President Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses the nation on U.S. intervention in Formosa (now Taiwan), in 1958.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Evan Thomas: Biggest decision for next president could be on bombing Iran's nuclear facilities
- He says Eisenhower pondered a pre-emptive strike against a rising nuclear power: the USSR
- He was pressed by some to strike but grasped the magnitude and decided not to do it
- Thomas: Ike was good bluffer; faced with similar decision, will our next president fare as well?
Editor's note: Evan Thomas is the author of eight books, the most recent of which, "Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Struggle to Save the World," was published last month by Little, Brown and Company. He is a former editor and writer for Newsweek.
(CNN) -- It is possible, even likely, that the most
important decision either President Obama or a President Romney would
make in the next four years is whether to bomb Iran and its nuclear
facilities. The debates were never likely to tell us much that would be
useful about how either man would make that decision.
No amount of stage
presence or posturing can reveal the deepest recesses of the
presidential mind -- the place where, especially in the age of mass
destruction, decisions about going to war must be made.
Evan Thomas
Of course, Obama or
Romney will not be the first president to ponder a pre-emptive strike
against a rising nuclear power. The first was Dwight Eisenhower.
In late summer 1953,
shortly after Eisenhower became president, the Soviets detonated their
own crude H-bomb, code named Joe IV (after Stalin) by the Americans.
About nine months earlier, the United States had set off its own first
H-bomb, code named Mike -- 500 times more powerful than the bombs that
devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
"I've never seen the
president so concerned," the president's national security adviser,
Robert Cutler, told the chief White House speech writer, Emmet Hughes,
in early September. Cutler quoted Ike as muttering, "My God, 10 of these
things and ..." The president didn't finish the sentence.
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The United States still
had the capacity to knock out the Soviet Union with a massive first
strike. But for how long? At a secret national security meeting on
September 24, 1953, the president gathered his closest advisers and
asked: Would it be morally wrong not to attack the Soviets before it was
too late?
"The question could no
longer be excluded," a note taker wrote, "and it was the duty of the
president and his advisers to find the best answer to it." But while
anyone could ask the question, in the end only the president could
answer it.
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Eisenhower and his
advisers ultimately decided not to strike first, disregarding the wishes
of some -- such as the Strategic Air Command's Gen. Curtis LeMay -- who
continued for many years to hope that Ike would unleash America's
nuclear forces in a pre-emptive attack.
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Certainly, Eisenhower
made very clear throughout the rest of his presidency that he was
willing to use nuclear weapons to stop communist aggression, remaining
purposefully vague about when or under what circumstances. Such haziness
was entirely intentional.
As a West Point cadet
and as a young army officer, Eisenhower had been a great poker player.
Indeed, he had to quit the game because he risked hurting his career by
taking money from too many fellow officers. (He switched to bridge, at
which he was also expert.)
Always a good bluffer,
as president he did the same with nuclear weapons. He used the threat of
their use to get America out of Korea in 1953, and similarly threatened
during crises in Vietnam in 1954, with Red China in the Formosa Straits
in 1954-55 and again in 1958, during the Suez crisis in 1956 and in
Berlin in 1958-59.
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Would he have actually used these weapons if push came to shove?
He never told anyone --
not his wife or son or closest advisers. To do so, in a city with no
permanent secrets, would make his threats less credible. Ike knew how to
hold his cards, even if doing so hurt him politically.
In 1958, when he was
under tremendous pressure to build more missiles to catch up the
Russians, which had just launched the first satellite, Sputnik, and
seemed to be creating what the press and some Democrats were calling
"the missile gap," Ike seemed strangely passive. He knew that the CIA's
spy plane, the U-2, had not found any Soviet ICBMs, but he wanted to
keep the existence of the spy plane a secret.
The president's bland
public statements disappointed even his followers and gave rise to
mutterings that he was too old (68) and playing too much golf (about 100
times a year). In the winter of 1958, Eisenhower was visited by the
poet, Robert Frost, who gave him a book of his poems inscribed with the
notation, "The strong are saying nothing until they see." Ike wrote a
friend that Frost's words were his "favorite maxim."
Eisenhower was accustomed to carrying great responsibility.
In his breast pocket on
D-Day, he carried a note he had written in case the landings failed.
"The responsibility is mine alone," it read. On his first day as
president in 1953, Ike wrote in his diary, "Plenty of worries and
difficult problems. But such has been my portion for a long time."
Neither Obama nor Romney
have Eisenhower's experience or credentials. But you can see just by
looking at Obama's face that he has been forced to learn on the job. He
or Romney will face greater tests.
Both men have said that
containment is not an option when it comes to Iran getting the bomb.
Will either man strike first? Wait for Israel to strike first? Get ready
to join a wider Middle East war?
The strong are saying nothing until they see.
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