Authors: Jim Newton
Those competing and reinforcing impulses expressed themselves in three speeches during his first year in office. His inaugural address launched his presidency, of course, and established both its tone and its aspiration. The third address was delivered in December before the United Nations. And in between, soon after Stalin’s death, Ike presented the American people with a stirring examination of the arms race and its implications.
The occasion was an April address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It was one of his first major speeches as president, and he prepared diligently. Two weeks after Stalin’s death, he asked the speechwriter Emmet Hughes what the United States could constructively propose to reduce the danger of war. Hughes recalled that Eisenhower spoke “with the air of a man whose thoughts, after a permissive spell of meandering, were fast veering toward a conclusion.” Pacing around his office, Ike abruptly turned to face Hughes: “Here is what I would like to say. The jet plane that roars over your head costs three-quarters of a million dollars. That is more money than a man earning ten thousand dollars a year is going to make in his lifetime. What world can afford this sort of thing for long?” Eisenhower continued that afternoon, sketching the vision and language of an address that would establish one of the moral underpinnings of his years in office—the commitment to peace through negotiation, his vision of engaging the Soviets in the common quest for coexistence while simultaneously seeking competitive advantage and ultimate victory.
Over the next few days, Eisenhower and Hughes circulated their draft among Ike’s leading advisers and America’s most important allies. Dulles was skeptical, worried about any proposed engagement with the Soviets; Churchill applauded the “grave and formidable” tone of the address but expressed a concern precisely opposite that of the secretary of state: he spied new hope for collaboration with the Soviet leadership and was nervous that the speech might be considered a challenge at a time when conciliation was more desirable. Milton Eisenhower weighed in, too: he proposed striking the language that might threaten the Soviet leadership and focusing instead on America’s intentions. Grueling debates tested Hughes’s patience and eventually Ike’s as well. Eisenhower gruffly dismissed Dulles’s objections: “I know how he feels, but sometimes Foster is just too worried about being accused of sounding like Truman and Acheson.” He directed Hughes to complete the draft as they envisioned it.
Then, just before he was scheduled to deliver the speech, Ike fell ill. Interrupting a golf vacation in Augusta, Georgia, the president arrived at the White House at 11:00 a.m. and then departed for the Statler Hotel just after noon. He was suddenly overcome by abdominal pains—a resurgence of the ailment that had long haunted him—and as he approached the lectern, he was shaking and perspiring, beads of sweat visible on his forehead. “Those sitting close to him could see … that something was wrong,” one journalist wrote later.
Gamely, Eisenhower began: “Today the hope of free men remains stubborn and brave, but it is sternly disciplined by experience. It shuns not only all crude counsel of despair but also the self-deceit of easy illusion.” Those dualities—hope disciplined by experience, despair checked by illusion—framed the core of the address. But when it came to the Soviets, Eisenhower was singularly direct. In 1945, when Western Allies and Soviet troops met on the plains of Europe, hope had flickered. Now it was nearly extinguished. “This,” he noted, “has been the way of life forged by eight years of fear and force.” Continued passage along this road, “this dread road,” led to awful alternatives, to atomic war or to “a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples.”
Eisenhower then moved to the imagery that thankfully survived the tinkering of others:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
There was the cost of the Cold War, in all its draining and dispiriting reality. And that was, as Ike emphasized, the best to be hoped for: “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Eisenhower proposed an alternative. He urged the Soviets to make a gesture of “sincere intent,” to sign a treaty preserving the future of Austria, say, or to release prisoners still in its custody from World War II, or to conclude a lasting armistice in Korea and cease hostilities in Indochina and Malaysia. Concessions in those areas would allow the United States to negotiate limits on military forces and production of atomic weapons enforced by international inspections. Eisenhower invited the Soviet leadership to join America in a “new kind of war … [a] total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need.” He was prepared to meet the Soviets in negotiation, but the Soviet leadership needed to demonstrate its sincerity as well. “I know of only one question upon which progress waits,” Eisenhower said near the end of his speech. “It is this: What is the Soviet Union ready to do?”
Ike spoke for twenty-seven minutes, interrupted five times by applause when he expressed Western resolve or condemnation over specific Soviet provocations. He finished still in pain. It was, the journalist Marquis Childs recalled, “a remarkable effort of will.”
In the years after Eisenhower concluded his presidency, generations of Americans would ponder the meaning of his Farewell Address, with its solemn warning of the “military-industrial complex.” Some professed surprise that a great general would sound such alarm in the final days of his presidency. But that theme was there throughout, discernible to anyone who wished to listen.
Sadly, the Soviet leadership was among those who failed to fully grasp the import of Eisenhower’s speech that April. In answer to his question of what they were prepared to do, the honest reply was very little.
Pravda
dismissed his proposals as so general that they “cannot in the least contribute to the urgent task of reducing armaments.” Eisenhower had offered a chance for peace; the Soviets elected not to grasp it. He would try again.
If Eisenhower’s April address marked the public opening of the strategy he would develop through Project Solarium and the National Security Council during 1953, the culminating speech came near the year’s close and reflected even greater deliberation and nuance. Hatched in the spring as Operation Candor, Eisenhower’s address grew out of varied impulses: a desire to be candid, up to a point, with the American people about the threat of nuclear war and his desire to engage the Soviet Union in serious negotiations to avoid it. Failing that, he wished to demonstrate American magnanimity. Eisenhower’s interest in those contradictory themes was sparked by Robert Oppenheimer, who in the late months of the Truman administration chaired a special panel on disarmament. The Oppenheimer panel’s classified report, delivered to Eisenhower in February 1953, observed that nuclear weapons had become a menace in and of themselves. As a result, America’s two chief foreign policy objectives—the containment of Soviet Communism and the “defense of the free world”—now were joined by a third: avoidance of nuclear war. To respond to that evolving threat to civilization, the panel’s first recommendation was to adopt a new policy of openness, of disclosing to the American people the risks and costs of deterring Soviet adventurism by atomic threat. Only with such candor, Oppenheimer and his colleagues argued, could the public comprehend the dangers ahead and the sacrifices necessary to avoid them. It was essential, the panel concluded, to encourage “wider public discussion based upon wider understanding of the meaning of a nuclear holocaust.”
Eisenhower was impressed, but he adopted the recommendations selectively. He grasped the wisdom of alerting the American people in straightforward terms to the threat of nuclear war and understood that cultivating a measure of alarm—somewhere short of panic—would encourage support for spending on weapons he viewed as essential to maintaining peace. Eisenhower, however, never seriously entertained the report’s more dramatic recommendations: that the United States should, for instance, make public “the rate and impact of atomic production.” His strategy implicitly rejected the group’s hope for reduced reliance on nuclear weapons. But he directed C. D. Jackson to work on a speech that would alert Americans to the danger and propose new, peaceful applications of nuclear technology.
From the start, the speech and the ideas it presented encountered stiff opposition within the administration. Dulles was wary, and Charlie Wilson warned that the fear of war would undermine the deterrent value of U.S. nuclear forces. As with previous doubters, Ike shrugged and pushed the project forward.
Jackson labored over scores of drafts. Officials weighed in, Ike mulled new ideas. By September, a clearly tiring Jackson confided to his diary that he believed the speech was “slowly dying from a severe attack of Committeeitis.” Admiral Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s nemesis, became increasingly engaged in the project while falsely denying to Jackson that he and Oppenheimer were at odds. Strauss and Jackson labored over drafts in a series of breakfast meetings—Strauss privately regarded the entire effort as “foolish” even as Jackson viewed him as an ally—and whimsically rechristened the project from Operation Candor to Operation Wheaties. Candor, always a hedged ambition of the address, slipped now even from its code name.
Nevertheless, Jackson persisted, with Ike’s encouragement. And despite several close calls, including a November 17 meeting at which John Foster Dulles vigorously denounced the entire undertaking, Wheaties took shape, with the speech now aimed at delivery before the United Nations, where Eisenhower was scheduled to speak in early December. After a tumultuous Thanksgiving weekend punctuated by an obnoxious McCarthy speech—the senator accused the Eisenhower administration of protecting John Paton Davies, a well-regarded American diplomat and “China Hand” whom McCarthy falsely alleged was a Communist—the senator now accused his government of permitting “twenty-one years of treason.” The internal debate crested on November 30, when skeptics mounted their last furious objections. Charlie Wilson suggested simply doing nothing and trusting that rising levels of Soviet education would eventually doom that country’s leadership (“an educated youth would overthrow the Soviets,” he said), John Foster Dulles struck a neutral pose, and others offered substitute ideas. As the session concluded, Eisenhower promised to reread the address that night. Ike admired and appreciated his deputies, but he refused to let their doubts deter him. When he returned the following morning, it was with an edited, improved draft and a renewed commitment to deliver it.
There were more setbacks in the coming days. Eisenhower traveled to Bermuda during the first week of December to meet with Churchill and the French prime minister, Joseph Laniel, for a largely ceremonial meeting, and Churchill took it upon himself to make suggestions. The drafting came down to the final moments before Eisenhower’s scheduled appearance at the UN. In fact, as Ike and his top aides flew from Bermuda to New York, Jackson rushed last-minute suggestions to Eisenhower and Dulles, who inserted the editorial changes and handed them back to Jackson. Ann Whitman typed furiously, and other aides threw pages on a mimeograph machine. Jackson’s diary captures the intensity of the final push: “President changed clothes, re-read Jumbo copy, underscored for emphasis, and as wheels touched La Guardia, everything done. But not one minute before.”
Eisenhower was whisked to the UN General Assembly. Although the speech was far from what Oppenheimer and his colleagues initially imagined, it contained traces of the original commitment to candor. Eisenhower recited the history of atomic testing and development—forty-two atomic tests since the end of World War II and the development of vastly more powerful and versatile weapons with staggering destructive capacity: “A single air group, whether afloat or land-based, can now deliver to any reachable target a destructive cargo exceeding in power all the bombs that fell on Britain in all of World War II.” The secret of such weapons—“the dread secret,” as Eisenhower called it—was possessed by the United States, Britain, Canada, and the Soviet Union, meaning that the American monopoly on atomic weaponry was long over. Those bracing acknowledgments were followed by one additional fact “at least dimly” recognized by the nations of the free world: there was no safety from such weapons. “Even against the most powerful defense, an aggressor in possession of the effective minimum number of atomic bombs for a surprise attack could probably place a sufficient number of his bombs on the chosen targets to cause hideous damage.”
The sober passages were delivered in Ike’s familiar tone, inflected with his occasionally amusing diction: he palpably worked to pronounce the name of the secretary-general, “Hammarskjöld,” fairly spat out his denunciation of “pious platitudes,” growled over the phrase “hideous damage.” Presenting those warnings candidly to the world fulfilled part of his mission. But Eisenhower was determined to do more than warn of catastrophe. “I do not wish to rest either upon the reiteration of past proposals or the restatement of past deeds,” he said. “The gravity of the time is such that every new avenue of peace, no matter how dimly discernible, should be explored.” And so Eisenhower presented his proposal. The nuclear nations, he suggested, should each make contributions of uranium and fissionable material to a UN agency, which would then apply that material to problems of “agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities.” The argument for such a sharing of material was twofold: it would apply the fruits of development to peaceful purposes, and it would shrink the global supply of fissionable material available for destruction. It was a genuinely new idea in the still-nascent politics of the Cold War, through which Eisenhower was improvising a fragile peace. Moreover, it reflected Ike’s delicate triangulation of the conflict’s forces: American defense, Soviet containment, and the threat of nuclear war.