IN THE MILITARY STYLE: DWIGHT EISENHOWER

• Document Type: SPECIALCOLLECTION
• Collection: Current/Central Intelligence Bulletin Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 06788937
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: March 18, 2019
• Document Release Date: March 28, 2019

Approved for Release: 2019/03/14 C06788937
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(U) In the Military Style: Dwight Eisenhower
81 Having served on active duty in the US Army from 1915 to 1948, Dwight Eisenhower as
president not surprisingly organized his national security apparatus along the lines of a military
staff, with large meetings and formal briefings. He made it clear early on that he did not read the
Current Intelligence Bulletin (CIB) and did not want to receive written materials or have regular
meetings with CIA officers. Instead, Eisenhower preferred to get his intelligence information
mostly from DCI Allen Dulles's briefing that led off what Eisenhower later called "the most
important weekly meeting of the government"�the NSC session held on Thursdays at 0900. "I
would much rather have it [an intelligence briefing] at the NSC level so all my staff and all of us
can hear the same thing each time rather than to have a personal briefing," an Agency officer
quoted him as saying. OCI and the Office of National Estimates (ONE) put together Dulles's
material; sometimes the Deputy Director for Intelligence or a subject matter expert also
contributed.'
(1 The CIB did not figure prominently in the weekly briefing or in Eisenhower's overall use of
intelligence.2 Every day, OCI's chief editors checked key items in the CIB for the president's
chief military aide to bring to his attention; such notifications occurred usually twice a week. If
requests for follow-up resulted from those interactions or the NSC meetings, OCI responded with
memoranda sent to the NSC, not with articles in the CIB. Early in 1953, OCT director
Huntington Sheldon and DDI Loftus Becker discussed producing a very brief, all-source
publication just for the president, but the idea never materialized until the Kennedy
Administration. Sheldon believed Eisenhower was hesitant to have a product tailored for his
eyes only and may have felt that the authors would be less objective than if writing for a
publication with wider circulation.3
($1 Eisenhower's lack of engagement with the daily Agency product also reflected his more
strategic appreciation of intelligence and his suspicion of departmental intelligence. According
to Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, the White House chief of staff, at the NSC meetings the president
wanted the DCI to concentrate on giving the intelligence context for larger or longer-term
foreign policy and military issues. In addition, throughout his presidency, Eisenhower made a
practice of not reading daily intelligence reports from a single agency. Instead, with the help of
the president's son, Lt. Col. John Eisenhower, Goodpaster reviewed the separate reports from
CIA, State, Defense, and the Joint Chiefs and then melded that material into a morning briefing.
Over time, OCI's main function became seeing that the members of the president's national
security coterie were kept informed and in a position to advise him as required.
3.3(h)(2)
'(U) Helgerson, 20-21; Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging
Peace (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 712; Fred Albrecht interview with Meredith P. Davidson, 24
September 1973
[not classified'
(U) Sources for this paragraph and the next are: Helgerson, 21-23; Albrecht, "Keeping the President Informed,"
48, 54, 56-57 [S]; Albrecht, "History of the CIB," 24.
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(U) Perhaps because of this lack of presidential attention to the CIB, it became more of a vehicle
for informing a broader audience of national security decision makers, and its dissemination
grew steadily. By mid-1954, 33 copies went outside the Agency, and that number rose to 48 by
1957 (compared to 14 during the last year of Truman's tenure). The Defense Department took
the largest share of the increase. Also in the mid-1950s, the CIB began getting cabled to a
number of domestic and overseas locations, such as CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, the
Continental Air Defense Command in Colorado, 4
3.3(h)(2)
($5 By its sixth year of publication in 1957, observers inside and outside the Agency recognized
flaws in the current intelligence process that were degrading the importance of the CIB. Noting
its broad distribution, the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Affairs
(PBCFIA) and the CIA Inspector General (IG) recommended, respectively, that a community-
wide coordinated publication be produced and that an interagency current intelligence unit be
created to replace OCI. OCI focused on the shortcomings of the CIB itself, some of which
sounded like those the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report had identified almost ten years earlier:
O Articles were based only on material received each day, opening up the possibility that
important situations might be ignored because they lacked a current "peg."
O The CIB did not provide enough day-to-day continuity on important situations.
O Not enough top officials read the CIB because they got the same information through
departmental channels; topics not important to them were often covered; and the articles
were too detailed or complex, or did not provide warning and prediction.5
(U) Notwithstanding the recommendations of the PBCFIA and the IG. CIA kept its authority
over current intelligence,6 and the burden of changing the daily publication and its production
process fell on OCI. In response to those criticisms, OCI instituted an interagency prepublication
planning procedure and premiered the Central Intelligence Bulletin (CEIB) on 14 January 1958.
Sheldon ambitiously declared that the CEIB would be a publication that "a responsible
policymaker will be able to ignore only at his own peril." The name change, displayed on a bold
new cover, was intended to underscore that the CEIB was the locus of all important current
intelligence and conveyed a coordinated interagency viewpoint. The CEIB routinely was longer
than its predecessor�from under 10 to nearly 20 pages long�and covered a dozen topics in six
to eight lines with longer backup articles on over half of them. For the first time, source
4 (U) Albrecht, "History of the CIB," 29-31.
5 Ibid., 35-41.
6 (U) NSCID-3 stated that "Normally, the current intelligence produced by the Central Intelligence Agency is
produced primarily to meet the needs of the President and National Security Council; in addition it serves the
common needs of the interested departments and agencies of the Government for current intelligence which they
themselves do not produce. The departments and agencies will contribute to the Central Intelligence Agency current
intelligence publications as practicable."
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document numbers were provided. Taking into account Eisenhower's fondness for graphics, the
CEIB soon included a map of the two hemispheres with red arrows locating the areas covered in
each issue. Given the increased participation of other agencies, the distribution jumped to 90,
with the Defense and State Departments accounting for most of the increase.7
(%) Meanwhile, the NSC-centric communication process between the White House and CIA
continued for the balance of Eisenhower's term. The president received formal intelligence
briefings from Dulles at the weekly NSC meetings and informal updates from staffers as the
situation required. No comments about the CEIB from Eisenhower or White House principals
have been recorded. Yet even though its principal customer was not reading it every day, the
CEIB's stature did not suffer. By the time the next administration was in office, its "special
status as a report designed particularly for the White House and NSC had been generally
recognized. There was no other daily intelligence product possessing the character of national
intelligence, carrying COMINT as well as collateral, and having the blessing of the chief
components of the Intelligence Community."8
7 (U) Albrecht, "History of the CIB," 42-47.
8 Ibid., 57.
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