It was a curious sort of performance for a President of the United States to display. Eisenhower did agree with Gaither that the country would have to start investing more money in military technology five years hence, and that in the interim the people would have to be educated so they would support what was required. But he declined to take on the burden himself. William Foster and John McCloy, one of the committee’s advisory board members, urged Eisenhower to take on this task, McCloy telling him that he could “blow the opposition out of the water.”
But Eisenhower demurred. “I’m a minority President in the Congress,” he said. “I can’t alienate the Democratic Party by attacking some of its leading members.”
Then Eisenhower made a more revealing, more thoughtful remark. Someone, he said, had advised him recently to describe the defense problem in more lurid terms than he had previously—not to say that it was a problem to be dealt with over the next forty years, but to call for a major spurt of activity now. But Eisenhower refused to go down that road. It wasn’t accurate, he said, it would be misleading. The true task was for the nation to carry the load, over the long haul, until the Soviets change internally. And he would be endangering and unnecessarily frightening the public to say anything different.
But, as of November 4, Eisenhower was generally supportive, and finished the meeting with the comment that it might be good for the Gaither group to be kept together to review the matter every now and then.
Sprague, Foster and the rest were pleased by Eisenhower’s favorable comments, but there was a sense of unease about it. On the specific points—the nature, magnitude and immediacy of the Soviet threat, as they saw it, the need to do something big now—the President had shown himself utterly unaffected.
Over the next two days, Sprague would feel still more ill at ease. On Wednesday, November 6, at 11 A.M., Eisenhower met in the Oval Office with about fifty of the Gaither Committee’s staff scientists. It was a courtesy meeting, called at the suggestion of Eisenhower’s national security adviser, Robert Cutler, just to express appreciation for all the work the staff had done. Eisenhower thanked them very much, told them it was a very interesting report, but then said something that seemed to come out of nowhere.
“You know, you recommend spending a billion dollars for something in here,” Eisenhower said, pointing at the report. “But do you know how much a billion dollars is? Why, it’s a stack of ten-dollar bills as high as the Washington Monument.”
He paused for a few seconds, thanked the group again, and they all left. If Eisenhower is so awed by a billion dollars, some of them thought, how could he ever be persuaded to spend the $44 billion that their report recommended?
Just after the meeting with Eisenhower, a luncheon was held for the committee’s steering panel. Robert Sprague was seated just to the right of Jim Douglas, Secretary of the Air Force, and Curtis LeMay was sitting on Douglas’ left. Sprague was growing nervous about the NSC session of the following day. He had asked Cutler to schedule fifteen minutes afterward for a private meeting to include just Sprague, Foster, the President and his closest military advisers; Sprague had something to say that was so sensitive he could not allow anybody else—not even his own colleagues—to hear it. Sprague had decided to tell Eisenhower what he had learned from LeMay on that second visit to SAC. Not the information about LeMay’s preemptive war plan—Sprague figured he had no business telling the President what one of his own military commanders was up to—but rather the startling news that, even by SAC’s own numbers, not enough bombers could get off the ground fully loaded in time to deliver a devastating retaliatory blow in response to a Soviet attack, and that therefore the Administration’s policy of “massive retaliation” was, in the event of a surprise attack with tactical warning only, unworkable.
After sitting in on the two preliminary meetings leading up to the November 7 session, Sprague wondered just how much the Administration really knew. So, during lunch, Sprague conducted a test. He casually leaned over to Jim Douglas and said, “I assume that you’re familiar with the fact that if the Soviets attacked us and we had tactical warning only, virtually none of our aircraft could retaliate.”
Douglas looked at Sprague incredulously. “You’re crazy,” he said. “Even under the worst of circumstances, one hundred and sixty-seven planes would not be destroyed.” Douglas then turned to LeMay on his left. “You heard Mr. Sprague, General. Isn’t it so that…”
“Wait, that’s not the right question,” Sprague interrupted. “The right question is: assuming tactical warning only, how many airplanes will we have available with full crew, fuel load and atomic weapons on board? And the answer to that question is: practically none.”
Douglas turned hesitantly to LeMay. “Mr. Sprague is correct,” LeMay stated. Douglas sat silent through the rest of the lunch.
Now Sprague was alarmed. If the Secretary of the Air Force had been asking the wrong question and thus getting an irrelevant answer, then no doubt the President had not been properly informed, either. In a way, though, Sprague was not surprised. When he had served as a one-man commission to the Senate Armed Services Preparedness Subcommittee in 1953, looking into the issue of continental defense, he checked out dozens of highly classified documents, including such crucial ones as the estimate of the likely result of a nuclear exchange three years hence. The thing that shocked him most was that this particular document had not been checked out previously by any high officials in the White House, the office of the Secretary of Defense or the State Department. Rather, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the national security adviser and the President had been briefed by staff officers. And, as Sprague well knew from his own experience, briefers are not necessarily paid to tell the truth. He had seen enough briefings by Navy officers on how the aircraft carriers could survive in wartime, and then read the actual study on which the briefing was supposedly based, only to find out that the study had come to exactly the opposite conclusion. Similar instances of deception had occurred with the Air Force and the Army.
The next day’s meeting was enormous, one of the largest of the NSC ever—sixty-nine attendants, including the President, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, the civilian service secretaries, the Joint Chiefs of the Staff, nearly the entire Cabinet, all the relevant deputies and special assistants on security matters, twenty members of the Gaither Committee and advisory board.
One by one, Sprague, then Jerry Wiesner, then William Foster, John Corson, then William Webster got up before the large group to discuss the sections of the report that they had supervised, graphs and charts used extensively. Above all, they emphasized the vulnerability of the SAC force and the supreme importance of a program to disperse the bombers (and ICBMs, when they entered the force) and to harden them in protective shelters. All listened attentively, Eisenhower with a copy of the report sitting on one knee, following along while he listened.
Eisenhower’s response, when it was all over, was roughly the same as his response to Gaither’s less formal presentation the previous Monday: very interesting, but would the American people really foot the bill? John McCloy and Robert Lovett, prominent financiers as well as members of the Gaither Committee’s advisory board, contended that the economy could sustain the measures recommended. Indeed, one entire section of the Gaither Report was devoted to illustrating just that point, through various assumptions and calculations about economic growth and taxation. Still, Eisenhower had his doubts.