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DwiGHT D. Eisenhower's "Chance for Peace": Quest or Crusade? Robert L. Ivie Early in the morning of March 4,1953, Dwight Eisenhower received word from the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles, that Joseph Stalin had suffered a severe stroke. By the following evening, Radio Moscow had announced Stalin's death.1 Such a momentous development just six weeks into the president's initial term set in motion a flurry of preparations for his first major foreign policy address, the "Chance for Peace." This speech, delivered on April 16 before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, was designed as the opening shot in an American peace offensive. Eisenhower and his advisers realized that they had been given a unique opportunity to score a significant propaganda victory over their Cold War adversaries in the Kremlin, and they were determined not to let the moment slip by without taking full advantage of it. Thus, through a carefully designed exercise in psychological warfare, the administration pursued a determined crusade against communism under the legitimizing guise of a quest for peace. The strategic ambiguity maintained between the overlapping, but distinct, images of a quest and a crusade is central to understanding Eisenhower as a cold warrior dedicated to the practice of psychological warfare.2 Together, through an interaction with metaphorical vehicles that contrasted the bright road of peace and prosperity to the dark road of nuclear confrontation, these two images of quest and crusade constructed the heroic motive of risking civilization's destruction in order to bring about communism's defeat as a necessary condition for achieving what Eisenhower termed "genuine peace." Thus, the nation was prompted to reject Soviet overtures of peaceful coexistence in favor of a policy of nuclear deterrence aimed at forcing the enemy to capitulate to an American vision of international security. My purpose is to tell the story of the "Chance for Peace" speech in sufficient detail to reveal its strategic objective as an exercise in psychological warfare, Robert L. Ivie is Professor and Chair of Communication and Culture at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1, No. 2,1998, pp. 227-243 ISSN 1094-8392 228 Rhetoric & Public Affairs including its evolving design through various draffs, its wide and strategic dissemination , and its public reception. This narrative, based primarily on documents located at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, features the conceptual imagery guiding the administration's rhetorical choices and constituting a heroic attitude toward nuclear imperilment that is Eisenhower's primary legacy as a Cold War rhetor. As an agency of Cold War acculturation, Eisenhower's rhetoric contributed to a legacy of fear and insecurity that remains problematic even today in the so-called post-Cold War era with Americans believing they can achieve peace on their own terms.3 The Strategic Objective of "Chance for Peace": Commitment to Psychological Warfare The symbolic context in which the "Chance for Peace" address evolved consisted of an admixture of images from Eisenhower's campaign rhetoric and inaugural address that featured Soviet barbarism, Christian faith, and psychological warfare. Together, these images predisposed the new administration to treat Stalin's death as a chance to weaken and eventually to defeat the nation's atheistic foe through a rhetorical initiative backed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. Eisenhower's vision of Soviet barbarism, which was portrayed vividly during the 1952 presidential campaign, conveyed his sense of the absolute and total threat posed by communism to the survival of Christian civilization. In his view, hope for peace after World War II was lost following "the monstrous advance of Communist tyranny," a tyranny that was "primitive in its brutalism," its "insatiable lust for conquest ," and its determination to reduce all humankind to "its chattel." The captive nations of Europe had been "beaten [and] terrorized into a uniform, submissive mass." The enemy's next objective was the "strangulation of industrial America." The United States had no other choice but to defend Western civilization by "preach [ing]" against "this paganism" the values of human dignity, freedom, and brotherhood "under the fatherhood of God."4 A renewal of Christian faith, when the nation's survival was threatened by atheistic communism, was...

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