1959
Dwight D. Eisenhower
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Jan. 4, 1960
"I saw close at hand the faces of millions..." Dwight Eisenhower in his
homecoming speech.
The faces of people reflected the biggest news about the world in 1959.
The faces belonged to the thousands of thousands who massed along the
streets of Ankara, Karachi, Kabul and New Delhi, of Athens, Madrid and
Casablanca. The faces were of all shapes and shades. But as they turned toward
the smiling, pink-cheeked man who had come among them, they held in common a
look—a look of thirsting for the good things that the modern world seemed to
promise.
That thirsting, as many of their slogans and leaders made clear, was less
for the things themselves than for the kind of life where the good things could
be attained. In 1959, after years of hostile Communist propaganda, spectacular
Russian successes in space, threats of missiles and atomic war, the throngs of
Europe, Asia and Africa cast a durable vote for freedom and liberty. The faces
were turned to the U.S. and to the man who had become the nation's image in one
of the grand plebiscites of history—Dwight David Eisenhower, President of the
U.S. and Man of the Year.
Names Making News. Behind Eisenhower's in 1959 came other names familiar
to the cold war, and the news they made was dramatic evidence of freedom's
vital toughness on many fronts. Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan,
challenger for Man of the Year, led his Conservative Party to a crushing third
straight election victory, an unprecedented feat; in booming Britain his
triumph buried the socialist dogma of the 59-year- old Labor Party as an
effective political force. Under Konrad Adenauer, Man of the Year in 1953, the
resurgent economic strength of free Germany posed such intolerable comparisons
that Communism tripped from threat to entreaty in its attempt to reduce German
influence. France's Charles de Gaulle, Man of the Year in 1958, set himself to
the task of restoring French pride, tried to bind up the debilitating wounds of
Algeria, chipped away at NATO's supranational foundations; but the problems
raised by De Gaulle's France were at least and at last those of national
purpose, not political paralysis. Just a hot breath away from the Red Chinese
dragon, Japan's premier Nobusuke Kishi, Man of the Year in the Far East, opted
for conservatism, free enterprise and closer ties with the U.S., won a thumping
victory in elections for the upper house of the Diet, routed Socialists who
campaigned for an alliance with Peking and Moscow.
Of all foreign leaders the one who did most to prove freedom strong—by
confronting it with its sternest tests—was the Soviet Union's Nikita
Khrushchev. In 1957 Khrushchev's Sputniks made him Man of the Year. In 1959 he
scored even greater successes in space; on Jan. 2 the U.S.S.R. sent a 3,245-
lb. package into sun orbit as the first man-made planet; eight months later, a
Soviet rocket smacked the face of the moon and on Oct. 4, two years to the day
after Sputnik I, the Russians launched a rocket that passed around and
photographed the moon's hidden far side.
Khrushchev's space challenge was underrated from the beginning by the
U.S.—and it still is. But the very show of technical prowess helped prove how
the West's pundits had underrated the appeal of independence and liberty in the
so- called battle for men's minds. To millions of the world's uncommitted
peoples, Communism's ability to master space was less impressive than its
inability to master its own nature—and the symbol of Communism in 1959 was not
that of Red rockets reaching for stars, but of Red China reaching brutally into
Tibet and India.
Against that abhorrent spectacle, and the memories of Hungary and other
Communist conquests, the U.S. example of liberty under law, of self-restraint
imposed by what Jefferson called "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,"
of willingness to use strength to protect independence stood out as powerful
assets. Dwight Eisenhower has been shaped by those principles—and in 1959,
carrying a message of peace with freedom to three far continents, he
represented them to the world as could no one else.
"We Can Trust Him." Last week, returned from his journey to Europe, Asia
and Africa, Eisenhower towered as the world's best-known, best-liked citizen.
His trip had been one of breathtaking excitement, high point of a bold venture
into personal diplomacy. How that venture came about and developed was one of
the year's most fascinating behind-the-scenes stories. But its real meaning lay
in an understanding of Ike the Man and Eisenhower the President.
At 60, closing out the seventh year of a presidency marked by three major
illnesses, Dwight Eisenhower had never looked better. His color was high, his
face firm (a slight puffiness around the eyes was the most visible sign of his
age), and there was spring to his step (he sometimes startled visitors by
bounding up stairs two at a time). On his trip he stood bareheaded in the
Italian rain (it was just after greeting the King of Morocco in foul Washington
weather that he suffered a stroke in 1957), stood for more than 100 miles while
riding through the streets of eleven countries, came out of it all with less
apparent fatigue than most of those who accompanied him.
His popularity, as marked last week by his Gallup rating, is a U.S.
phenomenon. Anyone seeking specific reasons why the people like Ike will get
answers no more complicated than "he's a good (or decent, or honest) man," or
"we can trust him," or "he does his best." But Dwight Eisenhower is not that
simply explained, and there are contradictions in his public image and private
personality. Although he can tie words into knots ("I do say this: I may have,
but I am not saying I didn't, but I don't believe I have. I do say this...") he
has been vastly successful in making himself understood. His warm grin is known
around the earth, but in private his temper can flare with crackling,
barracks-room fluency. He seems boundlessly friendly and outgiving, but White
House insiders have long since grown used to having him pass in the halls
without a nod or a word. He has seen and been seen by more crowds than any
other man of his time, but in fact he dislikes crowds and is uncomfortable with
them.
"The Glory of America." Ike's faults are those that his countrymen can
share and understand, and in his virtues he is more than anything else a
repository of traditional U.S. values derived from his boyhood in Abilene,
Kans., instilled in him by his fundamentalist parents, drilled into him at West
Point, tempered by wartime command, applied to the awesome job of the
presidency and expanded to meet the challenges of the cold war.
Returning to Abilene in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower spoke of his mother and
father. "They were frugal," he said, "possibly of necessity, because I have
found out in later years that we were very poor. But the glory of America is
that we didn't know it then." In a 1959 speech, he again drew on his memories,
going back to his days as an Army subaltern, newly married to Mamie Geneva
Doud, when he scrimped to buy a tiny insurance policy. "Well," he said, "I gave
up smoking readymade cigarettes and went to Bull Durham and the papers. (Back
on three packs a day of readymades when he was Army Chief of Staff, Ike
abruptly gave up smoking in 1947, told a friend his method was simple: "Just
don't feel sorry for yourself.") I had to make a great many sacrifices...Yet I
still think of the fun we had in working for our own future."
Fiscal responsibility was more than a nostalgic, negative notion with Ike.
He saw it as the basis of a positive philosophy of government. Against the
background of the New and Fair Deals, with the momentum toward more Government
spending and control, Ike's philosophy was as radical as it was conservative.
He explained it best in a little-noticed 1959 speech to representatives of the
National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, gathered in Washington to
holler it up for continued Government subsidy of rural electrification.
"Government, at all levels, has certain clear obligations to you and me,"
said he to a hostile audience. "It owes us security from external attack,
protection of our person and property, protection in the exercise of all the
individual rights guaranteed by our Constitution." Government may also help out
"particular groups" with special aid or subsidy. But the reason for help or
subsidy "is not to give one group of citizens special privilege or undeserved
advantage. Rather it is to see that equality of opportunity is not withheld
from the citizen through no fault of his own." The groups for which the
Government has made special provision must "use that help responsibly and
constructively." The aim should be to rise as swiftly as possible above public
aid and "re-establish speedily our own equality of opportunity, and so share
proportionally in the productivity of our economy."
The Essential Cut. Taking his oath of office in 1953, Eisenhower moved
swiftly to liberate the U.S. economy from the obsolete wartime controls that
still hobbled it. Fair Deal economists issued dark warnings, but the economy
whooshed off toward new highs. The doom criers were again out full force in the
worrisome days of Recession Year 1958 when Eisenhower refused to use
Government's heavy thumb for pushing the panacea buttons of subsidy and deficit
spending.
Also to Eisenhower, a sound U.S. economy (I know what I am for. I am for a
sound dollar") was the bedrock for construction of a free-world economic
system. "Dollars and security," said Ike, "are not separable." Again: "I say
that a balanced budget in the long run is a vital part of national security."
And again: "We not only have to be strong today but for 50 years, and if we
become reckless in the economic field, we will no longer find ourselves with
the means to protect ourselves."
In that cause, Dwight Eisenhower fought one of his hardest and most
successful battles in 1959. In January, when he formally announced his
determination to balance the budget at $77 billion, the lopsided Democratic
congressional majority hooted and howled. Indeed, it seemed all but impossible
at a time when the recession and the challenge of the U.S.S.R.'s Sputniks had
ballooned the deficit to some $12 billion.
But Ike rammed across his point. He scolded his Cabinet members (Defense
Secretary Neil McElroy had airily announced that military spending would have
to go up by about $2 billion; he soon got the word from his boss), wrote
personal letters to political, business and civic leaders around the nation,
urged his cause in press conferences and on radio and television, worked
closely with Republican congressional leaders, and used his veto and the threat
of his veto against lollygagging money bills. At year's end a balanced budget
was in jeopardy only because of the steel strike. Eisenhower had performed the
political miracle of making economy popular. Grinned a White House staffer:
"When those Congressmen come back in January, they're going to be so anxious to
find something to cut that they'll cut their own wrists if necessary."
Above and Beyond. The victory for a sound U.S. economy meant not only a
U.S. that could continue to meet its obligations of free-world leadership; it
served as a spring board for vast creative forces. With postwar U.S. help the
industrial nations of the West had built their economies to the point where
they could begin to tear down the trade barriers that are always a sign of
weakness. They could start to share with the U.S. in the immense and compelling
job of aiding the world's underdeveloped lands. Those lands, with examples of
successful free enterprise ranging from West Germany to Japan, were beginning
to shuck off their socialist notions of economic order by government decree.
Thus the tooling of U.S. fiscal responsibility to the facts of economic life
set off by 1959 a revolution in dynamic ideas and plans that held out to the
humblest of peoples the promise of a better life.
In recognition of that promise—vague, unstated but everywhere in the
air—came the tumults that met the President of the U.S. as he traveled among
the masses in 1959's last month. Into that promise the U.S., as represented by
Eisenhower, breathed the hope that economic gain could be achieved in
people—and enjoyed outside political bondage.
One Last Chance. Dwight Eisenhower first ran for President with the idea
that he might help bring the world closer to peace. In his first term he
demonstrated in the Strait of Formosa that the U.S. would stand staunchly
against aggression; he demonstrated in the Suez crisis that the U.S. would
resist aggression by its friends as well as its enemies, that peace was
meaningless without justice. In 1956, he decided to run for re-election despite
two major illnesses and the possibility that a constitutional ban against a
third term might dilute his effectiveness (in the event, the 22nd Amendment
strengthened Eisenhower's hand; with no political future he could plainly prove
that he acted in the national interest, not out of personal ambition). He gave
his reason for seeking re-election to a small group of friends: "I want to
advance our chances for world people, if only by a little, maybe only a few
feet."
At first his second term seemed only to bring more cold war crises. The
President sent U.S. troops to Lebanon, again deployed U.S. warships in Formosa
Strait. Then, on Nov. 27, 1958, Russia's Khrushchev handed the Western allies
an ultimatum to get our of Berlin.
Increasingly, as he saw the calendar running out on him, President
Eisenhower spoke to friends of wanting "one last chance" to move toward peace.
But he was determined not to be forced to a summit conference by the club
Khrushchev held over Berlin. "We are not going to give one single inch in the
preservation of our rights," he said. "There can be no negotiation on this
particular point."
Yet might not the creative energy of freedom be used to seize the
initiative? Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sought the
answer in long, intensely personal talks (often a sleepless President picked up
his bedside phone in the middle of the night to call a sleepless Dulles)—and
the idea of Ike's exchanging visits with Khrushchev came up. "We began to work
on this thing," Eisenhower recalled months later," and I gave the subject to
two or three of my trusted associates in the State Department and said `Now
let's try to tote up the balance.'"
Explosive events. Dulles saw merit in the proposal for an
Eisenhower-Khrushchev exchange, but first he wanted to find out if some sort of
progress could be made at a U.S. sponsored meeting of the Big Four foreign
ministers at Geneva. The U.S. was represented at that conference by a new
Secretary of State, Christian Herter, for in February Foster Dulles, gallant
warrior, entered Walter Reed Army Hospital with a recurrence of cancer. And on
May 24, 1959, the colleague Ike had trusted beyond any other died in his sleep.
Predictably, inevitably, the foreign ministers' conference ended in
failure. Recalls a top State Department official: "The President was very
firmly committed not to go to a summit meeting as long as he was forced to go
under threat, or as long as there was no prospect that a summit meeting would
show some results. He thought it over—and he decided to take the initiative."
From that decision stemmed the explosive series of events by which 1959
would be long remembered—and which made Eisenhower the Man of the Year. On the
morning of July 11, President Eisenhower drafted a formal proposal that
Khrushchev visit the U.S. and suggested that the President travel to the Soviet
Union. The letter was flown to New York by U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of State
Robert Murphy and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Foy Kohler, placed in the
hands of the Soviet Union's First Deputy Premier Frol Kozlov, about to return
to Russia after a U.S. tour. It was kept tightly secret for almost a month;
Vice President Nixon was informed of the plan only the day before his July
departure for the Soviet Union; Milton Eisenhower, accompanying Nixon, was not
told at all. Ike's invitation and Khrushchev's acceptance crashed into world
headlines on Aug. 3.
More Than Personal. To prepare for the confrontation with his tough clever
cold-war adversary, Eisenhower flew to Europe in late August, there to consult
and coordinate plans with U.S. allies, In Germany, the land overrun by his
Allied armies, in England, and in Paris, the city he had liberated, the swell
of popular emotion brought a mist to the old soldier's eyes.
The tribute was more than personal. When Ike left Europe, he knew that it
was in his capacity as the President of the U.S., in his symbolizing of U.S.
prestige and principles, that he bore with him the free world's faith.
Supported by that knowledge, Eisenhower was ready for Khrushchev.
Khrushchev came in September, and his visit is recalled in kaleidoscopic
flash back—of Khrushchev baronially breathing the morning air in front of
Blair House; of Khrushchev bulling his way across the U.S., now boasting of
Russian military might and space achievement, now uttering dulcet promises of
peace and friendship; of Khrushchev threatening to pick up his marbles and go
home when denied a chance to go to Southern California's Disneyland; of
Khrushchev falling in love with San Francisco; and of Khrushchev roaring in
merriment while an Iowa farmer shied ensilage at the newsmen who had crowded
too close.
Closeup View. But it was at Camp David, the presidential retreat on a
Maryland mountaintop, that Khrushchev's visit came into focus with its greatest
meaning to 1959. At Camp David, under a canopy of oak leaves, the President of
the U.S. and the Premier of the U.S.S.R. walked and talked along winding gravel
paths, lived together for three days in Ike's grey, batten- board Aspen Lodge.
From their conversations came only one tangible result: Khrushchev agreed
to lift his Berlin ultimatum. But more important was the personal, closeup view
that Ike got of Khrushchev.
President Eisenhower had already heard from such travelers to the Soviet
Union as Nixon, his brother Milton and democrats Adlai Stevenson and Huburt
Humphrey that the Russian people seemed desirous of peace. He was told that
they stubbornly held to a fund of friendship for the U.S. that had not been
washed out by 14 years of hostile propaganda, that they were pushing their own
government for more consumer goods and even for a measure of freedom.
Now, at Camp David, Khrushchev seemed to reflect those drives. He
impressed Eisenhower as a leader extremely anxious to win the respect and
approval of his own people, as one who might wish to divert armament spending
to consumer production for internal political reasons, as one almost
pathetically eager to be accepted into the society of legitimate statesmen.
When showing off before Soviet underlings as Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko and
Ambassador to the U.S. "Smiling Mike" Menshikov. Khrushchev was full of
bluster; in his private meetings with Ike he spoke quietly and seemed ready to
do business.
At Camp David then, Eisenhower came to believe that formal negotiations
with Khrushchev could be more than an exercise in thumb-sucking,
tongue-twisting futility. After Camp David, Ike was willing as never before to
go to the summit.
In fact he was eager. Plans were made for an October summit conference,
but France's De Gaulle scuttled the schedule. The Western allies agreed to a
December meeting of the Western leaders in Paris—and in that, Ike saw and
seized upon a historic opportunity to display the dynamics of freedom before
the world.
"A Great Awakening." He had long wanted to visit India. Now he decided
that on the way to Paris he would go not only to India but would also sweep the
southern tiers of Asia and Europe, where ancient civilizations stood alike with
infant nations in constant, poverty-torn struggle to improve their lot.
From Rome to Ankara to Karachi to Kabul journeyed the President of the
U.S., and to Tehran, Athens, Tunis and Casablanca. And everywhere, he carried
his message, understandable to all and backed by unbroken U.S. performance: "We
want to live in peace and friendship—in freedom." More than that: "We want to
help other peoples to raise their standards, to be as content with their lot as
humans can be." To India's Parliament, he spoke of "a great awakening" in which
the world's peoples have come to recognize "that only under a rule of moral law
can all of us realize our deepest and noblest aspirations." Without mentioning
Communism by name, he defined it as the dead hand of tyranny, pointed to a
free-world future based on economic order and law. At Delhi University, he
said: "A reliable framework of law, grounded in the general principles
recognized by civilized nations, is of crucial importance in all plans for
rapid economic development...Law is not a concrete pillbox in which the status
quo is armed and entrenched. On the contrary, a single role of law, the
sanctity of contract, has been the vehicle of more explosive and extensive
economic change in the world than any other factor."
A High Presence. On foot, by car and by camel-back, on bicycles and in
bullock carts, millions crowded into the cities along his route to see
Eisenhower, and their reply to his message came in a torrential outpour. "We
love you, Ike," cried the Turks, tough fighters on the cold-war frontier. "Take
back our love, Ike," cried Pakistani throngs. In India, the reception burst the
chains of imagination, crowds surged and seethed around Ike, and in front of
village huts appeared brass vessels, festooned with mango leaves in recognition
of a high presence.
The moment of profoundest meaning came at an outdoor "civic reception" in
New Delhi. When Ike, with Nehru, stepped up to the speaker's stand, he blinked
and shook his head in astonishment; the crowd reached farther than eye could
see. In neutralist India, Eisenhower invoked the memory of India's saint,
impled that Gandhi himself would today favor the dynamics of strength:
"America's right, our obligations, for that matter, to maintain a respectable
establishment for defense—our duty to join in company with like-thinking
peoples for mutual self- defence—would, I am sure, be recognized and upheld by
the most saintly men...In a democracy, people should not act like sheep but
jealously guard liberty of action." At his words, countless thousands of
Gandhi's disciples broke into cheers.
In his talks with the leaders of the nations he visited, the President
aimed at no t-crossing, i-dotting agreements. None were needed. Reported New
York Times-man Paul Grimes from New Delhi after Ike's departure: "It did not
seem to matter much whether Mr. Nehru had actually requested or been given a
guarantee that the U.S. would help India to meet further Chinese Communist
aggression. What mattered was the obvious strengthening of Indian-American
friendship to a point where no such guarantee was necessary."
In 1960, Dwight Eisenhower's last year in office, he may in a sense be the
victim of his own success in 1959. Ahead lie his trip to the Soviet Union and a
series of summit conferences—all carrying a special challenge, since the U.S.
has become the home of so many hopes. For the same reason the U.S. will have
less privacy and more urgency in facing 1960's other problems, old and new: the
dangerous lag in space achievement; the delicate, perilous balance between
fiscal responsibility and military strength; the integrity of NATO as a
free-world shield; the unrest in the U.S.'s backyard as shown in 1959 by anti-
American riots in Bolivia and Panama and by the bearded demagoguery of Cuba's
Fidel Castro.
But the look on the faces turned toward Eisenhower in 1959 was the
future's best portent. In Paris, during his trip, Ike rejected the view of a
"dark and dreary future," classified himself as a "born optimist, and I suppose
most soldiers are, because no soldier ever won a battle if he went into it
pessimistically." He thinks of the future, said Ike, in terms of his
grandchildren, and hopefully, someday, great- grandchildren, "and I am very
concerned that they get a chance to have a better life than I had." The forces
for freedom fired by 1959's Man of the Year would inevitably change the lives
of millions of grandchildren and great-grandchildren in an epochal historic
way. And men of hope might have new reason to believe that tomorrow's world had
a better than even chance.
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1959
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