5

Special Assistant for Disarmament, 1955–1958

It was apparent from the beginning that the Foreign Operations Administration would have a short life. Although it did not formally expire until June 1955, its fate was determined as early as February of that year. The problems of arms control and disarmament occupied a larger place in Eisenhower’s mind than the management of foreign aid. If UN control of atomic weapons was impossible in light of the Soviet veto power, the president sought other ways of achieving nuclear disarmament. On December 8, 1953, his “Atoms for Peace” proposal to the UN General Assembly offered an alternative to the abolition of nuclear weaponry by calling for the creation of an international atomic energy agency that would contain fissionable materials from the stockpiles of contributing nations.¹

Undeterred by the failure to convince his own foreign policy establishment, let alone the Soviet adversary, the president continued his efforts to slow the nuclear arms race and take specific steps to avoid a future nuclear disaster.² But advances in nuclear technology, resulting in a series of new tests by all three nuclear powers by 1954, made it difficult to reach the level of trust with the Soviet leadership needed to achieve his goals. He also had to contend with the influence of a February 1955 report from the Atomic Energy Commission that underscored the importance of tests: “If we had not conducted full-scale thermonuclear tests … we would be in ignorance of the extent of the effects of radioactive fallout.”³

While the president remained steadfast in his determination to reduce the threat of war with the Soviet empire, he recognized that nuclear testing would have to continue until he could come up with a workable disarmament agreement.⁴ It was in this context that Robert W. Bowie, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, proposed the creation of a cabinet-level position: special assistant to the president for disarmament. This official would draw from the many agencies involved in national security issues to devise a unified US position on disarmament. Bowie presented his views on February 10, 1955. Harold Stassen, with Dulles’s approval, was his choice.⁵

Was Stassen the right choice, or even the obvious choice, for this position? He was in the midst of an inspection of foreign aid projects in Karachi, checking on the progress of the aid program in Pakistan. The director of the FOA enjoyed his job, which required extensive travel. He felt it was important to win friends for America in a divided world where Soviet propaganda was often more influential than US efforts to solve Asian and African problems. Stassen was an effective administrator, but the opportunity to lead a team whose goal was to remove the threat of global destruction was far more exciting than promoting and managing foreign aid programs. When the telegram offering him the new post reached him in Karachi, he seemed to have few compunctions, beyond consulting his wife, about accepting it. He continued in his role as FOA director until the agency ended in June 1955. He gladly relinquished his old responsibilities to take on new and more interesting challenges and terminated his FOA obligations on a positive note.

His final report as FOA director was delivered while he was fully absorbed in his new and more ambitious assignments as special assistant to the president for disarmament. He was pleased to report that “the list of free-world accomplishments—to many of which our programs of mutual security have made a significant contribution—is long.” He went on to identify the areas where the program had made a positive difference in foreign relations. NATO Europe, he noted, was particularly responsive to US aid. But Stassen’s attention centered on the condition of the underdeveloped world: “The task of building peace must not be confined primarily to armaments and alliances. There will be little hope for enduring world tranquility unless the vast segments of humanity in the underdeveloped areas succeed in lifting themselves into a higher economic plane and develop political and social institutions responsive to their cultural and spiritual values.… It is in our own interest as well as theirs to help them to succeed.”⁶

The language and spirit were vintage Stassen. His final report encompassed his enthusiasm and optimism as well as his idealism and ambition. The task of providing economic aid on a global basis had been grandiose in scope, but he had never doubted that he could achieve the results he sought. His new challenge was even grander and more vital. Nothing less than the survival of civilization was at stake. The opportunity to make the world a better place made the mission of developing the Third World less pressing. If he succeeded in resolving the nuclear threat to humanity, he would be doing more than saving Asians and Africans from the lures of communism.

His appointment became official on March 19, 1955. According to the White House, the failure of the UN Disarmament Commission’s meeting in London to generate any progress or even “clear thinking on the subject” had prompted the president to create the new post.⁷

An additional incentive for Eisenhower’s action was his dismay over the Soviet Union’s unilateral proposal in February 1955 to freeze the two nations’ armed forces at January 1, 1955, levels and to rid both sides of nuclear weapons. The United States saw this as a means of preventing the rearming of West Germany and removing the US ability to depend on nuclear weapons to counter the USSR’s superiority in conventional weapons. Given the Soviet rejection of US proposals in 1945 to surrender its atomic monopoly to the United Nations, the new initiative was seen a cynical maneuver to put the United States on the defensive before the court of world opinion. The Soviet action evoked memories, the president noted, of the “tragic consequences of unilateral disarmament, the reckless moves of Hitler when the United States was weak, the Korean aggression when our armed strength had been rapidly diminished.”⁸ Eisenhower’s appointment of Stassen was designed to demonstrate America’s resolve to change these perceptions.

When Eisenhower was asked “what his ‘thinking’ was on the newly created position,” he replied: “There was nobody in the government, up until I appointed Governor Stassen to this post that was responsible for getting together all of the different ideas affecting disarmament and putting them together so the administration can say, ‘This is our program, and this is what we are trying to do in this field.’ … Let us have somebody with a small staff who cannot only do something to bring together, draw together, these views, but to devise a short, easily expressed program, maybe that all of us here could adopt.”⁹

Stassen believed his new position was unique in the nation’s and the world’s history. Neither the United States nor any other major power had ever appointed an official of such rank. With a seat in the cabinet, he would devote his time wholly to the possibilities of world disarmament and the means of achieving it.¹⁰

He expressed no sense of loss when his fiefdom in the FOA was split into pieces and parceled out to lesser officials in the State and Defense Departments. Given the grand vistas he saw beckoning as special assistant to the president, he was not bothered by the appointment of a Taft acolyte to head the successor agency. This easy acceptance might not have been his reaction had he not been given a more attractive assignment. Under other circumstances, he would have happily continued running the programs he had developed in the FOA, despite Congress’s inherent hostility to foreign aid and his unsuccessful efforts to demonstrate its positive effects on America’s national interests. But Stassen was off to a more promising arena with greater advantages. He expected to be better armed to deal with his old adversary Secretary Dulles.

Certainly, Stassen recognized that, as special assistant to the president, he would be a more formidable rival to Dulles in influencing American foreign policy, with closer personal ties to the president than the secretary of state possessed—or so he believed. He may have disavowed the sobriquet “Secretary of Peace,” but it was a halfhearted disavowal.¹¹ He was convinced that Eisenhower saw him as a kindred spirit in his approach to the Cold War, as opposed to the secretary’s rigid anti-Communist stance. He would be a better instrument than Dulles to carry out the president’s initiatives on disarmament. In his retrospective appreciation of Eisenhower’s presidency, Stassen quoted at length journalist Richard Rovere’s judgment that his appointment had been a rebuke to Dulles.¹²

Stassen’s assumption of Dulles’s personal animus was not misplaced, but he may have missed the nuances behind Dulles’s acceptance of Stassen’s appointment. The secretary of state agreed with the president’s decision to create the new position of disarmament adviser. He even gave lip service to the need for a single policy on disarmament. But Dulles may have backed Stassen’s appointment because he knew there would be strong opposition from affected agencies—State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Atomic Energy Commission. In fact, Dulles downplayed Stassen’s threat to his authority because he believed that progress on arms control and disarmament was unlikely. The president’s appointee, Dulles said, would be in charge of a “highly technical dead-end job, just the place for Harold Stassen.”¹³

Dulles’s opinion was widely shared by Stassen’s enemies in the State Department. Ambassador Robert Murphy assumed that Eisenhower’s offer was a polite way of pushing Stassen out of the limelight. Murphy recalled, “When he was offered the job I don’t believe anybody expected that he would accept it,” including the president. Instead, “he grabbed the ball and ran very hard with it,” in the expectation that a successful disarmament agreement would have his name attached to it.¹⁴ Given Stassen’s drive and ambition, as well as his organizing abilities, Murphy was mistaken in thinking Dulles had disposed of a rival.

The Geneva Summit

Stassen quickly immersed himself in his new job. He immediately appointed a White House disarmament staff to assist in policy recommendations. It consisted in part of specialists on loan from other government agencies and members of the teams he had created in the FOA. To advance the possibilities for disarmament, he established eight task forces to deal with the requirements for effective international inspection and control. Heading these task forces were such distinguished figures as Ernest Lawrence, director of the University of California’s Radiation Laboratories, and Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle, vice president and director of the Shell Oil Company and leader of the American raid on Tokyo in 1942.

The task forces and their chairmen, as well as their respective functions, were in place by August 1955, and their report was completed by October of that year. Consisting of preliminary recommendations on inspections, it was presented on October 22, 1955, at a joint meeting with the disarmament staff at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. It was an impressive beginning. For the first time, there was an operating manual on disarmament inspections. It offered comprehensive guidance on what would be inspected and how the inspections would take place. Essentially, the manual identified what could profitably be inspected in seeking safeguards against a surprise attack.¹⁵

While Stassen was pressing the task forces to come up with ideas to advance disarmament, outside events managed to accelerate the process. The Soviets, conceding that they had failed to keep West Germany out of NATO, set off on a new path to minimize Western defense programs. One step was to announce their readiness to make a peace treaty with Austria that would neutralize that country in the Cold War. A neutral Austria was acceptable to the United States, but the Soviets’ second announcement in May was met by reservations from a skeptical West. At a meeting of the UN Disarmament Subcommittee in London in May 1955, the Soviets introduced a comprehensive plan to control the atom. Abandoning their earlier insistence on the abolition of nuclear weapons as the initial step toward disarmament, they now seemed to accept some kind of inspection.¹⁶

Specifically, they proposed a moratorium on the production of weapons beginning in 1956, followed by the “progressive ‘dismantling’ of all bases to be completed by 1957.” Not incidentally, they intended to evacuate all foreign troops from Germany. Stassen’s special staff study reported to the president: “The USSR has thus placed disarmament in a political package in which it hints at the possibility of the withdrawal of USSR troops from positions in Central Europe in exchange for a pull-back of United States bases abroad.” There was no provision for the cessation of nuclear production “until the second stage.”¹⁷ Although inspection machinery was conspicuously absent from the Soviets’ proposals, they seemed willing to at least discuss the process of international controls.

Energized by this possible change of heart, Eisenhower took the opportunity to spur Stassen, along with Nelson Rockefeller, to come up with a new American initiative. Rockefeller also held the rank of presidential assistant, but without the prestige of Stassen’s job description. Actually, Rockefeller’s credentials as an internationalist and liberal Republican were even more impressive than Stassen’s. Scion of one of America’s most prominent families, Rockefeller was the same age as Stassen and had made a name for himself in his thirties when Roosevelt appointed him assistant secretary of state for American republic affairs during World War II. He actively promoted the Act of Chapultepec and the Monroe Doctrine, ensuring, as a US delegate to the San Francisco Conference on the UN Charter, that regional organizations were recognized. Eisenhower entrusted Rockefeller with directing Cold War strategy, and his mission overlapped Stassen’s.¹⁸

Given their complementary interests and ambitions, it is not surprising that Rockefeller claimed credit for the major proposal to emerge from the Geneva summit in the summer of 1955. This was modeled on “Open Skies,” the principle of mutual air inspections identified by Rockefeller’s team of experts at Quantico. In an interview a decade later, Rockefeller told Stassen’s former chief of staff, Robert Matteson, that the idea for Open Skies was contained in a memorandum written by Rockefeller. Stassen then drafted the document that “without too much change became the text of the President’s statement.”¹⁹

Stassen did not claim responsibility for the idea, but he recalled a generation later how impressed he had been with General Doolittle, who accompanied him on his flight from Tokyo to Washington as he prepared to take over his duties as the president’s special assistant for disarmament. Doolittle, who subsequently chaired the task force for aerial inspection, was the fabled World War II hero who had lifted the nation’s morale in 1942 with a daring bombing of Tokyo. In conversations with Stassen during that flight, Doolittle made the simple statement that, “in today’s world of the most destructive weapons of all time, the most important consideration is the mutual, reciprocal fear of all nations of a surprise attack. In this context our prime goal should be some formula to ensure against such a disaster. And if all nations could be similarly insulated there would be less need for a continuing armament race.”²⁰

Stassen was excited by Doolittle’s particular solution: “a formula to permit each side to fly over the other at any time to be sure that no military build-ups developed, no armies massed for movement.”²¹ He promised to present this idea to the president at the forthcoming Geneva summit. In this circuitous way, Stassen could identify himself with the inspiration for Eisenhower’s Open Skies initiative in July 1955.

There was one significant obstacle both to holding the summit and to having the president offer a dramatic shift in policy in the presence of Soviet leaders: the secretary of state. Dulles had numerous reservations about the president’s presence in Geneva, not least of which stemmed from his memories of Woodrow Wilson’s experience in Paris in 1919. The president, who was the head of state as well as the head of the US government, would be seen as equal to the other heads of government at the meeting, thereby diminishing the stature of his office. Unstated was Dulles’s fear that Eisenhower, like Wilson, would be taken advantage of by shrewder politicians unless an experienced diplomat such as himself was conducting the negotiations. The secretary, to Eisenhower’s annoyance, did not take into account the president’s many years of experience in diplomacy as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II and in NATO in 1951 and 1952.²²

Dulles’s concerns transcended the issue of protocol. They reflected the difference in temperament between the president and the secretary. The president certainly respected Dulles’s expertise and, for the most part, followed his lead. But Eisenhower the optimist clashed with Dulles the pessimist. Neither man had any illusions about the Soviet challenge and the dangers it posed. But the president was always looking for ways to bring the two sides together, while Dulles had no expectation that any bridge could be found to link Western democracy and Soviet communism. If the Soviets could be deterred from aggression, from Dulles’s perspective, it would require methods such as massive retaliation.

The idea that a summit meeting could open a path to accommodation was a dangerous illusion, in Dulles’s judgment. The president’s optimism would play into the hands of the Russian adversary, and the possibility of mutual disarmament was the most dangerous illusion of all. The secretary of state elaborated on his fears in a memorandum written just before the Geneva summit. He noted that there was really no substitute for massive retaliation against Soviet provocations. Any dilution of America’s retaliatory powers would provoke further aggression. Moreover, reducing nuclear weaponry in any exchange would deprive the United States of the keystone to its security. There was no possibility of matching Soviet ground forces in the event of a Soviet invasion of the east. The Eisenhower administration, Dulles was convinced, must remain vigilant not only in maintaining its military defense structure but also in resisting Soviet propaganda appeals for a reduction of nuclear weaponry.²³

The president’s appointment of Stassen as his special assistant for disarmament was needless, from Dulles’s perspective, and it would have been acceptable to him only if it were meaningless. The toxic personal relationship between the two men was always a factor, exacerbated by a recognition that Eisenhower had brought Stassen into his administration as a counterweight to the secretary of state. Dulles had locked horns with Stassen in his capacity as director of the MSA and FOA. Now it appeared that Stassen’s new post would not neutralize but rather empower his intrusion into matters that were appropriately the realm of the State Department. Stassen was a self-aggrandizing amateur in the sensitive field of nuclear issues, and he could do considerable damage to American diplomacy. The media’s insistence on calling Stassen the “Secretary of Peace” was particularly offensive to Dulles. “Not that I had any personal feelings,” he professed, but “it was not good for the State Department and Foreign Service to feel that some outside agency had primary responsibility for peace.” Stassen’s efforts to distance himself from the title were not convincing, particularly when the president himself casually employed it.²⁴

No matter how clearly Dulles expressed his opposition to Stassen’s personality and policies, Eisenhower’s need to respond to the Communist propaganda campaign outweighed the secretary’s objections. The most Dulles would concede under pressure was to consider the possibility of limited mutual inspections, but he would not condone a comprehensive arms limitation agreement without stringent political conditions.²⁵ This concession was swept away by Stassen’s enthusiasm for his own proposal. By May 26, he submitted to the president and the National Security Council (NSC) a progress report on disarmament. His aim was to facilitate the process “by bringing into focus areas of agreement and of disagreement and by suggesting solutions.” This was the first product of the group he had assembled in Quantico.²⁶

Since the abolition of nuclear weapons was not possible, the report advocated that “United States policy on the question of disarmament in the present state of world tensions should be directed primarily toward preventing the USSR from attaining a capability of destroying the United States through a surprise attack.” Consequently, it “should be concentrated on the method of a multilateral arms limitation agreement to reach this aim.” Admitting that “it is not possible by any known scientific or other, means to be absolutely certain of the control of all future production of nuclear weapons materials,” the report proposed the creation of an International Armaments Commission “to inspect by land, sea, or air, with the aid of scientific instruments, all existing armaments and to communicate the observations to an international center outside the country being inspected without interference.” The operation would include stationing US nationals in the Communist bloc and Soviet observers in the United States. This would be the first step in preventing a surprise attack. The report recommended that after this plan had been presented to the Senate, the president and secretary of state should find an appropriate occasion to explain its merits to the nation and, through the United Nations, to the world.²⁷

To Dulles’s dismay, this report was just what the president was seeking. And a summit meeting with the Soviets was precisely the venue where further progress might be made. Even before the report was delivered, Eisenhower had made it clear to a reluctant Dulles that he should “let other countries know that if they want a summit, I am ready to go to one. I want to take the affirmative approach to bring about a summit at an early date.” There was little the opponents of a summit could do to deter the president at this point. Military leaders joined Dulles in expressing their disapproval of a summit conference.²⁸

At least Dulles could take comfort in his success at keeping members of Congress from attending the summit meeting. He was worried about the effect of a congressional delegation on the British and French, who had been assured that attendance would be restricted to a small number. He warned Eisenhower: “If, for example, four Congressmen were to be there it would not only quite change the character of the conference, it would create difficult problems for Eden and Pinay. Therefore, I am confirmed in the view which you expressed to Senator George that the time for Congressional representation may be when we get to the second phase, namely, the substantive negotiations rather than at this initial phase.” This was a minor victory for the secretary of state. He never expected the conference to reach a “second stage.”²⁹

Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, shared Dulles’s and the Pentagon’s pessimism about any kind of nuclear test moratorium. As he told the secretary of state, “A moratorium on the testing of large weapons would be to our advantage if it could be arranged by a dependable agreement. A dependable agreement with the present Soviet Government is illusory.” Strauss underscored his concerns about Stassen’s disarmament proposals in a letter to Undersecretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr.: “In the absence of complete reliance upon Soviet good faith, I do not believe that any arrangements can be devised concerning disclosure and verification of information about atomic weapons that might not be prejudicial, to some extent, to the security of the United States.”³⁰

Their voices on the main issue went unheeded. Eisenhower and Stassen disagreed with Dulles, Hoover, and Strauss. The president and his disarmament adviser believed that an arrangement could be reached between East and West, but complete disarmament—desirable as that goal might be—was an impossible ideal. In the context of the Cold War, arms control would be an incremental step toward eventual disarmament after a warming of the Cold War.

The president took up the theme in a nationwide television address on July 15, 1955, in which he expressed his hopes: “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 that can be conducted in the history of mankind.”³¹ In light of this rhetoric it was obvious there was no stopping Eisenhower’s journey to Geneva, but Dulles still hoped to keep Stassen and Rockefeller from joining him there. Both Stassen and the president were aware that Dulles did not want Stassen in Geneva. But as the Minnesotan later recalled, Eisenhower was fully supportive of his ideas about breaking the Cold War stalemate. Furthermore, he believed that Dulles’s inflexibility would have exactly the opposite effect. So the president’s solution was to have Stassen and Rockefeller, along with Admiral Radford, quietly fly to Paris. They would wait there, ready to leave for Geneva as soon as Eisenhower sent for them.³²

This was an artful compromise, but it also reflected the president’s caution. He did not want to bruise Dulles’s feelings any more than necessary. He had not ruled out a future confrontation with the Soviets, and Dulles’s experience at that juncture would be invaluable. His continued reliance on the secretary of state was evident in a letter to Vice President Richard Nixon after Eisenhower’s heart attack in September, in which he emphasized Dulles’s importance in securing whatever gains were possible at the foreign ministers’ meeting in Geneva following the summit meeting in July: “I hope that each one in Government will do whatever he can to make Foster’s task easier. The Secretary of State must have the discretionary authority which is needed if there is to be effective negotiation… He must be the one who both at the Conference table and before the world speaks with authority for our country.”³³

The call to Paris came on July 19. Colonel Andrew J. Goodpaster, the president’s staff secretary, informed Stassen and Rockefeller that the subject of disarmament would be the sole topic of the July 21 session at Geneva.³⁴ This was the occasion for the presentation of Open Skies, a version of General Doolittle’s principles that Stassen had adopted. Dulles did his best to frustrate Stassen’s contribution. At the end of the internal debates, he dissented from the basic principles of Stassen’s draft on mutual inspections and the exchange of information on military installations: “It has not been my thinking of what should be included in this summit meeting.” Stassen recalled that these were Dulles’s exact words.³⁵

The president overruled Dulles, who reluctantly conceded that “the result of Soviet disarmament propaganda plus our allies’ weakness … combine to create a popular and diplomatic pressure for limitation of armament that cannot be resisted by the United States without our forfeiting the good will of our allies.” Consequently, Dulles recognized that the United States must support some plan for limiting armaments but warned, “We should not proceed quickly or radically to alter the present situation. We should proceed cautiously so long as the present situation gives us important bargaining power and so long as Soviet leadership continues basically hostile, autocratic and controlled by those who are not inhibited by any moral scruples.” At a meeting on the same day with Stassen and the principals from the Department of Defense, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the CIA, Dulles was dispirited. Gratuitously, he observed that Stassen “did not add anything new to the positions outlined in his various earlier memoranda.”³⁶

But Stassen had won his case with the president. The NSC recommended that he develop methods of inspection and incorporate the international pool of atomic energy materials for peaceful use, as outlined by the president in his speech on December 8, 1953. This was the substance of the disarmament statement Eisenhower offered at the eighth plenary session on July 23, 1955, in Geneva.³⁷

In his Open Skies speech, Eisenhower proposed practical steps that began with the two sides exchanging complete blueprints of their military establishments and then establishing facilities in both countries for aerial photography: “We to provide you … ample facilities for aerial reconnaissance, where you can take all the pictures you choose and take them to your own country to study, you to provide exactly the same facilities for us.” By taking these steps, Eisenhower believed that he could not only remove the danger of surprise attacks but also lessen the tensions between the opposing powers.³⁸

But as Eisenhower admitted in his memoirs, disillusionment quickly followed the termination of the Geneva Conference: “At the October Foreign Ministers’ conference, held in the same room as the Summit Conference, the Soviets had repudiated every measure to which they had agreed in July.… To those of us responsible for the conduct of foreign relations, the Soviet duplicity was a grievous disappointment.”³⁹

Open Skies, however, won applause even from adversaries. Premier Nikolai Bulganin, the nominal Soviet leader, hailed the proposal as sincere and worthy of study. This gracious response was typical of the language Bulganin used in his correspondence with Eisenhower. It prompted Dulles to be wary of the premier’s politesse. He urged the president to be cautious in his response to Bulganin’s flattery. He noted that whatever concessions the Soviets appeared to offer over disarmament had to be balanced against their repeated assertions that the incorporation of West Germany into NATO would preclude the possibility of German unification. Concerns about Germany joining NATO in 1955 were more compelling than any aspect of arms control.⁴⁰

Not that aerial inspection was ignored. Nikita Khrushchev, secretary of the Communist Party and a more powerful voice in the Kremlin than Bulganin, pointedly disagreed with Bulganin’s apparent acceptance of Open Skies. He saw the proposal as a ruse to spy on Russian facilities. According to Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen, who served as translator, Khrushchev asked Eisenhower “whom he was trying to fool? In our eyes, this is a very transparent espionage device.… You could hardly expect us to take this seriously.”⁴¹

On this sour note, the summit meeting essentially ended. Even without a formal rejection of Open Skies, the idea would, Bohlen predicted, “die of malnutrition.” Understandably, Eisenhower was disappointed by the outcome of the meetings. He had hoped that aerial inspections and an exchange of blueprints would be a first step in confidence building between East and West. But, “as always, the result was nothing but disappointment.” All that was accomplished, he told his cabinet, was “a new atmosphere.” But he admitted that, “in the final analysis, … I believe the Geneva Conference represented a limited success.” There were “small beginnings, but they could not have transpired in the atmosphere prevailing before Geneva.”⁴²

If the Geneva Conference of the Big Four had been a total failure, there would not have been the jockeying for credit that accompanied the unveiling of Open Skies. Rockefeller advanced his own assessment of the results of the Quantico meeting, asserting that he had initiated the idea of mutual aerial inspections in the face of Stassen’s opposition. In recalling the development of Open Skies, the president did not claim credit for originating the concept but seemed pleased to have his name associated with it. Stassen transmitted Doolittle’s musings, which expressed sentiments the president had been ruminating on since assuming office. While Eisenhower made no mention of Stassen’s specific contributions to Open Skies, the Minnesotan did so in considerable detail in his history of the Eisenhower administration. It was Stassen’s draft, acknowledging Rockefeller’s contribution, that Eisenhower presented to the Soviets.⁴³

If the Geneva Conference had a permanent impact on American nuclear policy, it was less from the lively imagery associated with aerial photographs of military sites than from an understanding that abolition of nuclear weapons was an impossibility. The most that could be achieved was arms limitation and control. Open Skies was a step toward that goal. The term “disarmament,” however, was too attractive to be discarded. Although the UN Disarmament Commission was eventually retitled the Arms Control Committee, Stassen’s title as special assistant to the president for disarmament remained untouched.

After Geneva

On July 28, less than a week after the Geneva summit adjourned, Eisenhower appointed Stassen US deputy representative on the UN Disarmament Commission, where he could apply his passion for Open Skies to a new venue. The president’s draft letter to Stassen outlining the terms of his appointment noted that he would serve as US representative at the forthcoming subcommittee meeting, where he would be under Ambassador Lodge’s direction on matters relating to his work with the United Nations. But the letter also noted that on matters relating to negotiations with other governments, Stassen would be under the direction of the secretary of atate.⁴⁴ The latter directive was obviously intended to bolster Dulles’s amour propre.

Stassen’s proposals to the UN Disarmament Commission—ostensibly preliminary but, as usual, ambitious—provoked Dulles to respond with a series of reservations. He squelched Stassen’s recommendations for immediate action. “There are as of now no known inspection procedures,” he asserted, “which could provide adequate support for an agreement to eliminate atomic weapons.” Moreover, no actions should be taken before coming to a consensus with Britain and France. Consequently, consideration of any decisions would be “premature.”⁴⁵

It was unlikely that Dulles expected Stassen to follow his advice. He had not done so in the past, and it was quickly obvious that Stassen would again go his own independent way. Stassen was heartened by the areas of agreement he perceived in the Soviets’ behavior at Geneva. He was convinced that the United States enjoyed a sufficient lead in nuclear weapons to permit bold initiatives. The point was to get started and allow momentum for change to build. The odds against success never restrained him.⁴⁶

He wasted little time in letting the Soviets know that the United States would be open to partial measures to implement the Open Skies proposals. He disregarded the concession for “reserved and inactive status,” pending further studies of inspections, the secretary of state thought he had extracted. Instead, Stassen informed Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson that he was proceeding to implement the NSC decisions of June 30, which were essentially his own interpretations of the administration’s plans for developing feasible methods of inspection. He would “actively seek an international system for the regulation and reduction of armed forces and armaments.” He had his special task forces in place to implement his plans.⁴⁷

Not surprisingly, Stassen moved swiftly prior to the August 29, 1955, meeting of the subcommittee to invite the chargé d’affaires and the first secretary of the Soviet embassy to meet informally with him. He suggested that the first meeting of the subcommittee dispense with ceremonial and procedural matters and begin substantive discussion. He reminded them that both President Eisenhower and Premier Bulganin “had found merit in the concept of reciprocal visits and technical exchanges between the USSR and the U.S.” Acting on the basis of this apparent imprimatur, Stassen made specific reference to the “creation of a panel of technical panels of experts to test the various methods of inspection which might be employed in the control of arms and armed forces.” To advance this idea, he invited members of the Soviet delegation to lunch on August 29, convinced that informal social conferences had proved productive at Geneva. The Soviet diplomats appeared somewhat flustered by Stassen’s enthusiasm but diplomatically responded with expressions of appreciation.⁴⁸

Stassen’s impulsive moves disturbed his cabinet colleagues. Secretary Wilson responded that the Defense Department was undertaking studies for the military portions of the comprehensive inspection plan, and he urged that comments from his department be taken into account before drafting any formal proposal. Secretary Dulles wanted a simple theme, comparable to the Soviets’ “Ban the Bomb,” and feared that introducing the complicated subject of inspections to the UN General Assembly would permit the Soviets “to bog the matter down in discussion of details while they went ahead with their own simple ‘Ban the Bomb’ program.”⁴⁹

Dulles was subsequently more blunt in his criticism when Stassen continued to press his proposals. On September 1 the secretary began a letter to Stassen with a clear rejection: “I remain convinced that it will militate against the President’s program if we go all out for this panel proposal on the scale and to the degree your draft suggests.” He claimed he had no objection to setting up a group to study methods of conducting inspections, but “to go on and give the study group authority themselves to become a pilot plan inspection group … seems to me to be so spectacular and far reaching that it will greatly dilute attention to and interest in the President’s proposal.”⁵⁰

The deputy representative paid lip service to the concerns of his colleagues and then proceeded along his own path. He agreed that, in light of State and Defense positions, it would be better to make no proposal until the Soviets had clarified their reaction to the Eisenhower plan: “An anemic study group would weaken the United States position in world opinion” without winning a satisfactory response from the USSR. But unlike the perennially suspicious secretary of state, Stassen thought the Soviets might be open to a more conciliatory approach, as suggested by the US Information Agency’s Andrew H. Berding. A first move would be to exchange blueprints at one port and one aerodrome and then exchange aerial photography at those sites. Stassen felt that a step-by-step, phased approach would achieve both world support and a more flexible response from the Soviet Union.⁵¹

Dulles ignored Stassen’s approach and continued to advocate a minimal statement to the UN General Assembly; he was doubtful that a favorable response from the Soviets could be expected under any circumstances. Stassen disagreed. The Soviets “were showing unusual reserve and respect for the President’s proposal,” he observed, and he blamed US behavior, exemplified by a bellicose speech from Secretary of the Air Force Donald A. Quarles on September 3, for stoking Soviet fears that the United States was not moving toward a reduction in armaments. He cautioned his colleagues to be mindful of how America’s adversaries might interpret speeches dealing with disarmament.⁵²

After meeting with the president at his summer home in Denver on September 16, Stassen informed the press that the odds were favorable for an eventual Soviet acceptance of the Open Skies proposal, even though “the United States delegation realizes that it will take some time for the Soviet Union to reach a decision.” He professed to be encouraged “by the kinds of question they are asking about the manner in which the plan would go into effect.”⁵³

Sensing flexibility in the Soviet position, he moved against the advice of Dulles to frame a resolution to the United Nations based on reports that his task forces would deliver in October. He was buoyed by the conviction that he was acting in accordance with Eisenhower’s objectives. Dulles, on the contrary, continued to believe that the Soviets would try to finesse anything the administration proposed. His skepticism seemed justified when Bulganin’s letter to Eisenhower on September 19 reverted to the familiar Soviet ploy of demanding the prohibition of nuclear weapons.⁵⁴

Dulles’s reservations, shared by most of the cabinet, did not delay Stassen’s preparations for a major report by his staff. He summarized its contents before the National Security Council on October 13, emphasizing specific suggestions for winning passage of the resolution on disarmament in the UN General Assembly. He elaborated on the advantages of the United States seizing the initiative rather than leaving it to the Soviet Union. His aim was a preliminary agreement by the NSC for a modest aerial inspection in an area 100 to 200 miles in breadth. This initiative would mobilize world opinion in favor of the United States and give the secretary of state a negotiating edge vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Dulles predictably deprecated Stassen’s suggestions, saying they “were still in an embryonic stage as far as we in the State Department are concerned.” Dulles wanted the report to dispense with technical details. He emphasized that the president’s Geneva proposal on inspection “was not really offered so much as a technical proposal or a cure-all as it was a means designed primarily to change the atmosphere of the world.” Stassen’s recommendations, he felt, would diminish the vision Eisenhower had projected and let the Russians off the hook by concentrating on relatively minor issues.⁵⁵

As these discussions proceeded in October, the president was still recovering from a heart attack suffered on September 24 while on vacation in Denver. Indirectly, Stassen won Eisenhower’s approval of his approach, as Lodge reported to Dulles after visiting the president in Denver. Lodge agreed with the president that getting an endorsement from the UN General Assembly would put pressure on the Soviets to allow aerial inspections. Failure to do so would expose them to censure for violating a UN resolution and the possibility of being “branded by the United Nations as the troublemaker and war-monger of the world.” Such wishful thinking by the convalescing president fitted Stassen’s worldview.⁵⁶

Obstacles at the UN Subcommittee Meetings

When Stassen finally unveiled his progress report to the administration on November 1, 1955, it fleshed out ideas he had been touting since his appointment to the subcommittee: namely, the importance of taking detailed initial steps toward nuclear arms control as the primary goal, with disarmament relegated to the background. The report assured that a “comprehensive, effective, feasible, reciprocally acceptable international inspection and control system for armaments and armed forces could be established to serve certain limited but very important objectives of the United States, if agreed to by the USSR and by the other states involved.” He took as his point of departure the Soviets’ offer to allow outside observers into the country and expanded it exponentially.⁵⁷

The essence of the report’s recommendations involved ground inspectors operating through five regions and approximately 280 posts in the USSR and Warsaw bloc nations. The aerial inspectors would originate in four external bases, and the inspection forces in the USSR and its satellite area would total between 20,000 and 30,000 personnel. A reciprocal arrangement would be made for inspectors in the United States.⁵⁸ This interpretation of Open Skies was in direct opposition to the expectations of Secretary Dulles and the State Department.

Dulles’s response was negative. He harped on Stassen’s denigration of disarmament in favor of inspection, a posture that would make the United States vulnerable to negative world opinion as well as Soviet criticism. The secretary felt that from a foreign policy standpoint, the report failed to give a clear indication of the US attitude toward the reduction of armed forces and conventional armaments. Moreover, in his judgment, the outline of the inspection and control system lacked the details necessary to evaluate Stassen’s policy suggestions.⁵⁹

At the meeting of the National Security Council ten days later, with the president present, Dulles was more caustic in his criticisms and arguably unfair to Stassen. After complaining that there was insufficient detail for State Department planning, he mocked the excessively elaborate inspection plan: “We can be absolutely sure that the Russians will never accept any arms inspection system which involved twenty to thirty thousand non-Russian inspectors on Russian soil. Such an all-or-nothing proposition—that is, no steps toward disarmament until this elaborate inspection system was in operation—would make the United States a laughing stock.”⁶⁰ For one who was suspicious of any disarmament program, it seemed hypocritical to fault Stassen for taking inadequate steps toward disarmament.

Dulles went on to accuse him of inconsistency: “Governor Stassen himself had not consistently followed his professed position that no steps toward disarmament could be taken until this great inspection plan had been accepted by the Russians and put into operation.” Actually, Stassen’s report did call for modest reductions of conventional armed forces before the inspection process was completed. When Stassen admitted that this was his intention, the secretary asserted that “he was compelled to describe this position as completely unrealistic.”⁶¹

It was obvious that whatever course Stassen pursued, he would meet resistance from the secretary of state. The “Secretary of Peace” was acting on assumptions that were unacceptable to Dulles: namely, that flexibility by the United States would soften Soviet resistance to an ultimate deal on arms limitation. Dulles, in contrast, remained convinced that the Soviet Communists were immune to change and could never be trusted to fulfill any agreement on disarmament.

What was surprising was the president’s reaction to Stassen’s progress report. His special assistant for disarmament had always counted on having common objectives that connected him with Eisenhower. They both believed in the need to de-escalate the Cold War and were ready to offer ways to do so. Open Skies in this context was more than a symbol; it would be integrated into a series of steps that would transform the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet Eisenhower appeared to reject Stassen’s report by agreeing with Dulles that there had to some Soviet political concessions to accompany arms control. Stassen’s failure to consider the political role in negotiations with the Kremlin was Eisenhower’s major criticism of the report. He stressed the necessity of developing programs that covered a political settlement as well as arms control. No progress could be made on one program without progress on the other. The president then observed that if the Soviets gave the United States a blueprint of all their military installations and allowed reconnaissance over Soviet territory, some kind of agreement on armament reduction would be reasonable. “Thus you would not be killing the whole plan from the very outset. We must not appear to the world … to be laying on the table so large and complicated [an] inspection system that other nations will accuse us of blatant insincerity. The United States could not get anywhere if it followed such a course.” To Stassen, the insertion of the issue of political concessions came as an unwelcome and confusing surprise.⁶²

The president appeared to be unnerved by the complicated program Stassen had put before him. He was particularly put off by the numbers—the 20,000 to 30,000 non-Russian inspectors on Russian soil that Dulles had derided as unrealistic. Stassen, on the contrary, claimed that the vast size of the Soviet Union required the number of inspectors he had recommended. The president was not convinced. In the judgment of historian H. W. Brands, Stassen failed to win Eisenhower over to his plan. Political scientist David Tal phrased Eisenhower’s disapproval more starkly; he “excoriated the plan,” pointing out that the only thing it achieved was to unite the Atomic Energy Commission, the CIA, the Defense Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff against Stassen’s ambitious program.⁶³

The special assistant for disarmament, it seemed, had overstepped the boundaries of his position and had been appropriately reprimanded for it. Dulles made the most of the apparent breach between Eisenhower and Stassen by asking what kind of installations and armaments could be inspected “without having recourse to the full and all-out inspection called for by Governor Stassen.”⁶⁴

Was this a change of heart by the president? Was he now moving away from Open Skies by linking arms control to diplomatic approaches that were unrelated to aerial inspection? Had he returned to the concept of disarmament in place of arms control? Or was this new attitude toward Stassen an expression of long-held feelings of distrust dating back to suspicions in 1952 that Stassen’s professed advocacy of an Eisenhower presidency had masked his own ambitions for the presidency?

Eisenhower may have had some questions about Stassen’s ambitions, but none of the foregoing speculations was applicable. He had brought Stassen into his cabinet to serve as a check on the presumptions of the secretary of state, but he had never intended to displace Dulles. Rather, Stassen provided an alternative way of looking at foreign policy, one to which the president was more sympathetic than he was to Dulles’s hardened position on the Soviet Union. Brands judged that Eisenhower drew closer to Dulles when the latter softened his approach to disarmament. Whatever his genuine feelings may have been, the secretary recognized both the global support for arms control in the United Nations and the need to respond to it. Besides, minor reductions in conventional weapons might divert world attention from Soviet pressure for the abolition of nuclear weapons—the United States’ critical strategic advantage over the Kremlin. Brands also speculated that in light of the USSR’s ambiguous response to Open Skies, Eisenhower had an open mind about the future of disarmament, and he seemed prepared to follow Dulles in attaching political preconditions to it.⁶⁵

Other factors may have been in play to account for Eisenhower’s shifting position. The foreign ministers of the four major powers had adjourned their meetings in Geneva on November 16, 1955, with no plans to resume them. The matter of disarmament would be returned to the UN Subcommittee on Disarmament.⁶⁶ The failure of these talks devolved on the US insistence that inspection and control of nuclear sites and weapons be the starting point for any disarmament plan. By contrast, the Soviets continued to press for agreement on the reduction of some armaments and the prohibition of others, regardless of whether adequate controls and safeguards could be established. Important as disarmament was, however, the unsettled ending of the Geneva talks most likely centered on the new membership of the Federal Republic of Germany in NATO. To the Soviets, inspections of nuclear facilities were basically opportunities for intolerable Western intrusion into the USSR’s territory, as Khrushchev had charged at the end of the Geneva Conference. Whatever concessions the Soviets were willing to make to world opinion or to US pressure had to be weighed against their primary objective—disarmament of Germany.

Consequently, the president’s reaction to Stassen’s report on disarmament seemed to presage a movement away from Open Skies and the first incremental steps toward disarmament, of which arms control was a basic element. In this contest, Stassen would be out of favor, and Dulles’s influence would correspondingly increase. Such was not the case. Stassen’s behavior did not reflect a loss of the president’s confidence in his judgment. Granted that Stassen was not always attuned to the nuances of interpersonal relations, but he certainly would have been aware of a change in their relationship.

One reason for Stassen’s self-confidence may be that Dulles pressed his advantage too far. For example, Dulles claimed it would be possible to control the construction of submarines in the Soviet Union without the large numbers of inspectors Stassen’s plan required. The president’s special assistant immediately and forcefully challenged the secretary, warning that limited inspections could give the West a false sense of security. The president backed up Stassen and expressed his reluctance “to say or do anything which would discourage Governor Stassen, and [he] suggested that Governor Stassen’s people get together with General Twining’s experts on aerial photography and find out from them just exactly what we could and could not effectively inspect through the agency of aerial reconnaissance.” These supportive comments were made at the same session of the NSC where Eisenhower appeared to join Dulles in dismissing Stassen’s report.⁶⁷

Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Stassen felt that he had the president’s encouragement, even as he accepted Eisenhower’s agreement with Dulles to require political concessions from the Soviets. Although Eisenhower never fully subscribed to Stassen’s positive attitude in negotiating with the Russians, his hopes for the future at the end of 1955 were closer to Stassen’s optimism than to Dulles’s pessimism.

When the UN General Assembly met in December, it endorsed the resolution submitted by the United States, Britain, and France by a vote of fifty-six to seven. It reflected the principle of Eisenhower’s Open Skies and the priority of the initial steps proposed by Stassen, along with Bulganin’s plan for establishing control posts at strategic centers.⁶⁸ Implementation of these confidence-building measures, however, was not on the General Assembly’s agenda.