by Jim Newton
Business complete, Khrushchev presented the group with a box of chocolates. As they were passed around, he politely complimented the quality of American chocolate. His ambassador interjected that Russian chocolate was superior, but Khrushchev, now in a generous mood, directed his interpreter not to translate the remark. Eisenhower and Khrushchev finished their candy and rode together back to Washington by car, accompanied only by a translator. They admired the scenery and reflected on the events of the past two weeks. Khrushchev left the country that night, and both men looked forward to a summit in the coming year, followed by Eisenhower’s reciprocal visit to Moscow in the fall of 1960.
Bumps in the trip notwithstanding, the pictures of a Soviet leader on Hollywood movie sets and in Iowa cornfields and Pittsburgh steel mills suggested an easing of relations that counterbalanced threats of retaliation, destruction, and conquest. On the American side, that sense of shifting emphasis—from conflict to conversation—gave rise to an imagined emergence of a “new” Eisenhower. This Eisenhower, the speculation ran, was unburdened of the twin restraints of Adams and Dulles and was freer, looser, more comfortable. That made for an appealing, though inaccurate, story line—the comeback of America’s great general. The notion that Eisenhower had been down and now was suddenly back up was captured by a question from a reporter in August, who remarked on the president’s busy schedule and asked “if you could explain to us whether this apparent new departure for you is due to perhaps a new concept in your own mind of the Presidency, or whether you are just feeling much better physically, or why all of this activity?” Eisenhower answered directly. “The only thing here,” he said, “is that I am trying to end the stalemate and to bring people together more ready to talk.”
Eisenhower rebounded politically to some degree in 1959, but not because of Dulles’s death or Adams’s resignation. The low point of his popularity came around the Republican defeats in 1958, when Ike was not on the ballot. Since then, the recession had abated, and the public’s affection for him had returned. By the summer of 1959, 60 percent of Americans approved of his presidential performance, compared with one in four who disapproved. That strengthened his political hand and freed him to be decisive, knowing that he had the support of the electorate. Reporters contrasted that sure-footedness with what seemed a stumbling White House a year earlier and deduced that Ike was finally free to be himself, now that his powerful deputies were gone.
Within the White House, those reports were considered a joke. Ann Whitman wrote: “The newspaper people suddenly find they have been wrong in riding the President, that he is not an ‘old and sick and feeble’ man, with no powers because of the fact that he cannot run again.” The Ike of 1959, after all, was only older than the Ike of 1958 and just as much a lame duck. Whitman acknowledged that Adams’s and Dulles’s departures did have consequences, just not the one that reporters believed. Herter and Persons, she observed, “are more inclined to remain in the background” than their predecessors, so the president commanded more of the foreground and seemed to outsiders more active when in reality he always had been.
Meanwhile, presidential jockeying irritated Eisenhower, and periodically the ambitions of those who would succeed him interfered with his work. In early August, Ike insulted Lyndon Johnson when he discussed potential Democratic nominees at a stag dinner for reporters and inadvertently neglected to mention Johnson as a possibility. A few days later, Johnson sulked through a session with the president and refused to speak other than to answer direct questions. Afterward, he showed White House aides some of the clips retelling Ike’s alleged slight. “I have had about all I can have of this,” Johnson complained. Eisenhower’s staff urged him to apologize. He refused.
Similarly, when Nixon’s secretary called frantically to complain that Nelson Rockefeller was quietly criticizing the Khrushchev invitation—and, presumably, seeking to take political advantage by distancing himself from the White House on that score—Whitman passed the message on to Eisenhower with a note indicating her surprise: “I said it just didn’t sound like Nelson at all.”
Nixon was no better. He confounded even those who liked him. In December, he dropped by science adviser George Kistiakowsky’s office, ostensibly to discuss the scientist’s views on nuclear weapons, but Kistiakowsky left the meeting frustrated that Nixon had held forth more than he had listened. He noted in his diary: “We were duly photographed together. This will clearly establish the fact that the Vice President is in close touch with the Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology.” The following week, the two had dinner in California, where Kistiakowsky continued to wrestle with his mixed feelings about the vice president, in part because Nixon suddenly began addressing him by his first name. “He leaves one with a strange impression,” Kistiakowsky again confided to his diary. “So far I haven’t heard him once make a statement which was wrong from my point of view, and most of the time he makes very sound observations, but I have a feeling that the motivation for these remarks is very strongly political and he openly admits so at times.”
In a White House where disdain for personal ambition was regarded as a virtue, Nixon would always be a puzzle.
Khrushchev left Washington in a blaze of optimism. The world’s two greatest antagonists—in the words of the Soviet press “a Russian worker, a revolutionary, a convinced Communist” and “a professional general, a pious man who believed in the capitalist system and who was entrusted by his country’s ruling class to guard the interests of that system”—had conferred in relative harmony and professed appreciation for each other. Khrushchev had toured America; Ike was scheduled to tour Russia; the world’s most powerful leaders had pledged to convene a grand summit to help insure the peace. Americans solidly voiced their approval of the trip.
Domestically, Americans were less confident. Steelworkers were on strike. The economy was just barely emerging from a sharp, short recession. There was an environmental health scare that fall and contentious debates with Congress, as Eisenhower used his remaining political leverage to press for government austerity, restrained defense spending, and balanced budgets even as congressional Democrats tried to accelerate spending, particularly on defense, in order to advance their political prospects.
And there was the matter of Cuba. Castro’s victory had been cautiously regarded by Washington in 1959. Eisenhower had little sympathy with the indisputably corrupt Batista: even an appeal from the dictator’s eleven-year-old son did not persuade Eisenhower to grant him asylum. Within a year, however, Ike had abandoned any hope of a working relationship with the Cuban leader, and Washington turned its sights from cooperation to destabilization. Castro was seizing private property as part of a national land reform; Cuban diplomats were seeking out allies among America’s enemies, including the nations of the Eastern bloc and Egypt’s Nasser, who hosted the emergent Che Guevara. “Castro and his advisers are moving very skillfully on the road toward the introduction of outright Communist Government in Cuba and are doing it in such a way as to not create by a rash act justification for intervention,” Kistiakowsky reported after attending the NSC meeting of January 14, 1960. Kistiakowsky would not even write about the plans in his diary, saying they were of such “extreme sensitivity” that he hesitated to put them on paper. The NSC notes offer a clue: it might be necessary, Eisenhower remarked, to blockade Cuba.
As the administration pondered its response, Eisenhower faced a related problem he was reluctant to admit. His director of Central Intelligence, in the estimation of several of Ike’s closest advisers, was woefully inept. As Castro strengthened his hold, Allen Dulles vacillated. Sometimes he urged caution and suggested that anti-Castro elements inside Cuba would topple the dictator; other times he portrayed Castro in almost demonic terms, joining with Nixon in late 1959 to compare the Cuban leader to Hitler. In July and August 1959, the United States began developing plans to “replace Castro,” only to back off in response to American interests on the island who said they thought t
hey were making headway. That promise evaporated, but U.S. hopes were raised in October, and policy turned toward supporting elements in Cuba who opposed Castro and hoping they would bring him down without America’s efforts being exposed.
The confused policy was the outgrowth of poor intelligence, for which Ike’s advisers blamed Dulles. Kistiakowsky, the science adviser, complained that Dulles would misreport essential details of intelligence matters (he once got the range of Soviet missiles wrong) and “knows absolutely nothing about what goes on in CIA.” Bryce Harlow, a long-serving deputy to the president, considered Dulles ill informed and said he misunderstood the basic responsibilities of his job. John Eisenhower regarded the director of Central Intelligence as a “bum.”
Ike never admitted that he lacked confidence in Dulles, but others wondered why he kept the enigmatic spy chief. Perhaps it was residual loyalty to the memory of John Foster Dulles. Or confidence that Ike had other sources of intelligence—the NSC, Bedell Smith, Bobby Cutler. In mid-1960, John Eisenhower suggested that Dulles be dismissed. “Dad took my head off,” he said. “When you get that angry,” John added, “sometimes it’s because you know you’re wrong.”
Ike would not act against Dulles, even as the crisis in Cuba grew more alarming. Castro shut down newspapers, jailed opponents, accused the United States of practicing for an invasion. (The United States did not need any practice to invade Cuba, Ike said drily.) By March, officials in Washington were laying contingency plans in the event that Castro massacred the Americans still on the island. Invasion and military blockade of the island were among the options before the NSC. But Castro craftily deprived the United States of a pretext to invade. At Eisenhower’s direction, the emphasis in 1960 moved from the prospect of war to the promise of regime change. As they had before in Guatemala, Iran, and Indonesia, covert operatives took the lead.
The steel strike had preoccupied Eisenhower since July 15, 1959, when the United Steelworkers of America walked out after deadlocking with employers over wage hikes and factory work rules. Eisenhower initially stayed out of it. He had consistently refused to invoke the government’s authority to settle strikes and was justifiably proud of the peaceful labor relations that characterized most of his presidency (measured by workdays lost to strikes, his years as president included six of the seven best since World War II). When the steel strike was more than a month old, Eisenhower still resisted calls for him to intervene, insisting that “these people must solve their own problems.”
But the strike dragged on, and its effects spread across the economy: in addition to 500,000 steelworkers out of work, another 200,000 workers in related industries either lost jobs or saw their hours cut. The strike even had international repercussions, as it became a source of embarrassment during Khrushchev’s visit. In August, the administration grappled with possible solutions, anxious to avoid a settlement that would result in a quick price hike, adding to the country’s economic troubles and injuring the competitive advantage of American steel in foreign markets. By late September, Eisenhower’s frustration was beginning to show as he released a tartly worded statement announcing that he was “sick and tired of the apparent impasse” and warning that the “intolerable situation” would not “be allowed to continue.” Finally, on October 9, he invoked his authority under the Taft-Hartley Act and convened a board of inquiry with the responsibility of analyzing the strike and reporting back to the president. Ten days later, he sought an injunction to force workers to return to their jobs, a “sad day for the nation” but an action that Ike felt necessary to protect the economy from further damage. The injunction was challenged but upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court; steel production resumed while talks did as well. Finally, under the leadership of Nixon, the administration brokered a deal: workers received pay and benefits increases of forty-one cents an hour, and management withdrew its attempt to gain greater control of work rules. Eisenhower was not thrilled by the terms, but he was pleased that the end of the strike helped the economy to rebound from recession.
The weeks after Khrushchev’s visit seemed to create an emotional letdown in the White House. Ike caught a cold in October. He tried to shake it by getting out of town and enjoying a few days of golf at Augusta, but he was grouchy and blue and then felled with sad news: on October 16, after a long illness, General George Marshall died.
Marshall’s death was a mournful occasion for the nation. His legacy included the great Allied victory, and his name was indelibly attached to Europe’s recovery. Marshall’s service had crossed from military to diplomatic, as he served as chief of staff of the Army, secretary of state, and secretary of defense. More than any man, he helped ready America for war after Pearl Harbor; and more than almost any other, he constructively imagined the recovery afterward. He was a general and the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize. He had been subjected to withering and unjustified criticism from Senator McCarthy and his allies, and Eisenhower was aware that he had done too little to defend his old boss during the 1952 campaign.
Marshall was a great man, and he also was an uncommonly good one. He had provided Eisenhower with a steadfast example, a counterpoint to the theatrics of MacArthur, and a study in self-effacement. It was Marshall who, upon being disappointed not to receive the command of the European invasion, nevertheless secured FDR’s handwritten order and saw that Eisenhower received it as a memento. For Eisenhower, Marshall’s death summoned a welter of deep emotion. Publicly, he ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff and released an eloquent encomium to his mentor: “His courage, fortitude and vision, his selflessness and stern standards of conduct and character were an inspiration, not only within the Army, but throughout the Nation and among our allies. For his unswerving devotion to the safeguarding of the security and freedom of our Nation, for his wise counsel and action and driving determination in times of grave danger, we are lastingly in his debt.” To Marshall’s widow, Ike was more personally reflective. “I cannot possibly describe to you the sense of loss I feel in the knowledge that George has passed to the Great Beyond,” wrote the president. “I looked to him for guidance, direction and counsel ever since I first had the great privilege of meeting him late in 1941.”
In just a year, Eisenhower had lost his oldest brother, his closest aide, and his most important mentor; little wonder that Augusta failed to cheer him up. But Ike was a resilient man, too responsible to be self-indulgent. He regained his equilibrium. A physical revealed him to be in sound health, and he managed to put the tragedies of recent months behind him.
The presidency permitted nothing less. The next crisis arrived just before Thanksgiving and arose from an unlikely source: the nation’s cranberry industry. As long as there have been cranberries grown by humans, there have been farmers who complained of weeds. The berries grow in bogs, thick pools of water unusually susceptible to clogging and choking by invasive plants. In the mid-1950s, growers seemed to have found an answer: the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the use of aminotriazole (ATZ) as an herbicide. Recognizing that ATZ posed some danger if ingested by humans, the Food and Drug Administration resisted granting blanket approval, and the Agriculture Department advised farmers that its use was restricted to clearing bogs at the end of the growing season, reasoning that it could then kill weeds but be rinsed clear by the time a new crop was planted. For whatever reason—growers who ignored the restrictions or the resilient presence of ATZ on the ground—the government’s attempts to keep ATZ out of the food supply failed. On November 9, Arthur Flemming, secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, announced that ATZ, which caused cancer in rats, had been detected in the nation’s cranberries. The government, he added, was recommending suspension of the sale of cranberries grown in Washington and Oregon “until the cranberry industry has submitted a workable plan to separate the contaminated berries from those that are not contaminated.”
It was, Life magazine reported, “a deed as awful as denouncing motherhood on the eve of Mother’s Day.” Growers cha
rged Flemming with being “ill informed, ill advised and irresponsible.” Ezra Benson, Eisenhower’s long-serving secretary of agriculture, sided with farmers against his fellow cabinet member. Nixon, campaigning in Wisconsin, another leading cranberry state, publicly ate four helpings of cranberry sauce, “just like the kind mother used to make.” Not to be outdone, John Kennedy drank a glass of cranberry juice.
The public was not so confident. Sales of cranberry sauce plummeted; Ike himself quietly removed it from the White House menu that Thanksgiving. And though a method of testing cranberries was ultimately developed, the scare that autumn foreshadowed a new public consciousness about the prevalence of chemicals in the nation’s food supply. Three years later, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was written with the cranberry crisis in mind. “For the first time in the history of the world,” she wrote, “every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception until death.”
In the meantime, once dangerous cranberries could be separated from safe ones, Ike gingerly asked Kistiakowsky whether it was okay to serve cranberry sauce at Christmas. “I urged him to do so,” Kistiakowsky noted. “He did.”
Near the end of the year, Eisenhower embarked on an eleven-nation tour that effectively served as his presidential valedictory. Accompanied by a party of twenty-one people—though not Mamie, who felt the trip was too grueling for her—Eisenhower left Andrews Air Force Base on December 3 and arrived in Italy at noon the next day. He then commenced a whirlwind trip of little substance but abundant goodwill.
Thousands greeted him in Rome, and Pope John XXIII received him that Sunday, charming John Eisenhower by remarking that they shared the same name. Tens of thousands lined the streets and squares of New Delhi, straining for a look at the president. Thousands more turned out in Washington when he returned home, even though it was nearly midnight and the weather was frigid. Many carried sparklers, twinkling in the night outside the White House.