In May 1959 Sir Winston Churchill visited President Dwight David Eisenhower. It was not a State Visit, but rather a private meeting of two old friends. Churchill had resigned as Prime Minister four years before, although he still remained as a Conservative Member of Parliament from Woodford, a town north of London.

Eisenhower looked forward to the visit. The presidency is a lonely office. There are no peers with whom to bounce off views. Churchill was not only a former head of government but an old friend whose wisdom and experience as a statesman exceeded that of anyone else in the world.

Eisenhower hosted Churchill on his Gettysburg farm. In the study after dinner, while both sipped scotch and soda, conversation ranged widely—not so much on current events but rather about the emerging direction of the two English-speaking countries. These were men whose roots were in the previous century, before the impact of the technology of the mass media—radio, television, advertising, and movies—seemed to shape a kind of mass culture.

The 69-year-old Eisenhower and 85-year-old Churchill were no "Luddites" who would wreck machines to turn back the clock. They would both harness emergent technology to advance their objectives. In World War I, Churchill fathered the tank and championed the airplane. He would be the first head of government to have piloted a plane. Eisenhower was also an early proponent of aviation, and like Churchill, the first American chief executive to be a licensed pilot.

Churchill would mobilize the medium of radio to rally his nation in World War II. Eisenhower was the first president of the television age and introduced the televised White House press conference. Both men as President and Prime Minister ordered the testing of the H-bomb. (Churchill would prophesy at the time that there would be no World War III because of the "mutual terror of the bomb.")

But the "big bomb" symbolized for both of them the out of control forces of modern technology that might dwarf the everyday citizen and endanger the very soul of democracy. They agreed that the spirit of the individual is what differentiates the free society from the totalitarian. Ten years earlier, in a commencement address at M.I.T., Churchill alluded to the potentially diminishing role of the individual in the rising tide of technology. "We need engineers in the world but not a world of engineers."

To both men the modern technology of the 20th century was a mixed blessing—bringing with it the enhancement of material benefits but the erosion of individual dignity and rights as well.

Both Churchill and Eisenhower saw in technology the tools of "bigness." The massive infra-structure of the new technology would require massive capital. Big business might drive out the small businessman. The big state universities would out-spend and out-equip the smaller colleges. (Eisenhower College, which was established in 1961, would close its doors in 1970.) Local governments would suffer in comparison to the federal government.