Washington Post News Clipping, "Eisenhower Pushes Operation Candor"

The series on "The Safety of the Repub- Eisenhower Pushes lic" which has grown out of this presidential decision is still strongly opposed by power- Operation Candor ful quarters within the Administration. The The opposition comes largely from the econo- mizers, who fear that there will be a bad By Stewart Alsop political reaction if the Administration cuts defense expenditures while the people are being told the truth. "Operation Candor" THERE is a simple, deeply significant may therefore be fudged in the end, or even reason why President Eisenhower has cou- abandoned. But the facts which so deeply rageously decided that it is time to trust impressed the President remain. the people with the hard facts of the na- Many people (including former President tional situation. The background story of Truman) have taken comfort from the "Operation Candor"-tl admirable plan thought that the intelligence services were for a series of candid reports to the Nation overestimating Soviet capabilities. T h e by the President and Administration leaders Pentagon particularly, these people argue, -goes back to midsummer. tend to inflate estimates of Soviet power, At this time a speech on the threat to this in order to justify its own huge expendi- country of the growing Soviet air-atomic tures. Unfortunately, the facts have in every power had been prepared, on an experi- case proven that the intelligence has greatly mental basis, for the President. Eisenhower inderestimated Soviet capabilities. had been strongly urged to make a frank on statement on this subject by some of his advisers-and he had been as strongly urged WHEN the first Soviet jet fighter appeared not to by others. Without making up his in the Russian skies in the late forties, our mind one way or the other, the President air specialists comforted themselves with asked that such a speech be drafted for him, the thought that this was probably only a so that he could see how it would look on "propaganda prototype," and that at any paper. rate the Soviets could not achieve mass pro- He took the draft with him on his vaca- duction of this type of aircraft. Their eyes tion, and began working it over in longhand, were opened in Korea, where the Russians as is his custom, covering about a third of it gave the Chinese enough MIG 15s to out- with revisions and interlineations. But he number our own jet fighter force by seven still had not decided to go ahead with the to one, while maintaining a- crushing air speech. Then, on August 12, came the news of the explosion of the Soviet hydrogen superiority in Europe. bomb. The first Soviet atomic bomb, tested years This event deeply moved and impressed before the intelligence experts had forecast, the President. As detailed analyses of the was another unpleasant eye-opener, and air samples of the Soviet hydrogen test be- there have been others. Now comes the came available, moreover, he became more Soviet hydrogen bomb, which was not only and more impressed by the terrible signifi- tested before the intelligence expected, but cance of the event. Here a certain caution which is also deeply disquieting for the is necessary, since certain secret technical technical reasons referred to above. matters are involved. Surely it is now time to realize that we on are in a race for simple survival, and that YET IT can be said that these analyses our competitors in the race are technically had a simple, nontechnical meaning which our equals and in some respects perhaps was all too clear to the President. For they our superiors. The race will surely be lost dispelled, once and for all, any lingering if we continue to entertain the elusion that notion that the Soviet physicists and weap- our rivals are ignoramuses tied to "an oxcart ons specialists were inferior imitators. They also exploded the hopeful theory that the economy," and incapable of original experi- Russians would never have made progress ments. in the nuclear art had it not been for Fuchs, Editor's note: Joseph Alsop is flying to the Pontecorvo, and the little band of traitors. Far East, and will shortly be reporting on the The Soviet hydrogen test proved, in short, im Asia that the Soviet specialists are brilliant ex- perimenters in their own right. The more he thought about these facts, the more President Eisenhower became con- vinced that the people had a right to under- stand the danger which confronted the Na- tion, and that he had a duty to help them understand. He sent the speech he had been writing back to the White House, with instructions to "carry on from there." Sub- Washing ton Post sequently, he approved plans for extending September 21, 1953 "Operation Candor" into a whole series of reports on one aspect or another of the na- tional peril, by other Administration leaders as well as himself. Electrostatic reproduction mada by the Eisenhower Library for preservation purposes.