by Jim Newton
Inside, Eisenhower barged in on Al Gruenther, Bill Robinson, George Allen, and Ellis Slater playing bridge. “Hi,” Gruenther said, not bothering to get up and barely turning to face Eisenhower. “What’s new?” Allen asked.
Ike pulled up a chair and sat down: “Now let’s see how the experts do it.”
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The Khrushchev visit that fall and the abating of the Berlin crisis left two significant, unfinished pieces of business for Ike to complete in his remaining months as president: the four-power summit and his reciprocal visit to the Soviet Union. By agreement, the summit was scheduled to go first and was set for May in Paris. Plans for it dominated the administration that spring, as aides recognized that it represented the culmination of a presidency devoted to striking some sort of lasting peace with the Soviet Union.
Business in Washington posed all the usual difficulties for a president whose power was beginning to wane. Castro had become intolerable; President Rhee of South Korea, after trying to steal his reelection, instead succumbed to pressure and departed—ostensibly with Eisenhower’s good wishes but in fact to his great relief. There were the usual visitors: Prime Minister Kishi of Japan came in January; Adenauer and Macmillan visited in March, de Gaulle in April. In between, Eisenhower took a grueling trip through South America, stopping in San Juan, Rio, the newly constructed city of Brasília, Buenos Aires, San Carlos, Santiago, Montevideo, and back home through Puerto Rico again. In Latin America, the mission, though mostly goodwill, also included a bit of fact-finding, as Ike sounded out his counterparts on their reactions to Castro.
Congress, meanwhile, tried again to fashion a civil rights bill as escalating civil disobedience in the South highlighted the persistence of Jim Crow. Eisenhower sidestepped the issue. Asked in March whether restaurants that denied blacks service were violating their constitutional rights, he answered: “So far as I know, this matter of types of segregation in the South has been brought time and again before the Supreme Court. Now, I certainly am not lawyer enough or wise enough in this area to know when a matter is such as actually to violate the constitutional rights of the Negroes.” That was barely credible, but Ike still refused to be drawn into a debate that he believed would be resolved by “the conscience of America,” and only “eventually.”
Yet even as he equivocated, Eisenhower continued to mark steady, incremental progress on civil rights. On May 6, he signed another bill in that area, still just the second to clear Congress since the Civil War. As with the first, it did not go as far as he had asked, but it criminalized obstruction of a federal court order, gave the FBI authority to investigate alleged civil rights violations, and required local jurisdictions to retain voting records—all steps to enlarge and defend the rights of American blacks, particularly the right to vote.
Eisenhower also waged a last attempt to control federal spending. He opposed a housing bill that was estimated to cost $1 billion. He favored a proposal to expand health care for the elderly, but he refused to back one version that would have made health insurance compulsory and subsidized by the federal government. On the revenue side, Eisenhower declined to endorse a tax cut, despite the benefits it might have had for Nixon’s political future. It was, Ike said, too likely to throw the federal budget out of balance. His refusal to yield to party conservatives on taxes hamstrung Nixon and infuriated other leading Republicans, but Ike benefited from a steadily improving American economy: by April, 66.2 million Americans were at work, and the nation’s gross national product was on pace to top $500 billion for the first time in its history.
That left Eisenhower free to focus on the upcoming Paris Summit. He conferred with de Gaulle and Macmillan in the weeks leading up to the event, with Macmillan crafting the proposal for a nuclear test ban. Writing to Khrushchev on March 12, Eisenhower urged the Soviets to join with the West in suspending all such tests indefinitely. “Surely,” Eisenhower suggested, “it is in the interests of our two countries and of the whole world to conclude now an agreement.” That prompted an exchange of letters between the two leaders in which there appeared to be progress. There were difficulties, concentrated mainly around the issue of inspections, but by early April, Eisenhower had come to regard Khrushchev’s suggestion on how to frame a test ban treaty as a “very significant and welcome development.”
Secretly, Ike also prepared for the summit by gathering intelligence on the Soviets. Since June 20, 1956, high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance planes equipped with the most advanced cameras of their time had overflown the Soviet Union’s satellite nations in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower granted his approval the following day for flights to penetrate the Soviet Union itself. Within weeks, he was presented with detailed aerial photographs of Leningrad and a Moscow airframe plant. Briefed about the flights, he regarded the program as “very interesting, very positive.”
U-2s crisscrossed Soviet territory for four years, their flights a nuisance to Soviet radar operators, who could track the planes but not bring them down because they were out of reach of the nation’s defenses. The Soviets routinely protested those intrusions on their airspace but did not publicize them for fear of what it said about the weakness of Soviet technology—this, at a time when they were boasting of scientific superiority. The result: Eisenhower knew much about Soviet military readiness, and Khrushchev knew that he knew. The essence of the U-2 program was a secret from the Soviet and American people but not from their governments. Nevertheless, Eisenhower understood how provocative the program was: it routinely violated Soviet airspace as part of a vast program of espionage. Understanding the risks, he insisted on approving every flight.
It was with special trepidation that he considered the request of Richard Bissell, the CIA’s director of plans, for one more overflight in the spring of 1960. Code-named Operation Grand Slam, it was slated to cross the western Soviet Union from south to north. It was originally scheduled for early April but had been delayed by bad weather. Bissell kept returning for permission. On April 25, security adviser Andy Goodpaster informed Bissell that the president had given his okay for one last flight, on one condition: it could not be made after May 1. After that, Eisenhower was worried that it could endanger the Paris Summit, scheduled to begin on May 16.
Armed with the president’s permission, the CIA selected the program’s most experienced pilot, Francis Gary Powers. He was ready to go on April 28, but the flight was again scrapped because of bad weather. For the next two mornings, he prepared to take off, only to be called back, again for weather. Finally, with the president’s deadline upon them, CIA officials cleared the flight. Powers took off thirty minutes late. He headed toward Afghanistan and sent one brief signal when he approached Soviet airspace at sixty-six thousand feet. Then, as with all U-2 flights, he went silent.
In Washington, there was no reason to pay particular attention to Powers’s flight. Although a matter of serious national security, the U-2 program had been under way for years without serious incident. Powers’s flight was more ambitious than most: rather than entering the Soviet Union and then returning the way he came, Powers was entering in the south and exiting near Scandinavia. Nevertheless, the planes had proven their invulnerability, flying beyond the reach of Soviet surface-to-air missiles and interceptor planes. Powers settled in for a long but presumably uneventful flight.
The first inklings of trouble came a few hours later when CIA officials in Washington were told that the Soviets had stopped tracking the U-2 with radar. Hours went by, and Powers did not arrive as scheduled. Concern deepened to gloom, but Bissell and his CIA colleagues were convinced that neither the pilot nor the fragile plane could survive a crash from nearly seventy thousand feet. Powers might be dead, but the chances of the mission being exposed seemed small.
At the White House, the downing of Powers’s U-2 caught the president flat-footed. The administration was conducting a civil defense test that day, and members of the NSC were being judged by how quickly they could relocate to High Point, a secure location i
n Virginia intended for use in the event of an attack on the United States. When Jim Hagerty received news that the U-2 had disappeared, he urgently relayed word to Goodpaster, but Goodpaster, preoccupied with the NSC scramble, did not tell Ike for more than an hour, infuriating Hagerty. When Ike finally heard that the plane was missing, he was asked to authorize the release of a prearranged cover story—that a U.S. weather plane lost contact and perhaps drifted off course. “You had better wait,” Eisenhower suggested. But the aide insisted: the point was to release a statement before the Soviets did. Ike didn’t like it, but he agreed: “Go ahead.”
Pursuant to the cover story Ike had approved in 1956, NASA released a terse statement that a weather plane on a mission in Turkey had disappeared. Before it had lost contact, the pilot, according to the statement, “reported over the emergency frequency that he was experiencing oxygen difficulties.” That way, if wreckage were discovered inside the Soviet Union, the announcement would suggest that the pilot had blacked out and the plane had drifted across the border as it fell to earth.
None of that would have fooled the Soviets, of course, but since they had been complaining about these flights for years without drawing attention to what they revealed about Soviet capabilities, American authorities believed they were safe. Safe, that is, so long as the pilot and the plane were destroyed—the scenario that CIA officials regarded as “best case.” Unfortunately, as the CIA’s study of the U-2 program later noted, “May Day turned out to be a bad time to overfly the Soviet Union.” Because it was a national holiday, much of the country’s military traffic was grounded; that allowed radar operators to focus more intently on Powers’s plane, which also mistakenly carried him over a missile battery that American planners did not know of. A little over four hours into his flight, a missile exploded close to Powers’s U-2 (a Soviet MiG dispatched to intercept Powers was hit by a second missile). He ejected from the plane, having failed to detonate it, and then parachuted to earth, where he was captured. His film was recovered.
Americans knew none of this and assumed that the cover story about a weather aircraft would hold. Khrushchev waited, letting the U.S. government further commit to a story. It was, he relished, a magnificent opportunity to retaliate for “all the years of humiliation.”
As he laid his trap, Khrushchev proceeded in the conviction that his new friend Eisenhower could not possibly have authorized the flights. Perhaps revealing something of his own relationship to his intelligence services, he imagined that the CIA or the Pentagon was conducting the espionage without the president’s knowledge; the Soviet premier’s gambit, then, was to expose the espionage, embarrass the United States, and still leave himself room to negotiate with Ike. Acting on those assumptions, Khrushchev played his hand for all it was worth. He delivered a long speech on May 5 to the Supreme Soviet. Well into the address, he revealed that the Soviet Union had shot down an American plane, thwarting an “aggressive act” and a clumsy attempt to put pressure on the Soviet state.
That goaded the United States into denying Khrushchev’s account. After the first statement announcing that the U-2 was a weather plane, NASA elaborated with “details.” It showed reporters another U-2, hastily adorned with NASA markings and a fictitious serial number. The plane shot down by the Soviets, NASA suggested, was similar to this one, assigned to perform high-altitude weather research. The Americans had now committed to a spurious version of events; they had lied and embellished in support of that lie—all on the assumption that Powers was dead and his plane destroyed.
On May 7, Khrushchev sprang. Speaking to the Supreme Soviet for the second time in three days, he began by extensively reviewing the story spun by the Eisenhower administration. Then, as captured in William Taubman’s memorable biography of the Soviet premier, Khrushchev allowed himself a chuckle. “Comrades,” he said, “I must tell you a secret … I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and in good health and that we have parts of the airplane.” The jig was up, and Khrushchev savored his moment. He revealed that the Soviets had recovered the film from the spy plane, then boasted that Soviet cameras were superior. He also informed his audience that Powers had carried cyanide and lambasted America for the “barbarism” of demanding its pilots commit suicide. Finally, he lampooned the weather plane story by asserting that Powers carried money and jewelry. “What did he need all this for in the upper layers of the atmosphere?”
If this was a treasured moment for the Soviet leader, it also was a stupid one. Even as Khrushchev baited the United States, he trapped Eisenhower into a position that was distinctly to the Soviet’s disadvantage. Imagining that Ike would disavow the U-2 and blame it on rogue elements of the Pentagon or the CIA was a fantasy; to have done so would have amounted to an acknowledgment that Eisenhower did not control his own administration. That said, the CIA had let him down, as Ike surely knew. The agency had pressed for these flights, confident that the U-2 was beyond striking distance of Soviet defenses. Allen Dulles was prepared to make it easy on Eisenhower. He offered to take responsibility and resign.
However tempted he might have been, Eisenhower could not afford to accept. It would have obliterated much of his legacy to suggest that America’s most sensitive operations were conducted without his knowledge or approval. Eisenhower understood that he had to take responsibility for this or sacrifice even more. “I would like to resign,” he muttered to Ann Whitman.
At the same time, Eisenhower saw no reason to apologize to Khrushchev. Since 1953, he had been urging the opening of the skies above the United States and the Soviet Union on the theory that observation would provide stability and reinforce peace. He knew that the Soviets had long been aware of the U-2, and they had, after all, launched Sputnik, further recognition that each country imagined itself free to gaze down on the other.
Eisenhower sized up his options. Having ruled out blaming others, he came clean. The State Department announced that despite its previous denials, the mission had been intended to spy on the Soviet Union, whose refusal to cooperate with proposed inspections such as Open Skies made such flights necessary. “The government of the United States,” the statement read, “would be derelict … if it did not … take such measures as are possible unilaterally to lessen and to overcome this danger of surprise attack.” In order to protect against that danger, the president, while not approving specific missions, had authorized flights, the statement added. Pointedly left unsaid was the future of the program. Khrushchev was crestfallen. This was, he told his son, a “betrayal by General Eisenhower, a man who had referred to him as a friend.”
Two days later, Eisenhower twisted the knife, opening his news conference with a personal defense of the U-2, blaming the Soviet “fetish of secrecy and concealment” for the need to engage in aerial espionage, and describing such work as “a distasteful but vital necessity.” If ever Khrushchev had harbored an illusion of friendship with Eisenhower, he did no more.
Although the U-2 episode badly strained U.S.-Soviet relations and embarrassed Eisenhower, American officials had every reason to think that its ramifications would be limited. Khrushchev was trumpeting the incident as evidence of American duplicity, but as Eisenhower knew, the premier had been aware of the flights for years and had continued to pursue normal diplomacy with the United States. The U-2 program had not so much as been mentioned during their talks at Camp David, when Khrushchev complained about all manner of American mistreatment. The summit, moreover, was more avidly desired by Khrushchev than by Eisenhower. So, as the U-2 crisis bubbled along, Ike continued to make plans to depart for Europe. Asked by Republican senators over breakfast whether the U-2 incident might jeopardize plans for the gathering, Eisenhower responded that Khrushchev was “much too smart” to think that this was the first such U-2 incursion and was unlikely to overreact to it.
But just as domestic considerations had prevented Eisenhower from shifting blame for the U-2 to subordinates, so, too, was Khrushchev driven now by his nation’s internal dynamics. His
theatrics over the U-2 had alarmed members of the Soviet military, and he had counted on Eisenhower to rescue him by disavowing the flights. When Ike took responsibility, it left Khrushchev dangling. Suddenly it was he being asked to swallow his pride and join Ike at the summit despite having made public theater of Powers and the U-2. As Khrushchev and the Soviet delegation pushed off for Paris, the premier made up his mind: Ike would have to apologize for the flights and agree to halt them, or the Soviets would boycott an event largely of their own making.
Eisenhower arrived in Paris on May 15, accompanied by twenty-five aides and greeted by more. After a brief respite at the American embassy, he met with de Gaulle and heard the French president’s report on his discussion with Khrushchev. It was grim, if not entirely unexpected. Khrushchev demanded his apology and insisted that the flights be halted. The latter concession Eisenhower was willing to offer since the utility of the program was “at an end” anyway. Ike was not, however, going to concede error or publicly discontinue the U-2 in response to a threat, so even as the summit prepared to open, the allies debated whether to walk out or let Khrushchev take the initiative.
Having come all this way, the allies decided to sit tight and see what Khrushchev would do. Meeting with Khrushchev, de Gaulle made sure the Soviet leader would not be misled about allied unity in that event. As one of Ike’s aides reported it to him, de Gaulle had been emphatic: “If this matter were to come to war, he wanted Mr. Khrushchev to know that France as an ally would stand with the United States.”
On Monday morning, the summit opened. Khrushchev, closely surrounded by his delegation, his hands shaking with nerves, read a vitriolic denunciation of Eisenhower and the U-2 and refused to proceed with the summit unless he could be assured that the flights had been discontinued and those responsible punished. That was, as he knew, impossible: Was Ike to punish himself? With that, Khrushchev stormed out of the conference. “No matter what happens,” de Gaulle reiterated to Eisenhower, “France as your ally will stand with you all the way.” For Eisenhower, who had spent so many years sowing the alliance, sometimes in the face of French recalcitrance, those were heartwarming words.
