Fifties (115 page)

FORTY-FIVE

L
ATE IN HIS PRESIDENCY
, Dwight Eisenhower came under increasing scrutiny personally.
Sputnik
was only the first of several psychological setbacks for America, the impact of which neither the President nor the men around him fully comprehended. Soon after, in November 1957, the Gaither report leaked out. It was prepared by the Security Resources Panel of the Science Advisory committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization and was officially titled “Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age.” It took its nickname from committee chairman Rowan Gaither and was a chilling piece of work. Based on information available to most laymen (and certainly with no knowledge of the Soviet weaknesses as sighted by the U-2), it implied that we were slipping in our nuclear capacity while the Soviets were becoming stronger all the time. The evidence, it reported, “clearly indicates an increasing threat which
may become critical in 1959 or early 1960.” The Russians seemed to be ahead of us in all aspects of defense and weapons technology, and even worse, their GNP was said to be growing at a faster rate than ours (a particularly preposterous idea, given the crude nature of Soviet industry). Clearly, the barbarians were not merely at the gate, they were able to fly over it with missiles and nuclear warheads. The Gaither committee recommended $25 billion for the building of bomb shelters all over the country and another $19 billion on increased budgeting for weaponry. William C. Foster, the head of Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation, who was on the committee, said, “I felt as though I were spending ten hours a day staring straight into hell.” Eisenhower was now in the embarrassing position of having appointed a blue-chip panel whose conclusions he would have to reject or at least ignore. This, after
Sputnik
and Little Rock, seemed to confirm the view of an administration of older men no longer in touch, unaware of how quickly the world was changing. Herblock, the talented and influential
Washington Post
cartoonist, was drawing Eisenhower as a slightly addled, goofy, ineffectual figure, confused by what he was doing and why he was doing it.

In a sense, the U-2 helped stabilize the relationship between the two superpowers. But because the information it provided could not be introduced into the democratic system, Eisenhower was oddly paralyzed. What he knew, ordinary citizens could not know. At one point, frustrated by all the pressure coming at him on the domestic front to intensify the arms race, Eisenhower said with some irritation, “I can’t understand the United States being quite as panicky as they are.”

Nevertheless, in the last three years of the Eisenhower administration, a debate began over an alleged missile gap, which did not, in fact, exist. In a way it was not without its own justice: The Republicans had won in the past in no small part because they had blamed the Democrats for losing countries to Communism; in the early part of the Cold War, the Republicans had exaggerated the natural anxieties of the Cold War. The result was that not only had the Democrats vowed never to be accused of being soft on Communism again, they were determined to find an issue that showed they were, if anything, even more vigilant and tougher. McCarthy’s attacks guaranteed that the national debate would shift ever more to the right. With
Sputnik
and the so-called missile gap, the Democrats, though careful not to attack the President frontally, managed to make it seem as if his best days were behind him.

He had nothing to offer but himself and his word in defense of
his policies. He had no proof. That lay locked in the CIA’s vaults. But there was no guarantee, beloved and trusted as he was, that his word alone was good enough now. Part of this was the erosion caused by his health. His personal signature had always been his physical vigor, his ruddiness and vitality, but like Truman before him, he had found the brutal rigors of the American presidency in the postwar era to be a killing job. Truman, with his plowboy constitution and simple life-style, had withstood the physical erosion remarkably well, but Eisenhower was not as lucky. In September 1955, Eisenhower had suffered his first heart attack; less than a year later, he was struck with ileitis. He underwent a stomach operation, even though there was considerable nervousness among his doctors about subjecting a man who had so recently suffered a heart attack to so serious an operation. Then, in November 1957, he suffered a mild stroke. The exhausting quality of the job was taking its toll. The doctors told him to avoid “irritation, frustration, anxiety, fear, and above all anger.” “Just what do you think the presidency is?” he asked.

In fact, he had never entirely wanted the job, nor for that matter did he like it very much after he got it. Cy Sulzberger, an old friend from Paris days, visiting him some twenty months into his administration, was surprised to find him “uneasy, irascible, crotchety, and not quite sure of himself. I felt sorry for him.” He was surrounded by politicians, whom he tended to describe as sons of bitches, who came to see him when they needed help getting reelected but who in no way supported his program. The longer he stayed in office, the more disillusioned he became. After one meeting with congressional leaders late in his presidency, he turned to an aide and said, “I don’t know why anyone should be a member of the Republican party.” He would talk often of the time when his term was up and he would be a free man again. When Everett Dirksen and Charlie Halleck spoke wistfully about the fact that it was a shame that he could not run again because of the Twenty-Second Amendment, he quickly disabused them of any desire he might have for a third term. Nor, he added, did he think anyone should be President after he was seventy. The job was taking its toll.

As the
Sputnik
-defense spending crisis deepened, his behavior seemed passive compared to the almost primal energy of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev was something new for Americans to contemplate. Stalin had been a completely foreboding figure, the paranoiac as ultimate dictator, inflicting his dark vision on all those unlucky enough to fall under the rule of the Soviet empire. Khrushchev
was quite different—ferocious, volatile, shrewd, vengeful, very much the angry peasant. If Stalin had represented the worst of Soviet Communism, then Khrushchev to many Americans was even more threatening, for he seemed to reflect the peasant vigor of this new state. Was America finally attaining a broad affluence only to find that the comforts of middle-class existence had weakened it? Crude, unpredictable, occasionally violent, Khrushchev seemed to be the embodiment of the sheer animal force of the Soviet Union, its raw power and, perhaps Americans many feared, its irresistible will.

There was something chilly about Khrushchev, pounding his shoe and threatening to bury capitalism, at the UN. Contrasting his own poverty with the affluent backgrounds of those Western figures he dealt with, he seemed to imply their good manners were a weakness. “You all went to great schools, to famous universities—to Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne,” he once boasted to Western diplomats. “I never had any proper schooling. I went about barefoot and in rags. When you were in the nursery, I was herding cows for two kopeks.... And yet here we are, and I can run rings around you all.... Tell me, gentlemen, why?”

Many Americans worried that the very material success of America in the postwar years—all those cars, kitchen amenities, and other luxuries—had made us soft and vulnerable to the Soviet Union, where people were tougher and more willing to sacrifice for their nation. Was there strength and truth in poverty? Styles Bridges, a conservative Republican senator, seemed to talk in this vein when he said that Americans had to be less concerned with “the height of the tail fin in the new car and be much more prepared to shed blood, sweat and tears, if this country and the free world are to survive.”

Part of Eisenhower’s problems, as he entered the last phase of his presidency, was that he could never bring himself to lobby the most important members of the press on his own behalf, or even on behalf of his policies. Because of network-television news shows, the national press corps was growing ever more influential as a force—if not in policymaking, then certainly in the way policy was seen by the general public. Yet in his relations with the press, Eisenhower still saw himself as the general and the press as obedient privates and corporals who liked him personally, shared his vision of the war and, given the circumstances of the national effort, all but saluted him. Therefore he thought he had not needed to get into the pit and explain. All he had to do was give his version. A challenge to his policy from people who, in his opinion, did not have a tenth of his experience and training, who were outsiders and had never made a
hard decision, would quickly ignite his anger. He had entered the presidency feeling that way and not having needed the press corps during his election run when their bosses, like Paley, Sarnoff, Whitney, and Sulzberger, had practically begged him to come in.

As President, he assumed the press would be properly respectful. A press corps that did otherwise was, to him, untrustworthy and quite possibly dishonest. It was not that he had not had opportunities to bring the press in. When he took office, various columnists volunteered to be insiders, to report what the administration was doing but could not say. The first and perhaps most brazen of these offers came from Joseph Alsop, who dropped by early in the administration to talk with Robert Cutler, Ike’s national security secretary. Cutler was an old Boston friend, a fellow member of the Porcellian Club at Harvard. Alsop pointed out the many Republican connections in his own family and suggested he could serve the administration with his column by publishing certain administration perceptions and thoughts without attribution. “Such a person, trusted by a President, could provide an anonymous channel to help shape public opinion,” Alsop said. But Cutler told Alsop to get his information like any other reporter—by attending press conferences and talking with Jim Hagerty. The administration, Cutler said, was not interested in deals. Alsop was not pleased: This was clearly beneath him. Cutler clearly did not understand the new hierarchy of Washington journalism.

This was fairly typical. Ike barely knew the names of the men and women who covered the White House every day. He knew the names of only the most senior reporters who reported on him. He did not read the major papers, and when he did, it made him angry. To his mind,
The New York Times
was “the most untrustworthy paper in the world.” He gave little access to its top people. Once the President asked Cy Sulzberger what Arthur Krock, the paper’s conservative columnist, was doing lately. Writing his column three times a week, Sulzberger said. “Is that so?” said the President. Then Ike noted that he liked Krock, which came as a surprise to Sulzberger, who knew that Krock had been trying in vain to see the President for more than a year. The President continued: He also liked one other columnist, though he often had trouble with his name: “And you know who another good reporter is—that’s that little fellow—what’s his name?—that little fellow who works for—” Sulzberger asked if the President meant Roscoe Drummond. “Yes,” said the President. “Roscoe, that’s the fellow I meant.”

Eisenhower disliked Walter Lippmann, the great sage of the era, and thought him usually wrong. He hated Ed Murrow: “I can’t stand
that gangster [Ed] Murrow. I can’t stand looking at him. I have no use for him. He always looks like a gangster with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.” But it was Joe Alsop, who became, to his mind, the lowest of the low as the columnist began to establish himself as the foremost journalistic critic of Eisenhower’s defense policies.

If there ever was a time and an issue when Eisenhower needed journalistic support, particularly from influential columnists, it was over his defense policies in the last three years of his administration. If ever there was an angry critic of them, it was Alsop. He was snobbish, vain, talented, hardworking, egocentric, and well connected to the powerful people in Washington, either through clubs, family connections, or the capacity to intimidate them by using his column as a lever. Close to hard-line Democrats like Acheson, Alsop soon became unusually influential in creating the impression that Eisenhower was somewhat confused, an ill-informed figure who was out of touch with reality and whose defense policies were putting American security in jeopardy. As he wrote his friend Isaiah Berlin in April 1958: “One prays—how odd it seems!—for the course of nature to transfer the burden to Nixon (who exactly resembles an heir to a very rich family ... now utterly distraught because Papa has grown a little senile and spends his family fortune out the window—really he is like that). I lunched with him the other day and he all but asked me how it was possible to argue with a ramolli papa without getting disinherited yourself!”

Eisenhower’s last three years as President saw him virtually alone on this issue, standing up to a powerful array of critics in insisting that America had more than enough defense, that there was no missile gap, and that the nation’s security was not in jeopardy. Allied against him were such powerful and influential Democrats as Lyndon Johnson, Stuart Symington, and Jack Kennedy, who were busy positioning themselves for a shot at the presidency. With this issue they could show that not only were they
not
soft on Communism, but they actually wanted to strengthen America. They had their allies in the government, most notably in the Air Force, which always wanted more bombers and more missiles. The Democrats and the liberal-centrist columnists were in touch with influential military sources, who were not privy to the U-2 intelligence and who were absolutely sure that the Soviets were moving ahead of us. “At the Pentagon they shudder when they speak of the Gap, which means the years 1960, 1961, 1962 and 1963,” the Alsops wrote typically in that
period. “They shudder because in those years the American government will flaccidly permit the Kremlin to open an almost unchallenged superiority in the nuclear striking power that was once our superiority.” At the moment, voices like those of the Alsops had a certain power; the tensions of the Cold War and the success of
Sputnik
had frightened many in the political center.