Eisenhower appreciated Hughes’s ability to craft speeches, but they were an imperfect fit. Writing in his diary about the process of preparing his first inaugural address, Eisenhower said that Hughes “has been no help—he is more enamored with words than ideas. I don’t care much about the words if I can convey the ideas accurately.”
While Hughes was in many ways following in the tradition of Raymond Moley—especially—Samuel Rosenman, Clark Clifford, and Charles Murphy, he had the distinction of being the first presidential assistant to hold the official position of speechwriter. Hughes’s predecessors all had broader portfolios that included speechwriting as a subset. But Hughes’s job was speechwriter, though his one-on-one access and willingness to engage in policy debates meant that he and his successors also could play a key role in Ike’s administration.
Late one afternoon more than a week after Stalin’s death, Eisenhower walked a long, slow arc around the Oval Office addressing Hughes in measured, forceful tones. “Look, I am tired—and I think everyone is tired—of just plain indictments of the Soviet regime,” he said. “I think it would be wrong—in fact, asinine—for me to get up before the world now to make another one of those indictments. Instead, just one thing matters: What have we got to offer the world?”
As Eisenhower spoke, it seemed to Hughes that his contemplation was drawing to a close. Ike’s thoughts were now coalescing. The president stopped and, jaw set, stared out the window onto the South Lawn. The tiny speck of an F-86 Sabre buzzed across the sky.
In an instant his reverie broke, and he wheeled around: “Here is what I would like to say. The jet plane that roars over your head costs three quarters of a million dollars. That is more money than a man earning ten thousand dollars every year is going to make in his lifetime. What world can afford this sort of thing for long? We are in an armaments race. Where will it lead us? At worst to atomic warfare. At best, to robbing every people and nation on earth of the fruits of their own toil.
“Now, there could be another road before us—the road of disarmament. What does this mean? It means for everybody in the world: bread, butter, clothes, homes, hospitals, schools—all the good and necessary things for decent living. So let this be the choice we offer. If we take this second road, all of us can produce more of these good things for life—and we, the United States, will help them still more…. This is what I want to say. And if we don’t really have anything to offer, I’m not going to make a speech about it.”
The basics were set quickly: an appeal to the Soviets to seek security through trust rather than military might; a detailed explanation of the cost of the arms race; a call for signs of Soviet good faith—including a treaty settling the status of Austria, which was still occupied by both Western and Soviet troops;* a set of principles regarding disarmament; and finally a discussion of the fruits disarmament might bear. There was little new in the various offers and demands the speech would contain, but it expressed a nuanced understanding of the cost of war—cold or hot—in the atomic age as well as of the opportunities for peace.
Roughly a month remained before the speech was to be delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16—time to polish and refine, and also time for opponents within the administration to marshal their criticisms. One key adviser bound to be displeased was Dulles, the tall, dour arch conservative, who less than twenty-four earlier had told Hughes that peace in Korea would be undesirable until the U.S. military had given the Chinese “one hell of a licking.”
Hughes pointed to the difference between what Ike was expressing and Dulles’s views. Eisenhower paused before replying: “All right then. If Mr. Dulles and all his sophisticated advisers really mean that they can not talk peace seriously, then I am in the wrong pew. For if it’s war we should be talking about, I know the people to give me advice on that—and they’re not in the State Department.”
Dulles did not like the notion of the speech at all. New Soviet premier Georgi Malenkov had initiated a post-Stalin “peace offensive,” as Dulles and the press described it. On March 15, when Eisenhower was sketching out his own speech for Hughes, Malenkov had in his inaugural address before the Supreme Soviet said there were no problems between the USSR and the United States that could not be decided by peaceful negotiations, a sentiment echoed by other Soviet leaders.
Dulles did not buy the peace overtures from Malenkov or any other Soviet leader and he feared a “real danger of our just seeming to fall in with these Soviet overtures” if Eisenhower gave his speech, he told Hughes. The way to retake the initiative in the face of a Soviet “peace offensive,” Hughes countered without effect, was “not by turning to race in the opposite direction—but by publicly leaping several steps ahead of Soviet proposals, to a prepared position where we take our stand and summon the Soviets to come to us.”
Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, Hughes was told on April 10, wanted it “clearly indicated that while we wish we could devote to schools, roads, hospitals, etc. the money now going into U.S. rearmament, we have to keep on with our rearmament until the USSR make a basic change in its present policies and actions.”
To protect the speech, Hughes kept the bureaucrats out of the loop. He worked directly with Eisenhower, going through more than a dozen drafts, each carefully read and edited by Ike. Only occasionally did he circulate updated versions to Dulles; his brother Allen Dulles, who was director of the CIA; and Jackson. He safeguarded the speech with the knowledge and endorsement of Eisenhower, who enjoyed the one-on-one act of creation rather than having language and substance cleared to insipidness.
On April 11, there was a threat to the speech from an unexpected quarter. Viewing the Soviet situation from the opposite perspective of Dulles, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had nevertheless arrived at the same conclusion. Because he was heartened by the Soviet moves, Churchill cabled that while he thought the speech “grave and formidable,” Eisenhower would do better to “bide your time” to see if silence might draw further Communist concessions.
Hughes was summoned to a conference with the president’s brother and close confidant Milton Eisenhower, who frequently consulted on speeches, and Under Secretary of State Bedell Smith, who had been Eisenhower’s chief of staff during World War II. Hughes privately suspected that Churchill wanted to be the one to make any dramatic offers to the Soviets. Smith said that while the State Department supported the speech, Dulles still doubted the “need” for it. “Maybe Churchill’s right,” the president said with an air of resignation, “and we can whip up some other text for the occasion.” Feeling a tingle of desperation, Hughes reminded the assembled group that he had initially been leery of a premature talk but that the time was right for such an address. The matter hung in the balance for long minutes until it was resolved in the way these things so often are—the conversation drifted from the question of whether to give the speech to issues of substance and content. Finally Eisenhower dictated a message to Churchill that he was going ahead with his speech because his official statement about the Soviet situation would need to convey a clear reaction and be “more than just a jumble of platitudes.”
Eisenhower interrupted a golfing trip to Augusta, Georgia, to give the address on April 16. Arriving in Washington, he was seized with such a severe intestinal upset that Sherman Adams, his chief of staff, worried he would not be able to speak. He did, barely. He skipped passages he deemed of lesser import, struggling to read words that seemed to dance before his eyes. He later confided to Adams that he had no recollection whatsoever of what he had said toward the end.
It was no matter. The speech was acclaimed then and remains one of the underappreciated pieces of Cold War eloquence uttered by a president:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Eisenhower had laid out two paths, and explained the grim costs of following the current course. He made an appeal to follow the second path, toward “a peace that is neither partial nor punitive.” Word later reached the White House that listeners behind the iron curtain had wept upon hearing the speech. Churchill sent a personal message to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov praising the address.
Dulles, who had grumbled and questioned throughout the process, spoke at the same conference two days later. The speech, he told the newspaper editors, was “a planned stage in the evolution of the Eisenhower foreign policy.”
Hughes, who had struggled with Dulles over the draft, left the administration that September, gladly returning to writing that appeared under his own name. He had never planned on staying in the White House more than “a few months,” but privately he told Jackson in July that he had reached the end of his patience with Dulles’s foreign policy.
Around the time that Eisenhower spoke to the world about the chance for peace, Jackson and Robert Cutler, the national security adviser, suggested to the president that he should educate the American people on the very real dangers presented by an atomic conflict. Within the White House, it was called “Operation Candor.” The notion of having to explain the peril posed by nuclear war may seem odd today, but the exact nature of the threat was still unclear to large sections of the public. One Gallup poll showed that less than one third of those surveyed believed there was much danger of their city being destroyed in a Soviet attack.
Jackson produced several drafts between April and June 1953, each more depressing than the last. They came to be known as the “Bang!” papers because they described in too much detail the wounds the United States would suffer in a nuclear war. When Eisenhower read one May draft, he shuddered and turned away, saying, “We don’t want to scare the country to death!”
Domestic politics were the focus when Eisenhower took to the television airwaves on June 3, appearing with Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby,* Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, and Attorney General Herbert Brownell.† Eisenhower’s speaking style worked on television—unpretentious, matter-of-fact, a plain sincerity that carried well over the airwaves. And while he appreciated the need for a president to communicate with the voters, he preferred to do it in settings like this, with cabinet secretaries answering his questions. “I keep telling you fellows I don’t like to do” direct, solo addresses to the nation, he told his staff. “I can think of nothing more boring, for the American public, than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.”
Eisenhower had other issues with the medium. He had a skin pigmentation that made his face seem a dead, pasty white on television regardless of how ruddy or tanned he was. For much of his administration the actor Robert Montgomery served as a television coach, flying in on the day of a speech to help him prepare his delivery. Montgomery took the role very seriously, but was viewed with skepticism by some members of the staff. “His real role, it seemed to me, was to stand as close to the president as he could in the minutes before the speech,” Robert Kieve, Hughes’s assistant, recalled, “and to point his finger at the president in a provocative way so that when the cameras clicked they would show Robert Montgomery instructing the president on how to speak English.”
Montgomery introduced Eisenhower to the gadget that Truman had declined to try: the TelePrompTer. He had brought the device to Ike in France in 1951 and it “ran backwards and every way except properly,” Eisenhower aide and speechwriter Kevin McCann recalled. After further foul-ups in the campaign, “it took years for anyone to get to talk about TelePrompTers to Dwight Eisenhower.” He eventually did grudgingly use it on occasion, but he felt it confined him—forcing him to keep to a certain pace, and not skip paragraphs that he decided were extraneous. If you could control the movement yourself, he thought, it might work, but otherwise Eisenhower did not like the thing.
White House officials had the June 3 style Eisenhower-and-friends format in mind for Operation Candor. “The patent purpose is to engender a greater understanding of the nature of the fight for freedom or the struggle for existence (call it what you will) in which we are engaged—and appreciation of the enormity of the threat which faces us as a nation,” James Lambie, the special assistant who headed the White House’s advertising liaison office, wrote on June 9 to Claude Robinson of the Opinion Research Corporation, a polling group that had done some work for Eisenhower during the election. “Needless to say, this is conceived as a true Operation Candor, not Operation Politick or Operation Justifying Republican Maneuvers.”
C. D. Jackson’s next set of drafts, “Bang! BANG!”, started circulating in July. “This leaves everybody dead on both sides, with no hope anywhere,” the president told Jackson. “Can’t we find some hope?” As Eisenhower later wrote to a friend, he wanted “to give our people and the world some faint idea of the size of the distance already traveled by this new science—but to do it in such a way as not to create new alarm.”
Jackson was losing hope that the speech would ever be given. But on August 8 Malenkov announced to the world that the Soviet Union possessed the hydrogen bomb, a weapon with far greater firepower than the atomic bombs that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Four days later the Soviet Union proved its claim, testing its first H-bomb. Eisenhower was vacationing in Colorado when word reached him.
Still searching for some hope, the president started thinking about how the threat of nuclear war had cast the atom as simply a force for destruction. He wanted to convey that not only was there another side to the matter, but it could benefit the other countries of the world. “The hope,” he later wrote in his diary, “was to awaken in these small nations an understanding that there were steadily opening up new and promising opportunities for using these materials and these skills to the benefit rather than to the destruction of men.” His idea was for the United States and the USSR to contribute isotopes to a United Nations–administered pool of nuclear material that could be used to demonstrate and share the positive side of the atomic equation.
The speech drafts remained grim. “The whole world for the first time in its history is faced with the possibility of the havoc of global atomic war,” an August 24 draft read. It described how much of Washington, D.C., or St. Louis would be obliterated in a surprise Soviet attack, before adding: “Unfortunately for mankind, even these are not the limits of atomic destructiveness. We can foresee no ceiling to the power of atomic bombs either in terms of size or in variety or conditions of employment.”
And the speech remained mired in bureaucratic muddle. “I am afraid that the Candor speech is slowly dying from a severe attack of Committee-itis,” Jackson wrote in early September. It was his unhappy task to guide the speech and the proposal through the bureaucracy. During the fall a debate raged within the administration about when, where, and whether to give the speech—and what exactly it should say.
Leaks were one problem. Through September columnist brothers Joseph and Stewart Alsop published a series of articles detailing the internal debate over Operation Candor. “C. D. Jackson asks me to use this outworn method (rather than the more expeditious one of going directly to Stewart Alsop) to make sure you are are apprised of the following,” Lambie started a September 28 memo.
The next day, Eisenhower convened a breakfast meeting at the White House that included Jackson, Dulles, Wilson, and Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss. The president finally asserted himself over the process. He wanted practical ideas of how to make his international atomic energy idea work, he told them. No more debate on the matter. Since the speech was taking on a new positive tone—no longer simply the dangers facing the world but the possibilities for progress—the project was given a new code name. It would now be Operation Wheaties because the decisive meeting had taken place over breakfast.
Administration hard-liners resisted. Jackson called Cutler on October 17 to complain that drafting “was getting off the rails again thanks to Foster [Dulles], who give[s] every appearance of deliberately side-tracking me.” Dulles and other State Department officials were leery as to whether the Soviets could be successfully engaged in public, preferring quiet diplomacy. “The specific and simple terms desirable for a speech are not a good basis for beginning negotiations,” Dulles wrote Eisenhower on October 23. “Either they seem to give away too much of our case or else they seem to be primarily propaganda, which would be likely to provoke only a propaganda response. I think, therefore, that when the time comes, the approaches should be primarily private.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 9