Yet none appeared. Instead Eisenhower decided, about a week too late, to assert some personal control over the mess his team had created. Instead of firing Dulles, putting the blame on an overzealous subordinate, announcing an inquiry and assuring the Soviets that he would not allow such overflights in the future, Eisenhower decided to take the path of personal honor. On May 9 he ordered yet another press release, the fourth on the U-2 affair in just five days, and finally admitted that the United States had conducted extensive spying on the Soviets, including periodic overflights of their territory. The statement adopted a defiant tone, insisting that the U.S. government would be “derelict” if it did not try to ascertain Soviet intentions and capabilities, given the enormous power of new missile technology to destroy the world.25
If Khrushchev had left open an escape hatch for Eisenhower, the president soon nailed it shut. On May 11, at his weekly press conference, Eisenhower came clean. In a prepared statement, he described spying as “a distasteful but vital necessity.” He coolly invoked the world war: “No one wants another Pearl Harbor. This means that we must have knowledge of military forces and preparations around the world, especially those capable of massive surprise attacks. Secrecy in the Soviet Union makes this essential. In most of the world no large-scale attack could be prepared in secret, but in the Soviet Union there is a fetish of secrecy and concealment. This is a major cause of international tension and uneasiness today.” Far from apologizing, Eisenhower remained defiant: If you would agree to open your country to weapons inspections and sign disarmament agreements, we would not have to spy on you.26
The May 11 press conference marked an important moment in Ike’s presidency and in the history of the cold war. Rather than leave things vague or heap blame on a subordinate or offer a muted apology and a reassurance that such things would not happen in the future, Eisenhower embraced spying as a professional obligation and threw a cloak of invulnerability around all his subordinates who had worked on the U-2 program. He would not offer a head on a platter. He would not apologize. On the contrary, he would blame the Soviets for their obsessive secrecy and militarism. Eisenhower’s actions on this day won him everlasting praise from intelligence professionals and many subsequent biographers who have seen in this moment the true character of a great leader. When things go wrong, the president must take the blame. And having cleared the air in this manner, Eisenhower saw no reason why the summit in Paris could not go ahead as planned.27
Some critics, though, wondered if Eisenhower had acted wisely. Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell had given the president faulty advice about the U-2 plane’s vulnerability. They had pushed for a flight just two weeks before the summit, and then bungled the cover-up. Eisenhower could have found a diplomatic way to deflect responsibility onto these risk-taking subordinates, as Khrushchev wanted him to do. Eisenhower’s decision to take the blame may have pleased his staff, but it destroyed the Paris summit. As Walter Lippmann wrote in his column, Eisenhower “locked the door which Mr. Khrushchev had opened.” In his press conference Eisenhower “transform[ed] the embarrassment of being caught in a spying operation into a direct challenge to the sovereignty of the Soviet Union.” Lippmann believed that Eisenhower’s “refusal to use the convention of diplomacy was a fatal mistake.” For Khrushchev to accept without protest Eisenhower’s statement and continue with the summit would be a terrible blow to Soviet prestige and sovereignty. Even a leader less sensitive to personal slights than Khrushchev would never have done that. Eisenhower chose an honorable path, one that kept his reputation for decency and integrity intact. Yet the price of that noble act was a dramatic worsening of the cold war. It is fair to ask if the price was too high.28
At almost the same time Eisenhower was speaking to the press, Khrushchev paid an emotional and stormy visit to the exhibition hall in Gorky Park in Moscow to inspect the wreckage of the U-2 plane that was put on public display. Before a gaggle of journalists, he gave vent to his fury and indignation. “Impudence, sheer impudence!” he cried, inspecting the bent and scorched metal of the plane. “Only countries which are at war with each other can act this way!” Asked about his opinion of Eisenhower, he sadly replied that he was “horrified” to learn the president did in fact authorize the overflight. “I had high hopes, and they were betrayed.” Ambassador Thompson, hearing these remarks, cabled Washington in despair: “The Cold War is back on again.”29
Certainly Eisenhower met with a chilly reception when he arrived in Paris on May 15. Gathering with the host of the summit, President Charles de Gaulle, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at 6:00 that evening, Eisenhower learned that Khrushchev had the day before presented to de Gaulle three demands that must be met for the conference to proceed: Eisenhower must apologize for the U-2 flight; he must ban all future overflights; and he must punish those responsible for the U-2 incident. Hearing this, Eisenhower reacted sharply. The USSR had spies throughout the United States, he said, and he would be “damned” if he was going to renounce or apologize for a practice everyone else carried on.30
Khrushchev knew perfectly well that Eisenhower would not agree to his demands. He had decided during his flight to Paris on May 14 to sabotage the summit. Later he explained his thinking: “We had to present an ultimatum to the United States. They would have to apologize for the insult and injury done to our country. We would have to demand that the president take back his statement asserting the right of the United States to make spy flights over foreign territory, something no sovereign state could permit.” America’s behavior had been an affront, Khrushchev felt, and “if we simply sat down at the table as though nothing had happened and began negotiating in the usual way . . . such behavior would do great harm to our authority in the eyes of world public opinion, especially among our friends, the Communist parties, and countries that were fighting for independence.” Khrushchev quite rightly thought the whole world was watching, and he could not buckle.31
When the summit opened on May 16 at 11:00 a.m. in the Élysée Palace, Khrushchev demanded the floor and attacked the U-2 overflight, Eisenhower, and America’s unwillingness to recognize the provocative and illegal character of such espionage. Unless Eisenhower condemned the overflight and promised future flights would cease, the Soviet government would leave the summit meeting. What’s more, Eisenhower would not be welcome to visit the USSR under such circumstances. Eisenhower responded briefly and calmly: he had already put a stop to future overflights, and he reiterated that the U-2 flight had no aggressive intent. Its purpose was only to gather intelligence.
Khrushchev refused to accept this gracious reply since he had already decided to scuttle the meeting. The combative premier insisted that Eisenhower apologize and that his apology be immediately given to the press. At this Eisenhower went silent. The minutes indicate that he never said another word. His son John explains: Ike was struggling to keep his temper during Khrushchev’s insulting monologue. Herter correctly concluded, “It was clear that Khrushchev had been determined even before arriving to torpedo the meeting.” Two days later the leaders departed Paris. A mere 48 hours after it began, the Big Four summit that might have altered the course of the cold war had collapsed.32
It was easy enough to blame Khrushchev for the summit’s failure, but Eisenhower too bore responsibility, which he refused to accept. Upon returning to Washington, he wrote letters to two dozen friendly heads of state, casting Khrushchev as the villain for his “calculated campaign . . . to insure the failure of the conference.” The United States had done nothing that justified Khrushchev’s “polemics and abuse” in Paris. In his memoirs Eisenhower insisted that the only “big error” the United States had made had been to release an “erroneous cover story.” As for his role in approving the overflight at such a critical moment, he expressed no regret. “I know of no decision that I would make differently,” he wrote. Given his numerous, well-documented reservations about the overflights before May 1, this statement is difficult to accept. Once again Eisenhower protecte
d his underlings, even at the expense of the truth.33
Though Eisenhower treated the U-2 affair with nonchalance in his memoirs, the downing of the spy plane had a huge impact on his presidency and on the cold war itself. It shattered his hopes to bring about a thaw in the war, thereby robbing him of a brilliant achievement in his last months in office. It led to a sharp intensification of cold war hostilities. It undermined all of his efforts to establish himself as a man of peace and goodwill in the eyes of the world’s peoples. And it provided his domestic political rivals with powerful ammunition to use against him and his handling of the cold war. In retrospect his decision to approve the U-2 overflights in the spring of 1960 was the biggest mistake he ever made.
IV
The collapse of the summit became a source of domestic political controversy. In the spring of 1960 both political parties had started weighing candidates to nominate for president in the November elections. The Republicans leaned heavily toward Vice President Nixon and a platform of “peace and prosperity,” the winning formula of 1956. But immediately after the Paris failure, the Democrats hit Ike hard. Adlai Stevenson declared the presidential campaign would now “be waged under the darkest shadows that ever hovered over the world—the mushroom clouds of a nuclear war.” Stevenson, speaking to an audience of 3,000 Democrats at a fund-raiser in Chicago, summarized the affair in a memorable turn of phrase: “Khrushchev wrecked the conference,” but Eisenhower “handed Khrushchev the crowbar and sledgehammer.” It was America’s “series of blunders” that gave the Soviet leader the pretext to walk out. Eisenhower and his administration “have helped make successful negotiations with the Russians—negotiations that are vital to our survival—impossible.”34
John Kennedy, the Democratic hopeful who had amassed nine primary victories since March, was campaigning in the Oregon Democratic primary on May 19 when he too weighed in. He said in a brief campaign speech that if he had been president, he would have found a way to keep the summit going by “expressing regret” to Khrushchev; he initially used the word apologize but then corrected himself. Senator Stuart Symington called for a new foreign policy built on the “ruins of the summit conference.” The Democratic Advisory Council, made up of leading liberals, declared that “the fiasco in Paris” had done “incalculable harm to the cause of peace.” The Democrats ripped the administration: “The integrity of the word of the United States has been put into doubt. The danger of an all-out destructive nuclear war has been increased.” The GOP revealed its “fundamental lack of purpose” in its foreign policy, they said.35
The Republicans did not take these attacks lightly. The Republican National Committee smelled appeasement in the air. Stevenson, it said, “fell like a ton of bricks for the Khrushchev line.” His “wishy-washy ‘let’s not anger the Russians’ position” looked weak next to Ike’s stalwart defense of America’s cold war strategy. On the floor of the Senate on May 24, Hugh Scott, Republican of Pennsylvania, declared that Kennedy and Stevenson must now be asked to “relieve themselves of the gross suspicion of appeasement” for the suggestion that they might have apologized to Khrushchev. Six hours later Kennedy strode into the Senate chamber and fairly shouted, “I do not have to purge myself of the suspicion of being an appeaser,” and demanded a retraction.
Now the fat was in the fire. The Republican National Committee chairman, Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky, added more fuel, calling the Democrats “soft on Communism” and asserting that Kennedy “would have bowed to the Khrushchev bluster and expressed regret” for the U-2 flight. Mike Mansfield, the assistant Democratic leader in the Senate, struck back: “We are not the ones who are soft on Communism. . . . We did not invite Khrushchev over here, and he has never invited a Democratic presidential candidate to visit him.” The fight for the White House was on, and it would take place on a well-trodden patch of ground: determining which party was tougher on communism.36
In late May, Senator William Fulbright, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opened an inquiry into the U-2 and Paris events. Leading figures of the administration were invited to testify, thus keeping the pressure on the Republicans to explain their mishandling of the affair. The investigations centered on the decision to order the U-2 into Soviet airspace as well as the failure to handle the cover story adequately. The committee finally concluded that because of the enormous stakes of the Paris summit, the U-2 flight should not have been sent.37
In a speech to the Senate, Fulbright delivered a harsh verdict: “The prestige and influence of our country on the affairs of nations has reached a new low” as a result of the administration’s “blunders.” Sending the plane on May 1 was “a serious error of judgment.” More than that, Fulbright indicted Eisenhower personally on a key matter of presidential leadership. Echoing Lippmann, Fulbright insisted that Eisenhower made a mistake when he took the blame for the U-2 in a “self-righteous” manner that was “unbearably provocative to the Soviet Government and contributed substantially to the violence and intemperate bad manners of Mr. Khrushchev.” Fulbright asserted, “It is unprecedented among civilized nations for a chief of state to assume personal responsibility for covert intelligence operations.” Doing so all but forced Khrushchev to demand a personal apology that could not be delivered.
There is some irony to savor here. While Democrats typically blasted Eisenhower as a detached, disengaged golf-obsessed president, Fulbright blamed him for being too closely involved in the handling of the U-2 affair and for taking personal responsibility for the actions of his administration. Had he only floated above the dirty business of spycraft, feigned a lack of awareness of the CIA’s program, and offered up Allen Dulles as a “whipping boy” (Fulbright’s term), Eisenhower could have saved the summit. Never was there such an effective if unintentional rebuttal of the thesis that Eisenhower “didn’t run the store.”38
Kennedy, by June the clear front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, knew that the events in Paris presented him with a golden political opportunity. Since he began his run for the nomination, Kennedy had been hitting the Eisenhower administration for its alleged weakness and confusion. He depicted American foreign policy as rudderless, failing, and reactive. The country was on “a slide downhill into dust, dullness, languor and decay,” he claimed. Eisenhower offered only “soft sentimentalism” when America needed “tough-minded plans and operations.”39
Now, after the Paris fiasco, Kennedy pressed his case. In a speech in the Senate on June 14, 1960, before a packed gallery of admirers and autograph seekers, the handsome 43-year-old legislator delivered a scathing assessment of Eisenhower’s cold war strategy. It had all been based on an “illusion,” Kennedy argued, “the illusion that platitudes and slogans are a substitute for strength and planning . . . the illusion that good intentions and pious principles are a substitute for strong creative leadership.” The collapse of the summit revealed America’s “lack of coherent and purposeful national strategy backed by strength.” Eisenhower offered only “eleventh-hour responses to Soviet-created crises.” To counter Eisenhower’s “confusion and indecision,” America needed “a comprehensive set of carefully prepared, long-term policies.”40
This portrait of a befuddled, ill-prepared Eisenhower out of his depth in a dangerous world became the leitmotif of Kennedy’s campaign. Of course the charges were hollow. Indeed when Kennedy went on in his Senate speech to itemize all the things he proposed to do, he cribbed shamelessly from Eisenhower’s own agenda. Kennedy demanded a stronger nuclear deterrent; beefed-up conventional armed forces; a stronger NATO; more foreign aid; better relations with governments in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa; a lasting solution in Berlin; and a serious effort at arms control—precisely the policies Eisenhower had pursued. RNC chairman Morton responded by saying that Kennedy seemed to have “endorsed the administration’s policies but said they should be carried out with brighter, nicer people.”41
Yet the Paris fiasco—Khrushchev’s sne
ering, Eisenhower’s fumbling, the sense of dashed hopes—irked Americans all across the political spectrum. Just as Kennedy attacked Eisenhower from the left, another powerful assault hit Eisenhower from the right. It came from an Arizona Republican named Barry Goldwater. Like Kennedy, Goldwater was a handsome World War II veteran, and also like Kennedy he came to the Senate in 1953. But unlike Kennedy, Goldwater did not want simply a better version of Ike’s policies. He demanded a clean break from the Ike years. His indictment came in a short, powerful book titled The Conscience of a Conservative that hit the bookstores on April 15, 1960.
In the 15 years since 1945, Goldwater argued, America had failed to maintain the dominant global position it had earned as a result of its great victory over Hitler. The country’s leaders had stood by and watched as the Soviet Union gained power, territory, and followers around the world. American leaders had been complacent. “Our leaders have not made victory the goal of American policy.” Instead they sought “peace” or “settlements.” “We have tried to pacify the world,” Goldwater stated. “The Communists mean to own it.” For Goldwater, the sole objective of American foreign policy must be not to end the cold war but to win it.
Goldwater scorned Ike’s foreign policy, with its reliance on defensive alliances, foreign aid, negotiations, disarmament, and the United Nations. He wanted the United States to defeat the Soviet Union and communism by taking the offensive, carrying the conflict into the enemy camp, subduing any and all challenges to American interests around the world, pressuring the USSR to withdraw and retreat. The risk of global nuclear war was real, he recognized, but such risks were better than accepting half-measures and compromise. “War may be the price of freedom.” The militant tone of Goldwater’s short book (in fact ghost-written by National Review writer Brent Bozell) echoed across the country. It became a best-seller within weeks; by November it had sold half a million copies.
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