by Jim Newton
Editorialists were skeptical of Goldfine’s good intentions and of Adams’s casual acceptance of the gifts. “Mr. Adams’ Bad Judgment” was the headline on the New York Times editorial when the revelations first surfaced. Eisenhower, by contrast, flatly refused to entertain the possibility that Adams had done anything wrong, but he recognized that his deputy was in trouble. On the day the story broke, Ike tried to console Adams, who sank into a depression that Eisenhower could not talk him out of. What’s more, the president realized that political challenges such as this would only grow more intense as the administration wound down. Eisenhower, Ann Whitman noted, “does not know what to do to make Adams feel better.”
On June 12, Adams appeared before a House subcommittee to defend himself against allegations of favoritism. His reply was clipped and slightly bossy. Adams acknowledged his long friendship with Goldfine. He addressed the implications of that friendship without hesitation or hand-wringing. “You are concerned, and most correctly concerned,” he observed of the committee, “with how such a friendship may affect the conduct of an Assistant to the President in his relationships with men of government. And you should ask me: ‘Did Bernard Goldfine benefit in any way in his relations with any branch of the federal government because he was a friend of Sherman Adams?’ ‘Did Sherman Adams seek to secure any favors or benefits for Bernard Goldfine because of this friendship?’ ” Having posed the committee’s questions, Adams then replied to them: “My answer to both questions is: ‘No.’ ”
For Ike, that settled the matter, and the next day he sought to put it to rest with what he regarded as a firm defense of his subordinate. “I believe that the presentation made by Governor Adams to the congressional committee yesterday truthfully represents the pertinent facts,” Eisenhower said. “I personally like Governor Adams. I admire his abilities. I respect him because of his personal and official integrity. I need him.” Reporters had been told that the president did not want questions about Adams; they honored that request.
Eisenhower badly miscalculated the impression of his remarks. The final sentence, “I need him,” struck many observers not as a stalwart defense of Adams so much as a plaintive admission of presidential weakness. Eisenhower’s aides had missed that interpretation when Ike shared his remarks with them. “Not one of us caught the hollow ring of the words, ‘I need him,’ ” one admitted later. “And we all just sat there—and said it sounded swell.” To Eisenhower, it was a measure of Adams’s abilities that the president needed his assistance, and the president had every right to rely on those he needed. To Ike’s congressional critics, it looked as if a timorous president depended on an unscrupulous aide.
Adams might have survived the frenzy had Goldfine not proved to be something less than just a loyal businessman, devoted to New Hampshire and fond of his friends. Instead, he was an assiduous collector of public officials, doling out gifts to men and women of influence. “Perhaps I do give gifts to too many people, but if I do, it is only an expression of my nature,” Goldfine insisted when he testified on the matter. Few were buying it. From the record, it appeared that Goldfine’s gifts seemed calculated to win favorable treatment, an inference strongly bolstered when it was learned that he wrote off those gifts on his income tax returns as business expenses.
As Goldfine’s reputation suffered, so did Adams. In July, Senator John Williams, a Delaware conservative and one of those who disliked Adams, met with Eisenhower to complain. The following week, Ike’s friend Cliff Roberts, cofounder of the Augusta National Golf Club, suggested to the president that Adams had to go, and news of that recommendation leaked to the press, suggesting both crumbling support for the assistant and disarray within the White House. The House then cited Goldfine for contempt in August after he refused to answer further questions. The House vote, a hard-to-ignore 369–8, was tallied even as Eisenhower addressed the United Nations, gathered in emergency session to discuss the Middle East. Eisenhower proposed a six-point plan to hold the peace in that twitchy region, where American forces still patrolled a fragile standoff in Lebanon. His speech was well received, and it cheered Ike up. As he rode back to his plane that morning, Eisenhower smiled at the crowds and shook hands with security officers. “I hope it does some good,” he said of his thirty-minute address to the delegates. “A fellow never knows about those speeches.”
Amid the normal crush of business, Eisenhower pressed on, hoping the Adams issue would fade. On one typical day that summer, Ike met with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and ambassadors from NATO and Guatemala; greeted winners of national science awards; considered whether to grant a request from Martin Luther King, who was seeking a meeting (he did); investigated the question of where to purchase blight-resistant elm trees for the Gettysburg farm; and pondered his most taxing question of the day: how much to pay his grandson for working around the farm that summer. He settled on thirty cents an hour.
Nothing succeeded in diverting the campaign to get Adams. Propelled by Republican political anxieties, the effort gained in intensity. The economy was struggling, and polls showed the GOP in danger of losing seats. Within the administration, some advisers urged Eisenhower to take dramatic action, particularly to show economic results. Some argued for ramping up the highway program, but it was an unwieldy tool for short-term stimulus, as it depended on states accelerating their share of the work. Others made the political and economic case for a tax cut, which Ike had approved in 1954 as part of a broader stimulus package. This time, however, Eisenhower resisted, influenced in part by Gabriel Hauge, the president’s special assistant for domestic and international affairs. “I thought the timing was wrong,” Hauge explained, adding that the tax proposals under consideration made more sense politically than economically; rather than encouraging investment, they would simply “lop taxpayers off the rolls.” Ike refused, disappointing Republican stalwarts deprived of yet another issue to run on.
Democrats remembered Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign and its vitriolic charges of Truman-era corruption. Now they turned that issue against the Republican incumbent as midterm elections approached. Adams had no friends on the right and a dwindling cadre of supporters in his own party. Eisenhower seemed flummoxed by an attack that he considered neither justified nor appropriate. Who were politicians to tell him whom he should employ as his top assistant? And, since no evidence of Adams having granted any favors to Goldfine had surfaced, what was the actual basis for demanding that he resign?
At last, Congress’s session came to an end on August 23. Whitman captured the sense of relief and exhaustion at the White House. “Mostly all we did was pray,” she wrote, “that they would fold their tents and steal away.”
It was too late. Eisenhower recognized that he could not risk his party’s fortunes to save his assistant; or, more to the point, he could not afford to provide his party’s conservative wing with an excuse to blame him if it suffered losses at the midterms. Once Congress was out of town, Ike spent a few days weighing the issue in relative quiet and decided Adams had to go. As when he had considered dropping Nixon from the ticket in 1956, he declined to bring the matter up himself. This time, Eisenhower asked Nixon to take on the distasteful task that he had once experienced from the other side. The vice president was on vacation, but he came rushing back to Washington from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. By the time he arrived, Adams had gone for the day, but the two conferred the next morning. Adams fought back. He had become, at least in his own eyes, so irreplaceable that the administration would founder without him. That attitude annoyed others close to Ike—Whitman was convinced it was partly responsible for the false notion that Eisenhower was weak—but the president himself seemed untroubled. Indeed, after first concluding that Adams had to go, Eisenhower hesitated. The wait grew longer and longer and convinced some leading Republicans that Eisenhower was unwilling to do what they felt needed to be done.
They did not stop trying, however, and eventually Ike capitulated. He was particularly affected by a convers
ation with Winthrop Aldrich, a financier and former ambassador (Eisenhower appointed him to the Court of St. James early in his presidency) and one of the wealthy business leaders whose advice Eisenhower so often solicited. Unlike so many of those calling for Adams’s resignation, Aldrich liked him. The trouble, Aldrich emphasized, was that Adams had publicly professed his great friendship for Goldfine, who now was widely regarded as a crook. That was too much: “This man [Adams] has got to go or we are done.” Ike protested a bit more, emphasizing Adams’s work and dedication, but he knew Aldrich was right.
So Ike sent Nixon back to Adams in the company of Meade Alcorn, chairman of the Republican National Committee. Their task was to persuade him that he had become a political liability, that Goldfine was dragging down the party and compromising its future leaders. This time, Adams heard the message. Eisenhower groused about the power of “cheap politicians” to “pillory an honorable man,” but he cut his deputy loose to protect his administration. Once it was done, Ike relaxed, seemingly for the first time in weeks. He dictated a few letters, signed some pictures, and went out shopping with his old friend George Allen. They stopped at a roadside stand for a pumpkin, startling the girl at the register because she did not recognize the president. Then they dropped in at a Howard Johnson and bought everyone there an ice cream. Presumably, Allen paid; Eisenhower rarely carried money. The next day, Adams called the president and offered his resignation. Eisenhower accepted.
Adams lingered for a while, forcing Eisenhower to nudge him out of his office. But on September 22, he announced publicly that he was leaving. Adams and Eisenhower both insisted he had done nothing wrong, and Adams would stubbornly cling to that notion long after Goldfine had been convicted in the court of public opinion and tax court as well. Eisenhower presented Adams with a silver bowl, and his assistant went home to New Hampshire. The inscription on the bowl was signed by “his devoted friend, Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
For Eisenhower, Adams’s departure was in one sense a relief—the fight had been long and distracting. Just two days before Adams resigned, Khrushchev had threatened nuclear war over Quemoy and Matsu, and on that same day a deranged woman lunged at Martin Luther King in a Harlem store, stabbing him in the chest and barely missing his heart. It was no time for a president to be hobbled by an ineffective assistant.
To replace Adams, Eisenhower selected General Jerry Persons. Persons was amiable and easygoing where Adams was brusque, mellifluous where Adams was clipped, and one contemporary compared the transition to a move from “hard cider to mellow bourbon.” Persons was an old friend—the two met back when Ike was working for MacArthur, and Persons was such an effective congressional advocate for the Army that Marshall turned down Eisenhower’s request to bring him to Europe during the war. Now, as Adams’s successor, he had Eisenhower’s abiding appreciation, but he struggled to adjust to the new job. While Adams’s stern blockade at Eisenhower’s door had angered those who wanted greater access to the president, Persons’s lighter touch added to Ike’s burden. He complained to Whitman that “the staff seemed to descend upon him in droves and dump everything in his lap.” It was, she added, much worse “than when Adams was here.” Persons also sounded out staff for advice, again, a likable trait and one notably in contrast to Adams’s imperiousness. But that, too, bogged people down in long meetings. Ike gently chided Persons about it.
In the shuffle of advisers, Eisenhower drew one of his most trusted intimates into the White House. John reported for duty on October 8. His father had always been tough, and it was no different now that he formally served him as his president. John avoided referring to him as “Dad,” preferring instead to call him “Boss.” And Ike gave him no special privilege. He would bark at his son just as he did his staff, forgive him just as readily, appreciate him just as deeply. For John, there was no escaping the call to duty. It was, he reflected, “the long arm of the White House,” and it drew him “once more into the Boss’s orbit.” Cinching the bond, John moved his wife and children into a converted schoolhouse in Gettysburg, just down the road from Ike and Mamie.
Adams had been sacrificed to solidify the Republican showing in the midterm elections. Come Election Day, however, it fell well short of its goal. Ike did his part. He traveled, delivered speeches, raised money even for Bill Knowland, who was running for governor of California. (Knowland lost and never regained a position in politics. In 1974, he shot and killed himself.) But southern Democrats railed against Little Rock. Northern Democrats turned to organized labor for financial and political support. In contrast, the Republicans were divided. Democrats picked up thirteen seats in the Senate, breaking Republican strongholds in the industrial East, the mid-Atlantic region, and even the Plains states. It was, the New York Times reported, “a national triumph.” It was not all bad news for Eisenhower: the Democratic tide also swept out remnants of the Republican old guard, the die-hard supporters of McCarthy and Knowland, the isolationists of the Taft and MacArthur era. Still, it was a trouncing, and largely one of the GOP’s own doing. “The faults of the Republican Party are many,” Eisenhower acknowledged to Harold Macmillan in a letter a few days after the votes were in. “If I could devote myself exclusively to a political job, I’d like to take on the one of reorganizing and revitalizing the Party.”
The congressional defeats were dispiriting, but sadder still was the loss of one of Ike’s oldest friends. Beginning in early 1957, Swede Hazlett had faced a series of ailments. He had high blood pressure and headaches. Treated at Bethesda—he was a Navy man—he underwent tests and responded initially to treatment. But in April 1958, he had a lung removed, and he faded to the point that he was a “virtual shut-in.” Ike sent flowers, flattered him with briefings on world affairs, visited him in the hospital. Hazlett struggled to correspond with his old friend, but the labor of writing was too much. When he died in November, he left an unfinished note to Ike among his things.
Swede’s passing took from Ike his most faithful friend, a tie to his youth, and a stalwart admirer to whom Eisenhower had unburdened himself for decades. “I can never quite tell you what Swede meant to me,” the president wrote to Hazlett’s widow. “While I am glad for his sake that he suffers no longer, his passing leaves a permanent void in my life.”
It was then, shortly after Adams’s farewell and Hazlett’s death, that Khrushchev decided to test Eisenhower’s firmness. Khrushchev had watched as Eisenhower cut a deal with China to avoid a nuclear war in Asia. Was that a reflection of a new American weakness? A fear of growing Soviet nuclear power? If the United States was moving to accommodating Communism rather than confronting it, maybe it was time for Khrushchev to act.
Near the end of 1958, he decided to challenge Western strength not at the margins of the Cold War but rather in the heart of Europe, in the city most riven by the divisions of the era. On November 10, 1958, Khrushchev announced that the time had come to end the occupation of Berlin. And on November 27, Thanksgiving, he followed that up with an ultimatum, delivered orally to Western journalists in Moscow and in writing to Ike: vacate West Berlin in six months or have it pass into the control of East Germany. Eisenhower understood that if he walked away from Berlin, as he told John, “no one in the world could have any confidence in any pledge we make.”
American policy with respect to Berlin was honed by previous conflict over that Western outpost, precariously isolated deep inside East Germany. Truman had rescued Berlin by airlift in 1948 and 1949. The Soviets eventually withdrew their blockade, but a decade later Berlin remained just as vulnerable and just as vital to Western prestige. It was, as Khrushchev alternately complained, a “thorn,” a “cancer,” and a “bone in my throat.” In 1958, just as in 1948, the United States was prepared to wage war to protect Berlin—“all-out war,” as James Forrestal, Truman’s secretary of defense, had once described it; “general war,” as Eisenhower now imagined it. In the intervening years, little had changed in Berlin, but much had changed inside the Soviet Union. Now that he was ar
med with nuclear weapons—how many, the United States did not know—Khrushchev’s ultimatum threatened not just war in Europe but the destruction of mankind. The Soviet premier taunted Eisenhower. “Only madmen can go the length of unleashing another world war over the preservation of privileges of occupiers in West Berlin,” he warned in a note to the American ambassador in Moscow. “If such madmen should really appear, there is no doubt that straitjackets could be found for them.”
Khrushchev’s long deadline allowed for negotiations and forced the Eisenhower administration again to confront the question of whether the United States was prepared to wage a nuclear war in defense of an ally. Nuclear weapons, if they were used in defense of Berlin, would be released in a mass attack that would not just drive the Soviets from Berlin or Europe but also destroy every vestige of their government and society. “Our whole stack is in this play,” Eisenhower emphasized to his aides. In the event of a Soviet attack on Berlin, America’s response would be simple: “Hit the Russians as hard as we could.”
Yet even as Ike girded for war, he and John Foster Dulles furiously explored diplomatic alternatives. Dulles worked to cement Western unity—no small feat given that the American strategy in the event of a war almost certainly relied upon atomizing much of Europe. Eisenhower’s military and civilian aides urged him to adopt a firm response if Khrushchev turned Berlin over to East Germany. As with Quemoy-Matsu, however, Eisenhower refused to be pinned down. He insisted he was prepared for general war and yet steadfastly declined to treat Khrushchev’s ultimatum as an imminent danger. Berlin was, Eisenhower complained, an “illogical” military position, but it was a political necessity and as such required American defense. Some of Ike’s aides argued for a quick military probe to test the seriousness of the Soviet threat. Eisenhower refused. He would not lurch into an error.
