Introduction
First Term - Volumes XIV - XVII
by
Louis Galambos and Daun van Ee

Historians of the twenty-first century will, we believe, place the first administration of President Dwight David Eisenhower primarily in two contexts. One will involve what many see as a slow, uneven swing in the industrial nations of the world away from reliance on national public programs stressing security and equity and--in an effort to achieve greater efficiency and freedom from bureaucratic controls--toward greater reliance on the private sector. The other basic context will involve the strategy Eisenhower employed to wage the Cold War. President Eisenhower was not the author of that strategy. Instead, he inherited, modified, and sustained what would arguably be the most successful diplomatic initiative of the twentieth century.

As president, Eisenhower was determined to reverse the trend he saw in U.S. domestic policy toward greater federal involvement in the affairs of the states, localities, and private citizens. His bench mark was Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and Eisenhower's personal historical position on this fundamental issue was framed almost entirely in domestic terms. But of course the drift toward the creation of a modern welfare/regulatory state had deep roots in nineteenth-century European ideologies and political struggles. Those contests had influenced the development of America's post industrial, liberal ideology. They also helped to shape the reform movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, movements that gradually extended the power of the federal government in an attempt to ensure greater equity and security for particular groups of Americans. Not all who received help were poor or powerless. Nor did all of the liberal innovations in government stress these goals; for instance, our volumes were edited with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. But these important programs notwithstanding, it was equity and security that were central to the liberal vision and to the New Deal and Fair Deal administrations that concerned Eisenhower.

Eisenhower had not given much systematic thought to these aspects of American history prior to his service as president of Columbia University and as Supreme Commander of NATO's forces in Western Europe. Before going to Columbia, he had certain likes and dislikes. He knew, for example, that he would be more at home in the Republican party than in the Democratic party. But he was still a novice in these matters when the prospects of a run for the presidency became likely. Then he began to collect information on domestic policy and formulate his own concept of a domestic program.

Too much authority, he concluded, had been shifted to the federal government. He had spent most of his career loyally serving the national government, but he thought that individuals and their local and state governments had lost much of their power to initiate action in the years since 1932. He did not want to roll back history, junking federal policies that in his view had proven successful. As he told his brother Edgar during an unguarded moment, "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history." He was in fact willing to strengthen those federal programs that had good track records and even to introduce new measures on a selective basis. But at the same time, he wanted to prune programs such as those in public power and agricultural subsidies, whose costs he thought far outweighed their benefits to the nation. If successful, he would slow and perhaps even stop the growth of the administrative state. This was his concept of the "middle way."

Eisenhower's effort to stem the expansion of the federal government was one in a long series of such forays that began with the end of the New Deal in the late 1930s. The rhetoric has varied from decade to decade, as has the major locus of opposition to liberal programs. At times Congress was the main source of conservative opposition; at times, the White House. In the years following the Eisenhower presidency, the swing away from federal efforts to provide equity and security was periodically interrupted--for example, in the mid-1960s and late 1970s--but never decisively put to rest. Since 1952 American voters have elected relatively conservative Republican presidents in six of the ten elections, and while Congress has often been a Democratic preserve, a loose coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans has dampened many of the efforts to extend federal power.

Since the late 1970s the shift away from the public and toward the private sector has reached global proportions. As of this writing not a single nation in the world is contemplating nationalization of any major economic activities. Most have curtailed the regulation of economic activities and transferred a variety of public functions to the private sector. In country after country, efficiency and innovation have acquired the same political salience once enjoyed by equity and security. Intense global competition has heightened the concern for efficiency. Even liberal and socialist governments have embraced elements of the antigovernment, antibureaucratic movement. Welfare and regulatory systems are under attack in a manner that would have been hard to imagine in 1953 when Eisenhower took the oath of office.
Eisenhower's presidency was part of this much broader political epic played out against the backdrop of the Cold War. In dealing with that struggle, Eisenhower was intensely committed to the policy of containing communism by deploying economic and military aid, by forming defensive alliances, and by threatening to exercise--and when all else failed by exercising--U.S. military power. Containment, he thought, would be a winning strategy only as long as the United States avoided three crucial errors: First, it should not allow anything to interfere decisively with free trade and should do everything possible to support its capitalist trading partners. Second, the United States could not let the Western Alliance be undermined, even as the old colonial empires collapsed and the nation's communist opponents tried to break down the unity of the West. Third, America should not try to buy so much security that it weakened its economy over the long term. In keeping with this third strategic principle, he sought to constrain the warfare state as well as welfare and regulatory programs.

The first Eisenhower administration had numerous opportunities to make all three of these fundamental errors, but in each instance the President, his advisers, and key congressional leaders cooperated in keeping the containment strategy viable. The presidents who followed would have similar opportunities. Some would come dangerously close to losing a grip on containment. But in the 1980s that policy would finally achieve its primary goal. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to a sudden and stunning close that long phase of world diplomacy and seems to have vindicated Eisenhower's successful efforts to preserve the Western Alliance and wait out its communist adversaries.

Eisenhower's role in these two historical transitions helps explain the astonishing change that has taken place in scholarly evaluations of his presidency. Contemporary appraisals of the Eisenhower presidency were for the most part critical. The administration's domestic policy in particular aroused criticism, as did the Eisenhower style of leadership. Many of the White House initiatives had a negative tone; after all, the main thrust of the Middle Way was to stop the growth of the federal government, a policy that was not likely to bring scholars out of their seats cheering. Academic communities in the United States have tended to be liberal and have supported many of the types of government programs Eisenhower was attempting to cut back or eliminate.
Agricultural subsidies were typical of the programs the administration intended to recast. "Today," Eisenhower wrote in 1956, "we have surpluses that cost us some eight billion dollars and are costing us something like a million dollars a day to store. This means nothing to the politicians, who believe that they can extract political advantage from the circumstances." Trying to create his own "circumstances," Eisenhower and Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson attempted to develop a number of new programs that would manage the surpluses while cutting the subsidies. The documents in these volumes provide a blow-by-blow account of the struggles that followed and the relatively minor victories the administration had to accept.

A similar fate awaited two other efforts to shift the emphasis of America's political economy from the public to the private sector. Eisenhower was opposed to extension of the authority or operations of the Tennessee Valley Authority. He wanted private, not publicly subsidized, electric power, but his efforts to use the Dixon-Yates contract to achieve that goal were thwarted when conflict-of-interest charges emerged. Similarly, his vigorous opposition to the extension of federal authority in the natural gas industry had to be abandoned in 1956, when lobbyists for the industry engaged in corrupt practices.

Eisenhower was far more successful in implementing his fiscal policy. He advocated a balanced budget, sought a low rate of inflation, and wanted a rate of growth that was sustainable over the long term. "Under conditions of high peace time prosperity, . . ." he said, "we can never justify going further into debt to give ourselves a tax cut at the expense of our children." Many Republican congressmen disagreed. "Some of them," Eisenhower said, "will shout 'sound money' but they are unwilling to face the music in taking the steps that will keep that currency sound." The intra- and inter-party struggles over fiscal moderation were fierce, but in 1956 and 1957 the administration managed to balance the budget--a feat matched only one time since 1960.
In all of these political struggles, Eisenhower was forced to deal, as he had during World War II, with serious divisions in his own camp, in this case the Republican party. The right wing of the party, whether it was Senator Joseph McCarthy or Senator John Bricker, repeatedly attempted to undercut his leadership. "There is," he said, "a certain reactionary fringe of the Republican Party that hates and despises everything for which I stand or which is advanced by this Administration." Angered, the President nevertheless dealt patiently, often indirectly, and ultimately successfully with this opposition. He saw McCarthy rebuked by his colleagues in the Senate and Bricker thwarted in his attempts to tie the President's hands in foreign policy. Moreover, the administration was able to push through Congress improvements in social security and a new highway construction program, neither of which appealed to the "true reactionaries."

While he was willing to maneuver to achieve his objectives, Eisenhower never became comfortable with certain basic aspects of the American political system, or as he put it, "this political business." He found even the normal workings of patronage hard to stomach. The basic nature of lobbying groups disturbed him because they seemed incapable of placing the national interest above the self-interests of their members. He lamented the "time a President has to spend in resisting pressure groups--each organized to gain for its members some advantage through Federal law or to make it possible for them to dig deep into the Federal treasury."

There were of course pressure groups that did not want to "dig deep into the Federal treasury," and those dedicated to achieving full civil rights for African Americans were some of the most active and forceful in the 1950s. This movement did not fit comfortably in Eisenhower's categories of political thought. Civil rights was not grounded in the New Deal, was not a mainstream, American liberal movement at all. But its leaders sought fundamental changes in governance and social relations at the local, state, and federal levels, and the President had to respond to those demands. He looked for a middle way through informal leadership. He ordered desegregation in the District of Columbia, in the federal government, and in the military, where he could act unilaterally. He formulated for Congress a bill that would ensure voting rights for all Americans.
Unlike his Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, Eisenhower was privately uncomfortable with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and he would in this case be disappointed in his search for a peaceful, middle way. "I believe," Eisenhower wrote, "that Federal law imposed upon our states in such a way as to bring about a conflict of the police powers of the states and of the nation, would set back the cause of progress in race relations for a long, long time." Shortly, however, a direct conflict between state and federal power would take place, and progress in race relations would be accelerated, not set back, by augmentation of the authority of the federal government.

In domestic policy, then, Eisenhower's first administration came short of the objectives he had sought upon taking office but made substantial progress toward achieving one of the President's primary goals: slowing the expansion of the New Deal administrative state. Forced to accept only modest gains in agriculture and in the battle between public and private power, Eisenhower could take solace in the performance of the economy. A balanced budget, a low rate of inflation, and steady economic growth were not negligible accomplishments--as his successors in the White House would discover. Although slow to move on civil rights and unwilling to take a direct, visible role in halting the depredations of Senator McCarthy, Eisenhower and the millions who voted to reelect him could be assured that the government had not avoided "responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it."

While Eisenhower was sometimes uncertain about the dynamics of domestic policy, he was forceful and far-sighted in foreign affairs. He could not always be deft in diplomacy. There were too many bureaucracies to deal with, too many allies with whom to coordinate. But the President had a fixed purpose, a good understanding of the means necessary to achieve U.S. goals, and a sure hand in deploying American power throughout the world. He inherited his fundamental strategy: the policy of forcefully containing communism while waiting for that system of political economy to collapse as a result of its internal contradictions and inefficiencies. He added to that strategy an important qualification: the means had to be economical, had thus to enable the United States to preserve the strengths of its economy through this long struggle.

He undertook with enthusiasm what he understood to be his first responsibility--to bring a peaceful conclusion to the war in Korea. Here too he had difficult partners. He found South Korean President Syngman Rhee "such an unsatisfactory ally that it is difficult indeed to avoid excoriating him in the strongest of terms." "Of course," he wrote satirically, "the fact remains that the probable enemy is the Communists. . . ." Still, Eisenhower held the United States on a steady course, saw to it that the country negotiated and implemented an armistice, and repeatedly rebuffed South Korean efforts to rekindle the war.

Having ended that hot war, Eisenhower, who had spent virtually all of his career in the military, then spent the rest of his first administration struggling to preserve a tenuous peace. Asia presented several serious challenges to the containment program. Communist China threatened to attack offshore islands still controlled by the Nationalist Chinese. In Eisenhower's view, Communist conquest of these islands would weaken Nationalist morale and might threaten the independent existence of Formosa itself. Likening the non-communist nations on the Asian periphery to dominoes lined up in a row, he concluded "that the loss of Formosa would doom the Philippines and eventually the remainder of the region. . . ." American policy on the offshore islands drove a wedge between the United States and its allies--especially the United Kingdom. Although Eisenhower and Dulles worked hard to remove that wedge, the British remained suspicious of what they interpreted as American willingness to risk a nuclear holocaust merely to keep Nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek from losing face.

There were other cracks in the western alliance, some of them impossible to patch or even to conceal. The collapse of the colonial empires of France and Great Britain generated tensions throughout these years. "Colonialism is on the way out as a relationship among peoples," Eisenhower told Winston Churchill. In the postwar world there was "a fierce and growing spirit of nationalism. Should we try to dam it up completely, it would, like a mighty river, burst through the barriers and could create havoc." Eisenhower hoped that his strong personal ties to and admiration for Churchill would ease the two countries through the evolving crises of imperialism. But in this case the hold of tradition was far stronger than the appeal of a friend and ally. Churchill, who gave more lectures than he suffered, resigned his position in 1955, leaving Eisenhower to deal with more "havoc" than even he had anticipated. At Suez the British, then under the leadership of Anthony Eden, another wartime comrade of Eisenhower, joined with the French and went to war to defend a colonial heritage. They disregarded Eisenhower's strong warnings. Their invasion of Egypt, the President told an old friend in Britain, "was not well thought through before the plunge," and they suffered a humiliating defeat. Seldom, Eisenhower concluded had the United States and Great Britain "been faced by so grave a problem." The rift between the United States and its principal European allies threatened the alliance that Eisenhower knew was the foundation stone of containment.

The collapse of the French position in Southeast Asia created a similar, if less immediate, crisis. Along with Churchill, Eisenhower resented "the tyrannical weakness of the French Chamber," and he was especially critical of France's unwillingness to recognize that its colonial empire had now to be abandoned. Eisenhower wanted colonialism to be "militantly condemned by the colonial powers, especially Britain and France." But in this he was disappointed. The French fought hard to hang on in Vietnam. They would not accept Eisenhower's condition for direct American military support, that is, total freedom for the Indochinese colonies.

For his part, the President remained convinced that "any nation that intervenes in a civil war can scarcely expect to win unless the side in whose favor it intervenes possesses a high morale based on a war purpose or cause in which it believes." Disappointed in his efforts to convert that struggle into an uncompromising crusade for liberty, he would not give "even a tentative approval to any plan for massive intervention." Instead, the United States limited its role, while the French military efforts collapsed. Eisenhower was deeply concerned. If "Indochina passes into the hands of the Communists," he said, "the ultimate effect. . . could be disastrous. . . ." Hoping to keep the dominoes from falling, he looked for an alternative short of "massive intervention" that would bolster the forces in South Vietnam. As the French were leaving Vietnam, Eisenhower decided South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem might provide the necessary "high morale" and was thus worthy of U.S. support. Ultimately, however, Eisenhower was no more successful in shoring up the American ally in South Vietnam than the next three U.S. presidents would be.

In Europe, too, he constantly struggled to hold the Western Alliance and NATO together and was periodically disappointed by his inability to maintain a united front. He had hopes for the European Defense Community, the collective-defense organization that had seemed so promising in 1951-52, when Eisenhower was NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. But after French fears of a resurgent Germany sank that plan, he admitted that he could not understand "why the peoples of Western Europe, and particularly of France, do not see that, unless they unite militarily and economically, they are doomed." To prevent that dire outcome, he supported German rearmament, sought to bolster NATO's southern flank by helping settle the Italian-Yugoslavian struggle over Trieste, and proposed at the Geneva summit meeting a mutual aerial inspection plan (Open Skies) in an effort to reduce the fear of a surprise nuclear assault. Although the 1955 Geneva summit yielded no specific agreements on the issues separating the United States and the Soviet Union, some thawing of the Cold War appears to have taken place in the months that followed.

Like most other Americans, Eisenhower worried because "the United States has reason, for the first time in its history, to be deeply concerned over the serious effects which a sudden attack could conceivably inflict upon our country." He pressed for disarmament under conditions that could be carefully monitored. Inspection was important because he was deeply suspicious of the Soviet Union and its leaders: "No one could be happier than I," he wrote, "to find that I have been wrong in my conclusion that the men in the Kremlin are not to be trusted no matter how great the apparent solemnity and sincerity with which they might enter into an agreement or engagement." Nevertheless, he looked for common ground while trying to avoid the hyperbole and propaganda, the false hopes and inevitable discouragement that would accompany an ill-conceived summit meeting. In 1953 he had proposed to redirect the supply of fissionable materials--the essential elements in the construction of atomic and hydrogen bombs--into programs that could better the lot of mankind. This effort to get the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union off "dead center" captured the imagination of a fearful world. While the President failed to achieve his immediate objectives, his proposal gave the administration and its allies a viable ideological position around which to rally continued support for containment.

That strategy required patience, a virtue customarily in short supply in most modern democracies--and especially in the United States. Eisenhower knew that a destructive atomic war was possible: "I think it would be unsafe to predict that, if the West and the East should ever become locked up in a life and death struggle, both sides would still have sense enough not to use this horrible instrument." To avoid prospects he found to be "truly appalling," he looked for "ways of lessening or, if possible, of eliminating the danger. . . ." The United States, he said, needed "patience, steadiness, firmness and time." Meanwhile, Americans should keep up their guard by maintaining "effective retaliatory power and a continental defense system of steadily increasing effectiveness." He was willing to use covert and deliberately deceptive methods to achieve the nation's national security goals. He did so in Iran and later in Guatemala, working in both cases through the Central Intelligence Agency. He believed that the loss of Iran's great oil resources justified intervention; in his words, "there has been no greater threat that has in recent years overhung the free world." Central America was too close to home to allow a radical leftist regime, even a freely elected one, to consolidate its position. In these and other exercises of American power, the President depended heavily upon CIA Director Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whom Eisenhower described as "a man of great intellectual capacity and moral courage."
Throughout Eisenhower's first administration, Secretary Dulles assumed a position of high visibility, frequently employing atomic rhetoric, reminding the Soviet leaders that a destructive war was possible. He and the President were in constant communication. "So far as Dulles is concerned," Eisenhower said, "he has never made a serious pronouncement, agreement or proposal without complete and exhaustive consultation with me in advance and, of course, my approval." Eisenhower's tight control of foreign policy ensured that behind the Dulles rhetoric there would always be a reality centered around a patient search for accommodation and peaceful solutions.

The gulf between rhetoric and reality became evident during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. As Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, Republican campaign blustering about rolling back communism in Europe was quickly revealed for what it was--hollow political rhetoric. The President mused about what he would have recommended "to the Congress and the American people had Hungary been accessible by sea or through the territory of allies who might have agreed to react positively to the tragic fate of the Hungarian people." But since he was not about to start a "general war," he was reduced to another round in the war of words. He worked with America's allies in an effort to bring the matter before the United Nations; meanwhile, he protested to the deaf ears of the Soviet Union's Nikolai Bulganin.

While Eisenhower was willing on such occasions to use the United Nations as a pulpit, he was a realist about power relations and a traditionalist in his approach to international affairs. He wanted the United States to acquire new allies. If Jawaharlal Nehru of India had a tendency to lean toward the West, Eisenhower urged Secretary Dulles "to nurture and promote it." He wanted Americans to be more understanding about Mexico's problems: "I am determined," he wrote, "to develop, expand and strengthen our ties with Mexico to the end that country will constitute a strong and friendly ally on our Southern flank." Above all, Great Britain remained crucial to his strategy throughout the first administration. In his view, the "free world" could not "possibly prosper should there be any major cleavage between" these two close allies.

In all of these encounters, Eisenhower had national security at the forefront of his mind. He tried to obtain as much security as he thought the nation could afford over the long term--and no more. Near the end of his first administration, he lamented his inability to persuade the military services to cooperate wholeheartedly in achieving the proper "balance between minimum requirements in the costly implements of war and the health of our economy." Each separate service, convinced that it alone could protect the nation, persisted in urging upon Congress and the people its own "fantastic programs." This, he complained, was his "most frustrating domestic problem." From the perspective of the 1990s, however, Eisenhower appears to have been quite successful in controlling the budgetary demands of the services and compelling adherence to a carefully conceived national security policy.

Eisenhower had a distinctive political style that was a product of both his personality and his experience. His service as a commander of international forces in World War II and in NATO made him aware always of the need for a high level of cooperation in government, even among those who disagreed. He expected all of his Cabinet members to pull together politically and administratively, and he had little patience with those who tried to convert internal debates into public struggles. Long accustomed to effective staff support, he used his Cabinet and the White House staff to clarify issues and illuminate policy alternatives. After the reports and discussion, the President made the important decisions.

Hierarchy mattered to Eisenhower, but he was willing to seek advice and new ideas in informal as well as formal settings. He staged a series of stag working dinners at the White House in order to collect opinions on matters before the nation. He corresponded frequently with a circle of friends with whom he also played golf and bridge, his games of choice. He answered a large number of the unsolicited letters he received, devoting to many of them a considerable amount of personal attention. Members of his family also advised him from time to time. He called his youngest brother, Milton, was his "most intimate general advisor." His brother Ed was another matter, and the papers in these volumes record in detail their feisty exchanges.

Indeed, one of the interesting aspects of the documents we present is the manner in which they reveal a leader whose life was far less compartmentalized than accounts in our newspapers and histories might lead us to believe. Eisenhower bobbed back and forth from matters of high policy to mundane details involving the trees, the cattle, and the buildings on his farm at Gettysburg. He became engrossed in the "fascinating business" of bloodlines and breeding regarding his Aberdeen Angus herd. He and Mamie Eisenhower looked forward to retirement at Gettysburg. His detailed instructions for the improvement and operation of the farm indicate how closely he was still connected to his turn-of-the-century, small-town life in Abilene, Kansas, and to agrarian America.
A heart attack in 1955 made him look longingly to the farm at Gettysburg, but he knew that he had not yet achieved many of his major political goals. Allowing himself to be persuaded that he should run again, Eisenhower was confronted with a difficult choice. Who should be his running mate? He was lukewarm about Richard Nixon and in 1956 expressed his "personal feeling" that his Vice President would be better off in some other position than one that a friend described as having "the outward appearance to the public of a secondary job." The controversy over his running mate would continue until the Republican convention in August, when Nixon's powerful support from the conservative wing of the party would decide the issue for Eisenhower.

The President devoted more time and energy to his reelection than he initially hoped would be necessary. Unable merely to stand on his record and devote most of his attention to the tense international situation, he carried his message to the voters. The rigors of the campaign, combined with the worsening international situation in the fall of 1956, made Eisenhower's schedule extremely burdensome. In early October he told a close friend, "Between official work, campaign trips, speeches--and my first world series game--I haven't stopped revolving in weeks." He hoped that he had made the alternatives in the election clear to the voters: "If Americans believe that centralization of power in Washington, inflation with rising living costs, and Federal ownership of an increasing number of types of utilities, would best serve their own interests, then those are the people that should vote against me." As it turned out, of course, he won an overwhelming personal victory at the polls. He was disappointed that his coattails did not pull through enough Republican candidates to give the party control of Congress. But he had no time to lament that situation, because on election day he was deeply immersed in the Suez and Hungarian crises--struggles that were of central importance to the containment policy that he had made the centerpiece of his international leadership.

The documents published in these volumes should help the reader experience these and many other crises with President Eisenhower and those who shared his first administration. We trust that these documents and the annotations will also help those who are writing and seeking to understand postwar America obtain a better sense of how U.S. government dealt with both foreign and domestic policy during four important years of transition. Whether academic historians and others are writing from a liberal perspective, from a conservative point-of-view, from a vantage point attuned to Eisenhower's concept of the Middle Way, or from some as yet unanticipated outlook, we believe they will be able to make good use of these volumes of The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower.

Selection and Annotation

While our basic editorial policies regarding selection and annotation of documents have not changed since we first began this project in the 1960s, the changing patterns of Eisenhower's career have made necessary some minor adjustments in mid-course. We have continued to focus on Eisenhower the man, not on the offices he held. As in the past, we have selected for publication only documents that he wrote, dictated to a secretary, redrafted, or was closely involved with in some other way. We do not include routine correspondence, such as the large number of declinations sent out over his signature. These selection criteria were necessary when we covered the World War II years, and they proved very useful when we edited the papers generated when Eisenhower was Chief of Staff of the United States Army, President of Columbia University, and Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, for NATO. As we followed the General's move into the White House, the incredibly large volume of correspondence passing through the Oval Office made it even more essential to focus tightly upon Eisenhower the man and President.

Fortunately for us, two dedicated and talented staff members had instituted efficient office and record-keeping procedures during Eisenhower's tenure. General Andrew J. Goodpaster, White House Staff Secretary, and Ann Cook Whitman, Eisenhower's personal secretary, organized and maintained matters so systematically that Eisenhower was able, as Winston Churchill noted, to put his hand exactly where he wanted it (Ann Whitman memorandum, June 25, 1954, AWF/AWD). The records of the Eisenhower White House reflect this efficiency, leaving us with several ways to determine the nature and extent of Eisenhower's involvement in any particular issue or piece of correspondence.

As in Eisenhower's academic and military careers, staff members drafted many of the President's letters. Early in 1953, some file copies retained in the Oval Office followed the Army practice of showing the drafter's initials in the upper-right-hand corner. For letters written after this practice was abandoned, we had to look elsewhere to determine presidential involvement. Using memorandums of conversation, lists of items signed by the President, congressional mail summaries, records of telephone conversations, calendars, routing sheets, emended drafts, handwritten postscripts, and Ann Whitman's own detailed notes, we could almost always make an informed judgment on whether or not a particular letter was a true "Eisenhower" document. We published as many of these documents as possible, leaving out those prepared by the staff and merely signed by the President with minimal involvement on his part. In our annotations we have continued to identify the aide (or, in some cases, the executive department or Cabinet official) who drafted the letter or cable for Eisenhower. We have abandoned, however, our practice of using a superscript zero to indicate that we were unable to determine the drafter. For the most part, readers may safely assume that unless otherwise noted, either Eisenhower himself or, in the case of a few selected personal notes or routine letters that the President later changed, Ann Whitman prepared the first draft. General Goodpaster has assured us, moreover, that every significant letter that left the White House with Eisenhower's signature was, in the largest sense, Eisenhower's own message.

Since it was the practice in the White House during these years to make multiple copies of letters and memorandums, we often had a choice of files from which to obtain Eisenhower documents. We have, of course, selected the best available copy as our source text. Frequently, however, we were able to locate a number of identical copies of the same Eisenhower document. Although in such cases we have cited those files that were most convenient for us--often the location where we first found the document--we have also tried to cite a wide variety of files in order to assist those researching the original sources. Our annotations will guide readers to the collections containing incoming and backup correspondence.

Alert readers will notice that we have made one minor change in our headings. In order to save space, we have abbreviated the names of the principal files from which our source texts are taken. The Eisenhower Manuscripts are now abbreviated as "EM." Citations to the Ann Whitman File are given as "AWF," and we have cited the White House Central Files as "WHCF." These abbreviations now correspond to the ones used in our annotations (see the note on primary sources in vol. XVII).

One other aspect of our editorial apparatus requires an explanation. In his correspondence with foreign leaders, Eisenhower often dictated letters or edited State Department drafts for dispatch via diplomatic pouch. When rapid communication was called for, as it often was, the State Department usually cabled the text of Eisenhower's letter to the appropriate American Embassy for rapid hand delivery. Occasionally both means of transmission were used for the same letter. In such cases we have normally taken the letter rather than the cable version as our source text. We have also noted any variations between the letter and cable versions.

We have as far as possible remained consistent in our editorial policies regarding annotations, as well as those pertaining to document selection. As in the past, we have not published incoming letters and reports in their entirety. Printing documents written by persons still or recently alive presents serious legal problems; moreover, a summary of the contents of an incoming letter or lengthy report given as a part of the annotation to Eisenhower's reply suffices, we believe, to make the reply understandable. We have paraphrased, summarized, and often quoted parts of the incoming papers in our notes; our aim has been to give the reader a good understanding of what prompted Eisenhower to draft his document and of the context in which the document was prepared. As we said in the introduction to the first volume of our series, our notes have kept in mind "three different types of readers: scholars who will use the documents in researching their specialties or in writing more general works; graduate and undergraduate students who will use them in writing term papers, master's theses, and doctoral dissertations; and those few nonacademic readers who have an interest in examining a basic set of source materials."