Foreign News: Ike's Dramatic Offer & How It Came About

TRADING SECRETS

IN half a dozen simple sentences, unrehearsed and devoid of speechwriters' polish, the President of the U.S. raised the conference from the legalese in which it was beginning to flounder, and seized the world's imagination with a rough-hewn plan to free mankind of the fear of surprise attack.

The core of his plan was a one-two challenge to the Russians. He proposed that:

¶The U.S. and Russia "give to each other a complete blueprint of our military establishments, from beginning to end, from one end of our countries to the other."

¶"Next, to provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other country—we to provide you the facilities for aerial reconnaissance, where you can make all the pictures you choose and take them to your own country to study, you to provide exactly the same facilities for us, and we to make these examinations." The ifs and buts would have to wait; the details could be picked over later. What matters, said Ike, is that Russia and the U.S., with their "new and terrible weapons," could in this simple manner "convince the world that we are providing, as between ourselves, against the possibility of great surprise attack, thus lessening danger and relaxing tension."

Top Secret. It was one of those grandly simple concepts that are the stuff of history. It was also the conference's best-kept secret. At the risk of ruffling allied feelings, not even Eden and Faure had been consulted in advance. They were as surprised as the Russians and the rest of the world.

In Washington many members of Ike's own Cabinet had not been told. Defense Secretary Wilson was aware of the general outlines, but new Army Secretary Brucker admitted that it was news to him. Key members of Congress got a top-secret dispatch containing an outline of the proposal only a few hours before the President delivered it. It was handed to them personally by an Assistant Secretary of State.

The plan got its start a year ago among a group of young Air Force officers, who were bemoaning the thinness of U.S. intelligence about Russia. The airmen did not know it, but their idea soon traveled up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Eisenhower's adopting it, and forming it into a specific proposal, was a secret he shared with barely half a dozen men.

The final "I-dotting and T-crossing," said one of them, was done on the shores of Lake Geneva, with two Eisenhower military colleagues: NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. General Alfred M. Gruenther, and Chairman of the J.C.S., Admiral Arthur Radford.