Authors: Jim Newton
The stroll around the Eisenhower farm did Khrushchev good. He charmed Ike’s grandchildren, calling them by their Russian names (save Susan, whose name has no precise Russian equivalent) and inviting them to join their grandfather on his expected visit to the Soviet Union. The children jumped at the chance. Khrushchev presented each with a red star pin (on the way home that afternoon, Barbara threw them out the window of the car). Eisenhower showed off his herd of Black Angus cattle and impulsively offered one to Khrushchev as a gift. “This seemed to please him,” Eisenhower recalled, adding that once Khrushchev was removed from Camp David, he became a “benign and entertaining guest.” Once again at ease, the two leaders returned to Camp David, arriving at Aspen Lodge at 6:06 p.m., just in time for cocktails.
Meetings the following morning, Sunday, were delayed while Eisenhower provocatively left Camp David to attend church while his nominally atheistic counterpart waited for his return. Once the talks resumed, Khrushchev’s petulance returned. He belittled American technology. All the cars on the highways, he said, were evidence not of prosperity but of instability: “Your people do not seem to like the place where they live and always want to be on the move going someplace else.” Ike, bemused, did not reply.
Finally, however, the outlines of a deal were agreed upon. The Soviet Union would withdraw its deadlines for Western departure from West Berlin; Eisenhower would commit to attending a four-power summit and would agree that the West, too, regarded a divided Berlin as temporary, though how temporary he would not say. In short, Khrushchev agreed to back down from his threat, and Eisenhower agreed to give Khrushchev some of what the threat was intended to produce. That was hardly a resounding recalibration of international relations, but it represented a genuine attempt by both sides to defuse the crisis. Then, just when the deal seemed done, Khrushchev took a step back, refusing to allow a joint communiqué of the meeting to mention his concession on Berlin. Eisenhower exploded. “This ends the whole affair,” he steamed, “and I will go neither to a summit nor to Russia.”
Now it was no longer Khrushchev digging in his heels but Eisenhower, and the expectations of a deal to conclude the celebrated American tour stood at risk. Khrushchev, having dawdled and argued and fumed for days, suddenly became conciliatory. It was not, he insisted, that he was unwilling to withdraw his threat against Berlin in exchange for Eisenhower’s promises; rather, it was that he could not issue such a public statement without first briefing his colleagues in Moscow. Eisenhower agreed to wait forty-eight hours after the summit concluded to make the Berlin statement public; at that point, Khrushchev said, he would publicly acknowledge it.
Business complete, Khrushchev presented the group with a box of chocolates. As they were passed around, he politely complimented the quality of American chocolate. His ambassador interjected that Russian chocolate was superior, but Khrushchev, now in a generous mood, directed his interpreter not to translate the remark. Eisenhower and Khrushchev finished their candy and rode together back to Washington by car, accompanied only by a translator. They admired the scenery and reflected on the events of the past two weeks. Khrushchev left the country that night, and both men looked forward to a summit in the coming year, followed by Eisenhower’s reciprocal visit to Moscow in the fall of 1960.
Bumps in the trip notwithstanding, the pictures of a Soviet leader on Hollywood movie sets and in Iowa cornfields and Pittsburgh steel mills suggested an easing of relations that counterbalanced threats of retaliation, destruction, and conquest. On the American side, that sense of shifting emphasis—from conflict to conversation—gave rise to an imagined emergence of a “new” Eisenhower. This Eisenhower, the speculation ran, was unburdened of the twin restraints of Adams and Dulles and was freer, looser, more comfortable. That made for an appealing, though inaccurate, story line—the comeback of America’s great general. The notion that Eisenhower had been down and now was suddenly back up was captured by a question from a reporter in August, who remarked on the president’s busy schedule and asked “if you could explain to us whether this apparent new departure for you is due to perhaps a new concept in your own mind of the Presidency, or whether you are just feeling much better physically, or why all of this activity?” Eisenhower answered directly. “The only thing here,” he said, “is that I am trying to end the stalemate and to bring people together more ready to talk.”
Eisenhower rebounded politically to some degree in 1959, but not because of Dulles’s death or Adams’s resignation. The low point of his popularity came around the Republican defeats in 1958, when Ike was not on the ballot. Since then, the recession had abated, and the public’s affection for him had returned. By the summer of 1959, 60 percent of Americans approved of his presidential performance, compared with one in four who disapproved. That strengthened his political hand and freed him to be decisive, knowing that he had the support of the electorate. Reporters contrasted that sure-footedness with what seemed a stumbling White House a year earlier and deduced that Ike was finally free to be himself, now that his powerful deputies were gone.
Within the White House, those reports were considered a joke. Ann Whitman wrote: “The newspaper people suddenly find they have been wrong in riding the President, that he is not an ‘old and sick and feeble’ man, with no powers because of the fact that he cannot run again.” The Ike of 1959, after all, was only older than the Ike of 1958 and just as much a lame duck. Whitman acknowledged that Adams’s and Dulles’s departures did have consequences, just not the one that reporters believed. Herter and Persons, she observed, “are more inclined to remain in the background” than their predecessors, so the president commanded more of the foreground and seemed to outsiders more active when in reality he always had been.
Meanwhile, presidential jockeying irritated Eisenhower, and periodically the ambitions of those who would succeed him interfered with his work. In early August, Ike insulted Lyndon Johnson when he discussed potential Democratic nominees at a stag dinner for reporters and inadvertently neglected to mention Johnson as a possibility. A few days later, Johnson sulked through a session with the president and refused to speak other than to answer direct questions. Afterward, he showed White House aides some of the clips retelling Ike’s alleged slight. “I have had about all I can have of this,” Johnson complained. Eisenhower’s staff urged him to apologize. He refused.
Similarly, when Nixon’s secretary called frantically to complain that Nelson Rockefeller was quietly criticizing the Khrushchev invitation—and, presumably, seeking to take political advantage by distancing himself from the White House on that score—Whitman passed the message on to Eisenhower with a note indicating her surprise: “I said it just didn’t sound like Nelson at all.”
Nixon was no better. He confounded even those who liked him. In December, he dropped by science adviser George Kistiakowsky’s office, ostensibly to discuss the scientist’s views on nuclear weapons, but Kistiakowsky left the meeting frustrated that Nixon had held forth more than he had listened. He noted in his diary: “We were duly photographed together. This will clearly establish the fact that the Vice President is in close touch with the Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology.” The following week, the two had dinner in California, where Kistiakowsky continued to wrestle with his mixed feelings about the vice president, in part because Nixon suddenly began addressing him by his first name. “He leaves one with a strange impression,” Kistiakowsky again confided to his diary. “So far I haven’t heard him once make a statement which was wrong from my point of view, and most of the time he makes very sound observations, but I have a feeling that the motivation for these remarks is very strongly political and he openly admits so at times.”
In a White House where disdain for personal ambition was regarded as a virtue, Nixon would always be a puzzle.
Khrushchev left Washington in a blaze of optimism. The world’s two greatest antagonists—in the words of the Soviet press “a Russian worker, a revolutionary, a convinced Communist” and “a professional general, a pious man who believed in the capitalist system and who was entrusted by his country’s ruling class to guard the interests of that system”—had conferred in relative harmony and professed appreciation for each other. Khrushchev had toured America; Ike was scheduled to tour Russia; the world’s most powerful leaders had pledged to convene a grand summit to help insure the peace. Americans solidly voiced their approval of the trip.
Domestically, Americans were less confident. Steelworkers were on strike. The economy was just barely emerging from a sharp, short recession. There was an environmental health scare that fall and contentious debates with Congress, as Eisenhower used his remaining political leverage to press for government austerity, restrained defense spending, and balanced budgets even as congressional Democrats tried to accelerate spending, particularly on defense, in order to advance their political prospects.
And there was the matter of Cuba. Castro’s victory had been cautiously regarded by Washington in 1959. Eisenhower had little sympathy with the indisputably corrupt Batista: even an appeal from the dictator’s eleven-year-old son did not persuade Eisenhower to grant him asylum. Within a year, however, Ike had abandoned any hope of a working relationship with the Cuban leader, and Washington turned its sights from cooperation to destabilization. Castro was seizing private property as part of a national land reform; Cuban diplomats were seeking out allies among America’s enemies, including the nations of the Eastern bloc and Egypt’s Nasser, who hosted the emergent Che Guevara. “Castro and his advisers are moving very skillfully on the road toward the introduction of outright Communist Government in Cuba and are doing it in such a way as to not create by a rash act justification for intervention,” Kistiakowsky reported after attending the NSC meeting of January 14, 1960. Kistiakowsky would not even write about the plans in his diary, saying they were of such “extreme sensitivity” that he hesitated to put them on paper. The NSC notes offer a clue: it might be necessary, Eisenhower remarked, to blockade Cuba.
As the administration pondered its response, Eisenhower faced a related problem he was reluctant to admit. His director of Central Intelligence, in the estimation of several of Ike’s closest advisers, was woefully inept. As Castro strengthened his hold, Allen Dulles vacillated. Sometimes he urged caution and suggested that anti-Castro elements inside Cuba would topple the dictator; other times he portrayed Castro in almost demonic terms, joining with Nixon in late 1959 to compare the Cuban leader to Hitler. In July and August 1959, the United States began developing plans to “replace Castro,” only to back off in response to American interests on the island who said they thought they were making headway. That promise evaporated, but U.S. hopes were raised in October, and policy turned toward supporting elements in Cuba who opposed Castro and hoping they would bring him down without America’s efforts being exposed.
The confused policy was the outgrowth of poor intelligence, for which Ike’s advisers blamed Dulles. Kistiakowsky, the science adviser, complained that Dulles would misreport essential details of intelligence matters (he once got the range of Soviet missiles wrong) and “knows absolutely nothing about what goes on in CIA.” Bryce Harlow, a long-serving deputy to the president, considered Dulles ill informed and said he misunderstood the basic responsibilities of his job. John Eisenhower regarded the director of Central Intelligence as a “bum.”
Ike never admitted that he lacked confidence in Dulles, but others wondered why he kept the enigmatic spy chief. Perhaps it was residual loyalty to the memory of John Foster Dulles. Or confidence that Ike had other sources of intelligence—the NSC, Bedell Smith, Bobby Cutler. In mid-1960, John Eisenhower suggested that Dulles be dismissed. “Dad took my head off,” he said. “When you get that angry,” John added, “sometimes it’s because you know you’re wrong.”
Ike would not act against Dulles, even as the crisis in Cuba grew more alarming. Castro shut down newspapers, jailed opponents, accused the United States of practicing for an invasion. (The United States did not need any practice to invade Cuba, Ike said drily.) By March, officials in Washington were laying contingency plans in the event that Castro massacred the Americans still on the island. Invasion and military blockade of the island were among the options before the NSC. But Castro craftily deprived the United States of a pretext to invade. At Eisenhower’s direction, the emphasis in 1960 moved from the prospect of war to the promise of regime change. As they had before in Guatemala, Iran, and Indonesia, covert operatives took the lead.
The steel strike had preoccupied Eisenhower since July 15, 1959, when the United Steelworkers of America walked out after deadlocking with employers over wage hikes and factory work rules. Eisenhower initially stayed out of it. He had consistently refused to invoke the government’s authority to settle strikes and was justifiably proud of the peaceful labor relations that characterized most of his presidency (measured by workdays lost to strikes, his years as president included six of the seven best since World War II). When the steel strike was more than a month old, Eisenhower still resisted calls for him to intervene, insisting that “these people must solve their own problems.”
But the strike dragged on, and its effects spread across the economy: in addition to 500,000 steelworkers out of work, another 200,000 workers in related industries either lost jobs or saw their hours cut. The strike even had international repercussions, as it became a source of embarrassment during Khrushchev’s visit. In August, the administration grappled with possible solutions, anxious to avoid a settlement that would result in a quick price hike, adding to the country’s economic troubles and injuring the competitive advantage of American steel in foreign markets. By late September, Eisenhower’s frustration was beginning to show as he released a tartly worded statement announcing that he was “sick and tired of the apparent impasse” and warning that the “intolerable situation” would not “be allowed to continue.” Finally, on October 9, he invoked his authority under the Taft-Hartley Act and convened a board of inquiry with the responsibility of analyzing the strike and reporting back to the president. Ten days later, he sought an injunction to force workers to return to their jobs, a “sad day for the nation” but an action that Ike felt necessary to protect the economy from further damage. The injunction was challenged but upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court; steel production resumed while talks did as well. Finally, under the leadership of Nixon, the administration brokered a deal: workers received pay and benefits increases of forty-one cents an hour, and management withdrew its attempt to gain greater control of work rules. Eisenhower was not thrilled by the terms, but he was pleased that the end of the strike helped the economy to rebound from recession.