The Ike I Never Knew

By Jeffrey M. Bowen

Reference: Ike’s Spies by Stephen Ambrose. University Press of Mississippi (Jackson), 1981.

           

Recently I read a book titled "Ike's Spies", by Stephen Ambrose.  Ambrose is known as President Eisenhower's primary historian. Obviously he admired the man and tells his story using research that is superlative and richly detailed.  Ambrose's history is loaded with anecdotes, and definitely to his credit, the work is supported by documentation few others have used as well since the book's publication in 1981.   From it I learned certain things about President Eisenhower and life in the late 1940s and 50's that really surprised me.  In fact, you could preface these revelations with the observation, “Seriously? I never knew...."

Such findings, admittedly limited to one in-depth reference that reflects strong opinions, have redefined my viewpoints on Ike.  Certainly they have amplified my perspective on this period when I was under 10 years old.  Here's a short list of the revelations, absent any transitions.  Consider each one to be led by the phrase, I NEVER KNEW...

We had incredible inside information about the Nazis' impending maneuvers because the British broke their secret message code using a complex mechanical wonder called ULTRA.  At the same time,  it seems Adolf Hitler was a very skilled and daring military leader who would have succeeded on many fronts had it not been for ULTRA, but even more significantly because some of his generals arrogantly ignored his orders and could not be trusted (remember, some of them tried to assassinate him).  

We deliberately sacrificed thousands of American soldiers' lives so as not to tempt the Reich's leaders to think we had broken their code.

Eisenhower was deeply and enthusiastically fascinated with the use of secret agents and intelligence gathering.

We were almost insanely terrified of World War III being perpetrated by Communist Russia. Our distrust and fatalism about the spread of Communism was something like our regarding it as an EBOLA-like plague.  Our fear inflected the very highest policy levels, potentially influencing the mind and emotions of Eisenhower.

We allowed the CIA to become expansively, secretly manipulative throughout the 1950's. Eisenhower essentially sanctioned this, and much of it occurred because we so feared the spread of Communism.

We conducted overflights of Russia for 4 or 5 years BEFORE Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2 spy plane.  I didn't realize that each flight was mapped and rechecked personally by Eisenhower.  By the time Powers was shot from the sky, the use of satellites was well on the way to outdating the use of the U-2.   We were assuming that any U-2 hit by a missile would totally disintegrate, and our policy (but not our apparent practice) was not to give the pilots any parachute.  I had forgotten that Powers lived, was exchanged for a Russian master spy, and subsequently wrote about it.

Significant national prosperity in the 1950s was engendered by Eisenhower's steadfast insistence that spending on the military should be reduced, as should the size of the military.  Thereby inflation was curbed, taxes were held down, and the arms race was muted by Eisenhower's philosophy that simply adding more firepower to stockpiles would make little difference in the event of an all out nuclear war.  I didn't realize how promptly and severely this philosophy was reversed by both Nixon and Kennedy.

As early as 1953 we were spending significant taxpayers' dollars to try unsuccessfully to shore up the French in Indochina, in particular Vietnam, and our subsequent CIA operations in Vietnam put most of the pieces in place for future disasters that would occur in the oncoming decades.

Our country's master spy, to this day, was most likely Allen Dulles.  Nor did I know that one of our greatest undercover heroes, a real behind-the-scenes diplomatic manipulator, was Kim Roosevelt.  These last names are no coincidence.  They had powerful relatives. 

To an extraordinary, almost traitorous extent, J. Edgar Hoover undermined the CIA's initiatives; he was petty, jealous, and territorial where the FBI was concerned.

Our efforts to kill Castro and his brother Che Guevara. were bizarrely contrived and included reliance on the Mafia, even before Eisenhower had left office.  The Castros were well prepared with countermeasures because they watched and learned from the CIA's previous incursions in Guatemala.

American traitors simply handed over to the Russians the equivalent of our blueprints for making nuclear weapons.  Yes, those traitors, the Rosenbergs, were put to death, but not before there was stiff, prolonged legal resistance to doing so, and to this day residual confusion over whether they actually did what they were tried for.

Eisenhower was quite dependent on the counsel and support of his brothers who maintained high level policy influence throughout his administration.  Today, this would spawn vociferous opposition from Congress based on potential conflicts of interest.

Our intelligence information for at least a decade after WWII was typically undependable, and flat-out wrong, because we didn't pay enough attention to the details, to the actual gathering and comprehensive analysis of data.  When a mid-level bureaucrat in the bowels of the CIA finally started developing this more detailed and voluminous information, called National Intelligence Estimates, although they were seldom read all the way through, the result was a vastly improved array of actionable information.  I never knew that our lack of good information foolishly convinced us for several needless years that the Russians were on the verge of igniting World War III with a direct attack of some kind.

 Eisenhower was far from being an indecisive or incompetent boob.  By and large, he exercised good judgment based on a sophisticated grasp of information. He was admirably cautious in his decision making; a very good judge of character; and really a likeable guy whose interpersonal relationships held him in good stead both as a general and as a civilian statesman.  But he was also very human, had a big temper, insisted on personal control of many decisions, made some big mistakes, and didn't always acknowledge them forthrightly.