The Age of Eisenhower
Page 38
Yet once the leaders adjourned from their set-piece exercises at the conference table, little ripples of cordiality began to radiate through the meeting rooms. Between breaks the delegations chatted around groaning tables of food and drink, and the quartet of leaders entertained one another at dinners and cocktails throughout the week, allowing some spontaneous discussions. The Soviets were surprisingly warm hosts, Macmillan recalled, offering guests at their evening dinners large tumblers of vodka and giving heartfelt toasts to the memory of the great Second World War alliance. In these informal settings the Eisenhower magic had an opportunity to shine. One observer noted that Eisenhower’s “man-from-Abilene” style impressed the Soviets, and his earnest, sincere declarations seemed to disarm their suspicions. Ike showed off his talent as “the great pacifier, the master of the sweeping generalization.” He spoke unceasingly about “building a bridge between East and West,” prompting one reporter to ask, “How many bridges can he build in one afternoon?” Long on gestures of warmth, Ike was short on detail: “He has shunned specifics like the plague.”14
Eisenhower put his sincerity to work outside the conference meetings. On July 18 he hosted a dinner at his villa for Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. With Molotov seated on his left and Bulganin on his right, Eisenhower regaled the men with a detailed analysis of his campaign in Normandy, from D-Day to the liberation of France. Bulganin, who had been a lifelong apparatchik in the security services and had served as defense minister before taking over as nominal head of state under Khrushchev’s patronage, peppered the president with questions. Evidently he knew little about American military operations in Europe in 1944–45. As the evening wore on, Bulganin, a rotund man with a white goatee and an amiable laugh, frequently expressed “the warmest feelings of friendship for the American people and for the President.” The two men returned again and again to the “futility of war in the atomic age.” Even Dulles, having received a respectful toast from his old nemesis Molotov, was touched by the change in the Soviets’ tone.
Two days later Eisenhower invited Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the great battle commander and conqueror of the German Wehrmacht, for a private luncheon. One of the Second World War’s heroes, Zhukov had been sidelined by Stalin as a possible rival and threat, but he had returned to prominence since Stalin’s death and now served as defense minister. The two men spoke as friends and seasoned warriors. They had a remarkably open and wide-ranging discussion whose theme was the urgent need to restore good U.S.-Soviet relations despite their differing systems of government. The lunch concluded with a casual discussion of trout fishing, a passion the men shared. In all these exchanges the heads of government agreed to little of substance, but after so many years of frozen hostility, these warm currents of sympathy promoted good feeling and optimism.15
By the end of the third day of meetings, however, the atmosphere in the meeting hall had become strained. Bulganin continued to read speeches clearly prepared for him by others. Khrushchev seemed to the Westerners to be the real circus master. Macmillan was amazed: “How can this fat, vulgar man, with his pig eyes and ceaseless flow of talk, really be the head—the aspirant Tsar—of all these millions of people and this vast country?”16
The summit began to look like a failure. But then Eisenhower made a move that he had carefully planned ahead of time. He had been drawn to the idea of a mutual weapons-inspection program that would open both American and Soviet military installations to regular monitoring. Given the intense security and secrecy that had always surrounded military bases in both countries, this seemed a quixotic idea at best. Yet the context helps explain Eisenhower’s thinking: just a few months earlier, James Killian had made his heart-stopping presentation in the White House about the vulnerabilities of the United States to a surprise attack. In reply the president had ordered a rapid program to get the U-2 spy plane operational. Its first test run would come in August. Eisenhower desperately wanted the information the secret overflights would provide to be sure that the USSR was not preparing a major attack. But how much easier it would be if both sides simply opened their skies to aircraft for approved overflights! Photographs would make plain the size of the arsenals and their state of readiness. In theory, such information, publicly gathered, would raise confidence and ease tensions. Ike hinted at this in Geneva in his very first conversation with his British and French allies. Instead of arguing about how to reduce weapons, why not simply allow inspections of the existing arsenals? “If this were done,” the president mused, “what would be left to a potential aggressor? His capability for surprise would be severely limited.”17
On the evening of July 20 Eisenhower summoned to his villa his chief advisers on the disarmament problem, including Nelson Rockefeller, who had been serving since 1954 as a special assistant on foreign affairs, Harold Stassen, Admiral Radford, and NATO’s commander Gen. Alfred Gruenther. Sitting in the library with this powerful cohort, the president made plain his intention to push the idea of mutual inspections of military bases as a preliminary step in a broader disarmament plan. In order to capitalize on the propaganda value of the proposal, the advisers agreed that no word of the plan would be shared beforehand with the British or French. The men also counseled the president to make his announcement “in more or less extemporaneous fashion,” as part of his longer speech on disarmament the following day.18
And that is just how Ike handled it. When, on the afternoon of July 21, the Big Four met to discuss disarmament, Eisenhower took the floor to present a general statement on the desirability of reducing world armaments; it was platitudinous. Halfway through, he stopped, removed his reading glasses, looked directly at Bulganin, and spoke as if off the cuff. His words were simple and moving, though carefully prepared. He said he had been searching his heart and mind for a suitable demonstration of the good faith of the United States in the search for peace, and he hit upon this: “to give each other a complete blueprint of our military establishments, from beginning to end, from one end of our countries to the other.” In this scheme each nation would “provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other country.” Each side could take unlimited photographs, study them, and so build certainty that neither side was preparing any “great surprise attack, and so lessening the dangers, [and] relaxing tensions.”19
The Soviets, experts at making ringing declarations for propaganda purposes, scoffed at Eisenhower’s proposal. After the president finished his remarks, Khrushchev sidled up to him and said, “Mr. President, we do not question the motive with which you put forward this proposal, but in effect whom are you trying to fool? In our eyes, this is a very transparent espionage device.” With a hint of contempt, Khrushchev added, “You could hardly expect us to take this seriously.” Eisenhower stuck to his script. The plan offered to share information equally; neither side would benefit more than the other. We need, Ike insisted, “a departure from established custom.” But Khrushchev dismissed the scheme as worthless and a distraction from the real need to reduce weapons. His response was “100 percent negative.”20
But at a summit starved for signs of real progress, Eisenhower’s visionary proposal captivated world opinion—just as he hoped it would. His suggestion was hailed in West German papers as “revolutionary”; the London Daily Mail called the speech “the greatest of [Eisenhower’s] career”; the British Labour Party paper, the Daily Herald, considered the idea “amazing”; even the French communist paper, L’Humanité, thought the scheme “sensational.” “Its chances of acceptance must be almost nil,” noted the British News-Chronicle, but it was a ringing testament of “the idealism which is prepared to fight for peace at any cost.”21
When the conference came to an end on July 23, the professional diplomats called it a failure. The U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Charles Bohlen, thought it “the most disappointing and discouraging of all the summit meetings,” and he had been present at the great wartime meetings between Stalin and Roosevelt. Ther
e was “no real progress” on the major issues, and though the foreign ministers would continue to meet in the following months, they produced no breakthroughs. But for Eisenhower personally, the summit had been a magnificent success. Ike transformed a meeting he initially opposed into a triumph for his style of politics. He won a “moral victory,” the New York Times asserted, by stressing his desire for peace and making innovative proposals for arms inspections: “He represented what is best in this nation.” He persuaded a skeptical world that “the United States is sincerely opposed to war, cold or hot.” He also imposed his will over his truculent secretary of state, his chief military advisers, and many on the right in his own party who viewed conciliation toward the Soviets as tantamount to appeasement. These achievements testified to Eisenhower’s genuine political prowess.22
When he arrived back in Washington, he was met at the airport by 2,000 well-wishers in a summer rainstorm. Much of the cabinet stood in line to greet the returning peacemaker, who beamed through the downpour and happily shook every hand. Then he went directly to church and offered prayerful thanks. The press churned out page after page of glowing reports of Eisenhower’s triumph in Geneva. Nothing much had happened, reporters admitted, but even so, Ike had prompted a global sigh of relief. With “instinctive sureness” and the “disarming conviction of his almost boyish manner,” he convinced the world’s people of his desire for peace. “The big figure of the American president, perfectly tailored, vigorous in action and broad and sweeping in thought, dominated the conference,” according to New York Times reporter Drew Middleton. Eisenhower, wrote an admiring Stewart Alsop, “has the grandeur and the power, and a curious brand of earnestness as well, which makes him a man remarkably difficult to disbelieve.” Ike scored a “signal victory” in the conference and “smashed into smithereens the deeply rooted image of America as inflexible and bent on war.”23
There was one additional benefit of the summit, as the crafty muckraker Drew Pearson reported: Eisenhower was “now in a mood as never before to run in 1956. The platform would be ‘peace in our time.’ ”24
III
Pearson, though, was wrong. The prospect of running for reelection and serving a second term did not appeal much to Eisenhower. For a man in his mid-60s who had been working hard for 40 years since he left West Point in 1915, it was natural that his thoughts frequently turned to retirement. By 1955 the Eisenhower home in Gettysburg was fully remodeled. It was a beautiful, comfortable place, the perfect expression of Ike and Mamie’s tastes. There Eisenhower felt fully relaxed. He enjoyed country life, inspecting cattle, talking to farmers, practicing on his own putting green, and entertaining small groups of intimate friends. He had served his country well, and he did not hide his resentment toward those who prodded him to stay on the job for another term. In an August 4 news conference, journalists asked him about his plans to run in 1956. Ike dodged, saying his decision would depend upon how world affairs, domestic affairs, and his own health looked in early 1956, when he would make his decision. Without the “gift of prophecy,” he said, he had no idea which way he would lean. Most observers felt certain he would stay in harness, noting that the president “has the vitality of a man of 54 instead of 64.”25
In his private correspondence, though, Eisenhower voiced much deeper concern about the prospect of reelection. To Swede Hazlett he confided that he did think about the question of age; he would turn 65 in October 1955 and would hit 70 in his last year of a second term. “No man has ever reached his 70th year in the White House,” he pointed out, and wondered if that barrier should be broken. After all, “the last person to recognize that a man’s mental faculties are fading is the victim himself.” He did not want to become one of those men who “hang on too long” while thinking that only they could do the job at hand. Yet he confessed he had not had much success in pushing forward an obvious successor. So far the “able younger men” he favored had been met with “inertia and indifference” by the public.26
In early August the Eisenhowers were looking forward to a long summer holiday. The Geneva summit had been grueling, and Ike was ready for a break. On August 6 he left Washington for Gettysburg and on August 15 flew to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, eager to spend a month in the outdoors, playing golf and fishing. He and Mamie stayed at the Doud home with Mamie’s mother, a place they had known since they were newlyweds. Although he attended to government business each day for an hour or two, using the offices at Lowry as a command center, Ike knew how to take a vacation: he played golf almost every day at Cherry Hills Country Club, spent hours working at his oil paintings, and met friends for evening card games at a presidential suite in the Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver. He spent many days at the Fraser, Colorado, ranch of an old pal, Aksel Nielsen, where the fishing was especially fruitful. Naturally he kept abreast of the political developments back in Washington. When Roscoe Drummond of the New York Herald Tribune described senior officials as “happily confident” that Eisenhower would run again in 1956, Ike shot off a private letter to his brother Milton. “I have done my very best to discourage the thought that automatically I shall be the candidate,” he fumed. “Of course you know exactly what that decision would be unless extraordinary circumstances would convince me to the contrary.” Indeed Milton steadfastly urged his brother not to run for reelection.27
His supporters would not listen to any talk of Eisenhower’s stepping aside after one term. In early September, Republican Party state chairmen met in Washington to discuss the elections of 1956 and declared, according to Reston, that “Ike was the answer” to everything. “If he should refuse to stand for reelection next year the confusion would be indescribable,” these men told Reston. More than that, they openly loved him. He is “a symbol of the atmosphere of the time: optimistic, prosperous, escapist, pragmatic, friendly, attentive in moments of crisis and comparatively inattentive the rest of the time.” Reston asserted that Eisenhower’s popularity had “gone beyond the bounds of reason” and had become “a national love affair.” Who could blame the public for engaging in constant speculation about a second term?28
For the time being Ike avoided all the nonsense. He was having too much fun in Colorado. But his vacation was about to come to an abrupt end. On September 23, during what was now his seventh week away from sultry, humid Washington, he did a few hours of paperwork and then headed out to the golf course. He played 18 holes with the club pro, then wolfed down a late lunch, and returned to the links for nine more holes. As he finished up his game, he complained to his playing partner that the onions on his lunchtime hamburger had given him indigestion and heartburn, and he called it quits. He returned to the Doud home for dinner, picked at his food, and turned in early. At two in the morning he awoke with a searing pain in his chest. Mamie, sleeping in an adjoining room, heard him moving about. She took one look at him and called Gen. Howard Snyder, their physician, who was staying a few miles away at Lowry.29
Snyder, a lifelong army doctor who had attended both Eisenhower and Mamie since 1945, had seen the president suffer many bouts of painful indigestion. Ike had a chronic problem of an inflamed small intestine, known as ileitis, which caused bouts of gastrointestinal distress. Knowing that Eisenhower had complained in the evening about heartburn, Snyder assumed the problem was related to his GI tract and administered morphine to ease his discomfort. In the morning Snyder told the staff the president was resting from his “digestive upset” and would not be in the office that day. It was not until 1:15 in the afternoon that Snyder began to fear Ike’s illness was more serious. He called Fitzsimons Hospital, the nearby military facility, and summoned a cardiologist to administer an electrocardiogram to the president. As soon as Snyder saw the results, he knew the president had suffered a coronary thrombosis, which had resulted in an “acute massive anterior myocardial infarction”—in layman’s terms a blood clot had caused a heart attack. Snyder now ordered Ike to be transferred to Fitzsimons by the Secret Service. There doctors gave him a number o
f anticoagulants and put him in an oxygen tent to ease his breathing. He slept fitfully through the afternoon and night.30
Saturday, September 24, was supposed to be a quiet one for the White House staff, and many of the top assistants had taken a vacation to coincide with Eisenhower’s Denver trip. The heart attack shattered that calm. Snyder called press secretary Jim Hagerty, who was at home in Washington taking a nap after a round of golf at Columbia Country Club. Hagerty called key officials, including Nixon, Foster Dulles, and (because Sherman Adams was in Europe on holiday) Jerry Persons, the deputy White House chief of staff. Persons in turn alerted cabinet members to the news. Hagerty’s deputy press secretary, Murray Snyder, who was with the team in Denver, released a bulletin to the press at 2:30 p.m. announcing that the president had suffered a “mild” coronary thrombosis. Hagerty hastily arranged to fly to Denver on a military aircraft and brought with him Dr. Thomas Mattingly, the cardiologist at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington who had regularly examined Eisenhower and never detected any heart disease. Hagerty arrived at midnight in Denver and immediately imposed order on the scene, ensuring that the press would be regularly informed of the president’s condition. He also effectively squelched what might have become serious criticism of Dr. Snyder for waiting 12 hours before transferring a gravely ill president to the hospital.31
John Eisenhower arrived from Washington the next morning. “Obviously under sedation,” he wrote later, “Dad spoke quietly. ‘You know,’ he said with an air of wistful detachment, ‘these are things that always happen to other people; you never think of their happening to you.’ ” John and Mamie took rooms in the hospital and slept there for the next few days. Mamie held up extremely well, spending most of her time writing replies to the flood of personal cards she was receiving daily from around the world.32