Tom Steed Remembers Dwight D. Eisenhower
Tom Steed Remembers Dwight D. Eisenhower
Steed: There’s a story about the generals of World War II – our generals – and how Eisenhower came to be what he was. President Roosevelt and George C. Marshall, who was then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs saw what was cooking in Europe, and they began to figure out Hitler and Stalin. They had decided that it was inevitable that there was going to be some kind of an international war. So, they began to look all through the American armed forces for talent. And every young officer that had – especially after he had come out of the academy – had showed particular leadership – they began to study them. And Eisenhower was one of those fellows.
And so, in a certain time in this evolution of study, he was called in to Washington deliberately so they could take a closer look at him. Along with Patton and several of these others you’ve come to know about the part they played in the war. And some of the military strategists or theorists say that if they hadn’t had that foresight and gone around and found the talent and then began to develop the talent so that they could be capable of handling the responsibilities that fell on them as the war broke out that we might not have – either couldn’t have won the war for a long, long time – longer than it took – or couldn’t have won it at all. And since Eisenhower was the best organizer and had the best talent for getting people to work together and create harmony and solve disputes and things of that sort, why, he just more or less inherited the head job. And he, ah, he did the same thing when he was a kid in high school at Abilene.
He was – I think he was the third son in a family of four boys, or seven boys, but he was outstanding as an athlete and became so popular because he could help the school win games, that he got an appointment to West Point. And when he got out of the West Point, they sent him to Texas as a 2nd lieutenant, and that’s where he met Mamie Dowd and then got married. And also, that’s where he fell under the influence of these old-time generals. And they began to notice that he was more than just another 2nd lieutenant. So this began his whole career that way. As you study his life, it was gaining strength and progressing and advancing through sheer merit. That’s about all he ever had going for him.
Lasalier: Well, he served on the staff of Douglas MacArthur, did he not, in Washington, D.C.?
Steed: Well, I think his first connection was with General John Pershing, and then he got an intro to MacArthur, and there was another general – Kruger – who was one of these technician types. And that’s where he got a lot of his background and why he did so well in the War College when they sent him both to the Strategy College and also to the main military War College in Washington. So he had all this exposure, and he reacted to it, and then, of course, when they got into Europe, before this final organization that won the war for us got really going, before we really invaded Europe, there was quite a contest among the Allies as to who was going to be the number one. You know, the British had a fellow named Montgomery and he thought he was the greatest general on earth, and he gave everybody a bad time, especially Eisenhower.
But it – this brought up a thing that – you’ve heard some, I think, probably whispers about Eisenhower having a girl chauffeur when he was in London and maybe had an affair with her. Well, nobody ever proved that, of course. But the reason his wife wasn’t over there, he came up through the ranks, you know, and in those days, officers were trained that their men came first. Well, the men that he was sending over to fight and die couldn’t have their families with them, so he figured that he had to set the example by not having his. And he practiced what he preached even down to that point. And I’ve never seen very much mention made of how that happened, but I still it’s a very important, more or less untold, factor of his biography, and it’s just kind of a shame that he went through what he did – would have to be a victim of smearing.
To show you how important that was to him, when he got elected president, one day some of the fellows asked him how he liked it and all, and he said, “Well, the best part of it is, I get to stay home all the time.” He’d been in the Army so long, it was just a big thrill to him to have a place where he stay home.
Lasalier: Have a place for eight years he could call home. . . .
Steed: We’ve got a president how that seems to want to get away from home all he can, rather than stay in it. But you can understand if a man’s whole life – the demand on him was such that he never could be what the average man is, a family man with a home and he goes to it and lives in it. When you just are camping out all your life, it can become a big thing with you.
Lasalier: Dwight Eisenhower, I suppose, I first recall remembering Dwight Eisenhower, June 6, 1944, when they invaded the European continent. Early in the morning on June 6, a radio speech – a recording – was played across the United States. Dwight Eisenhower made that speech. That’s the first I remember him. And the next time I heard of him, having been very young, I wasn’t paying much attention to who’s the Supreme Commander of American Forces in Europe, was in 1952, when he was the candidate for president. And he was elected. A vast, vast majority of people supported and voted for Dwight Eisenhower. Now he’s president. The first thing he’s got to do is take care of McCarthyism, or deal with it. A lot of people were very critical of Eisenhower for what seemed to be a waiting – a reticence, not to deal with McCarthyism. What was the atmosphere in Washington at that time, Congressman, and what do you see as how Eisenhower dealt with Joe McCarthy.
Steed: Well, I got messed up in a little bit of that McCarthyism myself. He came to Oklahoma, McCarthy did, and made a speech in which he called all Democrats traitors. And he especially singled out Mike Monroney, a senator from Oklahoma. I happened to be making a speech in Shawnee at that same time and so I dubbed him “public enemy number 1,” and it made the national headlines. And so everybody thought that was the end of me because they feared him, and I said “If we’ve come to a time that when a man as evil as he is can drive everybody else off the public scene. . .
[Excerpt of McCarthy reading a statement in the Tydings Committee, 1950:
“The name of John Stewart Service is not new to the men in the government who must pass on the government employee’s fitness as a security risk.”]
Steed: I think Eisenhower thought it a lot better and a lot plainer than I did. He just figured that’s the sort of thing – that you have to let a boil come to a head before you remove it. He was so sure it would and that the on-going reaction to it would be in the national interest, that he could afford the luxury of – see, had he knocked him over at the time that he first could have, he would have made a martyr out of him.
[Excerpt of McCarthy continues:
“The communist affiliation of Service are well known. His background is crystal clear.”]
Steed: And, ah, see, he took advantage of the fact that a lot of people did have an honest concern about subversion and traitors and that sort of thing, and so, it’s not unusual that people would give some attention to somebody that claims he has evidence. After time went on, they found out that he had nothing but his own filthy imagination, why, of course, that was the end of him.
[Excerpt continues:
During a hearing, questioner asks McCarthy:
“Have you in your possession any memorandum, any affidavit, any paper, any photostat or other material which would tell us who this individual is? Not where you got it, not how you got, not who gave it to you, but have you the material?
McCarthy: Let me say this, I know this is going to continue during this hearing. The very clear-cut obvious attempt not to get at the facts – not to find out what is in the files – you know you can find it out – but this obvious attempt to try and find the name of some State Department official – some loyal person who has come down to a senator and said “now here are facts – here are things that should be brought to the attention of the Senate – try to get their names so their heads will fall” – I think, Senator, that’s shameful. I think it’s obvious to everyone here what’s going on.]
Steed: [talking about Eisenhower] His first job was president of Columbia University. I think for a while he enjoyed it, but it began to get a little dull, and then when they organized NATO, they sent him over as the head of that. And it was while he was head of NATO that the Republicans began to call on him and see him in Paris and beg and plead with him to be their candidate for president. The (garbled) thing was that everybody of the whole political family of the nation knew that he could win whichever party he joined. And when he became a Republican and won, why, he continued the New Deal and the Fair Deal in spite of the Republicans because he was bigger and more popular than them or both parties put together. And that enabled him to do a lot of abridgement between the older radicals on one side and these ultra conservatives and keep the country in pretty good balance. And it’s too bad we can’t do that anymore. We’ve now gone either to the wild-eyed super liberals on the Democratic side or the wild-eyed ultra conservatives on the Republican side, and the truth is, the balance of American people don’t want either one.
Lasalier: You don’t mean there are super liberals in the Democratic Party? Well, never mind, I’m only kidding about that!
Steed: I’ll tell you. That’s what they call themselves, and I worked with them, and I’ll tell you what they really are. They’re Socialists whose party went down the drain and they jumped into the Democratic Party and began to try to take it over.
Lasalier: OK.
Steed: And, this I know from personal – I talked to them. They never denied it. But, ah, the Republicans got – they’ve got the opposite number. There’s always two sides and they have the other side of it and either one of them – the leaders of either party would gladly make the swap if they could.
Lasalier: Well, they have the history of Eisenhower’s president, and it seems that a lot of people think of the 1950s as being kind of quiet, placid sort of life-style, but when he got rid of McCarthyism, then came, in 1954, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the Supreme Court ruled, in effect, that segregation was unconstitutional. Well, shortly after that, Dwight Eisenhower had to take a stand to attempt to begin with due process to bring integration into the nation as a whole. And, of course, he had to start there in the South.
Steed: Well, how that happened – the first test of that decision was at Little Rock, Arkansas. A federal judge had ordered these – the schools to admit these black children. And, of course, the governor was opposed to it and there was a lot of ruckus and they were going to call out the national guard and all this stuff. Well, Eisenhower, on the assumption as Commander in Chief and head of the government thought that enforcing the orders of the court was part of his responsibility, and so he sent troops in there and enforced the order of that court. It didn’t have anything to do with whether he was for or against integration. The courts had decided that, and they had issued an order and people were defying it. And so he went in there to enforce the ruling of the court.
And, of course, that probably saved an awful lot of other trouble of the same kind in the time that followed. But, ah, to hear his version of why he did that doesn’t necessarily make him an integrationist or anything like that. He was so devoted to carrying out orders, you know, so disciplined in that that it never crossed his mind that he could do anything else but uphold the court.
Lasalier: Well, a couple of other points that we might touch on that would, ah, which you would be directly related would be the National Defense Education Act and the Interstate Highway Act. Did not both of those come in the Eisenhower Administration?
Steed: Yes, and the, ah, the, the Interstate Highway Act, see, he had a very close introduction to the Autobahns in Germany before, during, and after the war. And he saw the great advantage, both to the domestic life and to the military life of the nation. And, of course, he appointed an army engineer and they worked out this national system. And he endorsed it. And, ah, supported it all the way along. It got into so many different cross-fires that it took – I was on the subcommittee that wrote it, but, ah, the first time we passed it, or presented it, it was defeated. . . and, ah. . . because of a lot of lobbying maneuvering around, but then. . .
Lasalier: Well, who would be opposed to the Interstate Highway Act?
Steed: Well, it wasn’t a matter of being opposed to it, it was a matter to being opposed to it if you don’t put my game in it.
Lasalier: Ah-huh.
Steed: See, it was such a tremendous, multi-billion dollar baby that there was over 61different organizations that wanted a piece of the action. See, I kept a copy of all that, and, ah. . .because I was on the subcommittee, and I was under the pressure of these guys, and when they wouldn’t let the Steed Amendment, which happens to be the trust fund now, be offered as an amendment on the floor. . . see the Public Works Committee could not pass any legislation that raised taxes. That was the sole prerogative of the Ways and Means Committee, and the only way we could get around it was to waive the rule so I could offer an amendment on the floor because the, ah, Speaker Rayburn was demanding that we pay as we go. He wasn’t going to let them have a bond. Now, Eisenhower’s Secretary of the Treasury, a fellow named, I believe, Kennedy from Cleveland – a banker from Cleveland – he wanted to issue bonds. Of course, there was going to a lot of money made out of the bonds. So Rayburn wasn’t going to have any part of that. Now, the people who were going to pay for it, like the truckers – the American Truckers’ Association had agreed to paid 40% of the cost by having taxes added to tires and fuel and trucks and all this stuff. And the AAA [American Automobile Association] had agreed that the gasoline tax would have to be raised to pay part of it. And so, all this was worked out. And that’s what the Steed Amendment . . . I was the only one crazy enough to introduce a tax bill. But that’s what it was supposed to do was to make the money and the trust fund and the reason they agreed to that was it was part of the act that all money collected under these new taxes would be impounded in a trust fund and used to build roads. And it’s too bad that the rats have got in the corn crib since, because today they use a lot of that money for things other than building roads, and we’re getting now to where we’re going to have to either raise more money or quit throwing it away on foolishness and start repairing some of our roads.
Lasalier: Well, the Interstate Highway Trust Fund has multi-billion dollars in it, does it not, in reserve?
Steed: That’s right.
Lasalier: And they don‘t want that money touched for some reason. What is their . . .
Steed: Well, the allocation of that money is a matter that Congress has to OK each year, and, ah, so, if they use it for building roads and repairing roads, a lot of these other games like taking care of all these defunct New England railroads – Amtrak and the American Railroad Association – they want in on it, and they say, “well, the truckers are competing with us, and it’s alright for them to have to pay to keep us up. . .” and all these sort of things. Then, of course, you have this business of all the goodies, for instance, there are 18 programs in the Department of Transportation that are being funded out of the trust fund on safety. And for instance, I dug up one item and killed it with the aid of a Republican ranking member named Sylvio O. Conte from Massachusetts. He liked to stomp his foot, too, and we worked together a lot. But they were paying $200,000 a year to hire three guys – two main guys and one assistant – to study how high to build a bridge over a road! Like we never had known how to build a bridge over a road. And you get into a lot of things that ridiculous.
But as you go through this – more money – at the rate we’re going, more money is going to go into maintaining a railroad with feather bedding all kinds of unnecessary expenses. They won’t come down – they’ll go out of business before they’ll face reality, apparently. And they just expect the government to bail it out. Well, the easiest way to bail it out is dip in that highway trust fund, and in the meantime you have a road from Shawnee to Oklahoma City that needs repairs – on its Interstate Highway, because the state is hard-pressed to get that kind of money. And, ah, this is – this is what they are going to have to face up. Now, I think it is a matter of necessity the users of the highway are going to have to make some demands on Congress and get it back to where it belongs. The idea of just adding on more taxes is about to – you’re about to kill that goose so it can’t lay any more of those golden eggs. And, ah, it’s too bad that it let it start in the first place.
Lasalier: Well, what about that National Defense Education Act? Was there much opposition to that in the beginning?
Steed: No, there wasn’t. There, again, you had a conflict of interest. Everybody was for it if you did it their way. It was one of those kind of deals.
Lasalier: Where did that proposal come from? Did that come out of the Eisenhower Administration or out of Congress?
Steed: I don’t really know. I think it just sprang from several sources over a number of years and finally began to collect in enough unity to become – to have some chance to move ahead. You have a lot of issues that bounce around up there for several years before they ever gel enough to become a solid idea that different groups can gather in unity back of it. And it’s just funny how easy it is to pass a bill one year and how impossible any other. For instance, the St. Lawrence Seaway issue was before Congress for 20 years, and then they put me on the subcommittee and they had 18 guys for it and 18 against it and me. And I figured out a way to get it out of the committee without a record vote, so the lobbyists couldn’t know who to jump on, and we sent the bill over to the House after it had been nip ‘n tuck, back and forth, for years. All of a sudden it got on the floor through an end-run that I had learned watching the pros. And they – we had a Republican chairman, and I made a deal with him – of course, he was from Cincinnati, up there on – I mean, Cleveland – up there on Lake Erie, and he had to get that bill out, see. He was the Republican chairman, a Republican Congress, how’s he going to explain after all these years he couldn’t do anything? So to get rid of the thing so we could go on to the highway bill and some other things I – we – it got – the mean pros – I mean anti’s out of town on a golf trip down to Florida, and we got those for it to stay there and we called a meeting and got enough of them there to make a quorum and made an oral motion and he passed it, banging the gavel, adjourned the meeting, and there it was.
Lasalier: That’s national politics at work. That’s our money at work.
Steed: Yup. And, so, what happened, when the bill got on the House floor they had a record vote and only 17 members voted against it. And that’s a record. Now that shows you that all these lobbyists were doing – they didn’t want that bill passed. They just wanted to make enough action so as – they were all making a fat living off of it. And most of your lobbying in Washington is motivated that way, right today. And the only reason it’s effective is that the people at home who are the victims of it have become so disgusted they don’t vote. And the more they don’t vote, the meaner and the stronger these lobbyists get. And you can tell them and tell them and tell them and show them, a nobody at home will pay attention to you.
Lasalier: They don’t pay attention and as a result we end up with more and more corruption.
Steed: And more and more members are throwing up their hat and saying “to heck with it, I quit. I don’t want around here.” And the futility. . . but, it was, ah, when the Highway Bill was defeated because of this lack of that amendment, and Mr. Rayburn was very mad at the truckers because they weren’t going to let the railroads come in there where they shouldn’t have been involved and dictate how that road bill was going to be funded. So, I had a luncheon for the heads of several big companies, including the head of General Motors and Edsel Ford was one of my luncheon guests and people like that. Of course, they were so interested that they would have met with anybody, I guess. And I was just giving them the old barnyard language about how you did this and what had to be done. We had an agreement with Mr. Rayburn that if Mr. Eisenhower would agree to certain things, we’d put the bill back in next year and pass it. And, of course, I’d had the Green Book on how much money these guys and companies had put behind Mr. Eisenhower and I said, “Why are you sitting here letting the railroad run your business? Why don’t you. . .” We were in the Hay-Adams House just across the park there from the White House. And I said, “Why don’t two or three of you fellows that know Sherman Adams call him up and make a date and go over there and just tell him that if Eisenhower will agree to go with this pay-as-you-go trust fund that Rayburn wants, that Rayburn will give him the Clay Commission System that he wants, which connects all the military and capitol points of the country. So, ah, they went over there and came back and you go read Eisenhower’s State of the Union message the following January – this was in November after we had adjourned – and he said that while he still favored the bond plan that he would accept the pay-as-you-go plan if that’s what Congress wanted him to do. And that put us in business, and that’s how the thing got done.
Now, the reason I was interested in it, I was not only on the subcommittee, but – you look at that map and if you’re from Oklahoma and want to do something good for the state, what on earth could you hope to do that would make more impact for the better for Oklahoma that this system – we’re the hub of it – this system of highways. Because you can leave Oklahoma now on a superhighway and go to more markets in fewer miles than you can anyplace in the United States. And, so, I figured that I was just lucky that I got in a spot like that at that time.
Now, this showed that Eisenhower used his cabinet officers like he did his combat officers in the army. Each one of them was an individual and had a certain job to do and he dealt directly with Eisenhower. So, he just told his brother from Cleveland – this Secretary of the Treasury – he said, “I vetoed that” and that was the end of it. And no more lobbying for the railroads or anything else, you see. So he had – that’s why most of his administration moved smoothly. He delegated this man’s show to this man. And when they had a cabinet meeting these other guys couldn’t get their nickel’s worth in.
He also had something else that no other president had. You know, the big shots – striped pants boys over at the State Department, they think they are the only ones that know anything about the world and the people in it and what’s good for us, and mostly, apparently, all they can think to do is like Kissinger – they give them another billion dollars and they’ll love us! We used to make bets in the cloak room every time Kissinger went overseas as to what country we was going to give a billion dollars to. Mostly, he gave it to Israel, but anyhow, it always worked out that way. It’s a shame, but that’s the way it goes. You see, Mr. Hague wanted to be Mr. Kissinger, and the poor boys around – he didn’t know about the California Mafia! So they got rid of him!
Lasalier: Took care of him.
Steed: But, anyhow, Eisenhower could set down with his Secretary of the State, who happened to be Dulles, and they knew how to talk to each other. And he could tell Dulles what this guy will do. He said, “I know this man, he was from this country or that country, we had this same problem, here’s the way you have to handle him.” So he was a president from actual experience that could give his State Department people all kinds of background advice on how to deal with the people that we had to deal with. That’s why NATO worked and that’s why these other things got off the ground, and were successful. And, ah, it’s too bad that you can’t have every president be a man that had that kind of experience with all the other nations it’s important for us to get along with, but they all knew Eisenhower knew, so they didn’t try to run any . . .
Lasalier: Well, while you’re on the subject of personalities about Dulles, I want to come back to Sherman Adams in a few minutes, but on foreign policy, some historians say that, OK John Foster Dulles ran it all. Now more recently, some historians are coming around to saying, “Well, now, maybe Eisenhower had a little bit more input than we give him credit for having.” But there was Vietnam, there’s the Suez Crisis in ’56, and there’s Lebanon, and then Fidel Castro moving into Cuba. Would you have any observations or comments on all or any of those?
Steed: Well, I never was on the committees that got right down into the nitty-gritty of all those issues, but I’ll say this, that the reason Dulles appeared to be as powerful as he was, Eisenhower deliberately wanted him to be that. He was Secretary of the State, but he never made any pronouncements of any sort that they hadn’t had long and mostly private conversations about, because . . . and Eisenhower looked on him as a man that knew the game and all he needed to do was to fill him in with additional information that he could use in making his recommendations to him. And so, they had a very close, warm working condition and it wasn’t a matter of one of them selling – they was just trying to put together what they knew. The kept other people out that could disturb that and, ah, see what they could come up with as the best (garbled). He might, then, bring in the military and say, “Now if we do this, what will you think?” And get their opinions, but the basic ballgame had already been written before that happened.
Lasalier: So if Foster Dulles would make some speeches about, ah, what was it, brinkmanship – going to the brink to protect Europe – and talking about a policy of the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe and started beaming Radio Free Europe, and those balloons with the messages of freedom. And then, here comes Hungary and Poland in 1956 and ’57, so that was all policy developed in concert with the president.
Steed: That’s right, and he never found out anything by reading it in the paper. And, ah, the same time, of course, and the men he had for his cabinet, if they did this and it went sour, they insisted on taking the blame to keep it off of him, although he never asked them to do it. And that’s why they would go to the last mile with him because he ran his show the way they wanted him to.
Now, when it came to the military, he sat right down with the Secretary of Defense and his staff and talked about the overall picture, and then when they’d – more of less what they called divided up the – cut up the pie, you know, and gave a slab to each one of the departments, he’d sit down with the head of that department and say “Now here’s how much money you’re going to get and here’s what – you and I have to figure out what you’re going to do with it. Now, I think you want too much of this. We have to do it this way, and he knew enough about what he was talking about to that there wasn’t nothing they could do but agree with him. But he did participate very deep into that before it was ever announced or made public or any decisions were where you couldn’t back out from. And so, they tell me – see the people that I talked to that – I handled the budget for the White House – they said the reason that Eisenhower never had those problems was because they thrashed them out before they became a problem. And he . . .but he always had a system like the army does, or the military does, so that each head of each job, or program – Secretary of the Army, Secretary of the Air Force – they had direct contact with him before any final determination was made. And so, he, ah, he just – it’s too bad that all presidents can’t have a system like that he knows how to make it function, but, he gave a lot of tranquility to the country in the hurtful days right after the war and when all the picking up the pieces and putting the thing back together again was going on.
And I think that probably one of the greatest assets he had was the love and affection and trust of the people so overwhelmingly. It’s a very powerful weapon. And when he’d call a bunch of Congressmen down to the White House – I went down there several times with groups of them – and I always liked to go to see my colleagues make fools out of themselves, you know! (laughter) I’d turn newspaper man on them.
It’s funny how some guys like to be in the limelight so that even though they are somewhat in it themselves, they’ll still try to get with somebody else. And I was amazed – I didn’t know Mr. Eisenhower personally until we began to have these – and he did this all the time, you know. He would – every two or three months he’d have – he’d make arrangements to have you down there for some little chat or maybe a highball or a lunch. Just so you could talk. And I bet he had the personal opinions of more members of Congress than any president before or since.
But here’s the way he did it. Now, I was just standing over to the side and watching. And the first thing you know, here he is with his back to all the rest of them, talking to you. He wouldn’t let you stand on the sides. He was the most adroit host I ever met in my life. There was no way that anybody could monopolize him. And he’d make you feel like of all of them there, there was no one more welcome than you were. And he didn’t kowtow or anything, he just had that knack. And he’d get you, and the first thing you know, he’d tell you some things about you that you were surprised he knew and then get you to talking. And he liked for you to just tell him how you felt about something. And the first thing you know, why you’d be glad to do it because you’d think, well, the guy really likes to know what I think. Now, he never would disagree with you. He’d say, “Well, it’s nice to know how you feel.” Because you could tell that he was going to make a composite of what different guys had said different ways and arrive at some decision down the road. I would think that all the White House dinners and things like that for dignitaries and everything, everybody that – the old pros, you know, like on the foreign affairs committees and things like that – they always said that there was nothing to top an Eisenhower dinner – that the spirit of it, the goodwill of it. . .
Now when he went to this conference over in Europe after the hydrogen bomb was developed by both Russia and United States, he made a proposal that we enter into an agreement that we could photograph both countries and, and, all the time, everywhere. . .
Lasalier: What they call the “open skies” plan?
Steed: Yea, we gave them the blueprints of all our gadgets so that there could be no misuse of that weapon. Well, the Russians sat there in stone silence. They just couldn’t believe that a head of state would make such a . . .
Lasalier: Stupefied. . .
Steed: But he was doing it on the basis that now this will destroy mankind and the earth, and we owe to ourselves to fix it so that can’t happen. We can’t make it go away, but we can make it fixed so that nobody can use it illegally. Well, the Russians didn’t want any part of that. But, they were so impressed by the fact that he would do that, that they were very cordial about everything else in that – and the conference never did draw attention and blow up. It – they wouldn’t agree, of course, they just wouldn’t discuss it. But they treated him with so much deference after that that the conference went ahead and did some other things.
Lasalier: Well, what you say about the American people supporting him was rather obvious from his diplomacy at the time of Suez and enforcing what was it – the British and the French to back out after they had attempted an invasion of Suez, and then when he sent the American troops, ultimately numbering some 14-15,000 American troops into Lebanon. And, then, the take-over by Fidel Castro in Cuba. There was some criticism by that time, but generally speaking, the American people supported the Eisenhower foreign policy.
Steed: I heard a friend of Eisenhower defend that particular Cuban thing. Now, at that time, you got to remember that Cuba was in the hands of a bunch of exploiters and a dictator. . .
Lasalier: Batista.
Steed: And it was a, a, scandal and a mess. . .
Lasalier: Deplorable situation. . .
Steed: And the people down there were suffering. And Eisenhower had to keep that in mind when – obviously the only way you could give the average Cuban any hope at all was to get rid of Batista. And this did that problem. Then, of course, at that time, Castro was denying that he was under the influence of the Russians, you see, there wasn’t any friction. And, ah, some Johnny-come-latelys got in the act after that and drove Castro into the hands of the Russians. But, ah, of course, that was – a lot of these fat-cat Americans who owned all the sugar business and everything else in Cuba and had a monopoly of it . . .
Lasalier: Gambling halls . . .
Steed: But Batista took that all away from them – I mean Castro did. And so, they didn’t like this. They thought all the United States was any good for was to protect their rackets in Cuba. Well, of course, Eisenhower and these others figured that the people of Cuba had a higher claim on it, and they were trying to get a form of government that would take – kick the monopoly out, take the poor peon out of the cane fields and give him a chance to have a decent life. And that’s been basically the American theme ever since we started. And still is, and that’s why we get into some of these funny mixes in countries where there are always fat-cat dictators that are kicking the common man around. We can’t believe what’s in our own Constitution and Declaration of Independence unless we deplore exploitation of people no matter what country they are in? So we are the great human experiment, in other words. Now, ah, the, the part that Castro played was not all – he didn’t reveal that overnight. He had his own problems to get set in himself. And he had to kill about 600 leading Cubans to make sure there wasn’t anybody left smart enough overthrow him, and, of course, that’s one of the first things that communists ever do is kill off the people that are smart enough to oppose them. Then, ah, of course, Kennedy took a page from that, though, when the Russians tried to bring in the rockets, and he faced them down, and made them believe it, and they got out. There’s been another chapter to that. When we, we got the AWAC plane from Oklahoma City sent down to Florida to help the Customs Service spy on ships bringing in narcotic – this AWAC plane can look for 300 miles from 60,000 feet. Of course, it’s only 90 miles to Cuba and while they are flying up and down the Florida coast and across the Keys down to Columbia where they were loading these ships with marijuana and cocaine and we have – I had in my committee room movies of this – they were running this gadgets on this AWAC – they were kind of curious. And they began to see things in Cuba nobody knew was there. Do you remember reading in the paper about all this outburst of Russian equipment going into Cuba and all the fuss about it? They never did tell you how they found that out, did they?
Lasalier: No.
Steed: Well, these boys out here at Tinker Field could tell you. But the first kill they made was a big ship that we had the pictures watching them loading it there in Columbia. And when it came up off of the – see what the AWAC could do to the Coast Guard – they’d just have to go look at this ship every once in a while. The Coast Guard cutter had to trail it. Well, that would scare them off. They didn’t know the AWAC was looking at them. Well, what they wanted to know when they came from Columbia north whether they went to the right and came up on the Atlantic side of Florida or whether they went to the left and went into the Gulf of Mexico. As soon as the AWAC could tell the coast guard that, then their cutters would lie in wait. And when the ship got up just outside the international zone in Miami and five beautiful yachts from Miami went out to get the goodies, and they were all around there having a field day – nobody in sight. They didn’t know that AWAC was still somewhere up there. He was at 60,000 feet and 300 miles away. All of a sudden, here came two Coast Guard cutters, and they captured all five yachts. You know, whenever they come and find you with any narcotic in your car or plane or anything else, it belongs to the government. So that big ship and five yachts and all the cargo and all the passengers were prisoners – 75 million bucks that one little day’s work did for the government.
Lasalier: 75 million?
Steed: 75 million. And so, this, this is part of the evidence they used in some of these decisions they make and its easy to criticize when you don’t a whole lot of the inside detail and the reason they can’t use it – the president of all people – he can’t use what he knows a lot of times because if he did, he’d play into the hands of the people we’re trying to head off. You see, you can’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing and the president’s the guy that has to make that decision.
Lasalier: Let me ask you a hypothetical or theoretical question, Congressman. Would Dwight Eisenhower have carried out the Bay of Pigs completely? Would he had committed American troops?
Steed: First off, he would have had a better judgment as to whether it had a chance to work or not. If it, see, as a military man, he could see, well, this just won’t work. There’s too much assumption here, there’s too much gas here, you’ve got to have this. . .see, he’d have, he’d have beefed it up – he never would have gone in half-cocked like they did. And, ah, I would say that if he got what he wanted and got set the way he wanted, and then he went in there, it would have worked. And I doubt if he would have authorized it any other way. But, ah, it just was not . . it’s time hadn’t come, and the people didn’t know what they were doing that were trying to do it, and so it was a fiasco. A lot of innocent people got hurt. But, ah, human mistakes are around us all the time, and all through history and I guess we never will cure them.
Lasalier: That is a good point to take up what we had said we’d come back to a moment ago, and that was the man Sherman Adams, Dwight Eisenhower’s closest personal advisor and confidant. If you would, mention a bit about Sherman Adams, and then what you see as the impact of the loss of such a man as Sherman Adams or Harry Vaught or a Bert Lance to a president – what that does to the . . .
Steed: Well, you see, they are victims of the system. They are not victim because they are crooks or corrupt. Now Sherman Adams was a fine governor of New Hampshire, and he was a very smart man, and, for instance, he was the man that we got that made this patch between Sam Rayburn and Eisenhower to get the superhighway bill through. We never talked to anybody else but Sherman Adams. He knew the state’s side, he knew the federal side, and bingo, they were back in an hour and the deal was all worked out. And that’s the way you could operate with him. Now, the people that have come around the White House – that spotlight of power is so intoxicating and first thing you know, why, almost anybody could be killing something and it seems harmless and then next thing you know it’s a big scandal. Eisenhower – Harry Truman, you know, when Vaughn got in trouble about the deep freeze or something and I said, “You honor a man by making him part of your staff and then he lets you down, why don’t you kick him out?” And he said, “Well, I’ve got 31 other guys that are doing the same thing in different fields,” and he said, “if they make a good show, I get the credit. If they make a bad one, if I through the wolves on them, if I let them take the wrap,” he said, “I can’t get anybody to come down here and help me.” He said, “I have to beg these people. Any president does. And I have to have the best talent in that particular field.” So he said, “I’m going to get the credit if they do a good job. I have to take the wrap if they do a bad one. The buck stops here.” And that’s where that expression came – from him.
Now Eisenhower did the same thing with Sherman Adams. But Adams was a kind of a guy that would not let the president take the wrap. He took it off his back, and Bert Lance did the same thing. Now, Bert Lance was the only man of deep judgment that Carter brought to Washington with him. And he vetoed so many of those hair-brained things that that bunch of country hicks he brought up there with him were trying to promote, and how they could be taken out and bought champagne tonight and go down tomorrow and use their position in the White House to try to do some lobbyist’s dirty work for him. And, of course, he’d – Bert Lance would veto it. He said, “That’s nuts. It’s crazy.” And, of course, finally, they decided, well, we’ve got to get rid of him. So all the scandal they used on Bert Lance – he put in his own record when he went out to the Senate for his confirmation. There wasn’t a new word of any kind that was exposed at all. But they leaked it out with the press, and you know, the press is always glad to drink somebody’s blood, especially the video press because if they lose one point in their ratings, why they lose a lot of money, and so they don’t much care whose blood they have to use to keep you listening. And there’s so many of them now that if four of them are decent – it only takes one, you know, to spill the beans all over America, and they can do it in five minutes.
Anyhow, they . . . they finally built up a scandal. Now the funny thing about it is, if you go back now and check up all those things that they were so excited about him about – everyone of those loans and everything that everybody that was involved in it made money. The banks never lost a cent. It was all perfectly legitimate. But, they made Carter lose the best brains he had, and I, I would think that if Lance had stayed there and continued – see, I got to know the man real well because I handled his budget. He was head of the Bureau of the Budget, and I handled – I was the only guy that could tell the Bureau of the Budget what it’s budget was because he told everybody else what there budgets were. And that’s the way that you could have a lot of conversations sometimes that didn’t hurt Oklahoma, if you know what I mean.
Lasalier: So Bert Lance, Sherman Adams, General Vaughn were all victims of the power struggle in Washington D.C. that the – political struggle. And someone like, ah, Spiro Agnew might be called a corrupt or scandalous in office.
Steed: Spiro was a different man. He was taking shortcuts while he was in Maryland before he ever got into the federal show. These other men did their public work back home with complete cleanness – cleanliness. And, ah, I don’t know how you explain it to anybody, ah, the only man I know that I dealt with in my 32 years that didn’t have that power was LBJ. Now, he was such an arm-twister. He had been a House member and, in fact, he was the doorkeeper when I was a congressional secretary back in 1935. He had done everything. And he knew more about the government and it’s machinery than any other man that was ever president. But he was an arm-twister. He got things done no one else could do. He’d work on the House and Senate until finally, he’d just break them down. And it got to the point to where if the pages came and said “The White House is calling and wants you to go back in the cloak room and talk to the president,” you’d say “tell him you can’t find me (laughter), because he got you on that phone, you couldn’t hardly get out of his clutches. He was – he was the most amazing telephone arm-twister I ever saw. Other than that, if they came and said “The White House is calling,” everybody said “Oh, boy, that’s a big deal,” see. And these guys they had working down at the White House, they found out that anybody in Washington from any cabinet officer on down, they said “The White House is calling,” and he’d call them up and say “this is the White House,” and they’d say, “yea, yea, yea, yea, yea.” Well, even the smart people, much less country hicks, finally get to thinking, well, I’m just better than I thought I was. And they begin to make these foolish things. Lobbyists know this and if they can get you to go out and have fine dinners with them and to bring your girlfriend and make you feel like a million dollars and the first thing you know, they say, “Why don’t you do this for me?” And you think, “Oh, he’s a good guy. This won’t hurt anything.” And the first thing you know, bingo, you’re in trouble. It’s a . . . you sit there and watch it on the sidelines and it’s kind of – you can’t believe some of the people that fall victim to it. You just think they were natural born smarter than that.
Lasalier: Abscam wasn’t a movie, was it?
Steed: No.
Lasalier: That’s a good way – you’ve just described Abscam.
Steed: You, you – there are people there that if you dangle enough temptation in front of them they will fall for it. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if any of us have a point that we can’t be tempted, but, ah, it would seem to me that what these guys got into was so ridiculous that they should have known better.
Lasalier: Well, there are criticisms of Dwight Eisenhower, but those accusations have never – they never bear out the accuser. The proof is never there, about him. . .
Steed: Well, Eisenhower left a message for the American people. It’s done more good and, and, probably will continue to do more good than even George Washington’s Farewell Address. And that’s when he said “Beware of the industrial-military coalition.” And he was the one that set down on the military. He wanted strong national defense, but he didn’t want any foolishness along with it. And he didn’t think these admirals and generals ought to have money they was wondering what they were going to do with it. He thought they ought to be always kept hungry enough that they just had to do their very best just to get that little bit more they needed for something they had to have. And so, he didn’t believe in this fat cat – I don’t think that the military can give away the budget their working on this year – they can’t even throw it away and get rid of it all, it’s so fat. So this is the first time that they’ve really gone overboard and forgot what Eisenhower warned them.
It isn’t that – it doesn’t have anything to do with national security. You know, it’s a funny thing that every year whenever we’re getting ready to vote on the military budget, there will always be some crisis somewhere. And finally one year came, I always will remember this one. We were sitting in the cloak room and laughing about “well, this is one time the military hasn’t got anything to scare us with. Maybe this year we can get a reasonable military budget and cut out a lot of this fat.” You know what happened? It wasn’t two days until there was a mystery submarine popped up off of the North Carolina coast, and all kinds of publicity about what this might mean and everything else and we just got to have more of this and that. Bingo, we voted about a hundred million billion dollars more than we should have. Now that was after you couldn’t get an admiral or a general to look you in the eye and tell you that wasn’t a frame-up, see?
But Eisenhower – they didn’t do that with him. He did two or three other things. For instance, the presidential automobile was becoming more and more pronounced as – by the time he came along. And they had, by now, a limousine where the top was down and the president could ride and everybody could see him and he could wave to the crowd and everything, and by this time, as a result of the war, terrorism began to show its ugly face around, and the safety of public officials and prominent people began to be questioned. So, the Secret Service, whose budget I also had for 20 years, they decided that we had to begin to take more precautions. For years and years, the Secret Service dealt with counterfeiting and forgery and guarding of the president was a very minor thing. Now, today, two-thirds of the Secret Service guards people and one-third deals with forgery and counterfeiting. It just shows you how this terrorist thing has come on along in the last 20 years.
So, they devised – somebody invented some kind of a plastic thing that you could see through, but you couldn’t shoot a bullet through it. It was a bullet-proof plastic, so they had a little hood made for the president’s car so that if it was raining it wouldn’t rain on him, and if it was cold, it could be warm in there and still people could see him and he could wave to people and they couldn’t shoot him. And this is what they did and why Eisenhower felt free to go anywhere he wanted to. Well, John Kennedy came along and the first thing he did was take that off. He’d be alive today if he’d left it on. That’s one of the sad, unprinted stories of our time.
Now, Eisenhower didn’t feel like that he was showing his being afraid to see the people. He didn’t think he had to take that off to prove to people that he, he loved them and so forth. They just thought he was smart enough to have a little common sense. Now, ah, to show you how that evolved until today, we have an armored car that you can’t even destroy with a bomb, and there’s a lot of secrets to it, and, and, the first one I bought for the president, in my budget, was $150,000. And, of course, the Senators was throwing a fit about spending that much money on a car for the president to get around in. And so LBJ was the president. So he called me up and he said “I want you to agree to that Senate amendment knocking that out of the bill.” And I said, “Mr. President, you’re the only man in America I won’t listen to. That title you’ve got that makes somebody want to kill you don’t belong to you, it belongs to the American people. And if you’re going to carry that title, you’re going to stay just as secure as we want to. And it’s none of your business. We know you’re not afraid of the people. It’s a dirty, low-down trick for anybody to even hint that you ought to pass judgment on this. I’d be the worst friend you’ve got in the world if I even let you make any expression about it one way or the other. And I’m going to buy that car, and I’m going to insist you ride in it. If I catch you running around not riding in that car after we get it, I’m going to make speeches about how crazy you are.” So then, next time I saw him, he said, “There’s a lot of reasons why I love you.” But, what else could he say. . .
Now, one of the reasons we did that – people said that’s a lot of money. Well, we sat down one time with the Bureau of the Budget and the General Accounting Office and our expert staff, and tried to figure out how much it cost to bury John Kennedy. After we got over 400 million dollars, we came to the conclusion that it was a lot cheaper to keep the president alive with $150,000 bullet-proof bomb-proof car than it is to bury him. You can’t afford to let him get killed – it’s too expensive. And so, these are the kind of things that Eisenhower was so realistic about. And he set the pattern, and they’ve followed them.
Now, also, in planes. He was the first president that would ride in a jet airplane, because you know, up to that time the 4-engine airplane was the latest thing there was. The Boeing Company had made some and they were big planes and they could make a pretty good office out of one of them. Now, see, I believe the first airplane that was used by the president was called the Sacred Cow, and then when Eisenhower came along they were called the Columbine 2 and the Columbine 3. And that was because that was the flower of Colorado where Mrs. Eisenhower was born and it was in her honor. Then, when the Kennedy’s came along, they had their own airplane. It was a 707. And they used it. And, of course, they had to put all these presidential gadgets in there because they still have that button to press and all that. And, ah, so they didn’t have any name for it. So they called it Air Force One. And that’s – all of them since have been Air Force One. That’s how it got its name. It just evoluted [sic] into that. And, so, he – if it hadn’t been for the jet airplane, in the last two years of Eisenhower’s eight years of the two terms he served, he made several good will trips all to foreign countries. He made three one year and three the next, and they were – he was received, you remember, with great honor and everything from these people. No American in the world was ever so loved and honored by their nations as he was. He couldn’t have done that if it hadn’t been for the speed of the jet airplane. It was the only way he could have worked it in. So. . . he nailed down the fact that he was the first jet flyer of all of them. And there was a number of things like that that he kind of initiated because, you see, he could do things that others couldn’t. He was so popular, so well-loved, so trusted, so anything he said, people believed it. And I think he made sure that what he said was something they could afford to believe.
Lasalier: You made a good point a moment ago about Dwight Eisenhower’s president being the prototype or setting the foundation for modern American – post-World War II America. Do you have any concluding thoughts on Dwight Eisenhower as president?
Steed: Well, I think that, of course, having had that great responsibility and experience of commanding the victorious armies in the world’s worst war and go through this ordeal of making – giving an order that he knew was going to cause a lot of his fellow countrymen to give up their lives the next day – you know, that must be a hell of a thing for a man to take to bed with him, and that’s what commanding generals have to do. And he had to steal himself against all those sort of ordeals. Now coming back with that to a country that he had done all that for, and I guess, he had a pretty legitimate right to think that I’ve given it everything I am. He had an affection or a love or an attitude toward it that very few men could ever get because you don’t have that hot – the experience to build it into you. So he, he, he had not only a good mind, but he had a dream along with it. And that’s why he kept the New Deal and the Fair Deal because it, it kept the mass of people in more survival form. And he, he, although he was labeled a Republican, he didn’t believe that was Socialism or anything. He thought properly administered and kept in bounds that it was good at a time for a post-war thing to heal wounds and get people back. And of course, the Marshall Plan for Europe and all was based on the same kind of a feeling, and, ah, so, what it added up to me was that, ah, here was a man that could do all these things, but he still never lost sight that the man in the street was still the most important thing in the world.
