MANY MAYS AGO

By Edwin Cooney

The first of May 1960 began on a Sunday which was only fitting because, at mid month, President Eisenhower, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev were to be hosted by French President Charles De Gaulle at a peace conference which might well settle serious disputes that were blocking a sense of peace and happiness throughout Europe.

Two days previous, Ike, our beloved president, had approved a final mission conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency to launch one final spy mission over the Soviet Union before the upcoming Paris Peace Conference.

The U2 plane was piloted by 31-year-old Francis Gary Powers of Pound, Virginia. The U2 plane was an odd looking contraption with long spindly legs and a very lightweight shell which enabled it to rise above 12,000 feet, just high enough to avoid the range of Soviet defense missiles. When young Powers didn't land at the C.I.A. base in Sweden, the agency reported it to Eisenhower. Ike, who was golfing in Augusta, Georgia, decided to await developments. However, when none came from either the Soviet government or from search efforts by the C.I.A., Ike approved the issuance of a standard explanation by military aide Andrew Goodpaster stating that we had a weather plane missing which might have accidentally crossed over into Soviet territory.

In the meantime, Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who knew all along that the United States had been spying on his country, was not only presented with the plane and all of its equipment, but with a living pilot whom he planned to display to the world during the annual May Day celebration held at Red Square on Friday, May 6th. As righteously angry as he was, Khrushchev insisted that these flights, which he said had been occurring frequently for the past five years, did not have to mean that no progress could be made at the upcoming Paris Peace negotiations, especially if President Eisenhower would issue a public apology at the outset of the conference. Ike refused to apologize but attended the conference beginning on Monday, May 16th.

Being the cagey international politician he was, Nikita Khrushchev had humiliated Ike's pretense at Camp David the previous fall during the premier's visit to America. He revealed that during that conference, Ike had called him "friend" and had insisted that Khrushchev do the same. Knowing about the U2 flights, Khrushchev said that he had thought to himself: there’s something fishy about this friend of mine.

Beyond the fiery Khrushchev temperament, Americans were forced to consider, almost for the first time, that even the godless Soviets might have genuine cause for concern for their national security brought about by American hostility. The general public knew little about espionage and, insofar as they knew, only our enemies were guilty of espionage. Ike's participation in espionage in Iran, whose government we toppled in 1953, and in Nicaragua, whose dictator we had vanquished in favor of our own in 1954, was not widely known by most Americans by May 1960.

Humiliated at Paris in mid May, Ike's upcoming visit to Japan was at risk by the end the month.

Even more, whether espionage was legitimately a weapon in a peaceful people’s diplomatic arsenal became a political issue, Candidates Nixon and Kennedy privately agreed that espionage was not only a legitimate necessity, but a necessary ploy.

Gone forever was our perception that a free people was always at the summit of international good intentions.

As for the wisdom of Ike's lie regarding a missing weather plane, the fallibility of Ike's presidential task was exposed to history's judgment and, as a fact, on the record for consideration in evaluating America's future.

Today, sixty-three Mays after 1960, we're still grappling over the wisdom or the necessity of presidential lies. Are there good lies and bad lies? Is integrity the most valuable aspect of any individual president's success? Students of history and historians alike are invariably on the lookout for past presidential lies or sleights of hand.

However, until Sunday, May 1st, 1960, presidents might have lied as politicians while seeking office, but in foreign affairs they had brought about a League of Nations (Woodrow Wilson in 1919), the United Nations (Franklin Roosevelt in 1945), NATO (Harry Truman in 1949), Atoms for Peace (Dwight Eisenhower in 1953) and The Spirit of Geneva (Dwight Eisenhower in 1955).

Perhaps truths, lies, deceptions, fears, hopes and the capacity to recover from the worst of these was always true.

However, most vividly, it all became evident between Sunday, May 1st and Tuesday, May 31st, 1960.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY