NIXON (he has the last word): You mean that at ninety-nine, you will still be in power, with no free elections?
It was a curious exchange, less a debate than a quarrel between two aggressive men, each of them determined to impress the audience as more peaceful than the other. Both suffered from a self-imposed handicap. In a thousand speeches, the Soviet leader had created a crude stereotype of the typical capitalist politician as a Wall Street lackey, and Nixon didn’t fit it. Nixon’s handicap was a mirror image of Khrushchev’s. His archetype of the evil Communist boss had as much substance as a man of straw, as much life as a Sunday supplement demon. The American Vice President had scored more forensic points, but the Russian premier had come across as warm, direct, and perhaps as better suited to his role. Nixon emerged as a man who liked ideas, Khrushchev as one who loved his people and would go to great lengths to champion them. As if to confirm that, he overlooked Nixon’s insolence—plainly he regarded it as that—and accepted Eisenhower’s invitation to visit America once Nixon had returned home. “I am prepared to turn out my pockets to show that I am harmless,” he said in his disingenuous way. “In the old times people used to leave their weapons in the hall when they went in to talk peace. We should do that now, and there should be no saber rattling.” With that, he quietly scuttled his Berlin ultimatum.
***
One reason Dulles had given for opposing such summitry had been his concern that U.S. allies might feel that they were being abandoned. To reassure them, the President flew to Europe at the end of August for two weeks of talks with Konrad Adenauer, Harold Macmillan, and Charles de Gaulle. It was an amazing trip. In Washington it was easy to forget the tremendous affection Europeans felt for Dwight D. Eisenhower. Their feeling for him was unclouded by partisanship or ideology. To them he was the kindly, straightforward, low-key American general who had led the victorious crusade to free them from Nazi rule. The Germans seemed as grateful as the British and French. As Eisenhower’s Mercedes-Benz entered Bonn an estimated 315,000 people, twice the population of the city, lined the route, cheering him and holding up banners proclaiming, WE TRUST YOU and WE RELY ON YOU. In London his car was a dove-gray Rolls-Royce. There the shouts—from a crowd numbered in the hundreds of thousands—were “Glad to see you, Ike,” and “Good for you, Ike,” and as the motorcade entered Grosvenor Square, from which General Eisenhower had directed the coalition of armies that had routed Hitler, reporters saw tears in his eyes.
De Gaulle, now entering his difficult period, would have preferred that Parisians show more restraint, but it was impossible. At Le Bourget Airport the two generals-become-presidents exchanged tributes; then the throng’s cry of “Ike!” which in French came out “Eek!” drowned out everything else. It never died out completely during Eek’s two days in Paris, not even when he placed a wreath of pink lilies and red roses on the tomb of France’s unknown soldier, beneath the Arc de Triomphe, or during his response to the continuing ovation at the Hotel de Ville: “When the heart is full, the tongue is very likely to stumble. I have one small French phrase that, I think, expresses my feelings—Je vous aime tous.” Obviously it was impractical to conduct serious talks against such a background. De Gaulle did press his plan for a NATO guided by a three-power directorate. Eisenhower warded him off with a promise to keep in closer touch over the transatlantic phone. (“I know he’s a stubborn man,” Ike told an aide, “but as long as he’s stubborn on our side, everything’s all right.”) After a weekend at Scotland’s Culzean Castle, where he occupied a nine-room apartment given to him by the Scottish people after V-E Day, the President flew home September 7. There he told a welcoming crowd: “I am quite certain that for the moment, at least, everything is going splendidly.”
Nikita Khrushchev’s barnstorming of the United States was to be the next stage in the slackening of world tensions. On September 15, at Andrews Field in Maryland, Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov called to a ramp, “Nikita Sergeyevich, I salute you on American soil,” and as American spectators blinked in disbelief, down the steps he came, short, bald, and stocky, wearing three small medals on his black suit and accompanied by his shy wife, Nina Petrovna, his daughters Julia and Rada, his son Sergei, and a retinue of sixty-three Russian bureaucrats. President Eisenhower formally welcomed them, and then they were off on a two-week guided tour of the United States with U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge as their host.
On the whole it was a successful journey. Americans are partial to curmudgeons, and this one was as salty as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. In speeches before American businessmen, tours of rural Iowa, and luncheons with Mayor Robert Wagner of New York and Mayor Norris Poulson of Los Angeles, Khrushchev came on as shrewd, eccentric, and unscrupulous, but very human and determined to live in peace with his neighbors. Inevitably there were incidents. Khrushchev won an argument with Spyros P. Skouras, president of Twentieth Century-Fox, and lost one to Walter Reuther and his six union vice presidents. (He then denounced them as “agents for capitalists” and was puzzled when Reuther laughed.) After a Hollywood troupe had performed a cancan for him, the premier revealed a priggish streak, calling the dance “immoral” and adding, “A person’s face is more beautiful than his backside.”
At Camp David, the presidential retreat on Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain, Khrushchev was on his best behavior. He said nothing offensive. In fact, he said almost nothing beyond vague generalities. His concept of discretion seemed to preclude getting down to brass tacks. Midway in the second day of their talks Eisenhower turned to him with a personal appeal: “You have the opportunity to make a great contribution to history by making it possible to ease tensions. It is within your hands.” But the Russian leader refused to be pinned down. He praised American roast beef, enjoyed a western movie with Ike, and, after a helicopter hop to Gettysburg, admired the President’s prize herd of Black Angus cattle. For the time being, that was going to be the extent of his contribution to a detente.
After their third day together the two leaders issued a joint statement. They had agreed that general disarmament was the most important question facing the world, that negotiations on the Berlin issue should be “reopened with a view to achieving a solution which would be in accordance with the views of all concerned and in the interest of the maintenance of peace,” that “all outstanding international questions should be settled not by the application of force but by peaceful means through negotiation,” and that President Eisenhower would visit the Soviet Union next year.
For a while the newspapers made much of “the spirit of Camp David.” Briefly it seemed almost as substantive as the Roosevelt-Churchill Atlantic Charter. A turning point, men thought, had been reached in U.S.—USSR relations at last. It was all illusion. The President and the premier hadn’t even touched upon the basic and critical problems arising from different views over the future of Germany and the world. The benign mood eventually turned out to be evanescent. In time it soured and was succeeded by disenchantment. Among the participants who resolved that a firmer groundwork should be prepared before any new conferences with the Russians was Richard Nixon.
Nixon did not, however, feel that the disappointing outcome vindicated Dulles’s implacable opposition to meetings at the top. The world’s statesmen had embarked on what Time called “the new global game of personal diplomacy,” and none of them wanted a return to the arctic past. Their orchestrated journeys were now following a definite plot leading toward a desirable ending. The next step would be what was being called the “Western Summit,” a kind of semifinal conference whose participants would be Eisenhower, Macmillan, Adenauer, and De Gaulle. These four would renew their vows to keep Berlin free and hammer out a joint approach for the final conference, which would be between them and Khrushchev.
The semifinal was held in Paris in December. Eisenhower was not going to limit the December trip to France, though. The ventures in personal diplomacy, made endurable by the new Boeing 707 jet airliners, were encouraging. The rousing welcome given him in
the capitals of western Europe had given rise to a naive hope that the enthusiasm of the crowds that cheered motorcades could somehow be transformed into enduring good will and better international relations. With this in mind, and with Hagerty’s memorandum before him, the President decided that as long as he was abroad he might as well call on the rulers of Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran, Greece, Tunisia, Spain, and Morocco. Before leaving on this 19-day, 19,500-mile trip to eleven nations on three continents, he delivered a televised report to the country. “During this mission of peace and good will,” he said, “I hope to promote a better understanding of America and to learn more of our friends abroad.”
Whether it led to a greater understanding is moot. It did provide staggering new evidence of the President’s popularity, however. In Italy, where Romans stood in drenching rains for a glimpse of him—here “Ike” came out “Eekay”—a journalist worte in Corriere Delia Sera, “We welcome this man who speaks to us with the accent of Kansas farmers who cultivate fields of wheat as vast as seas, of pioneers who went West not long before his birth. He speaks without rhetoric before the imminent peril as he calls for ‘Peace, peace.’” Turkey was next. Eisenhower himself called his welcome to Ankara “the most stupendous I have ever seen.” Over 750,000 Pakistanis welcomed him to Karachi, and in New Delhi he said he was “completely overwhelmed” by the crowds, as well he might have been: a million shouting Indians held aloft banners acclaiming him as, among other things, “Eisenhower, Prince of Peace,” and they threw so many flowers at his open car that he stood a foot deep in blossoms. It was the same in every country. There were 750,000 cheering Iranians in Teheran, where he addressed a joint session of the Shah’s parliament; 500,000 enthusiastic Athenians outside when he spoke to Greece’s Chamber of Deputies; 500,000 Spaniards when Generalissimo Francisco Franco welcomed him to Madrid, and 500,000 to greet him in Casablanca.
It was numbing, and it was also rather baffling. Applause in western Europe could be traced back to World War II, but the only nation on this trip to have been in the war was Italy, and the Italians had been on the other side. Why should Indian untouchables walk forty miles to see the American President, or Afghan tribesmen spend days weaving floral tributes to lay before the wheels of his limousine? Part of the explanation seemed to lie in the recurring chants, in every tongue, of “Peace, peace.” War was recognized everywhere as mankind’s greatest scourge, even among peoples that had never heard gunfire. But that wasn’t all that lay behind these awesome demonstrations. Clearly America was more beloved than Americans knew. Anti-Americans made more noise, but the vast majority in these countries seemed to admire and trust the United States.
Eisenhower returned home on December 22. That Christmas was a high point in his Presidency and in the history of U.S. diplomacy. In his annual Christmas message to the nation—beamed overseas this time in twenty-eight languages—he said of his journey: “My purpose was to improve the climate in which diplomacy might work more successfully; a diplomacy that seeks… peace with justice for all men.” The test of his accomplishment lay less than five months away, when he and the three leaders of western Europe would confront Khrushchev in the summit of summits. It was scheduled to open on May 16, 1960, in Paris.
***
From time to time in the later 1950s subscribers to the New York Times read, under the byline of Herbert L. Matthews, captivating accounts of bearded young Cuban revolutionaries hiding out in the tangled jungles of that island’s Sierra Maestra range. Their leader was a hulking, verbose lawyer in his early thirties, Fidel Castro Ruz. Castro had landed in Cuba on Christmas of 1956 with just twelve men. Taking to the hills before dictator Fulgencio Batista’s soldiers could seize them, they unfurled the red and black flag of their 26th of July movement, so named for a desperate attack led by Castro on Santiago Batistianos on July 26, 1953, and called on Cuban lovers of freedom to join them.
In those early years Castro’s movement was very popular in the United States. Batista’s Cuba was a police state run by terrorists and corrupt bureaucrats who made fortunes in prostitution, gambling, and raids on the public till. Havana University was padlocked to suppress mutinous students; dissenters were murdered; their corpses were dismembered and sent to their parents, or dumped in gutters like garbage. Washington was elated at the prospect of a truly democratic Cuba. As early as March 1958 all deliveries of U.S. arms to Batista were halted. American correspondents like Matthews wrote sympathetic stories depicting Castro and his barbudos, or bearded rebels, as selfless Robin Hoods who wanted to give their countrymen liberty and justice. The reporters erred, but the error was common then, and it was shared by most members of the Cuban middle class and a great many influential Cuban army officers who were fed up with Batista. That was Batista’s undoing. Castro had fewer than two thousand barbudos to put against forty thousand superbly equipped Batistianos, but businessmen and landowners were financing him, and the middle class was acclaiming the rebels, who were, for the most part, middle-class themselves—young professional men and intellectuals like Fidel, his brother Raul, and Major Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine physician who had become Castro’s Trotsky.
In the last weeks of 1958 Guevera routed three thousand government troops in the province of Las Villas, one hundred and fifty miles from the capital, and captured the provincial capital, Santa Clara. A trainload of troops sent by Batista refused even to get out of the railroad cars. The old regime was through, and Batista knew it. On New Year’s Day he flew off into exile. Castro then began a seven-day, six-hundred-mile march of triumph down Cuba’s Central Highway. Fidel’s men fired their pistols and tommy guns at the sky. In affection they called their leader “El Caballo,” the horse. He was Gargantuan, a charismatic figure before the concept became popular. His personal life was ascetic. There were no women in it. Except for fifty-cent Montecristo cigars, he never indulged himself. Getting him to change his grimy green field jacket was next to impossible.
“Power does not interest me, and I will not take it,” Castro said. “From now on the people are entirely free.” He restored Cuba’s lost pride, gave it a national identity, rooted out corruption, and launched vast programs to educate Cuba’s children and inspire their parents. When whispering voices tried to spread reports that he was a Communist, the general reaction was scorn. Reactionaries always called reformers Reds; men like Matthews of the Times could remember their doing it in Spain twenty years earlier and they said so.
To demonstrate that he was a good neighbor to the United States, Fidel flew to Washington with a hundred cases of good-will rum. He lunched on steak and champagne with Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter—he wore his field jacket even there—and talked to eighteen congressmen in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee room. “The July 26 movement is not a Communist movement,” he told them. “Its members are Roman Catholics, mostly.” Asked about American investments in Cuba, he replied, “We have no intention of expropriating United States property, and any property we take we’ll pay for.” He was charming. To be sure, there was one sour note. After a three-hour conference with Castro, Vice President Nixon wrote a twelve-page confidential memorandum for distribution to the CIA, the State Department, and the White House, in which he said that he was convinced that Cuba’s new leader was “either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline.” But the CIA pigeonholed it, State ignored it, and Eisenhower waved it away. The administration was getting a little tired of Nixon’s seeing Communist bogeymen everywhere.
The rude awakening of the Americans, and the subsequent deterioration of U.S.-Cuban relations, came in that spring and summer of 1959. Castro’s hatred of dictators vanished, it seemed, when the name of the dictator was Castro. His indifference to power also disappeared. With a ruthlessness that would have startled Batista, Fidel suspended habeas corpus, established military tribunals all over the island, and decreed an end to the right of convicted defendants to appeal their sentences. By September he was caree
ning leftward. He recognized Red China, called the United States a “vulture… feeding on humanity,” renounced Cuba’s 1952 military pact with the U.S., and dared the yanquis to invade Cuba.
The idealists and visionaries of the 26th of July movement had been betrayed. When they realized it, all Cuba rocked with their thwarted rage. Over a hundred of them were jailed, and the others fled north to Florida. Manuel Ray, a radical young engineer who had commanded Castro’s Havana underground, was one. Two were famous liberals: Mio Cardona, whom Castro had chosen to be the first premier of his new government, and Manuel Urrutia, also hand-picked, the regime’s first president. Others who felt that they had been sold to the Reds included brave officers like José Peréz (“Pepe”) San Roman, Erneido Oliva, and Huber Matos, one of the 26th of July heroes of the Sierra Maestra. Some were incredulous when they first heard of Castro’s treachery. They said they wouldn’t believe until they saw it. Some literally witnessed it. Dr. Manuel Francisco Artime, the brilliant young manager of Oriente province, heard Castro himself outline his plan to communize Cuba within three years. “I realized,” Artime later said, “that I was a democratic infiltrator in a Communist government.”
Such men could not compromise with what they regarded as total evil. If they wanted to call their souls their own, they had to escape through what American reporters were calling “the cane curtain” in the hope that one day they could reclaim their homeland. Cubans have a certain style about them, and some of their escapes were dashing. Artime’s was one. He wrote a personal note to Castro declaring that he was quitting the movement because he had “heard from your lips the complete plans to communize Cuba.” Dressed as a priest and carrying a pistol inside a missal, he walked into the American embassy. There he was introduced to a certain man called “Williams,” who saw to it that he sailed north in a secret compartment on a Honduran freighter. On the Tampa pier Artime was met by a tall American who identified himself as “Mr. Burnett, a friend of Williams.” In Miami, which soon had so many refugees that it took on the air of a Cuban city, other friends of Williams and Burnett appeared and introduced themselves as “Jimmy,” “Sonny,” “Seabee,” “Don,” etc. All of them, Artime eventually discovered, were operatives of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 129