The Untold History of the United States
Page 39
While Eisenhower administration officials celebrated their victory, having fortified their belief that covert operations could be used to topple popular reform governments, others drew very different lessons. Among the witnesses to Guatemalan “regime change” was a young Argentinian doctor named Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who was in Guatemala City to observe Árbenz’s reform efforts. He wrote to his mother from the Argentinean Embassy, where he had taken refuge during the subsequent slaughter. Árbenz made one major mistake, he contended: “He could have given arms to the people, but he did not want to—and now we see the result.” Che would not make that mistake when the time came to protect the Cuban Revolution a few years later.152 The revolution faced its main counterrevolutionary challenge when an invading force of U.S.-backed exiles was smashed in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs. Several of those who played leading roles in the Guatemalan overthrow of 1954 would also figure prominently in the 1961 fiasco, including Ambassador William Pawley, CIA operatives E. Howard Hunt and Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Allen Dulles.
Events of even greater significance were unfolding simultaneously in Vietnam. In April 1954, Ho Chi Minh’s peasant liberation army, commanded by General Vo Nguyen Giap, and peasant supporters hauled extremely heavy antiaircraft guns, mortars, and howitzers through seemingly impassable jungle and mountain terrain to lay siege to desperate French forces at Dien Bien Phu. Incredibly, the United States was then paying 80 percent of the French costs to keep the colonialists in power. Eisenhower explained in August 1953, “when the United States votes $400,000,000 to help that war, we are not voting a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can to prevent the occurrence of something that would be of a most terrible significance to the United States of America, our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesia territory and from Southeast Asia.”153 He envisioned countries in the region falling like dominoes, ultimately leading to the loss of Japan. Nixon agreed: “If Indochina falls, Thailand is put in an almost impossible position. The same is true of Malaya with its rubber and tin. The same is true of Indonesia. If this whole part of Southeast Asia goes under Communist domination or Communist influence, Japan, who trades and must trade with this area in order to exist, must inevitably be oriented towards the Communist regime.”154 And U.S. News & World Report cut entirely through any rhetoric about fighting for the freedom of oppressed peoples and admitted, “One of the world’s richest areas is open to the winner in Indochina. That’s behind growing U.S. concern . . . tin, rubber, rice, key strategic raw materials are what the war is really about. The U.S. sees it as a place to hold—at any cost.”155
The French asked for help. Though Eisenhower ruled out sending U.S. ground forces, he and Dulles considered various options to stave off an imminent French defeat. Pentagon officials drew up plans for Operation Vulture, an air campaign against Viet Minh positions. They also discussed the possibility of using two or three atomic bombs. Air Force Chief of Staff General Nathan Twining later commented,
what [Radford and I] thought would be—and I still think it would have been a good idea—was to take three small tactical A-bombs—it’s a fairly isolated area. . . . You could take all day to drop a bomb, make sure you put it in the right place. No opposition. And clean those Commies out of there and the band could play the ‘Marseillaise’ and the French would come marching out of Dien Bien Phu in fine shape. And those Commies would say, ‘Well, those guys may do this again to us. We’d better be careful.’156
Eisenhower discussed the use of atomic bombs with Nixon and Robert Cutler of the NSC on April 30, 1954. Foreign Minister Georges Bidault and other French officials reported that Dulles had offered them two atomic bombs one week earlier. Eisenhower and Dulles later disputed such reports, but the use of atomic bombs would certainly have been consistent with U.S. policy at the time. Neither the British nor the French thought this wise or feasible. Evidence also suggests that the “new weapons” were vetoed because the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu were too close to French soldiers, who would be put into harm’s way. As Eisenhower told Walter Cronkite in 1961, “we were not willing to use weapons that could have destroyed the area for miles and that probably would have destroyed Dien Bien Phu.”157
Many scholars believe Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s disclaimers, but the United States’ offer is mentioned in diaries and memoirs of French General Paul Ely, Foreign Minister Bidault, and Foreign Ministry Secretary General Jean Chauvel. France’s interior minister had asked Premier Laniel to request the bombs.158 McGeorge Bundy also thinks it likely that Dulles raised the possibility with Bidault, as Bidault claimed, in part because the alleged offer coincided precisely with Dulles’s comments to NATO about the necessity of making nuclear weapons conventional. In late April, the Policy Planning Staff of the NSC again discussed the prospect of using nuclear weapons. When Robert Cutler broached the subject with Eisenhower and Nixon, the record indicates that they again considered giving a few of the “new weapons” to the French. Years later, Eisenhower’s recollection was quite different. He told his biographer Stephen Ambrose that he had replied to Cutler, “You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God.”159
Although no nuclear weapons were used at the time, Eisenhower did approve the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation that should the Chinese intervene, the United States would respond with atomic bombs, not ground troops.160
The day before Eisenhower’s “falling domino” press conference, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy had taken the floor of the Senate to oppose the proposed U.S. military intervention. He dismissed the optimistic blather with which U.S. and French officials had been regaling the public for the past three years, including recent assurances of French victory by Arthur Radford and Secretary Dulles: “No amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”161 Senator Lyndon Johnson had recently said that he was “against sending American GIs into the mud and muck of Indochina on a blood-letting spree to perpetuate colonialism and white man’s exploitation in Asia.”162
On May 7, after fifty-six days, the French garrison fell. Representatives of the United States, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China met in Geneva. Dulles attended just long enough to make his displeasure apparent. He refused to shake hands with Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai or to sit near any Communist delegates, and he objected to everything that was proposed, causing British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden’s secretary to describe his “almost pathological rage and gloom.”163 Despite the fact that the Viet Minh controlled most of the country and believed it deserved to govern it all, Viet Minh negotiators succumbed to Soviet and Chinese pressure and accepted a proposal that would briefly defer their nationwide takeover and allow France to save face. The two sides agreed to temporarily divide Vietnam at the 17th parallel, with Ho’s forces withdrawing to the north and French-backed forces retreating to the south. The final declaration clearly stated, “the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.”164 The agreement also stipulated that neither side allow foreign bases on its soil or join a military alliance.
The Viet Minh accepted this, in large part, because a national election was scheduled for July 1956 to unify the country. The United States refused to sign the accords but promised not to interfere with their implementation. But in fact it was betraying that promise as the words were coming out of U.S. representative General Walter Bedell Smith’s mouth.
So long as Bao Dai remained in charge in the South, the United States’ prospects of holding Vietnam were virtually nonexistent. Bao Dai was unknown by the peasants and scorned as a French puppet and despised by the intellectuals, while Ho was heralded as a nationalist leader and adulated as the country’s savior.16
5 As French troops prepared to leave the country, Americans maneuvered to replace Bao Dai with Ngo Dinh Diem, a conservative Catholic fresh from four years in exile, whom Bao had named prime minister. With the aid of Edward Lansdale, Diem wasted no time in crushing rivals and unleashing a wave of repression against former Viet Minh members in the south, thousands of whom were executed.
Eisenhower and Dulles greet South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem at Washington National Airport. American leaders had maneuvered to replace the French puppet Bao Dai with Diem, who wasted no time in crushing his rivals and unleashing a wave of repression against former Viet Minh members in the south, thousands of whom were executed.
In 1955, Diem called a referendum asking the South Vietnamese to choose between Bao Dai and himself. With the assistance of Lansdale, Diem “won” 98 percent of the vote. Diem’s U.S. backers formed the American Friends of Vietnam. Diem enthusiasts included Cardinal Francis Spellman and Joseph Kennedy, as well as Senators Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, and John F. Kennedy. Blinded by their anticommunism and their faith that this ascetic Catholic nationalist could turn the tide against overwhelming odds, they ignored what was obvious to independent observers like University of Chicago political theorist and foreign policy expert Hans Morgenthau. After visiting Vietnam in early 1956, Morgenthau described Diem as “a man . . . who acts with a craftiness and ruthlessness worthy of an Oriental despot . . . who as statesman lives by his opposition to Communism, but who is building, down to small details, a faithful replica of the totalitarian regime which he opposes.” Morgenthau outlined a situation in which nine of the eleven opposition parties dared not operate openly: “Freedom of the press does not exist,” and “nobody knows how many people are shot every day by the armed forces of the regime and under what circumstances.”166
With the United States’ backing, Diem subverted the most important provision of the Geneva agreement, canceling the 1956 election that would have turned control of the nation over to the Communists. Eisenhower later commented, “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai.”167 The insurgency was soon rekindled.
Growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam was taking place against a backdrop of heightened nuclear tensions. In late February 1954, U.S. authorities evacuated islanders and cleared all vessels from a large area of the Pacific in preparation for a new series of hydrogen bomb tests. Even though the wind shifted, they decided to proceed as planned with the March 1 Bravo test, knowing that this would put many people in harm’s way. To make matters worse, the bomb exploded with twice the force predicted. At 15 megatons, it was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The cloud of radioactive coral drifted toward the Marshall Islands of Rongelap, Rongerik, and Utrik, contaminating 236 islanders and 28 Americans. Unaware of the danger, children played in the radioactive fallout. Many of the islanders were not evacuated for three days, by which time they were showing signs of radiation poisoning. Twenty-three fishermen aboard a Japanese trawler, Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5), suffered a similar fate as they were blanketed by the deadly white ash that fell from the skies for three hours. When they pulled into port thirteen days later with their contaminated tuna, crew members were showing signs of advanced poisoning. The first died several months later.
The world was shocked by the United States’ negligence and by the incredible power of the latest generation of nuclear weapons. Panic set in when people realized that the Japanese ship’s contaminated tuna had been sold in four major cities and eaten by scores of people. Many people stopped eating fish entirely. Four hundred fifty-seven tons of tuna were eventually destroyed. AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss told the White House press secretary that the boat had really been a “red spy outfit” conducting espionage for the Soviet Union, a blatant falsehood that the CIA quickly dispelled.168 Speaking at Eisenhower’s press conference, Strauss emphasized the test’s contribution to the United States’ “military posture,” blamed the fishermen for ignoring AEC warnings, and downplayed the damage to their health.169 The inhabitants of Utrik were allowed to return within two months. The Rongalapese did not return home until 1957. They remained in Rongelap until 1985, when scientific findings confirmed their suspicions that the island was still contaminated.
The international community was appalled. Belgian diplomat Paul-Henri Spaak warned, “If something is not done to revive the idea of the President’s speech—the idea that America wants to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes—America is going to be synonymous in Europe with barbarism and horror.” Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said publicly that U.S. leaders were “dangerous self-centered lunatics” who would “blow up any people or country who came in the way of their policy.”170
Eisenhower told the NSC in May 1954, “Everybody seems to think that we are skunks, saber-rattlers, and warmongers.”171 Dulles added, “We are losing ground every day in England and in other allied nations because they are all insisting we are so militaristic. Comparisons are now being made between ours and Hitler’s military machine.”172
The bomb test had other unforeseen consequences. The terrifying power of hydrogen bombs and the slightly veiled threat of nuclear war now figured much more prominently in international diplomacy. The nuclear threat influenced the behavior of the major players at the Geneva Conference more than most people realized. Shortly after the test, Churchill told Parliament that the topic occupied his thinking “out of all comparison with anything else.” Dulles met with him in early May, afterward telling Eisenhower that he “found the British, and particularly Churchill, scared to death by the specter of nuclear bombs in the hands of the Russians.” Anthony Eden connected this fear to the proceedings at the conference. “This was the first international meeting,” he noted, “at which I was sharply conscious of the deterrent power of the hydrogen bomb. I was grateful for it. I do not believe that we should have got through the Geneva Conference and avoided a major war without it.”173
The Lucky Dragon incident also catalyzed a worldwide movement against nuclear testing and popularized the previously obscure term “fallout.” It sparked renewed questioning of Eisenhower’s New Look.
Nowhere was the reaction stronger than in Japan, where postwar U.S. efforts to censor discussion of the atomic bombings had not succeeded in extinguishing the memory of what the United States had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A petition circulated by Tokyo housewives calling for banning hydrogen bombs gathered 32 million signatures, an extraordinary total representing one-third of the entire Japanese population.
To counter this pervasive anti-nuclear sentiment, the NSC’s Operations Coordinating Board proposed that the United States launch a “vigorous offensive on the non-war uses of atomic energy” and offer to build Japan an experimental nuclear reactor.174 AEC Commissioner Thomas Murray applauded this “dramatic and Christian gesture,” believing it “could lift all of us far above the recollection of the carnage” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.175 The Washington Post offered its own hearty endorsement, seeing the project as a way to “divert the mind of man from his present obsession with the armaments race” and added, in an extraordinary admission, “Many Americans are now aware . . . that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was not necessary. . . . How better to make a contribution to amends than by offering Japan the means for the peaceful utilization of atomic energy. How better, indeed, to dispel the impression in Asia that the United States regards Orientals merely as cannon fodder!”
In what would seem the cruelest irony yet, Murray and Illinois Representative Sidney Yates proposed building the first nuclear power plant in Hiroshima. In early 1955, Yates introduced legislation to build a 60,000 kilowatt generating plant in the city that less than a decade earlier had been the first target of the atomic bomb.
A month after the powerful Bravo test, the New York Times reported that the recent tests confirmed Szilard and Einstein’s fear that the cobalt bomb could be built, leading to widespread discussion of Szilard’s revised estimate that four hundred one-ton deuterium-cobalt bombs would release enough radioactivity to end all life on the planet.177
A front-page article in the Los Angeles Times two days later offered the sobering news that Japanese scientist Tsunesaburo Asada had informed the Japan Pharmacological Society that the Soviets were producing a nitrogen bomb—a hydrogen bomb enclosed with nitrogen and helium—so dangerous that “if 30 such bombs are detonated simultaneously all mankind will perish in several years’ time.”178 As if that weren’t frightening enough, the following February, German Nobel Laureate Otto Hahn, the physicist who had first split the uranium atom, lowered the requisite number from four hundred cobalt bombs to ten in a radio address that could be heard throughout most of Europe.179