Cold War exhibit opens at Eisenhower Museum

Apr. 16—In a throwback to the days of Spy vs Spy and Duck-and-Cover drills in school, the Eisenhower Presidential Museum has opened its Cold War: Soviets, Spies, and Secrets exhibit.

The original Cold War exhibit was curated by the Nixon Presidential Foundation in Yorba Linda, California and covers about 50 years of the acrimonious relationship between America and the former Soviet Union.

When it came to Abilene Curator William Snyder said they had time to bring in some new artifacts that still tell the story of the Cold War but with a concentration on the Eisenhower years.

"We didn't borrow the same artifacts that the Nixon library had borrowed from other museums to tell their story," said William Snyder, curator. "They were, not surprisingly, looking at the Cold War ... (during) the late 60s and early 70s, during the Nixon administration."

While serving as a learning experience for some people, the exhibit will bring back memories for those who grew up in the 1950s and 60s when the country lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation. School children practiced Duck-and-Cover — hiding under their desks to protect themselves for when the bomb would drop.

"The storyline is great, and some of the imagery is just fantastic," Snyder said. "There's some really awesome pictures of everything from the early Cold War when the barricades were going up dividing Eastern and Western Europe and then later dividing East and West Berlin and then all the way through to the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it's not only about what was going on in Europe, it's also about what was going on here at home."

At the start and the end of the exhibit are two pieces of barbed wire. The first was from the Hungarian front of the Iron Curtain given to President Eisenhower. The second was a piece presented to George H.W. Bush, who was president in 1989 when the Iron Curtain came down with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"We sort of work the exhibit from beginning to end with those little insignificant pieces, I mean, it's a piece of barbed wire, right?" Snyder said. "We're in Kansas, we got a lot of barbed wire. But this barbed wire, where it was, and what it represents — Hungarians were presenting it to Eisenhower to say, 'Hey, please come help us.' And at the end of the Cold War we're getting from another section of the ... iron curtain that was given to President Bush. It's just a fascinating way to sort of bookend the entire exhibit.

In between those pieces of barbed wires, visitors will walk through the building of at-home bomb shelters; the government testing of nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert, where people could pay a small fee and watch the blast; and the scientific advancements the Cold War precipitated.

While most of the artifacts and information areas far from Abilene, there is one piece on loan not from a museum that has local ties.

Snyder said when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited America, he brought matryoshka dolls for each of Eisenhower's grandchildren. Mary Jean Eisenhower still has hers and installed it in the exhibit before it opened.

"We're hearing the stories about Nikita bouncing her on his knee and giving her a nesting doll, while at the same time telling her granddad, as she calls the president, 'I'm going to bury your grandchildren.'" Snyder said. "It's just incredible, it could only happen in the 1950s."

Some of the other artifacts exhibit how close to real life the spy movies of the time were. Among the artifacts are spy tools used by the KGB and the CIA. One is a tweed jacket on which a button is a working camera lens.

Another is a briefcase that opens into a camera stand, which allowed a spy to quickly set up a camera to photograph documents.

They also have on display a miniature toolkit complete with about a half dozen miniature tools. The tools are stored in a small capsule that resembles a pill that someone might swallow.

"Only this you wouldn't swallow," Snyder said. "You would put these tools in the smooth plastic container and you would hide them on your person — or, umm, in your person. It was actually called a rectal toolkit."

Cold War: Soviets, Spies, and Secrets opened March 23 and will remain on exhibit through the end of March 2025.