by Oliver Stone
LeMay objected to the restraints placed upon the military, recalling that when the war started,
We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon and said, “Look, let us go up there . . . and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea—and they’re not very big—and that ought to stop it.” Well, the answer to that was four or five screams—“You’ll kill a lot of non-combatants” and “It’s too horrible.” Yet over a period of three years or so . . . we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too. . . . Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening—a lot of people can’t stomach it.61
Korea was only one piece of a rapidly unraveling situation in Asia. In Indochina, the United States had decided to bolster its support for the French, making $10 million available for the French puppet Emperor Bao Dai in Vietnam. Trouble was also brewing in the Philippines, where the U.S.-backed president Manuel Roxas and his successor Elpidio Quirino had been battling the Huk peasant insurgency. After collaborating with the Japanese during the war, Roxas aligned himself with the large landowners and the Catholic Church. The United States built up the Philippine army and began a successful counterinsurgency campaign spearheaded by Major Edward Lansdale and fortified by U.S. airpower. A flamboyant advertising executive who served in the OSS and CIA and was immortalized in two famous novels, Lansdale would later lead similar counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam and Cuba but with decidedly less success. And even in the Philippines, primary credit for undercutting the Huks should go not to Lansdale but to President Ramon Magsaysay, who instituted land reform and welcomed the Huks back into the political system.
The Korean War paved the way for the dramatic remilitarization of U.S. society. Truman approved NSC 68, and the defense budget for fiscal 1951 almost quadrupled, from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion. Within six months of the start of the war, U.S. defense spending soared to $54 billion, providing a tremendous boost to the aerospace and defense sector across the country and particularly in California. In Los Angeles County, 160,000 people worked in aircraft production, and 55 percent of county residents worked in the defense and aerospace sectors. In San Diego, the defense sector accounted for nearly 80 percent of all manufacturing.62 NATO was transformed into a full-fledged military structure with a U.S. supreme commander and U.S. troops stationed in Europe.
U.S. decisions to rearm Germany and sign a peace treaty with Japan, regardless of Soviet participation, further hardened the enmity between the United States and the USSR, leading the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, to worry that “we had . . . contributed . . . by the overmilitarization of our policies and statements—to a belief in Moscow that it was war we were after.”63
Given the hypermilitarization of American life, it was only fitting that one of the nation’s top military men run for president. The 1952 election pitted Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson against General Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower chose anti-Communist hatchet man California Senator Richard Nixon as his running mate. During the campaign, Nixon did Ike’s dirty work, denouncing “Adlai the appeaser” who “carries a Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s cowardly college of Communist containment.”64 Senator Joseph McCarthy struck a similar theme, referring to the Democratic candidate as “Alger,”65 a reference to Alger Hiss. McCarthy had a particular vendetta against General George Marshall, whom he blamed for “losing” China during his tenure as Truman’s secretary of state. Eisenhower was set to defend his friend and mentor against such scurrilous attacks while campaigning in McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin. But Eisenhower backed off from a confrontation with the anti-Communist demagogue, pusillanimously dropping a passage defending Marshall from his speech. He was apparently aware of the fact that an astounding 185 of the 221 Republican members of the House had requested appointment to the House Un-American Activities Committee.66
The Eisenhower campaign, which had inveighed against Democratic corruption, reached its nadir in September, when it was rocked by the news that conservative businessmen had given Nixon a secret donation of $18,000. Eisenhower’s advisors echoed the public in demanding Nixon’s ouster. In a last-ditch effort to rescue his candidacy, Nixon delivered his famous “Checkers speech” to 55 million television viewers.
That bit of sentimentality saved the day for Nixon. But Eisenhower let Nixon twist in the wind a bit longer. He told Nixon to meet him in West Virginia. Nixon composed a letter of resignation and barked at an aide, “What more does he want? I’m not going to crawl on my hands and knees to him.” The next day Eisenhower met him at the airport and said, “Dick, you’re my boy.”67 Nixon broke down and cried.
Eisenhower won the election handily, carrying thirty-nine states. U.S.-Soviet relations were extremely tense when he took office in January 1953. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, his new secretary of state, had done little to lower the temperature during the campaign, fanning the flames of anti-Sovietism with their calls to move beyond Democratic “containment” to Republican “liberation.”
But Eisenhower had not always been such a perfervid anti-Communist. He had pushed hard for opening a second front in 1942 and later developed a friendly relationship with Soviet Marshall Georgi Zhukov. After the war, he remained confident that U.S.-Soviet friendship would endure. Stalin, who held him in high regard, told U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman, “General Eisenhower is a very great man, not only because of his military accomplishments but because of his human, friendly, kind, and frank nature.”68 Eisenhower visited Moscow in August 1945 and received a hero’s welcome from the Soviet people. Stalin accorded him the special honor of being the first foreigner to witness a parade in Red Square from the platform atop Lenin’s tomb. Later, in his farewell report as army chief of staff, he rejected the facile equation of military strength and national security:
National security does not mean militarism or any approach to it. Security cannot be measured by the size of munitions stockpiles or the number of men under arms or the monopoly of an invincible weapon. That was the German and Japanese idea of power which, in the test of war, was proved false. Even in time of peace, the index of material strength is unreliable, for arms become obsolete and worthless; vast armies decay while sapping the strength of the nations supporting them; monopoly of a weapon is soon broken.69
During his time in office, Eisenhower would be confronted with repeated opportunities to roll back the Cold War and arms race. Presiding over the world’s most powerful nation during perhaps the tensest extended period in history, he could have taken bold action that could have put the world on a different path. Signs emanating from Moscow indicated that the Kremlin might be ready to change course. But because of ideology, political calculations, the exigencies of a militarized state, and limited imagination, he repeatedly failed to seize the opportunities that emerged. And although he deserves credit for avoiding war with the Soviet Union at a time when such a war seemed quite possible, he left the world a far more dangerous place than when he first took office.
Eisenhower didn’t have to wait long for an extraordinary opportunity to reverse the course of the Cold War. On March 5, 1953, barely a month into Eisenhower’s presidency, Josef Stalin died. Some of Eisenhower’s close advisors urged him to take advantage of the chaotic situation in Moscow and “scare the daylights out of the enemy.” The National Security Council (NSC) called for “psychological exploitation of this event,” and C. D. Jackson, Eisenhower’s advisor on psychological warfare, proposed “a general political warfare offensive.”70 But the new Soviet leaders moved quickly to ease tensions with the United States, instructing China and North Korea to compromise on an armistice agreement. On March 15, Georgi Malenkov publicly declared, “there is no disputed or unresolved question that cannot be settled peacefully.”71 The new CIA director, Allen Dulles, reported that Soviet leaders seriously desired to “lessen the dangers of global war.”72 They even took preliminary steps toward liberalization within the Soviet Union.
Churchill, who had been reelected prime minister in 1951, had grown wary of the nuclear threat. He urged Washington to seize this unprecedented opportunity to end the Cold War conflict. He pressed for a summit with Soviet leaders.73 Eisenhower held his tongue for six weeks while his advisors crafted a response. He finally broke his silence, offering one of the most lucid statements ever made by a U.S. president on the toll the Cold War was taking on the nation:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world . . . is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is . . . a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all. . . . Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.74
In what seemed a dramatic departure, Eisenhower called for peace, disarmament, and third-world development. But in equally fundamental ways, he remained an orthodox Cold Warrior, blaming the Soviets for the troubled state of the world.
The New York Times called the speech “magnificent and deeply moving.”75 The Washington Post hoped that it signaled a rejection of Truman’s “provocative words,” “belligerent gesturings,” “militarization of policy,” and “aid . . . to everybody who would turn anti-Communist.” Eisenhower, the Post felt, still needed to repudiate “the theory that a crack of the whip from Moscow produces automatic obedience in the far corners of the satellite states and throughout Red China and Communist-infected Asia.”76
The Soviets reprinted the speech widely and offered some hopeful measures of their own. But the optimism proved short-lived. Two days later, Dulles dismissed Malenkov’s “peace offensive” as a “peace defensive” taken in response to U.S. strength. He accused the Communists of “endlessly conspir[ing] to overthrow from within, every genuinely free government in the world.”77
Perplexed, the Soviets wondered whether Eisenhower or Dulles spoke for the administration. They applauded Eisenhower for detailing the costs of U.S. militarism but chided him for leaving out the astronomical cost of accumulating a vast nuclear arsenal and constructing hundreds of military bases around the world.
Nor did the steps taken to end the fighting in Korea necessarily augur well for future relations. Despite making progress in the negotiations, Eisenhower threatened to widen the war and considered using tactical atomic weapons, which the United States first tested in January. At an NSC meeting in February, Eisenhower identified the Kaesong area in North Korea as a good place to use the new weapon. In May, when Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton Collins said that he was “very skeptical about the value of using atomic weapons tactically in Korea,” Eisenhower callously replied, “it might be cheaper, dollar-wise, to use atomic weapons in Korea than to continue to use conventional weapons.”78 That month, the Joint Chiefs recommended and the NSC endorsed atomic attacks on China. Eisenhower and Dulles made sure the Communist leaders knew of those threats.
The United States also began bombing the dams near Pyongyang, causing enormous floods and destroying the rice crop. The Nuremberg tribunal had condemned similar Nazi actions in Holland in 1944 as a war crime. Finally, in June, the two sides signed agreements settling the POW issue and agreeing on a truce demarcation line, but fighting intensified and casualties skyrocketed on both sides. The morale of the UN forces plummeted. Desertions increased. Self-inflicted wounds reached epidemic proportions. On July 27, 1953, an armistice was finally signed by North Korea, China, and the United States, two years and seventeen days after talks began. South Korea has still not signed. In August, Eisenhower kept up pressure, instructing LeMay to dispatch twenty nuclear-armed B-36 bombers to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa as part of Operation “Big Stick.” LeMay invited the press to observe their arrival.
Eisenhower used atomic bombs repeatedly throughout his presidency in the same sense, as Daniel Ellsberg has argued, that a robber holding a gun to someone’s head uses the gun without pulling the trigger. Among those who learned the lesson that nuclear threats could frighten an enemy into capitulating was Richard Nixon. In 1968, Nixon explained his strategy for dealing with North Vietnam to Bob Haldeman: “I call it the madman theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
Haldeman explained that Nixon “saw a parallel in the action President Eisenhower had taken. . . . When Eisenhower arrived in the White House, the Korean War was stalemated. . . . He secretly got word to the Chinese that he would drop nuclear bombs. . . . In a few weeks, the Chinese called for a truce and the Korean War ended.”
“It worked,” Nixon insisted. “It was the bomb that did it.” He credited Eisenhower with teaching him the value of unpredictability. “If the adversary feels that you are unpredictable, even rash,” he wrote, “he will be deterred from pressing you too far. The odds that he will fold increase greatly and the unpredictable president will win another hand.”79 Eisenhower was certainly not a “madman,” but he paid little heed to how someone like Nixon might mimic his actions.
The Korean War had its winners and its losers. Rhee’s and Jiang’s shaky regimes survived. Japan profited. China had stood up to the Americans, enhancing its international prestige, but the Soviets had not, accelerating the Sino-Soviet split. And Churchill grasped the real meaning for the United States: “Korea does not really matter now. I’d never heard of the bloody place until I was 74. Its importance lies in the fact that it has led to the re-arming of America.”80
Among the war’s victims were the accused atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Upon sentencing them to death in a highly controversial ruling, the judge charged, “your conduct has already caused the communist aggression in Korea with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 Americans.”81
A casualty of a different sort was Henry Wallace. The Progressive Party’s ranks had dwindled sharply after the 1948 election debacle, leaving it largely in the hands of Communists who, for the most part, remained uncritical of the Soviet Union. Wallace had seen enough of Stalinism to know how abhorrent it was. He told delegates to the Progressive Party convention in late February 1950, “The United States and Russia stand out today as the two big brutes of the world. Each in its own eyes rests on high moral principles, but each in the eyes of other nations is guided by force and force alone.”
The North Korean invasion of South Korea proved the final straw for Wallace. When Progressive Party leaders opposed UN action, he issued his own “statement of conscience.” Insisting that the Soviets could have blocked the North Korean invasion in the first place if they’d wanted and could stop it now, he declared, “I hold no brief for the past actions of either the United States or Russia but when my country is at war and the United Nations sanctions that war, I am on the side of my country and the United Nations.” But he urged U.S. leaders to break with recent policies, which he continued to deplore: “The United States will fight a losing battle in Asia as long as she stands behind feudal regimes based on exorbitant charges of land lords and money lords. Russia is using a mightier power than the atom bomb as long as she helps the people get out from under their ancient aggressors. But we in the United States have a still mightier power if we will only use it for the people.” Three weeks later, he resigned from the Progressive Party. After years of waging an often lonely, though courageous, struggle against overwhelming odds, the indo
mitable visionary leader had finally had enough. Stalin’s betrayals, when combined with the growing influence of domestic Cold Warriors, had sapped him of the strength needed to continue the fight. He retreated to his farm in upstate New York and spent his remaining years largely tending to his corn and chickens, which were then feeding much of the world.
The final casualty of the war, some feared, was American manhood. One postwar study found that 70 percent of U.S. POWs had “collapsed” and collaborated with their captors. Some attributed the phenomenon to Communist brainwashing. Others pointed to something more troubling. One army doctor who traveled about the camps to treat U.S. prisoners reported, “the strong regularly took food from the weak. . . . Many men were sick, and these men, instead of being helped and nursed by the others, were ignored, or worse. . . . On winter nights, helpless men with dysentery were rolled outside the huts by their comrades and left to die in the cold.” An astounding 38 percent of U.S. prisoners died. Most withdrew into themselves and made little effort to find food or keep clean. The doctor attributed this to “some new failure in the childhood and adolescent training of our young men—a new softness.”82
If American men were getting soft, American technology would compensate. Just three days before Eisenhower’s election, the United States tested its first prototype hydrogen bomb on the island of Elugelab in the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The island burned for six hours under a mushroom cloud a hundred miles across and then disappeared. The more-than-10-megaton blast exceeded all expectations. A sailor commented, “You would swear the whole world was on fire.”83 Physicist Harold Agnew was aboard ship twenty-five miles away. He observed, “something I’ll never forget was the heat. Not the blast . . . the heat just kept coming on and on and on. And it was really scary.”84 Eisenhower acknowledged the new reality in his inaugural address. “Science,” he warned, “seems ready to confer upon us . . . the power to erase human life from this planet.”85 Yet his policies over the next eight years propelled us ever more disastrously toward realizing that threat. It was as if Lewis Mumford’s brilliant 1946 essay about the madness of American leaders had been written with the future Eisenhower in mind.
