon after arriving, he had ascertained that the president had suffered a heart attack—but the discrepancy was lost in the relief at Ike’s recovery.
The administration was scattered when Ike was hospitalized—Adams was returning from Europe; John Eisenhower was on a golf course in Virginia; Brownell was in Spain on vacation; other members of the cabinet were in Washington or traveling. John rushed to his father’s side and found Mamie deeply worried. “I just can’t believe that Ike’s work is finished,” she told her son. Her worry was haunted by an eerie coincidence: Ike suffered his heart attack on Icky’s birthday.
The members of the administration, meanwhile, returned to the White House and sorted out their duties. The National Security Council met on Thursday and the cabinet on Friday, as scheduled, with Nixon presiding from his own chair, leaving Ike’s seat vacant. Adams, meanwhile, decamped for Denver, taking his place at the president’s side. Hagerty was so grateful to see Adams arrive that he kissed him, undoubtedly shocking the dour Adams.
Woodrow Wilson’s incapacitation offered the only guidance American leaders had for grappling with the inability of a sitting president to fulfill the duties of his office, and Wilson’s was a frightening primer in mismanagement. But Eisenhower’s cabinet was blessed by both ability and luck. Luck that Ike’s illness struck at a calm moment in domestic and international affairs: Congress was in recess; it was an off year politically; the glow of Geneva helped insure a tranquil summer abroad. And ability forged by two years of common effort and by Ike’s selection of his top deputies. An informal committee assumed temporary control of the government: Adams served as the personal conduit to the president; Dulles took charge of international relations; Brownell supervised domestic and constitutional questions; and Nixon, assiduously deferential, coordinated the cabinet and directed the administration.
Nixon and Eisenhower in 1955 were closely associated but had never been friends. Barely acquainted when they were united on the Republican ticket in 1952, they found their early association strained by the Checkers debacle. Eisenhower recognized the younger man’s talents and deep intelligence, but Ike also patronized his vice president, who seemed too young and too political to be trusted entirely. Eisenhower’s contradictory impressions of Nixon—as capable but limited, intelligent but ambitious—persisted through their early years together but were abruptly challenged in the weeks after Eisenhower’s heart attack.
Nixon calibrated leadership and modesty through those tense weeks, taking command but not power, deferring to Ike’s position even when Ike was confined to an oxygen tent or barely allowed to sit up. Eisenhower recognized the sturdy job that Nixon was performing, and he appreciated it, though, as ever, he viewed Nixon as a capable understudy, not a peer. “He is a darn good young man,” Eisenhower told Adams. He believed the country still regarded Nixon as “a bit immature,” and though Eisenhower himself did not, he understood why others, including Adams, perceived a lack of readiness. “He has not quite reached a maturity of intellect,” Adams said.
To the immense relief of an anxious world, Eisenhower recovered. Just a few days after the episode, he announced to Snyder: “If I didn’t think you knew what you were doing, I would suspect you of having the wrong patient in bed.” He was ordered not to work from the day of his heart attack until October 1, but on that afternoon Adams spent twenty minutes with him, catching him up on official business. From then on, Adams was a regular visitor, at first for short conversations, then for more serious matters. Ike signed appointments, reviewed classified material, approved promotions, named an ambassador, drafted a letter to Bulganin. Nixon came with Adams on October 9, Dulles spent half an hour with Ike on October 11.
On October 14, the president celebrated his birthday in the hospital, by then chafing at the restrictions imposed by his doctors and eager to handle an increased load; he grumbled about being tended to by too many physicians and was irritated by what he perceived as conflicting medical advice. Eleven days later, Eisenhower took his first unaided steps and was allowed to meet with reporters on the hospital rooftop. For the occasion, he dressed in a gift the press corps had presented him soon after he was hospitalized: a set of red pajamas with gold stars on the collar tabs and the words “Much Better, Thanks” embroidered over the breast pocket. Through those weeks, Ike’s spirits also were raised by the thousands who wrote to wish him well. Mamie wore out her hand responding, grateful to have a way to contribute. Some admirers mailed records, which Ike happily played on a phonograph in his room.
Five weeks after the heart attack, Robert Cutler visited. He met Mamie at her parents’ house, spent an hour talking and drinking old-fashioneds, then headed to the hospital. Mamie was tense and scared, “speaking rapidly and decisively, sometimes with tears.” Cutler held her hand and comforted her. At the hospital over the next few days, Cutler assessed Eisenhower’s condition and left reassured. It was strange to see Ike, so enduringly vital, forced to sit still and quiet, but he was, Cutler thought, “a wonderful patient.”
Eisenhower’s chief cardiologist, the internationally renowned Paul Dudley White, predicted that Ike would be able to leave the hospital between November 5 and November 12, and on November 11 he did. Eisenhower might have left even sooner, but he waited that long so that he would not be taken from Fitzsimons in a wheelchair. He wanted to be able to walk up the stairs to the airplane. Finally, he bade an emotional farewell to the medical staff before flying on to Washington. Thousands waited for him at National Airport and along the route from there to the White House. Ike did his best to stay calm, but he was jumpy and cross. Although he had asked for an open car to wave to crowds, a limousine was substituted at the last minute because the day was brisk. As a result, he squirmed back and forth to acknowledge well-wishers on either side of the car. “I was tired and annoyed by this inconvenience,” he complained decades later in his memoirs.
Ike stopped briefly at the White House, where his staff monitored him closely. “Every one of us took a deep breath,” Adams recalled. Ike and Mamie then proceeded on to Gettysburg to complete his convalescence, with Mamie zealously attempting to protect their home from being converted into an office, a mission in which she enlisted the help of the Gang (Robinson told Snyder he feared that possibility “more than any other possible development”). A local Catholic girls’ school turned out to welcome the Eisenhowers home, and they arrived in time to mark Mamie’s birthday, November 14. After the events of recent weeks, Mamie felt strongly that they should bless their home, and Ike invited the Reverend Edward Elson, the minister at the National Presbyterian Church, which the Eisenhowers had selected upon arriving in the city, to perform the ceremony. Elson bestowed that blessing in the home’s living room, asking that “it may henceforth be a place of health and healing, a haven of tranquility, an abode of love, and a sanctuary of worship. Bless all who call it home, and all the loved ones and friends who are encompassed by it in abiding love and devotion to Thee.”
Mamie pulled herself together after the heart attack, but Ike still suffered. He was, like many heart-attack survivors, morose and ill-tempered, and he fretted over his ability to recover sufficiently to resume shouldering the burdens of his office. Adams was reassured by his alertness, though he noted that Ike had lost weight and color.
Eisenhower shared his misgivings with Swede Hazlett, himself a victim of a heart attack. Ike described his rest and exercise regimen in some detail—a brief rest before lunch, daily swims and walks, eating slowly—and then allowed himself a moment of annoyance with his doctors. “I am to avoid all situations that tend to bring about such reactions as irritation, frustration, anxiety, fear and, above all anger,” Ike wrote. “When doctors give me such instructions, I say to them, ‘Just what do you think the Presidency is?’ ”
Though the fall of 1955 was a tranquil time in international affairs, there were rising confrontations at home, at first subtle and then increasingly intense. The Brown decision in 1954 had done more than place the Supreme Court’s stamp of disapproval on segregation in public schools; it had supplied moral impetus to the growing demand for civil rights in all walks of life. If, as the Court ruled in Brown, “separate but equal” had no place in education, then what about restrooms or restaurants, beaches, golf courses, or buses?
On December 1, 1955, a Montgomery Fair department store worker, Rosa Parks, posed that question to the nation’s conscience by refusing to yield her bus seat to a white passenger. J. F. Blake, the bus driver, ordered her and three other black passengers to move to the back; no one moved. He got up from his seat and ordered them again: “You better make it light on yourself and let me have those seats.” This time, three of the passengers moved to the back, but Parks still refused. Blake warned her that he had the power to enforce segregation laws himself. Parks replied that he could do what he had to. She was not getting up. Blake arrested Parks.
After a short but harrowing stay in the Montgomery, Alabama, jail—no place for a black woman in 1955—Rosa Parks defied her family’s objections and agreed to serve as a test case for the segregation of Montgomery buses. That was Thursday night. On Monday morning, the Montgomery bus boycott began.
While Parks and her neighbors launched their crusade, Ike was still regaining his strength. He shuttled from his Gettysburg home to Camp David and back in early December, presiding over the National Security Council and eventually the cabinet. He entertained close friends and family, though his commitments were kept to a minimum. George Allen dropped in often, Ellis Slater came early in December, Dr. Snyder stayed close by. Slowly, Ike built up his workday.
Eisenhower’s heart attack reframed for him the essential question of those weeks, one that he had pondered almost since he became president: Should he run again? The question had been on his mind for months. As early as February 1955, he volunteered to Len Hall that the GOP should search for a host city for its convention other than Chicago, where Eisenhower argued that the “reactionary fringe” would coalesce around that city’s notorious newspaper. Now, with election year at hand, Ike had no choice but to focus on his own candidacy.
Oddly, the heart attack did not discourage him from seeking a second term; indeed, it caused him to consider the question in a new light. Eisenhower now was less inclined to think of whether he wanted to serve a second term and more prone to debating whether he could. As his health improved, he began to debate the idea more seriously. Just a few months earlier, prior to his heart attack, he had often seemed drawn to retirement. Now he worried that no one was well suited to succeed him. The possible Democratic candidates struck Eisenhower as astonishingly unworthy, and he was frustrated that Republican contenders had not developed during his term. He wondered whether New York’s Tom Dewey might at last be acceptable, but Jim Hagerty warned him that a Dewey candidacy would badly split the party. All the other possibilities also posed problems for Ike: Cabot Lodge needed steadying; Bob Anderson was little known outside Washington (not to mention a former Democrat); Sherman Adams and Herb Brownell lacked a political base; Milton Eisenhower had Ike’s thorough approval, but the prospect of one brother succeeding another was too dynastic to fly. Earl Warren was renowned because of Brown, but Eisenhower disapproved of Warren stepping off the Court to pursue the presidency and felt Warren better suited to the Court in any event.
Nixon, the most obvious choice, still presented a question for Ike and his advisers. As Adams faintly put it: “On the whole, he felt that Nixon had made good progress.” Although Eisenhower admired Nixon and considered him a capable vice president by late 1955, he remained convinced that Nixon was unelectable. He searched for a way to ease Nixon off the ticket, weighed the possibility of placing him in the cabinet, and definitely doubted his viability as a candidate for president in his own right.
Ike was growing stronger, tugged as always by his sense of duty. Now another December quietly drew to a close, and after Christmas at the White House, Ike and Mamie flew to Florida to mark the New Year. Ike golfed and walked the beaches. He, along with Mamie and the Snyders—sometimes joined by Milton Eisenhower, Hagerty, or others—ended each evening with a movie. They watched Wichita on December 29 and Angels in the Outfield (Ike’s favorite movie) on December 30, and ended the year with Tall Man Riding on New Year’s Eve. The president retired just after 10:00 p.m.