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8. Caught in the Crosscurrents
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176 chapter eight Caught in the Crosscurrents Larson’s writing and public speaking skills so impressed Dwight Eisenhower in the summer and fall of 1956 that the president decided immediately after the election to groom him for higher things. Eisenhower’s plans for Larson’s future grew out of a larger interest in developing a corps of talented younger of¤cials who could advance the cause of Modern Republicanism in the years ahead. Acutely aware that Old Guard Republicans would like nothing better than to recapture control of the party once the president completed his second term, Eisenhower intended, as he told Larson at a meeting on November 9, 1956, “to start getting some of you young fellows ready for 1960.”1 Eisenhower by this point saw the forty-six-year-old Larson as one of the most promising members of a group that included the president’s younger brother Milton, an academic economist who had worked in government and then as a university president; former Texas oil man, secretary of the navy, and secretary of the treasury Robert Anderson; former supreme allied commander in Europe and Red Cross president Alfred Gruenther; and former Health, Education and Welfare under secretary and Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Strategy Nelson Rockefeller. That none of these men had ever run for public of¤ce before did not bother Eisenhower much. His rapport with Larson and the others stemmed in part from the fact that they, like him, had not entered high government of¤ce from a career in partisan politics, a background that did not impress him. Eisenhower tended to look for successors who had achieved distinction outside politics and to give less serious consideration to the two professional politicians in his Cabinet, Vice President Richard Nixon and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge.2 With these thoughts in mind, Eisenhower informed Larson at their meeting caught in the crosscurrents 177 on November 9th, which Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also attended, that two high-level posts had become vacant: secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which carried America’s of¤cial message to the outside world. Although Larson’s expertise in the area of social insurance made the ¤rst of these seem the more appropriate choice, Eisenhower urged him to take the second . In this way, the president explained, Larson could acquire experience in foreign policy and thus round out his credentials for higher of¤ce.3 Even though Larson did not take the idea of a political future seriously, he did nothing to dissuade Eisenhower or Dulles about that possibility. In part this appears to have stemmed from Larson’s unwillingness to admit to them that his back problems could seriously disable him without warning. They had eased somewhat in recent years, thanks in part to the skilled treatment he received from the White House masseur, whose services Eisenhower and Sherman Adams had thoughtfully made available to him. Even so, Larson understood from many years of experience that he could not bend over safely and thus could never have withstood the rigors of a national political campaign. In his memoirs, Larson acknowledged that hard fact in the circumspect fashion he used whenever referring to his back trouble: “All of this was very ¶attering, although I myself knew that the idea of me as President was preposterous. By now I had had a chance to observe at close range what it takes not only to arrive at that eminence, but to survive there. I could never understand why anyone in his right mind would really want to let himself in for that kind of punishment.”4 Had Larson made these thoughts clear to all concerned, however, his chances for the new and interesting job assignments put before him might well have disappeared. So Larson accepted the USIA directorship, which would allow him to pursue a long-standing interest in foreign policy, and voiced no objection to the president ’s rationale behind this appointment.5 Taking this course had the effect of increasing Larson’s already considerable visibility within the Eisenhower administration. In part this was simply a result of moving from an under secretary’s position to that of agency head. The shift in his formal duties from domestic to foreign policy signaled even more clearly to Washington insiders that Larson’s star was on the rise. Favorable attention in the press...