On March 6, 1953, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party announced with "profound sorrow" that Joseph Stalin was dead. Citizens of the USSR must have greeted the news with a mixture of relief and anxiety. Editorialists in the United States expressed undisguised joy at the demise of the "murderer of millions" but permitted themselves only a glimmer of hope. The great struggle of the century would continue, they averred. Stalin's successors could be as bad or worse. The world might be plunged into an "era of darkest uncertainty."1 In fact, Stalin's death, along with the development of nuclear weapons with destructive capacity too awful to contemplate, changed the Cold War fundamentally in the 1950s. The conflict shifted to new battlegrounds, took new forms, and required new weapons. New leaders on both sides struggled to cope with a more complex and, in some ways, more menacing world.2 While speaking of peaceful coexistence, they lurched from crisis to crisis. The end of the decade brought simultaneously major steps toward substantive negotiations and one of the most dangerous periods of the postwar era.
The Cold War remained the dominant fact of international life in the 1950s. It was still primarily a bipolar affair between the United States and the Soviet Union, with blocs massed around each of the central combatants. It resembled traditional power struggles between nation-states, but it was also a fierce ideological contest between two nations with diametrically opposed worldviews. The two sides saw each other as unremittingly hostile. They used every imaginable weapon: alliances; economic and military aid; espionage; covert operations including targeted assassinations; proxy wars; and an increasingly menacing arms race. The conflict extended across the world and even below the earth—the CIA dug a tunnel deep beneath East Berlin to better intercept Soviet bloc communications. With the advent of missiles and satellites in the late 1950s, the Cold War soared into space. The possession by each side of thermonuclear weapons and delivery systems capable of reaching the other's territory meant that any crisis risked escalation to a nuclear confrontation. Ironically, what Winston Churchill called the mutual balance of terror also provided a powerful deterrent to great-power war. The adversaries chose to wage the conflict largely through client states, diplomacy, propaganda, and threats of force. The challenge was to gain advantage without provoking a nuclear conflagration.3
The international system became more complex during this period. Fissures began to appear in Cold War alliances. Rebellions against Soviet rule broke out in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. By the end of the decade, a long-simmering feud between the Soviet Union and China boiled to the surface. The Suez Crisis of 1956 provoked bitter conflict between the United States and its major allies, Britain and France.
During this heyday of decolonization, more than one hundred new nations came into being, creating a fertile breeding ground for great-power competition. The Cold War thus increasingly shifted to a battle for the allegiance of what a French demographer labeled the Third World. As with the United States in the Napoleonic era, some leading Third World nations sought to insulate themselves from great-power struggle and also exploit it through what came to be called neutralism, a refusal to take sides in the conflict that raged about them. India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito assumed leadership of a budding neutralist movement that posed major challenges for the great powers. The advent of the Cold War to the Third World sometimes brought with it proxy wars causing massive physical destruction, loss of life, and disruption of domestic politics. While often victims of the Cold War, Third World leaders in seeking to exploit it for their own ends sometimes expanded, intensified, and prolonged the great-power conflict.4
Events in the Third World cannot be viewed solely through the prism of the Cold War.5 To be sure, U.S. policymakers generally looked at issues this way, distorting their understanding of what was happening. They also perceived, however dimly, the equally or even more disturbing possibility that the non-white masses with or without the Soviet Union might align against the industrialized nations. East-West conflict could be augmented or possibly supplanted by North-South conflict. Some U.S. officials worried that pan-Arabist and Islamic movements might provoke a clash of civilizations. Race played an increasingly important role in world politics. In April 1955, at Bandung, Indonesia, delegates from twenty-nine nations gathered for the first worldwide meeting of peoples of color, raising fears among U.S. diplomats of a "rip-tide of nationalism" among Africans and Asians, even a new "yellow peril."6
By the mid-1950s, the Cold War had altered beyond recognition America's national security apparatus and global presence. In 1953, the defense budget exceeded $85 billion, constituted 12 percent of the gross national product, and consumed 60 percent of federal expenditures. Conscription was an established feature of postwar life; the nation had some 3.5 million men and women under arms. A State Department with five thousand prewar employees expanded to more than twenty thousand. Through a global network of alliances, the United States was committed to defend forty-two nations, a level of commitment, Paul Kennedy has observed, that would have made those arch-imperialists Louis XIV and Lord Palmerston a "little nervous."7 More than a million U.S. military personnel manned more than eight hundred bases in a hundred countries. The Sixth Fleet patrolled the Mediterranean; the Seventh Fleet, the Pacific. The foreign aid budget averaged $5 billion per year between 1948 and 1953. Henry Stimson had snarled in the 1920s that gentlemen did not read each other's mail. In the intelligence agencies, gentlemen—and ladies—now regularly read each other's mail and listened in on telephone conversations and radio transmissions. The CIA illegally opened the mail of U.S. citizens corresponding with people in the USSR. To win the global competition for hearts and minds, Americans stationed abroad helped grow crops, build schools, train military personnel, and manipulate the outcome of elections. The wives of servicemen became unofficial ambassadors, sometimes repairing the public relations damage done by rowdy GIs and seeking to inculcate local women in the American way of life. Foreign governments hired U.S. public relations firms to boost their image and secure maximum economic and military assistance.8
As part of the Cold War quest for influence, the embassies built in other countries became political statements. The government recruited top architects such as Edward Durrell Stone and Walter Gropius to produce designs reflective of the nation's values and capable of boosting its prestige. The Cold War and modern architecture joined forces with sometimes stunning results. Designers sought to win goodwill from host nations by avoiding ostentatious display and where possible conforming with local architecture. Their buildings employed the glass curtain wall to stress openness and transparency, a sharp contrast with drab Soviet styles—a glass curtain juxtaposed against an Iron Curtain. They sought to capture the nation's spirit of freedom and adventure, self-confidence and prosperity. Stone's embassy in New Delhi achieved worldwide acclaim. Ironically, the structures built to symbolize the United States of the 1950s became easy targets for anti-American attacks in the next decade.9
The Cold War defined American domestic life in the 1950s. A huge spurt in population growth—the postwar baby boom—along with continued high demand for U.S. products abroad, fueled a period of sustained economic prosperity. What economist John Kenneth Galbraith called the "affluent society" produced a certain complacency and retreat from the reformist spirit of the New Deal. Abundance brought the fruition of American consumer culture.10
The Communist threat produced a mood of near hysterical fear, paranoiac suspiciousness, and stifling conformity. Top government officials—including the attorney general of the United States—ominously warned that the Communists were everywhere—"in factories, offices, butcher shops, on street corners, in private businesses . . . they were busy at work 'undermining your government, plotting to destroy your liberties, and feverishly trying, in whatever way they can, to aid the Soviet Union.' " Filmmakers, television producers, newspaper editors, and novelists spewed forth fear-mongering products with such suggestive titles as The Red Menace, I Was a Communist for the FBI, and I Married a Commmunist. Federal and state governments harassed, investigated, and deported real and suspected Communists and even encouraged citizens to spy on each other.11 The danger posed by godless Communism spurred a religious revival. Church membership soared; religious motifs suffused the popular culture. President Dwight D. Eisenhower encouraged this phenomenon with outward displays of faith, the addition of "In God We Trust" to coins, and the inclusion of religious themes in his speeches. For Eisenhower, his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and other U.S. leaders, the Cold War was the equivalent of a holy war. Even the administration's national security statements affirmed that religious principles should inspire and direct U.S. domestic and foreign policies.12
Various segments of society joined in waging the Cold War. Universities welcomed government contracts for defense-related research and dispatched technical and agricultural missions to Third World countries to win friends for the United States. "Our colleges and universities must be regarded as bastions of our defense," Michigan State University president John Hannah exclaimed in 1961, "as essential to the preservation of our country and our way of life as supersonic bombers, nuclear-powered submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles."13 Private charitable organizations such as CARE and Catholic Relief Services willingly sacrificed their independence by accepting government funds and some measure of government supervision to expand their good works in priority areas.14
Race relations—the most divisive issue in American life in the 1950s—became inextricably entangled with the Cold War. The persistence of virulent racism in the United States and its most blatant manifestation in rigid, legalized segregation in the South gave the lie to U.S. claims for leadership of the "free" world and became a stock-in-trade of Communist propaganda. Diplomats from non-white countries encountered humiliating experiences in the United States, even in Washington, D.C., which remained a very southern city and for diplomats of color a hardship post. Ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. labeled racial discrimination "our Achilles' heel before the world."15 Even the Eurocentric Dean Acheson conceded that the United States must address the issue of racial injustice to deprive the Communists of "the most effective kind of ammunition for their propaganda warfare" and eliminate a "source of constant embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations."16
Dwight David Eisenhower in many ways epitomized the zeitgeist of the 1950s. A product of rural nineteenth-century America, he personified the values the nation clung to under external threat. Conservative in his politics, he was also moderate in his approach to life and avuncular in demeanor. He brought to the presidency a lifetime of experience in the national security matters that now held top priority. His leadership of Allied forces during World War II had "internationalized" him, setting him apart from the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. Though he was often dismissed as an intellectual lightweight and a political bumbler, his seemingly placid disposition and clumsy rhetoric concealed a clear mind, a firm grasp of issues, instinctive political skills, and a fierce temper. His casual attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons was balanced by his innate caution. His basic integrity won the trust of Americans and allies alike.
John Foster Dulles became the nation's chief diplomat almost as a matter of inheritance. The grandson and namesake of late nineteenth-century secretary of state John W. Foster and nephew of Wilson's chief diplomat, Robert Lansing, he carried out his first diplomatic assignment at the age of thirty when he drafted the notorious reparations settlement at the Paris peace conference. As a partner in the powerful New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, he joined the world of corporate wealth and international finance. Like Woodrow Wilson the son of a Presbyterian minister, Dulles applied his intense religiosity to analyzing the tumultuous international politics of the 1930s and '40s. A great bear of a man, stern and unsmiling, he could appear brusque, even rude—"the only bull who carried his own China closet with him," Winston Churchill once snarled (and indeed Dulles was a collector of rare china).17 An indefatigable worker, as secretary of state he set a record by traveling more than a half million miles. Once viewed as the dominant force in policymaking in the Eisenhower years, he and the president in fact formed an extraordinarily close partnership based on mutual respect in which the latter was plainly preeminent. Dulles's strident anti-Communist rhetoric and penchant for "brinkmanship" stamped him as an ideologue and crusader. He often served as a lightning rod for his boss. He was also a cool pragmatist with a sophisticated view of the world and ample tactical skills.18
The new administration restructured the mechanisms of policymaking. Confident in his own judgment on defense issues, Eisenhower kept his military advisers at arm's length. From extensive managerial experience in the army, he believed that careful staff work was essential for sound policy. He created the position of special assistant for national security affairs, a step with enormous long-range implications. He expanded attendance at NSC meetings and established separate planning and operations boards to facilitate decision-making and oversee implementation of policies. The full NSC met weekly, more often in times of crisis. In addition, the president met regularly, sometimes daily, in informal sessions over drinks with Dulles, often accompanied by his brother, CIA director Allen W. Dulles, and a kitchen cabinet of White House advisers.19
Especially in Eisenhower's first two years, Congress posed major challenges, ironically with Republicans giving the president the most headaches. Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy, now chairman of a Government Operations Committee, wreaked havoc through investigations of alleged Communist influence in the government. McCarthy's very success led directly to his failure. Televised hearings of his investigations of the army displayed to the nation the ridiculousness of some of his charges and the viciousness of his methods. Eisenhower eventually intervened to help check McCarthy. In December 1954, the Senate voted to censure him, ending his meteoric career in disgrace. The administration also fended off a constitutional amendment proposed and pushed doggedly by isolationist senator John Bricker of Ohio intended to thwart an alleged UN threat to U.S. sovereignty that would have sharply limited executive power in foreign policy. Eisenhower took a firm stand against the so-called Bricker Amendment and with crucial assistance from Texas Democratic senator Lyndon Baines Johnson secured its defeat. The Democrats regained control of Congress in 1954. Unwilling to challenge the president directly on major foreign policy issues, different groups of legislators used the power of the purse to chip away at foreign aid spending and push for a larger defense budget.20
Even before the administration could formulate a national security strategy, Stalin's death raised new and troublesome issues. More tyrannical than ever in his final years, the dictator suffered extreme paranoia and ruled by sheer terror. His successors, Lavrenty Beria and Georgi Malenkov, were products of the Stalinist system and loyal henchmen. Each had played a key role in building Soviet military power. Beria had run the nuclear program. Beria nearly matched Stalin's cruelty toward subordinates—"our Himmler," the dictator called him.21 A shrewd and capable administrator, Malenkov was the more pragmatic of the two men. Both were technocrats rather than ideologues. Insecure at home, they saw themselves surrounded and threatened by U.S. bases. Soviet intelligence even warned that the United States might attempt to exploit the succession by starting a war. Against opposition from old-guard stalwarts like V. M. Molotov, Beria and Malenkov attempted to shift toward a less confrontational mode. At Stalin's funeral, Malenkov asserted that there was no "contested" issue that could not be resolved by "peaceful means." Fearing escalation of the Korean War, the new Soviet leaders talked to China about ending it. They sought to repair relations with Israel, Yugoslavia, and Greece. They warned that the emergence of new and more menacing nuclear weapons made war unthinkable and spoke of "peaceful coexistence." Hailing a "new breeze blowing on a tormented world," British prime minister Churchill urged Eisenhower to test the USSR's intentions by meeting with the new leaders.22
The administration responded coolly to Soviet overtures. Establishing a pattern that would be repeated time and again in Cold War presidential elections, Republicans in 1952 had blasted the Democrats for weakness, promising to combat Communism more vigorously, even to liberate "captive peoples." In light of its own belligerent rhetoric, the new administration could not jump into negotiations so soon after taking office. In any event, U.S. officials saw no real opportunity to ease tensions or negotiate substantive agreements. From Eisenhower down, they viewed the Soviet peace offensive, in the words of a State Department study, as a "treacherous stratagem of as yet indiscernible proportions" designed to undermine Western morale, expose divisions in the alliance, and hold back Western rearmament.23 Eisenhower responded with a major speech on April 16, warning of the dangers of war and vowing his personal commitment to peace. Pointing to numerous hot spots, he insisted that Soviet words must be matched by deeds. Mainly, he appealed to Americans and allies to rally behind U.S. leadership for victory in the Cold War.24 Whether an opportunity for peace was missed, as diplomat Charles Bohlen later argued, can never be known for certain. Divisions within the Soviet leadership would have made major agreements at best difficult to achieve. The fact remains that the United States never tried.
Over the next six months, Eisenhower and his advisers formulated a grand strategy to fight the Cold War. Despite their 1952 attacks on the Democrats and promises of a "policy of boldness," the changes they initiated were more of means than ends. In office, the administration mollified the Republican right wing with fierce anti-Communist rhetoric. Dulles presided benignly over a purge of suspected leftists from the State Department, in the process ruining the lives of numerous dedicated public servants and eliminating much of its expertise on East Asia. For the most part, however, the administration's rhetoric was not matched by equally bold changes in policy. A fiscal conservative, Eisenhower was appalled by the enormous expenditures necessitated by NSC-68. Certain that the Cold War would last for many years, he feared that runaway defense spending could destroy the nation from within. He had no enthusiasm for further Korea-like military entanglements in peripheral areas. After an extended and painstaking review of options by several task forces, the administration settled on its New Look strategy. Despite Dulles's dismissal of European leaders as "shattered 'old people,' " it upheld the Democrats' commitment to collective security.25 It sustained the principles of containment while altering the methods used. Superior military forces would be maintained to deter aggression. To permit substantial budget cuts without weakening the nation's defense posture, the New Look relied on nuclear weapons—"more bang for the buck," it was called. Dulles publicly outlined a concept of "massive retaliation" by which the United States would respond to aggression at times and places and with weapons of its own choosing, leaving open the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union itself. Conventional forces would be cut dramatically. New alliances would be formed to deter and contain Communist expansion and provide manpower for regional or global conflicts.26
Eisenhower believed that a shooting war was unlikely and that the enemy would rely mainly on subversion to achieve its goals. NSC-162/2 of October 1953 thus put great emphasis on the importance of propaganda and psychological warfare, calling for the use of "feasible" political and economic pressures, propaganda, and covert operations to "create and exploit troublesome problems the USSR, impair Soviet relations with Communist China, complicate control in the satellites, and retard the growth of the military and economic potential of the Soviet bloc." All weapons would be considered available for use. If the nation were to survive, a commission headed by World War II hero Gen. James Doolittle concluded in 1954, it must reconsider its long-standing concepts of fair play. "We must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective means than those used against us."27 While sticking to established foreign policy goals, Eisenhower's New Look significantly altered the means to achieve them.
The strategy of massive retaliation was immediately put to the test in East and Southeast Asia. In its first two years, the Eisenhower administration contemplated or threatened the use of nuclear weapons in responding to crises in Korea, French Indochina, and the Taiwan Straits. In each case, Dulles claimed the strategy had worked. The reality is far more complicated.
Eisenhower managed to end the fighting in Korea, but his success owed as much to circumstances as to diplomatic proficiency. The president and Dulles did maneuver skillfully among their Communist enemies, allies who wanted to liquidate the war as quickly as possible, and South Korean president Syngman Rhee and the Republican right who clung to the chimera of victory. The administration later claimed that its threats to use nuclear weapons forced the Communists to settle. In fact, its warnings of nuclear escalation were notably vague—and may never have got to Beijing. The decisive event in the Korean settlement seems to have been Stalin's death. Problems of succession and rising unrest in Eastern Europe compelled the new Soviet leaders to seek a breathing space through the relaxation of tensions. Eisenhower had insisted that peace in Korea was an essential first step. Mao Zedong seems grudgingly to have concluded that any possible gain from continuing the war would not be worth the cost. Rhee almost sabotaged the negotiations by releasing thousands of prisoners of war. He had to be appeased with promises of a U.S. mutual security pact, yet another entangling alliance. The Korean War officially ended in July 1953, but what amounted to an armed truce left a still bitterly divided nation and an international trouble spot that would outlast the Cold War.28
A crisis in Indochina the following year posed for the administration one of the sternest challenges in its eight years in office. By the spring of 1954, the outcome of France's eight-year war against the Communist-led Vietminh hinged on the fate of a fortress at Dien Bien Phu, in the remote northwest corner of Vietnam, where twelve thousand French troops were besieged by vastly superior enemy forces. Facing certain defeat, France in late March appealed to the United States to intervene. Eisenhower and Dulles sympathized with the plight of French forces if not with French goals. Above all, they feared the consequences of French defeat. The loss of additional Asian real estate a mere five years after the fall of China would invite attacks from Democrats and the Republican right wing. A Communist victory in Vietnam would threaten the rest of Southeast Asia with its crucial sea routes, vital natural resources, and markets essential for Japanese economic recovery. The consequences might extend to Europe, where a French defeat could spell the end of Allied plans for mutual defense. Eisenhower and Dulles seriously contemplated air and naval intervention, even the use of nuclear weapons. To underscore the importance of Vietnam, the president unveiled publicly on April 7 the famous domino theory, warning that if it should fall to Communism the rest of Southeast Asia might soon follow, with reverberations extending to the Middle East and Japan. But Congress refused to endorse intervention without the participation of Great Britain and French pledges of independence for Vietnam. Despite weeks of frantic shuttle diplomacy and urgent appeals for "United Action," Dulles could not secure the requisite pledges from either ally. Amidst angry recriminations among the Western nations, Dien Bien Phu fell on May 7, 1954, just as a conference already under way at Geneva began to consider the fate of French Indochina.29
The continued threat of U.S. military intervention—largely bluff—appears to have helped the administration at Geneva snatch some semblance of victory from near certain and total defeat. Dulles made a brief and stormy appearance, more scowling than usual, conducting himself, in the words of a biographer, with the "pinched distaste of a puritan in a house of ill repute," even reportedly turning his back when Chinese delegate Zhou En-lai extended a hand in greeting.30 To deter possible Chinese intervention and influence the outcome of the conference, the United States kept alive the possibility of military involvement. The U.S. threat may have helped bring about a settlement. The Chinese and Soviets each had their own reasons for ending the war. They compelled reluctant Vietminh leaders to accept much less in the way of peace terms than they believed their battlefield success entitled them to. Following Cold War precedents badly applied in Germany and Korea, the Geneva Accords of July 21, 1954, divided Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel and set elections for 1956 to unify the country.31
Most observers believed that Ho Chi Minh's Vietminh would easily win the elections and unify the country, but the United States and the fiercely anti-Communist South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem had other ideas. The "important thing," Dulles insisted, was "not to mourn the past but to seize the future opportunity to prevent the loss in Northern Vietnam from leading to the extension of communism throughout Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific."32 Despite universally gloomy prospects for success in South Vietnam, the United States made a high-stakes gamble by committing itself firmly to the imperious Diem in late 1954 and standing by him when he almost lost power the following year. Violating the letter and spirit of the Geneva Accords, the United States backed Diem's refusal to participate in the national elections. Through a massive nation-building effort, it set out to construct in southern Vietnam an independent, non-Communist nation that could stand as a bulwark against further Communist expansion in a critical region. To further deter possible aggression, Dulles through extended negotiations in Manila in the fall of 1954 helped establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), an eight-nation alliance committed to defending the region from Communism.33
A 1954–55 crisis in the Taiwan Straits posed another major test for massive retaliation and had enormous long-term consequences for U.S. relations with Taiwan and China. The Chinese-American standoff provides a classic example of the way in which lack of direct communication, misperception, and miscalculation raised the threat of direct conflict during the Cold War, in this case for territory of no real value. In early September 1954, despite previous U.S. efforts at deterrence, the Chinese began shelling Quemoy and Matsu, tiny and strategically unimportant islands off the southeast coast of mainland China still under Nationalist control. Eisenhower and Dulles conceded that the islands were worthless. They did not want war. But neither did they wish to appear weak in the face of a Chinese challenge. They also recognized that Chiang Kaishek might seek to exploit the crisis by sucking the United States into war with China. Mistakenly viewing the shelling as a prelude to Chinese seizure of the islands or even an attack on Taiwan, they experimented with a policy of deterrence through uncertainty, "keeping the enemy guessing," in Eisenhower's words, to head off aggression without getting more deeply entangled with Chiang. The policy had the opposite effect of what was intended, encouraging Mao's government in January 1955 to seize one of the Dachens, another set of offshore islands, in the belief that the United States would do nothing.34
The crisis quickly escalated to the brink of nuclear war. Mao sensed the danger of further moves and did nothing more. Again misperceiving Chinese intentions, the Eisenhower administration saw the Dachens seizure as a prelude to attacks on Quemoy, Matsu, or even Taiwan. The "Red Chinese appear to be completely reckless, arrogant, possibly overconfident, and completely indifferent to human life," the president warned.35 To reassure Chiang and deter Mao, the administration signed a Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan (which did not include the offshore islands) and in January 1955 secured from Congress a Formosa Resolution giving the president blank-check authority to respond to Chinese "aggression." It considered preemptive military action, possibly even the use of nuclear weapons against Chinese forces on the islands. Believing war possible, if not likely, it set out, in Dulles's words, to "create a better climate for the use of atomic weapons."36 Eisenhower raised the stakes and set off alarm bells at home and abroad by publicly suggesting on March 16, 1955, that the United States might use nuclear weapons "as you use a bullet or anything else."37 To persuade Chiang to abandon Quemoy and Matsu, the United States offered to blockade five hundred miles of the Chinese coast opposite Taiwan—an act of war—and place nuclear weapons on the island. Ironically, Chiang sabotaged this most risky escalation by refusing to give up the islands. Tension eased in April when Zhou En-lai at Bandung stunned the world with conciliatory gestures. Under pressure from nervous allies and an anxious public, the United States responded in kind. The two nations would soon initiate sporadic ambassadorial talks in Warsaw to help ease tensions.
Dulles later insisted—and some historians have supported his claim—that the Taiwan Straits crisis marked a victory for massive retaliation. To be sure, the United States avoided war and Taiwan was safe. But the Chinese focused attention on Taiwan, one of their principal aims in the first place, and also gained some Nationalist territory. Eisenhower's vague nuclear threats did not deter attacks on Quemoy, Matsu, or Taiwan—no such attacks were ever intended. The United States might have provoked a war over worthless real estate had it not been for Chiang's fortuitous obstinacy. The president's threats did little to establish U.S. credibility. In fact, they seem to have stiffened Chinese resolve and led Beijing to launch its own nuclear program. By provoking protests at home and among allies, they also raised serious questions about the viability of massive retaliation as the key element of New Look defense policy. More ominously for the long run, the crisis tightened U.S. ties with Chiang and produced more binding U.S. commitments to defend Taiwan, posing insuperable long-term obstacles to any reconciliation with the Beijing regime.38
The United States' credibility was also severely tested by crises in Eastern Europe. During the 1952 campaign, Dulles had rejected containment for an "explosive and dynamic" policy of "liberation" of captive peoples, and liberation at first became the cornerstone of the administration's policies toward Eastern Europe. Eisenhower had seen the value of psychological warfare (psywar) as commander of Allied forces in Europe. He brought to the White House wartime propaganda adviser C. D. Jackson of Time-Life and endorsed his proposal to make psywar the "real guts" of U.S. policy for Eastern Europe. Jackson expanded and perfected programs initiated by the Truman administration. More and better leaflet-dropping balloons, thinly disguised as weather balloons, were sent out over the region—in all, sixty thousand balloons with three hundred thousand leaflets between 1951 and 1956. Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberation overcame furious jamming to beam broadcasts into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. Such propaganda satirized Communist practices and mores, divulged the name of secret police operatives, and openly appealed to dissidents to revolt.39
Such psywar operations did not cause, but certainly encouraged, a series of revolts in Eastern Europe in the 1950s. Jackson had scarcely settled into office when harsh economic conditions in East Germany in June 1953 provoked protests in East Berlin that soon spread across the country, led to calls for a general strike, and eventually sparked widespread rioting. The uprising caught the United States completely off guard. Dulles and other U.S. officials hoped to exploit Soviet problems in East Germany. But they were distracted by Korea, where Rhee's release of prisoners of war imperiled the peace agreement. Attention was also focused on Western Europe, where they were attempting to beef up NATO defenses and begin West German rearmament. Eisenhower insisted that force could not be used. Neither Dulles nor anyone else could devise ways to exploit Soviet troubles. Moscow eventually suppressed the rebellion with twenty thousand troops and 350 tanks. All the United States could do was gain propaganda advantage through a relief program that provided five million food parcels—"Eisenhower Packages"—that fed one-third of East Germany's population. The East German crisis had a sobering effect on the concept of liberation, even Dulles concluding that forceful measures risked destruction of the free world. NSC-174 of December 1953 held to rollback as a long-term goal but tightly circumscribed it by affirming that the United States would not provoke war with the USSR and would seek to prevent "premature" uprisings in Eastern Europe.40
More serious crises erupted in Poland and Hungary three years later. In early 1955, the shrewd reformist Nikita Khrushchev, along with Nikolai Bulganin, took control of the Soviet government. A year later, in his famous keynote speech before a party congress, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's "crimes" and "cult of personality." The speech was not intended to be made public, but within weeks it appeared in newspapers around the world. Designed to initiate a process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union and the satellites, it offered to Eastern Europeans hopes of liberalization and spurred uprisings in Poland and Hungary where old-line leaders clung desperately to power. The return of reformer Wyadislaw Gomulka raised fears in Moscow that Poland might break away from the Soviet bloc. Uninvited—and furious—Khrushchev and his entourage descended upon the Warsaw airport on October 19, 1956, backed by Red Army troops a hundred kilometers away. At a stormy session on the tarmac in tones loud enough to be heard by chauffeurs, Khrushchev threatened military intervention. The courageous Gomulka refused to talk with a "revolver on the table." Khrushchev eventually accepted Gomulka's pledges to retain close ties with Moscow and remain in the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance of seven Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union created in May 1955. "Finding a reason for an armed conflict would be easy," the Soviet leader conceded pragmatically, "but finding a way to put an end to such a conflict later on would be very hard."41 While remaining faithful to the Soviet Union and exercising tight party control, Gomulka instituted modest reforms. Twenty-three years later, Poland made a relatively smooth transition to democracy.42
In Hungary, on the other hand, dissent grew into open rebellion, posing for Moscow a direct and menacing challenge. Khrushchev initially hoped for a Gomulka-type solution. But he lacked confidence in Hungarian leader Imre Nagy, and when the rebellion gained steam and Nagy promised a multiparty democracy, withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and a Tito-like neutralism, an anxious Kremlin responded with brute force. With Britain and France attacking his new ally Egypt in the concurrent Suez Crisis and Hungary in open revolt, Khrushchev saw his credibility at stake. If the Soviet Union departed Hungary, he exclaimed, the "imperialists" will "perceive it as weakness on our part and will go on the offensive. . . . We have no other choice."43 He dispatched sixty thousand troops and more than one thousand tanks to suppress the rebellion. The streets of Budapest ran red with blood for days. The city was left in rubble. As many as four thousand Hungarians were killed; another two hundred thousand fled to the West. Up to three hundred, Nagy included, were executed.
The reality of liberation posed a painful dilemma for those Americans who had so enthusiastically promoted it. Coming on the eve of the 1956 presidential election and in the midst of the Middle East crisis, Hungary raised especially difficult questions. Once again, the United States was caught by surprise. Although they too profoundly distrusted Nagy, Eisenhower and Dulles hoped for a solution like that in Poland. They carefully avoided provocative steps and even offered public assurances that the United States did not view an independent Hungary as a potential ally. At the same time, RFE broadcasts and the agitation of émigrés working under a CIA program led the rebels to count on U.S. support. Inaction thus created among Hungarians profound disillusionment. Again, however, the United States would do nothing more than seek propaganda gain by highlighting before world opinion Soviet repression. Ike lamented that the United States had "excited" Hungarians and was now "turning our backs on them." Dulles rationalized, rather pathetically, that "we always have been against violent revolution."44 In fact, as far as Hungary was concerned, the policy of liberation was probably counterproductive. By casting doubts on Nagy's ability and loyalty and urging Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, RFE broadcasts may even have contributed to Soviet intervention and probably set back rather than speeded the process of freedom. Painfully aware of the fragility of the Communist bloc, Khrushchev more than ever saw the Cold War in zero-sum terms, ending any plans he may have had for reform in Eastern Europe.45
The bloody denouement in Hungary forced basic changes in U.S. propaganda toward Eastern Europe. Henceforth, the administration shied away from actively encouraging revolt in favor of more subtle forms of subversion through trade, travel, and culture. The aim was to break down the isolation of East Europeans and, by presenting positive images of life in the United States, increase their dissatisfaction with the regimes they lived under. The new approach involved expanded trade through loans and credits, exchange visits by students and professors, and information programs through books and specially designed newspapers and magazines. In Poland, the newly created U.S. Information Agency established an American bookstore and where possible set up libraries and reading rooms. The United States during the 1950s even initiated cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union itself.46
Music and especially jazz became powerful weapons in the new arsenal of liberation. In 1955, Voice of America (VOA) launched a nightly program, "Music USA," targeted especially at the youth of Eastern Europe and the USSR. Featuring mainly jazz, it was an instant sensation. Its disc jockey Willis Conover became one of the best known and most popular Americans on the Continent. "Music USA" reached an estimated thirty million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a hundred million worldwide. It spawned numerous fan clubs and proved one of the most successful ventures in VOA history. Fighting the Cold War with "cool" music, Conover was said to be more powerful than a fleet of B-29 bombers, "the most famous American that virtually no American ever heard of."47 Even those Americans who condemned the subversive effects of jazz at home welcomed the mischief it might cause abroad. The influence of the U.S. cultural offensive cannot be precisely measured, but over the long term it may have been considerable.48
In Western Europe, Eisenhower and Dulles brought to fruition policies initiated by Truman and Acheson. From the outset, relations with the major European allies were difficult at best. Dulles doubted the toughness of British and French leaders.49 Since Soviet bombers could not reach the United States, London and Paris, on the other hand, feared that the new administration's nuclear bluster put them at risk. The relationship between Dulles and British foreign minister Anthony Eden was further complicated by a personality clash that evolved into intense personal hatred.
West Germany's independence and rearmament remained the most troublesome issues. Like its predecessors, the new administration saw NATO and collective security as the keys to European defense and German rearmament as indispensable to NATO. An alliance strengthened by an armed West Germany could meet the Soviet threat, while NATO would also keep in check a rearmed West Germany. Still haunted by bitter memories of two world wars, France naturally balked at the idea of a revived and rearmed Germany. French leaders proposed a European Defense Community (EDC) that would merge German forces into an integrated military organization, thereby precluding an independent German army and presumably giving France some control over German forces. But Britain's refusal to join EDC dimmed French enthusiasm. Weakened and divided by the war in Indochina and worried about Germany, a nervous and chronically unstable France slew its brainchild. "Too much integration, too little England," Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France complained.50 Even Dulles's threats of an "agonizing reappraisal" of U.S. policies failed to sway French leaders. In August 1954, the French parliament rejected EDC, a "dark day for Europe," German chancellor Konrad Adenauer moaned. "A grave event," Dulles concurred.51
French rejection of EDC stunned the allies into shockingly rapid resolution of their most nettlesome issue. Deeply committed to EDC, the United States, for one of the few times in the postwar era, took a backseat, permitting Churchill and Eden to devise an ingenious compromise, the so-called London Agreements, that retained some features of EDC while rearming West Germany within the framework of NATO. At a nine-power conference in September 1954, an obviously agitated but uncharacteristically silent Dulles deferred to Britain. The allies then achieved in a brief period what they had been unable to do before and produced a result that improved on the European Defense Community.52 The conferees constructed a Western European Union on the foundation of the 1948 Brussels Treaty and expanded it to include Italy and West Germany. Its military forces were placed under NATO command. German rearmament was thus made more palatable by giving a U.S. commander control over the size and use of German forces. Adenauer also agreed not to produce warships, bombers, and atomic, biological, and chemical weapons. In return, the Western powers recognized West Germany's sovereignty. Exactly ten years after the end of war in Europe, the Allied occupation ended. The Truman program was completed. United States officials continued to pay lip service to unification, but they preferred a separate, rearmed West Germany tied to the West. The division of Europe was sealed for a generation. Western Europe settled into an unaccustomed period of stability, its once warring nations at peace with each other for the first time in decades, their internal politics fixed along centrist lines.53 An unhappy Soviet Union responded to the European arrangements by forming its military counterpart to NATO, the Warsaw Pact.
German rearmament also led to the neutralization of Austria and a top-level summit meeting in Geneva. To improve its world position and gain breathing space for dealing with urgent domestic problems, the Soviet leadership set out to heal wounds opened by Stalin. A veritable globetrotter compared to his reclusive predecessor, the ebullient Khrushchev traveled to China, where with great ceremony he gave back Port Arthur and pushed for closer economic ties. He also flew to Belgrade to patch up relations with Tito. Fearing that Austria might go the way of Germany, he dropped a prior demand conditioning withdrawal of Red Army troops on German neutrality and asked simply for Austrian neutrality. The result was the Austrian State Treaty of May 1955. Having previously affirmed that Soviet withdrawal from Austria was the key to resolving other issues, Eisenhower had little choice but to succumb to Soviet appeals for a summit. To do otherwise, he conceded, would make him appear "senselessly stubborn in my attitude."54
The Geneva summit of May 1955 was significant mainly in that it took place, the first such meeting since the end of World War II. Unschooled in the conventions of great-power diplomacy, the Soviet leaders worried about how to behave and whether they would be treated as equals. Khrushchev's insecurities were magnified upon arrival by the fact that his plane was much smaller than Eisenhower's—"like an insect," he later barked.55 Khrushchev and Bulganin clung desperately to hopes of somehow undoing West German ties to NATO. The Eisenhower administration was equally wary, fearing that the summit might disrupt hard-won Western unity, a fear underscored when the British proposed negotiations on German unification. Dulles had acquiesced only grudgingly to the idea of a summit and advised the president—known for his broad and winning grin—to appear stern and unsmiling. The administration made clear it would consider German unification only in the context of discussion of freedom in Eastern Europe and on condition that Germany remained tied to the West, terms that ensured no substantive negotiations. Bulganin sprang on the United States sweeping disarmament proposals that were difficult to reject without appearing to stand in the way of easing world tensions. Eisenhower countered by proposing mutual aerial surveillance—"Open Skies"—which the Soviets summarily dismissed as legalized spying. The two sides engaged in bizarre and surreal banter about the USSR joining NATO. Despite much brave rhetoric about the "spirit of Geneva," the conference adjourned without agreement. Eisenhower and Dulles believed they were moving in the right direction before the summit and did not want to be thrown off course. Khrushchev may have concluded that the Americans feared nuclear war as much as he and thus was tempted to initiate games of nuclear chicken.56
Having cobbled together almost despite themselves a shaky equilibrium in Europe and East Asia, the Cold War combatants in the mid-1950s shifted to the Third World, where they competed vigorously for the allegiance of nations emerging from colonialism. The Middle East took center stage in this new phase of the Cold War and posed especially complex challenges. Throughout the region, revolutionary nationalists struggled to gain full independence and sought to exploit the Cold War to their advantage. Americans sympathized with nationalist aspirations. Eisenhower privately puzzled over why the United States could not "get some of the people in these down-trodden countries to like us instead of hating us," conveniently forgetting that skin color, America's own imperial past, and its close ties with the Western colonial powers tainted it in their eyes.57 Khrushchev's late 1955 entrée into the Middle East through an arms deal and trade agreements with Egypt struck alarm bells in the West. Eisenhower and the men around him viewed Third World peoples as childlike, sometimes irresponsible, not ready for full independence, and especially vulnerable to clever propagandists like the Communists. The administration increasingly feared that Arab nationalism might veer to the left and that Allied obstructionism would facilitate that outcome. "We must have evolution, not revolution," Dulles averred.58 The Arab-Israeli conflict, of course, added yet another volatile ingredient to an already explosive mix.
Eisenhower and Dulles significantly deepened U.S. involvement in the Middle East. They shared in full measure their predecessors' assessment of the region's importance for its military bases, lines of communication, and huge reservoirs of oil. They sought to promote stable, friendly governments capable of withstanding Communist-inspired subversion and willing to resist aggression. Exaggerating both the Soviet threat and Arab susceptibility to Moscow's influence, Eisenhower went much further than Truman, mounting covert operations to overthrow unfriendly governments, forging a regional anti-Communist alliance, attempting to mediate the Arab-Israeli dispute, and even employing military force. More often than not, the United States found itself hopelessly snarled in the raging conflicts between Arabs and Israelis, Arabs and Arabs, and Arab nationalism and the European colonial powers.
Eisenhower's first major intrusion into the Middle East maelstrom came in 1953 in Iran, a focal point of U.S., British, and Soviet rivalry since 1941 and an early Cold War battleground. By the time the new administration took office, Iran once more had become the center of international attention when a bitter dispute over decolonization issues took on Cold War overtones. Long resentful of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company's (AIOC) domination of their nation's most valuable resource and its shameful treatment of Iranian workers, nationalists in 1951 voted to take over the giant British corporation. They were led by newly elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, an enigmatic, eccentric, and immensely colorful figure. Nearly seventy years old, tall and balding, with an elongated, sharply protruding nose, the European-educated prime minister had a well-rehearsed flair for the dramatic. He often received visitors in his bedroom dressed in pajamas and burst into tears in the midst of conversation or speeches. He also had a xenophobic streak and a tendency toward political self-destruction. A traditional liberal, he was willing to cooperate with Communists when it suited his needs. Americans had little sympathy with British oil interests, but they also abhorred nationalization and hesitated to undermine a major ally. They increasingly feared that instability in the region along the Soviet Union's southern border might tempt Moscow's involvement. The Truman administration thus sought in vain to mediate the conflict. The crisis intensified in 1952 when Mosaddeq's government broke relations with Britain.59
Eisenhower quickly changed U.S. policy from mediation to intervention. As in other areas, Americans in Iran blurred distinctions between local nationalism and Communism. They suspected Mosaddeq of being a Communist or a tool of Communists. His clumsy efforts to exploit the Cold War by warning of a Communist takeover and even flirting with Iran's leftist Tudeh Party only confirmed their suspicions. They also viewed him as unreliable, unpredictable, and weak, even effeminate—Dulles called him "that madman"—and therefore an easy mark for wily Communists. Eisenhower had come to appreciate the value of covert operations in World War II as an inexpensive and relatively risk-free means to undermine untrustworthy governments. CIA director Dulles affirmed that when a country was vulnerable to a Communist takeover "we can't wait for an engraved invitation to come and give aid."60 The United States thus joined with Britain in the spring of 1953 in a plot to replace Mosaddeq with the youthful and presumably more pliable Shah Reza Pahlavi, whom the prime minister had just removed from power. In what was called Project Ajax, CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of Rough Rider Teddy, hired local agitators to destabilize an already fragile Iranian political system and used satchels of cash to purchase the loyalty of key elements in the army. Partly as a result of the shah's irresolution—the CIA called him a "creature of indecision"—the scheme nearly backfired. It was salvaged by the persistence of Iranian dissidents, Roosevelt's refusal to obey orders to return home, and Mosaddeq's political miscalculations. In August, the prime minister was overthrown and replaced by the shah. The coup represented a major short-term victory for U.S. policy. The United States supplanted Britain as the dominant power in a pivotal Cold War nation and gained a grateful ally in the shah, and U.S. oil companies got a 40 percent interest in the international consortium that replaced AIOC. The coup also marked a major turning point in Iran's modern history, a retreat from at least the semblance of parliamentary government to what became a brutal dictatorship. The United States' hand was carefully concealed, but Iranian nationalists knew what had happened—and remembered. When a revolution toppled the shah twenty-five years later, it quickly turned radical and virulently anti-American.61
Subsequent forays into the Middle East did not produce even short-term gains. To counter any Soviet military threat to the region, Eisenhower and Dulles, in keeping with the New Look's emphasis on regional alliances, encouraged in 1954 formation of the Baghdad Pact among the "northern tier" nations of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. To avoid provoking the Soviets, on the one hand, and encouraging Israel to ask for similar commitments, on the other, the United States remained out of the alliance. But it dispensed military aid to induce nations to join and maintained close ties with the pact's military bureaucracy. Whatever value the alliance may have had in containing the Soviets was more than offset by its inflammatory impact in an already troubled region. It divided Arab states against each other—even members of the alliance—raising tensions still further. Britain's active participation struck Arabs as imperialism in another guise, especially antagonizing Egypt and encouraging Nasser's arms deal with the USSR. The pact further exacerbated the Arab-Israeli conflict.62
Also in the interest of checking possible Soviet advances in the Middle East, the administration in 1955–56, working closely with the British, launched the first of countless futile U.S. efforts to resolve the intractable Arab-Israeli dispute. Certain that his administration's "lopsided" partiality toward Israel had doomed Truman's diplomacy, they tried to be impartial and pushed hard to complete negotiations before the U.S. presidential election of 1956 brought forth powerful Israeli political pressures. The gambit went nowhere. The Arab states viewed Israel as a "cancer" that must be removed. The signing of the Baghdad Pact just when the peace initiative was presented did great damage. The plan called for Israel to give up territory won in the 1948 war, an idea repulsive to its leaders. "The whole proposal smacks of Munich," snarled the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Abba Eban. The administration's timing was atrocious. Just when it sought to mediate, tensions between Arabs and Israelis rose to such dangerous levels that Eisenhower contemplated sending U.S. forces to the Middle East to prevent a conflagration. The more the United States pressed for peace, the more strained Arab-Israeli relations became.63 To balance Soviet military aid to Egypt and appease domestic lobbyists, Eisenhower in the spring of 1956 approved a major arms deal for Israel.
All the deadly crosscurrents of a deeply troubled region came together in the Suez Crisis of 1956, an imbroglio that not only undermined U.S. policy in the Middle East but also opened deep fissures between the United States and its major European allies and handcuffed the administration in dealing with the simultaneous crisis in Hungary. The Suez Crisis originated in the broader struggle between Arab nationalism and European colonialism that heated up after Nasser's 1952 overthrow of the British puppet King Farouk. An admirer of Mosaddeq, the thirty-five-year-old army colonel was a master conspirator, compelling speaker, and fiery nationalist with ambitions for regional leadership and glory. The United States appreciated his suspicions of the colonial powers but worried about his neutralism. Dulles and Eisenhower at first sought to seduce him with promises of $400 million to assist with a pet project, the grandiose scheme for a mammoth dam at Aswan on the Nile River to produce hydroelectric power, control flooding, and promote Egyptian agriculture through irrigation.
The commitment to assist Nasser provoked an uproar in the United States. Southern congressmen seeking to protect vital cotton interests protested the use of economic aid to promote foreign competition. Supporters of Israel declaimed against assisting its mortal enemy. Militant anti-Communists bitterly opposed rewarding neutralism. When Nasser tried to blackmail the United States by recognizing the People's Republic of China and threatening to seek aid from Moscow, an outraged Dulles seized the opportunity to renege on an offer that had become a diplomatic and political liability. "Do nations which play both sides get better treatment than nations which are stalwart and work with us?" the secretary thundered.64 Nasser in July 1956 stunned the world by using the U.S. action as an excuse to nationalize the British-run corporation that managed the Suez Canal, rationalizing that he needed the tolls to pay for his Aswan project and thus setting off a dangerous four-month crisis.
Nasser's bold move threatened Britain's oil supplies, jeopardized a vital lifeline to its interests in South and Southeast Asia, and struck directly at one of the proudest symbols of a once glorious empire. "The Egyptian has his thumb on our windpipe," Eden, now prime minister, exclaimed.65 Denouncing Nasser as a "Moslem Mussolini" who must not be appeased and fearing that defeat at his hands could force Britain out of the Middle East, Eden rebuffed U.S. pleas for patience. He rejected—as did Nasser—Dulles's frantic last-minute proposals to form an international consortium to run the canal and pay Egypt equitable compensation. He formed with France, which feared Nasser's threat to its North African colonies, and Israel, which had numerous grievances against the Egyptian, a secret military plan calling for Israel to attack Egypt across the Sinai desert and provide a pretext for British and French military operations to recapture the canal and get rid of Nasser. On October 29, 1956, Israel attacked, seizing the Sinai and Gaza without significant opposition. When Nasser, as expected, rebuffed European demands for withdrawal, Britain and France launched air and naval attacks against Egypt. Before they could achieve their major objectives, Nasser one-upped them, blocking the canal by sinking more than fifty ships loaded with concrete, rocks, and even beer bottles. An attack justified on grounds of keeping the canal in operation had precisely the opposite effect.66
The Suez-Sinai War set off the most serious crisis in America's relations with its major Western allies since the 1930s and raised the possibility of war with the Soviet Union. Eden later claimed that Dulles had given him a green light for military operations. In fact, each nation completely misread the other's position, and Eisenhower and Dulles were kept in the dark about Allied military plans. The Americans had no use for Nasser. Dulles agreed with Britain that he should be "made to disgorge his theft."67 But they were shocked that their allies had resorted to war on the eve of the U.S. presidential election and furious that they had taken action that inflamed Arab nationalism and risked major Soviet gains in a crucial region. The Anglo-French offensive also prevented them from taking full propaganda advantage of Soviet military intervention in Hungary. "Foster, you tell 'em goddamn it, we're going to apply sanctions, we're going to the United Nations, we're going to do everything that there is so we can stop this thing," Eisenhower raged.68 The United States threatened sanctions against Israel. It refused to bolster British currency reserves and oil supplies—letting them "boil in their own oil," as the president put it, and permitting the pound sterling to plummet. Also caught off guard by Anglo-French military action, an equally enraged Khrushchev threatened—largely bluff—to unleash rockets against London and Paris. The Pentagon developed contingency plans for a general war for a cause the administration considered dubious. Desperate to repair damage with the Arabs and prevent Soviet intrusion into the Middle East, Dulles in a dramatic speech before the United Nations disassociated his nation from Britain, France, and Israel and proposed a cease-fire and withdrawal of all forces. He closed with a ringing attack on colonialism he said he would be proud to have as his epitaph. Britain and France gave in, in part from Soviet threats but mainly because U.S. pressures worsened an already serious economic situation in England, leaving them no choice.69
The Suez affair was one of the most complex and dangerous of Cold War crises. Walking a tightrope over numerous conflicting forces, Eisenhower and Dulles did manage to avert war with the Soviet Union and limit the damage to relations with the Arab states. On the other hand, America's relations with its major allies plunged to their lowest point in years. Washington and London each believed they had been double-crossed. The British and French resented their humiliation at the hands of their ally. Eden and Dulles's mutual hatred deepened—as "tortuous as a wounded snake, with much less excuse," an Eden still angry years later said of his by then deceased U.S. counterpart.70 An already volatile Middle East was further destabilized. Nasser remained in power—a fact Dulles later privately lamented to the British. His noisy neutralism veered further eastward. Soviet premier Khrushchev mistakenly concluded that his rocket-rattling had carried the day—those "with the strongest nerves will be the winner," he boasted—thus emboldening him to further and even more reckless nuclear gambits.71
Amidst the wreckage of Suez and with an overwhelming electoral victory behind him, Eisenhower set out to craft a new strategy to protect U.S. interests in a vital region. He and Dulles backed off from mediation in the Arab-Israeli dispute, reasoning that with little hope of a settlement additional intrusion would only antagonize both sides. They rejoiced that European influence in the region was on the wane but feared the Soviets might fill the vacuum. They worried that Nasser and other Arab nationalists might create more instability that the Soviets could exploit. Presumably with Eisenhower's blessing, the CIA attempted unsuccessfully to overthrow the government of Syria, inflaming anti-U.S. sentiments in that country. It may have attempted to displace or even assassinate Nasser.72
But the main solutions were to bolster conservative, pro-Western governments in the region with economic and military assistance and deter Nasser and the Soviets with threats of military intervention. The administration lavished aid on Jordan and its boy king, Hussein. It put the greatest faith in Saudi Arabia and King Saud, son of the legendary Ibn Saud, some officials even hoping that as custodian of the holy places he might defuse Arab radicalism and isolate Nasser by becoming a sort of "Islamic pope." The modern U.S.-Saudi relationship took form during these years, but it did not have the effect Americans hoped for. Saud continued to rant against Israel and complain about the inadequacy of U.S. aid. Not a strong leader like his father, he drank heavily and became engaged in a bitter power struggle with his brother Faisal. By the end of the decade, the administration was exploring an accommodation with Nasser.73
To back up the threat of military intervention, Eisenhower and Dulles sought from Congress in early 1957 broad authority to send military forces to any nation threatened by a nation "controlled by International Communism." Democratic senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota warned of a "predated declaration of war," Oregon's Wayne Morse of a "chapter written in blood," but in tones reminiscent of Acheson in 1947 Eisenhower insisted that Soviet domination of the Middle East would "gravely endanger all the free world."74 Ten years to the month after Truman requested aid to Greece and Turkey, Eisenhower secured from Congress $200 million in aid and blanket authority to intervene militarily in the Middle East. The so-called Eisenhower Doctrine took a giant step beyond its predecessor.
As before, it was easier to promulgate a doctrine than apply it. The administration continued to blur the distinction between indigenous conflicts and international Communism. As always, involvement in the Middle East brought a steep price and numerous trade-offs. Threatened by a radical nationalist rival, Jordan's pro-Western Hussein in the spring of 1957 used Cold War lingo to attract U.S. intervention. Eisenhower sent economic aid and in a modern act of gunboat diplomacy dispatched the Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean. Hussein remained in power, an apparent victory, but U.S. intervention heightened tension with Egypt and Israel and briefly threatened a general Middle Eastern war. A similar effort in Syria completely backfired. Soviet aid to the Syrian government provoked from Washington dire warnings of a Hitler-like threat to the Middle East. The United States again dispatched the Sixth Fleet to the region and tried to line up a coalition against Syria. But the CIA's bungled covert operation and U.S. indecision about intervention led potential allies to balk and in some cases even support Syria. When the dust settled, Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic. Soviet influence grew.75
The United States sent troops to Lebanon under the Eisenhower Doctrine in the summer of 1958. Afflicted with deep-seated religious as well as ethnic and political divisions, Lebanon posed especially difficult challenges. When the Christian, pro-Western leader Camille Chamoun sought to extend his power, Muslim nationalists rebelled, and Chamoun appealed for U.S. aid. Eisenhower was wary of intervention, but the overthrow of the friendly Iraqi government at about the same time raised fears of a full-fledged Middle East crisis. Employing yet another analogy from the 1930s, the New York Times warned of a "Lebanese Anschluss."76 The administration feared that Nasser, Israel, and the Soviets might exploit the turmoil. Eisenhower speculated that Lebanon might be "our last chance to do something."77 After forcing Chamoun to step down, Eisenhower sent fourteen thousand marines to help stabilize Lebanon, the largest U.S. amphibious operation since Inchon. Upon hitting the beach, the marines encountered vacationers rather than enemy soldiers. They remained until September and at least temporarily eased the crisis.
Short-term successes in Jordan and Lebanon could not obscure the perils and pitfalls of intervention in the Middle East. Eisenhower admitted that there was a "campaign of hatred against us" and the people were on "Nasser's side."78 After extensive study, the NSC similarly concluded in late 1958 that the Eisenhower Doctrine was already outdated. By permitting itself to be "cast as Nasser's opponent," the United States had helped him become the "champion" of Arab nationalism. Interventionism had cost the United States Arab goodwill, further destabilized the region, and played into Soviet hands. The NSC recommended that the United States continue to defend the crucial northern tier states. It must distance itself still further from European colonialism. It must also seek ways to improve relations with Nasser and win Arab support. The administration tried to do these things, but it was not easy in a short time to repair the damage of six years of interventionism. Under Eisenhower's direction, the United States had plunged much more deeply into the politics of a turbulent region and assumed commitments difficult to shed. "U.S. leaders found themselves caught in the Middle East," historian Peter Hahn has concluded, "unable to relinquish the responsibilities that they had accepted even as those responsibilities became increasingly difficult to fulfill. And they were caught in the middle of the Arab-Israeli conflict, unable to resolve a dispute that would generate instability for years to come."79
While bringing the Cold War to nearby South Asia, the United States also encountered intractable local issues and sometimes unbridgeable cultural divides. Americans might well have empathized with India, which, after gaining independence from Britain in 1947, became the world's most populous democracy. But from the outset, the two peoples approached each other from markedly different perspectives. Indian culture was built on a sense of give-and-take Americans never quite understood. To Americans, on the other hand, Hinduism was backward looking and bred confusion, otherworldliness, and passivity.80 Each nation had pretensions to moral superiority that rubbed the other the wrong way. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru deeply resented U.S. pushiness and airs of superiority. He claimed not to understand "why a man with such strong muscles should publicly demonstrate his muscles all the time."81 Nehru's determination to remain neutral in the Cold War especially annoyed and alarmed Americans, raising fears that India might drift into the Communist "camp." India's frequent and shrill criticism of U.S. policies further riled leaders and citizens.
By contrast, American officials found much more to like in India's bitter rival Pakistan, the Muslim state carved out of the South Asian subcontinent in the partition that came with independence. Monotheistic Islam seemed much closer to Christianity. Pakistani leaders appeared much more vigorous, energetic, forthright, and warlike, in short more manly.82 Unlike India and primarily for its own reasons—to build the military strength necessary to fend off its much larger neighbor—Pakistan expressed willingness to stand with the United States in the Cold War. "Pakistan is a country I would like to do everything for," Vice President Richard M. Nixon exclaimed. "The people have less complexes than the Indians. The Pakistanis are completely frank even when it hurts."83 Not surprisingly, then, when the Eisenhower administration set out in 1953 to find allies, Pakistan stepped forward. It became a charter member of SEATO and the Baghdad Pact, making it, in the words of one wit, "America's most allied ally."84 Large-scale economic and especially military aid programs quickly followed.
The alliance with Pakistan brought as many problems as benefits. Nehru hoped to keep the subcontinent free of the Cold War, but the United States brought it there. One major result, as Indians had predicted, was to provoke a profound anger against the United States, driving their country toward the Soviet Union. Nor did relations between the United States and Pakistan especially flourish under the alliances. It was never quite clear what role Pakistan would play in Middle East defense. Its incessant demands for the newest and most expensive military hardware annoyed and concerned top U.S. officials. Military aid from the United States enabled Pakistan's leaders to ignore major domestic problems and refuse to negotiate with India. In turn, Pakistan's leaders resented U.S. refusal to meet their demands and accused their ally of bad faith.85
In the mid-1950s, the United States initiated a shift in its policies toward South Asia. Khrushchev's 1955 trip to the subcontinent followed by major commitments of aid for India alarmed U.S. officials. Some pundits speculated by this time that competition between China and India in terms of economic development might be the pivot on which world history turned. A 1957 economic crisis suggested that India could be losing. The United States thus became more receptive toward economic assistance for India. At the same time, Eisenhower had concluded that America's "tendency to rush out and seek allies was not very sensible," even a "terrible error."86 The United States thus sought to contain military aid to Pakistan within reasonable bounds. To help stabilize South Asia, it set out to encourage negotiations between Pakistan and India on vexing issues such as the disputed territory of Kashmir.
The policy changes produced no more than modest gains and highlighted once more the difficulties of imposing Cold War frameworks on complex local situations. India happily accepted U.S. assistance, and relations improved somewhat in Eisenhower's last years. But it refused to negotiate with its archenemy. Pakistan deeply resented U.S. aid to India. While also refusing negotiations with its neighbor, it demanded more for itself. The United States could hardly refuse. Pakistan provided crucial posts for electronic eavesdropping on the Soviet Union. Bases at Peshawar and Lahore enabled high-flying U-2 spy aircraft to gather vital intelligence on Soviet military capabilities and missile installations. The 1958 coup in Iraq replaced a pro-American government with radical Arabs, making Pakistan more important for Middle East defense. Pakistan's shrewd and hard-nosed leader, Ayub Kahn, warned that U.S. bases put his country at risk, therefore necessitating F-104 fighters and Sidewinder missiles. The Eisenhower policy shift brought some balance to U.S. relations with South Asia and improved relations with India. But it did little to stabilize the subcontinent or resolve America's essential policy dilemmas there.87
In the raging Cold War competition for the allegiance of Third World nations, the United States found itself increasingly handicapped abroad by one of its most difficult problems at home—the denial of equal rights and opportunities for all its citizens and especially the segregation of African Americans in the South. Race relations at home intersected with foreign policy in various ways. African Americans now openly questioned their nation's claims to moral world leadership. "Advocacy of free elections in Europe by American officials is hypocrisy," the young minister and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. observed, "when free elections are not held in great sections of America."88 African diplomats posted in Washington and at the United Nations ran up against discriminatory racial mores in the United States. Under fire for their handling of decolonization, Europeans turned the tables by pointing to the country's management of its own racial issues. Top officials increasingly recognized the contradiction. "We cannot talk equality to the peoples of Africa and Asia and practice inequality in the United States," Nixon warned the president upon returning from Africa in early 1957. "In the national interest, as well as for the moral issues involved, we must support the necessary steps which will assure orderly progress toward the elimination of discrimination in the United States."89
The Little Rock school desegregation crisis of September 1957 became a watershed issue for U.S. foreign policy. Eisenhower sent federal troops to the Arkansas capital with great reluctance. He was personally comfortable with segregation and had many friends among the southern elite. He believed social change could come only gradually and hesitated to intervene in what he considered a state matter. But Governor Orval Faubus's blatant defiance of Supreme Court school desegregation rulings left him no choice. More important, Little Rock had a huge worldwide impact. Scenes of federal troops escorting African American children to school while white foes of integration hurled ugly epithets of protest played in newspapers and especially on the powerful new medium of television across the world. Soviet and Chinese propagandists had a field day. Europeans still smarting from Suez crowed that America's handling of its own race problems hardly qualified it to lecture them. A Nigerian newspaper asserted that the United States "has no claim to be leader of Western democracies." The crisis in Arkansas was "ruining our foreign policy," Dulles warned the president; the impact in Asia and Africa "might be worse for us than Hungary was for the Russians."90 Little Rock thus inextricably linked foreign and domestic issues. Americans, Eisenhower among them, concluded that the nation must effectively address its domestic issues to validate its claim to be leader of the free world.
Following Little Rock, the Eisenhower administration took modest steps to address a serious problem. It made symbolic gestures to improve its image among emerging nations. It supported a Haitian candidate for president of the UN Trusteeship Council. In the late 1950s, decolonization hit Africa with a vengeance, and the United States supported more openly the independence and even neutralism of new nations there. The State Department established a Bureau of African Affairs, removing that continent's questions from the European divisions traditionally more sympathetic to the colonial powers. In October 1958, for the first time, the United States voted for a U.N. resolution condemning apartheid in South Africa. There were, of course, limits to how far the administration would go. Following the notorious 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa in which police brutally killed sixty-nine protestors and wounded two hundred others, the State Department disavowed a U.S. diplomat who had issued a mild statement of protest. Most important, the administration recognized that it could no longer remain indifferent to the international implications of racial problems at home. Eisenhower and even more his successors plainly saw how important they had become to the nation's global position and pretensions.91
Throughout its history, when facing a real or imagined foreign threat, the United States has taken a keener interest in the Western Hemisphere. The Cold War was no exception. During their first years, Eisenhower and Dulles continued with little change the Latin American policies they had inherited. They worried about Communism in the hemisphere, as elsewhere, but saw little reason for alarm or exceptional measures. Like Truman and Acheson, they rebuffed Latin American pleas for a hemispheric Marshall Plan, insisting that modest loans and private investment were the correct path to economic development. To sustain close ties with Latin American military leaders, they expanded their predecessors' military aid program. They mounted a major propaganda campaign featuring comic strips, cartoon books, and radio broadcasts warning the Latin American masses of the dangers of Communism. They continued the usual public relations measures of feting hemispheric leaders and celebrating Pan-Americanism—"you have to pat them a bit and make them think that you are fond of them," Dulles instructed the president.92
Continuing the practice dating to the 1920s, they accommodated the dictators who ruled thirteen of the twenty Latin American nations. Indeed, in their first years, they went much further, bestowing the Legion of Merit on such distasteful characters as dictators Marcus Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela and Manuel Odría of Peru and entertaining Nicaragua's brutal tyrant Anastasio Somoza and Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner. During a goodwill tour in 1955, Nixon publicly embraced Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, whom he compared to Abraham Lincoln, and the Dominican Republic's Rafael Trujillo. At a time when anti-Communism was the highest priority, democracy and human rights took a backseat. In any event, as Nixon explained, "Spaniards had many talents, but government was not among them."93
The administration also followed through on a policy initiative devised by its predecessor by using covert operations in the summer of 1954 to topple the leftist government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. A handsome and charismatic politician, the popularly elected reformer sought to modernize his nation's economy by encouraging factories, establishing banks, and exploiting the nation's mineral resources. He launched a massive land reform program, expropriating thousands of acres for redistribution to peasants. In 1952, he seized four hundred thousand acres of land belonging to the mighty United Fruit Company, the U.S.-owned corporation that dominated Guatemala's economy. Closely connected with the U.S. government, "the Octopus," as it was known to Guatemalans, raised the specter of Communism and furiously lobbied the administration to do something. No less than the pioneer of public relations, Edward Bernays, who had originally peddled bananas as a cure for indigestion, put together a network of propaganda operatives to discredit Árbenz in Guatemala and brand him a Communist in the United States. In America, at least, UFCO preached to the choir. Although the CIA could find no direct ties with Moscow, the administration was already deeply suspicious of Árbenz. When his government took anti-U.S. positions in inter-American meetings and purchased arms from Czechoslovakia (because it could not buy them from the United States), it confirmed what most U.S. officials already suspected: Árbenz was a Communist and therefore a menace to the hemisphere.94
Implemented by the CIA in the summer of 1954 with a budget of $3 million, Operation PBSUCCESS lived up to its code name. The agency employed mercenaries from various Central American countries and established training camps in Florida, in Honduras, and on Somoza's estate in Nicaragua. CIA-trained teams using psywar tactics showered Guatemala with broadcasts and leaflets fomenting rebellion. They sent "mourning cards" to Árbenz and other leaders, hinting at doom for any recipient, and warned Catholics that pictures of Lenin and Stalin would replace statues of the saints in their houses.95 CIA propagandists exaggerated the strength of the uprising. On June 18, 1954, U.S.-picked rebel leader Castillo Armas "invaded" Guatemala with an "army" of about 150 men. A small "air force" of Cessnas and antiquated U.S. military aircraft "bombed" ammunition dumps and oil storage facilities in Guatemala City with such things as Molotov cocktails and blocks of dynamite attached to hand grenades. Wrongly persuaded that the United States would do anything to get rid of him, Árbenz, much like Mosaddeq, cracked under pressure, resigning on June 27 and fleeing into exile. Castillo Armas visited Washington shortly after and obeisantly inquired of Nixon: "Tell me what you want me to do and I will do it."96
The coup had significant consequences for all concerned. As in Iran, it succeeded despite numerous blunders in execution mainly because Árbenz, like Mosaddeq, lost his nerve. Top U.S. officials saw it as further confirmation of the ease with which hostile Third World governments could be eliminated. PBSUCCESS thus induced a great hubris in the agency and a certain complacency about Latin America and in time led to similar efforts in Cuba, British Guiana, and Chile. The coup produced a stable government friendly to U.S. interests, but for Guatemala it brought disaster. The overthrow of Árbenz shattered the political center and initiated a cycle of violence that would last for more than four decades. The CIA retained influence in Guatemala into the 1990s, assisting with a so-called counterinsurgency program that resulted in torture, political assassination, and the massacre of entire Mayan villages. Somewhere between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand people were killed in what the agency's inspector general later conceded was "one of the saddest chapters of American relations with Latin America."97
A series of shocking events in the Eisenhower administration's last three years produced dramatic shifts in U.S. Latin American policy. The hemisphere itself underwent major changes. A recession in the United States caused a catastrophic drop in prices for Latin American exports, halting economic growth and leaving widespread human misery. Economic problems brought political instability. Ten of the thirteen dictators fell from power. Economic and political unrest also provoked in the hemisphere rising anti-Americanism.
An attack on Nixon in Caracas in May 1958 brought home to North Americans in the most alarming fashion the seething discontent among their southern neighbors. Already concerned about the turmoil in Latin America, the administration sent the vice president back on another fact-finding mission and goodwill visit. He encountered some verbal protests in Montevideo, Uruguay, and his entourage was stoned in Lima, Peru, but in Caracas his life was threatened. En route to a ceremony at the tomb of the liberator Simón Bolívar, his motorcade was surrounded and stopped by an angry mob shouting anti-U. S. slogans. As the crowd closed in, the police fled. The mob broke the windows of cars in which the vice president and his wife were riding. For nearly fifteen minutes, they were trapped and seriously endangered. An alert and intrepid driver finally extricated them to the safety of the U.S. embassy. Nixon returned to Washington to a hero's welcome; eighty-five thousand people lined the route from National Airport into the city.98 Some top officials at first dismissed the attacks as the work of Communist provocateurs, but CIA director Dulles insisted there was no evidence of Soviet involvement and conceded that there would be "trouble in Latin America even if there were no Communists."99 The attack on Nixon stunned the administration into recognition of the surging unrest in Latin America, producing in time reassessments of basic policies.
The rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba and his drift toward the Soviet Union brought the Cold War into the U.S. backyard. Many Cubans admired the United States, imbibed its culture, baseball especially, and liked its people. But they also resented outside domination and blamed many of their problems on the United States. For nearly a quarter century, they had suffered under Fulgencio Batista's oppressive regime. The U.S. government encouraged tourism in the 1950s to help deal with the worldwide dollar gap, and Batista brought in mobster Meyer Lansky to clean up Havana's casinos. An estimated three hundred thousand Americans flocked to Cuba yearly, making it a playground for the rich and a source of wealth for U.S. organized crime.100 The Platt Amendment had been abrogated in 1934, but its essence in terms of U.S. domination—what Castro called "Plattism"—lived on. Batista scrupulously accommodated Washington on major issues and granted favors, sometimes in return for bribes, to U.S. corporations like International Telephone and Telegraph. Reliant on the export of sugar, the Cuban economy remained an appendage of the United States.101
Castro boldly set out to change this. The son of a wealthy planter, well educated, a good enough pitcher that the New York baseball Giants once offered him a five-thousand-dollar signing bonus, the young rebel was also a fiery nationalist and admirer of José Martí, who had insisted that a genuine revolution must be a revolution against the United States. Still in his twenties, quixotic by nature, Castro launched premature uprisings in 1953 and 1956 that ended disastrously. Undaunted, he organized in the Sierra Maestra mountains of southeastern Cuba the guerrilla army that would drive Batista from power. He benefited from Batista's complacency, ineptitude, and cruelty, popular unrest due to high unemployment, and rising middle-class discontent. On January 1, 1959, a victorious Fidel rode triumphantly into Havana on a tank given Batista by the United States.102
As with China a decade earlier, Americans later played the blame game of who "lost" Cuba, some claiming that the Eisenhower administration should have seen Castro for what he was and nipped his movement in the bud, others insisting that it should have been more accepting of his revolution.103 In truth, likely neither approach would have worked. There is no persuasive evidence that Castro entered Havana in January 1959 committed to a Marxist revolution. In any event, until this time the United States had been preoccupied with crises in the Middle East and elsewhere. It complacently assumed that Batista would prevail or, in the unlikely event Castro won out, as with previous Cuban leaders, he could not survive without U.S. backing. On the other hand, it is easy to exaggerate U.S. hostility. The United States was tainted by its long-standing support of Batista, to be sure, and it might have broken with him earlier. But it eventually cut off aid and pressed him to step down. Washington was wary of Castro from the outset, but initially the bearded rebel in olive green combat fatigues was an object of fascination more than of hostility. Some Americans sympathized with his revolution. Eisenhower sent Philip Bonsal, an open-minded career diplomat, to Havana to work with Castro. In April 1959, when Washington welcomed him for an official visit, Nixon still hoped that the United States might "orient him in the right direction."104 This, of course, was the rub. Castro was determined to free Cuba of U.S. domination and in time saw the Soviet Union as a means to that end. In the tension-ridden Cold War environment of 1959–60, any move in that direction was anathema to the United States.
The two sides soon fixed on a collision course. Castro aroused U.S. suspicions not long after taking power by legalizing the Communist Party and welcoming leftists to his government. He drove off moderates and conducted show trials and public executions of Batista supporters, provoking outrage in the United States. He began to expropriate land and nationalize basic industries and sought to purchase weapons from Soviet-bloc nations. On a second, highly publicized visit to the United States in late 1959 he denounced U.S. imperialism before the United Nations. Perhaps most ominously, he advocated a Nasser-like neutralism and called for revolution throughout Latin America. The United States maintained the arms embargo imposed on Batista and vigorously protested Castro's nationalization and expropriations. It increasingly feared that the contagion of Cuba's revolution might spread through Latin America. As tension heightened, Castro in early 1960 pursued a bold option not open to previous Cuban revolutionaries by seeking a trade deal with the Soviet Union. Eagerly seizing this rare opportunity to gain an ally at America's back door, Soviet leaders responded positively—"we felt like boys again," one official later told an American.105 For Washington, Castro's move toward Moscow was the last straw. Labeling the Cuban a "madman," Eisenhower decided in March 1960 that he must go. Not wanting to overthrow him without an alternative available, the administration began to organize an opposition to prepare the way for a Guatemala-type operation.106
In response to this new challenge, the Eisenhower administration in its last months executed a reverse course in Latin America, mounting the most active approach to the hemisphere since the Good Neighbor policy. After years of coddling dictators, it publicly encouraged representative government and actively supported moderate reformists such as Venezuela's Romulo Betancourt. It cut back and attempted to redirect the focus of the military aid programs that had drained resources desperately needed for development and helped keep brutal dictators in power. Belatedly conceding that economic deprivation provided a fertile breeding ground for Communism, it embraced aid programs it had once spurned. It acquiesced in commodity arrangements to help stabilize prices for Latin American exports such as coffee and raw materials. In the summer of 1960, it created a Social Progress Trust Fund of $500 million to promote medical, education, and land reform programs, not exactly the Marshall Plan Latin American leaders had pleaded for but a big step beyond earlier policies and a foundation for John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress.107
While seeking to improve relations with other Latin American nations, the United States set out to eliminate Castro. It launched full-scale economic warfare, including a virtual trade embargo, broke diplomatic relations, and sought to mobilize opposition to his regime among other Latin American nations. As in Guatemala, it mounted a propaganda campaign to incite rebellion in Cuba. It also began to organize political opposition among anti-Castro exiles and to arm and train an exile force for an invasion of Cuba. The CIA hatched a variety of plots to discredit and even assassinate Castro. Recognizing that the Batista-like and increasingly egomaniacal Rafael Trujillo posed the danger of another Castro in the Dominican Republic, the administration prepared a parallel set of actions to get rid of him.108 After years of official U.S. indifference, Latin America, by virtue of Communism, Caracas, and Castro, was back at the top of the U.S. foreign policy agenda.
Cuba was not the only problem facing the Eisenhower administration in its last years. The world of the late 1950s was increasingly complex and infinitely more dangerous. Conflict between the Soviet Union and China, although still not out in the open, intensified at the end of the decade, complicating ties between the two Communist powers and their relations with the United States. The relentless advance of technology raised growing fears of a nuclear war no one might win. Eisenhower and Khrushchev saw the need to ease Cold War tensions, but their cautious moves in that direction confused as much as they clarified relations between the superpowers. The Cold War had a gained momentum of its own. The two leaders' initial steps toward what would later be called detente ran afoul of hard-line critics in each nation, institutional and economic imperatives, and conflicts in other parts of the world. Taking control of U.S. foreign policy after Dulles's death in May 1959, Eisenhower responded prudently and with admirable restraint to the multiple challenges of his last years, but at times he appeared to be reacting to events rather than shaping them. On occasion, he seemed to be stumbling. Remembering their 1952 electoral defeat, Democrats attacked the administration for allowing the nation to fall behind technologically and responding ineffectually to the Communist menace. The administration left office in 1961 in much the same milieu in which it had come to power in 1953—with the roles of the two parties reversed.
Nothing fed public anxieties and the political turmoil of the late 1950s more than the rising threat of nuclear war and concerns, often politically inspired, that the United States was lagging behind the USSR in technology. Nuclear weapons had been the centerpiece of the administration's New Look defense strategy, and Dulles often boasted that massive retaliation had won major Cold War victories. But in the second term, the reliance on nuclear weapons drew fire from different directions. Critics questioned the wisdom of a grand strategy based on such weapons when the other side also possessed them. Europeans correctly feared they might bear the brunt of a Soviet response in the event of a nuclear exchange and could not but question U.S. dependence on nuclear weapons. The impact on Japanese fishermen of radioactive fallout from a U.S. nuclear explosion in the Pacific highlighted growing popular fears about the dangers. Nevil Shute's 1957 novel On the Beach told the grisly story of the destruction of the world by nuclear war. Organized by internationalists and liberal pacifists the same year, the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (SANE) drew support from many celebrities and held rallies and protest marches demanding an end to atmospheric nuclear testing, steps toward nuclear disarmament, and international control of atomic energy. Intellectuals and political leaders across the world took up the cause.109
The New Look also provoked opposition from the other end of the political spectrum. Army officers and a growing body of civilian defense intellectuals increasingly warned that the reliance on nuclear weapons narrowed the nation's options to launching nuclear war or doing nothing. Especially as the Cold War shifted to the Third World, critics of massive retaliation called for building up conventional forces and developing capabilities for dealing with insurgencies. With total war threatening nuclear annihilation, political scientist Robert Osgood insisted that limited war was the only rational alternative. Democratic senators Stuart Symington of Missouri, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Henry Jackson of Washington, arguing on the basis of badly flawed intelligence, warned that while relying on nuclear weapons the administration had allowed the United States to fall behind the Soviet Union in its means of delivering them. Charges of a "bomber gap" surfaced as early as 1954, accompanied by demands that the United States undertake a massive building program to outstrip the Soviets in nuclear weapons and develop invulnerable delivery systems.110
More than anything else, the Sputnik "crisis" shaped the American mood of the late 1950s. On October 4, 1957, with maximum fanfare and propaganda, the Soviet Union put into orbit with a huge R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile the world's first artificial satellite, a monumental scientific accomplishment. A month later, it orbited a much larger instrument carrying a live dog. The launch of Sputnik I and Sputnik II shook the United States to its core. The superiority of U.S. science was assumed to be the bedrock of the nation's security. What the New York Daily News called "Khrushchev's comet" appeared to undermine the basic principles of massive retaliation and the New Look—and add substance to Soviet rocket-rattling.111 Much like Pearl Harbor, it created a sense of profound vulnerability, raising fears that turned to near panic. Sputnik even provoked questions among Americans and across the world whether the Soviet system might be superior to that of the United States, a huge problem in the ongoing global competition for hearts and minds. The explosion of an American rocket on its launch pad just weeks later ("Kaputnik," "Stayputnik," Americans nervously called it) added humiliation—and fear. The report of a blue-ribbon panel headed by H. Rowland Gaither Jr., presented to Eisenhower in November and leaked in part to the public, reinforced popular anxiety by painting a frightening picture of the inadequacy of the nation's defenses and calling for a Manhattan Project–like program for missile development and even the construction of fallout shelters. A call to arms much like NSC-68, the Gaither Report, according to the Washington Post, portrayed a "United States in the gravest danger in its history."112 The Sputnik panic evoked calls from intellectuals for a refocus from the self-absorption in the era's consumer culture to a higher national purpose.
Eisenhower handled the Sputnik crisis with admirable calm and self-assurance. High-altitude U-2 spy planes flying over the USSR since 1956 provided up-to-date intelligence on Soviet military capabilities. The president knew—although he could not divulge it publicly—that while the Kremlin had scored a huge short-term propaganda victory, its missiles could not reach the United States. The USSR remained well behind in nuclear warheads, bombers, and even long-range missile technology. He had long feared that excessive military spending would require additional taxes, hold back capital accumulation, retard industrial growth, and risk a garrison state that could threaten American democracy. Through a series of speeches, he sought to reassure the nation that its defenses could deter any Soviet attack. He muted criticism by taking modest steps, a small increase in defense spending to calm public opinion and creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to promote space exploration. He supported feel-good and ultimately significant programs to advance U.S. education, especially in science, mathematics, engineering, and foreign languages—one of them revealingly entitled the National Defense Education Act. He ordered the construction of a super-secret underground bunker complex three stories deep and the size of two football fields adjacent to the posh Greenbrier Hotel in rural West Virginia where Congress could conduct the nation's business in the event of nuclear attack. But he firmly and courageously resisted the crash programs and massive spending called for by the military and panicky citizens. He would not commit billions of dollars to beat the Russians to the moon. His refusal to bend to popular pressures had a political cost, of course, permitting Democrats to continue to exploit charges of a defenseless America.113
While the nation agonized over Sputnik, the Cold War raged across the world. In distant Tibet, site of the mythical Shangri-La, fierce Khampa tribesmen, trained in Colorado by the CIA and parachuted back into their homeland, fought a "pinprick" war against Chinese occupation forces. The rebels gained valuable intelligence about China's nascent nuclear program. They also suffered horrendous losses—like "throwing meat into a tiger's mouth," one guerrilla conceded. The enterprise was generally counterproductive. The guerrillas did enough to annoy China but never threatened its control; U.S. support for them enabled the Chinese to use an external threat as an excuse to invade Tibet in 1959.114
Certain that the mercurial Sukarno's neutralism exposed Indonesia to a possible Communist takeover, Eisenhower and Dulles in 1957 began covert support for rebel forces on the islands of Sumatra and Sulawesi. The CIA delivered arms by submarine and airdrop, and in 1958 U.S. and Taiwanese "volunteer" pilots began to provide air support. Unlike Mosaddeq and Árbenz, Sukarno hung tough and the Indonesian Army outfought the rebels. The U.S. hand was revealed in May 1958 when American pilot Allen Pope was shot down and captured. Eisenhower's claims that Pope was a soldier of fortune fooled no one. An embarrassed administration had to scrap an already faltering covert operation. The United States' involvement actually strengthened Sukarno and the Indonesian Communist Party. When the Soviets began large arms sales to Sukarno, the administration, to retain some influence in Indonesia, did the same. The debacle in Indonesia was an unnoted harbinger of things to come.115
Old Cold War hot spots flared up again in 1958. A second Taiwan Straits crisis erupted in August when China resumed shelling Quemoy and Matsu. Mao hoped to demonstrate his independence from Moscow and derail any Soviet tilt toward the United States. Thinking in conventional Cold War terms and fearing an all-out attack by Mao—or Chiang Kai-shek—Eisenhower and Dulles took a tough line. In his last go at brinkmanship, a gravely ill Dulles threatened war while the president briefly pondered using tactical nuclear weapons against Chinese airfields. Mao terrified Soviet diplomats by appearing to welcome a U.S. attack. Maneuvering skillfully amidst these conflicting forces, Eisenhower committed the United States to defending Quemoy and Matsu while leaving an opening for the Chinese. Having used the islands as a baton to make Khrushchev and Eisenhower dance, as he put it, Mao backed off. Sino-American ambassadorial talks resumed in Warsaw. Eisenhower's diplomacy provoked a backlash from some Democrats and European leaders who feared his actions might spark a war over worthless Asian real estate and from supporters of Taiwan who smelled appeasement.116
The United States encountered problems with allies as well as enemies. As Japan grew stronger economically and recovered from the trauma of defeat, sentiment increased for revision of the 1952 treaty. Japanese compared that pact to the unequal treaties of the past century. They resented the continued presence of more than two hundred thousand U.S. "occupation" troops, highlighted by a much publicized 1957 incident in which a GI brutally shot a Japanese woman picking up shell casings on an American firing range. They feared the treaty might drag their nation into war with the Soviet Union or China. Vividly remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they especially feared the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons on their territory. With typical, superheated Cold War rhetoric, Ambassador John Allison warned Washington that if relations were not soon put on a more equal basis Japan might slip away.117
Eisenhower moved expeditiously to stabilize relations with a crucial ally. In 1957, he authorized a major CIA covert operation to bolster conservative elements in Japanese politics. The agency bankrolled the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to the tune of $2 million to $10 million a year to influence elections for the legislature and secure political intelligence to discredit that party's foes. Such methods represented a blatant intrusion in Japanese politics and abetted the creation and perpetuation of a one-party "democracy."118 The administration also opened discussions for a new security treaty. To facilitate the process, it voluntarily reduced by more than half the number of troops stationed in Japan and offered generous trade concessions. After months of sometimes difficult negotiations, the two nations in early 1960 concluded an agreement that made concessions to Japan but protected what the United States considered most important. Each side could terminate the treaty after ten years. The United States gave up the right to intervene militarily in Japan's internal affairs, but it could act to protect the security of Japan and the Far East, a vague provision that aroused great concern among Japanese. Japan renewed U.S. base rights, a crucial matter for Washington, but U.S. and Japanese forces could be employed only after consultation, a key issue for Japan. The delicate question of nuclear weapons was addressed in a separate, secret agreement, the existence of which has still not been officially acknowledged or the terms divulged, permitting the United States to move such weapons in and out of Japan.119 The United States appears to have violated the spirit if not the letter of that agreement by keeping nuclear weapons on Iwo Jima and Chici Jima and housing bombs without cores and nuclear components on bases in Japan.120 The treaty marked a major change in the Japanese-American relationship.
It also provoked a crisis in U.S.-Japanese relations. To be sure, Americans warmly welcomed Prime Minister Kishi Nokosuke to the United States in January 1960, and the Senate approved the treaty without fanfare. But in Japan it became an explosive political issue. The left bitterly protested the continued presence of foreign troops on Japanese soil and warned of being drawn into war with the Soviet Union or China. The Soviet shooting down of a Pakistan-based U.S. spy plane in May, followed by another round of Khrushchev nuclear threats, gave powerful ammunition to foes of the treaty. Thousands of Japanese took to the streets to protest the alliance and Eisenhower's scheduled June visit. For a while, both governments stood firm, but in the face of rising protest and violence the United States agreed to Kishi's request for postponement. The president authorized the CIA to take additional measures to firm up the position of the LDP and promote the treaty. The agency also funded right-wing hit groups to harass leftist protestors. Democrats complained of yet another embarrassing defeat. Editorialists deplored cancellation of Eisenhower's visit as a "serious challenge to American prestige and a threat to our entire position in Asia."121
In the meantime, Khrushchev triggered yet another crisis over that perennial Cold War flash point West Berlin. For the Soviet leadership, in the premier's colorful imagery, Berlin was a "bone in the throat," a "malignant tumor" that required "some surgery."122 It provided an escape hatch for thousands of skilled workers who fled to the West, damaging the East German economy and embarrassing the USSR in a contest where symbols had become increasingly important. Khrushchev also perceived that Berlin was among his adversaries' most vulnerable positions—"the testicles of the West," he called it. "Every time I give them a yank, they holler."123 Now more secure in the Kremlin hierarchy, the Soviet leader interpreted as a victory U.S. refusal in July 1958 to send troops to Iraq to uphold the pro-Western government, further bolstering his self-confidence and confirming his view that threats and pressure were the only language the West understood. Exhibiting both his "peasant logic" and his reckless, sometimes bizarre, diplomatic style—he compared it to playing chess in the dark—in November 1958 he squeezed hard by demanding that West Berlin be made a free city (a city governed autonomously under international agreement).124 If the Western allies did not comply within six months, he would conclude a separate peace with East Germany, terminating the World War II four-power arrangements and leaving the question of access to West Berlin in the hands of his East German ally. Khrushchev's confused and risky diplomacy was designed to scare the West into serious negotiations and wangle an invitation to visit the United States for a summit meeting. But his move was poorly thought out and characteristically impulsive. If it failed, he casually remarked to his son, "Then, we'll try something else."125
Eisenhower agreed that Berlin was a "can of worms." He also was eager to settle the volatile German question. But he could not appear to give in to Soviet threats. He rebuffed hawkish proposals from his military advisers but stood firm on Berlin. He ordered a quiet military buildup while calmly reassuring the nation. Khrushchev's ultimatum expired May 27, 1959—ironically, the day John Foster Dulles was buried—without any comment from Moscow. The crisis eased momentarily, but Berlin would remain the most explosive spot in world politics for the next few years.
Even as the Berlin crisis smoldered, the major powers inched toward the first Cold War agreement on nuclear weapons. Initial discussions emanating from the 1955 Geneva summit went nowhere. Eisenhower was at best lukewarm, believing that real disarmament would come only after the Cold War had been won. Nuclear testing was the most pressing issue, and the United States refused to deal with it except as part of a larger agreement that included on-site inspections, a provision the Kremlin seemed sure to reject. Moscow linked a ban on nuclear testing to a sweeping ban on all nuclear weapons, an offer the United States turned down because of its inferiority in conventional forces. The deadlock provided ample room for propaganda moves, and Moscow took full advantage. In late 1957, Bulganin proposed suspension of nuclear testing for two to three years along with a summit to discuss other disarmament issues. In January 1958, Khrushchev proclaimed Soviet intentions to cut conventional forces by three hundred thousand troops; two months later, he announced a unilateral suspension of nuclear testing.126
Within a year, both sides took dramatic steps forward. Even as he sought to exploit nuclear threats, Khrushchev increasingly saw the dangers of nuclear war. Keenly aware that military spending was holding back Soviet economic development, to which he was deeply committed, he sought agreements that would enable him to divert precious resources to domestic needs. Eisenhower still dragged his feet. He did not trust the Soviets to abide by agreements that lacked the sort of inspections they were sure to reject. The Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission adamantly insisted that testing was essential to U.S. national security. On the other hand, domestic and international pressures for test bans increased dramatically, and the president began to see other benefits. A test ban would be relatively easy to monitor, and Soviet acceptance of inspections might generate other intelligence to help guard against a surprise attack. A testing agreement might help check the spread of nuclear weapons to other nations, a growing concern in Moscow as well as Washington. After another uproar over the dangers of nuclear fallout, Eisenhower belatedly committed to suspending atmospheric testing and subsequently underground testing above the "threshold" of 4.75 on the Richter scale. "We have got to try to make some progress somewhere in the disarmament area," he exclaimed.127 His stand helped get the Anglo-American-Soviet talks in motion. By early 1960, the major unresolved issue concerned the number of on-site inspections.128
Khrushchev's fall 1959 visit to the United States provided further hope for easing Cold War tensions. Eisenhower acceded to Khrushchev's wish to come to the United States reluctantly and mainly because a State Department official—without authorization—had extended an unconditional invitation. The affair was grand Cold War theater, a first-class media event before the phrase was coined. Barely five feet tall, portly, and balding, Khrushchev did not present an imposing figure. Limited in education, profoundly insecure, and determined to prove himself, the ebullient, bumptious, and unpredictable Soviet leader this time arrived in a humongous aircraft so high off the ground that the passengers had to exit from an emergency ramp. He showed poor taste in presenting his host a model of the latest Soviet space achievement. He bristled at tough questions from U.S. reporters about Hungary. "I do not have horns," he goaded a New York audience.129 He complained that he was not permitted to visit Disneyland and protested—perhaps too much—the scanty apparel worn by actresses on the set of the movie Can-Can. He also displayed flashes of folksy charm. The two-week visit ended with private top-level talks at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains. Ever nervous, Khrushchev worried that the hideaway named for Eisenhower's grandson might be some kind of internment center. Perhaps surprisingly, the talks went smoothly. The Soviet premier came to see the president as someone he could work with. He withdrew his Berlin ultimatum—sort of—and Eisenhower vaguely agreed that the status of the city must change. Khrushchev also concluded that his grand scheme for improved relations was workable. The scheduling of a four-power summit for Paris in May 1960 followed by an Eisenhower visit to Moscow brought forth talk of a "spirit of Camp David" and worldwide hopes for peace.130
It was not to be. On May 1, two weeks before the summit was to begin and just as May Day celebrations were starting in Moscow, a Soviet surface-to-air missile shot down a U-2 spy plane over the village of Povarnia in the Ural Mountains. Both sides handled the incident badly. Eisenhower had long been uneasy about the U-2 flights, recognizing that they constituted an act of war. He consented to this particular flight only at the insistence of the military and the CIA and with assurances there would be no problems for the summit. For Khrushchev, the overflights had been especially humiliating. Still clinging to hopes for a productive summit, he blamed the hard-liners around Eisenhower. He hoped to capitalize on the triumph of shooting down the plane without destroying the summit, but he could not resist the temptation to overreach. He initially concealed that the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had been taken alive and parts of the aircraft recovered, catching Washington in a lie when the usual explanations were issued of a weather plane straying off course. Eisenhower then compounded the problem by admitting to the spy flights without acknowledging that he had approved Powers's mission. Khrushchev's loud denunciation of the U.S. military for ordering the flight, perhaps intended to give Eisenhower a way out, instead forced the president to accept responsibility to make clear that he was in charge, thus undercutting Khrushchev's efforts to portray him as someone Moscow could deal with. Furious that Eisenhower had accepted responsibility, thus ruining his own scheme, an increasingly agitated Khrushchev once in Paris spewed forth a vitriolic, highly personal, forty-five-minute attack on the president. He demanded a formal apology and promises of no more violations of Soviet airspace. Publicly, the president struggled to contain his fury. Privately, he denounced Khrushchev as a "son-of-a-bitch" and refused even to speak his name.131 He agreed to suspend the U-2 flights, no huge concession since spy satellites would soon take their place. But he refused to apologize, believing that Khrushchev would have to give way to save the summit. After days of frenzied efforts by British and French leaders to salvage something, the meeting broke up in anger. Whether the Paris meeting might have accomplished anything without the U-2 incident can never be known. The two sides still differed sharply on Berlin and disarmament. What is certain is that the "U-2 mess," as Eisenhower referred to it, destroyed the summit, cost the president and the United States heavily in prestige, ended any chance of substantive negotiations before the November elections, and left Berlin more dangerous than ever.132
The Cold War played an important part in the 1960 presidential campaign. The U-2 affair, Castro's move toward the USSR, the cancellation of Eisenhower's trip to Japan, and a summer crisis in the newly independent Congo all kept the nation's attention focused on foreign policy. Khrushchev's stormy autumn visit to the United States, complete with a fiery speech before the United Nations and the bizarre spectacle of the Soviet premier removing his shoe and pounding it furiously on the podium—amusing, had it not seemed so ominous—kept the Cold War threat very much alive for Americans. Following themes his party had exploited since Sputnik, Democratic candidate John Kennedy repeatedly criticized the Republicans for permitting the nation to fall behind militarily and suffer a huge loss of prestige in the world. He called for "new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities."133 While touting his own proximity to power and foreign policy résumé, the Republican candidate, Vice President Nixon, questioned Kennedy's experience, maturity, and judgment. In the nation's first televised presidential debates and countless stump speeches, the candidates tangled over hot-button foreign policy issues. Kennedy questioned the wisdom of Nixon's commitment to defend Quemoy and Matsu, an entirely sensible stance but one the vice president cleverly twisted to depict his opponent as an appeaser. The Massachusetts senator blasted the Eisenhower administration for failing to prevent the rise of Castro. JFK won the election by a razor-thin margin, gaining a majority of neither the popular vote nor the states. He effectively hammered home his point about the nation's decline of prestige and played on Americans' fears of military weakness, but he nearly lost by mishandling foreign policy issues late in the campaign. What stands out in retrospect is the broad area of agreement between the two candidates, a clear reflection of the dominance of the Cold War consensus.134
EISENHOWER'S STOCK HAS risen markedly in recent years. No longer dismissed as an intellectual lightweight and political babe-in-the-woods, he is generally recognized as a self-assured and prudent leader who understood politics and, having seen war firsthand, appreciated the limits of military power.135 Despite frequent crises and the recurrent threat of war, he managed to keep the peace during his time in office. He worked out with the European allies and the Soviet Union the basis for a viable if by no means perfect settlement in Europe—Berlin, of course, the major exception—the foundation for what historian John Lewis Gaddis has called the "Long Peace."136 He adjusted America's relations with its crucial East Asian ally Japan in the direction of a more equal partnership, not always easy for a hegemonic power to do. He avoided open-ended military commitments and took the first hesitant steps toward nuclear arms limitations. Even during the post-Sputnik hysteria, he remained calm and kept the military budget under some semblance of control. He perceived and feared the way the Cold War was reshaping the U.S. economy and in his farewell address warned of the rising power of a military-industrial complex.
As critics have pointed out, to stop there is to provide only a one-dimensional assessment of Eisenhower's foreign policy legacy.137 Not surprisingly, given the New Look reliance on nuclear weapons, the U.S. nuclear arsenal grew to elephantine proportions during his presidency. By 1961, the United States had more than two thousand bombers, one hundred missiles, with many more on the planning board, and submarines capable of launching rockets with nuclear warheads. From 1958 to 1960 alone, the number of nuclear weapons increased from six thousand to eighteen thousand, overkill by any standard. Much like Truman and Acheson, Eisenhower failed most notably in dealing with Third World nationalism. He and his advisers persisted in viewing the new nations primarily in terms of the Cold War. They exaggerated the Soviet threat. They never fully appreciated the primal force of nationalism, the new nations' entirely understandable hypersensitivity to outside influence, especially Western, and their neutralist tendencies. In the Middle East and South Asia, the administration exacerbated regional tensions and aroused sometimes fierce anti-Americanism. It tightened U.S. ties with right-wing dictatorships in South Korea and Taiwan, thus inhibiting its foreign policy flexibility and making adjustments with the People's Republic of China next to impossible. It avoided military intervention in Vietnam in 1954, but its subsequent political commitments to South Vietnam left difficult decisions about war for future leaders. Its rampant interventionism, including assassination plots against numerous Third World leaders and the overthrow of popularly elected governments, seemed necessary—and in some cases successful—at the time but violated long-standing U.S. principles and had baneful long-term consequences in terms of "blowback" for the peoples involved and for the United States. For the short term, with Cuba and Berlin unresolved and Americans increasingly anxious, the administration bequeathed its successor problems that would lead to the most dangerous period of the Cold War.