In 1955, while Eisenhower was
making one last effort to rescue his ailing grand strategy, he was also
contemplating a profound change in the nature of the cold war. Just before he left for
This new front in the cold war looked like a new
opportunity to Rockefeller, Jackson, Rostow, and the others who had initiated
the “Open Skies” idea. They were not
interested in stalemate. They still
wanted to win the cold war. So the
“Spirit of Geneva,” which they inadvertently helped to create, was a bitter
reality for them. The public clamor for
detente would make it harder for them to realize their goal of victory. But if the military path to victory was
blocked, they would seek another way.
While the president lay recovering from his heart attack, they went back
to
Soon after Eisenhower returned to the Oval Office, he
received the Quantico II Report (written largely by the young Henry
Kissinger). “From beginning to end,” as
Cary Reich describes it, the report “had the apocalyptic tone of biblical
prophecy, conjuring scenarios that glistened with the fire and brimstone of
geopolitical nightmare.” It warned that
Eisenhower and Dulles embraced the Conference’s
approach and its premise: The U.S.
economy would continue to grow only if
On the economic as on the military front, though,
Eisenhower and Dulles gave these themes a very different meaning than Jackson
and his cohorts intended. After reading
the Quantico II report, the president warned a friend that the
From 1955 on, Eisenhower consistently argued for his
mutual security program in such apocalyptic language. His aim was not to eliminate the communists,
but merely to stop their advance and thus prevent catastrophic change. In March, 1956, for example, he asked
Congress to approve a major increase in mutual security funding as a weapon of
cold war. Without it, “Soviet expansionism”
would “disrupt and in the end dominate the free nations,” he warned.”[5] He was chagrined to find his request
receiving a less than enthusiastic reception.
In the following year, the president stepped up his
lobbying campaign. In his State of the
Union Address, he warned that the Soviet military danger lay only in the
future, but the economic danger was clear and present; the Soviets “could
defeat the free world regardless of our military strength.” Foreign aid would turn the recipients into
“bulwarks against communist encroachment.”[6]
His chief rhetorical strategy was to equate opponents of his program, quite
misleadingly, with old-fashioned isolationists seeking a “Fortress
Eisenhower
used the same kind of language in speeches advocating lower tariffs. Only free trade, he insisted, could provide
“adequate economic defense against Communist penetration … [the] deadly peril
impending.” Higher tariffs would allow
the Communists to lure the free nations “one by one into their spider web,”
leaving the
Any president might have used such extreme words to
foster support for an unpopular program.
But Eisenhower's private correspondence was equally alarmist. He wrote to Swede Hazlett that if the
The president used similar language with C. D.
Jackson, who certainly needed no persuading.
In April,1957, he wrote
Throughout his second term, Eisenhower was immensely
frustrated that Congress and the public resisted his calls for major increases
in mutual security. From his
perspective, this looked like one more example of the complacency he had always
decried. Since his World War II days, he
had claimed to see selfish individuals everywhere, putting their private
desires above the public good.
The facts of the matter were more complex, however. The strongest resistance to economic aid came
Eisenhower's old nemesis, the Taft Republicans.
Yet that wing of his party was no longer powerful enough to carry the
day on its own. Why did other segments
of the public join them in doubting the need for economic aid? The answer lay largely in the president's own
discourse. Publicly, he never fully
explained the many different goals he hoped to achieve with economic aid. He framed the issue overwhelmingly in the
simple terms of containing communism.
The public naturally heard his appeals as direct extensions of his calls
for vigorous military competition against the cold war foe. The differences between economic and military
competition were easily lost in this process of oversimplification.
Eisenhower's second inaugural address, in January,
1957, typified the alarmism and simplification that would plague his mutual
security program throughout his second administration.[11] “Rarely has this earth known such peril as
today. … This is no time of ease or of rest,” he warned at the outset. Although he briefly mentioned the peril of
nuclear war, the bulk of the warning concerned the newly independent and
developing nations: “In too much of the
earth there is want, discord, danger.” Americans
could not escape “this tempest of change and turmoil.”
Change was threatening, according to the speech,
because the whole world was divided:
“The divisive force is International Communism and the power that it
controls. That power, dark in purpose …
strives to capture—to exploit for its own greater power—all forces of change in
the world. … We look upon this shaken earth, and we declare our firm and fixed
purpose—the building of a peace with justice.”
Change was linked to division, multiplicity, and fear; unity, consensus,
and hope were functions of resistance to change. The only way to overcome division, he argued,
was through mutual security for all non-communist lands: “No nation can any longer be a fortress, lone
and strong and safe.”
Eisenhower kept up the same theme as he pressed for
mutual security in press conferences and speeches. He praised foreign aid as the most important
tool for “holding together the voluntary federation that must combat communism
in the world”; it would strengthen the wall of friendly nations the
Yet the president met strong resistance when he asked
Congress for aid to neutral nations. A
public accustomed to his rigid dualism could not grasp his new idea of aiding
neutrals. Privately, early in 1956 he
was already saying that “it might be not only cheaper, but a better and more
effective way of obtaining our interests” to have some nations remain
militarily neutral. He still wanted the
However, the president never clearly articulated the
goals of the “global development project,” nor its intimate links with his
apocalypse management policies. So he
let the familiar language of military competition dominate his public
discourse, language laden with images of an apocalyptic battle between good and
evil. That discursive framework made
military resistance to communism seem the only effective response to any
threat. It denied and obscured the
complex argument underlying his policy recommendations. When those recommendations often fell on deaf
public ears, Eisenhower did not realize the extent to which his own discursive
choices were at fault.
Instead, he filtered the opposing views through his
own ideology and assumed that they were motivated by selfishness and
complacency. Whenever he feared public
complacency in fending off threats to the nation, the language he used for his
rallying cries was always the military language of vigilant combat against the
enemy. Well into his second term, he was
still urging on Dulles the need to convince the American people the “we must be
vigilant, energetic, imaginative and incapable of surrender through fatigue or
lack of courage.”[14] Such language only reinforced the confusions
that provoked resistance to his policies in the first place. So he made it harder for the public to
approve, or even understand, his calls for increased economic foreign aid.
The president's frustration was compounded when many
of the economic aid programs that were initiated failed to achieve their
objectives. By focusing on public
resistance to his policies (which certainly never disappeared), he could avoid
seeing the internal weaknesses that accounted for much of the failure. Kaufman sums up the failure: “Policy experts ignored the possibility of
incompatible goals in foreign assistance.
As a result, the administration failed to bring about significant
economic and political changes or to realize its other objectives abroad. …
There is little indication that Third World governments were politically more
stable or democratic or even that they were more friendly to the
The administration's goals were, as so often,
incompatible. The overriding goal was to
protect global capitalism from the threat of communism. Therefore capitalism itself would have to be
expanded: “To develop private enterprise
in these [underdeveloped] areas had always been a part of our foreign policy,”
Eisenhower told the NSC. Public funds not
only could, but should, be used to encourage and protect private investment. To
promote private investment, projects had to aim for, and be evaluated in terms
of, increased private profits rather than public benefits. Moreover, since private capital would shy
away from areas that might move toward socialism, the U.S. had “to see that by
virtue of our military assistance program these countries have forces strong
enough to assure internal stability” — i.e., to suppress potentially socialist
movements — as well as “sufficient forces to prevent enemy infiltration of
their borders.”[16]
To assure stability, defend borders, and keep a
political tilt toward the west, aid money was funneled primarily to political
and military elites rather than democratic movements. Gaddis finds this the administration's most
significant “failure of vision”:
“Because the administration had so little faith in the ability of
non-communist nationalism to sustain itself, it resorted to frantic and
overbearing attempts to shore it up, in the process appearing to violate the
very principles of sovereignty and self-reliance it was trying to
preserve.” Challenged on this point at a
press conference, though, Eisenhower was ready with an explanation: “You must put your eye on the main danger. The main danger today is imperialist
communism … not from a local man who is exercising power, maybe even in
dictatorial fashion.” This answer left
no doubt that the cumulative result of the administration's efforts was also
its intention: to sustain the status
quo, not to promote structural change.[17]
As Eisenhower wrote to former vice-president Henry
Wallace,
As the second term progressed, the domestic public was
not nearly as deaf to the president's pleas as he claimed. Congress came to understand his arguments,
and often approved his requests, for economic foreign aid. By the end of his second term, the House
Foreign Affairs Committee was actually budgeting more than the administration
requested for foreign economic aid.[19] Yet Eisenhower remained frustrated, because what
he wanted most was
Indirectly, this was a criticism of apocalypse
management. “What many congressmen
protested most,” as Kaufman explains, was “the program’s lack of any guiding
concept other than the negative one of stopping the spread of communism, and
thus its continued emphasis on military rather than economic assistance.”[20] So the great debate of his second term was
not about whether to support mutual security, nor about whether the economic
approach to mutual security was valuable.
Rather, the question was how to distribute the tax dollars that went for
military purposes: How much should go to
the
The president disagreed. “The effort should not be to
balance exactly each Soviet capability,” he argued. The
Cost was still uppermost in Eisenhower's mind. The New Look, which was supposed to keep
military spending in check, was having quite the opposite effect. The military services’ competition for new
nuclear weapons and delivery systems kept the military budget spiraling upward.[22] The president hoped
to solve that problem by paying other nations to do the fighting. It should have been “the easiest
proposition to sell the American people that you could hire Korean soldiers for
less than you could maintain an American soldier in
Throughout his second term, Eisenhower continued to
warn that the
Eisenhower could never understand why Congress and the
public insisted on raising the
The best way to satisfy both of these demands was to
depict the cold war as a series of contests or races, pitting the
Eisenhower understood this. He “stressed the importance of picking out the
phases of activity in which we should undertake to compete with the Soviets,
and to beat them. We should not try to
excel in everything. He added that
psychological as well as technical considerations are important – at times
appearances are as significant as realities, if not more so.” To sell his
program to the public, he often reduced the cold war to a head-to-head military
battle between the superpowers. Since
nuclear weapons were “almost certain” to be used “in any future global thing,”
he explained, “we would be foolish indeed to be behind anybody else.” He approved a wide variety of missile
development projects, because of the “large psychological factor” if the
Soviets developed missiles first. He
also embraced the space race as an arena of contest for psychological reasons.[25]
By promoting mutual security in the same language of
cold war contest, the president ended up inadvertently weakening his own case
and fostering the opposition that angered him so much. In the early part of his second term, there
was significant resistance to purely economic aid. He could not counter it effectively, because
his language of military confrontation did not fit the field of economic
competition. There were no simple
quantitative measures to say what would count as victory, nor to answer the
crucial question: “Who is ahead?”
Moreover, the public did not see the races intertwined
in the complex ways that Eisenhower took for granted.[26] For him, the ends and means were inseparable;
for most of the people he led, they were eminently separable. They could easily
accept at face value some of the threats the president described, while
remaining skeptical about others. They
accepted his goal but felt free to disagree about the means he was using to
achieve that goal.
When the various perils were treated as separate and
distinct, it was possible, and perhaps inevitable, to prioritize them. Some races became more important than
others. Most people had no doubt that
the preeminent race was the most easily quantified one: the arms race. It was easy enough to assume that the best
defense against every threat was a bigger, better, more technologically
advanced military establishment. This
was certainly a message that the administration had been repeating over and
over again since January, 1953. However,
traditions of unilateralism and trust in products “made in
Eisenhower could never see how much he himself was to
blame for resistance to his policies on the military budget and foreign
military aid. Instead of searching for
new language to explain new policies, he persisted in framing everything within
the apocalypse management paradigm, hoping as always to raise public fear yet
control it at the optimal level. Craig
Allen observes that “fear management was a backward public relations strategy,
but one Eisenhower was forced to used repeatedly in his second term. Sputnik was not the only reason.”[27] During his second term, there were indeed
many crises, not only abroad but also domestically (race relations and economic
cycles), that evoked emotions he hoped to manage. But when it came to military spending,
Sputnik was a crucial turning point.
After the Soviet Union launched the first
earth-orbiting satellite, on October 4, 1957, the public clamor for more
military spending rose to a level Eisenhower was totally unprepared for—and
unprepared to accept. A few days after
the Sputnik launch he reviewed his “broad philosophy” with aides: “If the budget is too high, inflation occurs,
which in effect cuts down the value of the dollar so that nothing is gained and
the process is self-defeating.” Yet he
could not get this message across to the public. Since he did not understand
how much Sputnik had frightened the public, he never offered the public enough reassurance
to make his own view seem reasonable.[28]
The president wanted
to dismiss the panic as political maneuvering.
Fear could work in the Democrats’ favor, as they attacked the
administration for being “weak” on national security. The Pentagon and military-industrial forces,
who were constantly lobbying for higher military budgets, were making an
alliance of convenience with the Democrats.
However, the deepest root of the fear lay in the nearly five years of
frightening cold war rhetoric purveyed by the president and his administration.
The president had taught the nation to
see the “free world” as an island protected by a dike that might spring a leak
at any time. To millions of Americans,
Sputnik seemed to pierce the dike, and the hole had to be filled immediately.[29]
A few weeks later, the Sputnik panic was reinforced by
news stories about a frightening report on inadequate
When the
president received the Gaither report, he reminded its authors that the
inflation triggered by massive military spending would discourage investment;
so would the higher taxes needed for higher federal budgets: “To retain a free
enterprise system we must retain incentives. … The group’s study had not
embraced these complications. This to
his mind was the most difficult problem.”
As always, Eisenhower linked this problem to the need for a “long
haul.” The
The president also told the Gaither Committee what he
had told so many others: “We must
educate our people so they will support what is required. The difficult thing is that, in our
democracies, we can apparently only do this with crisis, and we do not think
government by crisis is the right process.
The crux is, therefore, how to keep up interest and support without
hysteria.” Just two weeks after the
first Sputnik launch, while he grappled every day with the public sense of
panic, he wrote privately: “The public
has not become sufficiently conscious of the gravity of the growing Soviet
capabilities.”[32]
This seemed to be his foremost concern as he prepared his public statements. In major addresses following the Sputnik launch, while he claimed to be trying to ease the panic, he used words that were bound to increase it. Just a month after Sputnik he equating Khrushchev with Hitler and warned the nation: “It is entirely possible that in the years ahead we could fall behind.” In the State of the Union address for 1958, he worried aloud whether the public had the will to build a military “shield behind which the patient constructive work of peace can go on.” A few months later he told a press conference that “we have got to be ready to pay those defense costs for the next 40 – 50 years.”[33]
“The menace of communist imperialism” had “almost
unlimited power,” he warned the Republican National Committee. “Our national survival and human liberty are
at stake.” “Peace, national safety—survival
itself—demand of
In notes for his 1959 State of the Union address, Eisenhower
wrote revealingly: “Our security
establishments, while built against the possibility of emergency or to prevent
emergency, are still as of today part of our daily life.” Daily life, he implied, had become a
permanent state of emergency. In the
address itself he muted the point: “The
threat we face is not sporadic or dated: It is continuous.” He called for limits on military spending,
yet at the same time he endorsed “the never-ending replacement of older weapons
with new ones.” The president’s response
to Sputnik was, as so often, to call for two quite opposite courses of action
at the same time.[35]
Conflicting claims of domestic and international
audiences further complicated the problem.
The administration had steered NATO to reliance on nuclear weapons by
promising to use them to deter, not to fight a war. The allies would feel reassured only if the administration’s
policies seemed to carry out this promise.
Yet the administration's domestic rhetoric promised overwhelming
Eisenhower ran into a similar dilemma when Khrushchev
threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with
Despite his constant complaints, Eisenhower did accept
a higher
Roman concludes that these military “policy outcomes
do not appear to be ‘resultants’ of a bargaining process but rather were a
conscious choice made by President Eisenhower.”
His most decisive choice was to retain the New Look strategies, which
depended on overwhelming military superiority.
In 1957, when some in Congress called for cutting the military budget,
he warned Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn that cuts “would endanger our
country and the peace of the world.” If
a choice had to be made between risking too much or too little spending, he
would opt for risking too much. If a
choice had to be made between too much public zeal for military spending and
too much public complacency, he would opt for zeal.[39]
Eisenhower explained to his Cabinet that his choice
was required psychologically, even if not militarily: “We just have to do with a little less
buttering and more gunning … to win the propaganda battle. … We have forgotten
some of the techniques of presentation.”
He told Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy that he was thinking about
“what is the figure that will create confidence. … The President said that he
thought that about two-thirds of the supplementary funds are more to stabilize
public opinion than to meet real need for acceleration.”[40] There were other kinds of confidence to
consider, too. He told McElroy that the
“feeling of greater confidence in the security sphere might go over into
economic confidence as well,” because investors would trust that their returns
would not be eaten up by inflation. Then
there was the confidence that allies placed in the
For all these reasons, Eisenhower's desire to limit
the military budget ran into direct conflict with the military and emotion
management requirements of the New Look.
Trapped between his crusading anticommunism and his attraction to
Humphrey’s brand of fiscal conservatism, he could not take a clear stand. In this context Emmet Hughes called him “a
man divided against himself.” But the
president ended up looking inconsistent because he stuck consistently to his
strategy of apocalypse management. From
within this paradigm, it was not only logical but necessary to seek a way to
stave off both communism and capitalist insolvency. Eisenhower never expressed doubt that there
was a perfect budget figure that would solve his problems. He simply never found that perfect figure,
because apocalypse management was a strategic vision divided against itself,
calling for both more and less military expenditure at the same time.[42]
The resulting confusion reinforced the public’s sense
of instability, which the president identified as the nation’s overriding problem. By the late 1950s, the public’s readiness to
fear destabilizing change as a harbinger of apocalypse proved the power of the
apocalypse management paradigm. There
was something familiar, even paradoxically reassuring, about the idea that new
developments were creating new, unpredictable emergencies for the
This was the underlying message of Eisenhower’s
Farewell Address. The address is usually
remembered for its warning “against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex … the
conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry
… felt in every city, every Statehouse,
every office of the Federal government.”
Few who quote these words go on to quote the next words: “We recognize the imperative need for this
development. … Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action.”” Taken in the context of the entire speech,
the famous warning becomes compelling evidence that Eisenhower held on to the
contradictory goals of apocalypse management to his last day in office.[43]
His discursive frame was the old, familiar, stark
dualism.[44] Although the president urged Americans to be
“strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace
with justice,” that goal was still only an eschatological horizon. The danger of the communist foe, “a community
of dreadful fear and hate[,] … promises to be of indefinite duration.” So actual policy and daily life had to focus
fully on the “prolonged and complex struggle” to prevent dangerous change. Eisenhower confessed that he lay down his
responsibilities in the area of disarmament “with a definite sense of
disappointment.” Yet he implicitly
denied any responsibility for the failure by contrasting the purity of his
motives with the motives of the true culprit:
“a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in
purpose, and insidious in method. … I wish I could say tonight that a lasting
peace is in sight. Happily, I can say
that war has been avoided.”
The address never suggested that the
military-industrial complex, and the nuclear weaponry it produced, were
intrinsically evil. On the contrary, it
clearly implied, they were good because they served to stave off the most
threatening evils for an indefinitely long future. They would be evil only if they were used in
a catastrophic war or grew expensive enough to drag down the capitalist
economy. The only goals of practical
importance were the various ways to stave off war, communism, and economic
collapse.[45]
Eisenhower left office as he had entered it, presenting himself as a lone voice discerning and crying out the dangers that beset an unwary, because all too selfish, nation: “We must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.” To the end of his presidency, the central issue remained the spiritual struggle between selfish greed and self-disciplined sacrifice. If selfishness won out, democracy would die and the world would be engulfed in “dreadful fear and hate.” On the other hand, if the military-industrial complex avoided the temptations of greed, it would play a vital role in managing apocalyptic threats indefinitely. In his typical fashion, though, the president embedded his hopeful vision in words so alarming that they were bound to undermine the sense of national security he aimed to enhance.
Notes to Chapter 11
[1] NSC, 6/30/55, FRUS 1955-1957, 20: 145, 152. Dulles agreed with Eisenhower on the new arena of struggle: “It is going to be very difficult to stop Communism in much of the world if we cannot in some way duplicate the intensive Communist effort to raise productivity standards”: Dulles to C. D. Jackson, 8/24/54, quoted in Brands, Cold Warriors, 23 (see also ibid., 130-131).
[2] Reich, Rockefeller, 626.
[3] See Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower, 304-309; Dockrill, Eisenhower's New-Look, 169.
[4] Eisenhower to Lewis Douglas, 1/2/0/56, PDDE 16 :1967; Eisenhower to Dulles, 12/5/55, PDDE 16: 1921-1922.
[5] Special Message to Congress on the Mutual Security Program, 3/19/56, quoted in Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 67.
[6]
State of the
[7] State of the Union Address, 1959, PPP, 1959, 8; Remarks to League of Women Voters, 5/1/57, PPP, 1957, 319; Special Message to Congress on the Mutual Security Program, 2/19/58, PPP, 1958, 160; Special Message to Congress on the Situation in the Middle East, 1/5/57, PPP, 1957, 25; Radio and TV address on the Mutual Security, 5/21/57, PPP 1957, 386-387.
[8] Address to National Conference on International Trade Policy, 3/27/58, PPP, 1958, 244, 248, 250; Special Message to Congress on the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Program, 1/30/58, quoted in Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 123. See also, e.g., Remarks to the Advertising Council, 5/6/58, PPP, 1958, 377; Address at a Dinner Sponsored by the Committee for International Economic Growth and the Committee to Strengthen the Frontiers of Freedom, 1/2/60, cited in Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 203.
[9]
Eisenhower to Hazlett, 8/3/56, PDDE 17:
2228; Memorandum of Conference, 5/21/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, box 24, “May
’57 Miscellaneous (2)”; Eisenhower to Humphrey, 3/27/57, AWF, DDE Diaries
Series,
[10]
Eisenhower to C. D. Jackson, 4/30/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series,
[11] The text is in PPP, 1957, .
[12] Press Conference, 8/21/57, PPP, 1957, 621; Press Conference, 3/13/57, PPP, 1957, 197; Press Conference, 5/8/57, PPP, 1957, 328; Remarks to the Governors of International Financial Institutions, 9/23/57, PPP, 1957, 685.
[13] Memorandum of Conference, 3/13/56, FRUS 1955-1957, 19: 239; NSC, 2/27/56, FRUS 1955-1957, 19: 202.
[14]
Eisenhower to Dulles, 3/26/58, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 31, “DDE Dictation
March 1958.” Dulles agreed with the
president. That same month, he urged a
SEATO conference to make “our peoples feel a very real sense of danger. …That,
and that alone, is the source of the authority which we require to make
ourselves safe and secure”: Lyon, Eisenhower, 819. See also, e.g., Eisenhower to Frank Altschul,
10/25/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series,
[15] Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 10.
[16] NSC, 2/27/56, FRUS 1955-1957, 19: 216; NSC, 1/3/57, FRUS 1955-1957, 19: 397.
[17] Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 182; Press Conference, 7/2/58, PPP, 1958, 515.
[18] Eisenhower to Henry Wallace, 12/1/56, PDDE 17: 2431.
[19] Kaufman, Trade and Aid, 170.
[20] Ibid., 71. See also ibid., 135, 140, 168, 170, 175, and Dockrill, Eisenhower's New-Look, 175, 225.
[21] NSC, 10/30/58, FRUS 1958-1960, 3:145 (see also, e.g., Legislative Leadership Meeting, 2/17/59, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 39, “Staff Notes February 1959 (2)”); State of the Union Address, 1/9/59, PPP, 1959, 8; phone call to Senator Hayden, 8/29/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 26, “August 1957 – Telephone Calls”; Memorandum of Conference, 11/18/59 (dated 1/20/60), AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 45 “Staff Notes Nov. 1959 (2).”
[22] See Herken, Counsels of War, 126; Brands, “Age of Vulnerability,” 988.
[23]
Phone call to Secretary Humphrey, 8/20/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series,
[24]
NSC, 2/4/60, quoted in Ambrose, Eisenhower,
563; NSC, 5/1/58, quoted in
[25]; Memorandum of Conference, 2/4/58, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 30, “Staff Notes February 1958”; Press Conference, 6/5/57, PPP, 1957, 435. On the space race, see Osgood, Total Cold War, chapter 8.
[26] On Eisenhower's failure to convey to the public of the logic underlying his policies, see Bose and Greenstein, “The Hidden Hand vs. the Bully Pulpit.”
[27] Allen, Eisenhower and the Mass Media, 152.
[28] Memorandum of Conference, 10/31/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 27 “October ’57 Staff Notes (1).” On Eisenhower underestimating public fear, see, e.g., Snead, The Gaither Committee, 12; Bundy, Danger and Survival, 34.
[29] See Brands, “The Age of Vulnerability,” 989; Roman, Eisenhower and Missile Gap, 148; Henry, “Eisenhower and Sputnik”; and the discussion of “moral panic” in Ungar, The Rise and Fall of Nuclearism. Roman (130) notes that Eisenhower’s response to Sputnik backfired politically because his “attempts to reassure the public seemed only to confirm the Democratic charges” that the administration was not spending enough on the military.
[30] Washington Post, 12/20/57, quoted in Bundy, Danger and Survival, 335. See Ambrose, Eisenhower, 434; Snead, The Gaither Committee, 180.
[31] Memorandum of Conference, 11/6/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 28, “November 1957 Staff Notes”; NSC, 12/8/60, FRUS 1958-1960, 3: 506; Memorandum of Conference, 11/16/59, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 45, “Staff Notes Nov. 1959 (3).” See also Eisenhower to Dulles phone call, 3/26/58, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 31 “Telephone Calls March 1958” (“blood, sweat and tears were necessary for the next 40 years”); NSC, 12/6/58, FRUS 1958-1960, 3:163.
[32] Memorandum of Conference, 11/6/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 28, “November 1957 Staff Notes”; Eisenhower to Frank Altschul, 10/25/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 27, “DDE Diary, October 1957.”
[33] Radio and TV address on “Our Future Security,” 11/13/57, PPP, 1957, 809; Radio and TV address on Science in National Security, PPP, 1957, 794; State of the Union Address, 1/9/58, PPP, 1958, 3; Press Conference, 4/23/58, PPP, 1958, 338.
[34]
Address to Republican National Committee Dinner, 5/6/58, PPP, 1958, 379;
Address to American Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/17/58, PPP, 1958, 326;
Remarks to
[35] Notes on state of union, 12/8/58, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 38, “Staff Notes December 1958 (2)”; State of the Union Address, 1/9/59, PPP, 1959, 8.
[36] NSC, 12/12/57, quoted in Wenger, Living With Peril, 165.
[37] Ambrose, Eisenhower, 516, 517, 555, 562.
[38] Eisenhower to Dulles, 10/14/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 28, “October 1957 DDE Dictation”; Snead, The Gaither Committee, 154. Snead (160) points out that “Eisenhower eventually accepted recommendations from his advisers to create a missile force substantially larger than the one proposed by the Gaither committee.” See also Rosenberg, “Origins of Overkill,” 173; Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, 193.
[39] Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, 204; Snead, The Gaither Committee, 77. Several of Eisenhower's biographers lament the result. Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower, 299: “One of the more bitter ironies of our recent history is the extent to which Eisenhower's presidency would help to create and to promote the very military-industrial complex he sincerely deplored”; Brands, “Age of Vulnerability,” 988: “More than any administration before or after, Eisenhower's promoted the growth of the military-industrial complex he decried”; Lyon, Eisenhower, 810: “He turned his back upon school and hospital construction, welfare, urban development, housing, and other civil needs, but he approved a peacetime record for spending on military hardware at home and military assistance abroad.”
[40]
Cabinet meeting, 10/18/57, quoted in Brendon, Ike, 348; Memorandum of Conference 12/5/57, AWF, DDE Diaries
Series,
[41] Memorandum of Conference 12/5/57, AWF, DDE Diaries Series, Box 29, “Staff Notes Dec. 1957”; Wenger, Living With Peril, 146.
[42] Hughes, Ordeal of Power, 238. See Zamouras, “Eisenhower's Foreign Economic Policy,” 182.
[43] Farewell Address, 1/17/61, PPP, 1960-1961,1035-1040.
[44] The president's brother Milton called the speech “about as 100% Eisenhower as you can get”: Melanson, “The Foundations of Eisenhower's Foreign Policy,” 59.
[45] See Ivie, “Eisenhower as Cold Warrior,” 20.