Authors: Jim Newton
Eisenhower was stunned and despondent: his most dependable allies, two nations whose destinies he had played a weighty role in shaping, double-crossed him. They had taken advantage of his preoccupations with Hungary and his reelection, then just a week away. Why the deception? As Mollet later acknowledged to Eisenhower, “If your government was not informed … [it was because of] our fear that if we had consulted it, it would have prevented us from acting.”
With the crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East now overlapping and the presidential campaign suspended, Eisenhower acceded to his aides, chiefly Sherman Adams, who insisted he needed to address the nation. Preparing such a speech occupied the tense corridors of the White House on October 31, which began with a frustrated Eisenhower searching for ways to halt the fighting in the Sinai. “Let’s call it a ‘Bomb for Peace,’ ” he exploded at an emergency session that morning. “It’s as simple as this: Let’s send one of Curt LeMay’s gang over the Middle East, carrying an atomic bomb. And let’s warn
everyone:
We’ll drop it—if they
all
don’t cut this nonsense out.” Aghast, aides let the remark pass in silence.
Having blown off that steam, Eisenhower sent Dulles off to prepare a text for the national address. Dulles did not deliver a draft until 3:15 p.m., and Eisenhower was dismayed. It was rambling and didactic, “with no force of argument,” as Emmet Hughes put it. Eisenhower and Hughes shelved the Dulles draft and pounded out a new one. Hughes called for Dulles, who came to the White House, so that he could read and edit while Hughes wrote and camera operators laid cables and put up lights. The address was scheduled for 7:00 p.m. Hughes handed the last edited page to Ike at 6:56. Eisenhower enjoyed the pressure. He grinned as he took the sheets from Hughes. “Boy, this is taking it right off the stove, isn’t it?”
The speech that night captured the strange duality of the week: the “dawning of a new day” in Hungary, or so it appeared; the “somber” situation in Egypt, which, while not the cause for “extravagant fear or hysteria,” nevertheless did demand “our most serious concern.”
The hope for Hungary and Eastern Europe reflected an astonishing set of reports from the region. That morning, Eisenhower had been startled to receive word that the Soviets appeared to be backing down from a full-scale war. In Poland, Khrushchev had allowed a new government to be seated, and the October 31 edition of
Pravda
featured a government proclamation that appeared to signal an abrupt change in the Soviet response to the unrest in Hungary. It announced a new set of relations between the Soviet Union and its satellites—“a great commonwealth of socialist nations”—emphasizing “the principles of complete equality, of respect for territorial integrity, state independence and sovereignty, and of noninterference in one another’s internal affairs.” As Ike addressed the American people that night, he imagined a reborn nation, wrenched from Soviet control by the force of popular will. “Today, it appears, a new Hungary is rising from this struggle,” Eisenhower stated, “a Hungary which we hope from our hearts will know full and free nationhood.”
A stupefied Allen Dulles tried to make sense of the news. The morning after Eisenhower’s speech, Dulles briefed the National Security Council on the
Pravda
announcement, which he described as “one of the most important statements to come out of the USSR in the last decade.” The force of public opinion, he said, had overpowered military might. “The impossible had happened,” Dulles announced. It was, he said, “a miracle.”
It was, however, a short-lived miracle. Four days later, Russian tanks and armor rolled through Budapest, this time without sympathy for the rebels. Artillery fire commenced at 4:15 a.m. on November 4. The Hungarians were denounced as fascist usurpers. Negotiators for the Hungarian government were arrested at the table where talks with the Soviets were under way. Nagy sought asylum at the Yugoslav embassy. By nightfall, the rebellion had been broken. Eisenhower, his own alliance badly strained by the events in Egypt, now watched in dismay as Soviet tanks imposed their forbidding authority on a brave and abandoned people, encouraged to rise up by his own rhetoric of liberation, now left to fight for themselves. Bodies lay strewn throughout Budapest. “I have noted with profound distress,” Eisenhower wrote to Bulganin, “the reports which have reached me today from Hungary.” His note almost pleaded: “I urge in the name of humanity and in the cause of peace that the Soviet Union take action to withdraw Soviet forces from Hungary immediately.” Bulganin accused Eisenhower of meddling in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, though Hungary was nominally an independent country. He baited the president, suggesting that the United States and the Soviet Union should jointly send forces to Egypt to repel British and French invaders there. The
New York Times
’s four-deck headline on Sunday, November 4, captured the complexity of the world that day: “Soviet Attacks Hungary, Seizes Nagy; U.S. Legation in Budapest Under Fire.” Beneath it, the other crisis: “U.N. Assembly Backs Call to Set Up Mideast Truce Force.” And beneath that: “Stevenson Holds President Lacks ‘Energy’ for Job.”
As that last headline suggests, the final weeks of the campaign brought out the worst in Stevenson, who sacrificed grace and honor as he grew increasingly desperate. He advanced his reckless proposal to unilaterally halt American nuclear testing, picking up the unfortunate support of Bulganin—hardly a favorite ally in the fall of 1956. Then, on the campaign’s final weekend, at precisely the moment when Eisenhower was most engaged in a crisis, Stevenson suggested that the president was feeble.
“The Chief Executive,” Stevenson told a Democratic audience in Chicago, “has never had the inclination and now lacks the energy for full-time work.” The president’s “age, his health and the fact that he cannot succeed himself make it inevitable that the dominant figure in the Republican Party under a second Eisenhower term would be Richard Nixon,” he added. It was easier to run against Nixon than Ike, but Stevenson’s message not only offended Eisenhower; it strained credulity, especially since it appeared the same day that Ike was dealing with the dual crises in Hungary and Suez. Ike did suffer through those weeks—his blood pressure was jumpy, and aides described him as drawn and tired. But he persisted and maintained a steady command. Ike was more disappointed than angry at Stevenson’s line of attack, writing off his opponent’s charges as “moves of desperation by a candidate who realizes he can’t win,” as the president confided to Ellis Slater.
Those chaotic weeks of October and November 1956 tested Ike as few others had. By the end of the presidential race, he was fed up, convinced that Stevenson had advanced the test-ban proposal for political gain without thought to national security. Stevenson and Kefauver, he complained to his old friend Al Gruenther, “are the sorriest and weakest pair that ever aspired to the highest offices in the land.” Against such opponents, Eisenhower would only be satisfied with a resounding victory. Anything less, and “I would rather not be elected.”
It was, Adams recalled, the worst period Eisenhower had ever experienced in the White House other than the days following his heart attack. The campaign was distracting, the world crises real and forbidding. To Gruenther, Ike admitted the strain. “Life,” he wrote, “gets more difficult by the minute.” The toll on Dulles was even greater. Drawn and ashen on the night of Ike’s address to the nation, he rallied to spearhead the U.S. diplomatic effort at the United Nations. Just after midnight on November 2, he awoke with severe abdominal pains; he checked into Walter Reed hospital, where doctors found cancer and performed a three-hour operation to remove part of his large intestine. Dulles did not return to work for more than two months.
Eisenhower was then, as in those crucible weeks after D-day, a strategic commander, determined and stalwart, patient and clearheaded. His friends were astounded at his calm. “Here were … the ten most frustrating days of his life, and yet there was no evidence at all of pressure, of indecision or of the frustration he mentioned,” Slater wrote in his diary. “Actually, he seemed completely composed.”
Eisenhower’s objective was the long-term preservation of democracy and American leadership; he calibrated his responses accordingly. To the amazement of the Third World, Eisenhower stood solidly behind Egypt. He demanded that his wayward allies end hostilities around Suez and pressed his case with the United Nations despite British and French fury. The administration’s armistice proposal, advanced by the still-ailing Dulles, was approved by a vote of 64–5—the no votes came from Britain, France, and Israel, as well as Australia and New Zealand. When the British and French—as well as Israel—still resisted leaving, Eisenhower applied economic pressure, denying his allies oil and refusing British access to capital during a run on the pound. Eventually, Eden succumbed; he left office in near-collapse, and Britain at last withdrew along with its allies in that misadventure.
“It really was a tough one,” Eisenhower said years later, “but I thought we had to stand on principle.”
In Hungary, Eisenhower’s options were fewer, but he resisted the temptation to escalate. Time, he was convinced, was on America’s side in the long struggle against the Soviets. He had sacrificed lives before in pursuit of grand objectives. These lives were brave Hungarians, misled into believing that Ike would come to their aid and resentful that he did not. Eisenhower allowed them to suffer for believing in his rhetoric of liberation, but his nation won through peace what it could not have secured through war. Hungary today is free in no small measure because Eisenhower allowed its revolution to fail. That is a bitter truth, but such were many victories of that perilous era.
For his part, Khrushchev showed the wear of those weeks as well. At a reception in November for Gomulka, Khrushchev was bellicose, rude, and inept. “We are Bolsheviks,” he boasted to Western diplomats attending the event. “About the capitalist states, it doesn’t depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don’t like us, don’t accept our invitations, and don’t invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” Khrushchev intended the remark to underscore his view of the eventual end of peaceful coexistence—that socialism was historically determined to outlive capitalism. But he had rattled his weaponry too menacingly to be taken lightly.
Dwight Eisenhower was reelected president on November 6, 1956. He won by a smashing margin, more than 9 million votes out of 61,607,208 cast, 457 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 73. Nearly 60 percent of Americans cast their votes for Ike. His only weakness ran along the band of the Deep South, where
Brown
rankled and Southerners were still voting against Lincoln. And yet this most triumphal political moment must also stand as one of this nation’s least climactic. It paled beneath the carefully constructed peace in Egypt, the smoldering cease-fire in Hungary. At the end of 1956, Eisenhower was president again, and the world remained, remarkably, at peace. His reelection was a point of pride; his peace a mark of statesmanship.
It had been a long year—marked by patience and care. None of it was easy. Wrote Ike with a sigh: “I really could use a good bridge game.”
PART THREE
THE SECOND TERM
13
The Press of Change, the Price of Inaction
T
he Eisenhower who took the oath of office for the second time had been forged by his own presidency. He spoke on January 21, 1957, flanked by symbols of his term: Chief Justice Earl Warren sat to his right, Vice President Richard Nixon to his left. Mamie joined them as well, dressed in a fur coat and hat. Ike was older, thinner than he had been in 1953, less exuberant, but more forceful. He had often been frustrated by the limitations of politics but also seasoned by them and masterful at divining a middle course through a divided nation.
Ike liked the speech in his hand that morning. He arrived at the White House early to announce that he had not changed a word overnight—“the most outstanding event of the past four years, from a secretary’s … viewpoint,” Ann Whitman joked.
With the nation watching on television, Eisenhower spoke of the sacrifices of the Hungarian people and the recklessness of his allies in Suez. The Soviets and the Chinese had tested his mettle, and he knew his enemy’s designs. “The divisive force,” he said, “is International Communism and the power that it controls.” He spoke from experience as he described the nature of that force: “The designs of that power, dark in purpose, are clear in practice. It strives to seal forever the gate of those it has enslaved. It strives to break the ties that unite the free. And it strives to capture—to exploit for its own greater power—all forces of change in the world, especially the needs of the hungry and the hopes of the oppressed.”
Eisenhower also drew upon Abilene and West Point, North Africa and Washington; he projected the accumulated experience of the world’s most respected leader, his style and vocabulary recognizably formal, with his distinctive appreciation for pairings—“May we pursue the right, without self-righteousness. May we know unity, without conformity”—the contrast of abundance and want, peace and threat. “We live in a land of plenty,” Ike reminded his nation, “but rarely has this earth known such peril.”
Eisenhower’s job was demanding, of course, but family troubles also nagged at him. The very morning of his inaugural, he confronted a flare-up in the life of one of his brothers. Visiting with family that week, Ike realized that his oldest sibling, Arthur, was suffering and receiving little comfort from his demanding and difficult wife. Before leaving the White House for his swearing in, Eisenhower made time to write to Big Ike to ask his help in the matter.
The senior member of the Eisenhower brethren, Ike reported to Edgar, was struggling with heart problems and was so debilitated that his White House escort feared he was near collapse and called a doctor, believing he needed to be hospitalized. But Arthur’s wife, Louise, refused and angrily implied that Arthur was somehow betraying her by entertaining offers that he be sent to Walter Reed (Louise, a member of the Unity School of Christianity, was wary of certain medical treatments). Compounding Arthur’s difficulties was the messy residue from a long-ago divorce; he had fallen behind on alimony payments and ended up settling up with his first wife later that year. Arthur’s difficulties worried his younger brother, who fussed over the letter to Edgar even as the hour of the inauguration approached. He confessed to Edgar that there was not much to be done for Arthur, merely that his brothers should look out for him and perhaps make it a point to drop in on him in Kansas City.