6

The Illusion of Progress, 1956

Whatever reservations Eisenhower may have had about Stassen’s plan in December 1955, they did not keep his special assistant from unveiling a new package of proposals in January 1956 that included letters to Bulganin and to Congress. As always when he went to work, Stassen’s progress was fast and thorough. He characterized the results as a compromise, although Dulles and the Joint Chiefs of Staff groused that they could find no evidence of it. His plan contained elements of both the incremental approach to disarmament that he and the president had advocated in the past and other more extravagant ideas that encompassed a wide range of steps toward disarmament. He believed that the UN General Assembly had substantially endorsed his views on December 16.¹

Stassen justified his haste, noting that “delay in [a] US decision would cause a serious loss of US initiative in world public opinion, would result in a gain for the Soviet Union, and would prejudice many other important interests of the U.S.” Not surprisingly, he had to face the continuing hostility of Dulles, who “believed that adoption by the US of the position which you recommend would not be sufficient to maintain for us our leadership in the free world coalition and to secure the essential support of world public opinion.”²

The secretary of state’s opposition reflected his persistent suspicion of any Soviet concessions on the issue of Open Skies. Nonetheless, Stassen did not retreat from his position. He explained why a large-scale system of some 30,000 or 40,000 inspectors was necessary, given the enormous size of the territory occupied by the Soviet Union. If the Russians reciprocated, he predicted that a 5 percent reduction in the defense budget would be possible by the end of the first year of the inspection program. He suggested that if the Soviet Union genuinely opened itself to aerial inspection, “as well as to external internal inspection, the United States would agree at this point of time … that all future nuclear production would be for peaceful purposes only.”³

Dulles’s many criticisms of Stassen’s presentation devolved on the latter’s unrealistic optimism that he could win over the Soviets on “the most difficult field of inspection and control, namely; the field of ground forces. In that field the Soviet totalitarian system provided Russia with the greatest advantages over the United States.… Historically, indeed, reduction of military manpower had always proved the hardest nut to crack in all past disarmament schemes, yet Governor Stassen has picked this very nut as the one to be cracked.”⁴

Stassen countered that his proposals would be a test of the Soviets’ seriousness about disarmament. And in this objective he had the president’s full approval. Eisenhower left no doubt of his intention to support his disarmament adviser in testing the USSR’s good faith. They both believed that the size of the inspection teams would not, by itself, be a sufficient reason for a Soviet rejection of Stassen’s proposals. Eisenhower was looking at Soviet reactions to see whether he had a partner “in trying to lead the world back from the brink of disaster.” In the mild-mannered, gracious Bulganin, Eisenhower thought he had such a partner. Their correspondence following the Geneva Conference, filled with comforting pieties about the spirit of the meetings, seemed to support the prospect of a mutual understanding on disarmament between East and West. Yet Eisenhower never carried his enthusiasm to excess. He recognized that “the heart of the problem was this: We are trying to bargain in good faith with a fellow whose good faith we have every reason to doubt.”⁵ That “fellow” was certainly not Bulganin. It was the Communist system. Stassen disagreed. While ready to criticize the Soviets when crossed, he always envisioned a positive outcome in future negotiations.

Dulles was not alone in his criticisms of Stassen’s proposals. The Defense Department, particularly Admiral Arthur M. Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was concerned less with the particulars of his proposals than with the implications of his strategy. The United States was dealing not with ordinary diplomatic adversaries but with “a people who had no intention whatever of keeping any agreement if they can get out of it to their advantage.” He cited historical examples between 1945 and 1950 to make his point. The only reason there appeared to be a new appetite for negotiation on disarmament, he declared, was because US military strength vis-à-vis the Russians had developed so greatly in recent years.⁶

Stassen would certainly agree that the newly favorable atmosphere was due, in large part, to America’s substantial military buildup at home and abroad. But his conclusion was the opposite of Radford’s. Because of America’s defense efforts, successful negotiations were now possible. While the admiral agreed that negotiations were likely, he was also convinced they would be unsuccessful.⁷

The president concurred with Stassen’s judgment. It was obvious that his views were closer to those of his disarmament adviser than to Stassen’s challengers in the State and Defense Departments. He observed, “We had given Governor Stassen a pretty good ‘going over’ at this meeting, and it was now time to provide him with some useful guidance. How were we going to give Governor Stassen’s proposals some real appeal, both to our own people and the people of the world?” He wanted “something of Governor Stassen’s policy proposals worked up in the form of a speech or statement by the President which would provide a kind of test of the reaction of our allies and of world public opinion.” As Eisenhower asserted repeatedly, the goal was to “secure some slight easing of the world situation without damaging our own national security.” He felt that even the Joint Chiefs would agree with this goal. This NSC meeting on January 26, 1956, adjourned without acting on Stassen’s recommendations. But the NSC accepted Eisenhower’s advice that Stassen’s arguments be used as the basis for a speech “by a responsible spokesman for the Administration” that assessed their probable impact on both allied and Soviet governments. That “responsible spokesman” would be Stassen. He was also charged with refining a letter the president would send to Premier Bulganin.⁸

Given the support of the president, it would be understandable if Stassen had assumed that his proposals would be formally accepted by the NSC at its meeting on February 7, 1956. They were not. In fact, the record of actions taken at that meeting noted that the draft statement of February 2 “will not be used.” While this sounded like a curt rejection, it was cushioned by the authorization “to explore and develop as a basis for negotiation with the USSR, his proposal of small strips of territory in the US and USSR within which the feasibility of inspection systems would be tested.”⁹ This permission did not encompass all that Stassen advocated, but it was an endorsement that he could use as a platform for expansion. The venue for future development would be the forthcoming meeting of the UN Subcommittee on Disarmament, to which Stassen had been appointed the US deputy delegate in July 1955.

The UN Subcommittee on Disarmament

The meeting of the subcommittee would proceed in two stages, the first taking place in March and April 1956. Not until the Suez crisis had passed and the presidential election in the fall had been decided was the second stage possible. The meetings resumed in March 1957 and concluded in August of that year. Stassen was a prominent participant in both stages.

To prepare for the March 1956 meetings, the president made it clear that Stassen would be the key interpreter of US positions on disarmament. His letter of guidance to Stassen revealed his discomfort with the secretary of state’s blunt rejection of technical inspections and the incremental measures of disarmament they signified. Eisenhower stated, “By flatly rejecting technical inspection as providing any practical basis for disarmament we thereby give to the Russians a great opportunity for hurting us politically.”¹⁰

Stassen had won his case. In his letter of guidance, Eisenhower seemed to take direct aim at Dulles’s dismissal of Stassen’s proposal to reduce the size of US and USSR armed forces to 2.5 million and the military budget by 5 percent. The president believed that if aerial inspections and accompanying ground inspections were operating satisfactorily, he would authorize his representative to indicate the acceptability of mutually agreed force levels of 2.5 million men for the United States and the USSR.¹¹ Although he linked China to this figure as well, which softened Dulles’s opposition, Eisenhower, intentionally or not, clearly rejected the position of his secretary of state.

Even as the president recognized the visceral hostility of the Soviet leadership to intrusive inspections, he was hoping to build mutual confidence based on Bulganin’s putative willingness to establish control posts at transportation facilities, as the Soviet premier had suggested in his letter of May 10, 1955. Eisenhower, however, was well aware of how “the United Nations inspection teams in Korea, tied down to fixed locations, were freely bypassed by the Communist air and ground forces; … thus [they] were able to dispose their units with impunity and strengthen their forces at will.”¹²

The thrust of the president’s letter to Stassen on the eve of his departure for London was his approval of the small steps Stassen had long championed, as opposed to the State Department’s demand that a complete disarmament package, along with a political settlement, precede disarmament talks. The key was using small strips of territory in the United States and USSR to test the feasibility of the work of “a small number of inspection personnel,” with the emphasis on “small” in taking steps toward the larger goal.¹³

Armed with Eisenhower’s optimism, Stassen spent two months in London—March and April 1956—at meetings of the UN Disarmament Subcommittee. There he joined a distinguished company of veteran diplomats—the Soviet Union’s Andrei Gromyko, Britain’s Harold Nutting, France’s Jules Moch, and Canada’s Norman Robertson. He had known Gromyko since his days at the San Francisco Conference in 1945, and he was well aware of Moch’s difficult personality. He anticipated some familiar problems in negotiating with his Soviet counterparts but was less prepared for serious conflicts with the chief NATO allies.

Dulles, whose diplomatic responsibilities were wider than Stassen’s, had to bear the brunt of the world’s criticism of the US refusal to accept Soviet demands for the immediate suspension of nuclear testing in December 1955. Cries for a test ban came from Nehru in India to the pope at the Vatican. These were echoed by the Soviets, who, as Dulles bitterly noted, advocated suspension only after they had completed their own test series. Stassen also occupied a lesser role when he testified in January 1956 before the newly created disarmament subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He argued that testing was only a symptom of international tensions and that weapons tests were necessary for national security. But it was the secretary of state who made the major case for continuing nuclear tests; Stassen was more open to test-ban arguments.¹⁴

Arguably, Dulles was less surprised at the British and French dissent over Stassen’s proposals. He was worried about the allies linking disarmament talks to German reunification: “It would be only playing into Soviet hands if we allowed ourselves to be drawn into discussing the substance of this matter even tentatively in the disarmament talks.”¹⁵

Reunification was not the only problem. A new Anglo-French initiative following the Geneva Conference was distinctly different from Stassen’s—or Dulles’s—views on disarmament. The initiative was primarily the work of France’s Jules Moch, a longtime Socialist leader and defense specialist. He saw the Soviet threat from a French perspective that was widely shared by the European NATO allies. Moch worried about a surprise attack coming from conventional rather than nuclear forces. This fear reflected the numerical superiority of Soviet ground forces in Europe. He did not disagree with Stassen’s (and now Eisenhower’s) idea of using small strips of territory to test the success of the inspection process. But Europeans were uncomfortable with the concurrent emphasis on deterrence in place of disarmament. While they were prepared to accept a link between arms inspection and arms control, they felt the Americans’ primary interest was in the threat posed by a surprise attack.¹⁶

The contrast between the American and European positions on disarmament was sharper than Stassen had anticipated. He had always promoted interim steps centered on credible inspections before arms reduction could be concluded. The Anglo-French plan, in contrast, proposed to craft a comprehensive agreement with the Soviets even if the inspection procedures were faulty or incomplete. Moch’s alternative would exclude the Open Skies initiative, which he believed the Soviet Union would never accept.

Disturbing as the French position was, the United States was more concerned with Britain’s association with it than with the content of the proposal itself. The transatlantic differences never reached a breaking point that might have jeopardized the alliance. But until the divergences were bridged, neither side could come up with a joint position paper for the subcommittee. The best they could manage was to identify the French plan as a “working paper” rather than a formal proposal.¹⁷

The Anglo-French issue was resolved in May when Stassen was able to convince Premier Guy Mollet, over Moch’s protests, to accept the US approach to disarmament. Soviet initiatives were more subtle and more difficult to address. The Soviets appeared to endorse Stassen’s proposals, including substantial reductions in conventional forces, which the Soviets had already begun to implement unilaterally as early as August 1955. Given the enormous disparity in the number of Western versus Soviet ground forces, this gesture was hardly a genuine concession. On the issue that was highest on the US agenda—nuclear arms control—the Russians were prepared to consider intrusive aerial photography, the heart of Eisenhower’s Open Skies, but only in the final stages of a comprehensive disarmament agreement. In the meantime, they were willing to allow the inspection of armaments in selected areas of Germany—East and West—but only if there were a ban on nuclear testing and all nuclear weapons were removed from West German territory.¹⁸

The Soviet proposal did not meet the US requirements for a settlement, but its tone was sufficiently conciliatory to raise Stassen’s hopes for an agreement in the near future. These hopes were nourished in part by events in the Soviet Union, especially when Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party, denounced Stalinism in 1956 before the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress. It was understandable that optimists in the West envisioned an improved environment, and Stassen was among them. Gromyko raised expectations for positive change when he expressly asked Stassen to maintain informal personal channels. It was likely that Gromyko regarded Stassen as a softer target than his State Department colleagues.¹⁹

There was, however, a troubling theme embedded in Soviet indications of their more flexible stance. This was the German question. The Soviet endgame in the negotiations with the West was the detachment of the Federal Republic of Germany from NATO. The removal of nuclear weapons from West German territory was just one step in that direction.

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was well aware of the potential dangers to West Germany. In his letter to Dulles on the eve of the subcommittee meetings in March, he reminded the secretary that “the Federal Republic is not represented in the Disarmament Subcommittee of the United Nations and, therefore, has no possibility to express her views. I believe, however, that her cooperation is necessary in the interest and the spirit of Atlantic solidarity.” Since the negotiations would involve the military security of his country, he wanted assurance that no decisions would be made without its approval.²⁰

The German problem was very much on Dulles’s mind when he urged the US delegation “to keep the discussion of this subject there centered on the questions within the competence of the Subcommittee.” He was disturbed by indications that Stassen’s team might lean toward accepting additional force reductions or weapons limitations in return for German reunification. He made it clear that the issues of German reunification and European security were too complex for the subcommittee to handle and should be managed through regular channels. His intention was not to downplay the importance of unification but to ensure that its pursuit did not come at the expense of dangerous force reductions.²¹

Despite Dulles’s usual misgivings about Stassen’s diplomatic skills and the ends he hoped to achieve, the State Department’s reaction to his conversations with Gromyko over German reunification was positive. Stassen gave the impression of taking a harder stance on the relationship between disarmament and political settlement than he actually held. Responding to Gromyko’s query if further progress on disarmament was dependent on the reunification of Germany, Stassen replied that although a prompt solution to the German problem was desirable, its absence was no obstacle to reducing the size of US and USSR forces to 2.5 million. While the tone of the conversation might have disturbed the German chancellor, given that disarmament trumped German reunification among Stassen’s priorities, nothing in that conversation suggested that the United States was considering decoupling disarmament from German reunification.²²

If Adenauer had any doubts about Stassen’s dependability, he could always count on Dulles to maintain a hard line. But it was not so hard that it precluded a warning to Adenauer not to stand in the way of US tactics on disarmament. Still, the chancellor could take comfort when the secretary denounced the Soviet plan as a sham, on the grounds that a limited inspection zone was a pretext for legitimating the division of Germany. Dulles perceived additional Soviet designs on Germany when he accused the USSR of seeking to prevent the deployment of NATO forces in West Germany.²³

After almost two months of intensive negotiations, an impasse developed that was not readily resolved. The Soviets had repeatedly turned down aerial photography and offered instead reductions in armaments and manpower without inspections. The Americans criticized the Russians for wanting disarmament without inspection, while the Russians denounced the Americans for wanting inspection without disarmament.

It is worth noting that at the elaborate Soviet reception at the Claridge Hotel on April 24, shortly after the talks formally concluded, Gromyko asked Stassen to meet informally with Bulganin and Khrushchev to discuss once again their differences over disarmament. Nothing concrete emerged from this impromptu meeting, but Gromyko’s special effort to bring Stassen together with Bulganin and Khrushchev suggested an awareness of Stassen’s flexibility on this subject and the potential to take advantage of his vulnerability.²⁴ Gromyko continued talks with Stassen the next day, implying an ongoing hope of exploiting Stassen’s passion for collaborative action to serve Soviet interests. But when the Soviets floated the idea of a small step involving no more than 10,000 men, their apparent agreement with Stassen’s approach failed over the issue of inspection. Stassen’s putative flexibility did not encompass a retreat from this fundamental US requirement.²⁵

The subcommittee adjourned on May 4 without resolving the substantive differences between East and West. For Stassen, the fundamental clash centered on his conviction that aerial surveillance was essential to any inspection system. Khrushchev had engaged in a tirade against aerial photography during their informal meeting at the Claridge. He claimed the Soviet Union could not understand why the United States insisted on it. Only his respect for President Eisenhower restrained Soviet diplomats from “openly rejecting it.” In his customary hyperbolic way, Khrushchev asserted that “the US should not seek to know everything, that the US should not try to look in everybody’s bedroom.” Stassen responded that a disarmament agreement would be sound only if both sides felt confident that the agreement was being respected. In sum, they talked past each other.²⁶

But it was not only the credibility of an inspection system that doomed Soviet overtures. Testing remained a formidable obstacle to an agreement. As Stassen told the Senate subcommittee in June, nuclear weapons were too important for America’s security to be compromised by a test ban unaccompanied by a general disarmament agreement. “It is essential that the United States continue exploration and testing in the field of thermonuclear weapons.” The subcommittee’s work thus ended in a familiar impasse.²⁷

Neither Dulles’s skepticism over the sincerity of Soviet overtures nor the French-inspired disagreement over negotiating priorities nor the Soviets’ persistent unwillingness to allow credible nuclear test inspections did much to damage Stassen’s optimism about the prospects for a settlement in the near future. The transatlantic split, for example, had been resolved when he convinced French premier Mollet to accept the US approach to disarmament.²⁸ Moreover, the subcommittee had just completed round one. He perceived enough progress to hope for better results when the subcommittee reconvened in 1957. Above all, he felt he had the president’s continuing confidence in his mission.

Aftermath of the London Meetings

A man of Stassen’s temperament could envision a potential breakthrough: for the first time, the Soviets had demonstrated a willingness to discuss disarmament without explicitly tying it to a prohibition of all nuclear weapons. Moreover, his embrace of nuclear testing was not as firm as his testimony suggested. Had his scientific advisers, especially Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, not objected so vigorously, Stassen might have moved in the direction of a test ban, without all the restrictions placed on it. World opinion and his own sensibilities responded to the appeal of a nuclear test ban, even though he pointedly disagreed with Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s April 21 speech urging an end to nuclear testing.²⁹

But the subject of nuclear testing was now problematic. From May 5 to July 22, 1956, the United States conducted a series of nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. The official account of the maneuvers emphasized the benefits of new information obtained on the long-range detonation of nuclear weapons.³⁰ In essence, the United States was catching up with Soviet nuclear activities over the past year. Nonetheless, this news did not affect Stassen’s own long-range sense of the future, as reflected in his official report to the National Security Council.

Stassen began his report on May 10 by spelling out the results of the disarmament negotiations at the London meetings of the UN subcommittee. It contained a positive gloss, focusing less on Soviet relations than on his success in deterring the British and French from submitting their own plan. “As a result of negotiations with the British and French,” he noted, “the latter not only modified their disarmament plan, but agreed to put it forward as a working paper rather than as a fixed position of their governments.” He also succeeded in winning German as well as British and French approval for the reduction of US forces to 2.5 million men prior to any agreement with the Soviets on German reunification. The four Western powers, including Canada, were in harmony over presenting a united front vis-à-vis the Soviets.³¹

Relations with the USSR, he admitted, continued to be marked by its resistance to aerial inspection and to linking German reunification with the reduction of armaments. Yet he believed the Soviets had made significant moves toward the Western position on ground inspections. Their next step, he hoped, would be accepting the Western position on aerial inspections. He was particularly pleased that the Soviets had abandoned the prerequisite of banning the bomb. He speculated that the Soviets had finally realized there was no hope of ever inducing the United States to agree to an immediate and outright ban of nuclear weapons.³²

Buoyed by his perceptions of American diplomatic superiority, he was convinced that success had been achieved largely through his own tactics. The special assistant posited five major areas where American policy on disarmament should be concentrated. They were all interrelated and centered on the need to convince the Soviets to reduce their hostility to Eisenhower’s aerial inspection plans and to reach an agreement before other governments began developing their own nuclear weapons. He concluded with the observation that despite the Soviets’ continuing use of propaganda based on the disarmament problem, “they are at long last aware of the suicidal character of a nuclear war. In short, they are beginning to see the problem of a general war with nuclear weapons much as we see it in the United States.”³³

The tenor of Stassen’s report conformed with his vision of the future. In the spirit of his ten-year advocacy of the United Nations, his last point proposed the earmarking of some portion of the nuclear stockpiles of several nations for the support of UN resolutions against aggression. This would have the advantage of freeing nations from having to maintain large military establishments. Instead, resources spent on self-defense could be diverted to economic development. “Thus the atoms-for-police program,” he contended, “would be an important factor in countering the economic offensive aimed at the underdeveloped nations of the world.”³⁴

From Stassen’s perspective, the objectives he had sought as director of the FOA might be achieved under the rubric of a reorganized nuclear program. His upbeat judgment of the progress of the UN Disarmament Subcommittee was submitted on May 10, just six days after it adjourned on May 4. Actually, there seemed to be little reason for optimism. The four Western powers officially conceded that, after a seven-week effort to frame an acceptable world disarmament plan, “the differences between the position of the Soviet delegations and those of the other four delegations were not reconciled in the meetings of the subcommittee.” The division was sharp. The United States, Britain, France, and Canada pointed to the need to proceed by cautious stages toward disarmament, to be carried out with parallel with the settlement of international disputes. The progress report reiterated the familiar demand that effective control measures had to be in place before disarmament could begin.³⁵

Given the termination of the subcommittee’s negotiations without a resolution of the differences between the United States and USSR, it was hardly surprising that there would be some negative reactions to Stassen’s optimistic appraisal of conditions. Even the president, usually a cheerleader, suggested that the “atoms-for-police” proposal be carefully defined before any steps were taken to implement the concept. The NSC tabled Stassen’s report and asked him for a new review, taking into account the US response to a possible unilateral Soviet reduction of conventional weapons. The NSC decided that Stassen should conduct more studies of US policy on the control of armaments before the United States committed to any new aspects of a disarmament policy. The NSC overlooked the details of Stassen’s report, as well as the enthusiasm with which he presented them.³⁶

What the administration faced in May 1956 was a full-blown peace offensive by the Soviets, highlighted by their May 14 announcement of a reduction in their armed forces as an earnest indication of their move toward disarmament. State and Defense Department officials denounced this as a ruse to weaken the West. General Alfred Gruenther, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, feared that this apparently conciliatory act would undercut vital congressional aid to Europe and noted that, in light of their superiority in manpower, the Russians’ capability for offensive action would not be “substantially affected at all.” Influential military analyst Hanson Baldwin dismissed the Soviet announcement as a gesture to back up its “peaceful coexistence” theme and put the United States on the defensive. If carried out, its military power relative to the West would hardly be changed.³⁷

No US reaction was more vigorous than that of Secretary of State Dulles. Rather than citing Soviet troop reductions as evidence of peaceful intentions, he saw the release of soldiers and sailors into industry and agriculture as a means of increasing the USSR’s war-making power. The Soviet move was prompted not by “a love of peace” but by “solid and compelling economic reasons.” He claimed that efforts to develop new weapons on a grand scale had overextended the USSR’s resources. At a point “where it could cut with the greatest advantage to itself,” it decided to take men out of uniform and move them into factories and farms. He subsequently brushed aside a Soviet invitation to General Nathan F. Twining, the US Air Force chief of staff, as just another propaganda ploy.³⁸

Stassen was disturbed by what he considered to be an overly negative reaction by the cabinet, Secretary Dulles in particular, to the Soviet action. He made a point of balancing the judgments of his colleagues by telling the press that the Soviets’ decision to reduce the number of troops “was an initiative we wanted them to take.” He elaborated on the reasons why they had acted, which were more nuanced than those cited by Dulles. Stassen noted the low birthrate in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which accounted for an usually small pool of young manpower at this time; the rising demands among the Soviet people for more consumer goods; and, most important, a conviction in the Kremlin that the United States had no intention of starting a war, given the devastating effects on both sides of a thermonuclear conflict. He was convinced that the Soviet announcement made the prospects for peace “a few degrees brighter.” He further denied that the force reduction was just a propaganda move.³⁹

Stassen’s attempts to counter the State Department’s negativism received support from both President Eisenhower and General Secretary Khrushchev. He would not have spoken so freely had he not gained the president’s quiet approval of his efforts to generate momentum on disarmament. Khrushchev was effusive in hailing Stassen as “a serious man,” and he referred to their productive talks in London in April. He used the occasion of a diplomatic reception at the French embassy in Moscow to compare Dulles unfavorably with Stassen, mocking the secretary for “guessing” that the USSR would reduce its military forces by 1.2 million men, “as if he got that out of the stars.” Dulles, he asserted to US Ambassador Bohlen, knew the exact figures, since he had given them to Stassen in London. In a further conversation with Bohlen, he intimated a camaraderie with Stassen and told him, “[I hope] you don’t mind, but when I was in London I invited Mr. Stassen to come here and stay at your house.” The Communist leader displayed more than his brand of humor in this exchange. Stassen obviously occupied a special—and arguably vulnerable—place in his perception of American policy.⁴⁰

The Kremlin made the most of its efforts to sow confusion about its disarmament measures, and it succeeded up to a point. The troop reduction issue pushed aside the ongoing Soviet refusal to accept nuclear inspection plans that were acceptable to the US negotiators, including Stassen. In fact, it induced a powerful military critic of Stassen’s policies, Admiral Radford, to consider reducing US troops in Europe, but only in the context of a strong, credible nuclear force. And the widespread concerns over nuclear testing had an effect as well: Stassen testified on June 7 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee on disarmament that the United States was willing to discuss a test ban as part of a comprehensive disarmament agreement, but not as “an isolated advance agreement.”⁴¹ He was responding to pressure from both Democrats and the Soviets in considering a suspension of nuclear tests. But the idea was attractive to him as well, under the right conditions.

The summer of 1956 turned out to be unproductive with respect to disarmament issues. Policies were not fully established, despite Stassen’s efforts to press the bureaucracy into decisions that he believed were vital for the future. Opponents feared that the United States would not suspend its agreements with the USSR if the adversary disregarded them. Stassen did not object, though, to the contention that the creation of a NATO or a UN force should not restrict the United States from using its nuclear capability. As he noted on July 20, “A sound policy now, leading either to a sound agreement or to no agreement, is preferable to the alternative of leaving a vacuum of undecided policy, with adverse effects at home and abroad.”⁴²

There was never a doubt about Stassen’s willingness and ability to fill any vacuum. But the opportunities were limited by the State Department’s questions about the timing and form of a UN “Atoms for Peace” police force. Deputy Undersecretary of State Robert Murphy asserted, “In general, I have always felt that the concept of a United Nations military force is a good one,” but the obstacles in implementing it at this time were formidable. Dillon Anderson, the president’s special assistant for national security affairs, identified a “stumbling block which at present prevents progress toward the policy decisions which Governor Stassen and you [deputy special assistant Amos J. Peaslee] have had in mind. This was the absence of any interdepartmentally agreed inspection system.” Consequently, he felt that it would be “well nigh impossible” to complete any major policy decisions in this area.⁴³

From another direction, Murphy raised the prospect of the United States taking the initiative in limiting the testing of nuclear weapons. Because of rising American worries about the health effects of nuclear testing and Soviet pressure for the discontinuation of tests independent of a general agreement on disarmament, the State Department floated the idea of a unilateral announcement of a one-year cessation of testing. This would put the Soviets on the defensive and win support in the UN General Assembly. This idea was on Stassen’s mind as well, given the right political circumstances; however, Gromyko’s July 12 call for an immediate cessation of atomic and hydrogen bomb tests was hardly the right circumstance. While the State Department draft won Dulles’s approval on August 29, it never went beyond that stage. The State Department’s rejection of Stassen’s “Atoms for Peace” police force reflected a more accurate judgment of the administration’s position on nuclear testing. Murphy replied to Stassen that, “while a proposal along the lines you suggest has merit, we must defer it for the time being.”⁴⁴

Although little progress was made on disarmament in the summer of 1956, the UN Disarmament Commission remained in session. The Soviets continued to advance proposals that asked the United States and Britain to refrain from nuclear testing. The Soviets had the implicit support of the commission when it approved the Peruvian delegate’s recommendation, by a vote of ten to one, to instruct the five-member Subcommittee on Disarmament to reconsider the many proposals submitted during its spring sessions.⁴⁵

A major explanation for this relative inaction was the upcoming presidential election in the United States. If the nation itself was distracted by politics in the summer of 1956, no political figure was more distant from his diplomatic obligations than Harold Stassen. His behavior seemingly defied easy explanation as he engaged in a one-man campaign to dislodge Vice President Nixon from his position as a candidate for reelection. His staff was uncomfortable with this effort.

Stassen was fortunate in that, over the years, he had assembled a group of able advisers and colleagues, some of whom occupied important positions on his various staffs. The most prominent member was Robert E. Matteson, a close personal friend who had served formally as the FOA’s director of research and reports and subsequently as staff director of Stassen’s special staff. Informally, Matteson had been Stassen’s alter ego since his years as governor. Almost as important to Stassen’s career was Amos J. Peaslee, Eisenhower’s ambassador to Australia until February 1956 and then deputy special assistant to the president. A wealthy international lawyer from New Jersey, Peaslee had been an enthusiastic supporter of Stassen’s 1948 presidential campaign. The former boy governor’s intellectual and organizational qualities had attracted followers to his cause, and some of them became influential members of his team. Stassen, to his credit and advantage, listened to their advice on most matters, but not when it conflicted with his ambitions. Was this unwillingness due to an overwhelming self-confidence in his future, as Matteson sensed, or was it, as his biographers suggest, an inability to think introspectively?⁴⁶ It is also worth considering whether he believed—accurately or not—that he acted with the approval of the president. In any event, against the judgment of his friends, Stassen plunged into a hopeless campaign to unseat Nixon.

The Nixon Fiasco

Stassen’s actions against Nixon were apparently based on long-standing grievances between the two politicians. They had met in 1944 during World War II, when both were serving as naval officers in the Solomon Islands. Nixon—six years Stassen’s junior—professed that he had been favorably impressed by the chief aide to Admiral Halsey. Stassen claimed he had no recollection of the brief meeting. They shared a youthful belief in the need to liberalize the Republican Party, and both endorsed the other’s campaigns—Nixon’s for Congress in 1946 and the Senate in 1950, and Stassen’s for the Republican presidential candidacy in 1948.⁴⁷

But friction arose in 1952 when Nixon became the vice presidential candidate. Nixon never forgave Stassen for urging him to quit after the exposure of a Nixon campaign fund from wealthy contributors. Nixon, in turn, helped block Stassen’s aspirations to be undersecretary of state in the Eisenhower administration when the vice president supported fellow Californian Herbert Hoover Jr. for that post.⁴⁸ In any event, it was unlikely that Dulles would have accepted Stassen as his undersecretary under any circumstances.

Was mutual estrangement a sufficient reason to explain Stassen’s apparently impulsive effort to dump Nixon in 1956 in favor of a more suitable candidate? And given his personal history, there was only one obvious candidate: himself. But he could hardly present this alternative to the president or to the Republican Party. He thus made a point of excluding himself as Nixon’s replacement.

Eisenhower’s ileitis attack in June 1956, only two months before the Republican convention in Philadelphia, was a reminder of the critical role of the vice president if the president became incapacitated. It energized Stassen to act on what a Nixon biographer called a “plot” to replace Nixon with Governor Christian Herter of Massachusetts. When Republican Party chairman Leonard Hall asked Herter to nominate Nixon, he knew that “something was wrong” when the Massachusetts governor asked for time to think about it.⁴⁹

Herter was a liberal Republican, with political views that Stassen and Eisenhower could appreciate. As a former diplomat, he was experienced in foreign relations and might have been a natural candidate to oppose Nixon, except for some obvious reasons. Among them were age—sixty-one—and physical infirmities—severe arthritis. But most notable was a lack of interest in serving as vice president, although he was flattered by the attention. Stassen’s proposal of Herter was based in part on Nixon’s association with Senator McCarthy, which had damaged his reputation in the liberal wing of the party. Moreover, as Stassen observed to reporters, the Gallup poll showed that with Nixon on the ticket, the Republicans would suffer a 6 percent loss in the general election. While this would not affect Eisenhower’s reelection, it might have resonance in the congressional races.⁵⁰ What Stassen did not discuss was his recognition that an elderly Vice President Herter would not be a rival for the presidency in 1960.

The former Minnesota governor did not rest his case solely on opinion polls. He asserted that Nixon had “evident weakness” among labor, minority groups, and independent voters. Stassen also benefited from McCarthy’s denunciation of him “as one of the most contemptible politicians of our era … possessed of an overpowering ambition to become President.”⁵¹ McCarthy may not have been far from the mark about Stassen’s ambitions, but his antagonism two years after his censure by the Senate only served to raise Stassen’s reputation among liberal Republicans.

That members of the Republican establishment, particularly party chairman Hall and Eisenhower’s press secretary James Hagerty, were solidly behind Nixon did not deter Stassen. He believed that only Eisenhower could stop him from advancing his plan to install Herter in place of Nixon. He was mistaken; congressional Republicans solidly supported the vice president. Stassen never had the backing of more than a few liberal Republicans, and even they quickly retreated in the face of the party’s opposition. Former Massachusetts governor Robert F. Bradford, who, according to Stassen, had encouraged the “dump Nixon” movement, denied ever writing to or talking with Stassen about the Nixon candidacy. Bradford wondered whether Stassen had confused him with his son, who had worked in Stassen’s anti-Nixon headquarters.⁵²

There were elements of absurdity in Stassen’s attempt to oust Nixon. With Eisenhower in Panama at the Inter-American Conference, Stassen wrote to Nixon and expressed his “long and continuing personal friendly feelings toward you,” yet he hoped Nixon would join him in supporting Herter for the vice presidency. This language indicates that Stassen was either hypocritical or delusional, and in light of his egoism, the latter seems more likely. Whatever excitement Herter experienced at his anointment by Stassen was quickly extinguished when Hall held out the possibility of an undersecretary of state position if he agreed to nominate Nixon. Given Herter’s preferences, he accepted the invitation, regardless of whether the State Department post ever materialized. To avoid any further doubts, Hall pressed Nixon to tell the president that he wanted to stay in office. There was no question, as Hall made clear, that dropping Nixon from the ticket would disrupt party unity.⁵³

Despite the lack of support from any corner of the Republican Party, Stassen persisted in his quixotic campaign right up to the opening of the convention. On the dubious assumption that Eisenhower remained on his side, he kept Herter’s name in contention long after Herter himself had agreed to nominate Nixon on the convention floor. The situation created by Stassen may have caused a brief sensation, as convention chairman Joseph Martin (R-MA) remarked, but Stassen himself was an embarrassing joke by the time the party met in San Francisco. Stassen did not recognize either the embarrassment he created or the laughingstock he had become. He was convinced that new polls, which were never released, showed the wisdom of his choice of Herter. Even when Herter agreed to renominate the vice president, Stassen was undeterred. Nixon could hardly believe it when Stassen claimed that Herter’s decision “was itself a confirmation of his [Stassen’s] very strong standing in the party.”⁵⁴

Finally recognizing the inevitability of Nixon’s renomination, Stassen asked Martin if he could second the nomination. He had no qualms about saying that he had always been a team player. Although the maximum number of seconding speeches had already been allotted, the chairman allowed Stassen two minutes for the sake of party harmony. Stassen rambled on for twelve minutes.⁵⁵

The reactions of the two principals involved in Stassen’s gambit—Nixon and Eisenhower—are worth noting. The vice president displayed the same reserve he had shown in September 1955 when the president suffered a heart attack. Nixon took pains not to appear too ready to assume presidential duties. Similarly, he took no public offense at Stassen’s brash attempts to take his office from him. He commented to the United Press on July 29 that “any individual within a political party has a right to express his views on candidates.” And, he added, “a healthy dispute” never proved harmful to a political campaign. Even in his memoirs, Nixon was restrained in his judgment of his adversary: “Many supporters urged me to shrug off Stassen’s effort as a clownish and transparent power play. But I knew that Stassen was a clever man, and except when blinded by ambition, a very able one.”⁵⁶ If Nixon’s restraint was an act, it was successful. He did not come across as feeling unfairly attacked by his former friend. It was good politics. He expressed no objection to the concept of an open convention, since he knew he had the backing of the Republican establishment. He let Hall and Hagerty take up his cause. Whatever resentment he may have felt over Eisenhower’s treatment of him was not exposed to the public.

The role of the president in this travesty was more complicated. He could have stopped Stassen in his tracks at any time but chose not to. Granted that Eisenhower’s temperament disposed him to allow the party to determine the choice of a nominee, but he had given so many indications of his dissatisfaction with his vice president that a less determined man than Nixon would have taken the hint. Eisenhower had considered Robert B. Anderson, a former Democrat from Texas, to be a suitable candidate for the office, but Anderson was not interested. The president then urged Nixon to take a cabinet position. Dulles was securely positioned at the State Department, but Nixon could have Defense after Wilson retired. Nixon, however, recognized that there was no better position for a politician than serving as vice president under an old man with a heart condition. He did not take the bait, even when Ike reminded him that no vice president since Martin Van Buren had been elected president.⁵⁷ How the president responded to the Stassen initiative should have been an indication of his ambivalence toward Nixon’s renomination. Eisenhower gave Stassen a leave of absence to drum up support for Herter. Stassen was free to promote his campaign against Nixon, as long as he did not do so as a member of the cabinet. After the election, speechwriter Emmett Hughes noted that Ike did not regret Stassen’s campaign to remove Nixon from the Republican ticket: “I’ve watched Dick a long time,” the president said, “and he just hasn’t grown.”⁵⁸

It is obvious that Eisenhower had no enthusiasm for retaining Nixon, but he deferred to the will of his party. The vice president’s popularity in right-wing circles of the Republican Party allowed him to ignore the president’s signals. As for the Stassen intervention, Eisenhower suggested in his memoirs that it added some excitement to what might have been a dull affair.⁵⁹ In fact, he seemed to enjoy the theater it created.

Resuming His Post

Although the president identified Stassen pejoratively as a professional politician, he continued to value his adviser’s many abilities. Three weeks before the Republican convention in San Francisco, Stassen told the press that he would return to his role as presidential assistant on disarmament, regardless of whether Nixon was renominated. After a four-week leave of absence, he was back at his White House duties immediately after the convention adjourned.⁶⁰ Stassen submitted his resignation after the election, but press secretary Hagerty made it clear that this action was nothing more than a traditional gesture extended to reelected presidents.⁶¹ This sequence of events could not have taken place if the president had lost confidence in his adviser. Stassen had every right to assume that he would continue in his post, secure in the backing of the president.

When he returned to his office, it was as if the Nixon interlude had never happened. During his absence, Amos Peaslee had stepped in with confidence as his surrogate. The State Department’s apparent dismissal of Stassen’s proposals was not the final word on the subject. Speaking for Dulles, Murphy acknowledged that “there may be political considerations that would make it advisable for the US to take the initiative with regard to nuclear weapons.” Not least of these were Soviet demands for discontinuing nuclear tests, whether or not there was a general agreement on disarmament in place. The British, French, and Canadians agreed and suggested that the UN Security Council take up the question of suspending nuclear tests. World opinion strongly favored this approach, as the public was becoming increasingly aware of the hazards of radiation. Accordingly, the secretary of state was supporting a draft that would have the United States abstain from testing nuclear weapons for at least a year. But, as noted, it was just a draft.⁶²

The special assistant, however, lost no time in pushing Secretary Wilson to develop methods to measure reductions in armaments and military expenditures. He was heartened by Bulganin’s willingness to reach a partial agreement without waiting for a resolution of the entire disarmament issue. After blaming the United States for failing to respond to the USSR’s reasonable initiatives to reduce armaments, the Soviet premier admitted that, “in view of the existence of a genuine desire of all parties concerned to come to an agreement on the problem of disarmament, there is the possibility of reaching an agreement—if not on this entire problem, at least on some of the parts, i.e., the reduction of conventional armaments, prohibition of atomic weapons, reduction of military budgets, etc.”⁶³

A month later, Bulganin repeated his recommendation for a partial solution, with a specific reference to nuclear weapons tests: “Until the necessary agreement on the prohibition of atomic weapons is attained, it would, in our opinion be desirable to reach agreement at this time on at least the first step toward the solution of the problem of atomic weapons—the prohibition of testing atomic and hydrogen weapons.”⁶⁴ Stassen might not concur with his priorities, but he could endorse Bulganin’s statement on September 11 that “agreement on any individual problem or partial proposal should not be made contingent on agreement of the disarmament problem as a whole.”⁶⁵

The tenor of this correspondence should have confirmed the wisdom of the recommendations Stassen had been making for the past year. Instead, the United States was sidetracked by the exigencies of a heated presidential election that was entering its last phase and by the concurrent Suez crisis, which exacerbated differences with both the British and French allies and the Soviet adversary. On the eve of the election, the British and French, along with the Israelis, invaded Egypt, despite the opposition of the White House. At the same time, the USSR ousted Hungary’s dissident Communist government by force, taking advantage of a split among the NATO allies. These diversions inevitably poisoned relations between the two superpowers and undermined Stassen’s optimism.

Departing from the friendly tone of his earlier exchanges with Bulganin, Eisenhower laced into the Soviet premier on October 21 and accused him of a series of offenses, beginning with a note, sent in the midst of the presidential election campaign, that seemed to endorse his opponent’s position on nuclear testing. The letter had been made public before it could be translated. In addition, Eisenhower charged that Bulganin’s statement with respect to the secretary of state “is not only unwarranted, but is personally offensive to me.” He added, “You seem to impugn my own sincerity.”⁶⁶

After this heated response to Bulganin’s letter of October 17, the president backed off a little, saying he would not instruct the secretary of state to return the letter to the Soviet embassy. He made this concession not because he was “tolerant of these departures from accepted international practice” but because he still hoped that direct communication could serve the cause of peace. This outburst expressed Eisenhower’s impatience with the USSR’s repeated insistence “that all plans for disarmament be based on simple voluntary agreements. Now, as always this plan allows for no safeguards, no control, no inspection.”⁶⁷

Expectations of progress in limiting nuclear tests were further dashed by the Democratic candidate for the presidency, Adlai Stevenson. He had expressed his opposition to all nuclear testing in April 1956; then in October he promised to end all H-bomb testing if he were elected president. One consequence of these challenges was Stassen’s need to distance himself from Stevenson’s position to maintain credibility in his party. This might explain his vigorous attack on the Democrat’s position as untenable and his announcement on August 24 that nuclear tests must continue.⁶⁸

In this environment, Secretary Dulles, who had kept a low profile during the Nixon fiasco, raised the stakes to reinforce his hard line on disarmament. As his position became more acceptable to Eisenhower, Stassen’s stock inevitably declined. Dulles managed to defer any response to Bulganin until further study on disarmament had been conducted in association with the British, French, and Canadian governments. Dulles had no shortage of allies in thwarting Stassen’s initiatives, including the president at this time.⁶⁹ So the year ended with no progress on the partial steps toward arms limitation that Stassen had been advocating since taking office.