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One Last Chance. Dwight Eisenhower first ran for President with the idea that he might help bring the world closer to peace. In his first term he demonstrated in the Strait of Formosa that the U.S. would stand staunchly against aggression; he demonstrated in the Suez crisis that the U.S. would resist aggression by its friends as well as its enemies, that peace was meaningless without justice. In 1956, he decided to run for re-election despite two major illnesses and the possibility that a constitutional ban against a third term might dilute his effectiveness (in the event, the 22nd Amendment strengthened Eisenhower's hand; with no political future he could plainly prove that he acted in the national interest, not out of personal ambition). He gave his reason for seeking re-election to a small group of friends: "I want to advance our chances for world peace, if only by a little, maybe only a few feet." At first his second term seemed only to bring more cold war crises. The President sent U.S. troops to Lebanon, again deployed U.S. warships in Formosa Strait. Then, on Nov. 27, 1958, Russia's Khrushchev handed the Western allies an ultimatum to get out of Berlin.
Increasingly, as he saw the calendar running out on him, President Eisenhower spoke to friends of wanting "one last chance'' to move toward peace. But he was determined not to be forced to a summit conference by the club Khrushchev held over Berlin. "We are not going to give one single inch in the preservation of our rights," he said. "There can be no negotiation on this particular point."
Yet might not the creative energy of freedom be used to seize the initiative? Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sought the answer in long, intensely personal talks (often a sleepless President picked up his bedside phone in the middle of the night to call a sleepless Dulles)—and the idea of Ike's exchanging visits with Khrushchev came up. "We began to work on this thing," Eisenhower recalled months later, "and I gave the subject to two or three of my trusted associates in the State Department and said, 'Now let's try to tote up the balance.' "
Explosive Events. Dulles saw merit in the proposal for an Eisenhower-Khrushchev exchange, but first he wanted to find out if some sort of progress could be made at a U.S.-sponsored meeting of the Big Four foreign ministers at Geneva. The U.S. was represented at that conference by a new Secretary of State, Christian Herter, for in February Foster Dulles, gallant warrior, entered Walter Reed Army Hospital with a recurrence of cancer. And on May 24, 1959, the colleague Ike had trusted beyond any other died in his sleep.
Predictably, inevitably, the foreign ministers' conference ended in failure. Recalls a top State Department official: "The President was very firmly committed not to go to a summit meeting as long as he was forced to go under threat, or as long as there was no prospect that a summit meeting could show some results. He thought it over—and he decided to take the initiative."