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

by Burleigh, Michael

  The National Security Council assumed a new importance, with Eisenhower chairing 339 sessions.26 His past experiences made him a superb manager. His view was that ‘a platoon leader doesn’t get his platoon to go that way by getting up and saying “I am smarter, I am bigger, I am stronger, I am the leader”. He gets his men to go with him because they want to do it for him, because they believe in him.’27 The new permanent special assistant for national security affairs, Robert Cutler, co-ordinated relations between the White House and the NSC, while for the first time the US Treasury Secretary was made a member of the NSC to underline the links between the economy and national security strategy. Eisenhower also increased the power of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in an attempt to bring wasteful inter-service rivalry under control. Service chiefs were told to cut costs. As a general, Ike knew every trick the Pentagon used to increase its budget and how much fat could be cut from the bone. Cutler set up a subordinate Planning Board and a separate Operations Coordinating Board for implementation, to accustom board members to work within their areas of expertise on the nation’s long-term security.28 The NSC itself became the scene of sophisticated group discussions, with Ike and John Foster Dulles not always in agreement about future strategy. Dulles was sceptical of the value of the ‘shattered old people’ who ran Europe, and insisted that the US should make strenuous efforts to liberate Eastern Europe. With the authority of a former NATO commander, Ike believed in the capability and will of the Europeans to defend themselves, while seeing the Cold War more as a battle for hearts and minds than for territorial control. The final word, as expressed in NSC 162/2, was the result of profound and far-reaching discussion, influenced by circumstances in the world beyond Washington.29

  Ike believed in the maxim ‘Planning is everything; plans are nothing.’ Ideas were subject to creative competition. Project Solarium, named after the White House sunroom where Mamie’s canary chirped, but in fact conducted at the National War College under cover of redesigning the curriculum, was an attempt to game-play and to cost alternative national security strategies. Ike was looking for a strategy which toned down the harsh pre-election rhetoric of John Foster Dulles, while reverting to the more considered approach of his wartime boss George Marshall. The exercise involved three seven-man teams that spent five weeks perfecting their play. Team A was led by George Kennan, the others by a general and an admiral. Team B’s position was straightforward and involved drawing a line in the sand and telling Moscow to go no further. Team C argued for the more aggressive liberation of areas under Communist domination. Kennan’s team turned in a 150-page report, which advocated watchful but unaggressive containment to bring about peaceful liberation when Communism collapsed from its own inner contradictions, thus avoiding the transformation of the US itself into an armed camp. At the plenary NSC meeting where Team A’s work was adopted, Kennan had the satisfaction of observing Dulles being saddled with his policy even though the Secretary of State had ‘disembarrassed’ himself of Kennan’s person.30

  Parallel with these discussions, the new men on the Joint Chiefs of Staff – notably Admiral Radford and General Ridgway – were asked for a new set of military strategies, which would also shape NSC policy. To Dulles’s alarm, they took him at his word, advocating a huge build-up of nuclear capacity, and the withdrawal of forces from defending all points of the compass, a combination which would also save money. He worried that such a defence posture would frighten Europeans into neutralism because of the unlikelihood that the US would risk total annihilation on behalf of Belgium. Consequently, after lengthy sessions with the President, Dulles emerged as a leading advocate of collective security, as well as of instant nuclear retaliation, with room left open for subversion of the Red Empire or its clients, provided this stopped short of provoking all-out war. That was where his brother Allen came in.

  Greater attention was paid (in National Security document NSC 162/2 of October 1953) to psychological warfare, covert operations and subversion, all of which were relatively cheap. Eisenhower was also keen on such catchy propaganda campaigns as Atoms for Peace, which stressed the civil uses of nuclear energy, and Open Skies, an abortive attempt to introduce mutual and voluntary aerial monitoring of US and Soviet nuclear and missile sites. Both were intended to maintain an American grip on the moral high ground of international opinion.31 No less importantly the giant US Information Agency aggressively sponsored the teaching of English in the Third World, arguably the best way of interesting people in the Western way of life. The radio station Voice of America’s most popular programme behind the Iron Curtain was Willis Conover’s Music USA – Jazz Hour, so much so that an entire generation of young people in Communist countries tried to speak English with the host’s tobacco-enriched accent.32

  Darker practices were the domain of the CIA and the newly founded National Security Agency responsible for communications intelligence. Truman had botched the establishment of the CIA by appointing orthodox military types to run it. Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter and General Walter Bedell Smith lacked the creative flair of many of their subordinates, including such legends as David Bruce, Kermit Roosevelt, Cord Meyer, William Bundy, Richard Bissell and William Colby. Far from being a collection of right-wing ideological fanatics, they were often registered Democrats who shared the outlook and sophisticated tastes of the East Coast liberal elite, and consequently incurred particularly malignant attention from Senator McCarthy. They admired Jackson Pollock, whose exhibitions the CIA covertly sponsored to advertise Western freedoms against Soviet socialist realism.33

  At the time of the riots in Bogotá during the 9th Pan-American Conference in 1948 which had menaced Secretary Marshall in person, Defense Secretary Forrestal commissioned a wide-ranging review of the CIA. The report was cleverly drafted by Allen Dulles to create a job description that fitted him perfectly. Although he made many sensible suggestions, NSC 10/2 of 18 June 1948 fatefully linked covert intelligence collection with the very different activity of covert operations – active intervention in the domestic affairs of foreign countries often involving contracted paramilitaries. The report gave birth to the blandly named Office of Policy Coordination to carry out such operations under the leadership of former OSS agent Frank Wisner. After the election of Eisenhower, the sixty-year-old Allen Dulles became the first civilian director of the Agency, his satisfaction at achieving a lifetime’s ambition marred by a messy marriage to Clover and the death of his son in Korea. Poolside weekend parties at their sister’s home in suburban McLean, where Allen and Foster dressed in Hawaiian shirts and baggy shorts, the one all bonhomie, the other like the grim reaper, was one unlikely venue where US policy was made.

  Britain: The Long Goodbye

  Eisenhower’s presidency coincided with a changing of the guard in Great Britain. In the general election of February 1950, the overall Labour majority was cut from 146 to 8. The result revitalized the seventy-five-year-old Churchill, who mercilessly harassed government spokesmen in Parliament for the next twenty months, finally forcing another general election in October 1951. Churchill captured people’s smouldering resentment of Labour’s regimentation of every aspect of daily life. ‘We are for the ladder,’ he said. ‘Let us all do our best to climb. They are for the queue. Let each wait in his place until his turn comes.’ The election saw him return to power with a majority of seventeen, although Labour still won a plurality of the popular vote (48.8 per cent against the joint Conservative and National Liberal 48 per cent). Had there been any major policy differences between the two main parties, the result would have indicated a dangerously polarized society. Instead it simply meant a needed change in personnel to administer the post-war settlement, as the attrition of office had consumed the limited pool of talent in the Labour Party.34

  The big political question was how long Churchill would remain in 10 Downing Street.35 All the many insider diarists of the period agreed that his character flaws became more pronounced with age: rambling mono
logues at the cabinet or dinner tables, and an obsessive interest in playing bezique rather than reading important state papers. Lachrymose bouts became simply embarrassing when detached from the high emotions generated by wartime. ‘He starts confused and wrong on almost every issue, hardly listens to argument and constantly reverts to wartime and post-war analogies,’ wrote Eden’s private secretary Evelyn Shuckburgh. He seemed ‘old, weary and inconsequent’.36 In June 1953, Churchill collapsed after suffering a major stroke while entertaining Italian premier Alcide De Gasperi in Downing Street. It was a moment to retire with dignity, but Churchill recovered and soldiered on, perpetually discovering fresh excuses to delay retirement. It was the final, desperate act of a wholly self-centred life, for he repeatedly said that he would die quickly once he left office, which was his reason to go on living.37

  He remained in office because none of the other Conservative leaders had the necessary killer instinct. His prissy young Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rab Butler, was coping with young children after his wife’s premature death. The dynamic Housing Minister, Harold Macmillan, was in his private life a knowing cuckold to Churchill’s bisexual crony Bob Boothby; he also suffered chronic pain from a First World War wound and had his gall bladder removed in 1953. That same year, two botched operations for the same condition nearly carried off Eden, who had to go to the US to have the damage repaired. Chronic bad health, as well as the loss of his son in Burma late in the war and a painful divorce in 1950, exacerbated Eden’s volatile nature, although marriage to Churchill’s niece Clarissa in 1952 had a stabilizing effect. From April to October 1953 Churchill acted as his own foreign secretary, implicitly putting another question mark over the capacities and stamina of his would-be successor, whose stock fell the longer Churchill remained in harness.38 There was much truth in Macmillan’s bitchy 1975 comment: ‘The trouble with Anthony Eden was that he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955.’39

  Although on a good day Churchill fussed over Eden like a son, on a bad day he could be vicious. Lavishing praise on the bearing and elegance of Acheson, who did indeed resemble a parody of a British Guards officer, Churchill turned to Eden and said, ‘Dean looks like you’re supposed to do.’ In Eden’s case it was difficult to decide whether he was a strong man with weak tendencies, as his ambiguous record on appeasement in the 1930s suggested, or a weak man neurotically pretending to be strong, which was Churchill’s private opinion of him.

  Churchill was more willing to subordinate Britain to the new realities of US power and was sentimental about the land of his mother in a way that Eden emphatically was not. Like most of his generation Eden deeply resented the Americans’ late entry into the two world wars and the huge profit they had made from them, as well as their primary responsibility for the Great Depression and their brutal cut-off of financial aid and nuclear collaboration in 1946. The feeling was mutual. Acheson was contemptuous of Eden’s habit of calling males ‘my dear’, and on one occasion his diplomatic mask slipped right off. In November 1952, accompanied by an aide, Acheson wandered from a cocktail party into Eden’s hotel room in New York, requiring ‘a real martini, meaning mainly gin’ despite already being four sheets to the wind. The British delegation had been trying to get the Americans to accept an Indian scheme to resolve the prisoner-repatriation issue in Korea, and Acheson let go with a rapid fire of contemptuous assessments of Commonwealth leaders and even of his uncomfortable British hosts.40

  Churchill’s wartime role meant that he was indulged in Washington, where his anti-Communism and flights of grandiose generalities about a commonality of culture and purpose were warmly received. Crossing the Atlantic aboard the Queen Mary to bid farewell to Truman and to salute President-elect Eisenhower, Churchill spoke of the need for an Anglo-American common front, ‘from Korea to Kikuyu and from Kikuyu to Calais’.41 Unfortunately he sought a continuing leading role in world affairs that neither he nor his country had the strength to justify, as evidenced in an obsessive quest for one last ‘Big Three’ summit conference with the Americans and the Soviets. His cabinet were privately appalled, as they could foresee his alcohol-fuelled grandiosity leading him to enter into unsustainable commitments and to make damaging concessions. Dulles did not believe in summits with the Soviets.

  Churchill had worked closely with Eisenhower during the war and shared the general British view that he was ‘a genial and dynamic mediocrity’.42 Ike’s account of his first encounter with Churchill as president in January 1953 reveals that the self-styled ‘dumb bunny’ had a more accurate understanding:

  Mr Churchill is as charming and interesting as ever, but he is quite definitely showing the effects of the passing years. He has fixed in his mind a certain international relationship he is trying to establish . . . This is that Britain and the British Commonwealth are not to be treated just as other nations would be treated by the United States in our complicated foreign problems. On the contrary, he most earnestly hopes and intends that those countries shall enjoy a relationship which he thinks will recognize the special place of partnership they occupied with us during World War II . . . Winston is trying to relive the days of World War II. In those days he had the enjoyable feeling that he and our President were sitting on some rather Olympian platform with respect to the rest of the world, and directing world affairs from that point of vantage. Even if this picture were an accurate one of those days, it would have no application to the present. But it was only partially true, even then, as many of us who, in various corners of the world, had to work out the solutions for nasty local problems, are well aware. In the present international complexities, any hope of establishing such a relationship is completely fatuous . . . the two strongest western powers must not appear before the world as a combination of forces to compel adherence to the status quo.43

  In Bermuda in late 1953, the British noticed that the President no longer smiled much and chewed the arms of his glasses during meetings. But they also noted how Churchill cut a sad figure beside the ramrod posture of the President when they took formal salutes. During one session, riled by Churchill’s claims that Russia had changed and needed to be wooed, Ike retorted: ‘So long as you mean what I think you mean, I agree – that it is the same old woman of the streets, even if she has on a new hat.’ Ignoring the pained expressions on British faces, when Eden asked when the next session might be Ike snapped: ‘I don’t know. Mine is with a whisky and soda.’44 The British were also chilled by Ike’s apparent nonchalance about nuclear weapons, and his casual comments about the cost-effectiveness of using them against Chinese military bases as a means of bringing the Korean War to a swift close.

  Given Britain’s abrupt decline, relations between any foreign secretary and the US secretary of state were bound to be delicate. Eden passionately believed that the British Commonwealth should play an autonomous role in world affairs, which entitled the British to be treated as equal partners by the Americans. Washington’s traditional anti-colonialism and its attempts to direct British policy in the Middle East towards accommodation with Arab nationalism were constant irritants. Eden was also indifferent to Europe and resented US pressure for Britain to participate in tentative schemes for enhanced European economic and defence co-operation. What with one thing and another, Eden had a growing chip on his shoulder about US power, though his class tended only to see chips on those of others.45

  In the first year of the new administration relations with Dulles were a considerable improvement, despite Eden’s attempt in May 1952 to dissuade Ike from appointing him. Dulles may have been deliberate and ponderous in manner, but he was also an experienced and highly professional operator.46 Churchill detested on sight the Secretary’s ‘great slab of a face’, ever after lisping his name as ‘Dullith’ or punning ‘Dull, duller, Dulles’. On learning that a brother, Allen, was the new head of CIA, Churchill commented: ‘They tell me that there is another Dullith. Is that possible?’47<
br />
  The first indication that all was not smooth sailing between Dulles and Eden was evident when the former claimed to have been ‘double-crossed’ and ‘lied to’, as Eden subverted Dulles’s attempts to establish SEATO before the convening of the Geneva peace conference on Indochina.48 The mood at Geneva in 1954 was not good: ‘A.E. is fed up with Dulles, refuses to make concessions to his feelings, and almost resents seeing him . . . A.E. is now hoping Dulles will go away as soon as possible . . . there is no doubt that Dulles and A.E. have got thoroughly on each other’s nerves, and are both behaving like prima donnas. Dulles is said to be irritated by the “imprecision” of A.E.’s mind . . . A.E had a terrible dinner with Dulles last night.’49

  With reference to his failed attempt to include India, which the US deeply distrusted, in SEATO, Eden commented that ‘Americans may think the time is past when they need consider the feelings or difficulties of their allies . . . We, at least, have constantly to bear in mind all our Commonwealth partners, even if the United States does not like them.’50 At the Geneva conference, which he regarded as a personal triumph, Eden shared with Molotov the worrying thought that Britain and the USSR were respectively the inside right and inside left, with the ‘wilder’ Americans and Chinese on the outside extremes. The more Eden tried to act independently of the US, with a view to distinguishing himself from Churchill, the more the Americans would resent his interference in their global schemes.51