The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War by Mulloy D

Author:Mulloy, D. [Mulloy, D. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2014-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.1. President Dwight D. Eisenhower receives a gift from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during his 1959 visit to the United States, as Vice President Richard Nixon watches. © Jerry Cooke/CORBIS

Overall, though, at least from the perspective of the Eisenhower administration, the visit was a successful one. The Soviet leader had been impressed with the scale and extent of American affluence, as had been intended, and once he had gotten over his fear that Camp David might be an internment camp, the discussions between Khrushchev and Eisenhower there had been cordial.58 No major agreement was reached, but Khrushchev rescinded his ultimatum on Berlin and the two leaders concurred that disarmament was the really crucial issue between them. A summit of the four occupying powers intended to solve the matter of Berlin once and for all was planned for Paris the following May.59

Having failed to prevent Khrushchev’s visit—although Welch believed that all the effort had been worthwhile, because it had prevented the tour from being turned into a “triumphal procession” and “brought home to millions of Americans” the “real nature” of the Soviet Premier—CASE now had another issue to pursue. The slogan changed once again—first to “Stay Away—USA! The Summit Leads to Disaster!” and then to “If You Go, Don’t Come Back!”—but the tactics and hyperbolic rhetoric remained essentially the same.60 “The Summit is a precipice at which the appeasement-minded leaders of the remaining free world will be pushed over the edge. Beyond that precipice there can be only a cataclysmic tumbling into the abyss of a one-world socialist government,” warned Welch in December 1959, as he urged Birchers to do all they could to prevent it taking place.61

In the end, the summit was derailed not by CASE’s petitions, postcards, or newspaper advertisements, but by the shooting down of a U-2 spy plane, the unlikely survival of its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, and by President Eisenhower’s (eventual) refusal to deny that he had been responsible for its flight. The plane was shot down by the Soviets on May 1, 1960, two weeks before the Paris summit was due to begin. Believing that Powers would commit suicide rather than be captured alive—each U-2 pilot carried a poisoned needle for just this purpose—the president initially stuck to the agreed-upon CIA cover story, which held that the recovered wreckage was nothing more than an American “weather plane” that had accidently strayed into Soviet airspace. On May 7, Khrushchev revealed publicly that Powers was alive and demanded an equally public apology from Eisenhower; privately, he urged the American president to say that the mission had been unauthorized so that the summit could still proceed. Eisenhower refused. He had approved the flight personally, was unwilling to pass the blame on to someone else, and was worried that doing so would give the impression that he wasn’t in control of his own government. The summit collapsed and Khrushchev’s invitation to Eisenhower to make his return visit to the Soviet Union in June was withdrawn.62

If the outcome was

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