Presidential Papers, Doc#715 To Emmet John Hughes, 6 February 1954. In The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower
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Doc #716

Document #715; February 6, 1954
To Emmet John Hughes
Series: EM, AWF, Administration Series
The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XV - The Presidency: The Middle Way
Part IV: "Pushing ahead along the broad center"; December 1953 to March 1954
Chapter 9: Fending off "the reactionary fringe"

 

Dear Emmet: The first of your articles on Russia is out and, together with your letter, remind me again how much we here miss you.1

With your thought that the next years will see an extension of what you call "peripheral political warfare" I have long been in agreement. If you ever have time to translate that conviction into a plan, I should like very much to have it. That sounds a little formidable, and if you have any concrete recommendations to make, do send them along.2

If you run into the High Commissioner while you are in Germany, please convey to him my warm greetings.3

With personal regard, As ever

1 Hughes, a former presidential speech writer, had returned to his journalistic duties with Time-Life International in September 1953. He would spend the majority of the following two years as a foreign correspondent living in Rome (see no. 427 and Hughes, Ordeal of Power, pp. 155-62). Hughes had written the President that two long articles based on his recent two-week trip to Moscow would be published in Life (Emmet John Hughes, "A Perceptive Reporter in a Changing Russia," Life, February 8, 1954, 114-31 and "Collective Rule: Kremlin Takes a Big Gamble," Life, February 15, 1954, 102-16).

2 Hughes had told the President that at first he had thought that "the towering threat of war and destruction on the fiercest scale was beginning to make somewhat academic our patient, labored concern with `peripheral' political warfare." He had, however, come to believe that the Soviet preoccupation with its consumer-goods program and the political experiment of having three Soviet officials in control of the country "mean that the years immediately ahead are going to be fought in precisely these terms. . . . And to this our energies and imagination must be directed" (Hughes to Eisenhower, Jan. 31, 1954, AWF/A).

Hughes would write periodically with impressions gained from his assignments abroad (see no. 1213; see also no. 1956).

3 James Bryant Conant had been U.S. High Commissioner in Germany since February 1953.

Bibliographic reference to this document:
Eisenhower, Dwight D. To Emmet John Hughes, 6 February 1954. In The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. L. Galambos and D. van Ee, doc. 715. World Wide Web facsimile by The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission of the print edition; Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/715.cfm

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