Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  Ike knew that, as in love, so in politics ‘the seeker is never so popular as the sought. People want what they can’t get.’ Robert Taft, a scion of the great Ohio political dynasty whom we encountered earlier in this book as the chief Republican isolationist, was the last serious anti-interventionist presidential candidate in US history, at least until George W. Bush, who started out with such views. He feared that the expanded overseas commitments represented by Truman’s doctrine of containment would put the US in the same boat as nineteenth-century Britain, perpetually squandering resources in fire-fighting insurgencies in places of little or no value to the metropolis, while federal government would grow like Jack’s beanstalk. Although highly intelligent and popular in the Mid-West, Taft did not appeal to the Republicans’ more international-minded East Coast elite, or to younger Americans who had experienced the wider world while in uniform.

  In January 1952 Ike allowed his name to be entered for the New Hampshire primary. Despite remaining in Paris, where he spent the election night playing bridge, he comfortably beat Robert Taft. On 12April he resigned his NATO command to fight for the Republican nomination. After a notoriously ill-tempered battle he won the nomination, putting the Californian Senator Richard Nixon on his ticket to appease the McCarthyite right and to increase his appeal in California. He had to get used to indignities for which his military career had not prepared him, including insinuations that he was a Jew (the name, you see). Arriving in Kansas City, the vast Governor Dan Thornton, wearing a ten-gallon hat, slapped him on the back with a ‘Howya, pardner!’ Eisenhower temporarily froze and glared at the Governor, before extending his hand to say, ‘Howya, Dan.’4

  Ike’s Democrat opponent was a similarly shy bride. Adlai Stevenson was the Governor of Illinois who, with a firm sense of dynastic entitlement, had achieved this august position on his initial foray into politics. He was in no hurry to run for the presidency, prompting Truman to exclaim: ‘Adlai, if a knucklehead like me can be President and not do too badly, think what a really educated guy could do in the job.’5 Stevenson had difficulty in pacing his speeches, and his forced smile flashed on and off in the wrong places. He found politics vulgar.

  Stevenson’s greatest weakness was that his heart was not in the contest. He had contemplated Eisenhower’s gambit of paying a ‘let’s end the war’ visit to Korea before he did, but rejected it as too populist.6 He even conceded that the Democrats had been in power too long and that Ike was a decent fellow. As George Ball remarked, the Democrats had exhausted the ranks of poor people to sentimentalize in an abstract way, while running into the quagmire of Korea.

  Eisenhower ran his campaign like a military operation, compiling orders with bullet points detailing the sequence of actions to be taken. Aged sixty-two, he also had the stamina for travelling over 50,000 miles and speaking in 232 towns and cities. In addition to his prestige as the supreme commander of the wartime campaign in Europe, Ike was blessed with a winning smile that made him an ad man’s dream. He was skilfully packaged for television, a medium his opponent held in snobbish disdain. Ad execs advising his team had no time for the exalted political rhetoric that came naturally to Stevenson and focused on the ‘fifteen-second spot’ that would be remembered when all the other words were forgotten. Heavily scripted Q&A sessions translated when broadcast as short spots into a housewife asking: ‘You know what things cost today. High prices are driving me crazy.’ To which the General would reply: ‘Yes, my Mamie [his wife] gets after me about the high cost of living. It’s another reason why I say it’s time for a change. Time to get back to an honest dollar and an honest dollar’s work.’ After a long day spent recording these spots, Ike grumbled, ‘To think that an old soldier should come to this.’7

  Popular desire for change was so great that Ike would probably have won handsomely anyway, but what clinched it was his dramatic last-minute promise to go to Korea immediately after he was elected, thus making it clear that ending the war would be his first priority once he entered the White House. He won 33.9 million votes to Stevenson’s 27.3 million, and 442 to 89 votes in the Electoral College. Republicans also won majorities in both Houses of Congress.

  US presidents have around ten weeks to assemble their governing team. Ike was adamant in avoiding cronyism, preferring big businessmen who would take a financial hit through government service as opposed to ‘business failures, college professors [crossed out and replaced by ‘political hacks’] and New Deal lawyers’. His appointments included ‘Engine Charlie’ Wilson, the President of General Motors, as secretary of defense, George Humphrey, the President of the Mark Hanna Company, to the Treasury, while the Boston banker Robert Cutler became national security advisor. The cabinet consisted of ‘eight millionaires and a plumber’ – a token and useless trade unionist. Engine Charlie in particular was ‘a classic type of corporation executive: basically apolitical and certainly unphilosophic, aggressive in action and direct in speech – the undoubting and uncomplicated pragmatist who inhabits a world of sleek, shining certitude’. He combined an ability to be coldly callous towards the ordinary worker with credulousness about doing a ‘package deal’ with the Soviets over Korea. After one too many Wilsonian monologues, a fellow cabinet member scribbled: ‘From now on, I’m buying nothing but [Chrysler] Plymouths.’8

  The millionaire lawyer John Foster Dulles was appointed secretary of state. He was a difficult man to like: big face, big ears, big glasses and a mouth like a shark. There was something relentless about him, as symbolized by the 559,688 miles of diplomatic travel he clocked up while in office. A shy man, Dulles appeared to lack social graces. Arguably the most knowledgeable Secretary of State in recent US history and certainly the most hard working, he would spend between twelve and fifteen hours preparing a thirty-minute speech, using the process to think through each problem. His favourite word was ‘moral’, which State Department officials tried regularly but unsuccessfully to remove from his draft speeches.9

  Dulles’s maternal grandfather General John Watson Foster had been secretary of state in 1892–3 and his ‘Uncle Bert’, Robert Lansing, served Woodrow Wilson in the same capacity in 1915–20. No less significantly, a paternal grandparent had been a Christian missionary and Dulles’s father a Presbyterian minister of the liberal persuasion. At Princeton his teachers included Wilson, then the university President, and during a graduate year at the Sorbonne he was taught by the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Henri Bergson, from whom he acquired a sophisticated understanding of the role of time in diplomacy. Dulles passed out top of his law-school class at George Washington University, joining the prestigious Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, who were aggressive seekers of business opportunities for their clients – lobbyists rather than trial lawyers. Uncle Bert used him as an international negotiator. His younger brother Allen also joined Sullivan & Cromwell, but with a lengthy intermission as a diplomat and in the wartime OSS.

  While John Foster was a Republican isolationist, close to the Nazi apologist Charles Lindbergh, brother Allen was firmly in the internationalist camp of the same party. Both brothers regularly attended the influential Council of Foreign Relations, where rich men and their tame intellectuals discussed the world over port and cigars. John Foster talked and wrote extensively about foreign affairs, where his main interest became the role of religious faith in securing peace through international institutions. After 1941, for the first and only time in their lives, Allen eclipsed his brother, running one of the OSS’s most effective agent networks from Switzerland. Beneath the Santa Claus manner – he laughed ‘ho, ho’ without any humour – this was a tough, complex and cunning man.10

  Neither brother was in good odour with the new Truman administration, which quickly closed down the OSS. Even so, John Foster occasionally served Truman, without securing a senior permanent post. This was no reflection on his competence, rather on his profound disagreement with the foreign policy of Truman and Acheson. In particular he judged the do
ctrine of containment as advocated by Kennan and other realists to be ‘non-moral’. Freezing the status quo, he said, left hundreds of millions of wretched people languishing under Communist totalitarian domination.11

  Ike met Dulles for the first time in April 1952, and immediately earmarked him for the State Department, although he did require him to tone down his comments on what he would like to do with the containment policy.12 Both men were conservative Cold War internationalists, and Ike said of him, ‘there’s only one man I know who has seen more of the world and talked with more people and knows more than he does – and that’s me’.13

  Ever more outrageous claims by Senator McCarthy were failing to maintain the red scare, and with Ike and Dulles in power and the compromised Democrats out, much of the heat went out of the domestic foreign policy debate. Although the competition is fierce, John Foster Dulles may be the American statesman most tendentiously vilified and misrepresented by leftists on both sides of the Atlantic. The reason is not hard to identify: he had strong Christian views and uncompromisingly condemned Communism as evil. A bit like Marxists, Dulles believed ‘there is a moral law which, no less than physical law, undergirds our world’. This was not exclusive to Christianity but common to many religions, as he had found when dealing with people of other faiths. Nonetheless, he believed that with its God-given form of government, the US had a unique mission to extend the values it incarnated to the rest of the world. A spiritually robust America would operate as a moral force, breathing life into such international organizations as the United Nations, through overseas aid and by the promotion of individual freedom and human rights.

  Dulles had strong ethical objections to the survival of Woodrow Wilson’s progressive spin on ‘racial segregation’, if only because it undermined the US case in the struggle with Soviet anti-imperialists.14 He discussed the difficult ethical choices he had to make with his high-level contacts in the American Churches, to which he also appealed to mobilize popular support for the administration’s foreign policy. He recruited the evangelist Billy Graham, a confidant and supporter of the President, as a roving US ambassador, notably to darkest Britain. Dulles’s relations with Church leaders were not without frictions, particularly over the issue of nuclear weapons, with the religious supporting disarmament and Dulles insisting on the necessity of maintaining a massive nuclear deterrent. The Time-Life journalist and presidential speechwriter Emmet Hughes judged that Dulles’s greatest failing as a statesman was that he thought and spoke like a lawyer, engaged in prosecuting the Soviet Union in a long-drawn-out case in the court of history. He was absolutely invested in his case, ‘quickly excited by small gains, suddenly shaken by minor reverses, and ever prone to contemplating the drastic remedy of the massive retort’.15

  Although Dulles was the more cerebral of the two, Ike had the edge in a key respect, for as a former general he was calmer in the face of major setbacks, never allowing the detail to obscure the big picture. Religious faith was important in cementing their relationship. A day before his inauguration, Eisenhower was baptized into the National Presbyterian Church by a pastor, Edward Elson, who had served as a military chaplain in occupied Germany. Ike personally insisted on prefacing his inauguration speech with a prayer of his own devising. He opened his first cabinet session with a prayer, and the practice was institutionalized at the urging of his Mormon Secretary for Agriculture. The President also held regular National Prayer Breakfasts, where religious leaders mingled with the powerful, as well as, from 1954 onwards, a National Day of Prayer. ‘In God We Trust’ became the national motto and henceforth appeared on US banknotes. The Pledge of Allegiance was emended to include the phrase ‘one nation under God’.

  The symbolic elaboration of an older civic religion was important to a nation whose global enemy marched under the banner of materialistic atheism. America of the 1950s may have been ‘about’ McDonald hamburgers, Holiday Inns, Levittown suburbs, Lucille Ball, Elvis, Marlon, Marilyn and James Dean, but it also witnessed an astonishing religious revival. ‘I believe fanatically in the American form of democracy, a system . . . that ascribes to the individual a dignity accruing to him because of his creation in the image of the supreme being,’ wrote Ike to a friend in 1947. The US may have been a deeply consumerist society itself, but Ike deprecated the Soviets’ obsession with technology, secure in the knowledge that the US was, and would remain, far ahead without having to make the sacrifices that the Soviet leadership imposed on their people. When the Soviets scored a major propaganda coup on launching the first space satellite in October 1957, which did little more than emit beeps to radio hams, Ike responded by helping raise $20 million to build a new National Presbyterian Church in Washington, while continuing to invest quietly in Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) and in the long-term development of a spy satellite system to replace the interim U-2 spy plane.16

  Realizing that spirituality was another potential weapon in the Cold War, Ike did not rely on such establishment bodies as the National Council of Churches, but co-opted evangelicals, Catholics, Jews and Muslims, while carefully excluding the more intemperate Protestant fundamentalists. In reality, relations with US Jews were cool, because Ike suspected them of divided loyalties over Israel, and Dulles resented incessant Zionist lobbying ultimately orchestrated by the Israeli government. This was the first and last US administration to refuse tax exemptions to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which affected its funding prospects. The crux of the problem was that the US needed amicable relations with Arab states to contain the Soviets, and hence could not over-identify with Israel, which for its part needed harmonious relations with the Soviets to expedite the exit of Russian and Polish Jews.17 Instead, aided by Pastor Elson, the chairman of American Friends of the Middle East, Ike went out of his way to be respectful towards Islam, sensing its utility in repelling Communism, and opening the US’s first national mosque.18

  Ike’s conundrum was how ‘not [to] destroy what we are attempting to defend’ – how to reconcile fiscal probity with international responsibilities.19 The administration’s first challenge was to reduce a defence budget that had nearly quadrupled under Truman, without impairing the nation’s future security. Truman’s parting gift in the field of national security, the day before he left office, was to approve a continental air defence system and a massive civil defence programme, all requiring a further $20 billion on top of defence expenditure of $53 billion in 1953, or 61 per cent of all government spending and 12 per cent of GNP.20 Ike believed that such an order of expenditure must harm America’s economy and so undermine the nation’s security, while the resulting ‘garrison state’ would subvert its own citizens’ cherished freedoms. The Bomb was seen as a means of squaring this circle.

  Ike’s ‘New Look’ policy relied on devastating nuclear retaliation as a cheaper option to interminable peripheral wars that could not be won, a strategy summed up by the jokey phrase ‘more bang for the buck’. Dulles believed in the certainty/uncertainty principle by which an opponent had to be convinced that aggression would trigger a response, but the opponent would not know what that would be. Eisenhower deplored nuclear weapons, but he never dispelled the belief that he would not hesitate to use them, and all in one massive blow.

  Nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them were rapidly evolving. By 1954 the USA and the USSR had respectively 2,063 and 150 nuclear bombs of various potencies, for their yield could be ‘dialled’ up or down. Obviously this information was highly classified and was not shared by the two major nuclear powers. The US significantly changed the game when on 1 November 1952 it tested its first thermonuclear device on the islet of Elugelab in the South Pacific. The 10.4 megaton weapon exploded with the force of 700 Hiroshimas and the flash of light was seen 400 miles away from a fireball three miles wide. Eighty million tons of coral, sand and water became a giant vapour cloud. Elugelab ceased to exist. Nuclear tactics evolved too. Operation Quick Strike in October 1953 showed
it was possible for the new B-52 Stratofortresses to take off from the continental US, refuel in mid-air, hit their Soviet targets, refuel again and land in Britain or Morocco. To shorten the lengthy time it took to deploy the bombs, Eisenhower authorized the final assembly of the devices in flight.21 The Soviets’ counter to the B-52, the Myasishchev-4 (NATO codename Bison), lacked the range and the mid-air refuelling capability to reach the US. The Soviets also had no aircraft carriers, and no ships or submarines capable of launching nuclear missiles. But even their medium-range Tupolev Tu-16 (Badger) could hit London or Paris. Nuclear testing took a frightening turn when the thermonuclear device codenamed Bravo was detonated at Eniwetok Atoll in 1954. It had been thought the component Lithium-7 would remain inert, but it did not and an explosion predicted to be in the eight- to ten-megaton range yielded a runaway fifteen. The fireball was four miles wide, while three condensation rings formed around the debris cloud which ascended at a thousand feet per second. A radioactive cloud extended a thousand miles away.22 The scientific search for a strategic edge also took bizarre forms. Looking for an alternative to nuclear warfare, in August 1953 Ike created the Presidential Advisory Committee on Weather Control to follow up on experiments in the late 1940s that had shown it was possible to induce snow by releasing dry ice from a plane flying inside clouds. Mercifully, weather-warfare projects were allowed to lapse.23

  Eisenhower inherited a vastly expanded range of global commitments. The State Department had mushroomed from 5,000 employees to 20,000, with US embassies becoming a conspicuous and often jarringly modernistic presence in foreign capitals. The embassy in Seoul alone had 2,000 staff.24 There were three and a half million men and women in the US armed forces, of whom a third were deployed in 800 overseas bases in fulfilment of treaty obligations to defend forty-two countries. Thanks to the end of active hostilities in Korea, Ike was able to cut their numbers to 2.8 million, and to reduce the defence budget by nearly $5 billion in 1954–5, and he brought it below $50 billion during the rest of his presidency. Only the air force saw an increase, its budget rising by $1 billion in line with the new emphasis on nuclear deterrence.25 Strategic Air Command alone represented $8.5 billion of fixed capital investment, twice that of the giant Standard Oil of Ohio.