Political humor at its most trenchant
Jul 9th, 2007 by Paul Moor
A used item discarded onto a sidewalk in my Berlin neighborhood took me back down Memory Lane this morning to a splendid example of political humor that came my way back during the Eisenhower administration. (Can you remember? Five-Star U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, victorious as Supreme Commander of the British, French, and American Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II - born 1890 in Denison, TEXAS - served as thirty-fourth President of the United States of America from 1953 to 1961.)
One day in the White House, bucked all the way up via the Secretaries of Commerce and State, came an order from the Soviet Ministry of Health in Moscow that demanded decision at the very highest level. It stipulated 12,000,000 condoms with only one additional detail: they should all uniformly measure 30 centimeters in length. A uniformed aide consulted the Library of Congress and informed the President that in real measurements that amounted to 11.82 inches precisely.
Ike summoned his entire Cabinet on the double, where from the perspective of Realpolitik this order posed a real problem, what with the Cold War right at its coldest and all and all. Brows furrowed in a silence broken solely by the tense sound of drumming fingers. Ike’s more hard-nosed fellow Republicans on hand favored advising the Reds exactly where they could shove their order, but their kinder, gentler, more realistic and intelligent crypto-ComSymp colleagues said no, the nation’s economy at that point could definitely do with such an unexpected international trade bonanza – and who could tell what else it might lead to?
With the Cabinet split 50-50, Ike said he’d like to sleep on this overnight, and would let them know his decision the following morning.
That night his unremitting tossing and turning made things hell for Mamie, and finally she said, “Ike, honey, what’s got you so upset?” – so he told her. Within minutes the President had finally lapsed into a profound sleep, and he woke up a few hours later ready and eager to greet the new day. He found his office already full of high-level aides with uniformly expectant faces, so he wasted no time before enlightening them.
After highest-level consultation (for tactical reasons he left Mamie out of this), he had decided that the country which had become the bastion of western democracy could indeed accept the Soviet order – under two preconditions.
First, each item would bear a stamp reading “Made in USA”.
And underneath that: “Medium size”.
(A quick historical footnote: State Secretary John Foster Dulles around that time coined a two-word phrase immediately adopted into American politics, referring to what the Reds could expect if they got funny with God’s Country, and an American diplomat in Munich spontaneously quoted that when I told him this joke: “Massive retaliation!”)
