THE PRESIDENCY: Man of the Year

(See Cover) I saw at close 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 had 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 69, 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 (see chart), 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.* 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 their 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 proportionately 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 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 the 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 lolly-gagging 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 & 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 springboard 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 peace—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 peace, 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 out 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 could 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 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, the country from which he had launched his vast command upon Europe, and in Paris, the city he had liberated, the swell of popular emotion brought a mist to an 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 Hubert 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 such Soviet underlings as Foreign Minister Andrei 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 thumbsucking, 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 Teheran, 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 for more explosive and extensive economic change in the world than any other factor.”

A High Presence. On foot, by car and by camelback, 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, implied 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-defense—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.

Less Privacy, More Urgency. 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 Timesman 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 U.S. 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 and-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 live 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.

* 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.”