Free Ike's Spies by Stephen E. Ambrose

Russians were
not
doing. If Khrushchev had been building bombers and rockets at maximum capacity, the “bomber gap” and the “missile gap” might have become reality. But photographic intelligence showed conclusively that the Soviets were building at a rate considerably short of capacity, and there was nothing in the pipeline, such as movement of basic supplies to construction sites, to indicate that they intended to speed up. There was no need to panic. 17
    The President would not be forced into spending money for weapons that were not needed. Of course, it was easier for Eisenhower to say no on such matters than any President before or since because—as one Senate hawk put it—“How the hell can I argue with Ike Eisenhower on military matters?”
    The JCS could, and did, argue with the President. They could not win the argument, and two Army chiefs of staff—Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor—resigned in protest over Ike’s reduction of the Army. Ike had been there himself, and he knew perfectly well that the Pentagon had to argue that not enough was being done for the nation’s defenses. In August of 1956 he wrote his oldest friend, Swede Hazlett, an advocate of more defense spending, “Let us not forget that the Armed Services are to defend a ‘way of life,’ not merely land, property or lives.” The President said he wanted to make the JCS accept the need for a “balance between minimum requirements in the costly implements of war and the health of our economy.” 18
    Or, as he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” 19
    Persuading the JCS to accept that position was one of the most difficult and frustrating tasks Eisenhower undertook as President. In a typical telephone comment to Foster Dulles, a month after the Hungary/Suez crisis, Ike said that “he was going to crack down on Defense people tomorrow, that he is getting desperate with the inabilityof the men there to understand what can be spent on military weapons and what must be spent to wage the peace.” 20
    One remarkable aspect of Eisenhower’s involvement with the U-2 was that he never revealed his sources, even after Powers was shot down, when it would have been greatly to his personal advantage to do so. Throughout 1960, Kennedy and the Democrats cried “missile gap” again and again, until it became almost the central theme of JFK’s presidential campaign. Ike contented himself with responding that it simply was not true, without indicating how he knew.
    He was badly disappointed, even hurt, when two of his own men, Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, turned against him on this issue. Rockefeller issued a “report” that repeated most of the charges the Democrats had made with regard to Defense spending. Nixon, at the height of the presidential campaign of 1960, went to New York, conferred with Rockefeller, and emerged to tell reporters that he, too, believed not enough was being done for America’s defense. Their joint statement declared that “the U.S. can afford and must provide the increased expenditures to implement fully this necessary program for strengthening our defense posture. There must be no price ceiling on America’s security.”
    In his memoirs, Ike put it politely when he commented, “That statement seemed somewhat astonishing, coming as it did from two people who had long been in administration councils.” 21
    During the campaign, Eisenhower did nevertheless speak for Nixon. His one major address took up the question of increased Defense spending, and might have been pointed at both candidates, although he referred only to the Democrats: “If they would pay for these programs by deficit spending, raising the