When the ECG showed that Eisenhower had suffered a major heart attack, Snyder must have been deeply embarrassed. The president’s driver was quickly summoned, and Eisenhower was rushed off to Fitzsimons, where he was injected with blood thinners and placed in an oxygen tent to relieve the pressure on his heart. Press Secretary Hagerty finally reached the hospital from Washington later that evening.
For years, Snyder labored to conceal the fact that he had badly misdiagnosed the heart attack and that his error might have ended Eisenhower’s life. Of course, few cover-ups succeed without help, and there was no lack of senior officials willing to help keep Snyder’s secret—even Sherman Adams did his part. In his memoirs, Adams recounts almost word for word Snyder’s version of events. Given his centrality to the administration, it is difficult to imagine that Adams did not know the truth. As press secretary, Hagerty was probably the person most responsible for keeping the lie alive. He wanted to control the narrative, so instead of entertaining media inquiries about the inconsistencies in the timeline of Eisenhower’s illness, he focused attention on Eisenhower’s progress in recovery. Eventually questions about Snyder simply died away, only to reemerge decades later in Lasby’s book.5
As the administration went into crisis mode to manage public perceptions surrounding the president’s illness, the central question became what to do if Eisenhower remained too ill to perform the functions of his office. There was a plan in place for what to do if Eisenhower died, but there was no playbook for how the government should function if the chief executive was only severely debilitated.
All this still lay in the future as Adams struggled to sleep on the long flight home from Scotland. As the plane prepared to land in the drizzle and fog of Washington, DC, Adams looked out the window at the city below, contemplating what awaited him. Eisenhower had assembled an extraordinary cabinet, and, for the most part, its members functioned as a well-oiled team. But they had never faced a challenge like this.
II
Covert Actions
As Eisenhower lay unconscious nearly two thousand miles away in Denver, concerns about how the government would function without him were on the minds of everyone in his cabinet. Vice President Nixon was now in the spotlight in a way that he had never been before. All the eyes upon him must have seemed to ask: “Are you in charge? Are you ready?” Ducking into the president’s shadow was no longer an option. Adams, no doubt, felt a similar pressure looking into the eyes of men who regarded him as Eisenhower’s de facto deputy.
Secretary of State Dulles had much to lose from Eisenhower’s absence. A healthy president meant access, influence and recognition as arguably the third most powerful person in the administration. Now, with Eisenhower gone, Dulles was just another member of the cabinet. Worse still, Eisenhower’s absence might mean foreign policy would be made by consensus, which Dulles, who was intent on maintaining control over foreign affairs, could not countenance.
In the fog swirling around the presidency in those critical first days, Dulles would need to move aggressively if he wanted to protect his power. Because of their authority, he perceived Nixon and Adams as real threats. By virtue of their positions in the administration, Nixon and Adams both had arguable claims to leadership of the cabinet. Like a character in a Shakespearean drama, Dulles would need to act swiftly and carefully if he wanted to marginalize Nixon and Adams and preserve his grip on foreign affairs.
Of the two, Dulles was less threatened by Nixon, whom he knew would be too worried about appearing power-hungry to overtly snatch control of foreign affairs from him. Since Nixon’s only real involvement in foreign policy was his participation in meetings of the National Security Council, ordinarily he posed no major threat to Dulles. But as vice president, no one would question him if he decided to take command of the cabinet on behalf of the ailing president. What if he started poking around in Dulles’s secret affairs?
Adams posed a much larger danger. He was seen as the power behind the throne in the White House, and no one would blink if he decided to assume control, on Eisenhower’s behalf, of the one small area of policymaking that he did not already dominate. If necessary, Dulles could tolerate Nixon’s leadership, knowing that his own vast experience would give authority to his complaints if he decided to push back. But it would not be as easy for Dulles to assert himself under Adams—Adams could be prickly. Twenty years in politics had made him an experienced and particularly vicious knife-fighter whose greatest strength may have been his lack of shame. Unlike most people in Washington, Adams was not burdened by ego. He did not care what people thought of him. If he was perceived as rude or callous or even deliberately mean-spirited in the pursuit of presidential business, so be it.
At fifty-nine, Adams was at the pinnacle of staff power in the White House. Though small in stature, he cast a colossal shadow. He had the cool, detached bearing of a man used to being in charge—and he looked the part, with his shock of white hair, compact athletic build, clenched jaw and steely blue eyes. He was a man of immense authority, with a temper to match. Those unfortunate enough to make him angry would face an assault of finger-snapping vitriol intended to cut deep. No one who worked for him in the White House left the job unscarred.
Adams was born in 1899 in a small farming community in eastern New Hampshire to a journeyman father who moved aimlessly from job to job. His summers were spent on his grandfather’s Vermont farm, where he was introduced to the true meaning of hard work. After graduating from Dartmouth, he took a job in a logging camp. It was there, biographers think, that he acquired a talent for offending and alienating people. As a small man among brutish lumberjacks, he needed to be direct and imposing. His words had to inflict the blows that his modest frame could not deliver.
He was a man of contradictions. The Ivy League graduate and aspiring musician, who regularly attended the symphony and read poetry in his free time, often recalled with good humor being kicked in the face by a horse and losing his front teeth while logging. He wore flamboyant neckties, sheer silk socks and ill-fitting suits that hung from his sharp angles like cheap drapes in a storefront window. His speech had a calm, languid quality similar to a Southern drawl, but clipped with the economy characteristic of those accustomed to New England winters. His manner was sophisticated and yet pedestrian. It was as easy to imagine him in a tux at the opera as it was to envision him out on a brisk November morning, wrapped in flannels, pulling up lobster traps. His voice was deeper than you would expect given his size, and he sometimes spoke with his tongue pressed tight up against his bottom teeth as if trying to conceal a secret.
He pursued a career in government as a way to provide for his growing family. Although he eschewed the backslapping kabuki of politics, his rise was swift. Soon after being elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives, he was elected speaker. He left briefly, to serve a single term in the US Congress, before returning to run for governor. During his second term as governor, he was persuaded to join General Eisenhower’s campaign for president. Eisenhower was so impressed with Adams’s abilities that he convinced him to resign from the governorship to work full-time on his campaign. When Eisenhower won the election, he made Adams his chief of staff and vested him with powers that rivaled those of past presidents.
Eisenhower assigned his chief of staff three principal responsibilities: (1) to oversee White House operations, (2) to control the paper flow in and out of the building and (3) to prevent all disagreements, big and small, from reaching the president’s desk. The structure and procedures Adams instituted to perform these tasks would make him the most powerful man to ever work for an American president.
As Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Dulles was the highest-ranking cabinet official besides the vice president, but he had good reason to tread carefully around Adams. As chief of staff to a man like Eisenhower, who delegated freely and who trusted him completely, Adams was the only man in the administration with the authority to reach into the portfolio of other staff members at his
own discretion. If done by anyone else, such “poaching” of another’s duties would be abhorrent, but Adams had been granted access to any matter worthy of Eisenhower’s attention. In essence, this is what Dulles feared. He had created a bubble around himself and Eisenhower that he wanted no one—apart from his brother Allen—to penetrate.
To fully grasp the extent of Adams’s power, and therefore the delicacy of the task before Dulles, one must understand the potency of a position like chief of staff when combined with the role of right hand to the president. The president’s chief of staff is not always his or her right hand. But, in Adams’s case, he was. His portfolio covered almost all aspects of the president’s policy and political work. Eisenhower did not want to be bothered with detail, so he gave Adams the responsibility of determining what to deal with on his own and what, on the other hand, rose to the level of the president’s attention. This responsibility comprised everything from whom Eisenhower met with, to what policy recommendations reached his desk, to what Eisenhower read. Their arrangement went both ways. Adams kept unnecessary detail away from Eisenhower, and the president would not even read a policy brief unless Adams had read it first and visibly indicated his recommendation on the page. Since Eisenhower disliked reading long documents, Adams would distill them into single-page reports. This process practically ensured that Adams had the final say on most issues before they reached the president.
This was not the only source of Adams’s power. Eisenhower abhorred politics and counted few politicians among his close friends. Since Adams was the only member of the staff who had actually held a senior political position before joining the administration, he was put in charge of maintaining relationships with important elected officials. Nowhere was this duty more important than in the patronage system presidents use to reward friends of the administration—which itself can be an enormous source of power. Not only did Adams do the hiring and firing for Eisenhower, he vetted and personally approved political appointees at all levels. Eisenhower, for the most part, simply signed off on Adams’s recommendations.
To manage the paper flow in and out of the White House, Adams devised an intricate process to oversee the advancement of recommendations from agencies. All policy initiatives that were to fall under the eye of the president would systematically traverse every relevant agency for input before a final recommendation document was generated for Adams to give to the president. For Eisenhower, the underlying assumption was that Adams had a very good reason for the recommendation he was making. Thus he often signed off without question.
As Eisenhower’s gatekeeper, Adams personally approved most meetings with the president—even the ones with senior cabinet officials. Adams determined who got in, how long they stayed and what was discussed. The only person exempted from this process was Secretary Dulles. He alone was permitted to make unsolicited calls to Eisenhower and schedule private meetings with him. Eisenhower viewed Dulles as a mentor and afforded him a level of autonomy over foreign affairs similar to that which he granted Adams over domestic affairs. An important difference, however, was that Dulles was required to provide hour-by-hour updates on developments. Adams was not subjected to the same reporting requirement. Furthermore, Adams had the authority to reach into Dulles and Eisenhower’s special partnership if the matter they were dealing with could be interpreted as political. A frequent problem for Dulles was that Adams was given to a broad definition of the word “political.”
In the first years of Eisenhower’s administration, Dulles could count on getting his way on foreign-policy matters. After Eisenhower’s heart attack, he feared that foreign affairs could become subject to decision-making by consensus among cabinet members or, worse still, that he could lose control over foreign affairs completely. Before Eisenhower’s illness, urgent national security matters were often discussed in a group setting, but Dulles and Eisenhower would decide together in private how to resolve the issues. In those first critical days after the president’s hospitalization, when everyone was scrambling, Dulles’s number-one priority was securing his grasp on the area of influence he had carved out for himself.
John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen could easily be described as the very definition of the “ugly American.” Their arrogance and refusal to even countenance the idea that non-Western cultures were worthy of an equal political footing with Western ones produced in them a prejudiced and myopic view of the world, which informed a dangerous foreign policy.
In many ways, the two brothers were opposites—Allen was charming and a notorious womanizer, and John was reserved and moralistic—but on the issue of which country should dominate global affairs, they were in full agreement. Modern observers are only now beginning to understand the great harm they did together.
John Foster was a devout Calvinist, and his faith determined his approach to life. In his youth, he was handsome, tall and lanky, with high cheekbones that gave his face a movie-star quality. He had an aloof, serious manner and a severe social awkwardness. In college, he had a crush on a male schoolmate, an attraction that he was ill-equipped to understand and that he only fully recognized when the other boy tried to raise their relationship to the physical.6
He developed a facial tic that would surface whenever he felt pressured, and he was given to over-blinking in an attempt to conceal it. He had a tendency to speak with his lower lip protruding—which, later in life, when combined with his hunched shoulders and large ears, gave him the appearance of an aging chimpanzee. At parties, he would often stir his drinks with his index finger and was once noticed squeezing candle wax into little balls and chewing on them.7 He was a man of unquestioned intellectual gifts, but his discomfort in social situations made him prone to gaffes. Winston Churchill once described him as the only bull who carried a china shop around with him.8
In youth, Dulles was imbued with the belief that he bore a special duty in life: to go out into the world and eradicate the forces that threatened Western civilization. Decades of work at the international law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, where it was his job to bully foreign countries into accepting the will of American corporations, only deepened his commitment to this mission. Once he was appointed secretary of state, this activist sentiment was the driving force behind an aggressive covert foreign policy that included the use of assassination and other cloak-and-dagger tactics, details of which were closely guarded at the highest levels of the administration.
Eisenhower’s presidency is often described as an oasis of calm between periods of global political tumult, but recently declassified documents are beginning to reveal that Eisenhower led a tremendously active secret foreign policy that the Dulles brothers helped implement. His administration would be dubbed the “Hidden Hand” presidency for the ways in which Eisenhower was involved behind the scenes in global affairs. He used the CIA as a covert army to overthrow governments9 and to install regimes friendly to the US. For Dulles, preserving his power in the cabinet after Eisenhower’s heart attack was about not only preserving his standing as secretary of state, but also about protecting the secrets that only he, his brother Allen and Eisenhower knew.
With Eisenhower incapacitated, Dulles imagined that rolling Nixon would be easy. The vice president’s relationship with Eisenhower was already on shaky ground.10 But Dulles worried about Adams. The president was permissive of his chief of staff’s “political” activities. Adams could be trouble if he chose to view Eisenhower’s heart attack in purely political terms. Dulles had tangled with him before.
One time, Dulles had tried to appoint a Democrat, Benjamin Cohen, to an important post at the UN. When Republican leaders complained to Adams, he reached out to Cohen—without consulting Dulles, who was abroad at the time—and encouraged him not to take the position. By the time Dulles returned, the matter was settled, and there was nothing he could do about it. With the president in the hospital and the next presidential election not far down the road, what was to stop Adams from similarly declaring everything “political�
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Dulles also feared that Adams’s dominance over cabinet affairs might affect his work. The chain of command put Adams in firm control of all cabinet matters; the staffers who handled the schedule and paperwork all reported to Adams. It was Adams’s job to set the agenda for meetings and to ensure follow-up. Dulles feared that with the president out of the way, Adams’s role might become even more invasive.
Dulles did not want to destroy Adams or even to usurp his power. All he really needed was to get Adams out of the way so that he and his brother Allen could go about their business without anyone asking difficult questions.
The instrument Dulles would use to marginalize Adams and the vice president was a simple one—a common press release.
Dulles had a law degree, but he was not really a lawyer in the traditional sense. At Sullivan and Cromwell, he had functioned more like a diplomat than an attorney. But anyone trained as a lawyer is trained in the writing of contracts, and Dulles must have recognized that getting the cabinet to approve a press release that codified cabinet operations in Eisenhower’s absence would serve as a contract of sorts. On the surface, it would appear intended to put to rest any public fears about the smooth functioning of the administration during the president’s illness. But in reality, Dulles was orchestrating what could be interpreted as a soft coup on paper. If Dulles could convince the entire cabinet, including Adams, to approve the press release, he would effectively marginalize Adams and Nixon. The contract ensured that no one, especially Nixon or Adams, would be able to disrupt any of Dulles’s covert actions.11
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