by Jim Newton
For Eisenhower, the highway act was a welcome respite from politics in 1956. For Nixon, the year would bring no such relief. In fact, his tribulations were largely inflicted by Eisenhower himself. After receiving the president’s suggestion that Nixon consider accepting a cabinet position, Nixon pouted, convinced that Ike was trying to bump him off the ticket and unsure about how to respond. As winter became spring, his mood was blackened by press reports that there was a move afoot to “dump Nixon.” Eisenhower defended Nixon time and again to the press but adamantly declined to say whether he wanted him on the fall ticket. Eisenhower’s refusal was, he and others insisted, merely a matter of form: Ike considered it improper for a candidate who had yet to receive his party’s nomination to announce his selection of a vice president. He had to know, however, that his own nomination was a foregone conclusion and his reticence regarding Nixon was naturally viewed as caginess at the vice president’s expense. Later, Eisenhower professed to be surprised that Nixon had ever felt uncomfortable. Though it is hard to believe, Ike said he only learned of his vice president’s anxiety when he read Six Crises, Nixon’s memoir published in 1962.
All through the spring, Ike and his advisers debated how best to deal with the vice president. In March, Ike reiterated his friendship with Nixon but also emphasized that neither friendship nor admiration “make[s] him vice president.” Nixon “has serious problems,” Eisenhower said to his secretary of the interior, Fred Seaton. “He has his own way to make … I am not going to say he is the only individual I would have for vice president. There is nothing to be gained politically by ditching him [but] … Nixon can’t always be the understudy to the star.” Six days later, Hagerty returned from a trip through the South and told Eisenhower that “not one person was for Nixon for Vice President for a second term.” Those who opposed him had a hard time saying why—some thought he was too immature or connected to “the Negro difficulty”—but they were uniformly opposed.
Finally, the matter wound to a conclusion. At a news conference on April 25, Ike—after first championing the highway bill then under consideration by the House—confronted what was becoming a customary query about Nixon’s status. “Some time ago, Mr. President,” began Bill Lawrence of the New York Times, “you told us that you had asked Vice President Nixon to chart his own course and then report back to you. Has he done this?”
Eisenhower replied: “Well, he hasn’t reported back in the terms in which I used the expression that morning, no.”
After months of waiting for Eisenhower to release him from his misery, Nixon now seized on the opportunity to do so himself. He called that morning to ask for time to meet with Ike, and the two sat down the same afternoon. Nixon assured Eisenhower that he was eager to remain as vice president, and Eisenhower accepted his decision. Hagerty quickly arranged a press conference, where Nixon announced his plans, and Hagerty informed reporters that Eisenhower was “delighted to hear of the Vice President’s decision.” Sadly for Nixon, the movement to dump him was not quite through, but he at least now officially enjoyed the president’s support.
In the meantime, Ike knocked off victories on his legislative agenda, including approval of an ambitious proposal to overhaul America’s national parks. That bill added 500,000 acres to the nation’s total, including a new park in the Virgin Islands, and built dozens of visitors’ centers and other amenities to accommodate the swelling demand for the nation’s most treasured outdoor spaces. For Ike, ever enamored of the outdoors and rarely more comfortable than with a fishing rod in hand, the approval was a source of special satisfaction. “For increasing millions of Americans, this undertaking,” he reflected later, “would bring benefits and enjoyment in great measure over the years.”
On the final day of the Twentieth Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev ascended the dais in Moscow’s Great Kremlin Palace. Before him, fourteen hundred delegates nervously awaited the address from their preeminent official. These were hard men, toughened by revolutionary struggle, at ease with violence, ideologically committed. Lenin’s statue greeted them. Stalin, who had died between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth congresses, was not pictured. Nikita Khrushchev spoke that day for four hours. It was the most important and brave address of his life.
His attack on the memory of Communism’s heralded leader shocked the delegates and reverberated around the world. Stalin, his successor announced, had committed ghastly atrocities, “a grave abuse of power … which caused untold harm to our party.” Possessed of a “capricious and despotic character,” Stalin had authorized mass arrests and executions, forced false confessions, and directed torture, “extreme methods and mass repressions.” To those who threatened or upset him, he practiced “physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the party and the Soviet Government.” Stalin’s “cult of personality” was insidious, vile, destructive, wanton, and cruel. Many in the hall that day knew it, but only Khrushchev dared to say it. The room was stonily silent.
Khrushchev’s stunning attack on his predecessor was delivered to a closed session of the Congress—hence its reputation as the “secret speech”—but it was widely reproduced in the aftermath, as copies were distributed to party cells and headquarters in Eastern Europe and around the world. In June, the CIA supplied a copy to the New York Times, which published the text. The effect was electrifying, but the impact difficult to predict. Did repudiation of Stalin’s crimes suggest a new attitude on the part of the Soviet leadership toward war with the West? Did it suggest liberalization of the press or religious practice under Communism? Most beguilingly, did the speech and the Congress’s endorsement of “peaceful coexistence” and the pursuit of Communism by varying national paths suggest a new relationship between Moscow and its satellites throughout Eastern Europe?
For the Eisenhower administration, this was a moment of wondrous possibility. Ike had run on a platform of liberating the Soviet satellites, but the foreign policy that constituted the Solarium Project and New Look made no such promises; instead, the administration had settled for deterrence on a grand scale, combined with covert action at the margins of the Soviet empire. That was a sound—if morally debatable—approach to containing and rolling back Communism in the Third World. It offered no realistic solutions for the satellite nations of Eastern Europe, and it was nearly inconceivable that the United States could do anything to accelerate the liberation of those stranded nations without engaging the Soviet Union in a frontal confrontation—almost certainly with nuclear ramifications. Khrushchev’s speech, however, raised the possibility that the Soviet Union would allow liberalization without American interference.
The CIA, despite its history of misapprehending developments in the Soviet Union, was appropriately skeptical that a new day was at hand. “The Soviet leaders are as unwilling now as they have ever been—and will be in the foreseeable future—to democratize their system and to permit public discussion of political problems,” read an internal analysis prepared in 1956 and not released until 1999. CIA analysts, while doubtful about Soviet liberalization, did imagine that the speech and its ramifications might force “many communists throughout the world to make difficult adjustments” and specifically predicted that it would “create increasing demands from the satellites to follow their own path to ‘socialism.’ ”
Poland was among the first to test that prediction. Protesters demanded higher wages and better food. The government hesitated in response until Soviet tanks restored order. Even then, however, Moscow allowed strikers to receive wage hikes and stood by as the dour Wladyslaw Gomulka, nearly executed by Stalin but saved by the dictator’s death in 1953, was rehabilitated and returned to public leadership. Poland did not win anything approaching independence in those early months of 1956, but Khrushchev’s response nursed the hopes of captive people from Warsaw to, most important, Budapest.
In the months following the announcement of his candidacy, Eisenhower’s approval rating
hovered near 70 percent, while less than 20 percent of Americans disapproved of his performance as president. With such strong sentiment to buoy him, Ike knew that his reelection was a near certainty.
Still, he had his critics. Edgar continued to needle his sibling about what Big Ike saw as Little Ike’s drift to the left. Having vigorously protested Warren’s appointment to the Court and irritated his brother over the Bricker Amendment, Edgar now tweaked Ike over his administration’s liberalism. Quoted by a newspaper reporter as describing himself as “the only real Republican in the family” and calling Ike “a little bit socialistic,” Edgar wrote to Ike to blame the reporter while reinforcing his point. “I never have thought you were socialistic,” he explained, “although I do think and have said so to you, that the Government is rapidly drifting into a socialistic state.” No pronouncement was too small or silly for the president to ignore when it came from his big brother. Ike’s response was slightly condescending. He noted that while his brother worried about socialism, Adlai Stevenson was charging that Eisenhower was the agent of big money and monopoly. Both charges, Ike insisted, were ludicrous: his administration managed parts of the economy to stabilize it and allowed the private sector wide latitude to generate growth. “You cannot return to the days of 1860,” Eisenhower lectured. It was not the last time an American president would have to fend off suggestions of socialist inclination, but it’s one of the rare times the charge came from the president’s brother.
Charges of socialism were hardly a threat to Eisenhower’s reelection. As he realized, only two obstacles stood between him and a second term: a political crisis that might upend public confidence in his leadership and a health setback that might raise questions about his stamina. Over the next few months, he confronted both.
Thursday, June 7, was the occasion for the annual White House News Photographers Association dinner. Held at the Sheraton Park Hotel, not far from the National Zoo, it was a jovial occasion, and Eisenhower readily accepted the group’s invitation. Before leaving, Ike hit a few golf balls with a friend and managed to lie down for an hour. The dinner was, as such things go, a pleasant evening, a clubby gathering of the nation’s leadership and those who chronicle it. Most of the Supreme Court—though not Warren, even though he lived in the building—was on hand; seven cabinet members were there. Bob Hope performed. In short, “everyone and his uncle” attended. Eisenhower stayed until 11:00 p.m., then returned to the White House.
Later that night, he complained to Mamie of an upset stomach, and Mamie briskly summoned Dr. Snyder. Arriving, Snyder confronted a set of symptoms eerily familiar and yet reassuringly less severe than those presented to him in Denver. This time, he diagnosed a recurrence of Ike’s long-running intestinal distress and ascertained that the president had wolfed down a Waldorf salad for lunch. No matter how often doctors urged Ike to slow down and chew his food thoroughly, the childhood habits of a boy racing his brothers for dinner died hard.
Now that lifelong habit cost him, as a piece of partially digested celery lodged in his intestine. Snyder sat with the president for several hours. Just before 8:00 a.m., he notified Ann Whitman that Eisenhower had a headache and was feeling sick to his stomach. He recommended that the president’s appointments, including that morning’s cabinet meeting, be canceled or postponed. Whitman and Adams began calling cabinet members, who received the news as routine. It was not until Hagerty ventured to see Ike himself that the staff realized how serious Eisenhower’s condition was. At 11:00 a.m., Ike was taken by ambulance to Walter Reed.
A team of doctors examined the president, and all but one favored surgery. The holdout worried about whether the president, so recently recovered from his heart attack, could stand the strain of the operation. The others then hesitated as well, resisting operating without unanimous consent that it was the right course. Eisenhower continued to suffer until, just after midnight, one physician, Walter Tkach, warned that without quick action Ike might die. The holdout then relented, but the team hit another snag: Mamie, desperate to avoid a surgery she feared might kill her husband, refused to authorize the procedure. John Eisenhower did so in her stead, and Ike was sedated and wheeled into the operating room at 2:07 a.m. Informed of the medical consensus and his son’s approval, the president concurred. “Well,” he said, “let’s go.”
He awoke around 8:00 the next morning, but he was groggy. His staff and family nervously awaited his emergence from the anesthesia. At last, after forty-eight hours, he shook off the last remnants of sedation. His color was good, he was alert and responsive, if still somewhat uncomfortable. For a time, he confided to a friend, “I doubted seriously that I would ever feel like myself again.” By July 1, he had recovered enough to resume his campaign and told Milton that he was “slowly but steadily … regaining some strength.” The White House took special pains to telegraph the president’s recovery. In August, for instance, Ike invited Tom Dewey to the White House; they spent forty minutes together for no other reason than that Dewey could then, in speaking engagements, say that he had seen Ike and that the president was well.
The health crisis passed, but it resuscitated questions about keeping Nixon on the ticket. If there was a reasonable chance that Eisenhower might not live out the term, Nixon might well become president, a possibility that unnerved many stalwart Eisenhower supporters, especially liberal Republicans, independents, and crossover Democrats (Eisenhower liked to refer to the last group as “discerning Democrats”) who supported the president in great numbers. Just before Ike departed on a goodwill mission to Latin America, one of those GOP liberals, Harold Stassen, came to the White House to inform Eisenhower that he had lost confidence in Nixon and was prepared to lead a campaign to drop him from the ticket. Stassen, then serving as Eisenhower’s special assistant for disarmament, spoke for twenty-four minutes; Ike listened in silence. When Stassen announced his position publicly, Ike released a statement saying that Stassen could support whomever he liked, but not as a member of the administration; Stassen went on leave.
If confusion about Nixon’s role threatened Republican unity as the GOP convention approached, the Democrats helped even the score. Adlai Stevenson began sniping at the administration that spring, and Ike infuriated his adversary by laughing off the criticism. In the end, the Democratic Party nominated arguably its worst ticket—tapping Stevenson, who had already lost once to Eisenhower, and Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator known for his national crusade against organized crime. Stevenson and Kefauver were articulate, intelligent men, each with a base and a national reputation. But they were vastly overshadowed by Eisenhower’s deep connection to the American people. The Democratic ticket lacked spark, imagination, and any strategic plan for undermining Ike’s popularity. Stevenson tried attacking Eisenhower directly but found little purchase. He then suggested that Eisenhower was a good man surrounded by conniving cabinet officers: “The Republican campaign, ‘Trust Ike and ask no questions,’ really means something else. It means trust the men around Ike. It really means: Trust Ezra Benson; Trust Foster Dulles; Trust George Humphrey; Trust Charles Wilson, and it means, Trust Richard Nixon.” The president just shrugged. Eisenhower’s approval ratings held rock steady through the summer. Two-thirds of the American people could not be convinced to dislike Ike.
By the time the Republicans met in San Francisco for their convention, there was little mystery left in the race. Although Stassen stumped for Governor Christian Herter of Massachusetts to replace Nixon, Herter was uncomfortable being a divisive figure within the party. And yet Ike himself, just days before the convention, remained halfheartedly committed to his vice president. As late as August 19, he was jotting names of those Republicans whom he would consider acceptable replacements: Brownell as well as Dewey, Governor Goodwin Knight of California, or even the California senator Bill Knowland, who so annoyed Ike as a legislative leader but who could help carry California if Nixon were not on the ticket. Nixon’s name appeared on that list, too, but as one of many, not as Eis
enhower’s singular choice. As the convention drew near, Herter found a way out of the controversy: he agreed to deliver the speech nominating Nixon for the vice presidency. With that, the air rushed out of Stassen’s balloon.
Eisenhower did his best to skirt that episode but involved himself much more heavily in the more mundane business of drafting the party platform. He did so partly to avoid saddling his second term with unreasonable demands or expectations but also to give vent to his frustrations over civil rights. Reading the proposed Republican platform, Eisenhower tripped over a phrase stating that the “Eisenhower Administration and the Republican Party have supported the Supreme Court” in its efforts to desegregate schools. Ike vehemently protested to Brownell that he wanted the reference to his administration deleted. The president insisted that the administration never “took a stand in the matter.” That must have puzzled his attorney general, who filed a brief in support of school desegregation personally edited by Ike. But Eisenhower, who had deferred to Brownell despite his misgivings over the pace of change in civil rights, now maintained that the Justice Department’s brief and argument in Brown did not reflect an administration view of the case; instead, Ike argued, Brownell had appeared “as a lawyer, not as a member of the Eisenhower Administration.” That, of course, begged the question of whom Brownell was representing, if not the administration, but Eisenhower insisted that the cabinet had never debated the case, and thus Brownell could not have appeared on behalf of that body. Eisenhower was emphatically wrong but in no mood to compromise on the question: unless he got his way and the party agreed to drop any suggestion that the administration supported the Brown decision, Ike said he would refuse to attend the convention.
Why was Eisenhower so determined to distance himself from a ruling that was written by his appointee, that had strengthened America’s position in the Cold War, and that had ennobled the nation’s commitment to perfecting itself as a constitutional democracy? He was, Ike said, torn: he understood his duty to obey the Court on constitutional matters, but he also felt that Brown had so antagonized Southerners that it had set back civil rights. In San Francisco, floor managers secured a compromise, agreeing that the platform would read that the administration “concurred” in the ruling. Even that wasn’t good enough for Eisenhower. He eventually signed off on language saying that the administration “accepts” Brown—a phrase so reserved that it suggested acquiescence rather than approval. For those who would later maintain that Eisenhower welcomed Brown, his role in crafting the 1956 party platform offers powerful evidence to the contrary. Far from appreciating or endorsing Brown, Ike, at every turn, attempted to minimize his role in fashioning it and to insulate his administration from its political ramifications. As a result, Eisenhower’s record in that area reflected a triumph of leadership style over personal conviction: he trusted Brownell to lead where he himself had reservations, and though he balked occasionally, the administration made progress despite Ike’s own reservations.
