by Jim Newton
The United States had no right to police Guatemalan trade, but Eisenhower was playing for psychological advantage. And the stakes were high. The CIA station chief warned that the introduction of Soviet weapons might upend the balance of power in Latin America. “Should this ammo ship arrive and its cargo be dispatched nothing short of direct military intervention will succeed,” he wrote. “I want you to know above is written not in panic but with cool, deadly determination that freedom shall not perish in this country.”
Meanwhile, the clandestine radio broadcasts and the government’s fruitless attempts to shut them down were squeezing Arbenz as intended. Arbenz begged Eisenhower for a meeting; Eisenhower did not respond. On June 8, Arbenz suspended constitutional freedoms, and two days later he rounded up suspected subversives, some of whom were tortured, continuing his descent into the repressive regime the United States imagined him to lead. On June 18, the invasion began.
“Even before H-hour,” the CIA history records, “the invasion degenerated from an ambitious plan to tragicomedy.” Castillo Armas’s army consisted of three hundred to five hundred rebels, well armed by the United States but no match for the Guatemalan regular army, which was Latin America’s largest fighting force. The army was still loyal to Arbenz, though nervous about his purchase of Eastern bloc weapons. The U.S. plan was for Castillo Armas to avoid direct conflict and instead to engage small firefights en route to the capital, destabilizing Arbenz without attempting to defeat his army. The military operation was supplemented by radio broadcasts trumpeting the success of the campaign and exaggerating the size and effectiveness of Castillo Armas’s forces. Although the psychological aspects of the plan worked brilliantly, Castillo Armas was a singularly ineffective commander. By June 20, his band of followers had penetrated only a few miles into Guatemala. That day, 122 rebels met up with 30 Guatemalan soldiers and, despite orders to avoid conflict with the army, engaged in a long battle. The result: all but 30 of the rebels were killed or captured. Another fight the following day saw the rebels defeated at Puerto Barrios.
Desperate, Castillo Armas begged for American air support, but Eisenhower hesitated. Authorizing such a strike would risk exposing the U.S. role and antagonize other Latin American nations. But withholding planes might doom the coup to failure. On the afternoon of June 22, Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, and Assistant Secretary of State Henry F. Holland met with Eisenhower at the White House. Holland opposed supplying Castillo Armas with aircraft, while the Dulles brothers, or at least Allen Dulles, favored it. What, Eisenhower asked, were the chances of the rebels succeeding without the air support? Allen Dulles replied: “About zero.”
“Suppose we supply the aircraft. What would be the chances then?” Eisenhower asked.
“About 20 percent,” Dulles answered. That was good enough for Ike. He authorized two fighters to be sent into the battle.
Later, Eisenhower told Dulles he was impressed by the director’s realism and said he might have rejected the request if Dulles had rated its chances of success at 90 percent.
Two planes were hardly enough to tip the military balance, but they contributed mightily to the psychological campaign against Arbenz. His army, though not challenged by a serious fighting force, was increasingly alarmed that the United States stood behind the rebels. The Guatemalan military could only wonder what might happen if the U.S. Army was committed to the fight. The day after Eisenhower authorized the two planes to the region, one of Arbenz’s allies found officers “cowering in their barracks, terrified and unwilling to fight.” Arbenz’s support was fading. The American pilots were given free rein to hurl explosives out the windows, so they began a rudimentary bombing campaign in Guatemala City (one improvised bomb hit a British freighter in the harbor; the United States later paid $1 million to settle that embarrassing mishap). The ensuing mayhem reinforced the public sense that Arbenz was unable to defend the nation. The CIA radio station, meanwhile, broadcast that Castillo Armas’s forces were converging on the capital, another falsehood but one easily believed in a city where bombs were exploding.
With his army frightened, his allies restless, and his public convinced that his leadership had failed, Arbenz gave up. At 8:00 p.m. on June 27, he announced his resignation, eventually leaving the country for Mexico. “Our first victory has been won,” the CIA wired from Guatemala. Dulles disingenuously told congressional leaders the next day that it was a great triumph for American diplomacy. (It was anything but. Diplomacy had failed; victory had been achieved through subversion.) A series of juntas briefly held power after Arbenz’s abdication, but Castillo Armas eventually received the position he coveted: command of his country. Briefed on the events of that month, Eisenhower listened in amazement as the CIA’s representative Rip Robertson described a scrubbed version of what had actually taken place. How many men, Ike asked, had Castillo Armas lost?
“Only one,” Robertson lied. The CIA’s own files had identified twenty-seven dead at Puerto Barrios and sixteen at Gualán, not to mention the scores who were killed in Arbenz’s final crackdown. The coup hatched in delusions of Soviet adventurism rather than nationalist aspirations ended with an intelligence community so emboldened by its covert capacities that it was willing to lie to the president of the United States. The CIA could truthfully boast of only two facts: it had overthrown an enemy and had done so within its budget. The entire coup cost precisely $3 million.
There was one other notable aftermath in Guatemala. Just as the overthrow of Mossadegh had left a deep mark on one of those who witnessed it, the cleric then known as Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini, so, too, did the coup against Arbenz burrow itself into the consciousness of one of its observers, a young Argentine named Ernesto Guevara. He yearned for a political affiliation worthy of his intellect and passion; he found it in the Arbenz reforms. “Guatemala right now is the most interesting country in America and must be defended with all possible means,” he wrote as the U.S. campaign gathered momentum. When the fall came, Guevara blamed Arbenz. To Guevara, the agents of Guatemala’s downfall were a weak government, a reactionary press, a complicit Catholic Church, and a failure to “arm the people” to resist the invasion. Of Eisenhower, he wrote to his father: “Politically, things aren’t going so well because at any moment a coup is suspected under the patronage of your friend Ike.” Those notions, impressed upon the twenty-six-year-old Guevara, would return to haunt the United States when he resurfaced as Che.
Subduing McCarthy and overthrowing Arbenz represented Cold War victories of different types. But the period’s most significant such triumph was only indirectly Eisenhower’s work. At 12:52 p.m., May 17, 1954, Earl Warren, Ike’s first appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, startled lawyers and reporters by turning to the case they had been waiting for. “I have for announcement,” he said, “the judgment and opinion of the Court in Number 1: Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka.”
This was the long-awaited, much-postponed work of the Court in the most difficult area before it. It had flummoxed the Vinson Court and preoccupied Warren since his arrival the previous fall. Those early months had been difficult for Warren. He had to leave his wife, Nina, behind in California to finish up their business there. The Warrens had six children—five together and one by Nina’s previous marriage—and had spent a dozen years in the California governor’s mansion. Eisenhower’s appointment had sent Warren to Washington, and it fell to Nina to organize the move east. Warren himself was accustomed to presiding over a large staff and now had just two secretaries and his clerks. He was lonely and out of sorts.
But he also was busy. From the start, Warren charmed his brethren. Harold Burton buried any regret over being passed over and commended Eisenhower for the selection, remarking that Warren “will meet the opportunity admirably,” praise that Ike gracefully acknowledged the next day. At the Court, Warren asked Hugo Black, the senior associate justice, for advice on what to read that would help him with crafting opinions. Black suggested Aristotle’s Rhetoric, a
nd Warren quickly picked up a copy. “The new Chief Justice is a very attractive, fine man,” Black wrote to his sons approvingly. For the first few weeks, Warren asked Black to chair the Court’s weekly conferences, but by the end of the year he felt comfortable doing so himself.
On December 12, 1953, Warren presided over his first conference on the subject of school segregation. Warren was chief justice, so, by tradition, he spoke first. As the other justices well knew, the matter had divided the Court in Vinson’s final term, with at least three—and perhaps five—members of the Court prepared to uphold school segregation. Vinson, along with Justices Stanley Reed and Tom Clark, had clearly signaled his willingness to tolerate “separate but equal” schools for black children. Justices Jackson and Frankfurter flinched at such a prospect, but they, too, had reservations about the Court striking down segregation after specifically upholding the principle through decades of precedent. In his conference notes, Justice Douglas recorded Jackson and Frankfurter as likely to uphold those precedents, dating to the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson, which legitimized the practice of “separate but equal,” in effect American apartheid. Though Douglas’s observations must be regarded skeptically, no doubt colored by his deep dislike for Frankfurter and Jackson, there was at least the possibility that the Vinson Court could have, had Vinson lived, voted to uphold the constitutionality of Jim Crow.
What all the justices also knew, however, was that Warren’s view would decide the matter. With Vinson gone, even if Jackson and Frankfurter continued to harbor reservations about the propriety of striking segregation by judicial fiat, only four justices remained in that column. So, as Warren began to speak that morning, he chose his words and tone carefully. The men around him were smart, successful jurists, but no one at the table was Warren’s equal as a politician. He understood that his vote would decide the matter, but he was after something more than victory. He wanted a decisive ruling that would send a unifying national message.
The time had come, Warren said, to decide this matter. And in his view there was only one way the Court could continue to sanction separate-but-equal schools: it would have to rely on the “basic premise that the Negro race is inferior.” That was a startling assertion, and it forced Jackson and especially Frankfurter into an awkward bind. Both had reservations about overturning decades of precedent in order to reach the result that Warren was proposing, but Frankfurter in particular had a long record of enlightened views on race (among other things, he had represented civil rights organizations and had hired the Supreme Court’s first black law clerk). To be allied with such naked racism would deeply offend him, and Jackson too, even if it were in defense of a judicial principle.
And yet as Warren staked a hard position on the substance of the ruling, he also offered a gentle approach to presenting and implementing it. He did not blame the South for its construction of separate institutions—that system had, after all, been sanctioned by the Court itself. He did not propose to overturn all segregation in a single opinion, but rather offered to confine the Court’s attention to public schools. And he did not suggest a sweeping or immediate order. He was open to remedies that would give the South time to adjust. Finally, he made a crucial tactical decision: contrary to custom, Warren asked that the justices not record their tentative votes that day. Doing so, he feared, would lock them into positions rather than allow them to consider the issue openly.
Then it was time for the other justices to offer their views. Black was absent, but all the justices knew he favored desegregation. Stanley Reed, who had declined to attend a Court Christmas party a few years earlier if blacks were invited, offered a thin defense of segregation as preserving differences, not establishing superiority or inferiority; he was inclined to uphold Plessy and segregated schools. Frankfurter then delivered ambiguous observations about the applicability of Plessy and the language of the Fourteenth Amendment. Douglas said he would strike down school segregation. Jackson followed Frankfurter’s ambivalent lead, seeming to say that the Court should eliminate segregation and simply admit that it was doing so despite questionable legal authority. Burton fell in with Douglas, Clark worried about how any desegregation order would be received in places such as his native Texas. Minton joined Burton and Douglas. The tally then, on December 12, 1953, stood as follows: Five justices—Warren, Black, Douglas, Burton, and Minton—solidly favored the end to public school segregation. Two, Frankfurter and Jackson, wanted to agree but were struggling with the law. Two more, Reed and Clark, were inclined to uphold segregation but were painfully aware that they were in the minority.
For the next three months, Warren methodically worked his colleagues. He lunched with wavering justices, drew out their concerns, paired them in congenial combinations. On January 15, he treated his colleagues to a duck and pheasant lunch (eight justices chose duck; Frankfurter preferred pheasant). In those conversations, Warren subtly shifted the discussion from whether to strike down segregation to how to do it. One at a time, the justices fell in line behind their new chief as he patiently guided them away from the tangle of the Vinson Court.
The Court’s work occurs in splendid remove from daily politics, and Warren’s leadership was invisible to the public in those months. That was fortunate since Warren had good reason for moving cautiously: as a recess appointment to the Court, he still had not received his Senate confirmation and would not until after first enduring a nasty committee investigation overseen by the irascible William Langer. Finally, on February 24, the committee voted out Warren’s confirmation on a 12–3 vote, with Langer oddly voting in favor of Warren. Eisenhower lobbied hard for Warren’s confirmation—notwithstanding his brother Edgar’s disdain for the chief justice. Ike tracked the Brown deliberations, meanwhile, from a discreet distance, receiving Brownell’s tip early in the year that a decision was likely in the spring.
The president did not cut off all contact with Warren. Indeed, their most significant encounter, that February, left a permanent scar on their relationship. Eisenhower established in his first year as president a tradition of hosting stag dinners at the White House—black-tie affairs at which a dozen or two leading men of politics, business, and culture gathered at the presidential mansion to discuss significant world matters. On February 8, 1954, the guest list was typically illustrious: Erwin Griswold, dean of Harvard Law School, and Franklin Murphy, chancellor of the University of Kansas, were among the prominent academics; the executives Ernest Breech of Ford Motor Company and M. M. Anderson of Alcoa represented big business, as did Lucius Clay and Alton Jones, two longtime friends of Ike’s who now headed corporations; Attorney General Herb Brownell and Undersecretary of State Bedell Smith represented the administration. But two of the guests were especially notable for their presence there together. One was Warren, still the acting chief justice; the other was John W. Davis, one of the nation’s most prominent lawyers, who was representing the state of South Carolina in Brown v. Board of Education.
Warren, a stern and somewhat prickly man, immediately took offense at Davis’s presence. The two were seated within speaking distance, adding to Warren’s unease. Then, as the men rose from the table and ambled into an adjoining room for after-dinner drinks, Eisenhower took Warren by the arm and nodded at the Southerners. “These are not bad people,” Eisenhower said. “All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”
Warren was appalled. He made sure to record Eisenhower’s words in his own memoirs, revealing the exchange to make the point that Ike instinctively sympathized with those committed to segregation rather than with those suffering by its conditions (it hardly needs saying that the stag dinner at which this offense occurred was an all-white gathering). Ike’s defenders have tried to explain away his damaging remark. David Nichols, in his elegantly argued A Matter of Justice, suggests that it may not have occurred at all, noting that Warren “alleges” the remark in his memoirs and “is the only source for th
e story. There are no corroborating witnesses.” Nichols argues that Warren related the story out of resentment toward “the war hero who had destroyed his chance to be president.” But, as Nichols acknowledges, others recalled Eisenhower making similar comments, and Herb Brownell, when he learned of the incident, attempted to reconstruct the evening and concluded that Eisenhower spoke clumsily and was angry with Warren for betraying the confidentiality that was supposed to govern the dinners—not that Warren made up the exchange.
Warren returned to his business, suspecting that he would not have the vigorous support of the White House should the Court strike down school segregation. Nevertheless, on the May afternoon that he announced the Court’s opinion, he spoke evenly and deliberately, reading as reporters, scrambling into the chambers, slipped into their seats and flipped open notepads. For the first few minutes, Warren’s recitation was factual, reviewing the circumstances of the case and the issues the Court had considered. Then he reached the decision’s pivotal passage, and he departed briefly and momentously from the text. “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” the decision read. But Warren interposed a word: “We unanimously conclude.” Justice Reed, the Court’s last holdout in Brown, wiped a tear from his cheek. Thurgood Marshall, lawyer for the plaintiffs, stood in amazement. Warren himself sensed the power of the moment: “When the word ‘unanimously’ was spoken, a wave of emotion swept the room, no words or intentional movement, yet a distinct emotional manifestation that defies description.”
Troubled by the ruling’s demands and the threat of rebellion from the South—and ever in search of a middle way—Eisenhower elected to regard Brown as an order from the Court rather than as a moral imperative to be joined. At a press conference two days after the Court’s historic announcement, Ike conspicuously declined to embrace the rulings (Brown was accompanied by Bolling v. Sharpe, which desegregated schools in the District of Columbia, outside the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment, since that amendment applies only to the states). Eisenhower formally received the Court’s decisions with studied neutrality. “The Supreme Court has spoken,” he said at a press conference two days after the ruling was handed down. “And I am sworn to uphold their—the constitutional processes in this country, and I am trying. I will obey.” Eisenhower’s discomfort with Brown would become more, not less, severe, as southern resistance stiffened and he felt torn between the aspirations of American blacks, few of whom he knew, and the uneasiness of southern whites, many of whom were his closest friends. Seeking his “middle way,” Eisenhower routinely deplored “foolish extremists on both sides of the question,” suggesting moral equivalence between those who sought equality and those who denied it.
