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The Simpleton. But the real villain, the one to whom Hughes keeps returning again and again, with merciless hostility, was Dulles. Hughes disagreed deeply with Eisenhower's State Secretary. Hughes was, and is, the advocate of the master thrust in world politics, the grand scheme that can achieve the massive breakthrough to peace. After Stalin's death, Hughes was an all-out pleader for negotiating at the summit with Khrushchev, while Dulles, who had the responsibility of office, was reluctant. Hughes, therefore, derided Dulles' brinkmanship on the one hand and his caution on the other.
Ike apparently spoke with a great deal of candor to Hughes about Dulles. Once, according to Hughes, he remarked: "Sometimes Foster is just too worried about being accused of sounding like Truman or Acheson." Dulles, who obviously did not know quite how Hughes really felt about him, also spoke unreservedly, once saying: "Standing away from my job, I guess I don't think the chances of war are more than one in four. But in my job, I've got to act as if they were fifty-fifty." Comments Hughes: "From almost any other Secretary of State, these words would imply little more than the sensible appreciation of world life. From Dulles, however, they carried an inflection subtly suggestive of a disconcerting readiness to invoke martial power to prove a diplomatic point."
Hughes came to conclude that Dulles was a sort of simpleton: "A personality initially suggesting great complexity grew to appear, with time, increasingly simple." Hughes was therefore astonished as well as angered that Dulles' policies continued to prevail and that he stayed in office.
Back with the Team. Instead, it was Hughes who left. He resigned near the end of 1953 "to return gladly to journalism," spent much of the next two years abroad, "thoughtfully" watching and grieving at the course of international events. But Speechwriter Hughes returned to the Eisenhower team in 1956—and his reason was even more labyrinthine than before. In August of that year, he says, he paid "a courtesy call upon the President." He had had no intention of returning to work for Ike. But he was "seriously swayed by the counsel of some astute and conscientious Democratic friends." These friends feared that the Republican Administration, almost certain to be returned to office, might even begin "boasting of its fancied attainment of world peace," which "might not only leave the governments of other free nations aghast at such unrealism; it might also leave the embattled Administration believing, at least a little, its own domestic propaganda." As a check against this, Hughes's "Democratic friends earnestly urged me to return to work with the President for the duration of the campaign."
Thus, when Hughes visited with Ike that August and the President said that he might be needing "a little help and advice." Hughes was ready. Writes he: "I had no need to answer the offhand remark. But I knew that the request would explicitly come. And I knew that, with deep but silent reservations, I would respond."