Ike's Spies Read Online Free Page A

“Gov. Dewey visited me yesterday. He stayed at my house for 2 hours. He says he’s worried about the country’s future—and that
I
am the only one who can do anything about it.
    â€œThe Gov. says that I am a public possession—that such standing as I have in the affection or respect of our citizenry is likewise public property. All of this, therefore, must be carefully guarded to use in the service of all the people.
    â€œ(Although I’m merely repeating someone else’s exposition, the mere writing of such things almost makes me dive under the table.)” 2
    On November 3, 1949, Ike again turned to his diary: “A message sent me by a very strong manufacturing association (not the N.A.M.) was to the effect that I had soon to let them know that, in the event of nomination, I’d be ‘willing.’ The argument was that this gang was ready to spend five million dollars—and they weren’t going to do that if there was any later chance of my declining. So I told the man to say ‘Nuts.’ In fact the thing smacks of the same ineptitude that has characterized a lot of American business leadership over the past 40 years.
    â€œI am not, now or in the future, going willingly into politics. If ever I do so it will be as the result of a series of circumstances that crush all my arguments—that there appears to me to be such compelling reasons to enter the political field that refusal to do so would always thereafter mean to me that I’d failed to do my duty.” 3
    Like most great men, Ike was both self-assured and dynamic. He had no doubts of his ability to do the job and in fact to do it better than anyone he could think of as an alternative. His great energy required an outlet. Already a world figure, the truth was, whatever his protests, he needed a world stage to fully express himself, to exercise his abilities, to satisfy his intense and never-ending curiosity. He needed to lead his nation through perilous times. In 1952, he agreed to serve.
    THAT THE TIMES WERE PERILOUS , that they demanded the best the nation could offer, he had no doubt. The menace of Stalin and the Communists was as grave to Ike as that of Hitler a decade earlier. In some ways it was greater. The Nazis had a limited ideologicalappeal outside Germany, while the Communists could and did appeal to entire classes of people in France, Italy, Germany, and throughout the world. The Nazis had been forced to buy their spies, and even then could not trust them, while the Communists could and did receive invaluable information—the best being how to set off an atomic bomb—from out of the blue, a gift from true believers who managed to convince themselves that giving Stalin military secrets would speed the coming of the inevitable socialist utopia.
    In post-Vietnam America it became fashionable on some college campuses to sneer at Ike and his contemporaries for their seemingly excessive fear of Stalin and obsessive anti-communism. That generation of American leaders, however, felt—like Churchill in the thirties—that they were warning against dangers that were terribly clear to them but which their countrymen seemed determined to ignore. The evidence that Stalin did pose a threat to all the world, including the United States, seemed to them to be beyond dispute.
    The facts spoke for themselves—Poland, East Germany, Rumania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Albania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, and China, all taken over by the Communists in the first half decade following Hitler’s death. In every instance Communist dictatorships suppressed precisely those freedoms Ike and his comrades in arms had fought to defend—freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of economic enterprise, and of personal movement. In the process, Stalin brought all these countries (except for China, Albania, and Yugoslavia) under his direct control, thereby adding enormously to the