Part Iv

The Ironies Of Apocalypse Management

Chapter 10: Beyond Geneva

The “Spirit of Geneva” did not last long. While the world was busy talking about turning away from cold war, Eisenhower and his administration were busy insuring that there would be no fundamental change. Just three days after making his renowned proposal, the president assured Congressional leaders that “there might well be changes in our methods of dealing with the Russians, although of course we would not change our basic policies.”[1]

Dulles agreed. The world could have peace only when the Soviets declared defeat, he wrote in a policy paper drafted in mid-August. U.S. pressure had forced the Soviets to seek a relaxing of tensions, “to gain a respite.” The Soviet leaders would “pay some appreciable price” to maintain the new “spirit of Geneva.” Therefore, the U.S. should press its cold war demands more strongly than ever. True, Geneva had eroded the “free world” alliance, which was “held together largely by a cement compounded of fear and a sense of moral superiority. Now the fear is diminished and the moral demarcation is somewhat blurred.”[2] To placate its allies, the U.S. should give the Soviets some of the relaxation they wanted—but “within carefully controlled limits,” demanding concessions in return, including a unified Germany within NATO, liberation of the eastern European satellites, and mutual aerial inspection. Negotiations should continue, but only as a tactic to put more pressure on the enemy without running any risk of genuine compromise.[3]

Dulles explained to the president that “the new atmosphere meant not a perpetuation of the status quo but rather the greater opportunity for change” — as long as the changes came entirely from the other side. “The President expressed himself as in complete agreement with this philosophy.” He approved Dulles’ paper, which was promulgated as official policy and sent to all U.S. diplomatic posts. On the same day, in a letter to Swede Hazlett, Eisenhower made it clear that the summit had not changed his essentially defensive stance: “I am quite sure that the October meeting of the Foreign Ministers in Geneva will begin to tell the true story. But a long time must elapse before developments can possibly reach the stage that we can have any confidence in the announced purposes and proposals of the Soviets. In the meantime we must keep up our guard.”[4]

Eisenhower had gone to the summit to shore up the dike of containment and strengthen his defenses against the threatening combination of communism and the H-bomb. The same pattern of discourse that led him to the summit presupposed that he would meet Soviet intransigence there. Naturally, intransigence was what he saw. With his basic assumptions newly confirmed, he came away convinced once again of the need to restrain the forces of evil by waging cold war vigorously and gaining as much control as possible of every cold war battlefield.

“Two Great Philosophies…In Contest”

When Dulles explained his new strategy to the president, the latter mentioned that it “would fit well” into a speech he was preparing for the upcoming convention of the American Bar Association (ABA). It was time to re-orchestrate the domestic public once again, to return to unrelieved cold war dualism. Eisenhower told speechwriter Kevin McCann that he wanted the speech to “make clear that a Germany divided by force, the captive states, the principle of international communism, all stand as blots on any world order that pretends to be based on justice and right.”[5]

In the speech to the ABA, there was no longer any common road for the two superpowers to travel. There was only “the central fact of today’s life: the existence in the world of two great philosophies…in contest.” The free individual, abiding by “moral law reflecting a religious faith,” stood against “the all-powerful state…which ignores the fact that man is a spiritual being” and therefore unjustly oppresses the individual. The whole world, including the “newly awakened nations,” was deciding which philosophy could best provide what all people want: genuine peace, which required freedom and “the well-being, the happiness of the individual.” By defining individual benefit as the criterion, the president made the outcome of the contest tautological, since by his definition only the “free world” was devoted to the “enlightened self-interest” of the individual. The speech presented the specific goals of U.S. cold war policy as the only path to peace, faith, and everything else that was good in human life. So it was perfectly logical for Eisenhower to call on all Americans to lead “the Crusade for peace…[to] make our system an ever more glorious example of an orderly government.”[6]

On the front page of the next day’s New York Times, James Reston announced: “President Moves to Brake ‘Spirit of Geneva’ Optimism.” The decision to brake the optimism had been made, Reston wrote, “after widespread indications that the ‘Geneva spirit’ was being regarded in some Allied and neutral countries, not as a means to a general European settlement, but as an end in itself”; i.e., a legitimation of the status quo as a permanent situation. Just as disturbing was “talk about cutting defense budgets, both here and in Western Europe.” The U.S. still wanted “continued friendliness,” Reston reported, but only if the Soviets agreed to “a more just settlement in Europe,” including German reunification, freedom for the satellites, and an end to “anti-American propaganda.”[7]

C.D. Jackson told a friend that the speech reflected the “top-level moods” he had found in Washington, where there was “considerable alarm” over the prospect of a “run-away spirit of détente” in western European. The U.S. public, on the other hand, was ready to support the administration's new tough stance. “That was a superb performance in Philadelphia,” Jackson wrote to Eisenhower. “This strange euphoria (new and very chic word) settling over the country and abroad could have disastrous results. I think you brought everybody up smartly, and one of the proofs is the virtually unanimous press approval.” “I like everything you say,” the president responded.[8]

Time read the press response differently: “The point did not get over to the U.S. public—or at least to the press.” The public already knew that “the growing political order and stability of the free world” had the Soviets in retreat.[9] Jackson’s interpretation and Time’s were equally true. The press and the public had been well schooled to see no difference between a genuine desire for peace and a renewed push for cold war victory. So they could easily approve the speech’s harsh words yet see no departure from the president's peaceable words at Geneva. The speech could be applauded yet ignored because it was generally assumed to be a slight tactical shift in a fundamentally unchangeable policy course. Dulles and others hoped that the shift would be more than slight. In retrospect the journalists’ assumption proved correct.

After Eisenhower's speech to the ABA, there is little documentary record to evaluate his own discourse or policy views for the rest of 1955. A week after the speech, he began a month’s vacation in Colorado. On the last day of that vacation, he had the heart attack that would keep him away from the White House for most of the rest of the year. From his convalescent bed, the president did follow the proceedings of the foreign ministers’ meeting in late October. He told Dulles, “I shall pray that the new Soviet proposals are genuine steps in the direction of peace rather than mere tricks to throw us off guard.”[10] In his discursive framework, only two alternatives were possible: Soviet compliance or Soviet guile.

The foreign ministers’ meeting soon degenerated into the familiar cold war pattern of mutual accusations and invective; no serious prospects for rapprochement were in sight. The president's response was predictable: “You can’t trust them when they are talking nice,” he told Under-Secretary of State Herbert Hoover, Jr., “and you can’t trust them when they are talking tough.” “The results of the [Geneva] Conference mean that you can’t let down an inch,” he told his top aides. “In certain ways we will probably have to step up our precautions because there seems to be no idea on the part of the Soviet leaders that such matters as justice and decency exist in Europe and in the world. … We have no change in our policy of peace through strength.”[11]

In Eisenhower's view, any region of uncertainty—any geopolitical or conceptual area where the forces of good intermingled with the forces of evil— still constituted a threat to peace. Despite his growing concern about the “third world,” he still worried most about Europe. At his first NSC meeting after his recovery, he proclaimed that “the unity of Western Europe today would solve the peace of the world. A solid power mass in Western Europe would ultimately attract to it all the Soviet satellites, and the threat to peace would disappear.” And he still hoped to manage every uncertainty with a skillful combination of words of peace and weapons of nuclear war.[12]

The policy shifts of 1955 showed that the administration could use varying tactics as they waged cold war—now accommodation, now confrontation. The president and his advisors never accepted the status quo of mid-1955 as a new stability. On the contrary, they viewed the geopolitical balance as very unstable. They hoped that a skillful blend of conciliatory words and pressure tactics would shift the balance of power substantially. After that, they would be happy to bless the new situation and keep it stable for the “long haul.” Discursive stability was the key to global stability.

Their hope for stability was in vain. The administration’s post-Geneva intransigence “dealt a devastating blow to the already fragile chances for successful negotiations,” as Ronald Pruessen says.[13] Once again, U.S. strategy perpetuated the very instability it was meant to control. The Geneva summit, which was supposed to solve problems, had only created new problems. The Eisenhower administration was now committed more strongly than ever to changing the balance of power, especially in Europe. It would have to deal with the dynamics its own maneuvers set in motion.

A Consistent Ideology

By December 1955, when Eisenhower had recovered and returned to active duty in the White House, his hopes for controlling the process of cold war were fading fast. Dulles' more aggressive post-Geneva strategy was not paying off; the Soviets were making no significant concessions in the interests of a prolonged respite. The confident tone of Dulles’ August policy paper and the ABA speech rapidly vanished, replaced by a return to the familiar foundations of insecurity and fear.

The new U.S. strategy for cold war victory was widening the gap between U.S. declaratory and actual policies. In its declaratory policy, the U.S. had to proclaim its intent to ease cold war tensions in order to court world opinion.[14] However, this ran the risk of fostering acceptance of the status quo in Europe and encouraging more resistance to nuclear weapons, thus endangering the actual hard-line policy. As always, Eisenhower’s policy depended on calibrating precisely the right levels of hope and fear in his discourse.

Observers abroad could see the contradictions more readily than most Americans, including their president. The resulting disappointment around the world, a risk the administration felt it had to take, was clear evidence that the U.S. could not control cold war discourse. Eisenhower's post-Geneva moves to promote stability and the U.S. position were bound, simultaneously, to be destabilizing and weaken the U.S. position.

This paradox plagued Eisenhower for the rest of his years in the White House. During his first term, he was widely perceived as a popular president leading a relatively effective administration (though his own central role in shaping his administration's policies was often misunderstood or underestimated). During his second term, however, as the paradox became evident, he would become the target of increasing criticism not only abroad but at home. Yet he found no escape, because the paradox grew out of his commitment to the New Look policies, its principles, and its discursive structure and ideological underpinnings. The president refused to abandon or even question that commitment.

During his second term, Eisenhower occasionally offered fragments of ideological reflection. He never doubted that the struggle against communism at home and abroad was a single battle “waged on two fronts.” At one level, it was a battle of economic systems. There was no guarantee “that our free system was inherently more productive in all fields than the totalitarian system,” he warned NATO leaders, nor “that the triumph of freedom over despotism is inevitable.”[15]

The outcome was in doubt, in the president's view, because the conflict, rooted in the most basic issues of human nature, was being waged within every individual. Under communism, he told his aide Gabriel Hauge, “the government imposes discipline upon both producer and worker. … Our economy is owned by our people as individuals. …This places upon every member of society a responsibility for self-discipline.” He summed up the point pithily in his State of the Union address for 1957: “Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline.” Every person should “truly dedicate himself to the good of the whole and not merely to the satisfaction of personal ambition,” he wrote to one correspondent. “Indeed, I think of personal ambition as something like the tempering of steel. If there is too little, the steel softens and becomes useless; if too much, it becomes brittle and breaks.” The key to preventing “the Kremlin’s control of the entire earth” was the average American’s willingness to sacrifice personal ambition for the good of all.[16]

Responsibility, self-discipline, and self-sacrifice remained the core of Eisenhower's religious views. “All of us were created as creatures capable of independent decisions,” he wrote to a teenager. The problems of life stemmed from refusing to accept that divinely given freedom. Little progress had been made against “sin, the devil and human misconduct,” he wrote to his brother Edgar, because most people “want to shift responsibility, both for their own individual problems and public activities, to the shoulders of someone else.” When he received a report urging that the way to win the cold war was “to breathe new vitality into the spiritual values of Western civilization,” he told Dulles it was “the most thoughtful document I have received” from any private group. In 1958, with his cold war efforts (and his political fortunes) flagging, he considered a major crusade for spiritual revival—not to eliminate the enemy, but merely to defend against it, to “develop a more unified and stronger purpose among free peoples to yield no single inch or advantage to atheistic communism.”[17]

He continued to be “Alarmist Ike,” warning European leaders that if their nations did not unite, “deterioration and ultimate disaster were inevitable.” The Soviets remained (he told Churchill) “implacably hostile and seeking our destruction.” To the end of his days in the White House, he remained certain that “Khrushchev is trying to promote chaos and bewilderment in the world.” Preventing chaos and destruction remained the nation’s official, overriding goal. NSC 5707/8, the statement of national security policy for 1957, announced that “the basic objective of U.S. national security policy is to preserve the security of the United States and its fundamental values and institutions.” A year later, the revised policy added “and enhance” as another goal, but it remained secondary to preservation. The basic problems facing the nation, it explained, were to win the “world-wide peaceful contest with the USSR” and to “foster an international environment in which the United States can sustain its values and institutions.” This seemed to make winning and “sustaining” coequal, perhaps even synonymous, aims.[18]

In 1957 White House staffer Arthur Larson complained of the “negativism” in the White House, where the only policies appeared to be “postpone, delay, or better still don’t do anything.” By the end of the second term, nothing had changed, according to Trachtenberg: “American policy was essentially defensive in nature. The United States was willing to live with things as they were and felt that the Soviet Union should do likewise.”[19]

Eisenhower still recognized that every effort to prevent change in one area opened up risks of change somewhere else. “The flexibility of the free world defense must be as great as the many-sided character of the Communist attack. No single type of defense can possibly be effective,” he wrote. Yet he recognized that “what we do in one field may have unacceptable impact in another.” “In terms of our over-all military program we can’t prepare everything that might be desirable, and can’t be strong everywhere,” he told his chief military advisors. “The real question is where to take the risks.” At a press conference, he explained the dilemma obliquely but openly: “You try to do something and it affects three other countries. … You try to lay out a program, a plan, work it if you have got it here, if you go here you have to defend from that, you have to move over here. It is a very difficult, intricate thing.”[20]

“Problems That Defy Solution”

Indeed it was so difficult and intricate that Eisenhower confessed he felt “forced to give constant attention … to problems that defy solution.” “Each hour will bring its own crisis,” he complained, and the “unsoluble [sic] ones land on my desk.” “There has scarcely been a day when some seemingly insoluble problem did not arrive on my desk,” he wrote. All he could do, he told his brother, was react to “steadily mounting crises and pressures. … There always seems to be an even more complex one than I could have imagined.”[21]

Talk of winning the cold war clearly gave way to the more modest goal of avoiding disaster. “He did not see at this time a clear alternative to the drift toward war,” he confessed to the NSC. “‘What,’ he asked the group, ‘can we do about it?’…He hoped that his advisors would give thought to this awful problem and bring forth any ideas which occurred to them.” The desperation in these words indicates that the president himself was at a loss and expected no real results from his plea. Just the day before, he told Dulles that disarmament offered no way out, for it too presented problems “inherently almost insoluble.” Later that year, he confessed to the NSC that communism could not be defeated by a hot war, for the scale of destruction “would result in the paralysis of both sides. He felt the problem was virtually unsolvable.”[22]

Yet there seemed no way to win a cold war either. It was “almost impossible” for U.S. to “hold the initiative” in striving for peace, he would later tell Dulles. “Our public relations problem almost defies solution.” Nor could he ever find a way to reduce the spiraling military budget. The experts kept demanding new weapons systems, he explained to Congressional leaders, and “the question of what to take out was virtually insoluble.” Pressures grew for military spending that Eisenhower thought was unnecessary and economically intolerable. At the same time, he was convinced that more foreign military and economic aid was economically wise and necessary for the cold war effort. Yet the problem of getting public and Congressional support for that aid also proved insoluble.[23]

Media analyst Craig Allen comments that “Eisenhower was impelled to use the media as a reactive shield against a flood of invidious developments that placed one crisis after another at his doorstep.” In such circumstances, the president would rarely talk about implementing any grand strategy. Indeed by 1956, as Trachtenberg concludes, “the whole Eisenhower strategy, so clear in 1953-54, was coming unglued. The president understood the problem, but he had no real answer.” He had no answer because he did not understand how he contributed to the problem. He was caught between constantly changing events and the unchanging interpretive lens through which he viewed those event. His fixed national security paradigm required a degree of control that he could not achieve.[24]

The Suez crisis typified the dilemma. In July, 1956, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez canal, creating a crisis that preoccupied the U.S. government for until November. Nasser was promoting himself, with some success, as the leader of an independent pan-Arab nationalist movement, taking whatever aid he could get from East and West alike. Nationalizing the Suez Canal was his most assertive act yet. Eisenhower identified Nasser and Arab nationalism as agents of communist expansionism and of a more abstract principle of disorder. The challenge he faced was “to bring some order into the chaos that is rapidly enveloping that region,” he confided in a diary entry. He told Vice-President Nixon that he feared Nasser’s efforts “to destroy the Western world.” He insisted that Soviet communism was the root source of the disorder.[25]

Eisenhower never wavered from the basic image of a dike of containment, intended to preserve order by keeping the chaotic communist flood out of that area. The choice was “violence, rioting, destruction of orderly government, and communist exploitation” or “a just and permanent peace.” When he sent troops to Lebanon, he assured Khrushchev that he wanted only to “change the international status quo by orderly and peaceful processes,” that his goal was “peace and a stable international order.”[26]

In his diary, Eisenhower acknowledged that “the true issue in the Middle East is whether or not the Western world can maintain its rightful opportunity to purchased vitally needed oil supplies.”[27] However, he could not see any contradiction between this pragmatic goal and the ideological goals of peace and stability. In his view, the oil supplies were “vitally needed” to preserve, not merely U.S. prosperity, but “the American way of life” as the bulwark of eternally true “free world” values. He knew the risk: a show of force could turn Muslim public opinion against the West and drive it closer to the communist embrace. When Britain and France invaded Egypt in October 1956, aiming to regain control of the Suez Canal, this risk led Eisenhower to condemn his allies, stirring up dangerous tensions in the NATO alliance.

Pragmatic and ideological concerns merged to give Eisenhower a limited view of the situation and thus to limit his options. He ended up frustrated and bewildered by what appeared to be an insoluble problem. He acknowledged his plight when he noted that the Suez crisis was the beginning of his unending series of insoluble problems.[28] But he never recognized that his own way of viewing his problems made them insoluble.

In ensuing crises throughout his second term, Eisenhower’s interpretations, and thus his responses, remained much the same. And every response tended to undermine another equally necessary response. He relied on military technology and economic aid as his principal instruments of apocalypse management. Yet, as he himself consistently declared, these instruments were the continuing sources of seemingly insoluble problems. So he found himself unable to control emotion and discourse, not only abroad but also in his own nation. The more his control efforts failed, the more he persisted in them and promoted the state of national insecurity.

Stuck in this insoluble situation, and not understanding it, Eisenhower inevitably made insecurity and avoiding disaster the central themes of his language, and therefore his policies, for the rest of his presidency. There would be a seemingly unending string of major crises from 1956 to 1960: Suez and the Middle East, Hungary, Sputnik, Lebanon, the Formosa Straits, Berlin, Cuba, the U-2, the Congo, and others. Each, in its own way, would illustrate the ironies of the administration's cold war effort, the ways in which apocalypse management bred and increased the very insecurity it was designed to allay. A full account of national security discourse and policy in the Eisenhower presidency would have to examine each of the individual crises and a wide range of related issues.

The following chapters do not offer such a full account. They merely illustrate the ironies of apocalypse management as they were manifest in Eisenhower’s approach to nuclear weapons, disarmament, the military budget, and mutual security. As individual crises came and went, these four areas remained at the heart of national security policy. In mid-1956, Eisenhower named them when he reminded the NSC of his administration’s major concerns, using his typically apocalyptic language: “retain our retaliatory power as a deterrent; have a good continental defense; support the military strength of our allies; ensure that friendly nations were able to make a living. … We have to do some of these basic things or cease to exist.”[29]

Notes to Chapter 10

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[1] Bipartisan Legislative Meeting, 7/25/55, AWF, Legislative meetings, Box 2, “Legislative Meetings 1955 (4) [July-August].”

[2] United States Post-Geneva Policy, 8/15/55, FRUS 1955-1957, 5: 551. Later Dulles would tell the NSC that “the loss of the cement of fear in our alliances” was one of the “unfortunate effects” of the Geneva summit: NSC, 11/21/55, AWF, NSC, Box 7, “267th Meeting of NSC, November 21, 1955.” See also Editorial Note 41, 11/21/55, FRUS 1955-1957, 19: 150-153.

[3] For a somewhat different interpretation, see Pruessen, “From Good Breakfast to Bad Supper,” 268. Dulles claimed that his strategy for the summit had been designed to weaken the enemy’s position in just this way: creating relaxation as a quid pro quo to increase pressure. Had it indeed been designed in this way, it would have been impressively clever. However there is no documentary evidence to support his retroactive claim.

[4] Memorandum of Conversation, 8/11/55, FRUS 1955-1957, 5: 546; FRUS 1955-1957, 5: 551, n.1; Eisenhower to Hazlett, 8/15/55, PDDE, 16: 1822. Dulles told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there was a very good chance that “within five years” the Soviet Union would lose control of all its satellite states: Pruessen, “Beyond the Cold War,” 80.

[5] Memorandum of Conversation, 8/11/55, FRUS 1955-1957, 5: 546; Eisenhower to Kevin McCann, 8/11/55, PDDE 16: 1816. In his own hand, Eisenhower added to the speech draft: “Whether or not such a spirit as this [of Geneva] will thrive through the combined intelligence and understanding of men, or will shrivel in the greed and ruthlessness of some, is for the future to tell”: draft of ABA Speech, 8/15/55, AWF, Speech Series, Box 14, “American Bar Association, Philadelphia, 8/24/55 (3).” The greedy, ruthless “some” were obviously the Soviet leaders.

[6] Address to American Bar Association, 8/24/55, PPP, 1955, 802-810.

[7] NYT, 8/25/55, 1. Reston reported that the new policy had been approved by the NSC, but NSC memoranda do not indicate any such discussion. Newsweek (9/5/55, 15) reported that Eisenhower found the “state of euphoria spreading across the nation…a highly unrealistic attitude.” Dulles’ policy paper was circulated to U.S. government officials and agencies on the day the speech was delivered, which was probably not a coincidence: Editorial Note 31, 8/15/55, FRUS 1955-1957, 19: 109.

[8] Jackson to Andre Laguerre, 8/23/55; Jackson to Eisenhower, 8/26/55; Eisenhower to Jackson, 8/29/55, all in C. D. Jackson Papers, Box 50, “Eisenhower, Dwight D. -- correspondence, 1955.”

[9] Time, 9/5/55, 11.

[10] Eisenhower to Dulles, 11/2/55, AWF, DDE Diary, Box 11, “DDE Diary - November, 1955 (2).” See also Eisenhower to Dulles, 11/8/55, PDDE 16: 1889.

[11] Hoover to Dulles, 11/10/55, FRUS 1955-1957, 5: 747, n.4; Memorandum, 11/14/55, AWF, DDE Diary, Box 11, “DDE Diary - November, 1955 (2).” See also Young, “The Geneva Conference of Foreign Ministers,” 273.

[12] NSC, 11/21/55, FRUS 1955-1957, 26: 703-4 and 19: 150.

[13] Pruessen, “Beyond the Cold War,” 81. See also Pruessen, “From Good Breakfast to Bad Supper,” 261. In his memoir, Eisenhower placed all the blame on the Soviet Union, which “broke all its promises.” In light of this failure, he produced yet another revisionist interpretation of the meaning of the Geneva summit: it had been a success because it had shown up “Soviet duplicity”: Mandate for Change, 631. This was just the outcome that the Quantico Panel had wanted. It had urged a strategy aimed primarily at creating an image of Soviet duplicity. Eisenhower in retirement seemed to accept the validity of a strategy he had largely ignored at the time.

[14] Young points out that the Eisenhower administration was imitating what it took to be Soviet strategy, in order to defeat that strategy. Thus both sides used the process of negotiation as an exercise in psychological warfare: “The Geneva Conference of Foreign Ministers,” 276, 291.

[15] Remarks at NATO Meeting, 12/16/57, PPP, 1957, 839. A few months before he left office, Eisenhower recalled a speech he had given to the American Bar Association on September 5, 1949, that “still represents the heart of my philosophy.” His theme had been the need for a conservative ideology of individual responsibility to stop the liberal drift toward centralized government: Eisenhower to Ralph McGill (not sent), 10/7/60, PDDE 21: 2123. See also Eisenhower to John Olin, 11/4/58, PDDE 19: 1188; Eisenhower to Edgar Eisenhower, 10/23/58, PDDE 19: 1163; Eisenhower to Benjamin Fairless, 10/6/58, PDDE 19: 1137.

[16] Eisenhower to Gabriel Hauge, 1/5/59, PDDE 19: 1278; State of the Union Address, 1/10/57, PPP, 1957, 21 (see also pre-press conference notes, 10/30, /57 AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 27, “October ’57 Staff Notes (1)”); Eisenhower to Frances Bolton, 12/14/60, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 55, “DDE Dictation December 1960”; Eisenhower to E. L. Hering, 5/29/59, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 41, “DDE Dictation May 1959.”

[17] Eisenhower to Nancy Bierce, 4/4/60, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 49, “DDE Dictation April 1960”; Eisenhower to Edgar Eisenhower, 10/5/60, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 53, “DDE Dication October 1960”; National Planning Association to Eisenhower, 10/15/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 27, “DDE Diary, October 1957”; Eisenhower to Dulles, 10/14/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 28, “October 1957 DDE Dictation”; Eisenhower to Arthur Sulzberger, 1/28/59, PDDE 19: 1320. See also Eisenhower to Hughes, 11/20/58, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 37, “DDE Dictation November 1958”; conversation with Queen Frederika, 12/9/58, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 38, “Staff Notes - Dec. 1958 (1).” In an earlier letter to Edgar, the president offered a rare confession that he treated the evils of life as inexplicable accidents. After the death of his first son, he wrote, it was “something I had to learn to accept or to go crazy”: Eisenhower to Edgar Eisenhower, 12/14/56, PDDE 17: 2444.

[18] Ambrose, Eisenhower, 405, 373; Memorandum of Conference, 10/1/60, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 53, “Staff Notes October 1960 (2)”; NSC 5707/8, FRUS 1955-1957, 19: 509; NSC 5810/1, FRUS 1958-1960, 3: 100.

[19] Brendon, Ike, 340; Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace, 259.

[20] Eisenhower to Arthur Morris, 11/21/60, PDDE 21: 2166; Eisenhower to Robert Biggs, 2/10/59, PDDE 19: 1340; Memorandum of conference, 3/13/56, FRUS 1955-1957, 19: 240; Press Conference, 5/28/58, PPP 1958, 436.

[21] Eisenhower to Clifford Roberts, 9/4/58, PDDE 19: 1090; Eisenhower to Isidor Ravdin, 9/30/58, PDDE 19: 1127; Eisenhower to Lorraine Knox, 4/2/58, PDDE 19: 815; Eisenhower to Arthur Eisenhower, 11/8/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 28, “November ’57 D.D.E. Dictation.”

[22] NSC, 2/7/56, FRUS 1955-1957, 20: 320; Memorandum of Conversation, 2/6/56, John Foster Dulles Papers, White House Memoranda Series, Box 4, “Meetings with the President, January 1956 - July 1956 (5)”; NSC, 8/16/56, FRUS 1955-1957, 19: 352.

[23] Eisenhower to Dulles, 3/21/58, PDDE 19: 790; Bipartisan legislative leaders meeting, 12/3/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 29, “Staff Notes Dec. 1957.”

[24] Allen, Eisenhower and the Mass Media, 151; Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace, 184-185.

[25] Memorandum of Conference, 3/13/56, FRUS 19: 238; diary, 3/8/56, PDDE 16: 2053; Eisenhower to Nixon, 7/14/58, quoted in Ambrose, Eisenhower, 470. See also Eisenhower to Arthur Tedder, 12/5/56, PDDE 17: 2434; Eisenhower to Winston Churchill, 11/27/56, PDDE 17: 2413, 2414 (where he said Nasser was playing “Mussolini” to Khrushchev’s “Hitler”); Eisenhower to Harold Macmillan, 7/18/58, PDDE 19:995; Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 270.

[26] Address to National Conference on the Foreign Aspects of National Security, 2/25/58, PPP, 1958, 181; Letter to Nikita Khrushchev, 7/22/58, PPP, 1958, 572; Statement by the President, 7/15/58, PPP, 1958, 556. See also Address to General Assembly, 8/13/58, PPP, 1958, 616.

[27] Diary, 7/15/58, PDDE 19: 986.

[28] “Certainly there have been no such days [without insoluble problems] since July of 1956”: Eisenhower to Lorraine Knox, 4/2/58, PDDE 19: 815.

[29] NSC, 8/16/56, FRUS 1955-1957, 19: 348.