8

The Long Anticlimax, June 1957–February 1958

If Matteson was correct in his speculation that Dulles was waiting for Stassen “to step over the line he has drawn so that he can lower the boom,” Dulles had a long wait ahead. Not until February 14, 1958, did Stassen step down and leave the Eisenhower administration. Rumors circulated about the president’s dissatisfaction with Stassen’s conduct in London. This was obvious when Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News asked Eisenhower on June 19, 1957, if reports that Stassen had been reprimanded for exceeding his authority at the London disarmament talks had limited his effectiveness as a diplomat. The president’s defensive response seemed to confirm the rumors: “Well, first of all, let’s get one thing clear. He was not reprimanded.… He may have been rushing too fast.” That Eisenhower softened his statement with praise for Stassen’s dedication to his job did little to stop the rumors.¹

Stassen’s tin ear with respect to his position ensured that he would not anticipate the objections to his communications with Zorin. He reported to his wife, Esther, on June 1 that he flew to Paris for a NATO session and then back to London for more talks. There was no sense of a personal crisis in this letter. His concern for his wife’s health may have been a reason for avoiding the controversy, but based on the pattern of his life, it is more likely that he had already dismissed the issue as no longer important and was concentrating on the more pressing reasons for postponing a formal submission of his revised recommendations on arms control. He explained to Esther the need for new direct consultations with key NATO allies.² When the State Department produced a paper on June 11, it centered on a partial agreement with no conditions that were unacceptable to the Russians.³ Despite the furor he had raised in Washington and among the allies, Stassen appeared to have won his argument. No wonder that throughout June he exuded a sense of optimism and assumed that only procedural difficulties stood in the way of completing a deal with the Soviets. As he told Esther, negative press commentary, “usually so inaccurate and anxious to breed controversy[,] blocked completion of the slow but steady progress” he was making.⁴

Back at his post in London, he behaved as if the warnings and rebukes had never been issued. At a dinner on June 19 with Macmillan and Eden, he had no qualms about assuring his British hosts that he was speaking for the administration in saying that “US policy had at no time contemplated that nuclear testing would be stopped tonight; that a temporary suspension would only begin upon the ratification of a treaty.” He foresaw nothing that would stop the British from proceeding with their nuclear plans.⁵

He continued with his sunny expectations of support from Britain and other NATO allies when he reported to the president on July 1 that “much was accomplished in accordance with the effective and welcome instructions from Secretary Dulles.” No details of Dulles’s reactions to Stassen’s conversations were included in this letter, but the assumption was that the secretary of state was in tune with its confident tone. Stassen admitted “that new obstacles may arise or some barriers that are now being lowered may suddenly stiffen, but as of today it looks as if, with free world backing, we are entering the phase of careful and thorough formal presentation to the USSR. I will not endeavor to anticipate their response.”⁶ But despite this disclaimer about foreknowledge of Soviet reactions, he was optimistic about the outcome.

Stassen’s team shared his optimism The first preliminary draft of a working paper on June 15 “welcomed the acceptance by the delegation of the USSR of the necessity of inspection posts to be located within the territory of the USSR, US, [and] UK” for the control and detection of nuclear testing. Consequently, “the four [Western] delegations accept in principle the proposal for a temporary suspension of nuclear testing as a … first step of disarmament.”⁷

This illusion of optimism should have been exposed on July 28, when Dulles personally took over negotiations in London. If Stassen did not recognize the change, it may have been because the proposals the secretary carried with him were not substantially different from his own. The United States, Dulles declared, was prepared to accept inspection of all its territory in North America and asked the same from the Soviets. If they were not prepared to follow suit, he proposed a less ambitious Arctic zone where the United States and the USSR adjoined.⁸

This approach seemed to conform with Stassen’s first steps, offering hope for subsequent gains. Where it differed was with regard to the suspension of nuclear testing. Dulles agreed with the reservations expressed by physicists Lawrence and Teller. He then told Stassen that their opinions had also made a deep impression on the president: “since then he has had serious mental reservations as to the correctness of our proposal to suspend testing.”⁹

At a meeting of the subcommittee on July 8, the Soviet delegate confirmed Dulles’s skepticism about Soviet intentions. While asserting that the subcommittee was on the threshold of an agreement, Zorin’s position was essentially unchanged: he opposed the linkage of test suspension to the cessation of production, along with its complicated inspection system. He complained that the discussions in London were proceeding too slowly and that the United States had not responded satisfactorily to Soviet initiatives.¹⁰

Andrei Gromyko, Soviet foreign minister since February 1957, underscored his country’s dissatisfaction. When US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn E. Thompson talked with him on July 12, Gromyko complained that the London talks were moving much too slowly. The Soviet proposals had been submitted on June 7, yet “the US delegation had responded to them only in part and had not dealt with them fundamentally.” The Soviet foreign minister felt that his country had made a major concession by allowing aerial inspections without receiving appropriate compensation. Thompson, however, came away with the impression that the issue of inspection and control continued to stand in the way of progress.¹¹

It was in the context of this renewed deadlock that Dulles decided that negotiations had reached the stage where his presence in London would not only advance the disarmament process but also convince the allies that the United States continued to have their interests in mind.¹² If Stassen had his way, he would have continued to meet with Zorin, hoping for an eventual breakthrough. But his was a losing battle. The secretary of state controlled US policy in every particular. Implicit in his decision to take charge in London was the upstaging of Stassen as head of the US delegation, an action that the president’s assistant had no choice but to accept. Stassen took refuge in his belief that the president essentially backed his approach to disarmament. He was further encouraged by the conviction of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Lauris Norstad, that a system of nuclear inspection in Europe would protect the allies from a surprise air or ground attack. Minimally, the general believed that Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia should be included in ground inspections, and he would prefer the aerial inspection zone to extend to the Urals—all with NATO’s endorsement.¹³

During one of his few opportunities to confer with Zorin, Stassen’s zeal for accommodation was manifested in his statement that suspension of testing would go into effect on the same day as the treaty, without waiting to establish a control system. But he added the expectation that both sides would quickly install an inspection system to monitor the suspension of testing. Stassen left the meeting satisfied that it had been conducted in a businesslike manner with a serious tone that promised results.¹⁴

His colleagues on the delegation were wary of Zorin, suspecting that he was “looking for soft spots in [the] US position in order to get on with [the] Soviets’ basic mission of separating out tests by paper agreement.”¹⁵ Stassen may have been surprised by Zorin’s new hostile tone in July, but he was not put off by it. He was always able to see the silver lining. His repetitive advice to the administration was to keep the negotiating process in place no matter how high the obstacles seemed to be.

Terminating the London Negotiations

The spirit of accommodation, however, did not appear either in the formal US paper on disarmament or in the Soviet response at the end of August. In fact, the US proposal, overseen by Dulles, was a repudiation of many of the first-step proposals Stassen had initiated and the president had approved. Dulles’s paper, in essence, was a declaration of all or nothing. Any agreement would have to recognize that all the provisions were inseparable. The suspension of nuclear testing was dependent not only on a cutoff of the manufacture nuclear weapons but also on the whole package of conditions, including reductions in the size of the armed forces, safeguards against surprise attacks, and an inspection system to verify the suspension of testing. Particular emphasis was placed on the requirement for inspection of a significant part of the Soviet Union, as well as countries in the Warsaw bloc. This was one of the points the Soviets had never accepted in the past.¹⁶

Stassen usually took for granted the allies’ willingness to follow the US lead; Dulles did not. He was more sensitive to the aspirations and fears of the NATO allies. He was particularly concerned about Britain’s nuclear capabilities and that country’s worry that the United States would compromise those capabilities in dealing with the USSR. Macmillan’s visceral reaction to Stassen’s initiatives reflected his anxiety. Similarly, Moch wanted no agreement that would interfere with France’s entry into the nuclear club. Above all, the Western proposals submitted to the UN Disarmament Subcommittee in August displayed the secretary of state’s belief that the Soviets could not be trusted to abide by any agreement.

The August 29 document should have made the secretary of state’s views abundantly clear to Stassen. It did not. He still hoped that, after the Soviets’ inevitable rejection of the US position (resulting in the end of the London negotiations), the Soviets would offer new concessions.¹⁷

The Soviet response was negative and unbending. On the connection between nuclear test suspension and the cutoff of production, Zorin claimed that the Soviet stockpile was significantly smaller than America’s, so the USSR would be at a disadvantage if it accepted the US demands.¹⁸

This caveat was not at the heart of Soviet objections, however. The Soviet pronouncement on disarmament talks—issued two days before the US paper, but with knowledge of the Western position—blamed the United States unequivocally for the failure of the London talks and implicitly blamed Stassen as head of the US delegation. The Soviet statement of August 27 asserted that the UN subcommittee, under the control of the United States and its allies, had rejected a reasonable, comprehensive program for disarmament that called for the complete prohibition of atomic and hydrogen weapons.

Zorin was especially upset by NATO’s decision to place atomic weapons at the disposal of a number of Western European members of the bloc, including West Germany. In brief, his position was that whereas the Soviet delegates had been consistent in their efforts to promote disarmament, the United States and its allies had “been consistently increasing the production of all types of armaments, and particularly of mean[s] of mass destruction, such as atomic and hydrogen weapons.”¹⁹ Such was the litany of obstacles, the Soviets insisted, originating in the United States.

The Soviet statement was a surprising ad hominem attack on Stassen as leader of the US delegation. Given the seemingly close relationship that had developed between Zorin and Stassen, at least from the latter’s perspective, the language terminating the London talks was harsh: “So far, the work of the United Nations Commission and its Sub-Committee has failed to yield positive results. There is no truth to the assertions of those who are now trying to give world public opinion the impression that the disarmament [talks] that have been going on in London for five months, at this session of the Sub-committee, have made satisfactory progress. In all this time the Sub-Committee has not advanced one inch towards the solution of the problems referred to it.” Zorin went on to accuse “ruling circles of the Western powers of playing a double game”: to deceive the public, they “are camouflaging military preparations under talks about disarmament and trying to create the impression that some genuine effort is being made in the United Nations Sub-Committee, whereas in fact the Sub-Committee is marking time.”²⁰ Since US behavior in the subcommittee had frustrated Soviet disarmament proposals, Zorin recommended that “disarmament questions could be discussed in the United Nations not by five countries alone, but also by other states having a vital interest in the settlement of the problem of disarmament.”²¹

Stassen’s Last Efforts

If Stassen recognized that the Soviets viewed him as their primary antagonist, it was not reflected in his reactions. He dismissed the Soviet criticism, just as he had the criticisms from his colleagues. On the eve of his departure from the Eisenhower administration, pundit Arthur Krock labeled Stassen the “‘asbestos man’ in his special suit of asbestos, on a deck that everyone told him was burning beneath him.”²² If Stassen could withstand the Nixon debacle of 1956 and the Zorin embarrassment of 1957, he had no reason to believe he could not go on as he had in the past.

He was mistaken in assuming that he could undo the all-or-nothing approach of the August 29 position that terminated the London meetings of the UN Subcommittee on Disarmament. Failing to appreciate his loss of status in the administration, he plunged ahead with an informal proposal to the secretary of state on September 23 that could satisfy the Soviets. It was much like Zorin’s July approach. There would be a two-year suspension of nuclear weapons testing, without reference to a cutoff in the production of fissionable material. He also omitted the installation of an inspection system to ensure compliance with the test ban.²³

Dulles quickly responded, even though it was hardly necessary. The Defense Department expressed all his objections. Most objectionable to Dulles was abandonment of the principle of inseparability of all components in the nuclear de-escalation process—the heart of his August 29 paper. To further cloud Stassen’s case, the Joint Chiefs were quick to note that his recommendations were in consonance with the Soviet resolutions on the suspension of nuclear tests introduced to the UN General Assembly on September 20, hinting that Stassen was a Soviet agent.²⁴

Not surprisingly, these dissents did not stop Stassen from making a vigorous argument for the immediate cessation of testing without obtaining agreement on any of the red lines required by the August 29 statement. This was, he insisted a “historic moment” that should not be wasted. He believed that the consensus of UN members supported his position, and he could take satisfaction in knowing that the US ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, agreed. He professed that the Soviet acceptance of inspection posts that included a portion of the northwestern United States and western Canada, along with approximately the same number of square miles of Soviet territory, signaled an opening up of the Soviet Union.²⁵

Stassen did not win approval from the secretary of state, but the president expressed support for restarting talks. He thought “it might be of interest to try to ascertain as to whether in fact the Soviets would ‘open up’ and to what degree, this to be done without any implication that we would accept testing without cut-off or inspection against surprise attack or the other features of our program.”²⁶

The president’s opaque response buoyed Stassen’s hopes, but the weight of the opposition from every other corner of the administration assured his defeat. Eisenhower deferred to the opposition. Dulles used this opportunity to urge the president to part with Stassen. “I have come reluctantly to the conclusion,” he wrote in a memo to the president on September 28, “that Harold feels that we should seek some sort of agreement with the Russians on almost any terms—on their terms if necessary.” Such an approach to disarmament, Dulles continued, was dangerous for the allies as well as for the United States. Just how “reluctant” Dulles was to raise this issue with Eisenhower can be judged by his conclusion that “Harold recognizes that the difference of our viewpoint is perhaps irreconcilable.”²⁷ Nevertheless, the president chose not to act on Dulles’s advice at this time.

While Dulles the lawyer was usually careful not to insult Stassen in his communications with Eisenhower, he was more candid when addressing him directly. Recklessly, Stassen challenged Dulles in December, reprimanding him for announcing to the press that his informal May 31 memorandum to Zorin had not been authorized. Dulles curtly replied, “What I said, however, could have been no surprise to you.” He referred to the cable of June 4, which explicitly stated that there were certain aspects of the memorandum that the government could not accept: “Under these circumstances, I could hardly have answered affirmatively the question of ‘whether this memorandum was representative of the views of the American government.’”²⁸

There could have been no sharper reminder of Stassen’s loss of status than this reference to his May 31 gaffe. Once again, Stassen chose to ignore the implication that he was persona non grata in Washington, relying on Eisenhower’s vague backing. Two weeks later, at the National Security Council meeting on January 6, 1958, he repeated his recommendations for revising the decisions of August 29. He sounded confident that the Soviet Union would also find his recommendations workable. While he was specific in his advocacy of inspection stations in the United States and USSR, he purposely left other contentious issues, such as cessation of the production of nuclear weapons, to subsequent negotiations.²⁹

There was essentially nothing new in these proposals. Dulles then recorded his objection to every particular, from the certain dissent of the NATO allies, who would be opposed to any test suspension, to the protests of West Coast congressmen, who would oppose opening their districts to Soviet inspection while the rest of the country was exempt. Dulles’s dissent was familiar and unnecessary by this time. He, the Pentagon, and the Atomic Energy Commission had won the president over to their side. Eisenhower pondered alternatives. He recognized the validity of Stassen’s concern about world public opinion but leaned toward the judgments of those scientists who distrusted Soviet intentions. The NSC recorded the president’s decision to adhere to the proposals Dulles had set out on August 29.³⁰

End of the Journey

At last, Stassen’s place in the Eisenhower administration was coming to an end. It was a messy exit as he ignored the many hints about his impending departure emanating from the White House. On February 1, 1958, he could not have avoided the headline in the New York Times, “President Ready to Drop Stassen as an Assistant,” followed by James Reston’s report that the president was prepared to accept his resignation and to request it if necessary.

This was not the understanding Stassen took away from a meeting with the president a week later. He stated that he had not been asked to resign. Nevertheless, he did so on February 15, ostensibly to announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination as governor of Pennsylvania.³¹

It is tempting to conclude that Stassen’s egoism and his ambition to be at the center of power accounted for his insensitivity and his unwillingness to accept the success of his enemies in thwarting his plan to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union. He met every rebuff with renewed energy and continued to submit proposals that he knew were unwelcome among all his colleagues, with the exception of Ambassador Lodge.

But was he as detached from reality as the record suggests? If so, he would not have laid the groundwork for engaging in Pennsylvania politics as early as February 1957, when his interest in that state’s governor’s race was leaked to the New York Times. This alternative took an even more serious turn when he advised his wife to look for a Pennsylvania location after selling his home in Washington. His intentions as the year ended were not secret, and his enemies were not silent about his ambitions. Representative James P. Fulton (R-PA) was annoyed enough to ask Dulles in January 1958 to make Stassen choose between keeping his job as presidential assistant and running for governor of Pennsylvania.³²

Stassen’s quixotic Pennsylvania ventures, as doomed as his presidential aspirations had been, do not explain why he clung so long to his position as presidential adviser. A reasonable answer may be found in his passion to mitigate the dangers of the Cold War. Toward this end, he was always able to marshal evidence, in his methodical way, to justify his opinions, believing that his ideas were more sensible than those of his adversaries. Even as he left Washington, he could not refrain from submitting two articles to the New York Times urging a trial agreement with the Soviet Union and suspending nuclear tests for two years under a rigid inspection system. It was a variation of the many “first steps” he had been urging since his appointment as special assistant. He followed this up with a detailed proposal for a summit, similar to the one in Geneva in 1955. He suggested the United Nations as the venue, with six nations drawn from both blocs. Republican and Democratic senators would be involved as well, and UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was his choice to chair the sessions.³³

Were these articles a signal that he was ready to return to Washington if called? This was not a plea for his old job but notice that he was ready to implement his ideas as president if the opportunity arose. And if such an invitation were not forthcoming, his six subsequent attempts to win the Republican nomination—ending with the 1992 campaign when he was eighty-five years old—suggest that he was willing to create his own opportunities. His presidential aspirations were unrealistic, but putting ego aside, what remained was the liberal Republican who had emerged from World War II determined to serve his party and his country, following a path that derived from his experience as one of the fathers of the UN Charter. His belief in his destiny may have been unjustified, but a steadfast conviction that it was possible to live in a world free from the menace of a nuclear bomb resonated throughout his long life.