by Conrad Black
Christian Herter, who was born in France, attended the Paris Peace Conference as Dulles had; served under Herbert Hoover in relief work and then in the Commerce Department; had six terms in the Massachusetts legislature and five terms in the House of Representatives, where he led the Herter Commission (including freshman Richard Nixon) to Europe to support the Marshall Plan; served two terms as governor of Massachusetts; and became Dulles’s under secretary and then succeeded him. He was a competent journeyman but was less informed than Dulles and had no comparable relationship or background with the president.
As Eisenhower got into the home stretch, after the slap on the wrists of the midterm elections, and sailing his own ship alone in foreign affairs without Dulles, he decided to try to build on his Open Skies plan and de-escalate the Cold War. Khrushchev and Macmillan were agitating for a summit meeting (Macmillan entirely for domestic political reasons, as he would be returning to the voters in 1959 and wanted the country to have forgotten all about Suez). Khrushchev kept extending his deadlines for Western withdrawal from Berlin (which the Soviets would also vacate but would make Berlin a UN-guaranteed international city and sign a separate peace with East Germany). Eisenhower kept dangling a partial test-ban treaty before the Russians, starting with a ban on atmospheric tests, never rejected a summit meeting (though he did not think it would accomplish anything), and teased further delays out of Khrushchev over Berlin and East Germany.
Eisenhower explained to congressional leaders and the JCS, who wanted more vigorous action, that he considered it his duty, derived from the Declaration of Independence, to facilitate the “pursuit of happiness” and not to upset the public unduly.184 In the Berlin Crisis of 1958–1959, he again showed his astonishing ability to seem to fumble his way smilingly through problems while in fact steering a carefully planned course between jagged facts and personalities, defending vital interests, conceding nothing, but giving no offense and good-naturedly rolling things forward. His ability to defuse crises, whether by negotiating from strength with recourse to discrete threats (Korea), dodging them altogether as a bad option (Vietnam), seizing on dramatic action in cases where he could not lose because they were either absurd (Quemoy and Matsu) or imagined (Lebanon) and looking strong doing it, or just dissembling and cautiously offering incentives while running out the clock, as in Berlin, was among Eisenhower’s greatest strengths as president.
Eisenhower adopted, in mid-1959, the rather bold position that if intercontinental ballistic missiles were successfully deployed, intermediate missiles in Western Europe might not be necessary, especially when close to the Soviet borders, such as in Greece, a site he judged “very questionable” for missile deployment.185 He rejected the argument that would later be adopted in the United States and the principal Western European states, that any war between the USSR and NATO should not be conducted directly between the United States and the Soviet Union over the heads of the European allies. And he also adopted the position, which would soon be taken up by his successor, that missiles close to the Soviet Union itself, such as in Greece, could be withdrawn in exchange for nondeployment of Soviet missiles in comparably close places to the United States (such as Cuba).
In July 1959, Eisenhower invited Khrushchev to the United States, intending a brief stay after the Soviet leader addressed the United Nations in New York in September. He entrusted veteran diplomat Robert Murphy with the personal issuance of the invitation, conditional on some progress in the Geneva arms-control and test-ban talks. Murphy didn’t express the condition and Khrushchev accepted for a 10-day visit. To allay concerns in the capitals of America’s principal allies, Eisenhower undertook a brief flying visit on the new presidential jet aircraft to Bonn, London, and Paris.
He found Adenauer very preoccupied with the French imbroglio in Algeria, where several hundred thousand French soldiers were now engaged in trying to suppress an Arab insurrection. About 10 percent of the Algerian population was European and loyal to France, and another 20 percent or more were Arabs who cooperated with the French and had placed their bets on the permanence of French rule. Algeria was officially a province rather than a colony of France. Adenauer was convinced the communists were behind the revolt and that if Algeria fell to them, all North Africa would. Eisenhower, who had considerable experience of the area in 1942 and 1943, thought Adenauer’s alarms excessive. Macmillan was affable and relaxed but urged a comprehensive test-ban treaty, regardless of deficiencies of inspection, presumably for political reasons, as his election was now imminent. Given verification difficulties with underground tests, Eisenhower wanted to start with a ban on atmospheric tests only, as these generated most of the radiation.
Eisenhower found Charles de Gaulle as difficult as he had foreseen, though he sympathized with many of de Gaulle’s views. De Gaulle had already proposed a tripartite agreement with Britain and the U.S. that would effectively assure a common worldwide strategy and foreign policy and would give the French a veto on any use of NATO nuclear weapons based in France. The first idea was impractical for several reasons, as it conferred on France and to a degree Britain an influence greater than anything to which they had a rightful claim. It also would have made operating the Western Alliance extremely difficult as the suspicions of the Germans and Italians, in particular, would be severely agitated. And it would mandate a level of external influence on American policy that would never be acceptable in the United States, as de Gaulle had not provided a resolution mechanism where the powers were at odds. The American military and civilian leadership both rejected the notion of a French veto on use of NATO nuclear weapons based in France, so de Gaulle ordered their removal, which was occurring during Eisenhower’s visit. But privately, Eisenhower could see de Gaulle’s point, and the principle he was pursuing was soon generally agreed in NATO. Of course, the host countries had to have the authority to determine if they could be the source of nuclear attacks on others, as was recognized after a few years.
Eisenhower had considerable sympathy for the French position in Algeria, but was militant that the United States must not throw in its lot with colonialism and the suppression of indigenous national forces. De Gaulle had not given up his hope that he might eventually, with the help of the Germans, entice the British to think more as Europeans than as Atlanticist Anglo-Americans, and he still had the wartime delusions of the revenant grandeur of France, though it was just starting to recover political stability under his leadership and constitution and was deeply mired in the Algerian War. Yet there might have been the possibility of some sort of placation of him that would have made France a closer ally—by conceding the joint approval of nuclear missions from NATO countries (what became known decades later as the two-key system) and by establishing some sort of NATO executive direction that would have included two other rotating countries and involved various bilateral guarantees for Germany and several other allies. Instead, Eisenhower only lamented the demise of the European Defense Community and asked de Gaulle to consider reviving it. This was the integrated European armed forces under American command and was at least as impractical an idea as anything the French leader was proposing. De Gaulle declined, but American leaders continued almost mindlessly to favor Euro-integration (civil and military) long after the end of any need to encourage it in order to make the Europeans better Cold Warriors.
Eisenhower did assure his hosts that they had nothing to fear in his meetings with Khrushchev, and the trip was a great personal success. He pulled immense crowds, about a million wildly cheering and spontaneously attending people lined the roads from the airports into London and Paris and hundreds of thousands in Bonn, a remarkable feat in London only three years after Suez. He and Macmillan appeared together on television in London and spoke ex tempore in conversation. It was a very successful occasion. He returned to Washington on September 7, just a week before Khrushchev’s arrival.
Khrushchev told the United Nations that the Soviet Union favored a complete abolition of all weapons, nuclear and co
nventional, in just four years, but had no suggestions for an inspection system and presented a fall-back proposal for a serious effort to close the test-ban agreement. He had a cross-country tour of the United States and two days of talks with Eisenhower at Camp David. His general position was that neither side wanted war, but there was no progress at all on the substantive issues of the test ban and Great Power relations in Germany, the Middle East, and Far East, other than Khrushchev’s relaxation of any deadline for progress on Berlin. At one point when Khrushchev proclaimed his ability to rout the conventional forces of NATO in Berlin and West Germany, Eisenhower instantly replied: “If you attack us in Germany, there will be nothing conventional about” our response.186 The visit generated what was called “the Spirit of Camp David” and was a modest improvement in atmospherics.
Eisenhower spent almost three weeks in December on a trip to Rome, Ankara, Karachi, Kabul, New Delhi (with side trips, including to the Taj Mahal), Tehran, Athens, Tunis, Paris, Madrid, and Casablanca. He again pulled tremendous crowds in almost all the countries, including India. He met again with de Gaulle and went over de Gaulle’s concern, expressed in a November letter, that the United States and the Soviet Union could level Europe without hitting each other, in the event of war between them, and could even reach a grand accommodation that would be to the detriment of Western Europe. He was really pitching this to a European constituency, to push again France’s claim to being the true defender of Europe and the unreliability of the Anglo-American allies without a stronger European (i.e., French) influence on the Alliance. There was a grain of plausibility in this, but for the most part French policy was an infelicitous aggregation of misplaced grandiosity, paranoia, and confidence tricks. Eisenhower remonstrated with him and did well assuaging his concerns, but he could not eliminate the temptations and advantages to de Gaulle of continuing to posture as an authentic European redoubt against both the Soviet Communists and the Anglo-Saxons, who would, however, as need arose, be a splendid ally of Washington and London in a crisis, if not for even slightly disinterested motives. It was essentially a fraud, but de Gaulle was a statesman of great stature, who was thus a more consummately adept charlatan.
By early 1960, the problem with Cuba was becoming quite aggravated. Castro was almost certainly a communist and was whipping up great hostility to the United States in his interminable addresses to huge crowds in Havana. He executed hundreds of alleged Batista supporters in procedures that made no pretense to due process, and had seized some American property. The traditional American recourse in such matters, after the dispatch of the Marines more or less at the behest of the United Fruit Company and similarly avaricious corporate ambassadors of the U.S., was to declare a violation of the Organization of American States prohibition of communist infiltration in the Americas. But Castro was too cunning to be overtly in violation of that, and too popular in Latin America, where he invoked ancient prejudices against the gringos and did not just hurl Marxist shibboleths, to enable imposition of such an accusation on the OAS. Eisenhower was warned that he could not move against Castro without doing the same against right-wing Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.
The CIA produced some very trivial suggestions for destabilizing the Castro regime—demolishing sugar refineries and so forth—and then some exotic but absurd and unsuccessful methods of assassinating Castro, including poisoned cigars and exploding seashells. There were growing numbers of angry Cuban refugees in Florida, and Eisenhower authorized a program to find a suitable exile leader and alternate government, to support destabilization efforts in Cuba, to establish a clandestine organization there, to launch a major propaganda offensive against Castro, and to create a paramilitary force for guerrilla action. In February 1960, Eisenhower made a moderately successful trip to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, as well as Puerto Rico. As always, he pulled large and friendly crowds, but they weren’t as full of gratitude and solidarity as those of Paris and London. This was going to be a very durable and complicated problem. The United States would pay a price for ignoring, for the 20 years since Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy was subsumed into World War II, the festering sores and antagonisms of Latin America.
Eisenhower was now preparing what he hoped would be the crowning achievement of his presidency, in arms control and Cold War de-escalation. He told a meeting of the National Security Council on March 24, 1960, that he would effectively accept a Soviet counterproposal of acceptance of a supervised and verified ban of all atmospheric, underwater, and large underground nuclear tests and a voluntary, unverified end to small underground tests. The JCS, Defense Department, and the Atomic Energy Commission were horrified, but the president pointed out to them that the U.S. was already using the peaceful program, Plowshare, which also revealed military applications, and that it would be inappropriate to be too self-righteous.187 He was prepared to accept an unverified moratorium on small underground tests for up to two years but emphasized that a treaty was necessary to stop the endless construction and deployment of utterly absurd numbers and throw weights of nuclear warheads, to the detriment of more productive uses of resources in both countries. Once again, General Dwight Eisenhower applied his immense knowledge of military affairs, and insight into the military and defense personality, to shape national policy in a sensible and placatory direction.
3. THE U-2, THE PARIS SUMMIT, AND THE END OF THE EISENHOWER PRESIDENCY
All was in readiness for the summit meeting in Paris when a U-2 aerial reconnaissance overflight of Russia was authorized by Eisenhower and did not return. The American leadership assumed that the plane crashed, and eventually referred to a routine, high-altitude meteorological flight, on the assumption that the pilot was dead. Khrushchev did nothing to undermine this claim and let the Americans reinforce the fraud about weather flights. On May 8, Khrushchev revealed that he had the plane and the pilot, and still the Americans persisted in their pathetic attempt at deception. Instead of saying that such flights occasionally occurred, were always authorized by him personally, were not a patch on Soviet espionage in the West, confirmed American missile superiority, and would not have been necessary at all if the Russians had accepted Eisenhower’s Open Skies proposal, the Americans waffled and, at Herter’s instigation, denied that the aircraft had had any authority to overfly the Soviet Union. The leading figures of the administration were scrambling and fussing and running for cover, and Eisenhower, on May 9, approved the acknowledgement of a broad authority for such overflights.
Played to perfection by Khrushchev, it was a humiliating, shaming, public relations disaster for America, and caused the partial disintegration of Eisenhower’s reputation as a cool, upright, highly capable Cold War commander. Khrushchev raised the temperature further by threatening to destroy the bases in neighboring countries from which the flights were launched. Khrushchev publicly professed to believe that Eisenhower did not know about these flights, in order to portray him as a fuddy-duddy unable to control American militarism and tempt him further into deception. Eisenhower said that Soviet conduct required such overflights and that Khrushchev’s histrionics revealed “a fetish about secrecy.” With Khrushchev demanding a public apology from Eisenhower, which the American president made clear would not be forthcoming, the two men and Macmillan departed for the Paris summit conference on May 14. Eisenhower met first with de Gaulle and Macmillan. Though the proportions of the fiasco were hardly comparable, it could not have been a more different atmosphere than that which followed Suez. Eisenhower said: “I hope no one is under the illusion that I am going to crawl on my knees to Khrushchev.” De Gaulle smiled and said: “No one is under that illusion,” and referred to Khrushchev’s threat of attack on America’s allies. Eisenhower replied: “Rockets can travel in two directions.” Macmillan expressed agreement and de Gaulle added: “With us it is easy; we are bound together by history.” Eisenhower was suitably moved and grateful for the solidarity of his allies, and said so, but the summit conference, in which he had place
d such hopes, was over before it began.
It did convene, and Eisenhower had intended to reply to a six-page demand Khrushchev had served on de Gaulle, calling for American apologies and so forth. Khrushchev stood up and started shouting accusations against Eisenhower and the United States. De Gaulle interrupted him and said the acoustics in the room were excellent and that there was no need for Khrushchev to raise his voice, and had his own interpreter say it to spare Khrushchev’s translator the embarrassment. Khrushchev started up again and quickly regained his former volume and complained of being overflown. De Gaulle again interrupted him and said that France had been overflown 18 times in the previous day by the satellite “you launched just before you left Moscow to impress us.” Khrushchev concluded his diatribe by withdrawing his invitation to the American leader to come to Russia. Eisenhower replied that he need not have gone to such lengths to withdraw his invitation, and that he hoped that they could now discuss serious matters. Khrushchev and his colleagues stood up abruptly and left. Eisenhower moved to follow them out and de Gaulle grasped his elbow and said: “I don’t know what Khrushchev is going to do nor what is going to happen, but whatever he does and whatever happens, I want you to know that I am with you to the end.” As always in stressful times, de Gaulle (and Macmillan too, though less dramatically) was elegant in his solidarity, and his last words to Khrushchev were “Don’t let me detain your departure.” De Gaulle was the leading figure of the aborted conference, but he had spoken nothing but the truth when, a few months earlier, he had “told Dwight Eisenhower that whatever the outcome of the conference, he [Eisenhower] would take with him into retirement the esteem of the whole world.”188