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action. The figure of speech that “the time of greatest danger of attack is two years hence” disappeared from JCS papers. Military intelligence officers and civilian analysts became more sophisticated, their language more moderate, their descriptions of the Communist threat more accurate and less scary.
    The commander’s estimate, Cline summarized, along with others in the following years, “succeeded in reducing the Soviet military threat to the United States to reasonable proportions in the minds of war-planning staffs.” This in turn allowed Ike to hold steady to his “New Look” in defense policy, at an immense financial savings to the nation while simultaneously reducing fears and slowing the arms race. The CIA , Cline boasts, “probably never accomplished more of value to the nation than this quiet, little-remarked analytical feat.” 4
    Cline’s accomplishment was a victory for analysis. It was matched by the CIA’S greatest triumph of intelligence gathering, the U-2 program, discussed in the following chapter. A third function of the DDI’S side of the CIA was prediction, to anticipate events around the world and report them to the President before they happened. Even when the President could not do anything one way or another about the event, which was usually the case, he always wanted to know in advance. American Presidents hate to be caught bysurprise. It is the CIA’S job to tell the President what is going to happen, and it is an almost impossible assignment.
    IN 1956, ON THE EVE of the Eisenhower vs. Stevenson presidential election, France and Britain joined with Israel to attack Egypt. White House Press Secretary James Hagerty told reporters that the President got his first information on the invasion “through press reports.” The attack “came as a complete surprise to us.” Simultaneously, the Russians sent their tanks into the streets of Budapest; Administration spokesmen told the press that the Russian attack on Hungary was also a complete surprise.
    Such reports made Allen Dulles furious. A month later he leaked stories to the Washington press corps that the CIA had predicted Hungary in detail. He also complained to reporter Andrew Tully, “My brother said the State Department was taken by surprise. That was only technically correct. What he meant was that the British, French and Israeli governments had not informed our ambassadors. But we had the Suez operation perfectly taped. We reported that there would be a three-nation attack on Suez. And on the day before the invasion CIA reported it was
imminent
.” 5
    Dulles’ leaks made Ike, in his turn, furious. The President had a legendary temper, which he struggled—usually successfully—all his life to control. When angry, he could not keep the bright red color out of his face, and the back of his neck would become red as a beet, but he did manage to sit perfectly still. Under his desk, however, he would tear his handkerchief into tiny bits, down to the individual strands of cotton. When he finished, there would be a loose ball of cotton strands at his feet, and no handkerchief.
    What upset Ike was, first, the fact of the leak itself—all Presidents dislike leaks. Second, Dulles’ claims to have predicted Suez and Hungary simply were not true. But the ultimate insult to Ike was Dulles’ hint that the President was too lazy to do his homework. Throughout his presidency, Ike smarted under the criticism that he took too many vacations, that he did not work hard enough, that he neglected his duties for a golf game or a fishing expedition, and most of all that he refused to read any report that was more than one page long.
    In an April 1958 article on Hungary,
Harper’s Magazine
repeated Dulles’ charges that Ike would have known what wasgoing to happen if he had only read the CIA reports. Eisenhower, according to
Harper’s
, “showed great