The President Should Resign
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The President "President Eisenhower has lost the confidence of the country. Even some of his warmest admirers are dismayed...
...Ernie Hill, a seasoned foreign correspondent writing from London for the pro-Eisenhower Chicago Daily News, conveyed some of the total rejection of Dulles when he wrote recently: "Distrust of Dulles is producing an ugly situation in Britain...
...For the first time in the history of NATO, our allies firmly declined to follow our leadership...
...And his concept of the Presidency—an office in which he reigns above the battle—is crippling at a critical time when militant leadership is urgently needed...
...Dulles spoke harshly of the hopelessness of negotiation with the Soviet totalitarians and spoke glowingly of his talks with Fascist Dictator Franco as constituting "ties like this that hold the free world together...
...Dulles expect the Soviets to sit back and allow us to catch up militarily to the point where we and we alone will enforce negotiated settlements...
...But Mr...
...Dulles stood alone among the diplomats of the free world in opposing negotiation with the Soviets...
...The Progressive has demanded his resignation for years, but until recently we were pretty much alone, although it was clear almost from the beginning, when he blandly and irresponsibly talked of liberating the enslaved satellites of Eastern Europe, that he has a capacity for boundless mischief...
...Of course such a conference may fail, but we have precious little to lose if it does, and a whole new world to win if it succeeds...
...Bulganin and Khrushchev to come to the White House, together with the leaders of some of the Western nations, to lay the groundwork for negotiated settlements...
...Dulles so mistrusted and American foreign policy so suspect abroad...
...They would hurry to try to make their own bilateral deal with the Kremlin...
...The distrust of Dulles, the lack of confidence in Dulles are too profound among our allies...
...Alsop wasn't sure whether it would work or not, and then added: "But there is one thing that can be told, here and now, with absolute certainty...
...The distrust is built largely on the belief that Dulles opposes all peaceful negotiation with Russia and is intent on driving the world into a suicidal war . . . Tories and Socialists alike consider him as much a threat to world peace as Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Communist boss...
...No one at the conference seemed to expect too much from negotiation with the Soviets...
...Instead of the previous Should Resign concensus that he must come smiling through his illnesses for the safety of the nation, this time the prospect of his resignation became distinctly more acceptable...
...A man who has suffered and survived a stroke, we are told, is usually inordinately determined to prove that nothing much has happened, that he has come through little more than a bad headache...
...Dulles, who is so full of the history of Soviet betrayal of promises, reversed himself as soon as he came home...
...Few Americans who have not had the opportunity to talk with the leaders and the people in the countries that are our strongest allies can understand the intensity of the feeling against Dulles almost everywhere on earth...
...The Norwegians demanded negotiation...
...Dulles clung to his twofold reason for rejecting negotiation: 1) the Soviet regime may soon disintegrate, and 2) we must not negotiate until we are militarily strong enough to enforce negotiated agreements with our own power...
...Dulles persuaded some of our allies to accept missile bases on their soil by promising to negotiate with the Russians, and then came home to make Problem Number One how to scheme our way out of our part of the agreement...
...The first step in that process should be the dismissal of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, architect of our negative policy of blustering brinkmanship...
...While Dulles is Secretary of State, a dialogue of giants is impossible...
...it isn't the fabulous confusion of a leaderless government, with resignations, insubordination, suppression of reports, and inter-departmental back-stabbing—it isn't any one or all of these that destroyed the President's prestige...
...Dulles' resignation is growing so great that President Eisenhower may yet find himself impelled to act—however much he frowns on action...
...Nor is the rest of the world...
...Even some of his warmest admirers are dismayed by the collapse of faith in his capacity to lead the nation...
...everyone knew the dreary story of Soviet intransigence at negotiating sessions in the past...
...Dulles was obliged to yield at Paris in the face of unanimous demand for negotiation...
...A measure of the extent to which some of his warmest personal friends are concerned about his capacity to govern appeared recently in Look, published by friends of the Administration...
...So did the Danes...
...The New York Times semiofficially conveyed the Dulles repudiation of the Paris accord when it reported that "the State Department takes the cautious view that negotiations should be avoided until the United States catches up with the Soviet Union in the science of missiles...
...The President of the United States sat looking glum, nervous, self-conscious, and even embarrassed as his Secretary of State droned on through his dreary monologue—and the country was embarrassed for the President, and some were ashamed...
...this is power politics in its most degenerate form—and no more likely to contain the Soviets than did our policy of containment...
...We urge this, too, mindful of our affection for Dwight D. Eisenhower the man and the public servant...
...It sounds like an announcement that we will tolerate negotiations only if we are assured that they are doomed to failure...
...And this was what was agreed upon...
...we believe that, with all his faults, he would make a better President at this moment in history than Mr...
...And James Reston, chief Washington correspondent for the Times who has extraordinary pipelines to the State Department, told us that of all the problems confronting our government these days, American officials define "Problem Number One" as "how to keep their promises to negotiate, made at the recent meeting in Paris, without risking the possibility of stopping the arms race at a point highly favorable to the Soviet Union...
...This conference at the summit in Washington should not seek to draw up the blue-print for agreement on specific issues, but rather aim at clearing up the debris of years of mistrust and creating the mood for give-and-take, live-and-let-live agreements that would subsequently be negotiated at the foreign minister and ambassador levels...
...Even more dramatic and far more affirmative would be a move to follow dismissal with an invitation to the Messrs...
...Does Mr...
...To keep the conference from collapsing and to obtain the agreement of our allies for the establishment of intermediate missile bases, we agreed, reluctantly, to keep open the door to negotiation with the Soviets...
...But all the participants except Dulles thought a supreme effort ought to be made...
...it isn't the Sputniks and the bitter realization that the Soviets are not so stupid and regimented as the Administration led the nation to believe...
...President Eisenhower has followed this pattern of behavior by going to Paris> by appearing if only as the relatively silent partner of Mr...
...We urge this mindful of the inadequacies of Vice President Nixon...
...It is time they reached into the rusting arsenal of freedom for the ideas and the ideals that would beckon a waiting world to the pursuit of peace, liberty, and equality of opportunity...
...Dulles' resignation, if it comes, will mean nothing unless it is accompanied by a reversal of our foreign policy—a reversal that will at last accentuate the positive...
...In fact, every official and private report, especially those suppressed by the Administration, emphasizes how great is the Russian lead and how dismal are the prospects for reasserting the military supremacy America held in the decade after World War II when we commanded a monopoly of atomic and hydrogen weapons...
...The first reason is self-deluding nonsense...
...Even Germany's crusty old Dr...
...Eisenhower has earned the right to retirement...
...Yet it would be foolish to try to conceal these feelings from the American people . . . Dulles stands for everything warlike and unyielding to the British—massive retaliation, brinkmanship, futile negotiation because of fixed ideas, arrogance, and a startling lack of both humanity and humility...
...But the country is not fooled...
...Dulles on television, and by insisting on delivering his State of the Union message in person—the last, incidentally, a more comforting performance than many dared hope for...
...I report this advisedly, realizing the deep significance of such a charge...
...At the NATO conference in Paris Mr...
...The President, as always, spoke earnestly of peace during the few moments he was allowed to speak, but for the bulk of the program Mr...
...The Russians have proved they can equal and surpass us in the deadly art of push-button warfare...
...But Mr...
...Italics ours...
...But Mr...
...James A. Wechsler, editor of the New York Post, summed it all up with characteristic clarity when he wrote: "In effect the position described in -these dispatches is almost a caricature of the deviousness ascribed to us not only by the Communists but by many troubled, independent citizens of the free world...
...The President should resign...
...the European statesmen were only too painfully aware of the great groundswell of public opinion for negotiation back home...
...Any notion he might have that resignation would stamp him as "quitter" is utterly groundless...
...It isn't only his recent stroke...
...A sure sign of the changed attitude came after his cerebral attack...
...It is time American leaders—and this goes for Democrats no less than Republicans—stopped pinning all their hopes on new and more fiendish weapons to overtake the Russians in an accelerated arms race...
...The British thought a start should be made...
...Dulles would have a dramatic impact on the whole world...
...Nothing more graphically illustrated this unhappy fact than the radio and television report to the nation that President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made after their return from the NATO conference in Paris...
...But Mr...
...If he decides to stick it out, he must at least act at once to wage that total peace, to which he referred in his State of the Union address, by freeing America from the sterile, arrogant, inflexible foreign policy which is costing us so many friends and imperiling peace itself...
...In a two-year span he has suffered a heart attack, an ileitis operation, and a stroke...
...There is an almost universal feeling of insecurity—a deepening conviction that no one is really in charge, that the President, old, tired, and ill, and paralyzed by his concept of a detached President, is no longer able to govern the nation in this hour of crisis...
...On the contrary, his decision to retire would greatly enhance his stature as a dedicated public servant who saw and acted courageously in the hour of his country's need for more active leadership...
...Writing from Paris for the equally pro-Eisenhower New York Herald Tribune, Joseph Alsop mused one day recently about the possibility of "a dialogue of giants" between the United States and Russia on the terms of peace...
...He resumed immediately his dark mutterings about the "futility" of negotiation...
...Nothing can be done, and nothing should be tried, he argues in effect, until we can ram our position down Soviet throats and make them like it...
...Dulles' second reason strikes us as a compound of political fantasy and moral depravity...
...He is one of the most decent men in public life today...
...Konrad Adenauer thought that perhaps the time had come to explore the possibilities...
...The demand for Mr...
...Dulles consumed 24 minutes while the President intoned a few sentences at the outset, in the middle, and at the end...
...In other words, Mr...
...But this isn't negotiation...
...It is something less tangible—a sort of feeling that while he means well, he doesn't have the faintest idea what to do, and as a result, is the prisoner of the men around him, some of whom, to put it mildly, lack his decency and devotion to peace...
...The moral depravity of the Dulles approach is most evident in its relentless commitment to an endless arms race...
...We confess to a feeling of relief to find ourselves, after all these years, in more popular company than we were for a long time...
...We watched and listened with heavy heart as Mr...
...They would expect to be sold down the river...
...The dismissal of Mr...
...Eisenhower is 67 years old...
...The French, however skeptical of the results, concurred...
...Dulles assured us in 1954 that the Soviet Union stood at the point of collapse, but the Kremlin today is far more powerful and secure than it was three years ago—and growing stronger every day...
...Or at Least Fire Secretary Dulles \V7"e are not very sanguine about " the prospect that President Eisenhower will accept our counsel to retire...
...For any such dialogue in which Dulles is the American spokesman or the President's chief adviser will almost automatically break ud the Western alliance...
...Richard L. Wilson, himself an admirer of the President, writing on "Ike's Second Term Tragedy," said: "Affection and sympathy aside, not only has his health once again been impaired, but so has his stature as President...
...It is this kind of conduct that has made Mr...
...His dedication to peace is genuine, his devotion to the general welfare unassailable...
...This, we are convinced, is the kind of fresh and hopeful start for which the whole world is waiting...
Vol. 22 • February 1958 • No. 2
