Authors: Jim Newton
The weeks after Khrushchev’s visit seemed to create an emotional letdown in the White House. Ike caught a cold in October. He tried to shake it by getting out of town and enjoying a few days of golf at Augusta, but he was grouchy and blue and then felled with sad news: on October 16, after a long illness, General George Marshall died.
Marshall’s death was a mournful occasion for the nation. His legacy included the great Allied victory, and his name was indelibly attached to Europe’s recovery. Marshall’s service had crossed from military to diplomatic, as he served as chief of staff of the Army, secretary of state, and secretary of defense. More than any man, he helped ready America for war after Pearl Harbor; and more than almost any other, he constructively imagined the recovery afterward. He was a general and the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize. He had been subjected to withering and unjustified criticism from Senator McCarthy and his allies, and Eisenhower was aware that he had done too little to defend his old boss during the 1952 campaign.
Marshall was a great man, and he also was an uncommonly good one. He had provided Eisenhower with a steadfast example, a counterpoint to the theatrics of MacArthur, and a study in self-effacement. It was Marshall who, upon being disappointed not to receive the command of the European invasion, nevertheless secured FDR’s handwritten order and saw that Eisenhower received it as a memento. For Eisenhower, Marshall’s death summoned a welter of deep emotion. Publicly, he ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff and released an eloquent encomium to his mentor: “His courage, fortitude and vision, his selflessness and stern standards of conduct and character were an inspiration, not only within the Army, but throughout the Nation and among our allies. For his unswerving devotion to the safeguarding of the security and freedom of our Nation, for his wise counsel and action and driving determination in times of grave danger, we are lastingly in his debt.” To Marshall’s widow, Ike was more personally reflective. “I cannot possibly describe to you the sense of loss I feel in the knowledge that George has passed to the Great Beyond,” wrote the president. “I looked to him for guidance, direction and counsel ever since I first had the great privilege of meeting him late in 1941.”
In just a year, Eisenhower had lost his oldest brother, his closest aide, and his most important mentor; little wonder that Augusta failed to cheer him up. But Ike was a resilient man, too responsible to be self-indulgent. He regained his equilibrium. A physical revealed him to be in sound health, and he managed to put the tragedies of recent months behind him.
The presidency permitted nothing less. The next crisis arrived just before Thanksgiving and arose from an unlikely source: the nation’s cranberry industry. As long as there have been cranberries grown by humans, there have been farmers who complained of weeds. The berries grow in bogs, thick pools of water unusually susceptible to clogging and choking by invasive plants. In the mid-1950s, growers seemed to have found an answer: the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the use of aminotriazole (ATZ) as an herbicide. Recognizing that ATZ posed some danger if ingested by humans, the Food and Drug Administration resisted granting blanket approval, and the Agriculture Department advised farmers that its use was restricted to clearing bogs at the end of the growing season, reasoning that it could then kill weeds but be rinsed clear by the time a new crop was planted. For whatever reason—growers who ignored the restrictions or the resilient presence of ATZ on the ground—the government’s attempts to keep ATZ out of the food supply failed. On November 9, Arthur Flemming, secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, announced that ATZ, which caused cancer in rats, had been detected in the nation’s cranberries. The government, he added, was recommending suspension of the sale of cranberries grown in Washington and Oregon “until the cranberry industry has submitted a workable plan to separate the contaminated berries from those that are not contaminated.”
It was,
Life
magazine reported, “a deed as awful as denouncing motherhood on the eve of Mother’s Day.” Growers charged Flemming with being “ill informed, ill advised and irresponsible.” Ezra Benson, Eisenhower’s long-serving secretary of agriculture, sided with farmers against his fellow cabinet member. Nixon, campaigning in Wisconsin, another leading cranberry state, publicly ate four helpings of cranberry sauce, “just like the kind mother used to make.” Not to be outdone, John Kennedy drank a glass of cranberry juice.
The public was not so confident. Sales of cranberry sauce plummeted; Ike himself quietly removed it from the White House menu that Thanksgiving. And though a method of testing cranberries was ultimately developed, the scare that autumn foreshadowed a new public consciousness about the prevalence of chemicals in the nation’s food supply. Three years later, Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
was written with the cranberry crisis in mind. “For the first time in the history of the world,” she wrote, “every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception until death.”
In the meantime, once dangerous cranberries could be separated from safe ones, Ike gingerly asked Kistiakowsky whether it was okay to serve cranberry sauce at Christmas. “I urged him to do so,” Kistiakowsky noted. “He did.”
Near the end of the year, Eisenhower embarked on an eleven-nation tour that effectively served as his presidential valedictory. Accompanied by a party of twenty-one people—though not Mamie, who felt the trip was too grueling for her—Eisenhower left Andrews Air Force Base on December 3 and arrived in Italy at noon the next day. He then commenced a whirlwind trip of little substance but abundant goodwill.
Thousands greeted him in Rome, and Pope John XXIII received him that Sunday, charming John Eisenhower by remarking that they shared the same name. Tens of thousands lined the streets and squares of New Delhi, straining for a look at the president. Thousands more turned out in Washington when he returned home, even though it was nearly midnight and the weather was frigid. Many carried sparklers, twinkling in the night outside the White House.
Inside, Eisenhower barged in on Al Gruenther, Bill Robinson, George Allen, and Ellis Slater playing bridge. “Hi,” Gruenther said, not bothering to get up and barely turning to face Eisenhower. “What’s new?” Allen asked.
Ike pulled up a chair and sat down: “Now let’s see how the experts do it.”
———
The Khrushchev visit that fall and the abating of the Berlin crisis left two significant, unfinished pieces of business for Ike to complete in his remaining months as president: the four-power summit and his reciprocal visit to the Soviet Union. By agreement, the summit was scheduled to go first and was set for May in Paris. Plans for it dominated the administration that spring, as aides recognized that it represented the culmination of a presidency devoted to striking some sort of lasting peace with the Soviet Union.
Business in Washington posed all the usual difficulties for a president whose power was beginning to wane. Castro had become intolerable; President Rhee of South Korea, after trying to steal his reelection, instead succumbed to pressure and departed—ostensibly with Eisenhower’s good wishes but in fact to his great relief. There were the usual visitors: Prime Minister Kishi of Japan came in January; Adenauer and Macmillan visited in March, de Gaulle in April. In between, Eisenhower took a grueling trip through South America, stopping in San Juan, Rio, the newly constructed city of Brasília, Buenos Aires, San Carlos, Santiago, Montevideo, and back home through Puerto Rico again. In Latin America, the mission, though mostly goodwill, also included a bit of fact-finding, as Ike sounded out his counterparts on their reactions to Castro.
Congress, meanwhile, tried again to fashion a civil rights bill as escalating civil disobedience in the South highlighted the persistence of Jim Crow. Eisenhower sidestepped the issue. Asked in March whether restaurants that denied blacks service were violating their constitutional rights, he answered: “So far as I know, this matter of types of segregation in the South has been brought time and again before the Supreme Court. Now, I certainly am not lawyer enough or wise enough in this area to know when a matter is such as actually to violate the constitutional rights of the Negroes.” That was barely credible, but Ike still refused to be drawn into a debate that he believed would be resolved by “the conscience of America,” and only “eventually.”
Yet even as he equivocated, Eisenhower continued to mark steady, incremental progress on civil rights. On May 6, he signed another bill in that area, still just the second to clear Congress since the Civil War. As with the first, it did not go as far as he had asked, but it criminalized obstruction of a federal court order, gave the FBI authority to investigate alleged civil rights violations, and required local jurisdictions to retain voting records—all steps to enlarge and defend the rights of American blacks, particularly the right to vote.
Eisenhower also waged a last attempt to control federal spending. He opposed a housing bill that was estimated to cost $1 billion. He favored a proposal to expand health care for the elderly, but he refused to back one version that would have made health insurance compulsory and subsidized by the federal government. On the revenue side, Eisenhower declined to endorse a tax cut, despite the benefits it might have had for Nixon’s political future. It was, Ike said, too likely to throw the federal budget out of balance. His refusal to yield to party conservatives on taxes hamstrung Nixon and infuriated other leading Republicans, but Ike benefited from a steadily improving American economy: by April, 66.2 million Americans were at work, and the nation’s gross national product was on pace to top $500 billion for the first time in its history.
That left Eisenhower free to focus on the upcoming Paris Summit. He conferred with de Gaulle and Macmillan in the weeks leading up to the event, with Macmillan crafting the proposal for a nuclear test ban. Writing to Khrushchev on March 12, Eisenhower urged the Soviets to join with the West in suspending all such tests indefinitely. “Surely,” Eisenhower suggested, “it is in the interests of our two countries and of the whole world to conclude now an agreement.” That prompted an exchange of letters between the two leaders in which there appeared to be progress. There were difficulties, concentrated mainly around the issue of inspections, but by early April, Eisenhower had come to regard Khrushchev’s suggestion on how to frame a test ban treaty as a “very significant and welcome development.”
Secretly, Ike also prepared for the summit by gathering intelligence on the Soviets. Since June 20, 1956, high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance planes equipped with the most advanced cameras of their time had overflown the Soviet Union’s satellite nations in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower granted his approval the following day for flights to penetrate the Soviet Union itself. Within weeks, he was presented with detailed aerial photographs of Leningrad and a Moscow airframe plant. Briefed about the flights, he regarded the program as “very interesting, very positive.”
U-2s crisscrossed Soviet territory for four years, their flights a nuisance to Soviet radar operators, who could track the planes but not bring them down because they were out of reach of the nation’s defenses. The Soviets routinely protested those intrusions on their airspace but did not publicize them for fear of what it said about the weakness of Soviet technology—this, at a time when they were boasting of scientific superiority. The result: Eisenhower knew much about Soviet military readiness, and Khrushchev knew that he knew. The essence of the U-2 program was a secret from the Soviet and American people but not from their governments. Nevertheless, Eisenhower understood how provocative the program was: it routinely violated Soviet airspace as part of a vast program of espionage. Understanding the risks, he insisted on approving every flight.
It was with special trepidation that he considered the request of Richard Bissell, the CIA’s director of plans, for one more overflight in the spring of 1960. Code-named Operation Grand Slam, it was slated to cross the western Soviet Union from south to north. It was originally scheduled for early April but had been delayed by bad weather. Bissell kept returning for permission. On April 25, security adviser Andy Goodpaster informed Bissell that the president had given his okay for one last flight, on one condition: it could not be made after May 1. After that, Eisenhower was worried that it could endanger the Paris Summit, scheduled to begin on May 16.
Armed with the president’s permission, the CIA selected the program’s most experienced pilot, Francis Gary Powers. He was ready to go on April 28, but the flight was again scrapped because of bad weather. For the next two mornings, he prepared to take off, only to be called back, again for weather. Finally, with the president’s deadline upon them, CIA officials cleared the flight. Powers took off thirty minutes late. He headed toward Afghanistan and sent one brief signal when he approached Soviet airspace at sixty-six thousand feet. Then, as with all U-2 flights, he went silent.
In Washington, there was no reason to pay particular attention to Powers’s flight. Although a matter of serious national security, the U-2 program had been under way for years without serious incident. Powers’s flight was more ambitious than most: rather than entering the Soviet Union and then returning the way he came, Powers was entering in the south and exiting near Scandinavia. Nevertheless, the planes had proven their invulnerability, flying beyond the reach of Soviet surface-to-air missiles and interceptor planes. Powers settled in for a long but presumably uneventful flight.
The first inklings of trouble came a few hours later when CIA officials in Washington were told that the Soviets had stopped tracking the U-2 with radar. Hours went by, and Powers did not arrive as scheduled. Concern deepened to gloom, but Bissell and his CIA colleagues were convinced that neither the pilot nor the fragile plane could survive a crash from nearly seventy thousand feet. Powers might be dead, but the chances of the mission being exposed seemed small.