Eisenhower (58 page)

As far back as 1959, with the midterm elections behind him and the end of his presidency within sight, Eisenhower had begun to think about his farewell. “I want to have something to say when I leave here,” Ike told his lead speechwriter, Malcolm Moos, adding that he was not interested in making a speech that was merely headline grabbing, but rather hoped to use the occasion of his farewell to say something meaningful. He imagined giving a ten-minute “farewell address” to the Congress and the American people.

Moos began to collect thoughts from stray sources—news clippings, books, suggestions. One of those suggestions came to him in 1960 and recommended that he and Ike consider the example of George Washington, another great soldier and the American leader whom Eisenhower’s career most resembled. Moos was intrigued.

With Washington’s second term drawing to a close, his heirs and rivals were fixated on the question of whether he would seek the presidency a third time. Exhausted by his long service, infuriated by the intrigues of politics and the stresses of nation building, Washington resolved to retire and to leave the nation with his reflections. Initially, he was inclined to deliver a defensive statement, but he was saved by a formidable speechwriter of his own, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton at first tried to edit Washington’s draft but ultimately tossed it out and started over. Together, they produced a message that would echo across the ages and find new expression in the statement Eisenhower now set out to draft.

In Washington’s Farewell Address—inaptly named, as it was never delivered orally but rather distributed as a letter to American newspapers—the former general warned of the dangers of party and imagined a day when sectionalism would yield to a unified nation. He briefly decried the threat of large standing armies, though he did not reject a permanent military force altogether. Ever balanced, ever conscious of his position as a transcendent figure in early American life, Washington (with Hamilton) wrote that wise American leaders “will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

Washington’s address is often remembered for its perceptive foreign policy prescriptions, though the larger part of his farewell was devoted to the exhortation to unify the nation across its regional and party differences, a passage so prescient it no longer seems visionary. Washington’s proposal for his nation’s foreign policy, by contrast, has been cited time and again as the country repeatedly confronted the issues of entanglement in European affairs:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

At first interpretation, Washington’s observations seem diametrically opposed to Eisenhower’s. Washington left office embroiled in controversy over the Jay Treaty, which posed fundamental questions about the power of the central government and its authority to make binding deals with foreign powers. Washington believed in the Jay Treaty but warned of ill-considered entanglement. Eisenhower, by contrast, saw entanglement as a virtue of modern diplomacy. As NATO commander and president, he had painstakingly woven a web of alliances as a common defense against the encroachment of Communism. But Washington’s warning was not a command toward isolationism but rather an argument for limited, rational engagement in order to advance America’s standing and protect it from harm. With that, Eisenhower had no quarrel. His presidency was rooted in Washington’s example: so, too, would be his farewell.

When it came time to begin drafting his Farewell Address in the fall of 1960, Ike was still hurt by the embarrassment of the failed summit and despondent over John Kennedy’s attack on his record as well as Richard Nixon’s failure to defend it. It was a wounded Eisenhower who prepared to leave, just as it had been a troubled Washington who laid down the burden of leadership.

Eisenhower’s speechwriters reflected on the themes of his presidency and the world he had helped to fashion. For eight years, he had steadfastly fended off those to his left who would risk the nation’s private economy by ignoring deficits and spending government money at will, and those to his right who would do the same by cutting taxes and demanding unsustainable defense expenditures. He held off generals eager to wage war against China or the Soviet Union and rejected those who imagined that Khrushchev, Mao, and Castro were sincere in their embrace of a durable international peace. He believed he represented a center point between those who demanded immediate racial equality and those determined to sustain discrimination. His middle way, as much a part of his character as of his politics, had sustained Ike in his confrontation with McCarthy, in his restrained budgets, and in his defense programs. He was as committed to balance at the end of his presidency as he was at the beginning.

But there was more to say than merely to rehash old arguments, no matter how salient. Castro had seized power in Cuba, China and the Soviet Union eyed Laos, the Congo was riotous, American politics was restless. Troubled by those threats to order, Eisenhower’s aides contemplated a paean to “constructive change,” a reminder that progress is generally the result of long and sustained work, not sharp breaks or impulsive leaps. Those thoughts captured Eisenhower’s deep sense of order and control.

Those were natural topics for Eisenhower, familiar themes of his presidency, and expressions of his character. So too was another gnawing concern, made fresh by recent events. From the earliest weeks of his presidency, his 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Ike had warned of the grave costs of maintaining a permanent war footing. In that first speech, he enumerated the real sacrifices extracted not merely by war but even by the threat of it. One bomber, he warned in 1953, represented the forfeit of “a modern brick school in more than 30 cities” or two electric power plants or two “fine, fully equipped hospitals” or fifty miles of concrete pavement. In that address, Ike had described the future as a choice: Vast expenditures on military might were “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Or the world could opt for war and, with it, the end of civilization in any recognizable form.

Eisenhower could take deep satisfaction in having preserved that civilization, often against great odds and pressures, but his anxiety about a militarized nation had only deepened. He witnessed the national hysteria over
Sputnik
and the quick response of the defense industry to capitalize on it; 1960, one missile maker happily pronounced, was the “best year we’ve had in the missile business.” And he had angrily seen the American people accept Kennedy’s false charge that the Soviets had opened up a “missile gap.”

Consequently, Eisenhower’s advisers suggested a second theme for his farewell speech. The emergence of a “permanent arms industry” could not be helped. In a nuclear era, the United States could no longer take the time to convert peacetime industries into war production once hostilities had begun. War between the United States and the Soviet Union, should it come, would be sharp and instant, overwhelmingly devastating, and over before the makers of cars or steel or appliances could convert their factories to the production of guns and tanks and other matériel. Instead, missiles needed to be at the ready, and the companies that produced them understood that their livelihoods depended on a threat of war that was both constant and intense. Moreover, those companies depended on relationships with the government in order to secure contracts and business; fortunately for them, retiring military officers brought such knowledge and connections as they left their services for work in this “military-industrial complex.” This new phenomenon, an alliance between the military and its suppliers, created new perils. “Billions of dollars in purchasing power, and the livelihood of millions of people, are directly involved.”

The task of marshaling those themes fell principally to Moos, a tiny, brilliant academic who had joined the administration in 1958. He took his job on the same day that Sherman Adams finally left the White House (one of Adams’s last acts had been to swear him in). Moos had not immediately impressed Eisenhower. An early speech annoyed the president, who complained to Jerry Persons that he “did not think that Dr. Moos would do.” Happily, however, that impression changed as Moos became familiar with Eisenhower’s style. Within a few months, he had helped infuse Ike’s rhetoric with a new vigor. Indeed, some of the press appraisal of the “new” Eisenhower derived from Moos’s writing, and reporters openly, if somewhat misguidedly, wondered about Moos’s influence.

As they honed their collaboration, Moos grew accustomed to Eisenhower’s bursts of temper—so furious that Moos “sometimes thought the varnish was going to peel off the desk.” And he adapted to Ike’s system for preparing a draft. The president would weigh in at the outset on broad themes, then send his writers off to draft language, usually with an admonition to keep it short. “Ten minutes, no more,” he often said. “You lose an audience after 10 minutes.” His two main writers, Moos and Ralph Williams, would then return with their pages, at which point Ike would “lock in like a target-acquisition radar, throwing out paragraphs, changing sentences, fiddling with words, re-writing whole pages, until by the tenth draft he’d probably put more time into it than both of us combined.”

Eisenhower got his first look at the draft of his Farewell Address in the fall of 1960 and, true to form, began to work it over in excruciating detail. He wrote the opening section himself and asked Milton to edit a full draft, which his brother did extensively. Over the course of twenty-nine drafts, the essential elements remained: Eisenhower wished his successor, whom he did not name, “Godspeed.” He recounted his long service, called for “balance” in national affairs—a section that expanded significantly through the drafting—warned of the “hostile ideology” that confronted the United States and its allies, and identified new dangers facing America.

His changes were significant and telling: Moos described America’s obligation to “enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among nations” as the obligation of “a free and Christian people.” Eisenhower smartly changed that to “a free and religious people.” Failure to achieve those obligations, an early draft noted, would constitute a “grievous hurt” and could be the result of “lack of effort, comprehension or readiness to sacrifice”; Ike amplified and rewrote that sentence so that it read: “Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.” In a section of the address devoted to the importance of international diplomacy, Eisenhower added sentences to emphasize that international relations must be based on mutual respect, a relationship of “equals.” “The weakest,” Ike wrote, “must come to the conference table with the same confidence as we.” He moved paragraphs for emphasis, elevated language, and trimmed references to himself in the first person. The Eisenhower-edited drafts were loftier, more powerful, more nuanced, and notably more modest.

The address was initially contemplated as Eisenhower’s final State of the Union speech, but as that date drew closer, he became uncomfortable with a formal talk to Congress as Kennedy prepared to take office. On December 14, Norman Cousins, editor of the
Saturday Review
, called to suggest that Ike deliver a farewell address from the Oval Office and to offer his help in putting together a draft. Eisenhower liked the idea of speaking directly to the American people but rebuffed Cousins’s offer of assistance. “The idea of trying to get anyone like Norman Cousins working on it would be dreadful,” Whitman wrote to Moos. “How in the world do we diplomatically thank him, but say No[?]”

Through early January, Ike continued to tinker; Moos and Williams incorporated their ideas and fine-tuned passages and language. The final speech was fuller and more balanced than the early drafts, but the essential thoughts and structure remained intact.

On January 17, 1961, with Washington braced for snow, Eisenhower sat before the camera. More than seventy million Americans tuned in at 8:30 p.m. Washington time to hear the president’s parting thoughts.

He spoke for sixteen minutes. His delivery was not flawless. He stumbled over a word here and there, once saying “disarmament” rather than “battlefield” before correcting himself. He mispronounced “insidious.” Much of what he said was familiar. His message of balance was hardly news as he argued one last time for a government that deferred immediate reward for long-term stability. His description of Communism—“a hostile ideology, global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method”—was uncommonly direct but hardly a departure from earlier speeches. Near his conclusion, however, were two remarks that were attention grabbing, one for its candor, the other for its subtle humor. Eisenhower acknowledged that he failed in his laborious efforts to bring about a lasting peace with the Soviet Union and thus left office with a “definite sense of disappointment,” a surprising admission from a departing president. On a lighter note, he summed up his long service by presuming to “trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.” He ended his address, as he had commenced his presidency, with a prayer:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.