Six Crises (41 page)

But it was my participation in another crisis, this one not national but partisan in character, which was to virtually erase the public memory of my success in Caracas, and put in its place an image of failure with which my name was associated.

The crisis was the 1958 off-year elections. Personally, I had to decide whether or not to throw my efforts and my prestige into the campaign for the election of Republican candidates for Congress, the Senate, and twenty-one contested governorships. Whichever way I decided, it was generally conceded among political leaders and observers that the Republicans would lose; the only question was, “by how much?” Traditionally, the party in the White House loses seats in the House and Senate in the off-year elections. Beyond that, we were having some special troubles: President Eisenhower in his landslide victory of 1956 had not carried the Congress for the Republican Party; the party was torn from within over the President's second-term budget; the economic recession was hurting the voters' pocketbooks; the launching of the first Sputnik had cast doubts upon the Administration's defense and science programs; and the Adams-Goldfine investigation had shaken the party to its roots.

Scores of personal and political friends urged me to avoid the campaign, or, at most, to participate only in a limited way. Tom Dewey, for one, put the case against my campaigning most succinctly. Reminding me that my efforts in 1954 had not won the House or Senate for the party, he pointed out I had not been given credit for seats we did win, but was blamed for the ones we lost. “You have done enough for Republican candidates,” he asserted. “Your conduct in South America finally has taken the blinders from the eyes of many Democrats and now you have wide support throughout the country. You are a national asset that should not be wasted. You are not a candidate this year. It will do the Republican Party no particular good for you to get into this campaign and could do you great harm. You owe it to yourself and the long-term interests of the party to keep and build on the support you now have among Democrats as well as Republicans.”

His eyes, of course, were upon 1960. But those who were up for
election and were facing defeat had their eyes on 1958 as well. As the individual campaigns shaped up, scores of candidates and local party leaders told me bluntly: “If you don't come in, Dick, it won't be just a defeat, it will be a disaster for the party.” Some candidates who were personal friends of long standing called upon our friendship in asking my support.

President Eisenhower desperately wanted the Republican Party to win in the elections of 1958. He told me that summer, “I would give a year of my salary if we could win either the House or the Senate.” But by personal and political inclination, he did not want to become enmeshed in political skirmishes which could destroy his ability to work constructively with any Congress, regardless of its political complexion. While almost all cabinets provide “big names” for political campaigning, the Eisenhower Cabinet was composed of men who were excellent administrators, but few of whom had any great interest or adeptness in the field of politics. If anyone was to carry the major load for political cross-country campaigning, I was the one who had to do it.

So weighing the alternatives and the pressures, I decided to do what I had to do. My responsibility was to the party. I could not stand aside and see fellow Republicans go down to disastrous defeat. I had to risk my political prestige to avoid a disaster, if possible, knowing full well, as in 1954, we would probably lose, and I would be the big-name target for the defeat.

I was weary after the stress of the South American trip and the long Congressional session, and I tried to limit my political appearances to the key states. That was impossible, of course. I ended up stumping more than 25,000 miles in twenty-five states. It was the most difficult campaign I've ever been through, harder even than my own presidential campaign. Because in 1958 there was a general feeling of discouragement which pervaded the Republican Party, and I, myself, could not completely fight off a feeling of futility in some of the states and districts I visited.

On election night I listened to the returns in my home in Washington, and almost all my fears came to pass. Internecine warfare among Republicans swept the Democrats to victory in my home state of California, in Indiana, and in several other states. The right-to-work issue sent Senator John Bricker, of Ohio, who had been considered unbeatable, down to defeat. Of the twenty-one contests for Governor, we won only eight. We lost a net of twelve seats in the Senate, and forty-eight seats in the House of Representatives. It was the worst defeat in history ever suffered by a party having control of the White House.
The only bright spots were Nelson Rockefeller's landslide victory in New York, the election of Mark Hatfield as Governor of Oregon and Chris del Sesto as Governor of Rhode Island, and the decisive re-election of Senator Barry Goldwater in Arizona.

One television commentator that night summed up the election results with this statement: “The big winner in this election is Nelson Rockefeller. The big loser—Richard Nixon.” A few days later, on November 9, Governor-elect Rockefeller flew south for a vacation on his estate in Venezuela. When he landed at Maiquetia Airport in Caracas where I had been just six months before, reporters asked him, “What about Nixon?” He replied, according to press reports, “No tengo nada que ver con Nixon,” which means, “I have nothing to do with Nixon.”

Just six months before, following the San Marcos University episode in Lima, I had received a cable from Nelson Rockefeller which read, “Your courage and determination have inspired democratic forces throughout the hemisphere. We all feel a great sense of pride in your action. Congratulations. Nelson.”

Communism creates and uses crisis as a weapon. Khrushchev, Communist man at his most dangerous best, has developed this technique to a highly sophisticated science. Plans designed to meet his moves may prove useless because of the unpredictability of his conduct. But intensive planning is absolutely essential, to avoid being knocked off balance by what he does.

“IN preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

There could not have been a more dramatic demonstration of the truth of this maxim—one of President Eisenhower's favorites—than my meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in July 1959.

I had never been better prepared for a meeting in which I was to participate. During my previous thirteen years in government I had had the opportunity to acquire more than a passing knowledge of Communist strategy and tactics.

At home, as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities I had met the Communist conspiracy face to face in the Alger Hiss case.

Abroad, I had met and talked at length with Communist leaders in Italy, England, Greece, and other countries, and in South America I had seen Communism in action in all its violence and viciousness.

While I could not qualify as a so-called “expert” on Communism in the popular sense of that term, I had studied the works of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, the Old Testament prophets of modern-day Communism,
as well as the statements of Khrushchev and the contemporary observers of Communist policies.

For months before the trip I spent every spare moment studying reports and recommendations from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House staff.

I talked for hours with every person I could find in Washington who had met and knew Khrushchev. I was briefed on more than a hundred different issues which might arise in my conversations with him.

I gathered up and tried to absorb every bit of personal information about him which was available.

I even had the benefit of a preview of what I might expect from Khrushchev when Mikoyan and Kozlov, who occupy the next to the top rung on the ladder of the Soviet hierarchy, visited Washington in the period just before I left for Moscow. They threw some pretty fair fast balls and a few curves in the long conversations I had with each of them. But meeting Khrushchev, after talking with them, was like going from minor to major league pitching. He throws a bewildering assortment of stuff—blinding speed, a wicked curve, plus knucklers, spitters, sliders, fork balls—all delivered with a deceptive change of pace.

I had made hundreds of protocol calls on high government officials in nations around the world, but never before had a head of government met me with a tirade of four-letter words which made his interpreter blush as he translated them into English.

Khrushchev had insulted his visitors before, but this time he did it on TV. And not just ordinary TV but on a new, revolutionary type of color-television tape being shown for the first time in the Soviet Union.

He had threatened his adversaries with missiles, but never before while standing in front of a model American kitchen.

It was not unusual for him to have serious discussions at lunch, but it was unprecedented for the wives of the participants to be present as silent but tremendously interested observers through a five-and-a-half-hour debate covering the whole range of American-Soviet relations.

He sometimes takes his visitors for boat rides on the Moscow River, but this was the first time he arranged for an added attraction—“impromptu political rallies” of hundreds of happy bathers demonstrating their affection for him and for the Communist system.

It is obvious that no plans could possibly have been devised to cope with such unpredictable conduct. Yet, without the months of planning, I might have been completely dismayed and routed by his unexpected assaults.

The idea that I go to the Soviet Union was conceived and first suggested to me by Abbott Washburn, Deputy Director of USIA, who was working at that time on the cultural exchange program between the United States and the USSR. When I indicated my willingness to undertake the assignment, the proposed trip was presented to and approved by his chief, George Allen, head of the USIA; Chris Herter, then Under Secretary of State; Foster Dulles and the President.

The official purpose of my trip was to open the first United States Exhibition ever held in the Soviet Union, on July 24 in Sokolniki Park in Moscow. The national exhibition was part of a cultural exchange program which had been adopted in the “spirit of Geneva” as an attempt to thaw out the frozen relations between our two countries. The 1955 “spirit of Geneva” had not lasted long, but this exchange program had been one of the few positive results to flow from that meeting between Khrushchev and Eisenhower. A Soviet exhibition, which spotlighted recent scientific advances in the Soviet Union, including a model of the new Sputnik, had opened in New York the previous January. Frol Kozlov, Deputy Premier, represented the Soviet Union and I represented the United States in speaking at the opening ceremonies. The exhibition had had heavy overtones of Soviet military might. Our exhibition, under the direction of Chad McClellan, a Los Angeles businessman, stressed U. S. consumer goods. Its inevitable effect was to dramatize the difference in the standards of living here and in the Soviet Union.

Because Kozlov and Mikoyan had received wide television coverage on their visits to the United States, the Soviet Government had agreed to give me the unique opportunity of speaking directly to the Russian people on a nationwide television hookup.

My visit would also afford an opportunity for high-level talks with Khrushchev in which I could make clear the United States' position on world issues and, at the same time, obtain for President Eisenhower and our policy makers some firsthand information as to Khrushchev's attitudes and views on the points of difference between the United States and the USSR.

As soon as final arrangements for the trip had been approved in Moscow and Washington, I began the most intensive series of briefings I had had for any of my trips abroad. In addition to such issues as the Berlin problem, atomic testing, and East-West trade—which are still with us today—I was prepared to discuss with Khrushchev such specific items as the long-missing U. S. airmen who had been shot down in a C-130 transport plane by Soviet fighters, the possible lifting of travel
restrictions, censorship, opening of consular establishments, the jamming of radio broadcasts, and permission for a list of over a hundred Soviet relatives of United States citizens to leave the USSR to live with their families here. Scores of subjects I had been briefed on did not come up in my conversations with Khrushchev of course. But to the credit of the State Department and other briefing teams, he did not raise a single issue on which I had not been briefed.

Beyond these briefings I tried to find, as many have before and after me, a new and fresh approach on how to talk to Nikita Khrushchev.

I sought out men who had studied Soviet affairs and men who had met Khrushchev. I saw Hubert Humphrey and Averell Harriman; I met with journalists who had interviewed him in Moscow, such as Bill Hearst, Bob Considine, Walter Lippmann, and Turner Catledge. Catledge gave me the kind of advice you might expect from the managing editor of the New York
Times.
In effect, he said: “The trouble with most meetings with Khrushchev is that he dominates the conversation, and the talk dwindles off into a maze of generalities going all over the lot. Be specific, have some definite questions in mind that you want to ask him, and keep after him until you get the answer one way or the other.” This was to prove easier said than done, as I am sure he understood.