The Age of Eisenhower
Page 14
III
President Eisenhower had reason to be anxious. His first year in office, and indeed his entire presidency, unfolded under the shadow of an intensifying arms race. Just three days before his election, on November 1, 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission oversaw the test of the first hydrogen bomb—to that date, the largest explosion detonated by man. The device had been built on the coral island of Elugelab in the South Pacific and weighed 80 tons. The 10.4-megaton explosion—500 times more powerful than the bomb that devastated Hiroshima—sent a mushroom cloud of steam and radioactive coral 100,000 feet into the sky. When the Soviets tested their first hydrogen bomb, in August 1953, detonating a 400-kiloton bomb in the remote steppe of Kazakhstan, the world’s peoples faced the no longer fantastical prospect that the superpowers could, between them, end human life on Earth.14
To drive home the strategic significance of these “super” weapons, the outgoing secretaries of state and defense, Dean Acheson and Robert A. Lovett, prepared an alarming report for the new administration. Their message must have made Ike’s blood run cold: despite its increasingly powerful arsenal of atomic bombs, the United States could do almost nothing to halt a Soviet first strike. “As of mid-1952,” Acheson and Lovett wrote, “probably 65–85% of the atomic bombs launched by the USSR could be delivered on target in the United States.” Only a crash program of investment in building a continental defense shield of interceptor aircraft and radar stations could help improve the nation’s ability to survive such an onslaught.15
A panel of distinguished experts reinforced this chilling message. Chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, the group arrived at some depressing conclusions. The time was very near, they predicted, when the Soviet atomic arsenal would be large enough to destroy the United States many times over. Of course the Soviets knew that any attack on the United States would lead to their own certain destruction from a devastating retaliatory strike. Even so, the United States was vulnerable as never before to a surprise attack from its principal enemy. Oppenheimer’s team concluded that the United States had to improve its air defenses to locate and intercept any Soviet bomber aircraft that might seek to deliver an atomic payload on American soil. The government also had to do a better job of informing the public about just what was at stake in the arms race. When Oppenheimer summarized the findings of the panel’s report for publication in the journal Foreign Affairs, he penned an enduring metaphor for the nuclear age: “We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”16
What was to be done? How should the United States wage the cold war in an era of thermonuclear weapons? Should the president, in light of the ever-increasing power of nuclear weapons, pursue a policy of conciliation with the Soviets and propose a halt to the arms race? Or should the new administration intensify America’s efforts to expand its nuclear arsenal, intimidating the Soviets with an array of fearsome nuclear weapons and perhaps even pushing the Soviets into retreat? The dilemma shaped Eisenhower’s first year in office.
Secretary of State Dulles had no hesitation about which course to take. He counseled Eisenhower to adopt “a policy of boldness” in world affairs. The leading hawk in the cabinet, Dulles rejected Truman’s strategy of containment as nothing more than a “treadmill policy” that offered no chance to win the cold war. What was needed was a “dynamic” and “active” approach, combining nuclear deterrence—he spoke of hitting the enemy with “shattering effectiveness,” if necessary—with a determined effort to “liberate” the enslaved peoples behind the Iron Curtain. Eisenhower himself echoed these sentiments in his State of the Union address on February 2, 1953. The president declared, “The free world cannot indefinitely remain in a posture of paralyzed tension, leaving forever to the aggressor the choice of time and place and means to cause greatest hurt to us at least cost to himself.” It was time for a “new, positive foreign policy.” Following Dulles’s lead, Eisenhower denounced Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime deal with Stalin at Yalta, which, according to the Old Guard, legitimated the Soviets’ “enslavement” of Eastern Europe. The president also signaled that he would no longer restrain the Nationalist Chinese in Taiwan, and their leader, Chiang Kai-shek, from waging war against mainland communist China. The “unleashing” of the Nationalists upon the communists had long been an ardent fantasy of the GOP hard-liners.17
But on March 5, 1953, Josef Stalin died, and the landscape of the cold war briefly shone in a new light. Eisenhower, sensing an opportunity, asked his advisers: Did Stalin’s death open up the chance for a thaw in the U.S.-Soviet conflict? Secretary Dulles and the CIA answered no: the Soviets, they argued, would remain just as hostile and aggressive under Stalin’s successors as they had been since the birth of the Soviet Union more than three decades earlier. If anything, Moscow might be even more inclined to take risks now, as a show of strength during the transition to new leadership in the Kremlin.18
Eisenhower bridled at this unimaginative attitude. Perhaps naïvely, he hoped Stalin’s death might create an opportunity for a new departure in world affairs. And the new Soviet leaders were making surprising gestures. Just 10 days after Stalin’s death, Georgy Malenkov, who had stepped out from behind the Kremlin’s cloak of secrecy as the leading figure of the new regime, expressed the hope of a settlement of East-West differences in terms unimaginable in Stalin’s day. “At the present time,” Malenkov averred on March 15, “there is no disputed or unresolved question that cannot be settled peacefully by mutual agreement of the interested countries. This applies to our relations with all states, including the United States of America.”19
Such overtures merited consideration, Eisenhower thought. The world wanted peace. Perhaps this was the moment to seize it? “We do need something dramatic to rally the peoples of the world around some idea, some hope, of a better future,” he told the National Security Council. As he put it to speechwriter Emmet Hughes, “We are in an armaments race. Where will it lead us? At worst, to atomic warfare. At best, to robbing every people and nation on earth of the fruits of their own toil.” He asked his advisers to sketch a bold proposal that contained “no double talk, no sophisticated political formulas, no slick propaganda devices. Let us spell it out, whatever we really offer.” He told his cabinet, “If we must live in a permanent state of mobilization, our whole democratic way of life would be destroyed in the process.”20
Despite Dulles’s reservations, C. D. Jackson, the senior adviser for cold war strategy and psychological warfare, hammered out a plan of action for the president. Eisenhower, he argued, should announce an immediate offer to the Soviets to unify Germany, end the war in Korea, and place firm limits on armaments production. Jackson felt this plan would seize the moral high ground, put the Soviets on the defensive, bolster allied unity, and quite possibly lead to an uprising inside the communist world or even a negotiated settlement to end the cold war. The death of Stalin offered “the greatest chance we have had in decades . . . to move history in the right direction without war.” If the president wanted a dynamic foreign policy, Jackson was ready with one. Eisenhower liked the idea of making some kind of opening gambit toward the Soviets, and over the next four weeks, he and Hughes prepared a quite extraordinary text that Ike delivered on April 16 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors at the Statler Hotel in Washington.21
The speech came to be known as “The Chance for Peace.” In it the president stressed the terrible waste of the superpower arms race and painted a picture of a world that could be turned toward more productive pursuits:
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of
concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
If the superpowers could agree on arms reductions and limitations, “this Government is ready to ask its people to join with all nations in devoting a substantial percentage of the savings achieved by disarmament to a fund for world aid and reconstruction. The purposes of this great work would be to help other peoples to develop the undeveloped areas of the world, to stimulate profitable and fair world trade, to assist all peoples to know the blessings of productive freedom.” All that was needed, apparently, was goodwill and sincerity. “We are ready, in short, to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world.”22
Among the finest words Eisenhower would utter in his time in the White House, his speech was acclaimed as a heartfelt appeal for peace and arms reductions. The text was circulated in printed brochures around the world; the Voice of America rebroadcast it in 45 languages. The world press commented on it. His chief of staff Sherman Adams called it “the most effective speech of Eisenhower’s public career.” Yet it did not alter the course of the cold war or even temper the arms race. It proved an empty gesture.23
Why so little impact? “The Chance for Peace” failed to ease the cold war because Stalin’s death did nothing to alter the fundamental ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Each superpower still saw the other as a looming threat to its security, its belief system, and its vision of the future. The ideological trenches were dug too deep, and the risks of appearing weak or engaging in appeasement were too great, for either side to commit to a genuine thawing of relations. The Soviet Union was now in the hands of a nervous team of men who had risen in the Soviet system by slavishly attending to Stalin’s every caprice. For a brief moment, Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenti Beria, and Nikolai Bulganin had hoped that a thaw with the West would buy them time to transition to a post-Stalin period of rule. But they dared not loosen the reins over the communist bloc for fear of letting it slip away. In June 1953 East German workers rose up in open defiance of the communist government in East Berlin, and the Soviets were obliged to send in tanks and soldiers to restore control. The post-Stalin thaw evaporated after just three months.24
Meanwhile Eisenhower, despite his inspiring rhetoric about the terrible waste of the global arms race, seemed unwilling to move from words to deeds. He approved a surprisingly belligerent speech that his secretary of state delivered a mere 48 hours after “The Chance for Peace” hit the airwaves. Aiming to reassure both the right wing of the GOP and allies abroad that the United States was not seeking peace from a position of weakness, Dulles publicly itemized the many ways in which the new administration had aggressively beefed up the U.S. military presence around the world. Dulles boasted that the United States was arming Western Europe, intensifying its operations in Korea, “speeding delivery of military assistance” to the Nationalist Chinese, pouring arms into French Indochina, and strengthening ties to governments in the Middle East and Latin America. The United States would not accept any settlement of the cold war that perpetuates “the captivity of hundreds of millions of persons” behind the Iron Curtain. If the Soviets wanted to ask for peace, the administration would listen to their proposals, but “we do not play the role of suppliants.” Two days after “The Chance for Peace” speech, Dulles put the world on notice: America was still waging the cold war and would seek nothing less than victory.25
Eisenhower’s actions following Stalin’s death set something of a pattern for his presidency. He was emotionally and personally attached to the idea of peace. He spoke eloquently about the horrors of war and his desire to turn the productive capacities of humanity away from swords and toward plowshares. But Eisenhower was not an impulsive man. As a general he had developed a reputation as a master planner, a man who husbanded power, amassed resources, and always fought from a position of overwhelming strength. As president he followed the same strategic principles, choosing to wage a long, patient struggle with the USSR in which American power would eventually win out, rather than make any sudden or risky move that could leave the nation vulnerable. There would be many sincere words of peace during his presidency, but Ike was always preparing for war.
IV
To win the cold war, Eisenhower believed, the United States must remain economically dynamic, robust, and expansive. Spending huge sums on armaments and national defense might be unavoidable, but it had to be done carefully. Since 1940 the United States had swung between extremes, from a total lack of preparedness to breakneck and improvised rearmament programs. In a long confrontation with the Soviets, the watchword must be balance: the nation must build a permanent strategic defense capability while also avoiding inflation, spending prudently, and encouraging private innovation and economic growth. Rather than turn the country into a garrison state built upon a command economy, Eisenhower proposed to wage the cold war along free-market principles moderated by wise fiscal management.
His first budget reflected these convictions. Truman’s last budget had proposed total spending of $78.6 billion against revenue of $68.7 billion, thus leaving a deficit of $9.9 billion—a shocking gap, as far as Eisenhower was concerned. Ike called for belt-tightening, though since 70 percent of Truman’s 1953 budget went toward defense spending and the costs of the Korean War, the cuts would have to come from the military. Treasury Secretary Humphrey strongly supported this approach. He told the National Security Council, “The money and resources required by the great security programs which had been developed since Korea to the present time simply could not be borne by the United States unless we adopted essentially totalitarian methods.” By that he meant that continued massive overspending on behalf of the military would make the United States no different from its nemesis, the Soviet Union. Humphrey told the president that “we were at a fork in the road and a decision would have to made.” The country needed “to make basic changes in national security policies and programs.”26
Designed by Joseph Dodge, a Detroit banker of vast international experience, Eisenhower’s 1954 budget made real cuts to Truman’s spending plans. Truman had wanted to spend $78.6 billion; Ike trimmed that figure to $72.1 billion, a reduction of 8 percent. Instead of a budget deficit of $9.9 billion, Eisenhower expected a budget deficit for 1954 of $3.8 billion—still large but far less than Truman had proposed. Where Truman’s defense budget for 1954 was $45.4 billion, Eisenhower’s was $41.6 billion. An additional $1.4 billion was cut out of the Mutual Security Program, that is, military and economic aid to nations in Western Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
These cuts had been hard to achieve. Secretary of Defense Wilson had to wage a long battle with the service chiefs, as the budget savings were attained mainly by cutting noncombat personnel by 250,000. This decision had a knock-on effect because a smaller military workforce meant slower training, production, and procurement of weapons systems, especially aircraft. Advocates of air power in Congress, including prominent Democrats like Representative George H. Mahon of Texas and Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri (Truman’s former secretary of the air force) laid into the administration for slowing the expansion of airpower, leaving America, they said, with merely the “world’s second best Air Force.” (This would be a constant refrain from hawkish Democrats right up to the 1960 presidential election, when John F. Kennedy criticized the Eisenhower administration for its weakness on national security.) But Eisenhower persevered.27
Not only did Democrats and the armed services object to the new budget. So too did the right wing of the GOP. To balance the budget, Eisenhower appealed to Congress to extend Truman’s Korean War taxation measures—chiefly the excess prof
its tax on big business—and he asked for a delay in the reduction of personal income taxes that Congress had approved. This left conservative Republicans deeply distressed. On April 30 Senator Taft, now majority leader of the newly Republican Senate, went to the White House to complain. After looking over the numbers, he exploded. Eisenhower wrote in his diary that Taft “broke out in violent objection” to the modest cuts to Truman’s budget and derided the reductions as “puny.” Having failed to deliver tax cuts, the GOP would take a beating at the polls in 1954, Taft predicted, and he announced that he would fight against the proposed budget. Eisenhower was stunned, then deeply offended and angered at what he considered a “demagogic” tirade. But Taft’s outburst was a harbinger: despite months of work to trim the budget, Eisenhower would get no easy pass from the GOP Old Guard. The archconservative Republicans mistrusted Eisenhower and were ready to pounce on any sign that he would simply carry on Truman’s policies.28
Taft was right about one thing: Eisenhower had no intention of drastically reducing defense spending. The numbers show that Eisenhower instituted a new era of steady, generous defense appropriations. In 1940 the United States had spent a mere $1.6 billion on national defense. In 1945, after four years of global war, the figure had soared to a staggering $83 billion. These huge expenditures were drastically cut back after the war; by 1950 defense spending had shrunk to a mere $13.7 billion, leaving the military hollowed out. Ike, as army chief of staff, had tried to sound the alarm, to no avail. With the outbreak of war in Korea in 1950, Truman turned on the spigots once again, and defense spending shot up to $53 billion by 1953. Eisenhower abjured these drastic swings in spending; they suggested an unwillingness to think ahead and stay prepared for future conflict. In his time in office defense outlays remained remarkably steady and substantial, averaging $46.5 billion a year. This was a huge sum, representing roughly 50 percent of annual federal budget outlays during his administration. Put another way, the United States consistently spent 10 percent or more of its GDP each year on defense during the Eisenhower years, a higher percentage than any peacetime administration in U.S. history, before or since.29