A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  In his memoir, Eisenhower’s comments about Zhukov reveal how difficult it was for the leaders on both sides of the Cold War to comprehend conditions in each other’s societies. He wrote of Zhukov as having been in their Germany days “a great personal friend of Stalin’s,” a figure “perhaps second only to Stalin himself.” Friendship, of course, was as foreign to Stalin as Greek, and it was precisely Zhukov’s prominence and popularity as a war hero that put him in grave peril from Stalin’s paranoia once Hitler had been defeated and Zhukov’s talents were no longer needed. As soon as he could, later in the 1940s, Stalin, with Beria’s assistance, had concocted the usual treason charges. Several officers who had served under Zhukov were arrested and false confessions beaten out of them in the cellars of Lubyanka Prison. Zhukov had been saved because the other ranking Red Army marshals and generals who sat on the Military Council had said emphatically that they did not believe the accusations. (Perhaps recalling the fate of their predecessors, who had mistakenly thought to save themselves by acquiescing in the condemnation of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky in 1937, they had reasoned that if the foremost among them again went down, they would all go down one by one.) Stalin had contented himself by demoting Zhukov to command of the Odessa military district. The marshal had recovered his career with Stalin’s heirs by joining the plot, cunningly guided by Khrushchev, to accomplish the arrest and execution of Beria in 1953. The chief of the secret police was the one heir of Stalin whom the other heirs could not allow to live. They had feared, probably correctly, that if he gained paramountcy he would liquidate them all.

  Not knowing the decade-long interregnum through which his acquaintance had passed, Eisenhower observed at the lunch in Geneva that “Zhukov was no longer the same man he had been in 1945.” The Soviet marshal now seemed “subdued and worried.” When the president shifted the talk from wartime reminiscences at the outset of the lunch to serious discussion of the issues of the summit, Zhukov simply reiterated, “in a low monotone,” what Eisenhower had been hearing from the other Soviet participants. “He spoke as if he was repeating a lesson that had been drilled into him until he was letter perfect… devoid of animation, and he never smiled or joked, as he used to do,” Eisenhower wrote. “My old friend was carrying out orders of his superiors. I obtained nothing from this private chat other than a feeling of sadness.” And so Eisenhower abandoned serious subjects and asked Zhukov near the end of the lunch what he planned to do for a vacation. Zhukov replied that he was going to fish for trout in European Russia. It turned out that he did not favor fly-fishing, to which Eisenhower was addicted, but preferred a spinning reel and rod to cast a lure. The president promised to send him a set of American spinning equipment through Bohlen’s embassy in Moscow. He was true to his word and accompanied the fishing gear with a note saying that he hoped Zhukov would catch “a lot of big ones.” The West German intelligence service learned of the existence of the note, but not its harmless contents, and informed the elderly and prickly chancellor of the Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer. He, for some bizarre reason, suspected that Eisenhower might be attempting to sabotage his efforts to make West Germany robust and independent. He complained privately that his American ally was conducting secret talks with the Soviets, using Zhukov as a channel. But by this time Eisenhower was long back at the White House, in a mood to listen to a briefing on how to build an ICBM.

  46.

  DAZZLING THE MONARCH

  Bennie Schriever arrived at the White House at 9:30 A.M. on July 28, 1955, half an hour before the scheduled briefing for the president. Trevor Gardner and Johnny von Neumann were with him in the back seat of one of the Pentagon’s long black Cadillac limousines as the car entered the rear gate to the White House grounds and made its way slowly up the circular drive. Schriever had been informed on July 11 that the briefing would take place on the 28th and they had been readying themselves ever since, most intensively after Bennie flew in from California on the 22nd. It had been decided that Schriever would anchor the briefing by wrapping up at the end. Gardner would go first with an introduction on the strategic significance of the ICBM. Von Neumann would follow with an explanation of how the invention of the hydrogen bomb and the ability to size it down, the “thermonuclear breakthrough,” had made an ICBM practicable. Bennie would conclude with a description of the unique organization the Air Force had formed with Ramo-Wooldridge to overcome the technological hurdles, and lay out the deadlines set for the building of the missile and its costs. Then they would run a short reel of 16mm film depicting fiery scenes of the rocket engines Ed Hall was experimenting with being tested on concrete stands across the continent in California. The film would constitute a bit of showmanship at the end if the president seemed inclined to let them take the additional time for it.

  They had been told by the NSC staff that they were restricted to half an hour in all for the three presentations. Power, who participated in the planning and rehearsals, did not think this would be nearly enough time to get across a subject of such strategic and technical breadth to a lay audience, but Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever believed that if they compressed hard enough and kept things simple, they would be able to get their main points across.

  The worst restriction had been laid on them two days earlier by Dillon Anderson, Eisenhower’s special assistant for national security affairs and as such head of the NSC staff, at a meeting in his offices in the Executive Office Building. Anderson had warned them that they were to confine their presentations to “straightforward and factual” descriptions of the project, that there was to be no attempt to “sell” the president on their needs or “pressure” him. “In particular, you will not comment on, or make any reference to, or use in any way,” he said, the letter Eisenhower had received on June 30 from Scoop Jackson and Clinton Anderson. (Dillon Anderson obviously had no idea he was addressing its ghost authors, or they might not be briefing the president two days hence.) Any recommendation to the president to order the radical changes advocated in the letter—a separate budget for the ICBM exclusive of all other Air Force needs, exemption from any Pentagon procurement regulation that might impede its progress, and a designation of the highest national priority—should come from Secretary Wilson on behalf of the Department of Defense, not just from the Air Force through them.

  In an indication that he did not view with favor this wish list the plotters were hoping would emerge from their briefing for the president, Anderson remarked that “there are other important areas—in addition to the ICBM—which bear heavily on the national security and which warrant Presidential support.” He mentioned SAC, the Air Defense Command, and a new early warning radar system under construction on the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, on Alaska’s north coast, and thence through the Arctic regions of Canada to Greenland and Iceland. It was called the DEW Line, for Distant Early Warning. “If we set up one project for high Presidential priority, then we are, in effect, downgrading the others,” he said. His listeners surmised that Secretary Wilson’s delegates on the NSC Planning Board had preceded them to Anderson. “Termites in the woodwork,” Schriever wrote in his diary that night. The best hope the plotters had of getting around this restriction was to convince the president that the ICBM was not just another parochial Air Force project, but rather an issue of the most acute national and international significance. They had to arouse sufficient enthusiasm in him, win him so thoroughly to their cause, that he would see the need for these extraordinary measures himself when he took another look at the Jackson-Anderson letter after their briefing.

  Vince Ford and Beryl Boatman had preceded them to the White House much earlier with the paraphernalia for the briefing. Their blue Air Force staff car had pulled up to the guard cubicle just inside the northwest gate to the White House off Pennsylvania Avenue at precisely 7:30 A.M. They had been instructed by the NSC staff to arrive two and a half hours beforehand in order to have plenty of time to complete their preparations. In the trunk behind them were the briefing charts, easel
s to set the charts on, a blackboard and a box of white chalk for illustrations, a pointer, and the reel of 16mm film displaying Ed Hall’s rocket engine experiments. Vince told the White House policeman inside the cubicle who they were and why they were there. The policeman glanced at a sheet of paper and said, “Just a moment, please,” while he turned, picked up a telephone, and apparently called someone inside for clearance. “Okay,” he said into the phone, “I’ll send them in.” He turned back and, addressing them politely as “Gentlemen,” instructed them to proceed along the drive and bear to the right until they saw a ramp that would take them to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House. Someone would meet them at the doorway there.

  Ford and Boatman set to work swiftly, setting up the easels, the blackboard with the chalk within easy reach, and the small, roll-down screen on which they were to show the film. It was placed on the podium at the front of the room, behind and to one side of the lectern that was already there, so that the president and others in the briefing audience could see it without obstruction. They left nothing to chance. They had not brought a 16mm film projector with them because they had been told that the White House had one. As their first move, Boatman ran a segment of the film to check out the machine and be certain it was in good order. They had calculated that if the machine malfunctioned, they would have plenty of time to send to the Pentagon for a substitute. The site of the briefing was a comparatively small room with a shallow arched ceiling on the lower level of the West Wing known as the Broadcast Room. It was often used for briefings and on this humid Washington morning in July it was filled with rows of straight-back wooden chairs. The one exception to this austere seating was a capacious, plumply stuffed red leather armchair in the center of the first row for the comfort of the president.

  Ford was familiar with the place. He had been there in mid-February when James Killian, the president of MIT, and his committee had briefed Eisenhower and the NSC on reducing the vulnerability of SAC by dispersing its bombers and increasing the number on airborne alert. The silence of the room and the rows of chairs “had a strange kind of eloquence,” Ford thought, because of the importance of the men who would soon be sitting in them and the importance to the nation of what they would soon be hearing. This was the era when the freshness of the triumph over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and the enormous power and paramountcy of the United States among the non-Communist nations had endowed the president and the surroundings in which he lived and worked with a monarchical aura. Ford had been conscious of “mixed feelings of awe” from the moment the staff car had passed through the White House gate. As he and Boatman went about their work in the Broadcast Room “electricity filled the air all around us.”

  They were done before they knew it. The time was still only 8:20 A.M. The big men of the land would not start gathering in the Broadcast Room for more than an hour at the earliest and so they went in search of a caffeine lift. A policeman in the corridor outside the room directed them to a small coffee bar in the West Wing basement that the White House police used. The cups of hot black liquid helped “calm the butterflies we knew we had but wouldn’t admit,” Ford recalled.

  After the limousine from the Pentagon arrived at 9:30 A.M., Schriever, Gardner, and von Neumann walked down the corridor toward the briefing room. They were an unusual threesome, the portly von Neumann flanked by the long-stem figure of Schriever on one side and the big-shouldered Gardner on the other. They were talking in lively fashion, but von Neumann was apparently dominating the conversation, as both Schriever and Gardner had their heads turned in toward him. As soon as he spotted them, von Neumann said, in his pronounced Hungarian accent and with jovial mock ignorance of the occasion, “Hello Veence, hello Boat, vat iss cooking?” Then his irrepressible curiosity took him over to the door to the briefing room, where he peeked inside. Gardner greeted Ford with a roar, “Dr. von Ford!” in more mock joviality to ease the tension of the occasion, instantly elevating Ford to genius rank in rocketry with Wernher von Braun. “Got any hot coffee?” he asked. When Ford and Boatman returned ten minutes later cups in hand, they found Gardner and Schriever talking to Dillon Anderson and James Lay, the executive secretary of the NSC, apparently about the procedure for the briefing. Johnny von Neumann was sitting in a chair next to the far wall making notes on a small white pad. Von Neumann didn’t need notes. Everything he was going to say was already concisely arranged in his head. Perhaps the note making helped him to focus and calm himself.

  Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever would be addressing, in addition to Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon, approximately twenty of the most important civilian and military leaders in the country. The lesser figures like Tommy Power, who was there because the program officially belonged to him, arrived early, not long after 9:30. At 9:50, with just ten minutes to go, the weighty men began strolling into the room in groups of two and three, chatting to one another as they took their seats—Vice President Nixon; Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; John Foster Dulles, secretary of state; his brother, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. They had been attending a prior meeting of the NSC in the Cabinet Room of the White House and it had just broken up. At 9:55, with only five minutes to go, Dillon Anderson walked to the podium to make sure that any laggards got themselves seated quickly. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if you will please find chairs so that everyone will be in place and seated when the President arrives.” Eisenhower, the military man, wanted his meetings to begin with precision.

  But then 10:00 A.M. came and passed and 10:05 and 10:10 and the president still did not come. As unobtrusively as he could, Ford got up from his seat in the separate row of chairs arranged against the far wall where von Neumann, Gardner, and Schriever were also sitting. He and Boatman, who had been on station next to the projector at the back of the room, sidled over to the entrance and stepped just outside so that they could spy down the corridor toward a double set of French doors through which the president would emerge. They had not waited long when suddenly the doors swung open and Eisenhower appeared striding at a fast pace down the corridor. He seemed angry about something, his face flushed. Whatever it was apparently concerned Defense Secretary Wilson, who was walking beside him, hurrying to keep up as the two men swept past Ford and Boatman and into the briefing room.

  Everyone in the room was standing. The president stopped, glancing around. He spotted his favorite cabinet member, George Humphrey, a Cleveland banker who was secretary of the Treasury, standing next to a chair in the second row. Eisenhower availed himself of the amenities offered by his rich friends and subordinates to take frequent vacations, too frequent in the opinion of his critics. He was obsessed with golf—he had a putting green constructed on the White House lawn—but also enjoyed hunting quail, fly-fishing for trout, and playing bridge. He often spent a week at Humphrey’s 13,000-acre Milestone Plantation near Thomasville in south Georgia, shooting quail with Humphrey and golfing at the neighboring Glen Arven Country Club. “Hello, Gawge,” he said in a drawl, the anger disappearing as his face metamorphosed into the famous slightly off-center Eisenhower grin. Then he seated himself in the well-padded red leather chair in the first row, rested his elbows on its arms, cupped his big bony hands together, and looked up at Anderson on the podium. The moment had come.

  Gardner was out of his chair and halfway to the podium by the time Anderson had finished announcing the subject of the briefing and identifying the three briefers. He laid down on the lectern a couple of white three-by-five-inch cards on which he had jotted notes in red pencil, then stepped off to one side so that he was standing directly in front of the president, about eight to ten feet away. He was at his natty best in dark suit, fashionable tie, and starched white handkerchief crisply folded into the lapel pocket. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a much feared Confederate cavalry leader, boasted that one of the ways he won battles was to put the “sceere” into his opponents. Gardner wasted no time putting the “sceere” into his audience. He ex
plained briefly how the invention of the hydrogen bomb and its projected downsizing had made possible the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile.

  Then he hit them with the consequences. “This breakthrough,” he said, “caused an irreversible change in the world power equation, in the waging of war. It says loudly and clearly that not only is it now technically feasible to develop a nuclear-armed ICBM but, more importantly, it is now of overriding importance to the security and survival of the United States that we do it first—ahead of the USSR.” He waited a moment or two for his words to register and then he hit them again harder. “Because, gentlemen, this technology is also known to the Soviets—and our intelligence tells us that they are going full out to develop it. It means, gentlemen, that it is now possible to send a ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead from the continental United States to Soviet Russia—or vice versa—in roughly thirty minutes.” He paused again. The room was absolutely silent. There was no clearing of throats, no shuffling of feet or shifting of chairs. Everyone in the room, including the president, had their eyes fixed on Gardner. That was all he would have to say for the moment, Gardner said, as if half an hour to annihilation was not enough. He then took the time to describe what von Neumann and Schriever would cover in their presentations and turned the briefing over to Johnny.