Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  The Federal-Aid Highway Act sailed through the Senate in May, but lost in the House 123–292. The Democratic majority objected to the bond issue and wanted the money for the interstates to come directly from the Treasury. When the second session of the Eighty-fourth Congress convened in January, a compromise had been reached. Rather than paying for the interstates through a bond issue, or by direct federal expenditures, the federal government would levy a gasoline tax of 4¢ per gallon, the money designated for a highway trust fund. Eisenhower was satisfied the measure would not be a charge on the Treasury, and the Democrats were content with user taxes. The revised measure passed both houses easily, and Eisenhower signed the bill into law on June 29, 1956. Today, the interstate highway system, officially the “Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways,” stretches 46,876 miles, and contains 55,512 bridges and 14,756 interchanges. The Highway Trust Fund, funded originally by a 4¢ per gallon levy, is now supported by the federal fuel tax of 18.4¢ per gallon, of which 2.86¢ is earmarked for mass transit. Total revenue from the tax exceeds $40 billion annually.

  Eisenhower was a fiscal conservative. He believed in a balanced budget, worked hard to attain it, and eventually succeeded.f But he was not a movement ideologue and had no interest in dismantling the national government. Federal action, he once said, was sometimes required to “floor over the pit of personal disaster in our complex modern society.”56 The interstate highway system and the St. Lawrence Seaway are enduring examples of Eisenhower’s belief in a positive role for government. Less well known is his expansion of Social Security in 1954 to provide coverage for an additional ten million self-employed farmers, doctors, lawyers, dentists, and others; his decision to increase benefits 16 percent for those already enrolled; his raising the minimum wage by a third (from 75¢ to $1 an hour),g his decision to provide the funds for Salk polio vaccine for the nation’s underprivileged children, and his establishment of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. When Ike appointed Oveta Culp Hobby as the first secretary of HEW, he told her he wanted to establish a national system of health care similar to what everyone received in the Army.57 FDR had made a similar suggestion to Frances Perkins when the Social Security system was on the drawing board in 1935. In both instances the presidential requests fell by the wayside in the day-to-day press of business.h

  During Eisenhower’s third year in office the nation found itself on the brink of war. Again, it was in the Far East, and again with China. In 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces had been driven from the Chinese mainland to Formosa (Taiwan), scattered Nationalist garrisons remained on three offshore island groups: the Tachens, Quemoy, and Matsu. Formosa, roughly 150 miles off the China coast, had been liberated from the Japanese in 1945 by the United States and was an integral part of the American defense perimeter in the Pacific. But the three island groups, much closer to the mainland, were historically a part of China itself and had been under the control of the central government. The Tachens, far to the north, were occupied by fifteen thousand Nationalist troops. The Matsu chain, some nineteen rocky outcroppings less than ten miles from the mainland port of Fuchou, were held by nine thousand of Chiang’s soldiers, and the Quemoy group, roughly sixty square miles in area, blocked the port of Xiamen, which was less than two miles away. The Quemoy garrison numbered fifty thousand or so, and was face-to-face with Chinese Communist forces across a few thousand yards of water.

  From 1949 to 1954 an uneasy truce had prevailed as the Chinese Communist government consolidated its position on the mainland and Chiang did the same on Formosa. But on September 3, 1954, Communist forces on the mainland launched a sustained artillery barrage against Quemoy, and sporadic shelling continued throughout the fall. “The shelling did not come as a complete surprise,” wrote Eisenhower. Chiang Kai-shek had been threatening to attack the mainland “in the not distant future,” and Chou En-lai had called for the “liberation of Formosa” in reply. It was almost inevitable that the war of words would escalate. An invasion of Quemoy appeared imminent.58

  In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Ridgway excepted) urged that the United States commit itself to defending the offshore islands and launch air strikes, with tactical nuclear weapons if necessary, against the mainland to break up Communist forces assembling there. Eisenhower said no. “We are not talking now about a brush-fire war,” Ike told the chiefs. “We’re talking about going to the threshold of World War III. If we attack China, we’re not going to impose limits on our military actions, as in Korea. [And] if we get into a general war, the logical enemy is Russia, not China, and we’ll have to strike there.”59

  Confronted with the possibility of total nuclear war, the Joint Chiefs cooled their ardor. But on Capitol Hill the “China Lobby” stepped up its demands for the United States to take action on Chiang’s behalf. Senator William Knowland, the Republican leader, went so far as to urge preventive war against China and the Soviet Union. “Do you suppose that Knowland would actually carry his thesis to the logical conclusion of presenting a resolution to the Congress aiming at the initiation of such a conflict?” Eisenhower wrote General Gruenther at NATO. “I don’t believe this for a second.” Knowland’s only policy, Ike told Gruenther, was “to develop high blood pressure whenever he says ‘Red China.’ ”60

  Eisenhower steered a difficult course. On the one hand, he was determined to defend Formosa, and on the other he was equally determined to avoid war with China. The offshore islands were not worth fighting for, but he could not abandon them. Chiang was unwilling to withdraw because of the adverse effect on his Army’s morale, but if the Communists wished to take them they could easily do so. Ike was a poker player. It was time to bluff without revealing his hand. China must be made wary of possible U.S. intervention, and Chiang must be restrained from launching any attack against the mainland. “The hard way is to have the courage to be patient,” Eisenhower told Senate Republicans.61

  On January 18, 1955, Communist forces landed on the island of Ichiang, seven miles from the Tachen group, and quickly overwhelmed the defenders. A move on the Tachens—which were two hundred miles from Formosa—appeared inevitable. Eisenhower responded with a two-step. He asked Congress for authorization to defend Formosa and the nearby Pescadores, but suggested that the Tachens be evacuated. Chiang would get a congressional guarantee of American support, but to do so he must relinquish the distant island group. The fate of Quemoy and Matsu was left ambiguous. “I do not suggest that the United States enlarge its defensive obligations beyond Formosa and the Pescadores,” Eisenhower told Congress, “but the danger of armed attack directed against that area compels us to take into account closely related localities which, under current conditions, might determine the failure or success of such an attack.”62

  Chiang, who recognized that the Tachens could not be defended without direct American intervention, acquiesced and was rewarded with a mutual defense treaty in which the United States undertook a solemn treaty obligation to defend Formosa and the Pescadores. But the Joint Chiefs initially resisted Ike’s strategy. Admiral Carney, the chief of naval operations, argued that because of harbor obstructions evacuating the islands would be more difficult for the Navy than defending them. Eisenhower, with amphibious landings in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy under his belt, overruled Carney’s objection. Admiral Felix Stump, the commander in chief of the Pacific fleet, was ordered to evacuate Nationalist forces from the Tachens, as well as all civilians who wished to leave. Stump was told not to initiate hostilities, but if fired upon he could return fire. One week later the Seventh Fleet successfully evacuated almost fifteen thousand of Chiang’s troops and twenty thousand civilians from the Tachens without incident.

  On January 29, 1955, the Senate adopted the Formosa resolution Eisenhower had requested, authorizing the president “to employ the armed forces of the United States as he deems necessary for the specific purpose of securing and protecting Formosa and the Pescadores against armed attack.�
� The resolution also gave Ike the discretion to include “such related positions and territories of that area now in friendly hands … as he judges to be required or appropriate”—a veiled reference to Quemoy and Matsu without including them explicitly. The vote was 83–3 in the Senate, with Democratic senator Walter George of Georgia, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, introducing the resolution on the administration’s behalf. In the House, the vote was a lopsided 410–3. In what may seem a curious twist in light of recent history, the opposition in the Senate was mounted by liberal Democrats who argued that the president’s inherent powers as commander in chief gave him adequate authority to take action and that the resolution was unnecessary.63

  With the passage of the Formosa Resolution, Eisenhower had what he wanted. The Chinese Communists were put on notice that the United States would defend Formosa, and the possibility that it might also protect Quemoy and Matsu was left to the president’s discretion. In another quid pro quo, Chiang agreed not to attack the mainland without U.S. approval. The situation played out during the spring of 1955. Eisenhower’s stance was sufficiently ambiguous to keep the Chinese Communists in check, and the danger that Chiang would upset the apple cart had been eliminated. It was a time of watchful waiting. “Sometimes,” Ike told a meeting of legislative leaders on February 16, “I wish those damned little offshore islands would sink.”64

  While both sides held back militarily, the rhetoric escalated. Before his news conference on March 23, press secretary James Hagerty told Eisenhower, “Some of the people in the State Department say that the Formosa Strait situation is so delicate that no matter what question you get on it, you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

  “Don’t worry, Jim,” Ike replied. “If that question comes up, I’ll just confuse them.”65

  Ike was true to his word. Halfway through the president’s news conference, Joseph C. Harsch of The Christian Science Monitor asked Eisenhower the question the world was waiting for. “If we got into an issue with the Chinese, say over Matsu and Quemoy, that we wanted to keep limited, do you conceive of using this specific kind of [tactical] atomic weapon in that situation or not?”

  Eisenhower’s answer was a masterpiece of obfuscation.

  THE PRESIDENT: Well, Mr. Harsch, I must confess I cannot answer that question in advance.

  The only thing I know about war are two things: the most changeable factor in war is human nature in its day-by-day manifestation; but the only unchanging factor in war is human nature.

  And the next thing is that every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred, and in the way it is carried out.

  So that for a man to predict, particularly if he has the responsibility for making the decision, to predict what he is going to use, how he is going to do it, would I think exhibit his ignorance of war; that is what I believe.

  So I think you just have to wait, and that is the kind of prayerful decision that may some day face a President.

  We are trying to establish conditions where he doesn’t.66

  The Chinese evidently deciphered Ike’s answer and chose to stand pat. But the Joint Chiefs remained restive. At the end of March, Admiral Carney leaked word to the press alleging that the president and his advisers believed an attack on Quemoy and Matsu was imminent. Eisenhower was furious. Carney was rocking the boat. The last thing Ike wanted was talk of war. The next day, at the president’s direction, Hagerty provided his own leak to the White House press corps: “The President did not believe war was upon us.” Carney’s views were “parochial,” said Hagerty, and should not be confused with the facts of the matter.67 i In his diary, Ike wrote, “I believe hostilities are not so imminent as is indicated by the forebodings of a number of my associates. I have so often been through these periods of strain that I have become accustomed to the fact that most of the calamities that we anticipate really never occur.”68 Several days later, Eisenhower told Sam Rayburn that “the tricky business is to determine whether or not an attack on Quemoy and Matsu, if made, is truly a local operation or a preliminary to a major effort against Formosa.”69

  Eisenhower’s cool head defused the crisis. The bellicose rhetoric subsided, the war party in Washington pulled in their horns, and the Chinese flashed an all clear. At the first conference of Asian-African nations meeting at Bandung, Indonesia, on April 23, 1955, Chou En-lai declared the Chinese government was “willing to sit down with the United States government to discuss the question of relaxing tension in the Far East.”70 Eisenhower responded positively. If the Chinese Communists wanted to talk about a cease-fire, the president told his news conference on April 27, “we would be glad to meet with them and talk with them.”71

  The shelling of Quemoy and Matsu eased off, and by mid-May it stopped completely. Talks by American and Chinese representatives commenced on August 1, and shortly afterward, the last American prisoners held by the Chinese from the Korean War were quietly released.72

  Writing about the offshore island crisis years later, Eisenhower summed up the advice he had received. Former British prime minister Clement Attlee had urged him to liquidate Chiang Kai-shek. Anthony Eden advocated neutralizing Quemoy and Matsu. Various Democratic senators had urged the islands be abandoned. Admiral Radford and Senator Knowland wanted to defend the Tachens, blockade the Chinese coast, and bomb the mainland, while Syngman Rhee wanted to launch a “holy war of liberation.”73 Eisenhower charted his own course and emerged from the crisis with almost total victory. War with China had been avoided, Quemoy and Matsu remained in Nationalist hands, and the defense of Formosa was secure.

  Congress had given Eisenhower what amounted to a blank check when it adopted the Formosa Resolution, and Ike had delivered. Without excessive saber rattling, he had so confused the Chinese as to whether the United States would use atomic weapons to defend Quemoy and Matsu that they decided not to risk it. Eisenhower’s ambiguous public remarks had restored calm to a situation that could easily have triggered World War III. He did not have to use the bomb, he kept the peace, and with the exception of evacuating the Tachens, restored the status quo.

  As more than one observer has written, Eisenhower’s handling of the Quemoy-Matsu crisis was a tour de force. It was one of the great victories of his career, and the key had been his coolness under pressure—his calculated use of ambiguity and deception. Eisenhower was comfortable wrestling with uncertainty. “The beauty of Eisenhower’s policy,” wrote historian Robert Divine, “is that to this day no one can be sure whether or not he would have responded militarily to an invasion of the offshore islands, and whether he would have used nuclear weapons.”74 The chances are that Ike himself did not know. As he told Sam Rayburn, the tricky part was to determine what the Chinese were up to. It was a two-way street. The Chinese kept Eisenhower guessing, just as he kept them off balance. One thing stands out: As on D-Day and at Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower kept the final decision in his own hands.j

  * * *

  a Mamie’s Bolivia regulars included Mrs. Everett Hughes, Mrs. Walton Walker, and Mrs. Harry Butcher, all former neighbors from the Wyoming or the Wardman Park, as well as Mrs. George Allen and Mrs. Howard Snyder, the wife of Ike’s personal physician. J. B. West and Mary Lynn Kotz, Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies 161 (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1973).

  b ”Shangri-La” is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton—a mythical Himalayan utopia isolated from the outside world. The novel was made into a film of the same name by Frank Capra in 1937 and starred Ronald Colman. FDR was fond both of the novel and the film and named the presidential retreat accordingly. In 1942, when newsmen asked him where the bombers that bombed Tokyo had come from, the president mirthfully said, “Shangri-La,” a reference to the Himalayan utopia, not the presidential retreat. James Hilton, Lost Horizon (London: Macmillan, 1933). Also see Charles Allen, The Search for Shangri-La: A Journey into Tibetan History (London: Little, Brown, 1999); Presidential press conference, April 2
1, 1942, 19 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 291–92 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).

  c Alton Jones was killed in an air accident in 1962. He bequeathed his farms to the United States government as an addition to the Gettysburg National Military Park, subject to Ike’s continued use of the property until his death. On November 27, 1967, Eisenhower and Mamie gave their farm to the government as well, with the provision that Mamie could stay until her death. The farm is now maintained by the National Park Service and is open to the public.

  d As a young fellow growing up in Washington, D.C., I frequently held summer jobs on Capitol Hill. Often when work was over, I would go into the visitor’s gallery overlooking the House chamber and watch the proceedings. I still remember Speaker Rayburn’s command of those proceedings. On occasion he would ask for the yeas and nays. Sometimes the nays would be shouted far louder than the ayes. That did not bother Mr. Sam. The gavel would come down and Rayburn would announce that the ayes had it (or whatever outcome he desired). He was rarely challenged.

  e The St. Lawrence Seaway runs from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Duluth, Minnesota, on the western shore of Lake Superior, a total of 2,275 miles. More than two thousand ships traverse the seaway annually, with the trip from Lake Superior to the Atlantic averaging eight to ten days.