by Jim Newton
Eisenhower was gracious—and heartbroken. He wrote consolingly to Dick and Pat Nixon: “I want to express to you both the fervent hope that the two of you will not be too greatly disappointed by yesterday’s election returns. I know that whatever disappointment you do feel will not be for yourselves but for our country and for the jeopardy in which our great hopes and aims for the future have been placed.” But he took Nixon’s defeat personally, called it the worst of his life. To his brother Milton, Ike confided that he felt the work of the past eight years had gone “down the drain.” And to George Murphy, an acquaintance who also had campaigned hard for Nixon, Ike was blunter still. He felt “like I had been hit in the solar plexus with a ball bat.”
Eisenhower rebounded, but Nixon fell into a deep gloom. He sulked through November and December while the country thrilled to its president-elect, his stylish wife, and their adorable children. Near the end of the year, Ike summoned Nixon to discuss the future of the party and Eisenhower’s role in it. The president imagined writing articles, quietly convening Republican leaders, perhaps for annual gatherings at Gettysburg, and fending off what he presumed would be Kennedy’s attempt to co-opt the political center that he had so long defended. The conversation was constructive until the two began to reflect on the campaign. Nixon was bitter. He complained that Lodge had hurt the ticket with his promise to put a black man in the cabinet, a jolting idea that “just killed us in the South.” Eisenhower agreed. The Lodge remark, he believed, cost the Republican ticket South Carolina and Texas. Eisenhower complained that the administration had championed civil rights but received too little credit from blacks. Negroes, Ike growled, “just do not give a damn.”
Nixon was not ready to concede that blacks had ignored him completely. He pointed out that he had tallied slightly more votes from blacks in 1960 than Ike had in 1952. But the black vote, Nixon said acidly, was a “bought vote, and it wasn’t bought by civil rights.” The Kentucky senator Thruston Morton, who headed the Republican National Committee and participated in the meeting as well, echoed that conclusion. Blacks had failed to appreciate the Republican Party’s work on racial equality, the senator said. As far as he was concerned, “the hell with them.”
Up to that point in his career, Nixon had a fairly commendable record on civil rights and had paid some price for it among conservatives. When he resumed his quest for the presidency in 1968, he would pursue it through the so-called southern strategy. The goal was to break the Democratic Party’s hold on the South by allying the Republican Party with the forces of racism. It would prove more effective than Nixon’s more accommodating approach in 1960. The southern strategy might well be said to have been born that December day in Eisenhower’s White House.
Nixon’s funk persisted into the new year. When NBC began shooting a tribute to Eisenhower to air on the last day of his presidency, the network invited Nixon to appear. He refused. Len Hall had to remind Nixon that his absence would surely be noted. Glumly, Nixon relented. He would, Nixon agreed, do anything he was asked.
As the days counted down on Eisenhower’s presidency, Ike turned to the most vexing foreign policy problem left on his agenda. Over the course of 1960, Castro had gone from meddlesome to threatening as he sought and received substantial aid from the Eastern bloc and encouraged other Latin American movements to challenge their governments. The CIA estimated that the Soviets had supplied ten thousand to twelve thousand tons of equipment to Castro’s regime, including six helicopters, many machine guns, and possibly tanks. The CIA further estimated that Castro commanded 32,000 ground forces and a militia said to number 200,000.
None of that made Castro a threat to invade the United States, but it gave him a formidable fighting force and overt Soviet support. Though the United States had long armed Turkey, similarly close to the Soviet Union, neither the American people nor their president was sanguine about a Communist foothold in the Americas. Eisenhower concluded that Castro was determined to place his country on a course inimically at odds with America’s best interests, and he vowed to thwart it. As Ike put it to Harold Macmillan, “We shall seek and use every possible opportunity short of outright intervention which might bring pressure to bear on Castro.”
In late November, Ike convened top members of his diplomatic and covert action staffs in his office. The goal was to bring together the various anti-Castro efforts and to unite them under a single command. State assumed the lead and proposed to contact President Frondizi of Argentina, whom Nixon had visited the previous year, in order to enlist his support in containing Castro. Meanwhile, the first step of the covert operation was authorized. Leaders of the State Department and CIA merged their “overt and covert actions” into a combined effort “completely geared into each other.” Just as with Guatemala in 1954, the United States was prepared to organize the effort and, when the time came, presumably would support it.
Preparations unfolded quickly. Taking advantage of a friendly government in Guatemala, the Cuban fighting force trained there, armed by the United States. But even in the jungles of Guatemala, it is not easy to hide hundreds of armed men, feverishly preparing to invade their homeland—in this case, joined by some three hundred Guatemalans as well. In January, the New York Times reported that Cuban forces were training, and Eisenhower again urgently gathered his Cuba group to discuss how to respond. The notes of that meeting leave no doubt about what Ike intended: “He recognized that some day we will want the force to move into Cuba.” If anything, Eisenhower was impatient, suggesting that “perhaps the real point is that we had best get started with our operation.”
Allen Dulles, who had waffled throughout Castro’s accumulation of power, now urged restraint. The operation was not ready, he insisted, and would not be for at least several months. Ike left office without ever approving an invasion.
After so many years of contemplating retirement, Eisenhower loosened his grip on power reluctantly. As a result, his final weeks were nostalgic and slightly sad. Earlier in the year, Ann Whitman had caught him in a White House hallway, musing about where his portrait might someday hang, imagining himself no longer as a president but rather as a relic. Hagerty believed that his boss was relieved to shed the burdens of his office but also regretful not to have accomplished more and worried about becoming bored.
Mamie tried to cheer up her husband. She threw herself into their final White House Christmas, bringing in a towering tree, lavish boughs, decorations, crèches. She marshaled her grandchildren to put on a Nativity play, rehearsing them relentlessly. Each child played multiple roles, switching in and out of costumes painstakingly fashioned by the First Lady herself. “The festivities,” her granddaughter recalled, “were a high point for Mamie. In her last year in the White House, the spirit of Christmas had truly been captured.”
Ike warmed to the holidays. He entertained the grandchildren of friends and aides on December 23, attended Christmas pageants and parties, and kept a light schedule. And as he prepared to shed the sense of duty that had guided him since he was a cadet, Eisenhower began to glimpse a new life ahead. He wrote to friends in good humor and with a special request: the restoration of informality. “During my entire life, until I came back from World War II as something of a VIP, I was known by my contemporaries as ‘Ike,’ ” he reminded them. “Whether or not the deep friendships I enjoy have had their beginnings in the ante or post-war period, I now demand, as my right, that you, starting January 21, 1961, address me by that nickname. No longer do I propose to be excluded from the privileges that other friends enjoy.”
19
Farewell
President Eisenhower looked directly into the television camera and thanked the networks for giving him time to speak to the American people. Back straight, owlish glasses fixed firmly across his broad face, notes before him because he still did not quite trust the teleprompters, Eisenhower began his “message of leave-taking and farewell.”
He had considered this moment for many months. Indeed, his whole adult li
fe had built toward it. Ike had served his nation since 1911, when he left his mother crying in Abilene as he departed for West Point and commenced a military career sprung from the unlikely bosom of the River Brethren. In the decades since, he had borne arms for his nation and secured a victory for American liberty unlike any other in history. As president, he had presided over a perilous peace, eight years of continuous threat, of nuclear arsenals and legions of armed men, of rising aspirations and mounting fears, of unrelenting ideological contest, of galloping technological progress and yawing uncertainty about where that progress would lead.
In the years since the end of the Korean War, annihilation still loomed, yet precisely one American died in combat, killed by a sniper in Lebanon. No American president of modern times had brought to the office greater skill as a soldier, yet none had done more to preserve the peace. Eisenhower, America’s warrior-president, had much upon which to reflect, and he looked forward to sharing some final thoughts with his countrymen.
As far back as 1959, with the midterm elections behind him and the end of his presidency within sight, Eisenhower had begun to think about his farewell. “I want to have something to say when I leave here,” Ike told his lead speechwriter, Malcolm Moos, adding that he was not interested in making a speech that was merely headline grabbing, but rather hoped to use the occasion of his farewell to say something meaningful. He imagined giving a ten-minute “farewell address” to the Congress and the American people.
Moos began to collect thoughts from stray sources—news clippings, books, suggestions. One of those suggestions came to him in 1960 and recommended that he and Ike consider the example of George Washington, another great soldier and the American leader whom Eisenhower’s career most resembled. Moos was intrigued.
With Washington’s second term drawing to a close, his heirs and rivals were fixated on the question of whether he would seek the presidency a third time. Exhausted by his long service, infuriated by the intrigues of politics and the stresses of nation building, Washington resolved to retire and to leave the nation with his reflections. Initially, he was inclined to deliver a defensive statement, but he was saved by a formidable speechwriter of his own, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton at first tried to edit Washington’s draft but ultimately tossed it out and started over. Together, they produced a message that would echo across the ages and find new expression in the statement Eisenhower now set out to draft.
In Washington’s Farewell Address—inaptly named, as it was never delivered orally but rather distributed as a letter to American newspapers—the former general warned of the dangers of party and imagined a day when sectionalism would yield to a unified nation. He briefly decried the threat of large standing armies, though he did not reject a permanent military force altogether. Ever balanced, ever conscious of his position as a transcendent figure in early American life, Washington (with Hamilton) wrote that wise American leaders “will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
Washington’s address is often remembered for its perceptive foreign policy prescriptions, though the larger part of his farewell was devoted to the exhortation to unify the nation across its regional and party differences, a passage so prescient it no longer seems visionary. Washington’s proposal for his nation’s foreign policy, by contrast, has been cited time and again as the country repeatedly confronted the issues of entanglement in European affairs:
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
At first interpretation, Washington’s observations seem diametrically opposed to Eisenhower’s. Washington left office embroiled in controversy over the Jay Treaty, which posed fundamental questions about the power of the central government and its authority to make binding deals with foreign powers. Washington believed in the Jay Treaty but warned of ill-considered entanglement. Eisenhower, by contrast, saw entanglement as a virtue of modern diplomacy. As NATO commander and president, he had painstakingly woven a web of alliances as a common defense against the encroachment of Communism. But Washington’s warning was not a command toward isolationism but rather an argument for limited, rational engagement in order to advance America’s standing and protect it from harm. With that, Eisenhower had no quarrel. His presidency was rooted in Washington’s example: so, too, would be his farewell.
When it came time to begin drafting his Farewell Address in the fall of 1960, Ike was still hurt by the embarrassment of the failed summit and despondent over John Kennedy’s attack on his record as well as Richard Nixon’s failure to defend it. It was a wounded Eisenhower who prepared to leave, just as it had been a troubled Washington who laid down the burden of leadership.
Eisenhower’s speechwriters reflected on the themes of his presidency and the world he had helped to fashion. For eight years, he had steadfastly fended off those to his left who would risk the nation’s private economy by ignoring deficits and spending government money at will, and those to his right who would do the same by cutting taxes and demanding unsustainable defense expenditures. He held off generals eager to wage war against China or the Soviet Union and rejected those who imagined that Khrushchev, Mao, and Castro were sincere in their embrace of a durable international peace. He believed he represented a center point between those who demanded immediate racial equality and those determined to sustain discrimination. His middle way, as much a part of his character as of his politics, had sustained Ike in his confrontation with McCarthy, in his restrained budgets, and in his defense programs. He was as committed to balance at the end of his presidency as he was at the beginning.
But there was more to say than merely to rehash old arguments, no matter how salient. Castro had seized power in Cuba, China and the Soviet Union eyed Laos, the Congo was riotous, American politics was restless. Troubled by those threats to order, Eisenhower’s aides contemplated a paean to “constructive change,” a reminder that progress is generally the result of long and sustained work, not sharp breaks or impulsive leaps. Those thoughts captured Eisenhower’s deep sense of order and control.
Those were natural topics for Eisenhower, familiar themes of his presidency, and expressions of his character. So too was another gnawing concern, made fresh by recent events. From the earliest weeks of his presidency, his 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Ike had warned of the grave costs of maintaining a permanent war footing. In that first speech, he enumerated the real sacrifices extracted not merely by war but even by the threat of it. One bomber, he warned in 1953, represented the forfeit of “a modern brick school in more than 30 cities” or two electric power plants or two “fine, fully equipped hospitals” or fifty miles of concrete pavement. In that address, Ike had described the future as a choice: Vast expenditures on military might were “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Or the world could opt for war and, with it, the end of civilization in any recognizable form.
Eisenhower could take deep satisfaction in having preserved that civilization, often against great odds and pressures, but his anxiety about a militarized nation had only deepened. He witnessed the national hysteria over Sputnik and the quick response of the defense industry to capitalize on it; 1960, one missile maker happily pronounced, was the “best year we’ve had in the missile business.” And he had angrily s
een the American people accept Kennedy’s false charge that the Soviets had opened up a “missile gap.”
Consequently, Eisenhower’s advisers suggested a second theme for his farewell speech. The emergence of a “permanent arms industry” could not be helped. In a nuclear era, the United States could no longer take the time to convert peacetime industries into war production once hostilities had begun. War between the United States and the Soviet Union, should it come, would be sharp and instant, overwhelmingly devastating, and over before the makers of cars or steel or appliances could convert their factories to the production of guns and tanks and other matériel. Instead, missiles needed to be at the ready, and the companies that produced them understood that their livelihoods depended on a threat of war that was both constant and intense. Moreover, those companies depended on relationships with the government in order to secure contracts and business; fortunately for them, retiring military officers brought such knowledge and connections as they left their services for work in this “military-industrial complex.” This new phenomenon, an alliance between the military and its suppliers, created new perils. “Billions of dollars in purchasing power, and the livelihood of millions of people, are directly involved.”
