Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  Critics of the seaway were not entirely wrong as to its adverse effect on eastern cities. Buffalo, New York, which had been the eastern terminus for Great Lakes shipping before the seaway, was the fifteenth largest city in the United States in 1950. In 2010, it ranks forty-fifth and its population has declined by half.

  f The budget Eisenhower inherited in 1953 showed a deficit of $6.5 billion. That was reduced to $1.2 billion in 1954, and by 1956 the federal budget was $3.9 billion in the black. The arms race plunged the budget back into deficit in 1958, but in 1960, Ike’s last year in office, the government ran a surplus of $301 million. Financial Management Service, U.S. Department of the Treasury.

  g A one-dollar-an-hour minimum wage does not seem like much today. But a dollar in 1955, adjusted for inflation, equals $8.15 currently. Today’s minimum wage is only $7.25. In comparative terms, that is 90¢ less than in Ike’s day.

  h In 1954, the Eisenhower administration introduced a reinsurance plan to backstop private insurance companies against “abnormal loss” if they expanded their coverage to individuals not adequately covered by health insurance. The reinsurance plan, in Ike’s view, was a “middle way” between government and private insurance. Despite vigorous administration backing, the plan was opposed by the American Medical Association as the opening wedge to “socialized medicine.” On July 13, 1954, it lost in the House of Representatives, 134–238, with 75 Republicans voting no. “The people that voted against this bill just don’t understand what are the facts of American life,” Eisenhower told his press conference the following day. Public Papers, 1954 633.

  i At his press conference on March 30, 1955, Eisenhower was asked whether Admiral Carney would be reprimanded for his remarks. “Not by me,” the president replied—a classic Eisenhower response. Carney’s reprimand came from Defense Secretary Wilson, who immediately issued an order directing all military personnel to henceforth submit for clearance all speeches, press releases, and “other information” intended for publication. When Carney’s term as CNO expired that summer, he was replaced by Admiral Arleigh “Thirty-one Knot” Burke. (During World War II, Burke mistakenly led his destroyer squadron into a Japanese minefield. Admiral Halsey radioed to ask Burke what he was doing in a Japanese minefield. “Thirty-one knots,” Burke replied. Eisenhower advanced Burke over the heads of ninety admirals more senior.) Press conference, March 30, 1955, Public Papers, 1955 374.

  j In a lengthy letter to General Gruenther, Eisenhower attempted to explain his thought process on the Formosa question.

  We must make a distinction (this is a difficult one) between an attack that has only as its objective the capture of an offshore island and one that is primarily a preliminary movement to an all-out attack on Formosa.… More and more I find myself, in this type of situation—and perhaps it is because of my advancing years—tending to strip each problem down to its simplest possible form. Having gotten the issue well defined in my mind, I try in the next step to determine what answer would best serve the long term advantage and welfare of the United States and the free world. I then consider the immediate problem and what solution we can get that will best conform to the long term interests of the country and at the same time can command a sufficient approval in this country so as to secure the necessary Congressional action.

  When I get a problem solved on this rough basis, I merely stick to the essential answer and let associates [Dulles? Nixon?] have a field day on words and terminology.…

  Whatever is now to happen, I know that nothing could be worse than global war.

  DDE to Gruenther, February 1, 1955, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 16, The Presidency 1539, cited subsequently as 16 The Presidency. (Eisenhower’s emphasis.)

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Heart Attack

  Misfortune, and particularly the misfortune of illness, brings to all of us an understanding of how good people are.

  —DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER,

  November 11, 1955

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1955, the thaw in the Cold War continued. First came an agreement about Austria, which had been occupied by the Allies since 1945. On April 19, the Soviet government suggested that the Big Four foreign ministers (Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR) meet in Vienna “in the nearest future” to conclude a peace treaty “for the restoration of an independent, democratic Austria.” Eisenhower had said that an Austrian peace treaty would set an important benchmark in the effort to reduce world tensions, and the new Soviet leadership appeared willing to cooperate. The quadripartite occupation of Austria ended on May 15, 1955, with the signing of the Austrian State Treaty. British, French, American, and Soviet forces withdrew, and the new Austrian government pledged to remain neutral between East and West.

  The situation in central Europe stabilized further on May 5, 1955, when the division of Germany was formally accepted. The three Western powers recognized the Federal Republic, ending the ten-year occupation. The following day West Germany became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In the East, the Soviets followed suit. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was accorded full sovereignty, and on May 14 in Warsaw the Soviet Union signed a mutual defense treaty with seven nations of Eastern Europe, including the GDR, creating the Warsaw Pact alliance.

  Europe was now divided between the member states of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, while Austria, Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland remained neutral. With the boundaries drawn, and the outlines of a modus vivendi taking shape, the time seemed appropriate to dust off Sir Winston Churchill’s 1953 suggestion for a Big Four meeting “with a measure of informality and a still greater measure of privacy and seclusion.”1

  Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union pressed for a summit conference. In Britain, Anthony Eden had succeeded Churchill as prime minister in April and faced a general election at the end of May. Eden believed that the announcement of a meeting of the heads of government would enhance his prestige prior to the election.2 In France, Edgar Faure, who had been premier of the Fourth Republic since February, shared the view that a summit meeting would redound to his political advantage, and the new Soviet leadership of Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, who had replaced Georgy Malenkov as chairman of the council of ministers, and Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), seemed similarly motivated. In the United States, Dulles and Eisenhower were initially reluctant, but were soon swept up by world opinion, which clamored for a summit. The time seemed ripe to press for a truce in the Cold War. Senator Walter George of Georgia, the influential chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, added his voice to those urging a meeting, and Eisenhower yielded. “Not wishing to appear senselessly stubborn in my attitude toward a Summit meeting,” wrote Ike, “I instructed Secretary Dulles to let it be known through diplomatic channels that if the other powers were genuinely interested in such a meeting we were ready to listen to their reasoning.”3

  On May 8, 1955, the governments of Britain, France, and the United States dispatched identical notes to Moscow suggesting a meeting of the four heads of government “to remove sources of conflict between us.”4 The Soviets accepted one week later, and on June 13 it was announced that the Big Four would meet in Geneva on July 18.

  When the meeting was announced, the Republican Old Guard threw a tantrum. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, evoking images of Munich and Yalta, warned that all international conferences contained seeds of “appeasement, compromise, and weakness.”5 Joe McCarthy, still reeling from the Senate’s condemnation, proposed a resolution requiring the president to condition his going to Geneva on Russian agreement to have the conference discuss the satellite nations of Eastern Europe. Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson sprang to Ike’s defense. McCarthy’s proposal “placed a loaded gun at the President’s head,” said LBJ.6 Johnson immediately recognized the opportunity McCarthy had provided to put the Senate on record supporting Eisenhower and to embarrass the GOP’s Old Guard at the same time. W
ith Senator George’s cooperation, LBJ kept McCarthy’s resolution alive, reported it to the Senate floor with Democratic votes, and let the Republicans squirm. When McCarthy belatedly recognized his error and sought unanimous consent to withdraw his resolution, Johnson objected. The yeas and nays were called, and McCarthy’s resolution was defeated 77–4. The vote was a ringing endorsement for Ike and the Geneva summit. Shortly afterward, the president met with congressional leaders to assure them that Geneva would not be another Yalta. No decisions would be made without their approval, said Eisenhower, and there would be no appeasement.7

  “Personally, I do not expect any spectacular results from the forthcoming ‘Big Four’ Conference,” Ike wrote Swede Hazlett. “Nevertheless, the general world and domestic outlook is better than it was two and a half years ago.”8

  As the date for the conference approached, expectations increased, and Eisenhower was caught up in the spirit. Speaking to a national radio and television audience from the White House less than an hour before his departure for Geneva, Ike said his trip was unprecedented.

  Other Presidents have left the continental limits of our country for the purpose of discharging their duties as Commander in Chief in time of war, or to participate in conference at the end of a war. But now, for the first time, a President goes to engage in a conference with the heads of other governments in order to prevent wars, in order to see whether in this time of stress and strain we cannot devise measures that will keep from us this terrible scourge that afflicts mankind.9

  Eisenhower was the last of the Big Four to arrive in Geneva. By a quirk of fate, the Reverend Billy Graham was holding a revival crusade in the city that coincided with the summit. Graham acknowledged that the timing was accidental, although he did not rule out the possibility that Providence may have played a role. Graham told The New Yorker’s Richard Rovere that he was much in favor of the summit. “Moses long ago held a parley at the Summit,” said Graham, “and had there received a ten-point directive that the heads of government would do well to restudy.”10

  The summit lasted five days.a Little progress was made on the agenda items the Big Four considered—disarmament, European security, and German reunification—but the atmosphere of collegiality provided a refreshing change from the hostile chill that had characterized East-West relations since the imposition of the Berlin blockade in 1948. At Geneva, the Big Four agreed to disagree. As one scholar of the period put it, they implicitly agreed to accept the status quo, and a decision to accept the status quo can be every bit as important, and in certain circumstances, as helpful, as a decision to change things.11 Anthony Eden said it best when he told Parliament the summit “has given this simple message to the whole world: It has reduced the danger of war.”12 Nikita Khrushchev agreed. “Neither side wants war,” he told the East Germans on his way back to Moscow.13

  Socially, the delegations mixed easily. Eisenhower held a lengthy private luncheon with his old friend Marshal Zhukov, who had been rescued from the internal exile Stalin had imposed and was now the Soviet minister of defense. In his memoirs, Eisenhower—who had been stung by political criticism of his friendship with Zhukov—was at pains to distance himself from his former comrade, who was “no longer the same man he had been in 1945.”14 But the notes of the luncheon conversation kept by Ambassador Charles Bohlen, who translated for Ike, reveal an animated, wide-ranging two-and-a-half-hour discussion that touched on most issues confronting the two countries. Zhukov insisted the Soviet Union did not want war. Eisenhower said all his experience with Zhukov in Berlin led him to believe his old friend, and he believed him now. Zhukov appealed for détente. Eisenhower replied that fear and distrust flourished on both sides; they were emotions difficult to dispel. And now there was the arms race.15

  Zhukov suggested that the way to relax tensions would be to curtail the polemic and invective between nations. Ike agreed, but reminded Zhukov that he could not control either Congress or the press. The discussion widened. Ike pressed disarmament. What about inspection to determine the facts? asked the president. Why not? Zhukov responded. And why not reduce the size of the armies? Eisenhower agreed. When Zhukov mentioned the admission of mainland China to the United Nations, and Ike brought up the subject of prisoners of war still held by the Soviet Union, it was clear the conversation had reached its end.

  The day after his lunch with Zhukov, Eisenhower stole the spotlight at Geneva when he unveiled his “Open Skies” proposal to throw open the airspace above the United States and the Soviet Union to mutual inspection flights by each country. Ike’s proposal was totally unanticipated and caught the world by surprise. But the plan had been carefully crafted by a high-level committee of experts working under Nelson Rockefeller, Ike’s special assistant for Cold War strategy, at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, just south of Washington. The proposal was then thoroughly vetted at NSC level by Radford, Dulles, Stassen, and Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Anderson, as well as Ike’s old friend General Alfred Gruenther and various subcabinet appointees. The administration maintained the utmost secrecy about the plan, but when Ike rose to speak he was scarcely shooting from the hip.

  1955 Herblock Cartoon, copyright by The Herb Block Foundation (illustration credit 24.1)

  To add drama to the occasion, Eisenhower spoke without notes. “Surprise in presentation I knew might be important,” the president observed afterward. Looking directly at the Soviet delegation, Eisenhower said, “I have been searching my heart and mind for something that I could say here that could convince everyone of the great sincerity of the United States in approaching the problem of disarmament.” The ornate council chamber of the Palais des Nations (the former home of the League of Nations) was hushed as Eisenhower continued. José-María Serty Badia’s massive neo-Baroque murals stared down on the delegates from the walls and ceiling. Outside a torrential rain was falling. Neither Cecil B. DeMille nor Alfred Hitchcock could have devised a more intimidating setting.

  Eisenhower told the Soviets that the terrible modern weapons they both possessed posed grave dangers of surprise attack. To minimize that danger, the president suggested that they “give to each other a complete blueprint of our military establishments, from beginning to end, from one end of our countries to the other.” The United States was also willing, if the Soviets would reciprocate, to open its skies for aerial photography so that each nation could scrutinize the other to reduce “the possibility of great surprise attack, thus lessening danger and relaxing tension.” Eisenhower said that practical progress toward a lasting peace was his fondest hope. “A sound peace—with security, justice, well being, and freedom for the people of the world—can be achieved, but only by patiently and thoughtfully following a hard and sure and tested road.”16

  At the precise moment Eisenhower concluded, a tremendous flash of lightning followed by a clap of thunder filled the council chamber. Every light in the building went out. “It was the loudest clap of thunder I have ever heard,” said Eisenhower. “For a moment there was stunned silence. Then I remarked that I had not dreamed I was so eloquent as to put the lights out.”17 b

  Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” proposal captured the world’s imagination, even though the Soviets were uninterested. After Stalin’s death, the Russian leadership continued to be obsessed with secrecy. Telephone directories and maps were unavailable to most in the Soviet Union, and the Kremlin was not about to introduce an open society. Khrushchev later denounced Eisenhower’s proposal as a ploy aimed at penetrating the iron curtain for purposes of espionage.

  Elsewhere, Eisenhower was the hero of the hour. “Without being effusive or overreacting,” wrote journalist Robert Donovan, “Eisenhower conveyed a sense of decency and dignity which mocked the picture of his country as an immature nation hell-bent for war.” Richard Rovere told readers of The New Yorker that “the man has an absolutely unique ability to convince people that he has no talent for duplicity.”c Le Monde, then in a robustly anti-American phase, reported that “Eisenhower
, whose personality has long been misunderstood, has emerged as the type of leader that humanity needs today.”18 Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” proposal was a dramatic moment in the Cold War, and an important attempt to begin the retreat from the danger of a nuclear Armageddon.

  The summit concluded on a high note. “This has been an historic meeting,” Eisenhower told his departing colleagues. “It is my judgment that the prospects for a lasting peace are brighter. The dangers of the overwhelming tragedy of modern war are less.”19 For Eisenhower, the Geneva summit of 1955 provided a new window through which to view Soviet behavior, much as Ronald Reagan discovered after meeting Mikhail Gorbachev in the Swiss city thirty years later. “There is no doubt in my mind, that in the few days we were there I personally gained insight and understanding that I could never have achieved otherwise,” Ike wrote his brother Milton on July 25. “I think, too, that the personal contact—in some cases, the friendships—that were developed there alone made the trip worthwhile.”20

  Eisenhower returned to a rapturous reception. The Gallup poll reported his approval rating at a record 79 percent.21 James Reston, writing in The New York Times, announced that “the popularity of President Eisenhower has got beyond the bounds of reasonable calculation and will have to be put down as a national phenomenon, like baseball. The thing is no longer just a remarkable political fact but a kind of national love affair, which cannot be analyzed satisfactorily by the political scientists and will probably have to be turned over to the head-shrinkers.”22

  Eisenhower worked assiduously to keep the “Spirit of Geneva” alive. “Now that the Four Power Conference has become a part of history,” he wrote Bulganin on July 27, “I want you to know how deeply I believe that our combined efforts during the past week produced an effect that will benefit the world. Since last Saturday evening, I have been thinking over your farewell words to me, which were to the effect, ‘Things are going to be better; they are going to come out all right.’…If we can continue along this line, with earnest efforts to be fair to each other and to achieve understanding of each other’s problems, then, eventually, a durable peace based on right and justice will be the monument to the work we have begun.”23 d