by Conrad Black
Eisenhower determined that the U.S. must put principle above traditional attachments and that he must ignore any political considerations arising from the election, though he doubted the American people would throw him out over such an issue anyway. He issued a statement on October 29 upholding the section of the Tripartite Agreement of 1950 (Britain, France, and the United States) that they would side with the victim of aggression in the Middle East, leaving no doubt that this was Egypt. He ordered that the British be advised that although they had a legitimate grievance against Egypt, it did not justify the drastic step they had taken, and that the U.S. would present the UN with a cease-fire resolution in the morning. The British chargé, J.E. Coulson, was summoned (the ambassador had returned to London), and Eisenhower asked that the British government be informed at once of his views.
Only on October 30 did the U.S. administration understand the proportions of the Anglo-French-Israeli action. Ben Gurion sent a message in the morning saying that Israel’s existence was at stake and there was no thought of stopping, much less retreating. Eden and the (ostensibly Socialist, though in France political labels are deceiving) French premier, Guy Mollet,175 exchanged messages with Eisenhower, and explained that the Tripartite Declaration was invalid because of changed circumstances. Eisenhower suspected Churchill’s “mid-Victorian hand” in this (completely unjustly), and speculated that the French thought that this action might somehow assist them in Algeria, where there was a widespread and bloody Arab insurrection.176
At midday on the East Coast, the British and the French gave Egypt a very severe 12-hour ultimatum. Finally, it was clear: unless the Egyptians and the Israelis each withdrew 10 miles from the banks of the Suez Canal, Britain and France would occupy the canal and keep it open. Israel, of course, accepted at once, and intended to retain the Sinai, and to be allowed transit of the canal.
Eisenhower may be said, finally, to have captured the essence of it when he said on that afternoon, though Eden was now at least trying to explain his and his allies’ actions to the U.S. president after a two-week silence: “I’ve just never seen Great Powers make such a mess and botch of things. Of course, in a war, there’s just nobody I would rather have fighting alongside of me than the British. But—this thing! My God!“177 He considered it, from the start, “the biggest error of our time, outside of losing China” (which he largely, and unfairly, blamed on his revered old chief, Marshall).
The next morning, Eden won a confidence motion in the British House of Commons, 270–218, which would not normally be considered adequate to continue with such a risky operation by a recently reelected government. But Russia announced that it would withdraw its forces from Hungary and respect the sovereignty of the East European states as it had promised to do at Yalta, and apologized for its past behavior. Eisenhower, while his closest colleagues rejoiced, again showed his worldliness by finally expressing doubt about Soviet sincerity.
It was not too late for Eden and Mollet to pull back, and they could certainly extract some concessions from Nasser now, but Eden ordered the attack to begin; British planes bombed Egyptian cities and military targets. Nasser did manage to sink a number of ships in the Suez Canal, effectively blocking it. Eisenhower spoke to the nation and the world at 7 p.m. on Halloween. He said the U.S. would economically assist Eastern European countries if they asked for it, but assured the Russians that he would not try to recruit them as allies; said the U.S. sought peace with Arabs and Jews; and spoke warmly of Britain and France and Israel, but said the United States had not in the slightest been consulted about this action, and that while the powers that undertook it had the right not to consult America, America had, and would exercise, its right to dissent from their initiative. The United States sought peace and the rule of law. It was an effective and statesmanlike address that showed Eisenhower’s grasp of longer-term strategic goals to keep the Western Alliance together through the outbreak of insanity in London. (Paris and Tel Aviv weren’t risking anything; France and Israel were both more or less at war with the Arabs, and could make it up with the Americans anytime.)
The American leadership was correct to be annoyed with its allies, but if Eisenhower hadn’t pulled out on the Aswan Dam, Nasser would never have seized the canal as he did. If the U.S. had lifted a finger to help France avoid a terrible humiliation in Vietnam two years before, the French would have consulted. And if Dulles had been more congenial with the British (both Churchill and Eden found him grating, humorless, unimaginative, and full of sanctimony, and didn’t notice his good points, especially his fierce anti-communism), and had earned their confidence as Acheson and Marshall and most subsequent secretaries of state did, Britain would not have put such strain on the alliance with such a hare-brained plan. (Dulles underwent an emergency cancer operation on November 4, and Hoover was acting secretary for the balance of these crises.) At least Eisenhower made sure that Lodge, the ambassador to the United Nations, got the U.S. resolution in first, to avoid a much harsher condemnation of the three renegade warrior nations by a Russian motion. The French and the British, and then the Russians, vetoed resolutions, including American ones, at the UN that they found disagreeable.
After 10 days of some disorder in Budapest and elsewhere, and ostensible negotiations, the Hungarian negotiators were seized; 17 more Soviet divisions were inserted into Hungary, as 80 percent of the Hungarian army had deserted rather than suppress the population, and the Red Army occupied Budapest in the predawn hours of November 4. Eisenhower had been correct to smell a Soviet rat, and only now, with Soviet tanks a few hundred yards away, did Nagy ask for military assistance from the international community—no one in particular, claiming it had been promised by Radio Free Europe. (It had been, implicitly, but not in these circumstances, and a radio propaganda station couldn’t officially bind the nation to war, even with all Dulles’s belligerent fantasies about liberation and rollback. And Nagy was seeking help from an international group, not just the U.S.)
The fact is, the U.S. could have airlifted some assistance to the freedom fighters, but didn’t even do that, so risk-averse was Eisenhower (as he had been when he let the Soviets take Prague and recommended against taking Berlin, in 1945, because he feared accidental conflict with them). It would have been worth a try for Eisenhower to propose a reciprocal scale-back of the alliances—Poland and Hungary, and possibly Greece and Denmark, joining Finland, Austria, and Yugoslavia as neutral states with no foreign forces on them, with guaranteed Soviet access to its occupation zone in Germany, and perhaps some cap on West German force levels. If the divided Kremlin had refused, it might at least have squeezed more political juice out of the lemon and seemed less of a betrayal of the forces of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If Nagy had acted like Gomulka and not just announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, he might have accomplished something durable, but he had no idea of world affairs and no idea what forces he was dealing with, especially with a war underway in the Middle East.
The British and the French finally landed in Egypt on November 5, paratroopers preceding amphibious landings around the northern end of the Suez Canal. The Soviet premier, Nikolai Bulganin, wrote to Eisenhower, threatening force, by implication including atomic attack, on Britain and France, if their alleged aggression did not cease, and proposing to Eisenhower that the USSR and the U.S. take joint military action in Egypt, a mad idea that could not have been meant seriously. Bulganin naturally avoided all mention of his country’s brutal reoccupation of Budapest the day before, and Eisenhower responded almost at once, with a statement that any Soviet military intervention in the Middle East would be resisted with military counter-force from the United States, and made it implicitly clear through channels, to all parties, that any attack on Britain and/or France would be treated as a direct act of unlimited aggression against the United States itself and would be responded to with instant and maximum force. That stopped the Kremlin’s references to the possible imminence of World War III. Eisenhower wrote in hi
s diary of moving to “help the refugees fleeing from the criminal action of the Soviets,” and claimed that landlocked Hungary was “as inaccessible to us as Tibet,”178 which, as a glance at the map shows, is self-justificative eyewash. And he scarcely lifted a finger to help the 200,000 refugees, despite Nixon’s going to the border and on his return pleading with Eisenhower and Rayburn to help them. The U.S. filled an upgraded quota of 21,000, and eventually nearly 60,000 more, and the refugees were generously received in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.
As America went to the polls, international grand strategy had been reduced to tragicomic farce on a scale rarely plumbed in modern history, though not chiefly by American actions.
10. REELECTION AND DE-ESCALATION
America voted on November 6, as the Syrians blew up oil pipelines from Iraq to the Mediterranean (it might have been too technologically challenging just to shut them and collect the through-flow for themselves). Eisenhower had scarcely campaigned and left that, as he left most distasteful tasks, to his vice president. International crises had made it a lively campaign. Stevenson had started out with an inane set of military proposals for abolition of the draft, a nuclear test ban, and an enhanced program of missile development. Eisenhower replied that the end of the draft would leave the United States in default of its military commitments, that a nuclear test ban would cause a great deal of missile development activity to be wasted, and that every rocket scientist in the country was already working overtime on developing the military potential of missiles of all sizes.
Stevenson had been under secretary of the navy in World War II, but had no executive authority or specialized knowledge of military matters and was demolished in one well-publicized press conference by the incumbent, who did not have to remind Americans that his combined credentials as a war planner and theater and alliance commander were probably greater than that of any person since Napoleon. Stevenson was reduced to informing the public, most directly on election eve, that Eisenhower’s health was so parlous that a vote for Ike was a vote for Nixon, an uncharacteristically tasteless and politically futile sally (and Eisenhower eventually outlived Stevenson, who was 10 years younger, by four years).
As always in international crises, the nation rallied to the president. There had never been any doubt about the election, and Eisenhower and Nixon won by 35.6 million and 57.4 percent of the vote, with 457 electoral votes and 43 states, to Stevenson and Kefauver’s 25.7 million, 42 percent, and 73 electoral votes from five states. The Republicans even took most of the South (despite the ruling of the Supreme Court declaring racial segregation of schools unconstitutional, which Eisenhower made it clear he would carry out, albeit without enthusiasm). As an endorsement of the incumbent, it was, next to Roosevelt’s in 1936, the greatest since Monroe ran unopposed in 1820, as Eisenhower polled slightly ahead of Jackson in 1832, Grant in 1872, and TR in 1904. But the Rayburn-Johnson control of the Democratic Congress was undisturbed, and Eisenhower was the first president to win an election and face a hostile Congress in both houses since General Zachary Taylor in 1848. The country detected the president’s (justified) disdain for his party’s congressional leadership—Knowland and the other reactionaries.
On Election Day, Eisenhower ordered the first stage of mobilization—recall of all military personnel from leave—and was delighted to get a call from Eden saying a cease-fire was acceptable to Britain, as he claimed that the British and the French already controlled the canal. Eisenhower expressed great pleasure and said that the UN peacekeepers would be led by Canadians, as he didn’t want any of the permanent Security Council members involved, because that would put Russian soldiers on the Suez Canal. (It was a White House plan that Lodge gave to Canadian external affairs minister Lester Pearson in the corridors of the UN, as Canada was a reliable ally that would be more acceptable to the neutral nations. Pearson happily ran with it, won the Nobel Peace Prize and the leadership of his party in 1958, and was elected prime minister of Canada in 1963.) Eden asked how the election looked, and the president responded that he had been focused on the Middle East and Hungary and that “I don’t give a damn how the election goes. I guess it will be all right.”179
The Suez crisis ended on the shabby note of Eisenhower destabilizing the British currency and enforcing an oil embargo on Britain and France until their forces were out of Egypt, and telling his ambassador in London, Winthrop Aldrich (John D. Rockefeller’s son-in-law and a financial backer of Eisenhower), to scheme with Harold Macmillan and Rab Butler, the two candidates to succeed Eden, who was deemed to be finished, and enabling Macmillan to tell Eden that the British pound would collapse if American demands for withdrawal were not met. This was something of an exaggeration but providential for Macmillan’s ambition to ditch Eden and take his place, which he did. Almost all Ike’s great British wartime comrades, from Mr. Churchill down through the upper military ranks at the time of D-Day (Britain’s last amphibious operation, which had enjoyed masterly planning and execution), wrote to Eisenhower asking for a gentler treatment of Britain, and Eisenhower responded to all in sorrowful but amiable inflexibility. (Thus, Macmillan largely owed his ultimate success to Eisenhower, and Pearson his to Lodge, and Eisenhower, despite his demi-urgic back-digging efforts to disguise it, largely owed his original nomination to Nixon; the beneficiaries of this vital career assistance, as happens in politics, were uniform in their ingratitude.)
Eisenhower was stirred by the Middle East crisis to advocate what became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, which enabled the president to extend military and economic assistance on his own authority to countries menaced by communist subversion. The Congress only approved the military part of it, and the only significant difference with Truman’s Doctrine was that Eisenhower’s extended throughout the Third World, though it was aimed primarily at the Arab world as a rival to Nasser’s rising influence. He invited a procession of Third World leaders to Washington, starting with Nehru and peaking at King Saud, whom he had been promoting as a rival in the Arab world to Nasser. Saud proved a shy man of medieval views, unsuitable to rival Nasser at stirring the Arab masses, but important as a source of oil for Europe. (Eisenhower was not brilliant at judging political horseflesh; his preferred candidates to succeed himself were Treasury Secretary Anderson and his capable but completely non-political brother Milton Eisenhower, president of Johns Hopkins University.) He again had recourse to coercion when he supported a congressional measure to stop private assistance to Israel if it did not withdraw from Gaza. These positions were broadly correct, and when Israel did occupy Gaza, from 1967 to 1993, it was terribly tumultuous and burdensome. The Israelis announced their withdrawal on March 1, 1957.
The crises had almost completely passed by the beginning of 1957. America’s allies had been trounced by American intervention, and the hob-nailed Soviet jackboot had crushed freedom’s windpipe in Hungary, but the Western Alliance had been preserved. As usual, Eisenhower had been perceptive and sound in his strategic judgment and analyses of the events as they unfolded, but contrary to his performance as a military commander, he had been ponderous and unimaginative in decision-making. He could have caused much greater inconvenience to the Russians over the Hungarian uprising, should not have driven Nasser into the arms of the Kremlin with the Aswan Dam decision, and could easily have preserved more dignity for his allies, mad though their Suez caper was. His attack on the British currency and his oil embargo after the cease-fire to hasten the Anglo-French departure were gratuitous and unfriendly acts, and neither the bonhomous “I Like Ike” gaiety of his reception of Eden’s surrender, nor the diaphanous whitewash he and his principal biographer, Stephen Ambrose, slap onto these events, disguise these facts.
This would be the last time an enfeebled France would have to endure such demeaning treatment. Charles de Gaulle’s long-awaited (particularly by him) hour was about to strike, and Eisenhower would live to see the Franco-American relationship shift unpleasantly. Ike was a safe pair of hands, and he consolidated
and gained Republican acceptance of the achievements of Roosevelt and Truman. If given long enough, he could come up with interesting ideas, like Open Skies and the interstate highway system, but he was getting a bit smug and slightly old in his attitudes. No president except possibly Monroe had had a better second than a first term. Eisenhower had rendered immense service to America and the world, but was entering an Indian summer that would be relatively undisturbed and rather unexciting. But he retained to the end the essential strategic sense to preserve America’s commanding preeminence in the world, and to avoid impetuosities that would bedevil some of his successors. Most of the world resumed its long march back to normalcy The Eisenhower years were the best the United States and most of the West had known, at least since the twenties and possibly ever. These six presidential terms of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower had produced steadily rising prosperity, and under American leadership, the slow advance of democracy in the world. The United States had led the West to victory in the World War II, while Russia took most of the casualties; imposed a containment policy on Soviet Communism; and, with Open Skies, begun the de-escalation of the Cold War. No other country could have done any of it.
