by Jim Newton
Eisenhower’s effort was both complicated and simplified by his adversary: Khrushchev was adamantly reckless and also shockingly easy to appease. He unveiled his Berlin ultimatum without even cursory consultation with the Kremlin leadership, and he escalated the crisis without any clear strategy. He was prepared to accept Western capitulation and imagined that negotiations along the lines that resolved Quemoy and Matsu might yield some advantage to the Soviet Union. He wanted to force a summit—that much seemed evident—and he coveted an invitation to visit the United States. Beyond those, the Soviet leader seemed to have few specific objectives as he bumbled toward a superpower confrontation.
Eisenhower, by contrast, was clear on his strategic objectives and flexible in tactical response. He refused to abandon Berlin and gambled that Khrushchev would not actually risk war to press his claims against the city. All through the winter of 1958 and 1959, intelligence reports confirmed that basic premise: Khrushchev, the Americans believed, would make demands and accept concessions but would not risk annihilation.
Eisenhower knew that part of Khrushchev’s plan was to force a summit, and he therefore resisted the idea. The British, by contrast, favored such a gathering, and, as in 1955, Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to consider it. On March 20, with the Soviet deadline growing nearer, the president entertained Harold Macmillan at Gettysburg, and the two capped their official conversations with a long ride around the Eisenhower farm. When they returned after dusk, Macmillan was darkly troubled. As they contemplated the risk before them, an “exceedingly emotional” Macmillan pleaded with Eisenhower to agree to a summit, begging him to recognize that an attack on England with just “eight bombs,” a phrase he used repeatedly, could wipe out twenty to thirty million of his countrymen. If a nuclear war seemed imminent, Macmillan asked for time to evacuate Britons to Canada and Australia.
Taken aback by Macmillan’s plea, Eisenhower reminded the prime minister that estimates of American casualties in a global war exceeded sixty-seven million and that, even so, he refused to “escape war by surrendering on the installment plan.” Eisenhower would not be “dragooned to a summit,” but did allow that he would consider attending if the foreign ministers would meet first and produce some evidence that a high-level conference would result in progress. Even slight progress, Eisenhower said, might be enough to justify the summit that Khrushchev desired and that Macmillan believed was the way out of the crisis. Macmillan was an old man at the end of a long career. This, he said, was “a duty he owed his people” and stood likely to be “the most fateful decision he would ever have to take.” With that, the two men joined their aides for dinner. They capped the evening with a Western. Macmillan remembered it as “The Great Country or some such name”—it was, undoubtedly, The Big Country. “It lasted three hours!” he exclaimed to his diary. “It was inconceivably banal.”
Macmillan’s appeal supplied the breakthrough that both sides sought. Six days later, the United States formally proposed a foreign ministers’ meeting, to be followed by a summit if progress warranted it. The Berlin crisis, triggered by Khrushchev’s impetuous dare, began to recede. Berlin would remain a hostage to the Cold War for decades, but the imminent threat to its survival had passed by the middle of 1959, allowing the city to resume its place as a locus of tension rather than a flash point of war.
Before the crisis could be resolved entirely, the stress of those dangerous years would claim another victim close to Ike. Ever since 1956, John Foster Dulles had battled cancer. His first operation, just after the Suez crisis, removed a tumor but did not get everything. Dulles worked on. Early in 1959, however, his illness overcame his stoicism. He complained of discomfort and warned one old ally, Adenauer, that he was going to need surgery to repair a hernia. A few days later, he checked into Walter Reed hospital. Once doctors opened him up, they realized his cancer had returned. General Snyder, Eisenhower’s personal physician, monitored the operation and immediately reported that the results were “not good.”
Eisenhower and Dulles had stood shoulder to shoulder for six years, from Dulles’s uncomfortable wait for the appointment he believed his for the asking to Walter Reed’s Ward 8. Together, they had fended off McCarthy, repelled Mao, overthrown Mossadegh and Arbenz, fenced with Khrushchev and occasionally each other. Dulles was not the dominant member of the pair, as some critics of the administration maintained. Eisenhower had watched him closely from the start, and Dulles had been forced to yield on occasion to Ike’s disagreement, most notably in the administration’s evolving nuclear policy. Eisenhower increasingly worried about the prospect of a war, while Dulles worried ever more deeply about the implications of being afraid to fight one. But no two Americans had done more to fashion peace within the context of the Cold War, a peace without precedent, created by their imagination and will. They had forged it as a team, in daily contact no matter where their schedules took them.
As their collaboration grew to a close, Dulles summoned up his energy and piety, lecturing as he was prone to do, when Macmillan and Ike came to visit him. A day before Eisenhower and Macmillan left for Gettysburg, the three men met in Ward 8, accompanied by Britain’s foreign secretary. Eisenhower sat on a sofa, Macmillan and his deputy in armchairs, Dulles in a higher, harder seat. Dulles counseled defiance. “He was against almost everything,” Macmillan recalled—against a summit, against a foreign ministers’ meeting, against any hint of retreat from Berlin. “He thought we could ‘stick it out’ in Berlin, and that the Russians would not dare to interfere with us.” Macmillan was moved but worried. “It was a splendid exhibition of courage and devotion. But I felt that his illness had made his mind more rigid … I felt also sorry for the President.”
Macmillan saw in Dulles the passing of a tough negotiator and an architect of a brutal peace. Eisenhower saw a dying friend. “I have rarely seen him shaken by … death,” Ann Whitman wrote. “But this morning he did talk a little bit about it.”
On Monday, April 13, Eisenhower visited Dulles in the hospital and told him he was prepared to accept his resignation. Dulles agreed. Two days later, Eisenhower announced the news from the Colonial Room of the Richmond Hotel in Augusta. “I personally believe he has filled his office with greater distinction and greater ability than any other man our country has known,” Eisenhower told reporters, his grief evident. The press, sensing his mood, was uncharacteristically gentle, asking just a few brief questions. “I can’t tell you how much regret I feel about this,” the president concluded. “I am quite sure that the United States will share that feeling.” Dulles’s letter, drafted by the White House for his convenience and then shared with him for editing, was finalized the next morning; Dulles did not change a word. He called Ann Whitman to thank her for their long association. She listened gratefully and then burst into tears.
Dulles died on May 24. Three days later, the day Khrushchev set as the deadline for Western withdrawal from Berlin, Dulles was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The foreign ministers interrupted their meeting in Geneva to attend.
17
The Final Months
Nineteen fifty-nine opened with two crashing events, one foreign and one domestic: on New Year’s Day, Fidel Castro swept down from the mountains to drive Fulgencio Batista off the Cuban island; later that month, the new U.S. Senate, with sixty-two Democratic members, took up the nomination of Lewis Strauss to become secretary of commerce.
Castro’s triumph was initially a source of bewilderment. He had toppled a regime that deserved toppling. Still, American intelligence was unsure what to make of him, as was the American press. Even the administration’s initial response was bungled: Eisenhower ordered the Navy to send ships to stand offshore, but to do so quietly, so as not to inflame the situation. Instead, the Navy announced the move and said it was ordered by the State Department. Still, the predominant mood within the Eisenhower administration was one of cautious hope. Allen Dulles did not brief the NSC on Cuba’s revolution until three weeks after Castro had taken pow
er, adding it almost as an afterthought to and update on events in the Soviet Union, Italy, Iran, and Yemen. In his briefing, Dulles anticipated future relations with Castro and alerted the council that the United States should be prepared to return refugees to Cuba if they were covered by extradition agreements with that country. Ike even went so far as to compliment Castro, remarking that the Cuban leader had learned one of the essential lessons of Ike’s military hero, Clausewitz. He had focused on defeating not Batista’s capacity to fight but rather his will to do so.
With that, Castro slipped toward the back of the administration’s concerns. The NSC did not take up Cuba again until late March. By then, events were clearly souring for American interests. Just ninety miles from the Florida coast, Castro was consolidating power, whipping up crowds, and jeering at the United States. He accepted an invitation to address American newspaper editors, infuriating Ike, who suggested that the United States deny him a visa. Allen Dulles described himself as worried by the developments but warned against any precipitous action. There was, he said, opposition to Castro within Cuba, and the United States must take care not to undermine those forces by playing into Castro’s hand.
Dulles’s indecision reflected a larger uncertainty about how to regard Castro. During his early months, Castro was sympathetically portrayed in the American press, notably in the New York Times. In August 1959, the Saturday Evening Post headlined its profile of the Cuban leader “Can Castro Save Cuba?” Even Castro’s murders of Batista loyalists were forgiven. “Castro’s executions of Batista henchmen shocked the world,” the Post reported, “but most Cubans considered them as just retribution.”
The tension about how to respond to it froze Ike’s initial response to the Cuban dictator through much of 1959. Over those months, Castro grew stronger and more belligerent. He courted Moscow, picked his brother to head the Cuban military, imprisoned critics, then feinted toward neutralism. Washington could not decide whether, or how, to react.
The Strauss nomination, by contrast, appeared simple. The Senate had never rejected an Eisenhower appointment to his own cabinet, believing in those days that wide deference was due presidents’ appointments. Moreover, Strauss was experienced—he was the longest-serving head of the Atomic Energy Commission, a position for which the Senate had confirmed him—and indisputably intelligent.
He was also arrogant and rigid, prone to overstatement and defensiveness. And he had accumulated influential enemies, particularly within the party that now dominated his future. The Senate reaction when it received Strauss’s nomination in January was portentous: it delayed hearings until March. Strauss at that point made his opening remarks and picked up a few endorsements, only to have the chairman then recess the session again until after Easter. It was not until April 21 that Strauss was finally exposed to the full wrath of his critics.
Estes Kefauver dredged up Strauss’s marginal role in the Dixon-Yates controversy, a tussle over private-versus-public electrical power that had generated a scandal some years earlier. Strauss denied any wrongdoing and pronounced himself satisfied with the resolution of that issue. Then a panel of scientists criticized Strauss for his emphasis on secrecy in the development of American nuclear capacity. That hinted at the real reason for the controversy around the nominee. Strauss had championed a particular vision for America’s nuclear strength. He ardently supported the development of bigger and more destructive weapons, and he believed that the government needed to protect those projects with utmost secrecy. He pursued those objectives with ruthless intensity and had driven his chief nemesis out of government. Thanks to Strauss, Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of America’s atomic bomb, was a private citizen in 1959. Strauss had prevailed in that fight, but Oppenheimer’s allies now got a second bite of the apple.
Led by Senator Clinton Anderson, who had long distrusted Strauss, senators challenged his integrity, and Strauss supplied them with enough misleading—in some cases, false—answers to justify their attacks. Strauss brought a confidential document with him one day and, when confronted, denied first that it was labeled “Top Secret,” then that he had brought anything at all, a falsehood. He fenced with senators about his record and a previous finding that he had demonstrated “willful duplicity” in his dealings with Congress. “Strauss,” a sympathetic biographer writes, “proved himself to be vain, arrogant, and self-righteous in defense of his record, but did these traits disqualify him?”
Eisenhower stood firmly behind Strauss. Asked at a news conference in early May whether the rancor against Strauss would make it impossible for him to serve, Eisenhower said no: “I have told you again and again that I think here is a man who is not only a valuable public servant, but who is a man of the utmost integrity and competence in administration. And if we’ve got to the point where a man, because of some personal antagonisms, cannot be confirmed for office in this Government, then I must say we’re getting to a pretty bad situation.” Two weeks later, by a vote of 9–8, the Interstate Commerce Committee recommended that Strauss be confirmed.
Eisenhower continued to push for Strauss, leaning on senators for their support. Indeed, he pressed so hard that some accused him of overreaching. He refused to be deterred. “When my conscience tells me [my recommendations to Congress] are right, I’m going to use every single influence that I can from the executive department to get the Congress to see the light,” he said just days before the final vote. “If that’s lobbying, I’m guilty.”
The Eisenhower of 1959, faced with a Democratic Senate and his impending departure from office, did not have the clout he possessed when he was a candidate for reelection. The Senate gathered for its vote on Strauss and, by the narrowest of margins, defied the president. The final vote was 49–46. “I am losing a truly valuable associate in the business of government,” Eisenhower lamented. “More than this—if the Nation is to be denied the right to have as public servants in responsible positions men of his proven character, ability and integrity, then indeed it is the American people who are the losers through this sad episode.”
Eisenhower had always been prone to temper—this was still the boy who beat his fists against a tree when he was denied the chance to go trick-or-treating—but his reaction to Strauss’s defeat was in a class by itself. Publicly, Ike accepted Strauss’s gracious resignation: “I salute you for the calm and even generous attitude in which you have accepted what will surely go down in history as one of the most erroneous and unfortunate verdicts of our time.” Privately, he was beside himself. “He thought it was a disgrace,” Jim Hagerty recalled. “It completely disgusted him.” He vented to friends and aides, brought it up in meeting after meeting. For the rest of his days as president, the Senate’s handling of the Strauss nomination would enrage Eisenhower.
Ike approached the final chapter of his presidency with an acute sense of time running out. Adams and Dulles were gone, replaced by Persons in the White House and Christian Herter—a gentle and dignified former Massachusetts governor who amassed a long career of public service despite hobbling pain from arthritis—in the State Department. Frederick Mueller filled in at Commerce after the Senate rejected Strauss. George Humphrey and Herb Brownell also had departed, their posts filled by Robert Anderson and William Rogers at Treasury and Justice, respectively. All capable men, but in no case did they match the ability or stature of the ones they replaced. The Republican losses in the 1958 elections insured that Eisenhower would never again govern with a cooperative Congress (not that he ever really had), and the race to succeed him would inject politics into every major decision of the final years. The rejection of Strauss proved the limits of Ike’s power to get his way.
Also in 1959, the United States grew—not just metaphorically, but physically as the nation absorbed two new states. Eisenhower had been skeptical of Alaska statehood. The area was so vast, so uninhabited, so removed from the rest of the nation that it hardly seemed to warrant consideration in his view. Hawaii, with its larger population and strategic significa
nce, struck him as a sounder case. There were, moreover, political considerations: it was generally assumed in Washington that Alaska would tilt Democratic and Hawaii would vote Republican.
In the end, most of those assumptions proved wrong: Alaska’s oil and proximity to the Soviet Union made it the more strategic addition, and it gradually drifted into the Republican column, while Hawaii became a solidly Democratic state. They were admitted under separate pieces of legislation, both of which Eisenhower signed, and the new states joined the Union in 1959. That meant redesigning the flag with fifty stars for fifty states. The final design was not the one Ike preferred: he liked a staggered arrangement of stars, but when he learned that a flag company was pushing that design, he reversed himself, feeling that the nation’s flag should not reflect a commercial interest. The nation got its new flag in August.
Eisenhower was more limited in the twilight of his administration. He guarded his health, as did his staff. Most days featured a long midday break; aides brought bad news to him gingerly. Yet Ike saw a chance for peace in his final months, and he determined to pursue it. In August 1959, he extended an invitation to his Soviet counterpart to visit and tour the United States. Khrushchev, astonished to receive the invitation he had so wanted, reacted “with immense satisfaction, even … with a sense of joy,” and with vindication that his pressure on Berlin had yielded newfound American appreciation for the Soviet Union.
