February 1953
People talk about Eisenhower’s golden age, the bright era and the wise, blandly all-American figure at the center of it, his oddly hieratic grin beaming a beneficent influence throughout the country. Nostalgia for the wholesomeness and boom economy has long since passed into cliché and there’s only so much I want to go into. I suppose in a sense the clichés were true for plenty of people. They had lovely cars, television sets and kitchens, oral contraceptives, Teflon and FORTRAN. Rock and roll and credit cards and white-out and Barbies and the bloody Mary. A mood of confidence, of joy and astonishment, at their own wealth and daring.
Or so I’m told, and I’m certainly glad some people were happy. I’m reading it in a book, because how the fuck should I know? It all happened without me. What is the vice presidency? The Constitution dictates only two duties: casting the deciding vote if the Senate is deadlocked and replacing the president if he dies or is impeached. Apart from waiting for those two things to happen, you made the rest up and were duly forgotten by history. The exception being Aaron Burr, who shot someone, decisively lowering the bar for the rest of us.
What I remember is small pieces of the world: the West Wing, the insides of planes and hotel lobbies and conference rooms. My life was dinners with Pat and the children; airplane flights; placeholder meetings with foreign dignitaries during which I nodded and reminded them I had no power to make an agreement but would speak to the president. Stomach-turning formal breakfasts, speeches to party elders and tradesmen. I opened factories in Detroit and Akron, breathing the various stinks of canneries, slaughterhouses, or rubber plants and bestowing that vice presidential combination of glamour, flattery, and the tacit reminder that they didn’t quite rate a visit from the top guy.
The rest of the time I was part of the consuming desperate purpose of the Eisenhower gang: the war. Not just the proxy war in Korea but the omnipresent, glacially vast global war with Communism. There were moments when it felt like Whittaker Chambers and I had dreamed up the Cold War in a conference room at the Commodore Hotel, but by 1953 we were all in the dream and it had changed and accelerated beyond all recognition, supercharged by the postwar boom in prosperity and science.
In October 1952 we exploded a thermonuclear bomb a thousand times more powerful than the atom bomb. The numbers had stopped meaning anything, but men from Strategic Air Command screened the footage for us, a smear of red clouds and fire like the Last Judgment. The bomb annihilated the island on which it had been built and made a temporary crater in the Pacific waters a mile wide and a hundred and fifty-two feet deep. We made this for you, they said, then they stood back to see what we would do with it. The Soviets exploded their own hydrogen bomb less than a year later.
Every month, it seemed, the solemn young men of Strategic Air Command briefed me on the latest wonder. The B-47 Stratojet that could fly for thirty-five hundred miles without refueling; the USS Nautilus, a nuclear-powered submarine that could travel under the ocean for thirteen hundred miles without needing to surface. I was born into a world that had just seen the first cars and airplanes, and Eisenhower could remember a world where the cavalry charge was still state-of-the-military-art. In a decade, conventional weaponry had all but ceased to matter, and the airborne nuclear war was the only thing that counted. Thousands of years of military doctrine had been made obsolete and we were looking at a clean sheet of paper. And this wasn’t even counting what I’d seen at Pawtuxet and on East Seventy-First Street in the Wexford building.
Who better than Eisenhower to lead us into the new age? But then, who was Eisenhower? I saw so little of him and what I did see was almost too bland to be believed, a tediously wholesome middle manager who liked nothing more than to get business done and return to the golf course or go on a card-playing weekend with his buddies, a crew of portly, glad-handing businessmen.
What did I know about him? Apart from his military record, I knew almost nothing. His name meant, literally, “iron-hewer,” and his family had been in the United States since the eighteenth century. He smelled like dry grass, like dust, like Texas, like the Great Plains. And, for reasons never made clear, he’d appointed me his vice president.
The American side of the Cold War began to assume its real form in Eisenhower’s mind and in his weekly planning sessions. We crowded into the Oval Office, myself, John Foster Dulles, a gang of uniforms from the Pentagon, and, in their spectacles and expensive suits, the men from the RAND Corporation, the strategy-and-policy think tank whose reach was breathtakingly wide. Cold-blooded intellectuals of the eastern elite.
At one level, the logic was relatively straightforward. In 1949, the United States’ first-wave attack plan consisted of a fleet of planes loaded with a hundred and thirty-three atomic bombs, the idea being that they would destroy about seventy cities and 40 percent of the Soviet Union’s industrial capacity. There was a general feeling that the Truman administration had been a trifle tentative, and we were determined to roughhouse a little bit if we had to. This year’s plan featured a robust seven hundred and fifty-five bombs, all of which could be dropped within a couple of hours.
The basic tenets of Eisenhower’s strategic policy were spelled out in a typewritten document handed around the inner circle, the notorious NSC 162/2, a report to the National Security Council. The Soviets were actively expansionist, determined to conquer or disrupt Western capitalist democracies. The document modestly stated that given the current state of affairs, “a prolonged period of tension might ensue, during which each side increases its armaments, reaches atomic plenty and seeks to improve its relative power position.” But, good news, the Soviets could likely be kept in their place if we Americans showed ourselves ready to play. And, buried in section 39.b.(1), the heart of the Eisenhower doctrine: “In the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions.” We were ready to go, with “massive retaliation” the scenario of choice.
Thorny issues remained, however, such as the strong incentive to make the first strike. Clearly, the first player to move held an enormous advantage as long as its forces could reliably take out the opposition’s nuclear arsenal at one go and didn’t mind gratuitously murdering tens of millions. The idea of a preventive or prophylactic war still occasionally came up for debate, although Eisenhower was firmly against it.
On a brisk day in March we were in the Oval Office reviewing a new RAND report, mulling over the issue of just how much damage we would have to do to effectively dissolve the USSR and turn it into nothing but a group of ragged comrades with a common language and fur hats. I looked at the assembled faces and wondered who knew what. Who had been to Pawtuxet and had Blue Ox clearance apart from Eisenhower himself? Why weren’t we talking about it?
Eisenhower read the key passages aloud to the group while pacing the Oval Office’s perimeter. “‘Just what it takes to destroy a society is uncertain…The destruction of hundreds of cities in the space of hours is possible…we simply do not have any human experience with the loss of ten or a hundred major cities in one night.’” He paused, struck by some vivid mental image, then called on me like a gruff professor. “Well, Dick? What do you think? What’s it going to take to put them down?”
“Sir, with respect, it doesn’t matter.”
“Well, why the hell not?”
“According to your policy, we’re not striking first, not in an all-out attack. We’re only going nuclear if they do.”
“Go on,” he said.
“And it’s well documented that a Soviet first strike would knock out most of our bombers. If our nuclear arsenal dies on the ground, there’s no counterstrike. So if we don’t strike first, we don’t strike at all.” I was addressing the room as I spoke, and they all shrugged. Everyone had gotten this far. “If I can figure that out, you certainly can, which leads to another conclusion.”
“Which is?”
“If we’re talking about this, there must be another dimension to the strategic landscape,” I said. “You must know something I don’t.”
“Again, I’m fascinated.”
“Is there a new anti-air-defense technology I haven’t been briefed on?” I knew there wasn’t. And submarine-mounted nuclear missiles were a decade away. “Is there something…else?”
“Else?”
“Some other technology. Altogether separate from nuclear devices.” I’d started this without thinking and I could feel my face getting red.
“Like what, Dick? Cosmic rays? Moon men?” He stood over me, a teacher singling out an unruly student for mockery.
“No—nothing like that.”
“You must have something in mind.”
I patted my forehead with a handkerchief. Eisenhower wasn’t sweating, but he never seemed to perspire.
“Sir.” I took a deep breath. “Sir, I know there were other programs. Like the Manhattan Project, but ones that went in other directions. Project Blue Ox.” A couple of the RAND guys flinched, but everyone else either had not heard of it or was too well trained to show anything.
“I’ve heard the name,” Eisenhower said. “But I’m not familiar with the details. Remind me?”
“I’m not—I’m not sure everyone’s cleared for it, sir.”
“I hereby clear you all for Project Blue Ox,” he said to the room, making a mocking magician’s pass with one outsize hand. “Well, Dick?”
“I know you funded it. I’ve been to the Pawtuxet Farm.” At that, there was a long silence.
“And what did you see there?” he said finally.
“I saw the farm.”
“And there you saw…chickens? Ducks?”
“Germans. Old buildings. A man who—who vanished.”
“Have you ever seen anything like that before?”
I could feel that I was blushing but I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to tell the president that I’d been forced into a ritual occult summoning by a pair of Russians.
“Have you?” he said again.
I muttered, “Never.”
“I see. And what did you think of what you saw?”
“A sort of a trick? I didn’t understand it. It seemed like he was…well, a ghost.” The generals were all smirking now, old comrades, I supposed, who knew the president’s routines of old.
“Well, if we’re done considering ghost-based strategic technologies, gentlemen, I believe we’ll close for the day.” Dismissed, we filed out. I expected to hear his voice call me back at any moment but it never came.
Every hour, I thought I’d hear from the Russians. They were only waiting for their chance to issue some impossible order or maybe just to bring the hammer down, turn everything they had over to the media and end the charade. I sweated and sometimes all I could hear was my own inner voice saying, Liar, liar, liar, as I wondered if the next thing to come out of my mouth would sound crazy or not.
I could have struck at them first, and I thought about it a hundred times. They were two little spies, and I was the vice president. With a little work I might have gotten the Kremlin suspicious of them, had them discredited as corrupt or even mentally unstable. And I could do worse. The CIA was a new thing and it was still the Wild West in American intelligence, without oversight or clear rules of engagement. And the two Russians were, in the end, the sworn enemies of my country.
But I felt the cold knife at my throat. They’d been in this game longer than I had. They had photographs, perhaps recordings; who knew what kind of insurance measures they’d taken? I lay awake thinking of how much I didn’t know. For all the vodka shots and gunpoint camaraderie we’d shared, Arkady and Tatiana were spies, which is to say, liars. Anything or nothing they said could be true. I had a lot more to lose than they did.
Or was that just an excuse? I’d waited for eight weeks and then that afternoon following the meeting where I’d brought up Blue Ox, almost without thinking, I found myself dialing the old fake number I’d been given for a fake laundry service and I told the guy who answered the phone I wanted my fake shirts back by fake Tuesday.
Soon Arkady would pull up in his disguise as a White House driver in the black monolith town car, swooping in with a little extra snap, maybe. I’d climb in the backseat, into the smell of sweet tobacco, leather, Russian sweat. He’d reach over and we’d clasp hands and then we’d drive a few minutes in silence and I’d be in the mirror world again, barreling along in a black car at night, family and office and loyalty forgotten, remembering what it felt like to be myself.