by Conrad Black
The French, in one year, had managed their greatest military defeat—apart from 1940 and Bismarck’s capture of Napoleon III at Sedan in 1870—since Waterloo, if not Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in 1812, and had fumbled their way into secondary position as a continental European ally behind Germany, the mortal and genocidal enemy of less than a decade before. Eisenhower bore in mind at all times that Europe was the key theater and Cold War battleground, and that too aggressive or impetuous a policy in the Far East would spook America’s allies in Western Europe, where communism was militating within a hundred miles of the Rhine in East Germany, and seething and fermenting in more than 20 percent of the population in France and in Italy. America and the Western world were well-served by his world view, as they were by the U.S. president’s disposition to discount the alarms and bellicosity of his Joint Chiefs.
In the off-year election in November 1954, the Republicans lost control of both houses of the Congress fairly narrowly, and Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson began the exercise of an iron control over the House and Senate that would continue to the end of the decade. They were two of the legendarily capable leaders in the history of the Congress, on a par with Clay and Webster (as managers not orators). Eisenhower gained general bipartisan support, apart from the more extreme members of the reactionary Republican right, for his strategic policy of containment in Europe through American-led alliance, the arming of infiltrated countries (building on the Truman Doctrine), a reduction of American military manpower, and a steady build-up of air, naval, and atomic superiority, while prompting counter-subversion through the CIA wherever a country was threatened and seemed susceptible. This was the “New Look,” which many senior officers and some Republican hawks criticized, but which preserved the peace and avoided large deficits and tax increases.
New Year’s Day, 1955, was an occasion for mutual threats of war from Chou En-lai and Chiang Kai-shek. The Communists seized a couple of the small islands in the Formosa Strait. Eisenhower broke new constitutional ground in asking Congress for authority to use any level of force, including atomic weapons, that he judged necessary, for the defense of Formosa and the Pescadores, and “closely related localities,” the identification of which would be left to the president. Eisenhower produced the “Formosa Doctrine,” which like many of his forays into the prosaic, especially at press conferences, was designed to be incomprehensible: Chou called it a war message and Chiang complained that it did not cover Quemoy and Matsu. Eisenhower made it clear to the Joint Chiefs and the congressional leaders that he would only use the degree of force he thought necessary to defend Formosa and the Pescadores, and that on no account would he allow an attack upon mainland China or be dragged into the Chinese Civil War by Chiang. The timeless leaders of the House, Speaker Sam Rayburn and minority leader and former Speaker Joe Martin, jammed it through without debate, 403–3. There was a resolution in the Senate curtailing Eisenhower’s authority, but this was brushed aside and Johnson and Knowland put the president’s measure through after three days, 83–3. Eisenhower, in a remarkable vote of confidence, was given a blank check, even to blast China with atomic weapons if he thought the national interest justified it.
In almost identical letters to the NATO commander, General Alfred Gruenther, and to Winston Churchill (who was finally about to retire as prime minister, after nine years and over 30 years in government and 54 years in Parliament), Eisenhower wrote that Europeans consider America “reckless, impulsive, and immature,” but reminded them that he had to deal with “the truculent and the timid, the jingoists and the pacifists.” Where Roosevelt flattered whom he had to, dissembled when he felt it necessary, and sailed through like a monarch, and Truman took the best decision as each came up, crisply and clearly, Eisenhower was always mindful of the political landscape and maneuvered in a grey zone of complicated syntax and personal discretion, aware of the poles between which he had to operate.
Churchill was skeptical about anything to do with East Asia, and really cared only about Hong Kong and Malaya. He didn’t believe the version of the domino theory that Eisenhower tried to sell through a visit by Dulles—a rather pious, overserious, and uncongenial man to send as an emissary to Churchill, unlike Acheson, who liked a drink and was very witty and much more articulate than Dulles. Churchill and Eden didn’t buy any of it, and thought the U.S. should try to negotiate the handover of Quemoy and Matsu for a guarantee not to bother Formosa, which, as Eisenhower said, was “more wishful than realistic.” In post-colonial terms, the British had no idea at all of how to deal with East Asia, and had no resources to be a factor there anymore.
Dulles went from London to the Far East and said when he returned to Washington that he doubted the Nationalist Chinese army would remain loyal to Chiang if the Communists invaded, and that if it was the president’s decision to defend Quemoy and Matsu, atomic weapons would have to be used. There was a great deal of concern, even among conservative Democrats like Johnson, about betting too much on strategic rubbish like Quemoy and Matsu. Truman’s favorite general, Matthew B. Ridgway, now the chief of staff of the army, told congressional hearings that he opposed Eisenhower’s “New Look” of fewer troops and more firepower, atomic and otherwise. Eisenhower was sorely tempted to sack him, as Truman had fired MacArthur, but didn’t, partly on the advice of Dulles.
Hard as it is in retrospect to believe that these trivial islands could have created such a war agitation, it was a period of intense strain. Finally, on April 23, Chou gave in Bandung (Indonesia) a very conciliatory speech, Eisenhower responded somewhat in the same spirit, and the shelling of the islands was reduced, and stopped altogether in May 1955. The whole episode is generally reckoned a great Eisenhower victory, as the bombardment stopped and Chiang retained Quemoy and Matsu. It was not a triumph in preventing an invasion of Formosa, as there was no chance China could have achieved that successfully with the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Formosa Strait (which Eisenhower had beefed up with three additional aircraft carriers). But it was a triumph in picking a showdown where he could not lose, providing himself the flexibility to avoid a Dien Bien Phu at Quemoy and Matsu, which is probably why Mao and Chou did not attack the islands in human waves—because the U.S. had no prestige invested in them. He had faced the Chinese down at no cost in American lives, and had maintained the confidence of all strata of American opinion except the extreme pacifists and screaming war hawks, who could not, between them, have exceeded 10 percent of opinion.
7. OPEN SKIES
There had not been a high-level meeting between the U.S. and the USSR for almost 10 years, since Potsdam. The United States declined to meet with the Soviets until they showed some sign of being in earnest. Following the resolution of the Formosa Strait impasse, Eisenhower said that he would accept agreement on a peace treaty with Austria as a sufficient sign of Russian seriousness. All four powers did agree to evacuate Austria, which would be a neutral state that would organize its own defense. A four-power summit meeting was then convened for Geneva, starting July 18, 1955.
The summer of 1955 was the first time the world had generally breathed easily since that of 1929. In 1955, Detroit built and sold almost eight million cars, but only New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles had highways around them, and apart from the Pennsylvania Turnpike there were scarcely any four-lane inter-city highways in the country. Eisenhower was from the interior of the country (Abilene, Kansas), and had admired the advanced highways in Germany when he had been military governor there. In July 1954, Eisenhower had Nixon unveil the greatest public works project in the country’s history, a 10-year, $50 billion interstate highway program. This would revive the internal-improvements controversies of 125 years before and recall aspects of Roosevelt’s New Deal, workfare projects. And it would soak up what unemployed there still were, as the country shook off the last vestiges of depression and war and enjoyed almost full employment, only 1 percent inflation, a balanced budget, and the Cold War seeming, two years after the death of the gruesome Stalin, to set
tle down. Peace and prosperity had returned after whole or partial absences of over 25 years, and unlike in the twenties, the United States was now engaged everywhere in the world.
There had been some proposals by both the Soviet and the American side for military inspection teams on the ground in both countries, at highway crossings and such, but Eisenhower was skeptical that they would accomplish much, after he had seen how surreptitiously the Chinese had moved around in Korea. He had been very aware of the advances in aerial reconnaissance since he was the theater commander in Europe, and had been for some months working up some proposals for reciprocally opening up each country for air inspection by the other. The U-2 high-altitude, Mach 2 aerial reconnaissance plane was almost ready, and rocket-launched satellites that could perform the same function would be ready within a few years. Eisenhower thought it an idea whose time was coming anyway. Eisenhower addressed the nation on the eve of departure for Geneva and claimed a desire only to change the atmosphere for the better between the superpowers. Though not a religious man, he concluded by urging the entire nation to pray for peace. (He had also called for a prayer at his inauguration, a time-honored gambit for American leaders—even, or perhaps particularly, the less religiously observant of them.)
The Soviet delegation was headed by Nikita Khrushchev as Communist Party chairman; the new premier, Nikolai Bulganin; the ancient foreign minister, V.M. Molotov; and Eisenhower’s war-time colleague, the defense minister, Marshal Georgi Zhukov. Eisenhower soon discovered that Zhukov was exhausted and diminished and nothing like the powerful figure he had been. Despite having been elected on a platform that heaped denigration on the Yalta Conference for having given Europe away to Stalin, and having told his Republican congressional leadership that there would not be another Yalta, Eisenhower opened the conference with a stern demand for specific performance of the Soviet Union’s promises from Yalta, specifically in the Declarations on Poland and Liberated Europe.
The opening sessions were fairly acrimonious, but the social occasions were quite convivial. Eisenhower, because of his position and great military prestige, was certainly the leading figure there, and, like Roosevelt and Truman before him, was the only chief of state, and so presided. Churchill, who loved summit conferences, had finally retired, and Eden led the British. The French were led by Mendès- France’s successor, the very capable Edgar Faure. But France had suffered too many defeats in the previous 15 years to carry much weight.
Several days into the conference, after trying to revive the “Atoms for Peace” proposal, Eisenhower, Eden, and Faure rejected Khrushchev’s proposal for an Austria-like solution to Germany: reunification and neutrality. This indicated the degree to which the West really had won the war: Stalin took most of the casualties against Germany, but the West had the overwhelming majority of the Germans, and West Germany vastly outperformed the Communist East. The powers agreed on more cultural exchanges, and then Eisenhower made his pitch for what was called his “Open Skies” proposal. The British and the French were very positive. Though the Russians were at first non-committal in Bulganin’s reaction, he was followed by Khrushchev, who dismissed the idea as just an espionage attempt. It was here that it became obvious, as would soon be confirmed, that Khrushchev was emerging as Stalin’s successor as dictator of the country. As Eisenhower had hoped, there was a lightening of atmosphere, and Khrushchev and Bulganin had made it clear that they wished to visit the U.S.A.
Eisenhower gave the conference a rather platitudinous wind-up, claiming to have come to Geneva because of “my lasting faith in the decent instincts and good sense of the people who populate this world of ours.” He spoke to the country on television on his return, pledged that there had been no secret deals, acknowledged that there had been no progress on the divided nations of Germany, Korea, China, and Vietnam, but said that the atmosphere was relatively upbeat and that it could be built upon from there. Eisenhower was proving to be a fortunate, as well as a capable, if cautious, often devious, and idiosyncratic, president. He suffered a modest heart attack on September 24 while on holiday in Colorado, and was in hospital for six weeks, and convalesced at home into the New Year, 1956.
8. THE SUEZ CRISIS
Eisenhower carefully considered whether to seek reelection at age 66, in light of his recent indisposition, and he did the modern U.S. presidential candidate’s obligatory semi-public consultation of family and advisers, receiving the inevitable harvest of sycophancies, cresting with his brother Milton’s concern that the country might be so concerned about his health that it would defeat him at the polls in order to increase the likelihood of greater longevity. His advisers felt that no one else could defeat the Democrats, which was nonsense, considering that Nixon would effectively draw the election in 1960 against a stronger candidate than Stevenson. Eisenhower said he would “hate to turn this country back into the hands of people like Stevenson, Harriman, and Kefauver.” (Harriman had been elected governor of New York, by 11,000 votes out of over 5.1 million cast, against Irving Ives; Estes Kefauver was a prominent Democratic senator from Tennessee, and they were all quite respectable politicians.)166 A few years before, Eisenhower had described the Democrats as “Extremes of the left, extremes of the right, with corruption and political chicanery shot through the whole business.”167 (He was speaking of Roosevelt, Truman, Rayburn, and Johnson; what he might have thought of Jesse Jackson, George Wallace, and George McGovern intimidates the imagination.)
Eisenhower, as is customary with incumbent American presidents, thought himself indispensable, and when assured by his medical team that he was up to it, he determined to run again, and then inflicted an agony on Nixon about reselecting him as vice president—pretty shabby treatment of a loyal and capable vice president who had been instrumental in securing Eisenhower’s nomination over Taft in 1952. Eisenhower was not indispensable and after his heart attack he slowed down considerably. He certainly had a good record to run for a second term, but four years later he would be the oldest president in history up to that time, and would seem pretty tired.
In January 1956, the new British prime minister, Anthony Eden, came to Washington for substantive talks with Eisenhower. Eden had known Eisenhower well since the North African campaigns of 1943; had served three separated terms as foreign secretary since 1935, totaling 12 years, plus six years as shadow foreign secretary; had worked closely with Churchill for 16 years; and had dealt in detailed negotiations with Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Truman, Chou En-lai, de Gaulle, and almost everyone else who had been prominent in the world in the last 20 years. The British wanted to abandon the pretense that anyone except Mao Tse-tung’s Communists governed China, but agreed to support Diem’s refusal to hold Vietnam-wide elections, for the official reason that the North had violated the Geneva Accord (which it had, but the real reason was that Ho Chi Minh would have won 100 percent of the vote in the North from nationalist enthusiasm and by application of the usual communist electoral methods, and perhaps 20 to 30 percent in the South).
Eden was mainly concerned about Egypt and its leader, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had seized power in 1954, two years after he and other officers had ousted the absurd and dissolute British puppet, King Farouk. Eden had lost confidence in Nasser, whom Eisenhower had thought something of a reformer. Dulles intervened that he feared Nasser was a tool of the communists, but Dulles suspected that of a wide swath of leaders, from Nehru to Mossadegh to the unfortunate Guatemalan Arbenz. This was an implausible complaint, because Dulles himself had approved a demand of cash payments for $27 million of arms Nasser had made the year before, driving him into the arms of the Czechs, who sold him the arms on credit. Eden reminded Eisenhower and Dulles that selling any arms to Egypt violated the Tripartite Pact between their countries and France to do nothing to aggravate hostilities between Israel and the Arabs.
Of course, this too was nonsense, as it just made the Arabs dependent on the Soviet bloc as arms suppliers. It was a figment of the neo-colonial imaginat
ion of the British and the French that they could long maintain the Middle East in a relatively disarmed state. Eden now proposed that Britain take the lead in the Middle East, and that the U.S. join the British-sponsored Baghdad Pact, which linked Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, to block Russia’s way to the south, and make it a military alliance. The Israelis and Egyptians both thought the Baghdad Pact directed against them, and Eisenhower and Dulles thought they would irritate the Israelis and the Arabs by joining it. This was a bit rich, considering the mess Britain had made of the admittedly complicated problem of Palestine, where they had effectively promised the same territory to the Jews and the Arabs in 1917, and mismanaged the balance between them for 30 years afterward. Further, the administration had quietly undercut the British position in the Middle East from its start, and rather as Roosevelt had imagined that the Russians and the Vichy French preferred the Americans to the British, Eisenhower and Dulles had an evangelical notion of the boundless goodwill the United States deployed in the Middle East compared with the British and the French. Of course the Arab nationalists had no use for any of them, and to boot, the Israelis hated the British, whom they considered responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews who would otherwise have successfully fled prewar Europe for Palestine (with, unfortunately, some reason).
Eisenhower now sent the man he (inexplicably) favored to succeed him, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Anderson, to start the lengthy process of shuttle diplomacy between Nasser and the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion. Eisenhower authorized Anderson to offer both countries large amounts of money to compose their differences. The U.S. was prepared to guarantee Israel’s UNAPPROVED borders of 1948, but Ben Gurion was not prepared to retire to them. Anderson offered resettlement of the Palestinian refugees throughout the Arab world, but Nasser declined to agree to such a “destruction of a people.”168
