Eisenhower: The White House Years

by Jim Newton

  Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and Macmillan all waited in the conference hall for two hours, while Khrushchev five times demanded an apology for the U-2. Without it, he refused to enter the conference. Eisenhower would not give in, so Khrushchev barnstormed around Paris and into the countryside. It was, the New York Herald Tribune reported, a “wildly chaotic day which would have driven Alice in Wonderland to a psychiatrist.” Their patience finally exhausted, the Western leaders left the conference room.

  The mood was gloomy afterward as the American delegation, suddenly deprived of a mission, straggled back to the embassy. There, the ambassador’s wife had readied the patio for Ike to barbecue. He let off steam by grilling steaks.

  Khrushchev’s antics wrecked the summit and ruined a last chance for a major peace agreement in the Eisenhower years. Ike knew he was partly to blame. Though Khrushchev’s domestic pressures drove him to sabotage the affair, the U-2 had supplied him with a pretext. Eisenhower was defensive about the lost opportunity. Weeks later, when an aide suggested that the United States work to “regain our leadership” in the aftermath of the U-2 and failed summit, Eisenhower exploded. The United States, he insisted, had not lost its leadership and therefore did not need to regain it. Never again, Ike demanded, did he want to hear anyone from his administration argue otherwise.

  It was clear that the collapse of the summit weighed on the president. It is also true, however, that Khrushchev hurt himself with his handling of the affair. Internally, he gave ammunition to his critics who saw him as irresponsible; his eventual downfall was, in large measure, traceable to his actions in those weeks. He antagonized Eisenhower and cemented the common purpose of the West. Indeed, one lasting effect was to reinforce the ties that bound Eisenhower and de Gaulle, two such very different men—one garrulous and popular, the other austere and formal. De Gaulle could irritate Ike—he irritated just about everyone who knew him—but he stood with America when it counted. As he prepared to leave Paris, Eisenhower wrote to his old friend to thank him:

  I leave Paris with, of course, a measure of disappointment because our hopes for taking even a small step toward peace have been dashed by the intransigence and arrogance of one individual. But in another respect I leave Paris with the warmth and strength of your friendship, so amply demonstrated and renewed under the stress of the last four days, an even more valued possession than ever before. You and I have shared great experiences in war and in peace, and from those experiences has come, for my part at least, a respect and admiration for you that I have for few men.

  18

  Rejection

  Of all the many emotions that Richard Nixon elicited from the American people, pity was surely one of those least frequently directed his way. And yet it is hard not to feel for him as he embarked on his campaign for president. Nixon was positioned as heir to one of the most popular men in America, but he launched his effort just as the administration stumbled through its least impressive months. As a candidate, he had to harness himself to Eisenhower’s popularity and at the same time distance himself from what was widely perceived as the administration’s dwindling effectiveness. He struggled at both, succeeded at neither.

  Eisenhower did not know quite what to make of Nixon’s candidacy. The vice president had grown on him since their early days, when Ike left Nixon painfully exposed during the Slush Fund controversy. Nixon had performed well in two of Eisenhower’s health crises, running the cabinet after Ike’s 1955 heart attack and quickly stepping forward after his alarming stroke in 1957. Nixon had successfully resisted when Eisenhower tried to push him off the ticket in 1956 and had been a model of loyalty, fencing well with Khrushchev at the Kitchen Debate and easing Adams from office with minimum fallout. Yet Ike could never regard Nixon as an equal and was flummoxed by Nixon’s most primal political instincts.

  In June 1959, as Nixon began to maneuver for the race to succeed Eisenhower, the two had breakfast together, and Ike left shaking his head. “It is terrible when people get politically ambitious,” he confided to his secretary. “They have so many problems.”

  What’s more, Eisenhower, perhaps forgetting how long it had taken him to warm to Nixon, seemed baffled that others showed reservations about him. Reports cascaded into Ike’s office from those who were leery of Nixon’s candidacy. Conservatives blamed Nixon for civil rights; blacks did not give him credit. Southerners were suspicious of him. Many Californians felt burned by him. Jews never supported him; so grim were reports of Jewish antipathy toward Nixon that Eisenhower actually pulled his vice president aside at one point to ask him why the antagonism ran so deep.

  Even in the early months of the campaign when Nelson Rockefeller—once Ike’s aide, now governor of New York—began to ratchet up his efforts to run, Eisenhower did his best to stump for Nixon. At Ike’s direction, Malcolm Moos, then the president’s chief speechwriter, researched whether Nixon and Rockefeller each could pledge to serve a single term if elected, thereby clearing the way for the other to serve as well. Nearly a hundred years earlier, Rutherford Hayes had done precisely that and had won tremendous support for his selfless renunciation of political ambition. Ike thought Nixon, identified in the public mind—and in Eisenhower’s—as a victim of his crippling ambition, would potentially benefit from a similar move. Moos compiled a list of excuses that Nixon could offer (he had been in public life for eighteen years, he wanted to see more of his family once his presidency was concluded, and so on) and of reasons why Rockefeller might then benefit as well by agreeing not to challenge Nixon in return for a clear path at the nomination in four years (he would remain governor of New York and be a leading presidential contender in 1964). Neither Nixon nor Rockefeller took to the idea; they continued to pursue the presidency against each other.

  Ike was eager to help, but he would not compromise on matters of consequence in order to help his vice president. Under pressure yet again from Republicans to cut taxes—this time to stimulate Nixon’s chances—Eisenhower refused. He had come to office determined to erase the $8.2 billion budget deficit he had inherited from Truman. Steady resistance to federal spending, along with the expansion of the economy through the mid-1950s, had allowed Eisenhower to deliver surpluses in 1956 and 1957, only to have those dry up during the 1958 recession. But that recession had passed quickly, and the 1960 budget offered Ike his final opportunity to deliver the economy into safe hands. He held fast on spending and taxes, and left office with a $500 million surplus. Not until 1999 would another American president produce a budget in the black.

  Meanwhile, on the Democratic side of the 1960 race, Lyndon Johnson pivoted from his position as a spearhead of southern influence to a national candidate, a move that Eisenhower and his aides viewed with skepticism. By 1960, Eisenhower had become accustomed to regarding Johnson as a cynical obstructionist to the administration’s modest civil rights efforts in Congress. It was Johnson who had persuaded Ike to drop the most ambitious sections of his civil rights bill in 1957, but when the matter returned to the administration two years later, Johnson offered to carry a bill. Remembering their last round, Ike’s aides warned the president against taking Johnson’s word; he was, they said, “completely untrustworthy.” Eisenhower replied that he liked Johnson personally but, more to the point, had no choice but to live with him. When Eisenhower reported that Senator Richard Russell, Johnson’s mentor, regarded Attorney General Bill Rogers as a “hydra headed monster,” Rogers responded that that was nothing compared to how Johnson described Ike.

  So it was hard for Eisenhower to root for Johnson’s candidacy. Nor was he enthusiastic about Johnson’s most prominent rivals. Hubert Humphrey was too liberal, Stuart Symington too close to Truman, Stevenson was old news—Ike was responsible for that—and Governor Pat Brown of California too inexperienced in international affairs. That left John Kennedy, who seemed to Ike to be too young, too inexperienced, too ambitious—and, quite possibly, too Catholic—to win the presidency and occupy the office whose tribulations Eisenhower understo
od.

  On the issue of Kennedy’s Catholicism, there is no evidence that Ike engaged in the commonplace bigotry of the era, the sloppy assumption that a Catholic president would take orders from Rome, or at least that his public policy decisions would be dominated by his religious faith. Eisenhower put no stock in such casual prejudice; he had appointed Brennan to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1956 and had even considered running with a Catholic Democrat as his vice president. But Ike did grasp the political consequences of such widespread assumptions. He noted with interest, for example, a 1960 statement by the Vatican insisting that the doctrines and hierarchy of the Church guide adherents in their public as well as their private lives. Though that admonition was directed at Italian public officials, it carried implications for Kennedy’s candidacy as well.

  Kennedy announced his candidacy on January 2, 1960, and contested it with sharp-witted acumen, aided by his tough younger brother Robert. He campaigned in seven state primaries, accumulating delegates but at first not impressing the party hierarchy, which viewed his early successes primarily as evidence of Catholic loyalty (his strong showing in Wisconsin, for instance, was largely attributed to that state’s substantial Catholic vote). Only after West Virginia, where he and his family heavily invested, could Kennedy claim victory in a state without a substantial Catholic population. From that point on, he was a genuine contender, and he rolled into the Democratic convention with a solid lead in delegates but with doubts about whether he could win.

  Democrats descended on Los Angeles over the weekend of July 9, 1960, welcomed to the city by its Republican newspaper and eager to contest an election in which Eisenhower would not be their opponent. Governor Pat Brown refused to endorse any candidate. The party’s elder statesman, Harry Truman, was still waffling on whether to attend. Kyle Palmer, the Los Angeles Times’s lead political correspondent known more for his Republican leanings than his acumen, reported that Jack Kennedy had “dropped his hope of winning on the first ballot” and instead was resigned to winning, if at all, on the third or fourth tally. Johnson, even bolder, predicted Kennedy would lose after two rounds.

  Kennedy was nominated on Wednesday night and won on the first ballot. Palmer now predicted that Kennedy would run as an “ultra liberal,” the second of his inaccurate predictions that week. When, the following day, he wrote that Kennedy’s selection for vice president, Johnson, was “unexpected,” readers must have wondered as much about Palmer’s abilities as about the new Democratic pairing. The Democratic ticket of rivals was chosen for political advantage, and it achieved it. Johnson buried his pride and brought Texas to the party’s column, along with other wavering states of the South and near South.

  Nixon, meanwhile, wrapped up his nomination more tidily, though not without incident. Campaigning as the heir to the Eisenhower era’s peace and prosperity, he beat down Rockefeller’s challenge and held off a threat from his right in the form of the Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who appealed to the conservative elements of the party who never fully embraced Eisenhower. Eager to repair divisions caused by the Rockefeller-Nixon split, those around Eisenhower urged him to broker a combined ticket. But neither Nixon nor Rockefeller was amenable, so Ike directed his influence toward Lodge as Nixon’s vice president.

  Having secured the nomination he had so long dreamed of, Nixon began to stumble. Eisenhower sent him a private telegram congratulating him on becoming the Republican nominee and wishing him success against Kennedy: “To your hands I pray that I shall pass the responsibilities of the office of the Presidency and will be glad to do so.” At the same time, Ike asked that Nixon treat the note in confidence, undoubtedly because he included some thoughts on Nixon’s vice president; Colorado Republicans, Eisenhower confided based on reports from his friend Aksel Nielsen, favored Lodge, with Robert Anderson, then Ike’s secretary of the treasury, as their second choice (curious, in that those recommendations precisely mirrored Ike’s own preferences). Nixon promptly violated Eisenhower’s confidence by releasing the telegram to the press. That benefited Nixon; it helped dispel the persistent sense that Ike lacked confidence in him, but it embarrassed Eisenhower, who woke to read his telegram in the morning papers and thus was caught lending support to two potential vice presidents over the rest of the possible field. Rose Woods, Nixon’s secretary, took the blame and apologized profusely. Lodge got the job, but it was not an auspicious start.

  Modeling one aspect of his campaign on Eisenhower’s 1952 effort, Nixon vowed to compete across the country. In Ike’s case, that meant a promise to venture into the South; in Nixon’s, he explicitly promised to campaign in all fifty states. That was a mistake, but by the time Nixon realized it, he was committed. The result was much wasted travel and energy in a race that both sides knew would be close.

  The travel also took a physical toll on Nixon. In late August, he bumped his knee on a car door while campaigning in North Carolina. The injury became infected. Nixon limped along in pain.

  That was nothing compared to the damage Eisenhower did to Nixon in late August. It was the end of a long press conference, and Eisenhower was irritable. Reporters had been needling him about the campaign, probing about his reaction to Francis Gary Powers’s conviction and sentence after a Soviet show trial, and suggesting that the government’s acknowledgment that Powers was on a spy mission might have hindered his defense. More annoyingly, the White House press corps, which would never quite accept Ike’s praise for Nixon at face value, kept demanding some evidence that Nixon had played the role he was campaigning on—that of Ike’s senior, trusted decision maker.

  “Will you tell us some of the big decisions that Mr. Nixon has participated in since you have been in the White House?” asked Sarah McClendon of the El Paso Times.

  “I don’t see why people can’t understand this,” Eisenhower groused. “No one can make a decision except me if it is in the national executive area. I have all sorts of advisers, and one of the principal ones is Mr. Nixon.”

  The president thought that would settle the matter. But reporters kept dogging him. Time magazine’s Charles Mohr asked whether, in light of Eisenhower’s earlier answer about decision making resting solely with the president, it would be fair to characterize Nixon as more of an “observer” than a “participant” in the Eisenhower White House.

  Ike smelled the trap and tried to wriggle free, but Mohr pressed again. “We understand that the power of decision is entirely yours, Mr. President,” Mohr continued. “I just wondered if you could give us an example of a major idea of his that you had adopted in that role, as the decider and final—”

  Eisenhower cut him off: “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”

  Ike delivered that with a smile and insisted afterward that he’d been joshing, not that he had delivered the withering insult that it appeared. But there it was: Nixon argued that he deserved to be elected because he had the seasoning necessary to guide a nation through a troubled world, that John Kennedy was too young and removed from real power to understand the perils of the office. Nixon’s claim was based on eight years at the side of America’s war-hero president, the builder of a complex and balanced peace. Yet when asked to supply a single example of Nixon having contributed to that peace, the president confessed that he could not name one. Ike wished he could take it back, but it was too late.

  The following week, Nixon succumbed to his throbbing knee and checked into Walter Reed hospital. Ike visited him there on August 30, arriving late in the afternoon to find Nixon on the mend from a quite serious staph infection—one that Eisenhower might have sympathized with, given his boyhood experience with an infection that nearly took his leg. Ike found his vice president nursing a much deeper wound, to his ego and his political fortunes. Nixon had led in the polls since the national conventions, but Eisenhower’s careless remark had hurt him just as the campaign entered its pivotal period, from Labor Day through the election. The two men took pictures at the hospital to advertise their mutual af
fection, but that was for political purposes. Once they were left to talk, there was, Ike recognized, “some lack of warmth” on Nixon’s side. What was worse, the man seemed alone, isolated. It struck Ike then, as it had before, that his vice president, for all his loyalty, was a man of few friends. Ike had men he could turn to, men whose friendship offered him respite and comfort that professional associates could not. He understood the value of those men. And yet here was Nixon in the hospital, all by himself.

  Nixon’s isolation baffled Eisenhower. Others understood the difference between the two men more clearly. Eisenhower, observed Ann Whitman, “is a man of integrity and sincere in every action, be it possibly wrong. He radiates this, everybody knows it, everybody trusts and loves him.” Whitman respected Nixon, too, but she grasped that he was no Eisenhower, and she summed it up with a remark as penetrating as any ever offered on the long-suffering Nixon. “The Vice President,” she wrote, “sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.”

  Nixon retreated into his hard, lonely shell, and rejected sound advice. Eisenhower, among others, advised him to refuse Kennedy’s debate challenge. It would, many people warned him, elevate the junior senator from Massachusetts to share a stage with the vice president. And it would undermine a fundamental premise of the Republican campaign to have them spar as equals. But Nixon liked to debate. He had won in college by dint of hard work, and he had held his own against Khrushchev. He was sure he could handle Kennedy. Conversely, when Len Hall, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, pleaded with Nixon to court the support of newspaper editorial boards, Nixon refused. “What for?” he asked. “They’re all against me anyway.”