Any official preparing drafts of presidential pronouncements may well know the mind of the Chief Executive better than any member of his Cabinet, for the dialogue between the two is boundless. But the weight of the aide's role is easily exaggerated . . . All that Dwight Eisenhower chose to "wear" in public belonged to him, not to any valet or tailor of his language. And in this spirit I shall so report it.
And so he does.
No man, perhaps, is a hero to his valet. But in The Ordeal of Power, Journalist Emmet John Hughes uses his experiences as an Eisenhower speechwriter to strip not only Ike but almost everyone around him as well.
Hughes, 42, is a former TIME-LIFE correspondent, was political adviser to New York's Nelson Rockefeller from March 1960 to last January, is now a columnist for Newsweek and the Washington Post. In his own politics, he says, he shares "the views and spirit of the Christian Democratic Left in Western Europe," and if he had ever voted in a national election before 1952, he would have voted for Democratic presidential candidates.
Down in the Diary. Yet, seven weeks before the 1952 election, Hughes became a speechwriter for Republican Eisenhower. Why, believing as he did, did he take the job? Hughes's reason is circuitous: "I believed the essential vigor of the nation's two-party system to stand in clear and present danger . . . In 1952, for the life of the two-party system, it was 'time for a change.' But I thought this change essential—paradoxically—less by reason of the faults so loudly imputed to Democrats, too long in power, than by reason of the political follies so willfully practiced by Republicans, too long in exile."
After Eisenhower's election, Hughes stayed on for ten months as a speech-writing presidential aide. As such, he had privileges given to few valets. He sat in on Cabinet meetings and other high Government councils, had long, earnest conversations with Ike and his colleagues. For them, these were unguarded moments —they could hardly know that Hughes was writing down everything that they said and did in his diary.
From the beginning, Hughes obviously felt himself surrounded by lesser men. Indeed, his disenchantment set in even before Eisenhower's inauguration, when the President-elect and some of his Cabinet choices cruised for three days on the U.S.S. Helena. Writes Hughes: "Attentively attending almost all the discussions of those three days, I found in them a somewhat dismaying contrast between their actual substance and their public appearance. To the world's news agencies, flashing their crisp reports across the globe, these meetings constituted 'the epic mid-Pacific conference' . . . And in succeeding years, there were widespread rumors and reports of the portentous 'strategic decisions' supposedly made aboard the Helena. There were, in fact, no such decisions. Nor did anyone present delude himself on the matter."