IN HIS MEMOIRS, Eisenhower complained that the day Dien Bien Phu fell, the banner headlines covered not that event but rather McCarthy’s demand for a test of Eisenhower’s right to use executive privilege to bar secret data to congressional investigators. Ten years later, Eisenhower said, it was plain to see that the action in Vietnam was far more important than McCarthy, who “ceased to command public attention shortly after that day in history.”1 What Eisenhower could not know was that almost exactly twenty years later the precedent of executive privilege he created in his response to McCarthy’s demand would play the central role in Nixon’s response to Watergate. In May 1974 it would not have been quite so self-evident that the headline writers had put the wrong story on top back in 1954.
Eisenhower took McCarthy’s demand far more seriously than he implied in his memoirs. In March, he had asked the Attorney General if the President could order federal personnel to not appear before McCarthy on the grounds that they were being abused. The reply was that there was no such precedent.2 On May 3 and 5, Eisenhower asked for further briefs on his power to withhold confidential information from Congress.
What bothered Eisenhower was how far down he could extend the blank wall. On May 11, Wilson called him to report that the McCarthy committee had demanded the names of all Army personnel who had any connection with the Peress case. Wilson said that Ridgway “violently objected” to this, and asked Eisenhower what to do. Eisenhower said that in this case the Army had better give in to avoid the appearance of a “cover-up.”3 Two days later, McCarthy was threatening to subpoena White House personnel. Eisenhower began to feel the pressure. In a conference with Adams and Hagerty, Eisenhower said it might be necessary to send one man from the White House, probably Adams, before the committee. He should give his name, and title, and then refuse to answer all questions under presidential order.4
The following day, May 14, Eisenhower told Hagerty that he was not even going to send Adams. “Congress has absolutely no right to ask them to testify in any way, shape, or form about the advice that they were giving to me at any time on any subject.” Eisenhower was angrier than he had ever been with McCarthy, because McCarthy had now pushed him to the point where he had to act. His response to McCarthy’s demands had become the central issue. With Adams, Lodge, and the others before his committee, McCarthy could have a field day. It made Eisenhower shudder to think of what McCarthy might bring up. Worst of all would be Oppenheimer.
What was at stake, as Eisenhower saw it, was the modern Presidency. Previous Presidents had been exceedingly reluctant to withhold information or witnesses from Congress, and Brownell was never able to find any convincing precedent for a doctrine of executive privilege. What Eisenhower felt so keenly was the need for such a doctrine for a President in the nuclear age. The reason there were no precedents was precisely because the situation was unprecedented. There were so many things Eisenhower felt he had to keep secret, like Oppenheimer, the H-bomb tests, the CIA’s covert activities, and a host of others, that he was willing to vastly expand the powers of the Presidency to do it. He told Hagerty, “If they want to make a test of this principle, I’ll fight them tooth and nail and up and down the country. It is a matter of principle with me and I will never permit it.”5
On May 17, at a leaders’ meeting, Eisenhower said that “any man who testifies as to the advice he gave me won’t be working for me that night. I will not allow people around me to be subpoenaed and you might just as well know it now.” Knowland protested that it would be a terrible thing if Eisenhower challenged Congress’ right to subpoena. Eisenhower repeated that “my people are not going to be subpoenaed.”6
That afternoon, Eisenhower released a letter to Wilson, directing Wilson to withhold information from the committee. The President put his case in sweeping terms: “It is essential to efficient and effective administration that employees of the Executive Branch be in a position to be completely candid in advising with each other on official matters.” Therefore “it is not in the public interest that any of their conversations or communications, or any documents or reproductions, concerning such advice be disclosed.”7 This was, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writes, “the most absolute assertion of presidential right to withhold information from Congress ever uttered to that day in American history.”8 Earlier Presidents had held that their conversations in Cabinet meetings were privileged and confidential, but none had ever dared extend this privilege to everybody in the Executive Branch. Congress was upset, Republicans and Democrats alike. The Army-McCarthy committee members told reporters that they could not possibly carry on unless Eisenhower relaxed the order. He was asked at a press conference two days later whether he intended to do so. “I have no intention whatsoever of relaxing or rescinding the order,” he declared. He said he hoped the hearings would end soon, “so these extraneous matters and these things that roam all up and down the alleys of government, of every kind of thought and idea, are kept out of them. Now I hope that disposes of my order.”9
McCarthy was livid. His real source of power was the power to subpoena, and he knew at once that his whole career was at stake. He therefore made a public appeal to federal employees to disregard Eisenhower’s orders and report directly to him on “graft, corruption, Communism, and treason.” Eisenhower took up the challenge. When Hagerty discussed McCarthy’s appeal with Eisenhower, the red-faced President damned “the complete arrogance of McCarthy.” Pacing around the room, speaking in rapid-fire order, Eisenhower said, “This amounts to nothing but a wholesale subversion of public service . . . McCarthy is deliberately trying to subvert the people we have in government. I think this is the most disloyal act we have ever had by anyone in the government of the United States.”
Eisenhower told Hagerty to make sure the subject came up at his next press conference, so that he would have the opportunity to tell the reporters “that in my opinion this is the most arrogant invitation to subversion and disloyalty that I have ever heard of. I won’t stand for it for one minute.”10 But between the time of that discussion and the press conference, Eisenhower spent another afternoon on the Oppenheimer case. He was beginning to think that the case was even worse than he had feared, that Oppenheimer really was a Communist, and really had significantly held back H-bomb development.11 But whatever the facts, Eisenhower remained determined to avoid a public debate on Oppenheimer, with its probable demoralizing effect on the atomic scientists. So he did not want to push McCarthy too far against the wall. He did not deliver the rough treatment that he had promised to give McCarthy at the press conference; instead he refused to answer any questions on the subject. He simply held to his order on executive privilege.12
Next McCarthy threatened once again to investigate the CIA. Eisenhower was delighted. He explained to his aides, “My boys, I am convinced of one thing. The more we can get McCarthy threatening to investigate our Intelligence, the more public support we are going to get. If there is any way I could trick him into renewing his threat, I would be very happy to do so and then let him have it.”13 In practice, however, he moved to outflank McCarthy by setting up his own committee “to conduct a study of the covert activities of the CIA,” and appointed General James H. Doolittle to head it.14
The Army-McCarthy hearings, meanwhile, droned on to their doleful conclusion. On June 18, the day after they ended, Eisenhower called Army counsel Joseph Welch to the Oval Office, where he congratulated Welch on his prosecution of the Army’s case. Welch said that the only good thing to come out of the hearings was that they had given the nation an opportunity to see McCarthy in action. Eisenhower agreed.15
And that indeed was the effective end of McCarthy. He still retained considerable strength in the polls, he still had his committee chairmanship, but he no longer had the power to frighten. The Army-McCarthy hearings had degenerated to ridiculous points of trivia, primarily because Eisenhower denied to the committee access to people and records that could have provided McCarthy with sensational disclosures. But with nothing substantial to go after, McCarthy was reduced to ranting and raving (and increasingly heavy drinking), which cost him his credibility. It was not the things Eisenhower did behind the scenes but rather his most public act, the assertion of the right of executive privilege, that was his major contribution to McCarthy’s downfall. At the time, few noticed and fewer commented on Eisenhower’s boldness in establishing executive privilege, which quickly came to be regarded as traditional.
• •
In the spring of 1954, the Supreme Court was scheduled to make its pronouncement in the school segregation cases. Brownell told Eisenhower that he thought the Court wanted to delay making a ruling as long as possible. Eisenhower laughingly replied that he hoped they would defer it until the next Administration took over. More seriously, the President said, “I don’t know where I stand, but I think I stand that the best interests of the United States demand an answer in keeping with past decisions.”16 He invited Warren to the White House for a stag dinner, along with Brownell, John W. Davis, who was counsel for the segregationists, and a number of other lawyers. Eisenhower had Davis sit near Warren, who in turn was on the President’s right hand. During dinner, Eisenhower—according to Warren—“went to considerable lengths to tell me what a great man Mr. Davis was.” And as the guests were filing out of the dining room, Eisenhower took Warren by the arm and said of the southerners, “These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”17
If Eisenhower intended to influence Warren, he failed. On May 17, the Court handed down its decision in the case of Brown v. Topeka. It declared segregation by race in public schools to be unconstitutional. Eisenhower was “considerably concerned,” Hagerty recorded in his diary the next day. The President thought that the southerners might “virtually cancel out their public education system,” putting in its place all-white “private” schools to which state money would be diverted. “The President expressed the fear that such a plan if it were followed through would not only handicap Negro children but would work to the detriment of the so-called ‘poor whites’ in the South.”18
In his memoirs, Warren wrote that he always believed that Eisenhower “resented our decision in Brown.” He added that with that decision, “[there] went our cordial relations.”19 Much later, in the sixties, Eisenhower frequently remarked that his biggest mistake was “the appointment of that dumb son of a bitch Earl Warren.”20 But Eisenhower did not have those feelings at the time; he came to them as a result of his disapproval of the Warren Court’s decisions in criminal and Communist cases in the early sixties (as Warren himself notes in another section of his memoirs).21 Although Eisenhower personally wished that the Court had upheld Plessy v. Ferguson, and said so on a number of occasions (but only in private), he was impressed by the 9 to 0 vote and he certainly was going to meet his responsibilities and enforce the law. But he would not comment on it in public. At a May 19 press conference, he was asked if he had any advice to give to the South as to how to react. “Not in the slightest,” Eisenhower replied. “The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional processes in this country; and I will obey.”22
Shortly thereafter, Eisenhower wrote Hazlett, “The segregation issue will, I think, become acute or tend to die out according to the character of the procedure orders that the Court will probably issue this winter. My own guess is that they will be very moderate and accord a maximum of initiative to local courts.”23 He was right about that. He admired Warren for his moderation in the pursuit of desegregation, and continued to support Warren strongly in his correspondence and conversation. In December 1955, when Hagerty asked about the possibilities of getting the Republican nomination for the Presidency for Warren, Eisenhower snapped back, “Not a chance, and I’ll tell you why. I know that the Chief Justice is very happy right where he is. He wants to go down in history as a great Chief Justice, and he certainly is becoming one. He is dedicated to the Court and is getting the Court back on its feet and back in respectable standing again.”24
“Both Eisenhower and Warren,” Herbert Brownell once said, “were very reserved men. If you’d try to put your arm around either of them, he’d remember it for sixty days.”25 And William Ewald, an Eisenhower speech writer, puts it perfectly when he says of Eisenhower and Warren, “For more than seven years they sat, each on his eminence, at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, by far the two most towering figures in Washington, each playing out a noble role, in tragic inevitable estrangement.”26
What hurt was not Eisenhower’s private disapproval of Brown, but his refusal to give it a public endorsement. As with McCarthy, Eisenhower insisted time and again that he had neither need nor right to comment. Even as violence flared across the South, as the implementation of desegregation began, Eisenhower refused to ever say that he thought segregation was morally wrong. That allowed the bitter-end segregationists to claim that Eisenhower was secretly on their side, which they said justified their tactics.27 Warren, and many others, thought that one word from Eisenhower would have made possible a smoother, easier, and quicker transition period. But Eisenhower never said the word. He insisted that it was not his role to comment on Court decisions, just as firmly as he insisted that the Court’s ruling had a “binding effect” on everyone. He told Hazlett, “I hold to the basic purpose. There must be respect for the Constitution—which means the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution—or we shall have chaos. This I believe with all of my heart—and shall always act accordingly.”28 That was a long way from President Andrew Jackson’s famous dictum, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” But it was also a long way from saying that Brown was morally right. He missed a historic opportunity to provide moral leadership. In fact, until Little Rock in 1957 he provided almost no leadership at all on the most fundamental social problem of his time.
• •
One place where he did supply leadership was in the worldwide struggle against the Communists, especially in Central America, although here too he was careful to operate in private, and secretly. Reports from two men he trusted above all others—his brother Milton and Beetle Smith—had convinced him that Guatemala was fast falling to the Communists. Milton had made a fact-finding trip to Latin America for his brother in 1953; when he returned, Milton said that Guatemala had “succumbed to Communist infiltration.” Smith, six months later, told Eisenhower that “the Guatemalan government has abundantly proved its Communist sympathies.”29 Many other observers, however, including some in the State Department, said that the “proof” was lacking, that Jacobo Arbenz was a democratically elected President who was trying to carry out a relatively mild land-reform program. According to this view, the critics of Arbenz were using his toleration of the Communist Party as a red flag; their real objection was to Arbenz’ nationalization of some of United Fruit’s vast idle acreage in Guatemala. And it certainly was true that United Fruit had some highly placed friends in the Administration; among others of Eisenhower’s closest advisers, the two Dulles brothers, Bobby Cutler, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Sinclair Weeks—and even Ann Whitman—had a financial stake in United Fruit, and thus a direct interest in overthrowing Arbenz.30
Eisenhower, too, wanted Arbenz removed, not so much to protect United Fruit but because he genuinely believed that Arbenz either was himself a Communist or had been taken over by them. Sometime in late 1953 or early 1954 (it is impossible to pinpoint the project’s inception), Eisenhower told the CIA to go ahead with Operation Pbsuccess, a covert action designed to drive Arbenz from office and replace him with someone more acceptable to the Americans. Planning took place with utmost stealth, as Richard Immerman writes in his authoritative account of the incident. Only Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers, Cutler, and a handful of others knew that an operation was even being considered. The CIA marked its communications to the President and the Secretary of State “top secret Ita,” a superclassification that restricted circulation of the document to the recipient. Later, the Agency burned most of the papers generated by Pbsuccess. All agents brought in on the operation were sworn to secrecy. Eisenhower usually discussed the project with the Dulles brothers at a Sunday brunch that Eleanor Dulles hosted for her two brothers each week.31
The model for Pbsuccess was Ajax, the CIA coup the previous year in Iran. It involved turning the Army against Arbenz, frightening him into leaving the country, then staging a coup. Eisenhower’s guidelines to the CIA were that there was to be no direct United States intervention. The planners could not use military force; they would have to use deception, much as they had against Mossadegh. Dulles believed that the Agency could convince Arbenz that Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, the CIA’s chosen successor, was at the head of a major insurrectionary force, and that if necessary the United States was ready to back him up with arms. But as Immerman insists, “The Eisenhower administration never intended to commit United States troops or substantial equipment to the effort.”32
In April, the CIA prepared Pbsuccess for action. On May 15, a Swedish merchant vessel, the Alfhem, docked in Guatemala. It contained a load of small artillery pieces and small arms from Czechoslovakia. Foster Dulles announced the arrival in a press conference and denounced this blatant violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Washington was in an uproar. Senator Wiley, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the shipment “part of the master plan of world Communism.” Eisenhower asserted that this “quantity [of arms] far exceeded any legitimate, normal requirements for the Guatemalan armed forces.”33 He was right, but the arms were not intended for the armed forces. Arbenz distrusted his own military, with good reason, as the CIA had been busy subverting the colonels and generals with money and arguments about Arbenz’ supposed Communist tendencies. Arbenz therefore intended to distribute the arms to his supporters in order to create a people’s militia, free of any control by the Army.
Eisenhower moved immediately. He ordered an airlift of fifty tons of rifles, pistols, machine guns, and ammunition to Guatemala’s neighbors, Nicaragua and Honduras, both ruled by fanatic anti-Communist dictators. Eisenhower also declared a naval blockade of Guatemala, called for a meeting of the OAS, and ordered the CIA to put the first phase of Pbsuccess into operation.34
Pbsuccess consisted of a handful of Guatemalans, hired by the CIA, and their leader, Castillo Armas, who had been personally selected by agent Howard Hunt. Richard Bissell was in charge. Its principal asset was a radio station in Honduras, which beamed propaganda into Guatemala City, along with “flashes” from the “front,” where supposedly major battles were taking place between Castillo Armas’ “invading force” and the Army. Actually, as Bissell himself later explained, Castillo Armas’ force was at best a “ragtag” group that had yet to set foot on Guatemalan soil. But the excitement the radio broadcasts created in Guatemala, added to the intense diplomatic and propaganda pressure the United States government was putting on, led Arbenz to order martial law, and to ask the Russians for more arms.35
The Soviets responded by arranging to ship ammunition to Guatemala. On June 14, however, American Army officers in Hamburg seized the freighter. The officer in charge admitted that the shipment was perfectly legal and all papers were in order; therefore he had “detained but not confiscated” the ship. The British were furious, both at the seizure and at Dulles’ proposal that ships bound for Guatemala voluntarily submit to a search by U.S. Navy vessels. Eden responded, “There is no general power of search on the high seas in peacetime.”36 Robert Murphy and other State Department officials then told Eisenhower that it was “a bad mistake” to violate “the high principle of freedom of the seas.”37
But instead of calling off the blockade, Eisenhower intensified it. Simultaneously, he told Allen Dulles to put the final stage of Pbsuccess into action. On June 16, at a news conference, Eisenhower limited himself to a few noncommittal remarks about Guatemala, concluding, “I couldn’t go beyond that in talking about the situation.”38 Two days later, Allen Dulles reported that “there would be an anti-Communist uprising in Guatemala very shortly,” which meant Pbsuccess was in full gear. “Officially we don’t know anything about it,” Hagerty wrote in his diary.39 The next day, June 19, The New York Times’ headline proclaimed, “Revolt Launched in Guatemala: Land-Air-Sea Invasion Reported: Risings Under Way in Key Cities.” That was putting it rather grandiloquently. In fact, Castillo Armas’ “army” of 150 men had crossed the Honduran border, advanced six miles into Guatemala, settled down in the Church of the Black Christ—and waited for the Arbenz regime to collapse.
But nothing happened. The people did not rally to Castillo Armas’ cause, the Guatemalan Army continued to sit in its barracks, refusing to get involved, and the Castillo Armas “army” stayed in its church. Late in the afternoon of June 22, Eisenhower held a meeting in the Oval Office with the Dulles brothers and Henry Holland, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America. Allen Dulles reported that without some bombing raids against Guatemala City, the “rebellion” might soon die of boredom. The Guatemalan Army would not drive Castillo Armas out of the country, but neither would it turn on Arbenz. Dulles further reported that Anastasio Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator, had offered to give Castillo Armas two P-51 fighter-bombers if the United States would agree to replace them. Dulles said this was the critical moment for Pbsuccess. Holland interrupted to say that the United States should keep hands off because the Latin-American republics would, “if our action became known, interpret our shipment of planes as intervention in Guatemala’s internal affairs.” But Allen Dulles insisted that supplying the two P-51s “was the only hope for Castillo Armas, who was obviously the only hope of restoring freedom to Guatemala.”
Eisenhower asked Dulles, “What do you think Castillo’s chances would be without the aircraft?” Dulles replied, “About zero.” “Suppose we supply the aircraft. What would the chances be then?” Dulles thought “about twenty percent.” As Eisenhower later put it, he “knew from experience the important psychological impact of even a small amount of air support, . . . our proper course of action—indeed my duty—was clear to me.” He told Dulles to give Somoza the P-51s.40
So Castillo Armas got his planes. Meanwhile (something Eisenhower did not reveal in his memoirs), American bombers, flown by CIA pilots, were already based at Managua’s international airport, and they joined in the air offensive. Arbenz asked the Security Council of the U.N. to put the Guatemalan situation on its agenda. He asked for U.N. observers, something the United States was determined to prevent, because observers would certainly identify the planes as American. But despite American opposition, France and Britain announced that they were supporting Arbenz in the U.N. Their action outraged the President. He told his aides, “We have been too damned nice” to the NATO allies. He singled out the British, who, he declared, “expect us to give them a free ride and side with them and yet they won’t even support us on Guatemala.” Eisenhower said he would teach them a lesson and show them that “they have no right to stick their noses into matters which concern this hemisphere entirely.”41 He then instructed Lodge to use the veto to keep Guatemala off the agenda, if necessary; America had never previously used the veto.
Lodge met with the British and French representatives. He told them he was prepared to veto, then added that Eisenhower had instructed him to say “if Great Britain and France felt that they must take an independent line backing the present government in Guatemala, we would feel free to take an equally independent line concerning such matters as Egypt and North Africa.” Britain and France then abstained on the vote, the United States did not have to use the veto, and Guatemala did not get on the agenda.42
The bombing raids continued, Arbenz lost his nerve, resigned, and was replaced by a military dictatorship. The closest observers of this incident believe that it was not the bombing raids that broke Arbenz’ will so much as it was his knowledge that Eisenhower was putting his planes into the operation.43 Arbenz had to assume that Eisenhower, once committed, would escalate the American military effort however far he had to go until he had achieved his objective. Arbenz was almost certainly right in his anticipation of Eisenhower’s probable actions in the event that he, Arbenz, tried to stay in office. Sometime later, Eisenhower told Andrew Goodpaster that “he had gone quite deeply into the Guatemalan situation” and the decision to act had been made. At this “critical period,” Goodpaster recalled Eisenhower saying, “some of those, of his principal associates began to get nervous about it, after we had committed ourselves. And his answer to them, which stayed very clear in his mind, was that the time to have those thoughts was before we started down this course, that if you at any time take the route of violence or support of violence . . . then you commit yourself to carry it through, and it’s too late to have second thoughts, not having faced up to the possible consequences, when you’re midway in an operation.”44
Eisenhower was highly pleased by the outcome. At a June 30 news conference, he announced that he had heard that the “Communists and their great supporters were leaving Guatemala. If I would try to conceal the fact that this gives me great satisfaction, I would just be deceitful. Of course it has given me great satisfaction.”45 On January 19, 1955, when Eisenhower gave his first televised news conference, he listed the elimination of the Arbenz regime as one of his proudest accomplishments. In his memoirs, it was the only CIA covert operation that he mentioned, and he did so in some detail and with great pride.46
But he gave his account a lighthearted touch by making it appear that the only risk the United States took was to send two planes to Somoza. In fact there were more planes involved, but what really matters was how much more than planes Eisenhower had put at stake. First, the prestige of the United States in a military action which he would not hesitate to escalate if necessary. As he so firmly told Goodpaster, once you start this sort of thing you don’t back down. Second, at a time when the Geneva Conference was at a critical point and Eisenhower badly needed British and French support for SEATO and EDC, he threatened to break with them—over tiny Guatemala. Third, he declared a naval blockade and enforced it. Fourth, he had authorized the first American use of the veto in the U.N., which would have given away one of America’s prize propaganda assets, that only the Russians used the veto.
Clearly, the President took grave risks over Guatemala. He also opened himself to the criticism that American policy toward Central America was dictated by United Fruit (the company, incidentally, got its land back from Castillo Armas). But he did not overthrow the elected government of Guatemala, or risk SEATO and EDC, or declare a blockade, in order to protect the holdings of the United Fruit stockholders. What he feared was not the loss of American profits in Guatemala, but rather the loss of all Central America. Milton had reported to him that the area was a breeding ground for Communism, because of the awful extremes between rich and poor, and that long term the United States had to work to correct the disparity. But short term, Milton had warned, the United States could never afford to allow Communism to establish a foothold in Central America. If the Russians ever got a base there, they could export subversion, arms, a whole guerrilla uprising to the surrounding countryside. In Eisenhower’s nightmare, the dominoes would fall in both directions, to the south of Guatemala toward Panama, endangering the Canal Zone, and to the north, bringing Communism to the Rio Grande. “My God,” Eisenhower told his Cabinet, “just think what it would mean to us if Mexico went Communist!” He shook his head at the thought of that long, unguarded border, and all those Mexican Communists to the south of it.47 To prevent the dominoes from falling, he was prepared to, and did, take great risks over tiny Guatemala.
• •
At the height of the uproar over Guatemala, Churchill and Eden arrived for talks. It was June 25, the day the Security Council was to vote on Guatemala. Eisenhower “talked cold turkey” to the British, who then reluctantly and unhappily agreed to abstain and to recommend to the French that they do likewise. Churchill later complained to Eisenhower that “Dulles has said a couple of things to Eden that need not have been said.”48 For the rest of Churchill’s visit his time was taken up with an address to Congress, stag dinners, formal and informal receptions, and other social events. Eisenhower found it difficult to talk to Churchill about matters of substance. The PM had had two strokes since he last saw Eisenhower at Bermuda, was in his dotage, quite feeble, could not hear, kept repeating points or asking the same question, and seemed almost to embarrass Eden and the rest of the British delegation. (One Britisher told Hagerty that the leadership no longer gave Churchill confidential information because he was likely to spill it in his next appearance before Commons.49) As Churchill was deaf, it was easy to keep information from him. Hagerty noted that during consultations, Churchill “constantly broke in with questions that had to be explained to him by either the President or Eden in a shouting tone of voice.”50
It was all a great strain on Eisenhower—too many parties, too much shouting, too many people who wanted to meet Churchill and could not be denied (Ann Whitman and the aides were all agog at having the great man in the White House; everyone in the Cabinet wanted at least a few minutes alone with Churchill). Fortunately for Eisenhower, when Churchill left, the President was able to get away to Camp David for a long Fourth of July weekend.
All the gang came to Camp David. Mamie kept the women busy playing bolivia and talking; Eisenhower exhausted the men by insisting on as much bridge and golf as possible. The men and women got together only at their meals. Everyone brought gifts for the Eisenhowers; Pete Jones gave Mamie a solid-gold bracelet and Eisenhower a gold vest-pocket watch. Priscilla Slater questioned Pete’s good taste, saying that the gifts seemed a bit lavish. On Sunday they all drove to Gettysburg, where the women inspected the interior decoration while the men checked the construction and talked about getting Eisenhower a good herd of Angus cattle. By Tuesday the various members of the gang were ready to return to their homes and work, but Eisenhower announced that he had been able to readjust his schedule and could stay an extra day. He asked the gang to stay with him. Over that afternoon’s bridge game, Eisenhower said he could “not begin to tell us how happy he was.” It was the best week of his life, Eisenhower declared, free from Washington, having fun with his pals, seeing the progress at Gettysburg and how happy it made Mamie.51
Shortly after returning to Washington, Eisenhower sent a private letter to Foster Dulles. The President said that his wine bill was getting completely out of hand because of all the entertaining he had to do, and that he had especially enjoyed some French white wine Dulles had given to him. He asked Dulles if the ambassador to France might not be able to arrange for importing a few dozen cases of that wine “without the need for paying duty.” Eisenhower admitted that he would be “horribly embarrassed” if this deal became public knowledge, but the savings on customs duties would be so great that he wanted it done if it could be done “quietly.”52
• •
Back in Washington, the business at hand was getting Eisenhower’s program through Congress and preparing for the fall congressional elections. Eisenhower was convinced that his middle-of-the-road program was best for the country, and best for the Republican Party. He thought that if the party supported him, Republican congressmen would be assured of re-election. Many Republicans and their supporters strongly disagreed and continued to oppose the President on specific issues. His proposal of a Health Reinsurance Bill for private health-insurance companies was one example. The AMA was dead set against it, and the Old Guard supported the AMA, on the grounds that this was the entering wedge of socialized medicine. When Knowland made that argument to Eisenhower at a leaders’ meeting, Eisenhower cut him off. “Listen, Bill,” the President said, “what do you think we’re going to tell the people of the United States? . . . As far as I’m concerned, the American Medical Association is just plain stupid. This plan of ours would have shown the people how we could improve their health and stay out of socialized medicine.” To Charlie Halleck, he said, “I don’t believe the people are going to stand for being deprived of the opportunity to get medical insurance. If they don’t get a bill like this, they will go for socialized medicine sooner or later and the Medical Association will have no one to blame but itself.” He complained that there was no way to do business with the hierarchy of the AMA, “a little group of reactionary men dead set against any change.”53 But he did not get the bill passed.
The reactionaries were giving him trouble on many fronts. He told one friend that Washington was full of people—important people—“who want to eliminate everything that the federal government has ever done that represents social advance. For example, all of the regulatory commissions are anathema to these people. They want to abolish them completely. They believe that there should be no trade union laws and the government should do nothing even to encourage pension plans.” To one such reactionary who had made a specific proposal, Eisenhower rejoined, “I must say that if you think you are going to get rid of the graduated income tax, you are certainly planning to live far longer than I am.” His own stance, he explained, was that “excluding the field of moral values, anything that affects or is proposed for masses of humans is wrong if the position it seeks is at either end of possible argument.”54
Eisenhower wanted his entire program put through. He told his Cabinet, “I want to remind you of what Nelson said just before Trafalgar. He told his officers that ‘as long as we have any enemy ship afloat the victory is not won.’ That’s the way I feel about this whole business.”55 When the Republican leaders in Congress told him that they could not stop a bill giving pay raises and the right to form a union to postal employees, Eisenhower lost his temper. This was a “raid on the Treasury,” he thundered, at a time when the Administration was within sight of balancing the budget. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded to know. He swore he would veto such a bill, and told the leaders that they were “opening up a Pandora’s box.” Allowing federal employees to unionize would be “a terrible mistake. Suppose you had an organized Army reporting and responsible to union bosses—wouldn’t that be something! I am not going to be slick on this one. I am not going to run around the cabbage patch.”56
Despite his outburst, the Republicans would not support him on the issue. There were too many votes to be won, and too few to be lost, on a postal pay raise. The representatives were all facing re-election, as were one-third of the senators. Eisenhower could afford to take the high ground; they had to get the votes. The situation led Eisenhower to propose a constitutional amendment to his Cabinet, one that would make the terms of the representatives four years instead of two. If that were done, they would have to run when the President did, and would be much more amenable to party control and to acting for the good of the country rather than for their own re-election. As things stood, Eisenhower said, congressmen were “always running.” He said he just tossed out the idea for consideration, “but I’ve been thinking about it for months.”57 His idea, however, was as much of a will-of-the-wisp as was his continuing notion to form a third party that would stand between the extreme Democrats and the extreme Republicans, and nothing ever came of it.
As Congress prepared to end its business and face the voters, any number of vote-catching bills were introduced and rushed through the legislative process. One of them was to stop TV and radio advertisements for liquor and cigarettes. Eisenhower was opposed: “What are we going to turn out to be—a police state?” Another proposed to insert the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Eisenhower was “very much in favor of it. Why not get up a speech and say that the only one who would be opposed to this would be a Communist?”58
The economy was improving, but not rapidly, and the Democrats were talking depression. Eisenhower deplored the way they played politics with the economy. “The Democrats are really riding for a hell of a fall if they turn out to be wrong prophets of a depression,” he told the Republican leaders. “How a man can preach depression for the sake of a few votes—well, I’ll be a son of a sea cook if I don’t think a man who does that is—well [expletive deleted].”59 The President urged his Cabinet members to spend as much of their appropriation as soon as possible, in order to help recovery; he sent a note to Sherman Adams: “Where do we stand on our ‘dramatic’ plan to get 50 billion dollars’ worth of self-liquidating highways under construction?”60
One place the President was not willing to spend money was on TVA. The Democrats wanted to expand it; Eisenhower would have liked to sell it to private industry. He never dared to go that far, but he was constantly complaining about TVA to his Cabinet. “Every river valley in America is open to development” was his position. Therefore, “Why favor Tennessee?” He thought that if the government was going to get into the business of producing electricity, it should do so “everywhere.”61 In the West, where the Truman Administration had started or proposed a number of TVA-like power projects, the Eisenhower Administration took most of the sites out of federal hands, including the biggest, Hells Canyon on the Snake River, and sold them to private companies. When Tennessee politicians asked to expand TVA so it could provide for the growing needs of both the AEC and the city of Memphis, Eisenhower flatly refused. Instead, he authorized a contract with Edgar Dixon and Eugene Yates, who had formed a company to build steam plants to provide additional electricity for both the AEC and Memphis. Eisenhower was pleased at his success in preventing the “encroachment of socialistic tendencies” on the utility industry. He could see no reason why the “nation’s taxpayers should be forever committed to providing cheap power for the people in the TVA region.”62
On TVA, most Republicans were with him. On the tariff, most were opposed. The congressmen were concerned with jobs and profits; Eisenhower was concerned about world strategy and economics. Various bills to halt Japanese imports, for example, seemed to him to be shortsighted at best. Without a healthy trade relationship with the United States, he told one trade group that had come to him to protest against Japanese imports, Japan “with its vast population and resources might be lost to the Communists.”63 Long term, he wanted to get the Japanese to sell their goods on the Asian mainland, which was one reason he put such stress on holding on in Indochina. He told the Cabinet, “If China finds that it can buy cheap straw hats, cheap cotton shirts, sneakers, bicycles, and all the rest of that sort of stuff from Japan, it would seem to me that would set up the need within China for dependence upon Japan.” In return, Japan could get raw materials from China. “We will have to exercise great care and we will have to watch Japan very closely,” he concluded.64
The Old Guard wanted to stop all trade with Communist countries. Even Eisenhower’s majority leader in the Senate, Knowland, wanted such a blockade. “Knowland has no foreign policy,” Eisenhower complained to Gruenther, “except to develop high blood pressure whenever he mentions the words ‘Red China.’ ”65 Once again, the Old Guard seemed to Eisenhower to be impossibly stupid. He said that trade with the satellite nations “would in the end weaken the Russian hold on them . . . Trade is the strongest weapon of the diplomat and it should be used more.” In Eisenhower’s view, “Anyone who says that to trade with a Red country is in effect advocating a traitorous act just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”66
As the summer wore on, and the campaign began, the Republicans escalated their political rhetoric, led by the McCarthyites in the Senate, who were hitting hard on the “twenty years of treason” theme. Nixon, out campaigning, was beginning to sound like them. Eisenhower called Nixon into his office to tell him to back off. The President said he needed Democratic votes to get his program passed and Nixon was not helping by calling the Democrats traitors. Nixon explained that he had meant to attack only Acheson and Truman, not the entire party. Eisenhower replied that any talk about treason by the Democrats was “indefensible,” and he ordered Nixon to stop it.67 Nixon stopped—at least for a while.
In early August, McCarthy said that Marshall “would sell out his grandmother for personal advantage.” Eisenhower was asked at a news conference what he thought about the charge. Eisenhower launched into a full and spirited defense of Marshall (“a brilliant record”) but was careful to note that he “knew nothing” about Marshall’s performance in China after the war.68 Privately, however, he blamed Marshall for the loss of China. As he explained to Nixon, “The reason we lost China . . . was because [Marshall] had insisted upon Chiang Kai-shek taking Communists into his government, against Chiang’s judgment.”69
The reason we know about this, and other private conversations with Nixon and other visitors to the Oval Office, is that the President had wired the office in order to tape-record his conversations. He had a switch under his desk that turned the machine on; Ann Whitman complained that he often forgot to use it, and when he did activate the machine the talk was usually garbled. Still, innumerable records were made. Eisenhower recommended to his Cabinet that the members tape-record all their telephone calls, or at least have them monitored (as were all the President’s calls). Laughing, Eisenhower explained, “You know, boys, it’s a good thing when you’re talking to someone you don’t trust to get a record made of it. There are some guys I just don’t trust in Washington, and I want to have myself protected so that they can’t later report that I said something else.”70 Eisenhower nearly always remembered to turn on the machine when he was talking to Nixon.
• •
With elections in the air, Eisenhower’s mind turned to his own political situation. He had been insisting for a year and a half that he would not be a candidate for re-election. On July 27, however, he told Hagerty that “I will run for another term,” but warned that “I am telling everyone that they better not speculate on this and let me make the decision. After all, it is my life and it will have to be my decision.” He then confessed that for the first time he was beginning to feel the tension of his office. The Geneva Conference had just concluded, on a sour note for the United States, and he was impatient with Congress. He hated “the multiplicity of petty problems that many people bring to me. The selfishness of the members of Congress is incredible . . . They are just about driving me nuts.”71
Eisenhower did not tell Hagerty that he was also disappointed in his aides, but he was. He missed Emmet Hughes and C. D. Jackson, especially Jackson. On August 4, he wrote Bill Robinson a five-page, single-spaced letter, saying that he needed help. He wished he could find someone—“A man of stature, of good judgment, of complete objectivity”—who could give him advice. “I need a person to evaluate the importance of the decisions I must make,” Eisenhower said, “to take over at least some of them . . . make the necessary study, and come up with what seems to be the best possible solution.” He hinted that he thought Robinson could handle the assignment, but Robinson was about to take over as president of Coca-Cola and, anyway, wanted to keep his relationship with Eisenhower on an informal basis.72
Next to Robinson, Eisenhower wanted Jackson back. But Jackson was making too much money at Time-Life to abandon his post for the pay of a White House aide. On August 11, he did come down from New York for a conference with the President and his aides, at Eisenhower’s direct request, to provide a critique of the Administration to date. Jackson said that the first thing that was wrong was the absence of follow-through. Atoms for peace, for example, had been launched with great fanfare—and then nothing happened. Eisenhower interrupted to say that it had taken six full months to get a definite no out of the Soviets on that one, and that now he was prepared to go ahead with atoms for peace without the Russians. Jackson then complained about Eisenhower’s McCarthy policy, saying that the President was still allowing the senator to run rampant. Eisenhower’s reaction to McCarthy, Jackson said, was “utterly incomprehensible to really serious people.” He warned that the impression was getting about that Eisenhower did not like his job. The government was not doing anything dramatic, at home or abroad. There was a sense of stagnation. Jackson wanted action.
To that end, Jackson proposed a “world economic plan” and had brought along a draft on the subject. He thought it necessary, dramatic, and good for both Eisenhower and the Republican Party. Eisenhower disagreed. He thought “we ought first of all to be content with little steps, even if we use the occasional dramatic appeal.” Eisenhower felt that there had been altogether too much talk about America’s role as a world leader, especially by Truman. The President thought a “world economic plan” much too ambitious, and confessed that “trying to sell it to Congress scares me.” The meeting concluded on that unsatisfactory note. Jackson agreed to fly down one day a week to “help out,” but that was the only positive achievement of Eisenhower’s attempt to get better advice.73
• •
The most serious problem Eisenhower had to face in the summer of 1954, and the one of the largest long-term significance, was Vietnam. The Geneva Conference was under way, with Beetle Smith there as the American representative. With Dien Bien Phu gone, the Communists at Geneva were stalling on the talks while the Vietminh regrouped after their victory and prepared to attack the French throughout the delta region of Vietnam. Which upset Eisenhower most—French defeatism or British refusal to cooperate—would be impossible to say. Australia and New Zealand had told Dulles they were willing to join a regional alliance; Eisenhower said that they were “more realistic and possibly more courageous than those who are apparently willing to accept any arrangement that allows them . . . to save a bit of face and possibly a couple of miserable trading posts in the Far East.”74 On May 5, Eisenhower told a news conference that “we will never give up,” and again gave a strong pitch for SEATO. That afternoon, Smith sent word that the British were proposing a five-power grouping (the U.K., U.S., France, New Zealand, and Australia) that would have its headquarters in Singapore. That was a bit of an improvement in the British position, but not much—Eisenhower wanted Asian nations included in the alliance—and he instructed Dulles to tell Eden that the United States would “not agree to a ‘white man’s party’ to determine the problems of Southeast Asia.”75 The President also told Dulles to work on Churchill’s “sense of history” by implying that the British in their desperate search for a negotiated settlement in Indochina “were really promoting a second Munich.”76
Meanwhile a major war scare ensued. The French convinced themselves that the Chinese were on the verge of intervening with jet aircraft to aid the Vietminh in their final drive to Hanoi. If that happened, the French wanted a guarantee of a massive and immediate American intervention. The JCS, the NSC, the State Department, and the White House all began to study the options intensively. The JCS, led by Radford, who had already made a series of unauthorized promises of support to the French, were ready to go—not to Indochina, but to China itself. Bobby Cutler reported to the President that the NSC also believed that “there was little use discussing any ‘defense’ of Southeast Asia; that U.S. power should be directed against the source of the peril, which was, at least in the first instance, China, and that in this connection atomic weapons should be used.”77 (Shortly thereafter, Eisenhower told Dulles that he felt “the NSC work was too hurried, and did not deal sufficiently with the long-range problems.”78)
Dulles was also breathing fire. He thought Chinese intervention in Vietnam would be the “equivalent of a declaration of war against the United States.” The Secretary of State advised the President to get a resolution through Congress at once, authorizing him to respond to a possible Chinese intervention as he saw fit. Eisenhower told Dulles (as recorded in notes taken by Cutler), “If he was to go to the Congress for authority he would not ask any halfway measures. If the situation warranted it, there should be declared a state of war with China; and possibly there should be a strike at Russia.” That took Dulles’ breath away. The President’s next point eliminated the idea of a unilateral intervention by the United States. Eisenhower said, “He would never have the United States go into Indochina alone.” Returning to his first point, Eisenhower said: “If the U.S. took action against Communist China, the President said there should be no halfway measures or frittering around. The Navy and Air Force should go in with full power, using new weapons, and strike at air bases and ports in mainland China.”79
Then Eisenhower called in the JCS. He told the Chiefs that an atomic assault against China would inevitably bring Russia into the war; therefore if the United States were to launch a preventive attack, it had to be against both Russia and China simultaneously. Looking directly at Radford, Eisenhower said suppose it would be possible to destroy Russia. “I want you to carry this question home with you: Gain such a victory, and what do you do with it? Here would be a great area from the Elbe to Vladivostok . . . torn up and destroyed, without government, without its communications, just an area of starvation and disaster. I ask you what would the civilized world do about it? I repeat there is no victory except through our imaginations.”80
With all the loose talk going on in Washington about atomic strikes, reporters inevitably heard about the JCS and NSC recommendations. At a news conference, Eisenhower was asked to comment on preventive war. He replied, “I don’t believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.” Was his answer based on military or moral considerations? “It seems to me that when, by definition, a term is just ridiculous in itself, there is no use in going any further,” Eisenhower replied.81
Syngman Rhee flew to Washington to tell Eisenhower that the moment had come to strike hard at the Communists. “Let me tell you that if war comes,” Eisenhower replied to Rhee, “it will be horrible. Atomic war will destroy civilization. War today is unthinkable with the weapons which we have at our command. If the Kremlin and Washington ever lock up in a war, the results are too horrible to contemplate. I can’t even imagine them.”82
Fortunately, the war scare in Indochina went away as quickly as it came on. The Chinese Air Force did not intervene in the delta. It did not have to, as the Vietminh were driving forward on their own, and the Laniel government in Paris was tottering. Gruenther reported to Eisenhower that the French were threatening “a wave of anti-American outbursts in France with great bitterness because the Allies let us down.” Eisenhower replied with a long, angry letter, reciting in some detail all that he had done for the French, and expressing his own bitterness that the United States should be blamed for French failures. Most galling was the continued French refusal, “even now,” to grant independence to the Associated States.83
Four days later, on June 12, the Laniel government fell by a narrow margin, 306–293. On June 18 Pierre Mendès-France took office as Premier on the strength of a pledge that he would secure a peace in Indochina by July 20. Privately, he told Smith—who had flown from Geneva to Paris—that he might be meeting with Chou En-lai. Smith strongly advised him not to. (Smith, who was living a hectic life, was suffering terribly from his ulcers. Eisenhower sent him a handwritten note of thanks for his efforts, concluding, “I am lost in admiration of your patience, ability, and skill.”84 Three months later Smith had to resign.) Smith suspected a French sell-out. Neither he, Dulles, nor Eisenhower wanted to be a part of the surrender arrangements at Geneva. Smith therefore returned to the United States, and the American delegation at Geneva was reduced to an “observer” status.
Meanwhile, Churchill and Eden came to Washington; one of the things they discussed with Eisenhower was the French and EDC. Laniel had been a strong supporter of EDC, but Mendès-France was shaky. The final vote on ratification was imminent. Without EDC, there was no program for German rearmament. Before meeting with the British, Eisenhower told Dulles, “Churchill is not supporting EDC but he won’t say so, so both you and I, Foster, had got to be very cagey on this. We are not interested in anything but EDC and we have got to be tough about it.”85 To get British cooperation on EDC, Eisenhower had something to offer Churchill. The British had been building bombers designed to carry atomic weapons, but they had more bombers than they did weapons. Eisenhower told Churchill, “If we ever get into trouble when we need these bombs it is our duty to provide them as quickly as possible to the British Air Force.” Eisenhower privately told Dulles his reason: “I don’t want to see American crews and American crews alone take the punishment they will have to take to deliver those bombs.”86 To influence both the French and the British on the EDC vote, Eisenhower had Knowland steer through the Senate a resolution, adopted unanimously, authorizing the President to take any steps necessary to “restore sovereignty to Germany and to enable her to contribute to the maintenance of peace and security.” In other words, if France and Britain did not get behind EDC, the Americans would help the Germans rearm themselves, outside an all-European army, but inside NATO as a full partner.87
After discussing EDC, Eisenhower and Churchill turned to Indochina. They agreed on what their minimum objectives were: independence for Laos and Cambodia, with a Vietminh agreement to withdraw from those countries; partition of Vietnam at the 17th parallel, with the Vietminh taking over in the north.88 As the Vietminh were demanding the whole of Indochina, and as they anticipated taking it by force in the near future, to ask them to settle for only northern Vietnam was to ask for major concessions from the victorious party. Nevertheless, accepting partition represented a major concession by the Americans, who in public were still insisting that the French should fight on. Eisenhower knew he would have the Old Guard to contend with, as well as his own military, whose inclination remained that it was better to launch an atomic attack on China than to accept the loss of northern Vietnam to the Communists. At a press conference on June 30, James Reston asked the President if he was willing to accept a partition that enslaved millions of people. Eisenhower replied, “I won’t be a party to a treaty that makes anybody a slave; but to make such a statement doesn’t mean you are not going to study every single region, every single incident that comes up, and decide what to do at the moment.”89
While Eisenhower was meeting with Churchill, Mendès-France was meeting with Chou En-lai. Those two agreed to a temporary partition of Vietnam, to be instituted with a cease-fire and ended with nationwide elections within two years. They also agreed to independence for Laos and Cambodia, with all foreign troops withdrawn. Chou told Mendès-France that he would see to it that the Vietminh cooperated. It was Mendès-France’s task to ensure American cooperation.
The French Premier then sent an urgent request to Eisenhower—that he send either Dulles or Smith back to Geneva to head the American delegation. The presence of either man would convince Chou that the Americans were willing to accept the decisions of the conference. Eden urged the same thing. Dulles firmly opposed going. He announced this decision at a Cabinet meeting on July 9. Eisenhower immediately interrupted him. “I was strong that way the other day,” Eisenhower admitted, but he had changed his mind. He wanted Smith sent back. He explained his thinking: “If we are not on record to oppose the settlement when it happens, it will plague us through the fall and give the Democrats a chance to say that we sat idly by and let Indochina be sold down the river to the Communists without raising a finger or turning a hair.”90
Smith returned to Geneva, although as an observer and not as a participant. On July 21, the Geneva agreements were signed. They established a cease-fire, partitioned Vietnam, called for nationwide elections within two years, forbade the introduction of new military equipment from foreign nations into either part of Vietnam, provided for free movement of people between the two parts of Vietnam, and established a three-nation supervisory commission (Poland, India, and Canada). This was an outcome to which Eisenhower had long since resigned himself. It was acceptable to him because it sealed off the Communist breakthrough and because SEATO was now well on track to establish a new defensive line in Southeast Asia. Ho Chi Minh was the big loser. Nevertheless, Eisenhower and the Republicans were embarrassed by the loss of northern Vietnam to the Communists, so Eisenhower had Smith issue a declaration that said the United States took note of the agreements, would not use force to upset them, but would not sign them. When Eisenhower informed a news conference on July 21 of the refusal to sign, he emphasized that “the United States has not itself been a party to or bound by the decisions taken.” He added that he was immediately dispatching ambassadors to Laos and Cambodia, and that he was “actively pursuing discussions . . . with a view to the rapid organization of a collective defense in Southeast Asia.”91
Old Guard senators, led by Knowland, were denouncing the agreements as appeasement. Eisenhower was asked to comment. He said the agreements certainly were not satisfactory to the United States, “but I don’t know, when I am put up against it at this moment, to find an alternative, to say what we would or could do.”92
What Eisenhower had done was face the realities. The French were not going to continue to fight; if the war went on, Ho Chi Minh would win everything in Indochina. At the critical juncture, the United States had neither the air nor troop strength to prevent a Vietminh victory, short of a unilateral atomic strike. But although there was extreme pressure to do just that, from a majority of Eisenhower’s military and civilian advisers, he set political and military obstacles that he knew could not be overcome. Of these, the most important were British cooperation, congressional approval, and a JCS facing of the fact that an atomic strike had to be directed against Russia as well as China, and could hardly be limited to Vietnam. As he had done in the crisis of late April over Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower in July 1954 again kept America out of Vietnam.
Then he put America into Vietnam. Dulles spent most of August flying around the world, signing up allies for SEATO. By September 8, the process was completed. France, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and the United States together pledged themselves to defend Southeast Asia. The treaty extended the protection of SEATO to Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. Less than one month later, Eisenhower pledged full American support to the Prime Minister of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, whom the CIA said was “the only figure on the political scene behind whom genuine nationalist support can be mobilized.”93 Eisenhower wrote Diem in late September that he was sending American officials to Saigon to confer with Diem to see “how an intelligent program of American aid given directly to your government can serve to assist Vietnam in its present hour of trial, provided that your government is prepared to give assurances as to the standards of performance it would be able to maintain in the event such aid were supplied.” The purpose of the offer, Eisenhower said, was to assist Diem “in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means.” There was a condition to the aid: “The government of the United States expects that this aid will be met by performance on the part of the government of Vietnam in undertaking needed reforms.”94
Eisenhower’s letter, along with the extension of SEATO protection to South Vietnam, violated the Geneva agreements in two ways. First, the agreements had stated explicitly that neither part of Vietnam could join an alliance. Second, it escalated South Vietnam’s position from that of one part of a divided country into a sovereign state. In practice, this meant that the United States was going to support Diem in his refusal to hold the promised nationwide elections. Eisenhower had good reason for rejecting elections—the CIA told him that if they were held, Ho Chi Minh would certainly win, perhaps by as much as 80 percent of the vote.95 To prevent that from happening, the President was willing to—and did—pledge the United States to the support of an independent South Vietnam.
• •
The debacle in Indochina badly strained the NATO alliance. As Gruenther had warned, many Frenchmen put the blame on the United States. They had an opportunity to vent their anger on August 30, when the French Assembly voted on EDC. Dulles had been active in Paris, putting every kind of pressure he could on the French. Eisenhower, at a news conference, added to the pressure by announcing that if the French failed to ratify EDC, the United States would move along to “secure a better relationship with Germany.” He wanted the French to know that one way or another there was going to be a German rearmament.96 Nevertheless, the Assembly voted to reject EDC, 319 to 264, with 43 abstentions.
Eisenhower had suffered a major setback. Since December 1950, he had labored to create EDC and the all-European army that would go with it, not only in order to get German rearmament under way, but also to provide a spur for a United States of Europe. He was disappointed and perplexed. He asked Hagerty, “Are the French deliberately saying they are going to tie up with Russia?” He recalled a meeting he had with the French Cabinet when he was SACEUR, when he had lost his patience and said to the members, “I obviously have a hell of a lot more fear of what happens to France than you do.” Eisenhower said that some of the Frenchmen present “broke down and cried,” but now look, they were rejecting their own proposal, EDC.
As in Vietnam, Eisenhower had his backup position ready. Immediately upon hearing the result of the vote, he told Smith—who was Acting Secretary of State while Dulles was in Paris—to arrange a meeting of the NATO countries, “with a view of including Germany as an equal partner therein.”97 Thus the chief result of the French vote was to restore German sovereignty, bring Germany into NATO, and create an independent German Army.
Taken together, the loss of North Vietnam and of EDC were serious defeats for Eisenhower. But he had lost only a couple of battles, not the war against Communism. As he so often reminded his Cabinet, “Long faces don’t win wars.” He insisted on remaining optimistic as much as he insisted on being realistic.