Eisenhower (48 page)

Lebanon, Quemoy-Matsu, and Indonesia represented strikingly different threads of the Cold War: one provoked an overt, conventional military response; one brought American forces to high nuclear alert; one was waged in the shadowy realm of covert action. What they had in common was instability that gave room for Communist advance, met with forceful U.S. reply. And in each case, Eisenhower’s calibrated actions preserved American lives.

It was exhausting. Ike told Ellis Slater that 1958 was the “year all hell broke loose” and described it as the worst of his life. But Eisenhower, despite his battles with his health and the crush of overlapping crises, persisted. In 1958, American troops and agents occupied a Middle Eastern nation, patrolled a knife’s-edge conflict between Taiwan and Communist China, and actively worked to support a rebel movement in Indonesia—with the resulting loss of a single American life. Rarely in American history has so much ground been held at so little cost.

16

Loss

E
isenhower’s string of foreign crises in 1958 occurred against a backdrop of an American recession and the loss of family members and advisers. The year would be marked by sorrow, which arrived, in Shakespeare’s words quoted by Eisenhower, “not in single spies, but in battalions.”

Since his earliest days, Ike had measured himself against his brothers—Roy had died in 1942, but cantankerous, conservative Edgar and elegant, erudite Milton strengthened Ike’s center, while his quieter brother, Earl, supplied memories of their modest upbringing. Periodically, the brothers would gather, their easy arguments a healthy reminder that while Ike might command armies, he was still just one of six Eisenhower boys, and not the senior one at that.

Arthur, the oldest, faded visibly in 1957, and though Louise eventually yielded to Ike’s urging that her husband consult a doctor, Arthur was over seventy, and his energy declined precipitously. Ike had felt his brother slipping away all year, and now he reached his end. On January 26, 1958, Arthur died. Eisenhower and Mamie attended the funeral in Kansas City. Ike returned with a sore throat and ill temper. “He was our ‘big’ brother,” Ike realized, “always dependable and always devoted.” With Arthur dead, the mantle passed to Edgar, now Ike’s oldest living sibling and forever “Big Ike” among the Eisenhower boys.

Arthur’s death, and especially Louise’s efforts afterward to have him interred at the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene, prompted Ike to consider his own mortality. With Louise pestering him to make room for Arthur at Abilene, Ike grumpily suggested that he wouldn’t be buried there himself. He imagined perhaps Washington or West Point, obvious signposts in his long life, or Denver, home of Mamie’s family. He indulged those thoughts for a few minutes, then returned to work.

As winter turned to spring, a different threat arose, this time to a confidant. Gatekeepers make enemies, and Sherman Adams was no exception. His brusque manner irritated many White House callers and puzzled even Adams’s most ardent friends. When Eisenhower painted a portrait of his aide and presented it to him, Adams looked at it and said: “Mr. President, thank you, but I think you flattered me.” He then turned and walked out. Eisenhower himself remarked that he never heard Adams begin a phone call with “hello” or end one with “good-bye.” Ike excused his deputy’s manner—“absorbed in his work, he had no time to waste.” Others were less charitable. “He was the most impolite person I ever met,” recalled John Eisenhower. Conservative Republicans viewed Adams as a liberal—many worried that he undermined their champion, Nixon—and elected leaders of both parties were offended at his unwillingness to pay them the courtesies to which they considered themselves entitled. They longed for the day when Adams would get his.

In early 1958, an opportunity arose and they seized it. As a legislator and later governor of New Hampshire, Adams was well schooled in the arts of constituent service. When friends or well-connected people wrote to him asking for government benefits or services, Adams’s practice was to forward the request to the relevant agency without comment and then, upon receiving an answer, to return it to the constituent who requested it. That, combined with Adams’s utter lack of pretentiousness—in an administration of many wealthy men, he drove his own car and sent out bottles of maple syrup as Christmas presents—made him seem an unlikely candidate for corruption. But he had forwarded constituent requests, and that practice came to haunt him in 1958.

Adams had known Bernard Goldfine for nearly two decades, going back to when Adams served as Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives and Goldfine ran a textile operation in Lebanon, New Hampshire. In those days, textile mills were fleeing New England for states with cheaper labor, but Goldfine stayed put. A Russian immigrant who came to America when he was eight years old and painstakingly built his own business, Goldfine impressed his friends with his steadfastness. “He treated his employees well, paid good wages and stayed out of labor trouble,” Adams said. “I was not the only New England governor who admired Goldfine’s courage and resourcefulness in holding fast while other textile men were moving out.” Admiration formed the basis of friendship, and over the years the two men and their families grew close. They exchanged gifts at holidays, and Adams was particularly fond of one of Goldfine’s sons, who, like Adams, attended Dartmouth. Adams intervened on the boy’s behalf when he ran into trouble there, and the Adamses were guests at his wedding.

Among the gifts Goldfine had given over the years were free hotel stays for Adams and his wife, as well as an Oriental rug for the Adams home in Washington, to be returned when they resumed their New Hampshire life, and, most memorably, a vicuña coat, given to Adams’s wife and valued, at least by Adams, at the $69 it cost Goldfine’s mill to produce it. Adams had given Goldfine presents, too: the businessman arrived at a Congressional hearing on the matter wearing a gold watch given to him by Adams to mark the occasion of Ike’s inauguration.

Editorialists were skeptical of Goldfine’s good intentions and of Adams’s casual acceptance of the gifts. “Mr. Adams’ Bad Judgment” was the headline on the
New York Times
editorial when the revelations first surfaced. Eisenhower, by contrast, flatly refused to entertain the possibility that Adams had done anything wrong, but he recognized that his deputy was in trouble. On the day the story broke, Ike tried to console Adams, who sank into a depression that Eisenhower could not talk him out of. What’s more, the president realized that political challenges such as this would only grow more intense as the administration wound down. Eisenhower, Ann Whitman noted, “does not know what to do to make Adams feel better.”

On June 12, Adams appeared before a House subcommittee to defend himself against allegations of favoritism. His reply was clipped and slightly bossy. Adams acknowledged his long friendship with Goldfine. He addressed the implications of that friendship without hesitation or hand-wringing. “You are concerned, and most correctly concerned,” he observed of the committee, “with how such a friendship may affect the conduct of an Assistant to the President in his relationships with men of government. And you should ask me: ‘Did Bernard Goldfine benefit in any way in his relations with any branch of the federal government because he was a friend of Sherman Adams?’ ‘Did Sherman Adams seek to secure any favors or benefits for Bernard Goldfine because of this friendship?’ ” Having posed the committee’s questions, Adams then replied to them: “My answer to both questions is: ‘No.’ ”

For Ike, that settled the matter, and the next day he sought to put it to rest with what he regarded as a firm defense of his subordinate. “I believe that the presentation made by Governor Adams to the congressional committee yesterday truthfully represents the pertinent facts,” Eisenhower said. “I personally like Governor Adams. I admire his abilities. I respect him because of his personal and official integrity. I need him.” Reporters had been told that the president did not want questions about Adams; they honored that request.

Eisenhower badly miscalculated the impression of his remarks. The final sentence, “I need him,” struck many observers not as a stalwart defense of Adams so much as a plaintive admission of presidential weakness. Eisenhower’s aides had missed that interpretation when Ike shared his remarks with them. “Not one of us caught the hollow ring of the words, ‘I
need
him,’ ” one admitted later. “And we all just sat there—and said it sounded swell.” To Eisenhower, it was a measure of Adams’s abilities that the president needed his assistance, and the president had every right to rely on those he needed. To Ike’s congressional critics, it looked as if a timorous president depended on an unscrupulous aide.

Adams might have survived the frenzy had Goldfine not proved to be something less than just a loyal businessman, devoted to New Hampshire and fond of his friends. Instead, he was an assiduous collector of public officials, doling out gifts to men and women of influence. “Perhaps I do give gifts to too many people, but if I do, it is only an expression of my nature,” Goldfine insisted when he testified on the matter. Few were buying it. From the record, it appeared that Goldfine’s gifts seemed calculated to win favorable treatment, an inference strongly bolstered when it was learned that he wrote off those gifts on his income tax returns as business expenses.

As Goldfine’s reputation suffered, so did Adams. In July, Senator John Williams, a Delaware conservative and one of those who disliked Adams, met with Eisenhower to complain. The following week, Ike’s friend Cliff Roberts, cofounder of the Augusta National Golf Club, suggested to the president that Adams had to go, and news of that recommendation leaked to the press, suggesting both crumbling support for the assistant and disarray within the White House. The House then cited Goldfine for contempt in August after he refused to answer further questions. The House vote, a hard-to-ignore 369–8, was tallied even as Eisenhower addressed the United Nations, gathered in emergency session to discuss the Middle East. Eisenhower proposed a six-point plan to hold the peace in that twitchy region, where American forces still patrolled a fragile standoff in Lebanon. His speech was well received, and it cheered Ike up. As he rode back to his plane that morning, Eisenhower smiled at the crowds and shook hands with security officers. “I hope it does some good,” he said of his thirty-minute address to the delegates. “A fellow never knows about those speeches.”

Amid the normal crush of business, Eisenhower pressed on, hoping the Adams issue would fade. On one typical day that summer, Ike met with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and ambassadors from NATO and Guatemala; greeted winners of national science awards; considered whether to grant a request from Martin Luther King, who was seeking a meeting (he did); investigated the question of where to purchase blight-resistant elm trees for the Gettysburg farm; and pondered his most taxing question of the day: how much to pay his grandson for working around the farm that summer. He settled on thirty cents an hour.

Nothing succeeded in diverting the campaign to get Adams. Propelled by Republican political anxieties, the effort gained in intensity. The economy was struggling, and polls showed the GOP in danger of losing seats. Within the administration, some advisers urged Eisenhower to take dramatic action, particularly to show economic results. Some argued for ramping up the highway program, but it was an unwieldy tool for short-term stimulus, as it depended on states accelerating their share of the work. Others made the political and economic case for a tax cut, which Ike had approved in 1954 as part of a broader stimulus package. This time, however, Eisenhower resisted, influenced in part by Gabriel Hauge, the president’s special assistant for domestic and international affairs. “I thought the timing was wrong,” Hauge explained, adding that the tax proposals under consideration made more sense politically than economically; rather than encouraging investment, they would simply “lop taxpayers off the rolls.” Ike refused, disappointing Republican stalwarts deprived of yet another issue to run on.

Democrats remembered Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign and its vitriolic charges of Truman-era corruption. Now they turned that issue against the Republican incumbent as midterm elections approached. Adams had no friends on the right and a dwindling cadre of supporters in his own party. Eisenhower seemed flummoxed by an attack that he considered neither justified nor appropriate. Who were politicians to tell him whom he should employ as his top assistant? And, since no evidence of Adams having granted any favors to Goldfine had surfaced, what was the actual basis for demanding that he resign?

At last, Congress’s session came to an end on August 23. Whitman captured the sense of relief and exhaustion at the White House. “Mostly all we did was pray,” she wrote, “that they would fold their tents and steal away.”

It was too late. Eisenhower recognized that he could not risk his party’s fortunes to save his assistant; or, more to the point, he could not afford to provide his party’s conservative wing with an excuse to blame him if it suffered losses at the midterms. Once Congress was out of town, Ike spent a few days weighing the issue in relative quiet and decided Adams had to go. As when he had considered dropping Nixon from the ticket in 1956, he declined to bring the matter up himself. This time, Eisenhower asked Nixon to take on the distasteful task that he had once experienced from the other side. The vice president was on vacation, but he came rushing back to Washington from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. By the time he arrived, Adams had gone for the day, but the two conferred the next morning. Adams fought back. He had become, at least in his own eyes, so irreplaceable that the administration would founder without him. That attitude annoyed others close to Ike—Whitman was convinced it was partly responsible for the false notion that Eisenhower was weak—but the president himself seemed untroubled. Indeed, after first concluding that Adams had to go, Eisenhower hesitated. The wait grew longer and longer and convinced some leading Republicans that Eisenhower was unwilling to do what they felt needed to be done.