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Abroad, the cold war became colder still, and the hopeful East-West exchanges of the first term turned to anger in the second. Ike was widely criticized for giving overly free rein to John Foster Dulles, his forceful but dogmatically inflexible Secretary of State. It must be remembered that Communism was then a very different force from what it is now, in its splintered and growingly bourgeois condition. But in hindsight it is also clear that Dulles needlessly oversimplified the world's predicaments by assuming that all nations must line up clearly on one side or the other in the cold war and that whoever was not for the U.S. was against it.
In July 1958, Eisenhower sent troops to save the government of Lebanon from Nasser-oriented Arab nationalists. In November 1958, Nikita Khrushchev handed down an ultimatum to the Western allies to get out of Berlin. To resolve the issue, Eisenhower initiated a venture in personal diplomacy. Khrushchev came to the U.S., and during talks in the President's Camp David retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains, agreed to lift his ultimatum. The "spirit of Camp David" was short-lived. Just before another summit conference in Paris in 1960, Khrushchev announced that the Russians had shot down an American U-2 spy plane. Not only was the conference canceled; Ike's planned trip to Russia was vetoed as well, a personal humiliation. The uncertain performance of his Administration, which clumsily lied and backtracked before Eisenhower himself claimed responsibility, marked the nadir of Ike's White House years, and the unhappy memory was only partly counterbalanced by his triumphal tours of world capitals in the last two years of his presidency.
Sins of Omission
In 1960, vowing to "get the country moving again," John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon—and by inference repudiated the Eisenhower era. Early in 1961, Ike, at 70, the oldest President in history, rode with Kennedy, the youngest elected President, down Pennsylvania Avenue. "The vitality of the man!" exclaimed J.F.K. his first night in office. "It stood out so strongly there at the Inauguration. There was Chris Herter, looking old and ashen. There was Allen Dulles, gray and tired. There was Bob Anderson, with his collar seeming two sizes too large on a shrunken neck. And there was the oldest of them all, Ike—as healthy and ruddy and as vital as ever. Fantastic!"