No doubt this deeply embarrassed Eisenhower. Yet it revealed the degree to which the party embraced his Middle Way and jettisoned the principles of the more conservative Taft faction. Political analysts caught on to Ike’s emphasis on reforming his party and banishing the ghosts of Coolidge and Hoover. New York Times columnist Arthur Krock saw that Ike had drawn a key lesson from the November 1954 defeat: “The Republican party must accept the political verities of the second half of the twentieth century instead of indulging in nostalgia for the dead past and continuing to run against Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.”37
In early August 1955, just as he was preparing to depart for his long-awaited Denver vacation, Eisenhower casually spoke to a group of Republican congressional staff workers and once again stressed the centrist ambitions of Eisenhower Republicanism. “It is idle to say that the Federal Government can be standoffish” toward the needs of the people, he said in the steaming August heat on the White House lawn. Certainly the Republican Party must identify itself with economic freedom and individualism. But “we must never be a party that is indifferent to the sufferings of a great community where, through some unusual cause, people are out of work, where people can’t educate their own children, where through any kind of disaster, natural or economic, people are suffering.” Eisenhower thought these ideas formed a “middle way” philosophy that could transform the Republican Party into the majority party in the United States—if only his loyalists would simply follow his advice.38
CHAPTER 11
* * *
To the Summit
“I believe mankind longs for freedom from war and rumors of war.”
I
BY THE START OF 1955 Eisenhower had attained extraordinary popularity and prestige in American public life. He had tamed the war in Korea and avoided American entanglement in Indochina. He had brought fiscal balance back to Washington. He had guided the nation through a brief recession and ushered in an era of robust economic growth. His expansion of social security aided millions. His defanging of McCarthy won him wide respect. Even his tepid support of civil rights for African Americans aligned with public opinion in much of the nation. And in July 1955 he pulled off yet another success. He traveled to Geneva to meet with the heads of government of Britain, France, and the Soviet Union in an effort to ease cold war tensions. It was the first time since 1945, when Stalin, Truman, and Churchill had met at Potsdam, that American and Soviet leaders had convened. The intervening decade had been a time of great anxiety, political upheaval, war, and an intensified nuclear arms race. The meeting in Geneva brought a break in the clouds, a moment when world leaders talked peace and when Great Power war, which had once seemed inevitable, began at last to look unlikely. Eisenhower basked in what was quickly dubbed “the spirit of Geneva.”
The Geneva summit of 1955 grew principally from the need of the new post-Stalin leaders in the Kremlin to show the world a moderate face. The collective leadership that replaced Stalin had stumbled for a while in finding a strategy for waging the cold war, but by the spring of 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the dominant figure in the Soviet government, a new look began to take shape. This bellicose, rotund Ukrainian with a bald head and a menacing grin had been one of Stalin’s closest associates in the 1930s and during the war years. A belligerent ideologue, he now held the post of first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Yet he saw that Stalin’s foreign policy had failed to win security and stability for his country. Stalin’s brutal behavior had triggered a robust Western response, from the infusion of Marshall Plan dollars to the creation of NATO and the rearming of Western Germany. Most worrisome, the United States had developed a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons and the aircraft to deliver them anywhere in the world. Meanwhile the Soviet Union was still poor and relatively weak—its atomic weapons arsenal was a fraction of America’s—and its hold on its Eastern European satellites was uncertain, as uprisings in Berlin in 1953 revealed. Soviet interests, Khrushchev believed, would best be served by a period of peaceful coexistence with the West rather than direct confrontation.
To signal his willingness to temper the conflict with the West, Khrushchev took some notable steps. In early 1955 the Soviets acquiesced to the long-standing Western demand to evacuate neutral Austria and end the four-power occupation of that country. He also made a major break with Stalin’s policy by traveling to Belgrade to curry favor with Marshal Josip Tito, the Yugoslav communist whom Stalin had declared an apostate and traitor to the Marxist cause. Khrushchev also applauded the meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, of world leaders from 29 African and Asian nations; even though these states declared themselves to be nonaligned in the cold war, they aired their grievances about the capitalist and colonial world order, much to Khrushchev’s delight. To cap off this period of activity, Khrushchev put public pressure on the Western powers to convene a major international summit to resolve such issues as the division of Germany, the militarization of Europe, and the nuclear arms race.1
Eisenhower initially rebuffed the idea of a summit with the Soviets, even saying in a news conference in April, “I see no reason for that summit meeting.” In a private conversation Ike said he perceived no “fundamental changes in Communist motives or objectives,” just a shift in tactics. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles agreed, and strongly. Dulles believed that Khrushchev’s charm offensive sprang from fundamental weakness. The Soviet economy had failed to meet basic consumer needs; the subventions to satellite states in Eastern Europe and China had become a costly burden; and the Russians were struggling to keep up with the Americans in the arms race. Dulles concluded that the Soviets wanted “a pause” in the geopolitical contest, and he was not inclined to give them one. In fact Dulles feared that a summit would merely give Khrushchev and his front man, the nominal head of state Nikolai Bulganin, a world stage to propose a series of bold ideas about uniting Germany, disarming Europe, and halting the arms race. Such ploys would play well in Europe and in the Third World, and might lead to the weakening of the NATO alliance that Dulles had toiled so long to secure. In short, a summit promised only risk and no reward.2
So why agree to meet the Soviets at all? Eisenhower, unlike Dulles, felt he could not appear “senselessly stubborn,” as he put it later. If proposals for peace and reconciliation were on the table, America must at least consider them. The public in America and in Europe, so accustomed to bad news about the Great Power rivalry, had been heartened by signs of a softening coming from Moscow. Intransigence now would be bad publicity for the United States.3
British leaders felt even more pressure. On April 6, 1955, Anthony Eden took over as prime minister from an ailing Winston Churchill. Eden, the suave, handsome Tory and longtime foreign minister, had toiled for years in Churchill’s shadow. Given the top job at long last, he announced a general election so as to strengthen his parliamentary mandate. This was set for May 26; the announcement of a great summit meeting to discuss peace with world leaders would help his campaign against the much more neutralist Labour Party. American officials in London reported to Dulles that “the British are disarmingly frank in acknowledging their proposals [for talks with the Soviets] . . . are aimed at the local electorate.” In a personal message Prime Minister Eden pleaded with Eisenhower to agree to a meeting of the Big Four world leaders. Despite Dulles’s serious reservations, Ike relented. Privately he told Eden that he feared “raising false hopes” about a breakthrough in the cold war stalemate. But he understood the political imperative of embracing the cause of peace and détente. The date for a meeting with the Soviet, British, French, and American heads of state was set for July 18–23, 1955, in Geneva.4
For the next six weeks the national security staff spun itself into a frenzy preparing for the great meeting. One of the major issues they expected the Soviets to press was the reunification and neutralization of Germany, a plan unacceptable to the Americans but appealing to many Germans. Another probable Soviet gambit would conce
ntrate on disarming central Europe—perhaps even creating a demilitarized zone in some or all of Europe—a suggestion that struck at the heart of the large American military presence across Europe and that would weaken NATO. And the Great Powers would likely tangle over the question of nuclear weapons: What if the USSR called for a nuclear arms freeze or even a radical proposal like the abolition of nuclear weapons?
The veteran newsman Joseph Alsop captured the preconference buzz in Washington very nicely when he wrote in his column, “Immense numbers of position papers were laboriously prepared. But essentially the aim was to prevent anything awful happening at the summit, rather than to make anything good happen there. Most of the position papers took the form: ‘If the Soviets make move A concerning Germany, then we must make move B to secure a check-mate.’ ” But on one matter, the arms race, American planners were genuinely torn, and it was here that Eisenhower would play a decisive role in shaping the Geneva meeting.5
The issue of nuclear weapons most worried American planners because it was the one that had the greatest influence in the public mind. By 1955, the superpowers had attained the ability to detonate hydrogen bombs of extraordinary power. Nuclear war would certainly mark the end of civilization. It was imperative that in public, at least, American officials recognize the deep desire of the world’s people to step back from the brink and impose some reasonable limits on atomic weapons. And yet, as government officials debated the appropriate American position, serious cleavages opened. The Pentagon and its military chiefs held an intransigent point of view: America’s nuclear arsenal was the best defense against a Soviet attack; it had already proven effective in limiting Soviet expansion. The limitation of nuclear arms would only help the Soviets in their bid for strategic parity with the United States. The USSR looked weak, and the military chiefs wanted to hold the Soviets’ “feet to the fire.”6
Such inflexibility annoyed Eisenhower. In a tense meeting of the National Security Council at the end of June, the president directly challenged Admiral Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, calling the arms race “a mounting spiral towards war.” If Radford really believed that arms agreements could never be advantageous, then perhaps the United States should “go to war at once with the Soviet Union.” Defense Secretary Wilson chimed in, backing up Radford. Atomic weapons were essential to countering the Soviet advantage in military manpower in Europe and Chinese manpower in Asia. Without them the communists would have “an overwhelming advantage.”
Eisenhower did not give up, however. While he knew that any serious agreement limiting nuclear arms was unlikely, he did not wish to go to Geneva only to obstruct the meeting. He wanted to put an arms proposal on the table that would at least test the willingness of the Soviets to negotiate. He was, he said, “much intrigued” with an idea of mutual inspection of military installations, even before an arms agreement was reached. This idea had been circulating among his various strategy planners for some time as one of many possible proposals the Americans might make. For Eisenhower, this one seemed to have the most appeal. If both the USSR and the United States agreed to open their arms installations to public inspection, this act alone might serve as a foundation for arms reductions and confidence building. At the very least such mutual inspections might help “penetrate the veil of Soviet intentions.” More crucial, Ike believed, his trip to Geneva needed some kind of big positive action on this front. If America emphasized only military solutions to all these great problems, he declared, “it would lose the support of the world.”7
These ruminations by the president led Foster Dulles to despair. This cautious, rigid, and suspicious man knew that Eisenhower wanted to make a bold gesture of peace and reconciliation, and he was terrified that he would go too far. All the patient work of building up the Western alliance and isolating the Soviet Union might be given away in a flash merely to placate public opinion. Two days before he left for Geneva, Dulles invited a fellow cold war hawk, C. D. Jackson, to his home for dinner and unburdened himself of his fears. Eisenhower, Dulles confessed, “is so inclined to be humanly generous, to accept a superficial tactical smile as evidence of inner warmth, that he might in a personal moment with the Russians accept a promise or a proposition at face value and upset the apple cart.” The looming danger was that Ike’s behavior might smack of appeasement—a word Dulles used and then retracted, as if it were too poisonous to utter. If that happened, Dulles’s career, built upon his ferocious anticommunism, would be in tatters. Dulles felt he could go toe to toe with the Soviets and give up nothing, but Eisenhower always wanted to avoid confrontation and believed a handshake could make a difference. Sighing into his afterdinner drink, Dulles said, “I would hate to see the whole edifice undermined in response to a smile.”8
II
Just an hour before his departure to Europe on the evening of July 15, 1955, Eisenhower sat down behind his desk in the Oval Office, faced a bank of cameras and microphones, and addressed the nation. His worries about raising public expectations had apparently vanished. He declared that for the first time in American history, a president was traveling overseas “to engage in a conference with the heads of other governments in order to prevent wars, in order to see whether in this time of stress and strain we cannot devise measures that will keep from us this terrible scourge that afflicts mankind.” In Geneva he wished “to conciliate, to understand, to be tolerant, to try to see the other fellow’s viewpoint.” Throwing aside his earlier caution, he now asserted that the Great Powers had a chance to take “the greatest step toward peace, toward future prosperity and tranquility that has ever been taken in the history of mankind.” With soaring rhetoric like this crackling across the national airwaves, no wonder Dulles was worried!
To cap this remarkable peroration, Ike asked the people of the nation to pray. “Suppose, on the next Sabbath day observed by each of our religions, Americans, 165 million of us, went to our accustomed places of worship and, crowding those places, asked for help, and by doing so, demonstrated to all the world the sincerity and depth of our aspirations for peace. This would be a mighty force.”9
Eisenhower’s flock obeyed. Clergymen of all denominations offered blessings to the president as he set off to Europe. The World Council of Churches appealed for special prayers. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral and at Temple Emanuel in New York, fervent orisons could be heard. Daylong vigils were held across the country, as millions of worshippers asked for divine blessings upon the Big Four peacemakers. Some religious leaders chose to get as close as possible to the action: Billy Graham appeared in Geneva at the opening of the summit, setting up a revival meeting in a public park, where he led prayers for the world leaders. Graham joined in the chorus of heightened expectations, saying, “The next six days may be the most important in the history of the world.”10
The president, traveling on the presidential aircraft Columbine with Mamie and their son Maj. John Eisenhower, who served as Ike’s aide for the conference, arrived in Geneva on July 16. They were welcomed at the airport by a small Swiss military band and the Swiss president, Max Petitpierre. Speaking into a microphone on the tarmac, Eisenhower recalled that 11 years earlier he had come to Europe at the head of a great war machine to destroy Nazism. Now he came as an ambassador of peace. The 1,500 reporters far outnumbered the curious civilian onlookers. Mamie, holding an enormous bouquet of dark red roses, followed Ike to a waiting limousine, and they were whisked off through empty streets to a glamorous 18th-century chateau on the shore of icy-blue Lake Geneva.11
The next morning, a quiet Sunday, the president and his son escaped from the official residence to attend services at the small American church in Geneva, where an African American singer, Fanni Jones, then studying music in the city, sang the Negro spiritual “Sweet Little Jesus Boy.” Billy Graham was in attendance that day and, looking at Eisenhower in church with his head bowed, remarked to a friend, “I believe God is really on the side of that man.”12
The conference opened on Monday morning
, July 18, at the Palais des Nations, a sprawling, white neoclassical behemoth that once housed the ill-fated League of Nations. As the world leaders took their places—Nikolai Bulganin for the USSR, Eden for Britain, Eisenhower for America, and Prime Minister Edgar Faure for France—it became apparent that there would be no private meeting of the minds. James Reston of the New York Times wrote, “The four leaders are sitting around four vast tables flanked by hordes of officials and addressing one another as if they were at a public meeting. . . . Officials are banked around the principals like ringside spectators at a championship prizefight.” British foreign minister Harold Macmillan, a friend of Eisenhower’s from the war years, confessed that his heart sank as he looked out over the cavernous hall: “The walls were decorated with vast, somewhat confused frescoes depicting the End of the World, or the Battle of the Titans, or the Rape of the Sabines, or a mixture of all three. I could conceive of no arrangement less likely to lead to intimate or useful negotiations.”13
This formal atmosphere encouraged ponderous moralizing. The four leaders took turns laying out their positions, restating views that were already well known and on which they appeared to be inflexible. Premier Bulganin, a figurehead closely controlled by Khrushchev, mouthed the tired old argument calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Europe, an end to NATO, and only then the unification of Germany. The Americans wanted Germany unified and kept in NATO. The British offered a tepid proposal for a European security pact that would include all the major powers; the French, in a reprise of Eisenhower’s “atoms for peace” proposal, offered a plan to take all the money the world spent on nuclear arms and place it in a fund for the development of Third World countries. All of these airy ideas fell harmlessly to the marble floors of the great meeting hall.
The Age of Eisenhower Page 37