Authors: Jim Newton
Meanwhile, Dulles fenced with Molotov over the summit’s arrangements. They met in Vienna and outside San Francisco. They jousted over Molotov’s address to the United Nations and his planned appearance on American television; Dulles advised him to keep his speech short, Molotov agreed. They sounded each other out regarding progress over the release of the American airmen. They reached no agreement. Regarding the summit, now definitely set for Geneva, Molotov indicated that the Soviet leadership would want to discuss disarmament, European security, and economic cooperation. Dulles countered with disarmament and German reunification. The two agreed that Germany and European security were “interconnected,” and they chalked that up to progress. But when Dulles suggested that the United States might also raise “the status of Eastern European nations,” Molotov huffily replied that “the position of the Soviet Union had been made abundantly clear.”
The American agenda firmed up over those weeks, guided by Dulles and Eisenhower as they assembled a list of American ambitions and tallied where they enjoyed French or British support. As late as July 6, just nine days before Eisenhower was scheduled to depart, Dulles’s list of goals for the summit included no reference to the work of Rockefeller’s group.
Before leaving, Ike had to tend to a sad duty: on July 13, he accepted the resignation of Oveta Culp Hobby. Over her thirty months in the Eisenhower cabinet, Hobby had resumed the work habits that drove her to exhaustion during World War II. Ike tried to persuade her to ease up. He gently urged her to take a long weekend at Thanksgiving in 1953. “I would deem it a very great personal favor,” he implored after informing her that he himself was heading for Augusta. She declined. After meeting with her two months later, Eisenhower worried that Hobby was “nearing the end of her rope.”
The demands on Hobby had grown more intense, not less. Her husband, the former Texas governor, was fighting ill health, and she was frantically overseeing the completion of the Salk vaccine for polio and its promise to halt the terrifying disease. Once known as infantile paralysis, polio was a global scourge that first devastated the United States in 1916, when twenty-seven thousand people were paralyzed after being felled by the virus; six thousand died. Year after year, the virus spread and grew in alarming epidemics. In 1952, the year Eisenhower was elected, more than fifty-seven thousand Americans were infected. Parents kept children out of school, forbade them to swim in public pools, prohibited them from mingling in public places.
Jonas Salk’s breakthrough vaccine was subjected to an extraordinary field test during the early 1950s. On April 12, 1955, the tenth anniversary of the death of FDR—himself a victim of polio—scientists confirmed its efficacy. Americans flocked to get the vaccine. Hobby’s department, HEW, oversaw its distribution and early release, thrusting Hobby into the middle of an experiment of nearly unimaginable promise.
With the announcement of the vaccine’s successful field test, families pleaded for access to it. HEW selected six manufacturers that produced the vaccine under provisional rules and then were granted licenses. Distribution began immediately, but on April 26 six children who had been vaccinated were diagnosed with polio. Cutter Laboratories, which had produced those vaccines, recalled its product from the market, but by early May the number of infected children had grown to fifty-two. Although that must be considered in light of the five million who had been vaccinated over those weeks, the whipsawing of public hope and fear was agonizing to the administration and Hobby. HEW called for a halt to vaccinations on May 6 and intensively examined the vaccine and the labs producing it; the interruption was brief, and vaccines soon resumed.
But the stress of that episode, added to her worry for her husband, pushed Hobby to her limit. On July 13, she submitted her resignation, citing “personal reasons of a high order” and explaining that nothing less “could persuade me to leave your Administration.” Eisenhower knew this was coming, but he was saddened nonetheless. “All who knew you as a dedicated, inspired American leader will miss your voice and counsel in Government,” he wrote back the same day, in what he described as “one of the hardest letters I have ever had to write.” “None will miss you more,” he added, “than Mrs. Eisenhower and myself.” When Hobby’s resignation was made public, it was George Humphrey who most memorably captured the administration’s loss. “She is,” Humphrey said, “the best man in the Cabinet.”
It was at that sad instant that Ike packed his bags for Geneva. Before leaving, he spoke briefly to the American people. He was going, the president explained, because no effort in the service of peace could be wasted. “We want peace,” he said. “We cannot look at this whole situation without realizing, first, that pessimism never won any battles, whether in peace or in war.” He was going not to compromise with Communism but rather to exercise tolerance, “to try to see the other fellow’s viewpoint as well as we see our own.” He did not guarantee success but promised to try to change the tone of international relations. “I say to you, if we can change the spirit in which these conferences are conducted we will have taken the greatest step toward peace, toward future prosperity and tranquility that has ever been taken in the history of mankind.” Closing, Eisenhower asked his 165 million fellow Americans to pray for peace that coming Sabbath, to demonstrate to the world that America was a nation not of conquest but of sincerity. “That,” he said, “would be a mighty force.”
The Eisenhower family watched from the second floor of the White House, as did several close friends—Bill Robinson, Bob Woodruff, George Humphrey and his wife, Gordon Moore and his. Ike joined them immediately after his address and could see in their faces, some streaked with tears, the anticipation and hope that surrounded Geneva. Less than an hour later, Ike, Mamie, and John departed for Europe. They stopped in Iceland to refuel and were given an elaborate luncheon; although it was just 7:00 a.m. Washington time, the guests opened the affair with martinis. Mamie and John passed the flight playing Scrabble; Mamie won. As they neared their destination, she fretted about spending the nights at a high altitude, but John checked and discovered, to their surprise, that Geneva was only twelve hundred feet above sea level.
Their stay was a blur of administrative details and important conversation, set in the elegant, ordered streets and plazas of the pleasant Swiss city. As the summit drew near, Eisenhower met with his British and French counterparts for a two-hour discussion at the American headquarters, the “Geneva White House,” as it was known. The European delegations had made their reservations earlier and snapped up all available hotel space in Geneva; the Americans were extricated from an embarrassing homelessness by a Swiss-Scottish couple who agreed to rent their fifteen-room lakeside château to the delegation because “we could hardly refuse to offer it to the President.”
The conversation that Sunday morning featured Eisenhower at his most commanding, conversant on a wide range of details, relaxed but guarded, thoroughly in control. Ike urged the French prime minister, Edgar Faure, to edit his remarks to emphasize the importance of German unity, and the leaders reviewed such mundane details as the seating chart for the discussions. A French proposal to cut military expenditures and devote some portion of the savings to an international development fund received exhaustive attention, despite Eisenhower’s clear skepticism. Ike then countered with his thoughts on weapons inspection. The meeting segued into lunch, followed by smaller conversations between various leaders and, finally, a private conclave with an old friend, Sir James Gault. Ike and Gault talked about the war, golf, and fishing as Eisenhower permitted himself a moment of quiet before the rush of the summit; the two retired to dinner alone.
The following morning, quiet Swiss crowds welcomed the delegates as the sun glinted through haze across the blue waters of Lake Geneva. Inside the hall, the participants took their places beneath high ceilings that once sheltered the League of Nations. The Western nations had agreed that Eisenhower would chair the gathering, so he spoke first. His remarks revealed little but stressed both his skepticism of past conferences and his flickering hope that this might be different. “I trust that we are not here merely to catalogue our differences,” he said. “We are not here to repeat the same dreary exercises that have characterized most of our negotiations of the past ten years. We are here in response to the peaceful aspirations of mankind to start the kind of discussions which will inject a new spirit into our diplomacy; and to launch fresh negotiations under conditions of good augury.”
The American delegation regarded the opening remarks as a prelude to the day’s main event, a supper for the six-member Soviet delegation—Nikolai Bulganin, Nikita Khrushchev, Molotov, Georgy Zhukov, Andrei Gromyko, and an interpreter—at the Geneva White House. Eisenhower hosted and surrounded himself with his most trusted aides: Dulles, Hagerty, John Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur (Dulles’s aide, not the general), along with Ambassador Bohlen and a few others. Mamie joined the group for a drink, then, by prearrangement, slipped out. For the Americans, the evening’s chief fascination was to lay eyes on a mysterious enemy, one whose rhetoric and actions suggested obdurate hatred for American government and society. There was profound uncertainty about this enemy; two years earlier, Stalin was the sole recognized force in Soviet life. With his death, power had dissipated into shadowy corners. Who, Ike wondered, was his genuine counterpart that evening?
Deprived of any meaningful intelligence into the workings of the Soviet government, Eisenhower naturally imagined that Zhukov held power. Ike and Zhukov had met in the rubble of Berlin, and Zhukov in those years occupied a place of stature in Soviet society not unlike that which Eisenhower held in the West: both victors carried the gratitude of a triumphant people. But Ike had returned to a free nation, while Zhukov returned to Stalin’s yoke. Ike had risen to his nation’s presidency, while Zhukov for a time disappeared. Many in the West, including Ike, feared him dead.
When the Russians arrived, they were pleasant but notably careful and somewhat nervous. “They were jumpy as hell,” John Eisenhower remembered. They drank “very, very little indeed,” he added. Zhukov had only orange juice, Khrushchev was “most abstemious and proper.” The Soviets exuded, if not exactly warmth, at least manners: “Even Gromyko managed by dint of much effort to smile a couple of times.”
Sizing up the Soviet leaders, John Eisenhower demonstrated the acuity that made him such a valuable adviser to his father. Zhukov, he quickly surmised, “appears frightened and worried.” So depleted did he seem that John Eisenhower wondered if he had been tortured: “Whether he was the physical receiver of actual rubber hose or whether he was only put in fear is, of course, not known.” But Zhukov’s presence was mandatory, so much so that he was forced to miss his daughter’s wedding. He was the icebreaker with Ike and wasted no time reminding Eisenhower of their common history, “the bond of truthfulness between soldiers.” John Eisenhower summed up the rest of the Soviet delegation: Bulganin appeared genial but restrained, “being driven and used principally by someone else”; Molotov as opinionated but stifled; Gromyko, notwithstanding his attempts at a smile, as “sour and fanatic.” It was Khrushchev whom Eisenhower’s son spotted as different, “extroverted and on this occasion pleasant. To the casual observer he is unimpressive, but to underestimate this man would be the gravest of errors.”
The evening passed mainly with small talk. Toasts were exchanged, along with pleasantries and compliments to Mamie. The Soviets “left most decorously at approximately eleven o’clock,” and John Eisenhower eagerly sought out Goodpaster to compare notes on the evening. Shrewdly, the young major spied humanity in his country’s adversaries while recognizing the solid, imposing front that the Soviet leaders presented. “I think the fact of contact does serve to remind each side that the other side has problems,” he added. And of his father, John noted: “Unquestionably Dad dominates a meeting between them.”
Appraising the Soviets was an essential aspect of the summit, but the underlying purpose was to intimidate or cajole them into easing world tensions. Eisenhower believed that the best chance lay in the unveiling of a bold proposal—one sufficiently imaginative to capture the world’s interest and sufficiently inoffensive to coax Soviet agreement or, at a minimum, to expose Soviet intransigence. Rockefeller’s secret group had been at work on such a stroke for weeks. Now, as the summit participants parried ideas, the young aide rushed to Geneva, arriving on July 20.
Ike met that morning over breakfast with Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden and lunched with Zhukov. Remembering that the conference had forced Zhukov to miss his daughter’s wedding, Ike and Mamie presented him with a pen set and a portable radio, to be given to his daughter in honor of her marriage. “Zhukov was visibly and I am sure genuinely moved,” recalled John, who attended as well. As for the proposal he was now prepared to present to the summit, Ike still said nothing.
The moment arrived at the afternoon session on July 21. Ike was at ease, relaxed from hitting golf balls that morning with John. He was well briefed by Goodpaster and Radford, among others. The Soviet representatives cycled through their proposal on disarmament, a suggestion that all nations renounce the use of nuclear weapons, knowing that the United States would never agree, both because Americans were convinced the Soviets would break any such agreement at will and, more important, because nuclear deterrence was the cornerstone of Eisenhower’s New Look defense strategy. To renounce that threat was to concede Cold War defeat. The Americans listened patiently but without enthusiasm. Finally, it was Eisenhower’s turn.
Ike spoke not from a prepared speech but from notes. He ticked off general topics for a few minutes, then paused. “Gentlemen,” he began again, “since I have been working on this memorandum to present to this Conference, I have been searching my heart and mind for something that I could say here that could convince everyone of the great sincerity of the United States in approaching this problem of disarmament.”