Eisenhower (54 page)

At the White House, the downing of Powers’s U-2 caught the president flat-footed. The administration was conducting a civil defense test that day, and members of the NSC were being judged by how quickly they could relocate to High Point, a secure location in Virginia intended for use in the event of an attack on the United States. When Jim Hagerty received news that the U-2 had disappeared, he urgently relayed word to Goodpaster, but Goodpaster, preoccupied with the NSC scramble, did not tell Ike for more than an hour, infuriating Hagerty. When Ike finally heard that the plane was missing, he was asked to authorize the release of a prearranged cover story—that a U.S. weather plane lost contact and perhaps drifted off course. “You had better wait,” Eisenhower suggested. But the aide insisted: the point was to release a statement before the Soviets did. Ike didn’t like it, but he agreed: “Go ahead.”

Pursuant to the cover story Ike had approved in 1956, NASA released a terse statement that a weather plane on a mission in Turkey had disappeared. Before it had lost contact, the pilot, according to the statement, “reported over the emergency frequency that he was experiencing oxygen difficulties.” That way, if wreckage were discovered inside the Soviet Union, the announcement would suggest that the pilot had blacked out and the plane had drifted across the border as it fell to earth.

None of that would have fooled the Soviets, of course, but since they had been complaining about these flights for years without drawing attention to what they revealed about Soviet capabilities, American authorities believed they were safe. Safe, that is, so long as the pilot and the plane were destroyed—the scenario that CIA officials regarded as “best case.” Unfortunately, as the CIA’s study of the U-2 program later noted, “May Day turned out to be a bad time to overfly the Soviet Union.” Because it was a national holiday, much of the country’s military traffic was grounded; that allowed radar operators to focus more intently on Powers’s plane, which also mistakenly carried him over a missile battery that American planners did not know of. A little over four hours into his flight, a missile exploded close to Powers’s U-2 (a Soviet MiG dispatched to intercept Powers was hit by a second missile). He ejected from the plane, having failed to detonate it, and then parachuted to earth, where he was captured. His film was recovered.

Americans knew none of this and assumed that the cover story about a weather aircraft would hold. Khrushchev waited, letting the U.S. government further commit to a story. It was, he relished, a magnificent opportunity to retaliate for “all the years of humiliation.”

As he laid his trap, Khrushchev proceeded in the conviction that his new friend Eisenhower could not possibly have authorized the flights. Perhaps revealing something of his own relationship to his intelligence services, he imagined that the CIA or the Pentagon was conducting the espionage without the president’s knowledge; the Soviet premier’s gambit, then, was to expose the espionage, embarrass the United States, and still leave himself room to negotiate with Ike. Acting on those assumptions, Khrushchev played his hand for all it was worth. He delivered a long speech on May 5 to the Supreme Soviet. Well into the address, he revealed that the Soviet Union had shot down an American plane, thwarting an “aggressive act” and a clumsy attempt to put pressure on the Soviet state.

That goaded the United States into denying Khrushchev’s account. After the first statement announcing that the U-2 was a weather plane, NASA elaborated with “details.” It showed reporters another U-2, hastily adorned with NASA markings and a fictitious serial number. The plane shot down by the Soviets, NASA suggested, was similar to this one, assigned to perform high-altitude weather research. The Americans had now committed to a spurious version of events; they had lied and embellished in support of that lie—all on the assumption that Powers was dead and his plane destroyed.

On May 7, Khrushchev sprang. Speaking to the Supreme Soviet for the second time in three days, he began by extensively reviewing the story spun by the Eisenhower administration. Then, as captured in William Taubman’s memorable biography of the Soviet premier, Khrushchev allowed himself a chuckle. “Comrades,” he said, “I must tell you a secret … I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and in good health and that we have parts of the airplane.” The jig was up, and Khrushchev savored his moment. He revealed that the Soviets had recovered the film from the spy plane, then boasted that Soviet cameras were superior. He also informed his audience that Powers had carried cyanide and lambasted America for the “barbarism” of demanding its pilots commit suicide. Finally, he lampooned the weather plane story by asserting that Powers carried money and jewelry. “What did he need all this for in the upper layers of the atmosphere?”

If this was a treasured moment for the Soviet leader, it also was a stupid one. Even as Khrushchev baited the United States, he trapped Eisenhower into a position that was distinctly to the Soviet’s disadvantage. Imagining that Ike would disavow the U-2 and blame it on rogue elements of the Pentagon or the CIA was a fantasy; to have done so would have amounted to an acknowledgment that Eisenhower did not control his own administration. That said, the CIA had let him down, as Ike surely knew. The agency had pressed for these flights, confident that the U-2 was beyond striking distance of Soviet defenses. Allen Dulles was prepared to make it easy on Eisenhower. He offered to take responsibility and resign.

However tempted he might have been, Eisenhower could not afford to accept. It would have obliterated much of his legacy to suggest that America’s most sensitive operations were conducted without his knowledge or approval. Eisenhower understood that he had to take responsibility for this or sacrifice even more. “I would like to resign,” he muttered to Ann Whitman.

At the same time, Eisenhower saw no reason to apologize to Khrushchev. Since 1953, he had been urging the opening of the skies above the United States and the Soviet Union on the theory that observation would provide stability and reinforce peace. He knew that the Soviets had long been aware of the U-2, and they had, after all, launched
Sputnik
, further recognition that each country imagined itself free to gaze down on the other.

Eisenhower sized up his options. Having ruled out blaming others, he came clean. The State Department announced that despite its previous denials, the mission had been intended to spy on the Soviet Union, whose refusal to cooperate with proposed inspections such as Open Skies made such flights necessary. “The government of the United States,” the statement read, “would be derelict … if it did not … take such measures as are possible unilaterally to lessen and to overcome this danger of surprise attack.” In order to protect against that danger, the president, while not approving specific missions, had authorized flights, the statement added. Pointedly left unsaid was the future of the program. Khrushchev was crestfallen. This was, he told his son, a “betrayal by General Eisenhower, a man who had referred to him as a friend.”

Two days later, Eisenhower twisted the knife, opening his news conference with a personal defense of the U-2, blaming the Soviet “fetish of secrecy and concealment” for the need to engage in aerial espionage, and describing such work as “a distasteful but vital necessity.” If ever Khrushchev had harbored an illusion of friendship with Eisenhower, he did no more.

Although the U-2 episode badly strained U.S.-Soviet relations and embarrassed Eisenhower, American officials had every reason to think that its ramifications would be limited. Khrushchev was trumpeting the incident as evidence of American duplicity, but as Eisenhower knew, the premier had been aware of the flights for years and had continued to pursue normal diplomacy with the United States. The U-2 program had not so much as been mentioned during their talks at Camp David, when Khrushchev complained about all manner of American mistreatment. The summit, moreover, was more avidly desired by Khrushchev than by Eisenhower. So, as the U-2 crisis bubbled along, Ike continued to make plans to depart for Europe. Asked by Republican senators over breakfast whether the U-2 incident might jeopardize plans for the gathering, Eisenhower responded that Khrushchev was “much too smart” to think that this was the first such U-2 incursion and was unlikely to overreact to it.

But just as domestic considerations had prevented Eisenhower from shifting blame for the U-2 to subordinates, so, too, was Khrushchev driven now by his nation’s internal dynamics. His theatrics over the U-2 had alarmed members of the Soviet military, and he had counted on Eisenhower to rescue him by disavowing the flights. When Ike took responsibility, it left Khrushchev dangling. Suddenly it was he being asked to swallow his pride and join Ike at the summit despite having made public theater of Powers and the U-2. As Khrushchev and the Soviet delegation pushed off for Paris, the premier made up his mind: Ike would have to apologize for the flights and agree to halt them, or the Soviets would boycott an event largely of their own making.

Eisenhower arrived in Paris on May 15, accompanied by twenty-five aides and greeted by more. After a brief respite at the American embassy, he met with de Gaulle and heard the French president’s report on his discussion with Khrushchev. It was grim, if not entirely unexpected. Khrushchev demanded his apology and insisted that the flights be halted. The latter concession Eisenhower was willing to offer since the utility of the program was “at an end” anyway. Ike was not, however, going to concede error or publicly discontinue the U-2 in response to a threat, so even as the summit prepared to open, the allies debated whether to walk out or let Khrushchev take the initiative.

Having come all this way, the allies decided to sit tight and see what Khrushchev would do. Meeting with Khrushchev, de Gaulle made sure the Soviet leader would not be misled about allied unity in that event. As one of Ike’s aides reported it to him, de Gaulle had been emphatic: “If this matter were to come to war, he wanted Mr. Khrushchev to know that France as an ally would stand with the United States.”

On Monday morning, the summit opened. Khrushchev, closely surrounded by his delegation, his hands shaking with nerves, read a vitriolic denunciation of Eisenhower and the U-2 and refused to proceed with the summit unless he could be assured that the flights had been discontinued and those responsible punished. That was, as he knew, impossible: Was Ike to punish himself? With that, Khrushchev stormed out of the conference. “No matter what happens,” de Gaulle reiterated to Eisenhower, “France as your ally will stand with you all the way.” For Eisenhower, who had spent so many years sowing the alliance, sometimes in the face of French recalcitrance, those were heartwarming words.

Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and Macmillan all waited in the conference hall for two hours, while Khrushchev five times demanded an apology for the U-2. Without it, he refused to enter the conference. Eisenhower would not give in, so Khrushchev barnstormed around Paris and into the countryside. It was, the
New York Herald Tribune
reported, a “wildly chaotic day which would have driven Alice in Wonderland to a psychiatrist.” Their patience finally exhausted, the Western leaders left the conference room.

The mood was gloomy afterward as the American delegation, suddenly deprived of a mission, straggled back to the embassy. There, the ambassador’s wife had readied the patio for Ike to barbecue. He let off steam by grilling steaks.

Khrushchev’s antics wrecked the summit and ruined a last chance for a major peace agreement in the Eisenhower years. Ike knew he was partly to blame. Though Khrushchev’s domestic pressures drove him to sabotage the affair, the U-2 had supplied him with a pretext. Eisenhower was defensive about the lost opportunity. Weeks later, when an aide suggested that the United States work to “regain our leadership” in the aftermath of the U-2 and failed summit, Eisenhower exploded. The United States, he insisted, had not lost its leadership and therefore did not need to regain it. Never again, Ike demanded, did he want to hear anyone from his administration argue otherwise.

It was clear that the collapse of the summit weighed on the president. It is also true, however, that Khrushchev hurt himself with his handling of the affair. Internally, he gave ammunition to his critics who saw him as irresponsible; his eventual downfall was, in large measure, traceable to his actions in those weeks. He antagonized Eisenhower and cemented the common purpose of the West. Indeed, one lasting effect was to reinforce the ties that bound Eisenhower and de Gaulle, two such very different men—one garrulous and popular, the other austere and formal. De Gaulle could irritate Ike—he irritated just about everyone who knew him—but he stood with America when it counted. As he prepared to leave Paris, Eisenhower wrote to his old friend to thank him:

I leave Paris with, of course, a measure of disappointment because our hopes for taking even a small step toward peace have been dashed by the intransigence and arrogance of one individual. But in another respect I leave Paris with the warmth and strength of your friendship, so amply demonstrated and renewed under the stress of the last four days, an even more valued possession than ever before. You and I have shared great experiences in war and in peace, and from those experiences has come, for my part at least, a respect and admiration for you that I have for few men.

18

Rejection

O
f all the many emotions that Richard Nixon elicited from the American people, pity was surely one of those least frequently directed his way. And yet it is hard not to feel for him as he embarked on his campaign for president. Nixon was positioned as heir to one of the most popular men in America, but he launched his effort just as the administration stumbled through its least impressive months. As a candidate, he had to harness himself to Eisenhower’s popularity and at the same time distance himself from what was widely perceived as the administration’s dwindling effectiveness. He struggled at both, succeeded at neither.