Then there was John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s highly vocal Secretary of State. He didn’t like the report one bit, indeed kept interrupting during the discussion period when anyone seemed on the verge of making a decent argument on its behalf. The recommendations, he said, were unnecessary, they would cost too much, would take away too much funding from the more vital programs, such as foreign aid, and this business of civil defense would regiment the country, frighten our allies and drive the Soviets into a still more massive arms buildup besides. In the end, the meeting resolved nothing.
Then came Sprague’s big moment. As the meeting broke up, Eisenhower headed toward the Oval Office, and Robert Cutler led a dozen men in the same direction. They were Sprague and Bill Foster, along with John Foster Dulles, his brother and Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, Defense Secretary Neil McElroy and his assistant for R&D, Don Quarles, Air Force Secretary Jim Douglas, Air Force Chief of Staff Tommy White, JCS Chairman Nathan Twining, AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss, Gordon Gray of the Office of Defense Mobilization, which sponsored the Gaither Committee, and Eisenhower’s staff secretary and ubiquitous notetaker, General Andrew Goodpaster.
Sprague had briefed Eisenhower forty-five or fifty times in the past few years as a consultant to the NSC. The reception had always been friendly. This one, he feared, probably would not be.
Sprague began by explaining the extreme sensitivity of what he had to say, that the Gaither Report had not contained much of the information that followed because very few members of the committee knew about it. First, he noted that the committee had studied SAC’s response capability under three broad conditions. In a situation of world tension, when SAC would be in a “readiness state,” the bombers could respond quickly and successfully in the event of a Soviet attack. If the Soviets initially attacked the NATO allies but saved the attack on the U.S. for later, SAC would also be sufficiently ready to respond. But, he continued, if the attack occurred at a time of low international tension, when SAC was on a normal alert status, and if there were up to five hours of warning time, SAC could scarcely respond at all.
He told Eisenhower of the September 16 alert exercise from NORAD, when not a single SAC airplane was able to take off with six hours’ warning. Remembering Eisenhower’s remarks about how easy it was to disperse SAC to overseas bases at the November 4 meeting, Sprague noted that very few SAC planes were actually on overseas bases because they were more vulnerable still. The SAC plan was to use those airfields as post-strike recovery bases. Furthermore, the Navy’s aircraft carriers, which had atomic weapons on board, were also highly vulnerable to attack.
In all, Sprague summed up, America’s retaliatory force presented some sixty targets for the Soviets to hit. If one assumed four airplanes per target to give a reasonable chance of destruction, the Soviets would need 240 aircraft to knock out the retaliatory force—and intelligence estimates indicated they would have far more than that number. At best, the United States might get off 50 to 150 large weapons, but the Soviets had invested a great deal on air defense, and they have a very large number of radars and fighters. In short, even under optimistic circumstances, we cannot assume we could lay down a substantial retaliatory attack.
Afterward, Sprague considered the meeting an abysmal flop. He told Andy Goodpaster that he thought he had failed to convey the sense of urgency that the committee felt. He thought that his words would startle and shock the President, but instead Eisenhower just sat there, silent, expressionless, that was the most disturbing thing about the whole episode.
But Sprague did not really know Eisenhower, and so could not have known that he played the scene all wrong. Eisenhower disdained hype, and hype was precisely what Sprague created.
The substance of Sprague’s briefing made little impact, as well. In fact, in Eisenhower’s eyes, he presented the best argument against the basic conclusion. Sprague had said that if the war began after a period of high international tension or if the Soviets attacked our allies first, if SAC had more than five or six hours’ warning, if it had “strategic warning” instead of just “tactical warning,” then SAC would be able to get off a good retaliatory blow in the event of Soviet attack. Eisenhower had enough background in military history and military affairs to know that wars tend not to start with a “bolt from the blue,” that they arise out of extremely high tension; and that being the case, SAC was probably in pretty good shape.
There was another factor that Sprague probably could not have known. Eisenhower took an enormous interest in all intelligence affairs, dating back to World War II when he was Allied commander, through his days as SHAPE commander in Europe, and including his tenure as President. Eisenhower may not have known about LeMay’s preemptive war plan, but he almost certainly knew about those airplanes flying over the U.S.S.R. twenty-four hours a day gathering all sorts of military intelligence. In short, he knew that SAC would probably have more than just tactical warning, more than five or six hours of warning time.
Ultimately, he did take some of Sprague’s comments to heart. He initiated a program requiring that one-third of SAC bombers either be airborne or be on a fifteen-minute alert. He took the Gaither Report seriously enough to ask for detailed commentary from the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Treasury Department, the Budget Bureau and the Council of Economic Advisers. The report was the subject of at least three NSC meetings over the next five months.
However, Eisenhower did not take Sprague’s comments enough to heart, did not take the Gaither Report so seriously, as to believe that their fears warranted spending tens of billions of dollars, on top of an already-expanding budget, to shore up a deterrent that he thought was, for the time being, already quite adequate.
On the evening of December 9, 1957, a dinner was held at the Georgetown home of William Foster, Robert Sprague’s deputy on the Gaither Committee. Attending were fellow Gaither members Paul Nitze, CBS president and Gaither advisory-panel member Frank Stanton, Wall Street lawyer and former Air Force Undersecretary Roswell Gilpatric, Laurence Rockefeller, pollster Elmo Roper, New York management consultant Franklin Lindsay, John Cowles of the Cowles Newspapers chain, and—reportedly with President Eisenhower’s permission—Vice-President Richard M. Nixon.
The dinner was Foster’s and Nitze’s idea. Their purpose was to figure out some way of breaking through the apparent indifference and apathy that the Administration was thus far displaying toward the Gaither Report, to come up with some way to convey the message and urgency of the report to the public and, at the same time, to keep battling on its behalf within the government. Foster was keen on trying to convince Eisenhower to issue a sanitized version of the report. Others liked the idea of forming a committee similar to the ones that alerted fellow countrymen to the dangers just before World War II and that helped sell the Marshall Plan to the public. Very gingerly, some talked of leaking its findings to the press.
Eventually, Foster and Sprague did make the Establishment lecture-circuit rounds, talking very broadly and generally about the present danger before such groups as the Business Round-table, the Council on Foreign Relations, the various War Colleges, each of them delivering forty or fifty speeches in all, Foster frequently conferring with Richard Nixon on what he could and should say. Nixon had virtually no say on defense issues with Eisenhower at this point; he had not even been invited to the November 7 NSC meeting at which the Gaither Report was discussed, even though forty-nine other government officials had attended, including a representative from the Justice Department. Still, at the Foster dinner, Nixon expressed agreement with the committee’s conclusion, and the group was pleased to find someone so high up in government in sympathy with their concerns.