Then the trip, already going wobbly, took a turn for the worse. In New York, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., ambassador to the United Nations, joined the party as Eisenhower’s personal representative and accompanied the visitors on a cross-country flight to Los Angeles. There they were greeted by what Lodge recalled as a “smoldering, Sahara-like heat,” as well as a tomato thrown by a youth at the chairman as he left the airport. (It missed.) Inexplicably the first item on the itinerary was a visit to the studios of Twentieth Century Fox, where a cast of Hollywood stars awaited. At that moment Fox was filming Can Can, a vapid song-and-dance picture starring Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Maurice Chevalier, and Louis Jourdan—all of whom were present to greet the Soviet leader, along with dozens of curious onlookers, including David Niven, Bob Hope, Gary Cooper, Charlton Heston, and Marilyn Monroe. The plot of the movie centered on the performance of a dance routine in the nightclubs of Paris, so the studio was crawling with dance girls in French ruffled skirts “exposing plenty of bare things and black garters,” according to Lodge. The foreign guests were treated to a chorus number, which featured, to the horror of the American hosts, “a brassy, sexy dance scene.” When a photographer tried to get the dancers to do a high kick while posing alongside Khrushchev, the Soviets put a halt to the risqué performance.
That night, at a huge dinner at the Ambassador Hotel, Khrushchev had the feeling that the wealthy dinner guests mainly wanted “to have a look at the strange guest as a kind of exotic bear from Russia.” The mayor of Los Angeles, Norris Poulson, delivered the last straw with a bellicose, sneering speech, asserting, “We shall fight to the death to preserve our way of life.” Khrushchev asked for the microphone and replied in a violent outburst that he was President Eisenhower’s guest and he would not tolerate “any disparagement, any humiliation” against the Soviet Union. As he put it later, “It was necessary to let this anti-Soviet person have it in the teeth.” By midnight the delegation had lodged a formal protest and threatened to pack their bags and return home. Lodge feared the trip had become “a horrible failure.” Freeman Gosden, a radio personality and Ike’s golf pal, told Ann Whitman, “Everyone in Los Angeles has decided that their town is going to be the first one the Russians aim a missile at!”44
VII
As they left Los Angeles by train to San Francisco, cooler weather seemed to soothe the visiting dignitaries. On the ride north, Khrushchev delighted in getting off the train at local stops to shake hands and engage with ordinary people, who cheerfully greeted him. The city by the bay charmed him with its beauty and demeanor; it was the most beautiful place in the country, Khrushchev declared. Triumphantly he said to Lodge, “The plain people of America like me. It’s just those bastards around Eisenhower that don’t.” Next came a stop in Iowa to visit a corn farm and meatpacking plant, a day in Pittsburgh, and then back to Washington and a huge reception at the Soviet Embassy, where the 24-year-old piano prodigy Van Cliburn, who had recently won the prestigious Tchaikovsky piano competition in Moscow, entertained the guests.45
Now at long last Khrushchev and Eisenhower met for their two days of personal talks at Camp David. Just after 5:00 p.m. on September 25, the two men departed from the White House by helicopter for a 35-minute ride to the Maryland mountain retreat. Eisenhower had been told by Lodge, who spent a week in close contact with Khrushchev, that the Soviet leader “wants peace . . . and needs peace.” He had been “deeply impressed” by what he had seen on the trip and privately had acknowledged to Lodge that the Soviet Union was still far behind America in its economic development. Yet Eisenhower approached the weekend at Camp David warily, as if fearing he might lower his guard and give away too much.46
He need not have worried. The meetings at Camp David produced little, other than the remarkable fact that they happened at all. In their first meeting, over breakfast on September 26—a foggy, damp morning—the two men talked mostly about the Second World War and Khrushchev’s relations with Stalin in those years. Khrushchev seemed relaxed, wearing a loose embroidered shirt, but picked at his food. According to John Eisenhower, he seemed intent on establishing an “old-soldier rapport” with the president and passed on the news that Stalin had always praised the fighting qualities of General Ike. The two men even strolled around the grounds together companionably. But when the discussions moved on to Berlin, there was no room for compromise. Eisenhower said the ultimatum on Berlin was unacceptable to the Americans; Khrushchev insisted the status quo in the divided city was unacceptable to the Soviets. The two leaders were earnest, frank, and unmovable. And there the matter rested.
Hoping at least to keep up the cordial atmosphere, Eisenhower called for his helicopter. At 4:30 p.m. they took off for Gettysburg, to tour the family farm. They looked over the grazing cattle, admired the freshly scrubbed Eisenhower grandchildren, and sat for an hour on the glass porch. John Eisenhower recalled that these were the moments when Khrushchev was at his best, posing as a “beneficent grandfather,” admiring the children and giving them trinkets. Back at Camp David the leaders dined on strip steak, creamed broccoli, and Pol Roger 1952 Champagne, then gathered in the film room to watch a few recent westerns—Shane, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and High Noon. Khrushchev remarked that Stalin too enjoyed watching westerns, and though he loudly denounced their reactionary political content, he was always eager for more.47
Khrushchev admired Eisenhower and found him “a very good-hearted man and a good conversationalist.” But they made no progress on substantive issues. Berlin, disarmament, trade relations, and the nuclear test ban questions—nothing moved. “We knew their position and they knew ours,” Khrushchev recalled. Both men were cordial but inflexible. Neither seemed too concerned. In fact they had not come to negotiate a real resolution of concrete points but simply to demystify one another, to humanize the U.S.-Soviet relationship. In the course of a long weekend, over meals, movies, walks in the woods, helicopter rides, and the swapping of war stories, this is exactly what happened. The only specific result of the conversations was that Khrushchev agreed to announce that he had withdrawn his ultimatum over Berlin and Eisenhower agreed to keep discussing future solutions to the German problem. He also signaled his willingness to attend a summit meeting of the Big Four in the spring of 1960, followed by a visit to the Soviet Union.48
By the time of Khrushchev’s departure, at 11:00 p.m. on September 27, the cold war had shifted from a bitter rivalry into something else, a competition to be sure, but one that could be disputed with words and ideas rather than nuclear weapons. The two leaders had engaged with one another on a personal, human level as never before. Khrushchev’s visit had been at times tense and awkward, at times comic and downright goofy. But it had sparked curiosity and even some goodwill. Ike told a press conference that the “threat” of war over Berlin had been lifted. In his last act in the United States, Khrushchev delivered a televised address to the American public—a remarkable occurrence in a country that only five years earlier had been gripped by the anticommunist hysteria of the McCarthy hearings. Khrushchev praised “the beautiful cities, wonderful roads, but most of all your amiable and kind-hearted people.” He spoke of the “common understanding on many points” that he and Eisenhower reached. The press inevitably hailed the “spirit of Camp David.”49
Back in the Soviet Union Khrushchev received a tumultuous welcome. According to biographer William Taubman, Khrushchev was “elated” by the trip, by the prestige it gave him as an equal of Eisenhower’s, and as a vindication of his policy of détente toward the United States. In a staged tribute to the returning leader, adoring party functionaries hailed Khrushchev for “crushing the ice of the cold war with the strength of an ice-breaker.” He promised a “new era” of peace and praised Eisenhower’s “wise statesmanship.” And he took particular delight that Eisenhower now agreed to visit the Soviet Union the following spring to show his respect and to continue their rapprochement. Khrushchev believed that he had pulled off his great gamble: he had moderated the cold war, won the support
of the American president, and fended off hard-liners and militarists in the Soviet system. He all but promised his people an end to the cold war as a result of his American overtures.50
Back in the United States, there were two chief winners of the “spirit of Camp David.” One was Nixon. Russell Baker of the New York Times wrote that Nixon could now run in 1960 as the candidate best qualified to maintain Eisenhower’s personal diplomacy and his “peace policy,” since he had helped to launch it. Nixon could, and did, claim that he had shown his talent for toe-to-toe combat with the Soviet leader, yet he also knew how to keep the USSR at the negotiating table. He described himself as the man who could “straighten out” the Soviets while avoiding war.51
But the real winner was Eisenhower. His personal diplomacy had restored his aura of world statesman, moving boldly and leaving tawdry partisan quarrels behind him. And he kept up the momentum. In December 1959 he departed on a 20,000-mile trip to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Europe to continue his global goodwill tour, just as Hagerty had advised a year earlier. In 1959 Eisenhower built a legacy as a man of peace who was also a man of firm principle where America’s rights were concerned. Of course there were those who feared the president had appeased Khrushchev by agreeing to negotiate about Berlin. Joseph Alsop, in a column that infuriated Eisenhower, considered Ike the new Neville Chamberlain. (Eisenhower privately called Alsop a “bastard” in return.)52
But the public looked on Eisenhower’s personal diplomacy enthusiastically. Just six years earlier America had been at war in Korea against the forces of “international Communism.” In his first term Ike stressed that the nation was “in peril” as a result of the communist threat. The frenzy of the McCarthy era remained white hot through 1954, and in 1956 the invasion of Hungary made the Soviets look like ruthless beasts. The early phase of the space race alarmed Americans and drew their eyes upward to search the nighttime skies for Soviet rockets. Yet now, at the close of 1959, Eisenhower, at his paternal and unruffled best, assured his people that the cold war could be managed, eased, and perhaps even defrosted through the power of his ice-melting charm. All that remained was to put Ike’s warm words of peace into action.
CHAPTER 17
* * *
Secret Wars in the Third World
“Our hand should not show in anything that is done.”
I
ON NOVEMBER 3, 1959, EISENHOWER’S limousine pulled out of the White House gates just after 11:00 a.m. and headed west, toward the Arlington Memorial Bridge and the Potomac River. Crossing into Virginia, the car eased onto the George Washington Parkway, a scenic road that carried the president northeast, along the Virginia bank of the river. After just a few miles the president got out to cut a ribbon to celebrate the opening of a stretch of the road that had been specially constructed for the employees of a federal agency whose new offices were being built in the quiet, woodsy hills nearby. The ceremonial act completed, Ike got back into the car and drove the remaining few miles to his destination: a leafy, 140-acre parcel of land that had been named two centuries earlier by Sir Thomas Lee, a prosperous 18th-century Englishman, after his ancestral home in Shropshire: Langley.
On this private and secluded spot, nine miles from the White House, construction crews had been busy for months laying the foundations of a sprawling new complex. They halted their noisy work on this warm autumn day to observe a solemn and significant occasion. President Eisenhower had arrived to lay the cornerstone of the new headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Building a new home for America’s spy agency had become an obsession of its director Allen Dulles. In 1955 Dulles won a whopping $45 million congressional appropriation to construct a building on a secluded “campus” in Virginia in order to gather in one place the many pieces of his clandestine service that had previously been scattered around Washington. Some CIA employees were still holed up in World War II–era temporary shacks along the National Mall. It was a sign of the growing importance of the CIA that it should be so richly rewarded with a gleaming new headquarters. Designed by the firm of Harrison and Abramovitz, the concrete and glass office looked like a huge H, but with two horizontal connecting bars. A perfect midcentury modern office block, it would feature air-conditioning throughout the building, self-operated elevators, an airy cafeteria, and a 3,000-car parking lot.
In the bright fall sunshine, standing in front of a large marble plinth, Eisenhower used a small silver trowel to dab some mortar onto a ceremonial stone. Then Dulles spoke. The CIA, he said, was one of the great agencies tasked with protecting the nation’s security. It had grown so large because “our vital interests are at stake in places as distant as Korea, and Laos, and Central Africa, and in the islands of the Pacific as well as in this hemisphere and Europe.” He praised the “high purpose and dedication” of the employees who strove “fearlessly” to protect the nation. And he solemnly declared that the CIA must be guided by truth and facts rather than wedded to “causes and theories.” Ideologies had no place in the intelligence business. With that he unveiled the marble slab on which was engraved a verse from the Gospel of John: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Eisenhower echoed these sentiments. The secret work of the CIA, he said, demanded “dedication, ability, trustworthiness,” and “the finest type of courage.” The successes of the CIA “cannot be advertised, failure cannot be explained. In the work of intelligence, heroes are undecorated and unsung.” Their reward came from knowing that they were performing “an indispensable service for their country.”1
With his trowel of cement, Eisenhower laid the foundations of a secret global empire dedicated to using any means necessary to advance American interests in the perilous cold war struggle. Beyond collecting intelligence through aerial overflights and other forms of electronic eavesdropping, Eisenhower’s CIA also undertook an astonishing range of covert actions against various enemies who were thought to pose a threat to the United States and its friends. Eisenhower condoned those secret wars with the argument that the ends justify the means. In facing an insidious global enemy, the United States had to use every tool at its disposal to fight back. It is a powerful argument that has held sway in every presidency since then.
Unfortunately Eisenhower’s CIA did far more harm than good to American interests. Rather than enhancing national security, Eisenhower’s secret wars created great human suffering, propped up awful dictatorships, left the U.S. government vulnerable to exposure and public humiliation, and alienated millions of people who otherwise had reason to like and admire the United States. Over the course of the 1950s the CIA engaged in sabotage, arms smuggling, destabilizing of governments, widespread radio and print propaganda, and the arming of insurgencies. It supplied arms, intelligence, and training to certain friendly regimes that were engaged in repression, summary arrests, torture, and murder. And it plotted the ouster and in a few cases the assassination of foreign leaders, violating American law and tarnishing America’s reputation.
Why did Eisenhower order such brutal and ultimately damaging secret operations, especially at a time when he was attempting to improve relations with the USSR? The simplest answer points to a failure of moral imagination. Eisenhower’s cold war strategy rested on these basic principles: To deter the USSR from attacking the United States, Ike invested heavily in nuclear weapons and air defense. To contain the USSR, he built global alliances and positioned American troops overseas. To surpass the Soviet system, he encouraged economic growth at home and demanded prudent stewardship of the domestic economy. And to foil the global design of communist expansion, he willingly embraced covert operations to weaken the ability of threatening nations, leaders, and movements to harm American interests. That made a kind of sense.
The failure lay in misunderstanding the long-term consequences of such policies for the billions of people just emerging from centuries of repressive European colonial rule. When Asians and Africans shook off colonial despotism, th
ey often embraced revolutionary nationalism, radical socialism, and communism, not because they wished to become the lackeys of the Soviet Union but because they desired economic justice, distribution of wealth, agrarian reform, and the breakup of foreign economic control of their natural resources. Such demands sounded threatening to American ears. And when threatened, American officials in the Age of Eisenhower tended to retreat to the well-defended ramparts of anticommunism. Eisenhower and his advisers refused to put themselves in the shoes of the struggling rebels, wild-eyed radicals, and utopian dreamers who populated the nationalist movements of the Third World. And that lack of empathy too often led to policies that earned the United States the enduring hostility of newly independent nations.2
Having embraced the rationale for an active program of covert operations, Eisenhower compounded the problem by giving Allen Dulles free rein. He had known since the 1954 Doolittle Report that Dulles was a poor manager, but he continued to rely on him, perhaps out of respect for his experience and his brother. He did try to create better supervision of the CIA. At the end of 1955 Eisenhower ordered the creation of an interdepartmental committee to monitor covert operations and report back to him. The group became known as the Special Group, or the 5412 Committee, because it had been called into being by NSC 5412/2 on December 28, 1955. At the 5412 Committee meetings representatives from the State Department, Defense, and the White House met with the director of the CIA, ostensibly to review ongoing operations.
The real purpose of the committee, though, was to allow Eisenhower to stay in the loop while sustaining the principle of “plausible deniability.” As long as the president did not formally chair discussions of such secret activities, he could always claim that he did not know about them. Dulles chafed at even this weak oversight. He faithfully informed Eisenhower about covert operations but sidetracked the bureaucracy. Until the end of the Eisenhower years, and indeed beyond, the initiative for designing and implementing covert operations remained with Dulles, who answered only to the president.3
The Age of Eisenhower Page 58