In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Brownell and Lucius Clay cleared the cabinet appointments, and for secretary of state gave no serious consideration to anyone other than John Foster Dulles. Later rumors that John McCloy’s name was in contention seem, on the available evidence, not to have been true. British foreign secretary Eden, on his behalf and Churchill’s, recommended against the choice of Dulles, but were told that their arguments were useless. Dulles’s facial tic, a reminder of his youthful endeavors to surmount British imperial trade barriers in the tropics, boded ill for the Churchill and Eden governments.

  In his own way Dulles was as deceiving as Eisenhower, and with the recent opening of his archives, historians are changing a good many judgments about him. An earlier view, associated with his lay religious activities, was that he was rigid and doctrinaire. Taft, who knew him when they were both students, was closer to the mark in worrying that he was a waverer. They had been isolationists together in the 1930s and early 1940s, but when the political winds shifted, Taft looked around and saw that Dulles had become a leader of the Republican internationalists. Taft was concerned that Dulles was “likely to let himself be pushed around by those who are with him,” but was resigned to accepting him as “probably the best appointment that could be made.”

  Dulles wrote the foreign policy plank in the 1952 Republican platform. It attacked the Democrats for appeasing communism, losing China, shielding traitors, aiming at national socialism, making unspecified blunders at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam, and much more to the same effect—after which nobody could have guessed that for years Dulles had been part of the bipartisan team that was formulating that policy. “We charge that they have plunged us into war in Korea without the consent of our citizens …” seems especially hard coming from the first person in June 1950 to cable Washington from Asia to send in the armed forces.

  Dulles criticized the policy of containment as “negative, futile and immoral.” He promised that Eisenhower instead would pursue a policy of “liberation”: that Soviet rule in Europe would be rolled back.

  Encouraged by the rhetoric of the Eisenhower administration, East Germans in 1953 and Hungarians in 1956 revolted against Soviet rule and called on the United States for help. America made no effort to rescue them, and the revolts were crushed by the Russians. Dulles’s pledges of liberation rang hollow.

  Had Dulles consciously been lying when he claimed he knew an alternative to the containment policy? Had he known (but how could he not have known?) that the only way to liberate Eastern Europe in the 1950s was to go to war with Russia, and that neither he nor Eisenhower—nor the people of the United States—were prepared to do that?

  So it was to be with one issue after another in the Eisenhower administration. Dulles claimed to have found the solution to the problem of how to reduce the ruinously expensive military budget required to deter Soviet aggression. “Massive retaliation” was his answer: give up buying costly conventional weapons, and in case of conflict threaten to unleash a nuclear war. But once the Russians had nuclear weapons of their own, that was not a strategy but the road to suicide. How could Dulles not have known that?

  EISENHOWER EXUDED CONFIDENCE that if elected, he would know what to do about Korea. It was a trap that Truman had not known how to escape. The basic problem was one of geography and population: Korea was next to communist China, which had a billion people. If the United States sent a million troops, China could send two million; if ten million, then twenty. There was no way to top China’s bid.

  The full story of how and why North Korea agreed to a cease-fire still has not emerged. Stalin’s death must have played a big role: in the communist world a period of quiet to sort things out might have been a strongly felt need. But mostly it seems to have been the result of China’s economic and military exhaustion.†

  It seems to have been the Korean War experience that led MacArthur to modify his worldview in an important way. Before he had been relieved of his command by Truman, the only ways he could think of to break out of the trap involved taking huge risks. The trap, of course, was caused by China’s “privileged sanctuary” position: officially not at war, she remained immune to attack, while free to slip a few hundred thousand more “volunteers” across the border anytime the North Koreans seemed to need help. MacArthur proposed attacking China, which might have brought her fully into the war and might have brought in her ally the Soviet Union as well. Soon after leaving the army, he developed a plan that he hoped Eisenhower and Dulles would adopt: the communist leaders would be offered a comprehensive world settlement, with the threat that if they refused it, the United States would drop atom bombs on North Korea and would bomb China to the point where she could no longer wage modern war.

  In the past it was only after MacArthur had run terrible risks and come away from them that he would start to tremble and become ill. Perhaps it was some similar effect that resulted in his change of mind, years after he had retired to civilian life and a business career. MacArthur had been in the trap of Korea; he had seen that he would have to risk a nuclear world war to fight his way out of it; and by the end of the Eisenhower administration, he had drawn the conclusion that American generals should not be ordered into China or the countries that neighbor her.

  His advice in the 1960s to President Kennedy and then, from his deathbed, to President Johnson was to never again send U.S. troops to fight on the mainland of Asia. All of his life he had been urging America to commit the bulk of its armed forces to Asia first and to Europe only second. In the end he seems to have changed his mind.

  AMERICANS BORN IN THE 1880s and early 1890s had been living with these questions all their lives, and now, in the last half of the 1950s, had resolved them. By the time of the second Eisenhower administration, it had become common ground for that generation that the United States should play an abiding role in international affairs; that it should do so in alliance with other nations, and in institutionalized cooperation with them; that it should police the world’s oceans; that it has vital interests outside of the Western Hemisphere and should defend them; that the United States should defend Germany and Japan so that those nations need not remilitarize in order to defend themselves; that preserving the independence of Great Britain and of the countries of Western Europe is among America’s vital interests; that America’s most intimate political and military association should be with Europe; and that if needed, American armies should be sent to war on the continent of Europe but not that of Asia.

  * Among clouds hanging over his candidacy in 1948 were rumors of his wartime love affair with Kay Summersby, his driver and secretary. Her popular book about working for Eisenhower defused that issue before the 1952 elections.

  † The claim that it was because Dulles threatened to use nuclear weapons has not been substantiated, at least as yet.

  59

  AMERICA’S TRIUMPH

  THE UNITED STATES had come to England’s aid in her darkest hour, yet in other respects she had been less than a friend. “[I]f only America were not so unsympathetic & indeed unhelpful to us—over Egypt, India …,” and the rest of the remaining and former empire, lamented Clementine Churchill (February 13, 1954) to her husband, prime minister again since the autumn of 1951. She was echoing a familiar British complaint. A couple of months before, Eisenhower had proposed in a speech to the UN to refer to the “obsolete Colonial mold,” and had been persuaded to delete that “obnoxious phrase” only by Churchill’s personal intervention.

  In the summer of 1954 Eisenhower sent Churchill a long letter critical of Britain’s overseas imperialism. The prime minister replied August 8 that “I read with great interest all that you have written me about what is called Colonialism, namely: bringing forward backward races and opening up the jungles. I was brought up to feel proud of much that we had done. Certainly in India, with all its history … of despotic rule, Britain has a story to tell which will look quite well against the background of the coming hundred years”—that is, in comparison with what the first centur
y of Indian independence, 1947–2047, was likely to bring.

  It was a debate that had gone on since the time of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams. British leaders found it hard to believe that in the twentieth century—for was not the war of 1776 finished yet?—Americans would still harbor such sentiments and indeed take anticolonialism seriously. But they were wrong to underestimate the tenacity with which such views were held. Antifascism and anticommunism might come and go, but anticolonialism was the principal political plank in the enduring foreign policy of the United States. The fact that in exercising hegemony within the Western Hemisphere, or in occupying territories abroad in pursuit of military or commercial advantage, the United States itself practiced what looked to others like imperialism was something that Americans at midcentury usually chose not to notice.

  It was not just a high-minded academic like Wilson or a crusty old isolationist like Senator Borah; even Franklin Roosevelt, an urbane man of the world who had traveled on the Continent, felt uneasy in both world wars in having Britain and France for allies, because the Europeans still clung to colonial empires.

  Indeed, one of the troubling limitations of NATO since its inception had been the American intention to defend Britain, France, and the others only within their own continent. The United States was determined not to be drawn into preserving Europe’s possessions overseas. The curious result was that America, though an ally of the NATO countries in Europe, was their critic, sometimes their rival, potentially their adversary, and conceivably even their enemy in other quarters of the globe.

  THE AMERICAN DILEMMA in the colonialist world was that Washington wanted to overthrow the existing European imperial regimes without allowing the indigenous rebels, who almost always seemed to the United States to be communists, to take power.

  An immediate problem when Eisenhower took office was the revolt in French Indochina led by the communist but nationalist Ho Chi Minh. Despite French pleas, the President did not supply the important assistance that Paris asked; rather, he discussed the possibility of doing so, and instead of saying no, posed conditions that were not met: that Congress should support such American intervention; that Britain and other allies should participate, too; and that all of the Joint Chiefs should recommend taking such action (which General Ridgway, the army chief of staff, refused to do).

  Eisenhower and Dulles were contemptuous of the French for losing the Indochina War, yet tried to persuade them not to negotiate an end to it. When the French nonetheless made peace in Geneva in 1954, the U.S. government launched a clandestine campaign of subversion in North Vietnam and a political program aimed at replacing France as the sponsor of the noncommunist regime in South Vietnam.

  Having succeeded in assuming responsibility for supporting the fragile new government of South Vietnam, the United States sought to make of it a nationalist regime: a local force both anti-imperialist and anticommunist, offering honest and effective leadership, that could command a mass popular following and that possessed the strength to win either an election or a civil war—but that also would accept guidance from the United States. Such a government was never found for South Vietnam.

  Dulles and Eisenhower did not face the stark question of what they would do if the only choice were between a European colonial regime and a native government not unfriendly to communism. It was a question they were going to be forced to answer in the Egyptian crisis that exploded two years later.

  THE ROAD TO SUEZ, the highway of empire and the crossroads of history, began, as it was to end, with a recognition by the British cabinet that the country was living beyond its means. As Churchill returned to office, Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office addressed the question of how to pay for maintaining Britain as a world power. His answer was to draw the United States, through NATO, into playing a greater role in Europe; and then to secure American help in garrisoning the Middle East, the second most important theater. “The more gradually and inconspicuously we can transfer the real burdens from our own to American shoulders, the less damage we shall do to our position and influence in the world,” Eden wrote.

  The United States, to which the Churchill government continued handing over responsibilities in the Middle East, had embarked on a new course under Eisenhower. Like his best friend in the cabinet, the powerful Treasury secretary and big-business executive George Humphrey, Ike believed that America’s strength lay in the health of her economy; the way to preserve that health was to shrink government, reduce or eliminate budget deficits, and lower taxes. Loath to order an ever more costly military buildup, the President turned to the CIA to deal with the Middle East and other Third World situations by covert operations that, in comparison with regular warfare by modern armies, would be extremely inexpensive.

  By coincidence the instrument was ready at hand just when needed. After all the organizational battles about what it should be and who should be in charge of what, the CIA came into its own as an entity only in the 1950s, under General Walter Bedell Smith (October 1950–February 1953) and his deputy Allen Dulles, who succeeded to the directorship when Smith moved to the State Department and Eisenhower became President.

  Within the clandestine operations division, there was a continuing tension between its two branches. The older of the two, the Office of Special Operations (OSO) was a sort of continuation of the wartime OSS and dealt with espionage and counterespionage: spying on the Soviet bloc and uncovering Soviet spies in the West. It functioned behind the iron curtain. To the extent that it functioned in the Third World, it did so only to obtain additional information about the Russian empire and its clandestine operations. The OSO did not take much interest in the Third World as such.

  The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was created by order of President Truman to engage in covert operations. It originally was under the direction of George Kennan at the State Department and was headed at first by Frank Wisner and Carmel Offie. It took the OPC a few years to learn what was, for Americans, a new business. It undertook to secretly manipulate the politics of other countries, particularly Third World countries emerging from colonialist rule.

  The more colorful operatives of the OPC were in the Theodore Roosevelt mold—and some were even his relatives. Like TR, they spoke many languages and prided themselves on being tough. Like TR’s political partner Henry Cabot Lodge, they were American nationalists—very much like the English and intensely competitive with them.

  Apparently the first OPC field operation was in 1949, and its first completely successful one was in 1952. With Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953, it was ready to go to work.

  Its services were required in Iran, whose nationalist and republican prime minister, Dr. Muhammad Mussadegh, had nationalized all foreign oil assets in May 1951. These were chiefly those of the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company, with its important refinery at Abadan. For two years Britain and Iran had argued about the payment due to the owners, while Britain organized a boycott of Iran. Mussadegh drew on deep reserves of antiforeign feeling in whipping up mass domestic support for his program. The shah fled, first to his castle on the Caspian Sea, then to Rome. This was the crisis that Churchill’s cabinet blamed on the previous Labour government, and in which London asked Washington for help.

  At Britain’s call for help, Wisner’s operatives were sent in to straighten out Iran. They arranged the overthrow of Mussadegh and the return of the shah. Having done so, they took for the United States 40 percent of what had been Britain’s monopoly of Iranian oil.

  Then there was Egypt. Moving into a political vacuum left by Britain, the CIA set out to back a potential new leader for the country. Allen Dulles for a time preferred Gamal Abdel Nasser, the most charismatic of the young officers who successfully plotted the overthrow of King Farouk I.

  The CIA in Washington acted (until 1956) as Nasser’s friend at court, while in Egypt it taught his secret police how to foil a coup d’état. An agency team set up an anti-American propaganda program for his use in case he had to out-dem
agogue opponents. But whether the CIA contributed to Nasser’s success is hard to say, for he was an immensely shrewd and popular politician with a mass following throughout the Middle East.

  European governments fighting to hold on to their positions in the region blamed their desperate situation on him. Successive French cabinets, losing a war in Algeria that in intensity approached a civil war, claimed that it was only Nasser’s support and inspiration that sustained the rebel forces. Eden, who followed Churchill as prime minister, became hysterical when it looked as though the kingdom of Jordan, the Colonial Office’s own creation, with its Sandhurst-trained monarch and its British-officered army, was being seduced by the Egyptian leader. Of Nasser, Eden said: “I want him murdered.”

  While Allen Dulles still was trying to build Nasser up,* his older brother began trying to tear him down. The secretary of state saw in the Egyptian someone who could not be counted on to resist the Soviet Union. John Foster Dulles therefore backed another candidate for leadership of the Arab world; he turned to the Iraqi dictator, Nuri Said.

  Nasser met this challenge by one of his own; breaking the rules set for him by the Western powers, he ordered massive quantities of arms from the Soviet bloc. Secretary Dulles escalated the conflict; he punished the Arab leader publicly by pulling out the financing from Egypt’s cherished project of building a new dam at Aswan, and in blunt terms meant to humiliate. Nasser reescalated in a speech July 26, 1956, by announcing the transfer to Egypt’s ownership of all shares in the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, the company that leased and operated the Suez Canal concession. He proposed to pay for the Aswan Dam with the profits from Suez. The owners of the shares he was taking were almost entirely European; his promise to pay them the closing market price for their stock holdings was either disregarded or not believed in Europe.