Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  4. THE CIA IN CENTRAL AMERICA

  As the Geneva Conference droned on, there occurred in Central America another farce of the kind that had been recurring at short intervals for over a century. In Guatemala, the democratically elected reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz was proposing relatively moderate land reform, but accepted support from the local Communist party. Arbenz nationalized some of the acreage of the United Fruit Company (of which Allen Dulles had been a director, and of which even Eisenhower’s secretary, Ann Whitman, was a shareholder, though it is unlikely, despite leftist insinuations, that these facts altered official policy). A CIA operation was cooked up by Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers, and a couple of senior CIA operatives, in which a designated colonel, Carlos Castillo Armas, was suddenly proclaimed by a friendly radio station in Honduras as a challenger for the presidency. A “front” was alleged to exist, headed by Castillo Armas, which in fact consisted of 150 hired hands of the usual ragged CIA insurgent variety. To call them soldiers of fortune would exaggerate both their levels of energy and discipline and the clarity of their motives. The Swedish ship Alfhem docked in Guatemala on May 15, 1954, with a cargo of Czech artillery, rifles, and side arms, which Dulles and Eisenhower immediately denounced in the most stentorian terms, with the inevitable bandying about of the Monroe Doctrine. In fact, this equipment wasn’t for the army, which Arbenz realized was being bribed by the Americans and was unreliable; it was for a people’s militia he was setting up.

  Castillo Armas’s “front” was claimed by the Honduran radio station the CIA operated to have “invaded” Guatemala, and a completely fanciful account was then disseminated, over the air and in the world generally, to the effect that a war of liberation was raging in Guatemala, and moving ever closer to the capital, Guatemala City. In fact, Castillo Armas moved six miles inside the Guatemalan border and went into permanent bivouac in the jungle, in the Church of the Black Christ. There was no front, no war, and certainly no uprising. Eisenhower himself calculated that the way to frighten Arbenz was air power, and he approved giving two P-51s to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who would then give Castillo Armas the two P-51s he already had. (This was the same Somoza whom Roosevelt had described as “a son of a bitch but our son of a bitch.”) Eisenhower authorized CIA pilots to fly from Managua Airport and do some precise bombing in Guatemala. He had also authorized a blockade of Guatemala and asserted the right of search and seizure on the high seas. This inflamed the ire of the British and the French.

  Arbenz requested the United Nations to take up the matter, and the British, scandalized at the threat to seize ships on the oceans, and the French, none too pleased at the failure of the Americans to help them in Indochina, let it be known that they would support Arbenz at the UN, including in the dispatch of observers to Guatemala. These would quickly unearth the proportions of the U.S. presence in these shenanigans, and Eisenhower told his UN ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, to tell the British and the French that the U.S. would veto (for the first time the U.S. would use a UN veto) any such initiatives, and that if the British and French threw in with Arbenz, the United States would reevaluate its views about Egypt, the Suez Canal, and North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco were all in varying stages of revolt against the French). The British and French thought better of it, abstained, and there was no need for a U.S. veto; Arbenz fled at the prospect of Eisenhower turning up the pressure as far as he had to, resigning on June 27, 1954. Churchill and Eden arrived in Washington June 25, and Eisenhower had a blunt talk with them about their meddling in the Americas.

  Eisenhower had been decisive in Guatemala, and may have spared the U.S. political inconvenience, but there was the appearance of being too wedded to the United Fruit Company, which had been effectively deploying U.S. forces in Latin America for decades, and was not the hemisphere’s most enlightened employer. The United States might have begun sooner to try to recruit moderate reformers in Latin America, and it is not clear if Arbenz really had any communist sympathies or not, though there is reason to believe that he was a slightly Kerensky-like figure, with an academic interest in Marx. Castillo Armas was assassinated, for unknown reasons, in 1957. Eisenhower was correct to expel the British and French from Latin America (yet again), and it is hard to get too excited about his ejection of a somewhat suspect government, but he was straying a long way from Roosevelt’s public relations success of the Good Neighbor, or even Harry Truman’s much-admired visit to the graves of Mexican soldiers who died in the Mexican War with the U.S. in 1848. If the objective was to keep the communists out of the hemisphere, and not just stop the pretentious blunderings of Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay, America was going to have to do better than this, and Eisenhower did send Nixon to visit South America comprehensively, later in his presidency. As usual, Nixon, who soon emerged as the administration’s star foreign policy thinker (not excluding Dulles or Eisenhower himself), came back with some serious proposals, but there was already a lot of water over the dam by then. (Eisenhower himself eventually toured South America and was very respectfully received, but the whole political nature of the continent had shifted by then.)

  5. EISENHOWER’S ASTUTE POLITICAL INSTINCTS

  A front where Eisenhower was unambiguously successful was in the expunging of the influence of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who had become more and more erratic. Once he attacked Eisenhower, and expanded the “twenty years of treason”160 he professed to find in Roosevelt and Truman, to include the incumbent, matters proceeded swiftly. McCarthy announced public hearings to investigate charges of subversive infiltration of the U.S. Army. Eisenhower made it clear that no subpoenas from McCarthy to the army would be responded to, and that anyone who responded to any such subpoena could consider doing so in a letter of resignation as a government employee. Eisenhower had had enough and imposed an absolute privilege as commander-in-chief and retired holder of the army’s highest rank and commands, and dismissed the complaints even of his own Republican congressional leaders. Nixon as president of the Senate, and the Democratic Senate leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, organized a censure vote, which passed against McCarthy 67–22 on December 2, 1954, after McCarthy had denounced his opponents as “handmaidens of Communism.”161 McCarthy disintegrated into alcoholism and inconsequentiality, and died, aged 48, on May 2, 1957. It had been a very strange era, an aberration of overreaction and demagogy, which enjoyed the durability it did only because American official policy required that the people be severely frightened by the Red Menace; a certain amount of frothy excess, with the American love of the spectacle and relative procedural flexibility, was almost inevitable.

  An aspect of the unsettled climate even of American military opinion was the frequency of requests from the Joint Chiefs of Staff for atomic attacks on China. America and the world were fortunate that in Dwight D. Eisenhower there was a leader who knew exactly how to deal both with trigger-happy generals and admirals, and with bellicose congressional leaders (he said of his Senate majority leader, William Knowland, that he “has no foreign policy except to develop high blood pressure whenever he mentions the words ‘Red China”’).162 Eisenhower patiently repeated to the JCS, headed by Admiral Radford, that an atomic attack on China would swiftly lead to nuclear war with the Soviet Union, which would leave the Eurasian land mass from the Elbe to Vladivostok and from the Arctic shores of Siberia to the northern border of Vietnam, except, it could be hoped, Hong Kong, a smoldering ruin of lethal radioactivity, famine, devastation, and scores or even hundreds of millions of corpses, and what did his bemedalled friends (though less bemedalled than he, had he chosen to receive the Joint Chiefs in his full kit) suggest as the civilized world’s next step after that? Answer came there none.

  Eisenhower, beneath his deliberately contorted syntax and generally amiable exterior, was a very complicated and sophisticated tactician and strategist. He knew from his dealings with Stalin and Zhukov in 1945 that the Russians would take brinkmanship, the threat of massive retaliation, seriously, and
that he could embrace that policy and cut defense spending, run a sensible federal budget, and even cut some taxes. But when the military high command started grabbing for the nuclear toys he slapped them down and told them such a war was out of the question unless the Soviets or the Chinese initiated hostilities against a vital American interest, such as a NATO country or Japan. Thus, his answer to Korea was to threaten nuclear weapons to get the status quo ante that Truman had been unable to close on without believable atomic threats. His answer to Vietnam was not to touch France’s egomaniacal pursuit of a colonial beau geste, not to go in without allies, but to announce that the dominos started at the demarcation line between Communist North Vietnam and a newly independent South Vietnam.

  Apart from trying to spare the French the Dien Bien Phu debacle, Eisenhower should have accepted at least discussions with Chou at Geneva, though they would have had to be conducted by a subtler mind than Dulles’s—Nixon, or even some bipartisan combination of MacArthur, Acheson, Bohlen, and Kennan. China might have traded normalization and reasonable assurances such as were made by Nixon 17 years later, over Taiwan, a Korean peace treaty, and the People’s Republic’s assumption of the Chinese seat at the UN, in exchange for a 20-year separation of the two Vietnams. But this is conjecture; Eisenhower tried to reason with the French, got Germany into NATO, and salvaged the possibility of half a loaf in Vietnam. He took a risk in violating the Geneva Accord, by which the U.S. was not bound, and SEATO was not ultimately successful. But by the time Vietnam was unified more than 20 years later, the communists had been massacred in Indonesia and defeated in Malaya; South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore were all tremendous economic success stories; and the United States had constructive relations with the People’s Republic. The resolution of the West German question, though not by Eisenhower’s preferred formula of an integrated European army, was by far the most important strategic outcome of the match, though it had nothing to do with China. As usual, Eisenhower, while seeming cautious and not especially dynamic, had deftly played an indifferent hand; he had taken a swipe at his principal foe, Stalin’s fractious successors, by elevating Germany; had matched wits evenly with the very cunning Chou En-lai; had brushed off the French, who were at this point impossible; and had sent a polite, firm message to the British, while quietly routing the domestic extremists. The Cold War had just begun, but was already very complicated. America had a deceptively subtle leader, and the times demanded no less.

  6. THE FORMOSA STRAIT AND VIETNAM

  On September 3, 1954, the latest Chinese initiative to aggravate the United States and roil the waters in the Far East, devised with almost fiendish imagination, began. China started shelling the tiny offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, which instantly became household words throughout the world. The nearest of the islands is closer to the Chinese mainland than Staten Island is to Manhattan. They are rock piles, historically attached to China, that Chiang had stuffed with soldiers and used as jumping-off points for the harassment of Chinese coastal shipping, and for raids on the mainland. Chiang claimed that the fall of Quemoy and Matsu would severely compromise the security of Taiwan itself, and the Joint Chiefs disagreed with that assessment, but averred that they could not be defended without American assistance. This was complicated by the fact that the waters among and between the islands and China, at their narrowest points, were not accessible to the principal ships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, because of the deep drafts of its heavy units, in particular the giant aircraft carrier Midway.

  Admiral Radford and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs visited the president in Denver on his summer holiday on September 12 and for the third time in less than six months recommended the use of atomic weapons on China, and also the deployment of American forces on the islands. Eisenhower wouldn’t hear of it; he said that if war broke out, Russia, not China, would be the main counter target, and he lectured them forcefully on the requirements of constitutional government and the need to obtain congressional approval for the use of such weapons, especially in so abstruse a cause. The implications of the fact that the Chiefs, the successors of MacArthur, Marshall, Eisenhower, Nimitz, and Bradley, would be so relaxed about precipitating millions of people into eternity for such nonsensical strategic assets are disquieting. Roosevelt would have had the self-confidence, and Truman the gritty independent-mindedness and Missouri skepticism, to refuse them; but even better was Eisenhower’s dismissal of Radford’s requests as military, moral, strategic, and constitutional foolishness. Senior military officials can always impute the non-cooperation of civilian chiefs to their strategic philistinism and civilian squeamishness; this is much more challenging with a president who reached the highest possible rank in the combat U.S. Army, successfully commanded the greatest military operation in world history, and received the unconditional surrender of the nation’s enemies in Western Europe.

  The usual suspects fell for Chiang’s response to Mao and Chou’s tweak. Senator Knowland demanded a naval blockade of the whole Chinese coast. To the shouts of Knowland and McCarthy and their claque about the “honor of America,” Eisenhower replied that he was well familiar with that honor and did not construe it as being “insensible to the safety of [American] soldiers.”163 In December, he signed a mutual-defense treaty with the Nationalist Chinese that made an attack on either an attack on both, but confined the definition of Nationalist China to Taiwan and the Pescadores. Chiang agreed formally not to initiate hostilities with the People’s Republic unilaterally, conforming with the message Nixon had been sent to deliver to Chiang and Syngman Rhee the year before. The Chinese bombardment of Quemoy and Matsu continued for the rest of 1954, steadily intensifying, and there were repeated requests from Chiang, the Republican right, and the JCS to take drastic action. Eisenhower privately recommended against Chiang putting “more and more men on those small and exposed islands.”164 At a news conference in late November, Eisenhower answered a question about using military intervention in response to Chinese mistreatment of American POWs in Korea by saying that he had written “letters of condolence ... by the thousands, to bereaved mothers and wives. That is a very sobering experience.... Don’t go to war in response to emotions of anger and resentment; do it prayerfully.”165

  Vietnam War. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History

  Five times in the course of 1954 he had been asked by military and State Department advisers and congressional supporters to go to war in Asia, usually with a sprinkling of atomic bombs upon China: in April and again in May as the Dien Bien Phu surrender approached, in late June when the French claimed the Chinese air force was about to attack them, in September at the beginning of the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu, and again in November when China revealed the conditions in which it detained captured American airmen.

  The ink (none of it American) was scarcely dry on the Geneva Accord when problems began to bubble up from the nascent but unproclaimed state of South Vietnam. Allen Dulles had sent the astute intelligence colonel Edward Lansdale (model for the good official in the novel The Ugly American) to harass the Viet Minh and assess Diem in the autumn of 1954. Lansdale reported that the Viet Minh were going to take absolute control of the North very quickly, and that Diem’s efforts to install himself were proceeding with difficulty, and in November Eisenhower appointed the distinguished combat general J. Lawton Collins as ambassador to what the president called “Free Vietnam.” Collins was given command over the entire American mission in the new country and the mission statement to assist in building and preserving its sovereignty. Lansdale had warned that when it became clear that the elections Chou and Mendès-France had set up at Geneva, to be held after the two-year decent interval to save a little decorum for France did not occur, Diem would have an insurrection, and to the extent that North and South Vietnam were separate countries, a war, on his hands.

  For Eisenhower to approve the cancellation of the elections, and send a four-star general to Saigon with a clear mandate to reinforce the permanent independe
nce of South Vietnam and help it build an army and fight the war that Collins warned was about to begin again, was a very serious step into what would prove a tragic adventure. Eisenhower met with Collins on November 3, just before his departure for Saigon, and told him that he wished to emulate the examples of Greece and South Korea and assist the South Vietnamese to be able to defend themselves. Eisenhower had complained that the French, after his old comrade de Lattre de Tassigny died in 1951, wanted American aid but would not listen to American advice. He transferred a $400 million package of military assistance to France to South Vietnam, and told Collins to disperse it according to his best judgment (and Collins was as distinguished a general as de Lattre, and infinitely more so than Salan). Many questions remain over these decisions, especially if, despite all the business about dominoes, Eisenhower would not have been better off to keep his hands off South Vietnam and announce that the French had fumbled away all Indochina and that the dominoes started at Malaya, Thailand, and other sturdier and more coherent states; and if he was going to take a stand, if he could not have taken it while France was still a factor in Indochina, trading evacuation from Dien Bien Phu and even the insertion of some forces, in exchange for a durable French military commitment to the newly independent non-communist Indochinese countries.

  Eisenhower sent Dulles to Europe in September 1954 to arrange Germany’s election to NATO. He agreed with West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer that the German army would not exceed 12 divisions, that West Germany would not seek nuclear weapons, and that control would reside with the NATO commander (SACEUR, the post Eisenhower had set up). Dulles carried out his mission skillfully, and the threat remained, if France did not come on side, that the United States would finally make a bipartite arrangement with West Germany. The French National Assembly and the U.S. Senate ratified the arrangements, and the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into the Western Alliance in April 1955 was one of the greatest of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s many historic achievements, as military commander and as president.