Eisenhower in War and Peace

Mamie’s experience running large household establishments was immediately evident. “She appeared fragile and feminine,” said White House chief usher J. B. West, but “once behind the White House gates she ruled as if she were Queen.”² Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie paid close attention to the White House menu. Although she had never learned to cook herself, she had an instinctive understanding of the compatibility of various dishes, and chided the staff to avoid waste. Every morning she asked for a list of food that had not been eaten the previous day. “Three people turned down second servings of Cornish hen last night,” she reminded Charles Ficklin, the White House maître d’. “Please use it in chicken salad today.”³

Official entertaining at the White House was straitlaced. The food was superior to that served by the Roosevelts, but the drinks were sharply rationed. Cocktails were never served, and butlers poured only American wines at the table with dinner. Alcohol flowed more freely in the family quarters. Eisenhower preferred scotch, and Mamie liked old-fashioneds, although, as J. B. West reports, her consumption was very modest despite rumors to the contrary.⁴

Once a month Eisenhower would host a stag dinner for sixteen or so guests, bringing together men from various professions whom he had read about and wanted to meet. Dress was usually black tie, and the conversation was free-flowing. “I used these dinners to try to draw from leaders in various sections of American life their views on many domestic and international questions,” said Ike. “The stag dinners were, for me, a means of gaining information and intelligent opinion as well as enjoying good company.”⁶

Eisenhower’s concern for appearances sometimes led him to make fussy decisions. Allegedly to save money he shut down the presidential winter quarters at the Key West Naval Station and got rid of the Williamsburg, the presidential yacht on which the Trumans often entertained. “The very word ‘yacht’ created a symbol of luxury in the public mind,” Ike wrote his friend Swede Hazlett.⁷ At the same time, Eisenhower permitted Arthur Summerfield, the Michigan GM dealer who served as postmaster general, to repaint the nation’s mailboxes and postal trucks from traditional post office green to a car salesman’s red, white, and blue—supposedly as a symbol of American patriotism.⁸

“Shangri-La,” FDR’s rustic retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, which the WPA had built in the 1930s, also went on the chopping block.^b But Mamie intervened, insisted that it be updated and redecorated, and used as a weekend getaway until the farm at Gettysburg could be rehabilitated. Like Key West, Shangri-La was maintained by the Navy, and as J. B. West writes, “Soon came the order for the Navy to redecorate Shangri-La, with Mrs. Eisenhower as the consultant, and the rustic lodge soon took on a ’1950s modern’ look, in greens, yellows, and beiges.”⁹ When it was finished, Eisenhower renamed it “Camp David” in honor of his five-year-old grandson, evidently hoping to erase the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Eisenhowers occasionally used Camp David as a retreat and conference center, but Ike much preferred to accept the hospitality provided by his friends in the Gang, with whom he felt he could best relax. His favorite spot was the Augusta National, and he used his trips to Augusta to unwind, much as FDR had done at Warm Springs.¹⁰ Eisenhower also enjoyed extended fishing vacations at Aksel Nielsen’s estate near Fraser, Colorado, and at Denver developer Bal Swan’s purebred Hereford ranch on the north fork of the South Platte River.

The property, known as the Allen Redding farm, was adjacent to the battlefield and about three miles from town. During the Battle of Gettysburg the house had served as a dressing station for Confederate wounded. Eisenhower paid a total of $40,000 ($362,000 currently): $24,000 for the farm, and $16,000 for the livestock and equipment. In addition to the two-story brick farmhouse, there was a massive wooden barn (one of the largest in Adams County), thirty-six Holstein dairy cattle, and five hundred white leghorn chickens. It was a working farm. The milk was picked up every morning by a Baltimore dairy, and the eggs (about twenty dozen daily) were marketed through a cooperative in Gettysburg. There were also two tractors and all the machinery necessary to operate the farm.¹²

Eisenhower, who was then president of Columbia, decided to retain the farm as a going concern. An old Army associate, retired brigadier general Arthur Nevins, who had been Ike’s deputy G-2 at SHAEF, was talked into becoming the farm’s manager, and General Nevins and his wife, Ann, moved into the house in the spring of 1951. The Nevinses and the Eisenhowers had been close friends since their service together in the Philippines.¹³

Ike and Mamie decided to renovate the house after they moved to Washington. Plans were drawn by Penn State architecture professor Milton Osborne, Mamie engaged interior designer Dorothy Draper, and the construction work was handled by Charles Tompkins, one of the largest contractors on the East Coast. Eisenhower insisted on using union labor, which meant that most workers had to drive from Washington or Baltimore, which added considerably to the final cost. On the other hand, Charles Tompkins charged no overhead and billed Ike only for actual expenses, which balanced things out.

But Ike’s time was limited. His first priority as president was to make peace in Korea. His second was to balance the budget. Unlike the Republican party’s Old Guard, he ruled out any reduction in social programs. Savings would be achieved through the elimination of government waste and a review of all other programs. National security, the largest budget item, was an obvious target, and when Ike took office, he ordered an immediate review of the nation’s military structure.

Eisenhower was critical of existing defense policy for two reasons. First, he believed President Truman had demobilized the armed forces too quickly after World War II, withdrawing from Korea and thus inviting attack. Second, after the Korean War started, the Truman administration quadrupled defense spending without considering the costs. That threw the budget seriously out of kilter. What was required in Ike’s view was a defense policy that could be sustained over the long run without sending the country to the poorhouse.

Eisenhower was uniquely qualified to lead the reappraisal. With the possible exception of Ulysses Grant, who confronted different but equally difficult military issues, no president has been better equipped by outlook and experience to deal with matters of national security. Like Grant, Ike was his own military expert, and as with Grant the country trusted him implicitly. Both Grant and Eisenhower twice won elections by massive margins because the electorate had confidence in their abilities to defend the nation. In Grant’s case, the danger pertained to Reconstruction and restoring the Union. In Ike’s case, it was a Cold War that might turn hot. Here lay Eisenhower’s supreme personal expertise, and he tackled the issue with enthusiasm.

Eisenhower announced that he intended to direct 40 percent of the upcoming defense budget to the Air Force. The Army and Navy would be reduced accordingly. The object was to prevent war, not to fight one. With the war in Korea approaching an end, there was no reason to maintain an Army of twenty divisions. The implication was clear. Under Ike there would be no limited wars, no police actions, no conflicts beneath the nuclear threshold. “Our most valued, our most costly asset is our young men,” said the president. “Let’s don’t use them any more than we have to.”

Ike put the matter in personal terms. “For forty years I was in the Army, and I did one thing: study how you can get an infantry platoon out of battle. The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.”¹⁹

The Pentagon pushed back. Omar Bradley, still chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told the National Security Council that the United States had to prepare for both conventional and nuclear war. “The build-up of the military strength of the United States is the keystone and indeed, the very life blood of the free world’s strategy to frustrate the Kremlin’s designs,” wrote Bradley. To cut military spending as the president proposed “would so increase the risk to the United States as to pose a grave threat to the survival of our allies and the security of this nation.”²⁰

Eisenhower was unswayed. The Joint Chiefs were seeking to fight a war; he was determined to prevent one. And their parochialism was appalling. In a letter to his friend Swede Hazlett, Ike noted that the Joint Chiefs had a lot to learn. “Each of these men must cease regarding himself as the advocate for any particular Service; he must think strictly and solely for the United States. Character rather than intellect, and moral courage rather than mere professional skill, are the dominant qualifications required.”²¹

Ike fretted about the chiefs’ recalcitrance. “Someday there is going to be a man sitting in my present chair who has not been raised in the military services and who will have little understanding of where slashes in [the Pentagon’s] estimates can be made with little or no damage. If that should happen while we still have the state of tension that now exists in the world, I shudder to think of what could happen to this country.”

Eisenhower told Swede that his “most frustrating domestic problem” was with the leadership of the armed services.

By the end of the summer of 1953, each of the Joint Chiefs had been replaced. Eisenhower did not relieve any, but as their terms expired they were not reappointed. Admiral Radford replaced Bradley as chairman, Matthew Ridgway succeeded J. Lawton Collins as Army chief of staff, Admiral Robert B. Carney replaced William Fechteler as chief of naval operations, and Nathan Twining followed Hoyt Vandenberg as Air Force chief of staff. Ike spoke with each before appointing him, and each assured Eisenhower of his support.

As a result of Eisenhower’s directive, the Army was reduced from 1.5 million men in 1953 to 1 million by June 1955. The Navy and Marine Corps shrank from 1 million to 870,000, while the Air Force increased from 950,000 to 970,000.²⁴ Admiral Radford announced the shift in a speech to the National Press Club on December 14. Radford called the change a “New Look” in defense policy, using a term then in vogue in the fashion industry to describe the lengthening of women’s skirts. Journalists labeled it “more bang for the buck.”²⁵

Eisenhower directed Secretary of State Dulles to put the shift in context. In a major speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on January 14, 1954—a speech that had been carefully vetted by Ike—Dulles explained the strategic significance of the New Look. Paraphrasing Eisenhower’s views, Dulles said, “Emergency measures are costly, they are superficial and they imply the enemy has the initiative.” The new aim of American policy, he said, was to make collective security more effective and less costly “by placing more reliance on deterrent power, and less dependence on local defensive power.” Dulles explained why the shift was necessary. “If the enemy could pick his time and place and method of warfare, then we needed to be ready to fight in the arctic and in the tropics; in Asia, the Near East and in Europe; by sea, by land, and by air; with old weapons and with new weapons.” But that was now changed. The United States would deter wars rather than fight them. “The basic decision was to depend primarily upon a capacity to retaliate instantly, by means and at places of our choosing.” That sentence had been added by Eisenhower when he reviewed Dulles’s original draft. The handmaiden of the military’s New Look was instantly dubbed the “doctrine of massive retaliation.” Dulles was given credit for the statement, but the words belonged to Ike.²⁶

Other administration figures were less reticent to chime in. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey said the United States had “no business getting into little wars. If a situation comes up where our interests justify intervention, let’s intervene decisively with all we have or get out.” Nixon said, “Rather than let the Communists nibble us to death all over the world in little wars, we would rely in the future primarily on our massive mobile retaliatory power … against the major source of aggression.”²⁸

But the New Look was not embraced by everyone within the administration. General Matthew Ridgway, although he initially signed on, soon became restive. Testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee in January 1955, Ridgway criticized the ongoing reduction in Army ground forces. The New Look, he told senators, was forcing the United States into an “all or nothing” posture and would expose the country to a series of future Koreas. “The foot soldier is still the dominant factor in war,” said Ridgway, “and weakening our ground forces would be a grievous blow to freedom.”²⁹

When Eisenhower met with the Senate Republican leadership the next day, he was asked by Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire how they should handle Ridgway’s testimony. “Ridgway is the Army’s chief of staff,” said Ike.

When Ridgway’s term expired in the summer of 1955 he was not reappointed. Instead, Eisenhower turned to Maxwell Taylor, with equally disappointing results. Taylor, a gifted linguist who had commanded the 101st Airborne in World War II and later Eighth Army in Korea, was considered a serious military thinker and an officer of keen intellect. Before sending Taylor’s name to the Senate, Eisenhower extracted from him a firm commitment to support the New Look and the nuclear strategy upon which it was based. “Loyalty in spirit as well as in letter is necessary,” he told Taylor.³¹

Like Ridgway, Taylor was soon off the reservation, arguing that the United States should abandon massive retaliation and the New Look in favor of what he called Flexible Response. Much to Eisenhower’s consternation, Taylor argued that a future war between the United States and the Soviet Union could be fought with conventional weapons. “That’s fatuous,” Eisenhower told Radford and Wilson. In Ike’s view, any war with Russia would be a nuclear war and in all probability that was why there was not going to be one. When Taylor persisted and suggested that the next war would be a limited one similar to Korea, Eisenhower rejected the idea. “Anything of Korean proportions would be one for the use of atomics,” said the president.³²

Taylor served as Army chief of staff for four years. After stepping down in 1959, he continued to press the doctrine of Flexible Response.³³ Academic circles joined the debate. Henry Kissinger established his reputation as a foreign policy expert with the publication of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957—an unrelenting critique of Eisenhower’s New Look strategy.³⁴ In the partisan days of the late 1950s, the Democrats adopted the concept of Flexible Response. John Kennedy anchored his campaign for president on a pledge to jettison the doctrine of massive retaliation. When he was elected, Kennedy undertook an accelerated program to enhance America’s conventional war capabilities. Maxwell Taylor was recalled from retirement to advise the president (and was later appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs), and Army ground forces, particularly special forces, enjoyed a renewed emphasis.

Critics of the Kennedy-Johnson administration and of the subsequent U.S. involvement in Vietnam often fault Kennedy’s revival of America’s limited war capability. By having the troops available to intervene incrementally, it was easier for the president to intervene incrementally. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it (in a different context), “What’s the point of having this superb military if we can’t use it?”³⁵ That was the antithesis of Eisenhower’s position. For Ike, war was not a policy alternative. The purpose of military power was to avoid war, not fight one. Soldiers were not paper cutouts, and combat was not a board game.

Eisenhower’s emphasis on the New Look and nuclear weapons preserved the peace during the Cold War. But it spawned a variety of side effects, some benign and beneficial, others downright pernicious. Among the pernicious was the arms race that led to the development of thermonuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the spiral in defense spending that Ike had hoped to avoid. The possibility of mutual assured annihilation scarcely made for restful sleeping. On the other hand, Eisenhower’s emphasis on nuclear technology fostered significant scientific and educational advances. Research and development became an integral part of the federal budget. Under Ike, the government funded not only applied research, but generously supported pure research in a variety of scientific disciplines. And to do so, Eisenhower often had to beat down the opposition of Charles Wilson and George Humphrey. “Between the year I entered office and the year I left,” wrote Ike, “the federal appropriations for medical research at the National Institutes of Health multiplied nearly ten times, going from $59 million to $560 million [$4.1 billion currently].”³⁶

After the Soviets successfully launched the world’s first man-made satellite (Sputnik) in 1957, Eisenhower created the position of a full-time science adviser to the president, and appointed Dr. James Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the post. Under Killian’s direction, the White House established the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), which provided Eisenhower a direct avenue for independent advice from the nation’s scientific community. Beginning in 1955, Eisenhower had pressed Congress to provide federal aid to the states for school construction—an unprecedented breakthrough in the relationship between the federal government and the states. The legislation lay dormant for two years on Capitol Hill, but in the aftermath of the Sputnik program, Congress enacted the National Defense Education Act of 1958, providing significant federal aid to education, particularly in the funding of graduate fellowships and improved public school instruction in science, mathematics, and foreign languages. The act followed closely Eisenhower’s recommendations in his message to Congress in late January 1957.³⁷ Ike sold the measure to a reluctant Congress as an emergency measure in the face of Soviet scientific achievements, and the breakthrough in federal funding for education has changed the face of the American educational system.

The Republicans lost control of both the House and the Senate in 1954. In the midterm elections, the Democrats picked up twenty-one House seats and one in the Senate. That gave the Democrats a comfortable (232–203) majority in the House, and a narrow two-vote margin in the Senate with Wayne Morse of Oregon, still an independent, now voting with the Democrats.³⁸ For Eisenhower, who would face Democratic congressional majorities for his remaining six years in office, it was a blessing in disguise. The Democrats supported Ike down the line in foreign affairs, had little interest in returning to the era of Calvin Coolidge domestically, and were not clamoring to investigate the executive branch.

In the House, Sam Rayburn took up the reins once more as Speaker, and Lyndon Johnson became Senate majority leader. Rayburn, a bachelor from Bonham, Texas, was a man of few words. But he ruled the House with a discipline rarely seen since the days of “Czar” Joseph Cannon.^d He had first been elected Speaker in 1940 following the death of William Bankhead, and was the undisputed leader of House Democrats. In the Senate, Lyndon Johnson, at forty-six, became the youngest majority leader in Senate history, and as Robert Caro explains, was soon the Master of the Senate.³⁹ With Eisenhower in the White House, Sam Rayburn as Speaker, and Lyndon Johnson as majority leader, the country was in the hands of skilled professionals. Ike, LBJ, and “Mr. Sam” did not trust one another completely and they did not see eye to eye on every issue, but they understood one another and had no difficulty working together. Eisenhower continued to meet regularly with the Republican leadership. But his weekly sessions with Rayburn and Johnson, usually in the evening over drinks, were far more productive.⁴⁰

For Johnson and Rayburn, it was shrewd politics to cooperate with Ike. Eisenhower was wildly popular in the country, and his foreign policy was essentially a recognition of America’s new role in world affairs. By supporting a Republican president against the Old Guard of his own party, the Democrats hoped to share Ike’s popularity. “Eisenhower was so popular,” Johnson explained, “whoever was supporting him would be on the popular side.”⁴¹

Eisenhower, for his part, had often found the Republican leadership testy. Taft had been difficult, and William Knowland was but a slight improvement. In the House, Speaker (later minority leader) Joe Martin and party whip Charles Halleck were scarcely on speaking terms. The GOP majority in the Eighty-third Congress seemed less interested in grappling with the problems of the day than in repudiating the work of Truman and Roosevelt. In the Senate, conservative Republicans had introduced no less than 107 constitutional amendments designed to repeal the New Deal. Several sought to annul the decision at Appomattox by asserting the supremacy of the states over the federal government, while one would have abolished the separation of church and state by inserting the following words in the Constitution: “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of Nations through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”⁴⁵ Later in his presidency, Eisenhower found himself so frustrated with the Republican leadership in Congress that he told his secretary Ann Whitman, “I don’t know why anyone should be a member of the Republican Party.”⁴⁶

With Rayburn and Johnson in charge, Ike’s relations with the Hill were much easier. “Speaker Rayburn and I had long maintained friendly contact,” Eisenhower recalled. “For many years prior to my inauguration he had called me ‘Captain Ike.’ ”⁴⁷ Eisenhower was also on friendly terms with Johnson, and kept a vigil on LBJ’s health. Whenever Johnson was in the hospital, Ike was sure to be at his bedside. “I don’t see any reason why these people shouldn’t be my friends,” Eisenhower once told an inquiring reporter. “They have been my friends in the past.”⁴⁸

Eisenhower is personally responsible for the interstate highway system—the largest public works project ever attempted. In the aftermath of the Korean War, defense spending slowed and the nation’s economy headed south. The danger signs were evident as early as February 1954. At a cabinet meeting on February 5, Eisenhower stressed the need to develop a public works program so that if needed it could be put into effect immediately. “If we don’t move rapidly, we could be in serious trouble,” said the president.⁵¹

Eisenhower favored a highway program. In 1919, Ike had been one of six officers to lead the Army’s first transcontinental motor convoy across largely unpaved roads and makeshift bridges from Washington to San Francisco, and he understood from firsthand experience the need for a network of national highways. During the war, Eisenhower witnessed the effectiveness of the German autobahns.⁵²

By the summer of 1954 it was clear that an economic crisis was at hand. Unemployment rose, and a recession seemed just around the corner. Needing to act, and to act quickly, Eisenhower summoned his old friend Lucius Clay to Washington—the only time during his eight years in the White House that Ike turned to Clay. “We had lunch,” Clay recalled, “and he asked me if I would head a committee to recommend what should be done. He felt that a highway program was very important. That was the genesis of the President’s Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program.”

Following his lunch with Eisenhower, Clay put together a five-man high-level committee stacked to recommend a national highway system: Stephen Bechtel of the Bechtel Corporation; William Roberts, head of Allis-Chalmers; Samuel Sloan Colt, president of Bankers Trust; and Dave Beck, president of the Teamsters Union. All had a vested interest. “That’s why I picked them,” said Clay. “They knew what the highway system was all about.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^b ”Shangri-La” is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton—a mythical Himalayan utopia isolated from the outside world. The novel was made into a film of the same name by Frank Capra in 1937 and starred Ronald Colman. FDR was fond both of the novel and the film and named the presidential retreat accordingly. In 1942, when newsmen asked him where the bombers that bombed Tokyo had come from, the president mirthfully said, “Shangri-La,” a reference to the Himalayan utopia, not the presidential retreat. James Hilton, Lost Horizon (London: Macmillan, 1933). Also see Charles Allen, The Search for Shangri-La: A Journey into Tibetan History (London: Little, Brown, 1999); Presidential press conference, April 21, 1942, 19 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 291–92 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).

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

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

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

Critics of the seaway were not entirely wrong as to its adverse effect on eastern cities. Buffalo, New York, which had been the eastern terminus for Great Lakes shipping before the seaway, was the fifteenth largest city in the United States in 1950. In 2010, it ranks forty-fifth and its population has declined by half.

^f The budget Eisenhower inherited in 1953 showed a deficit of $6.5 billion. That was reduced to $1.2 billion in 1954, and by 1956 the federal budget was $3.9 billion in the black. The arms race plunged the budget back into deficit in 1958, but in 1960, Ike’s last year in office, the government ran a surplus of $301 million. Financial Management Service, U.S. Department of the Treasury.

^g A one-dollar-an-hour minimum wage does not seem like much today. But a dollar in 1955, adjusted for inflation, equals $8.15 currently. Today’s minimum wage is only $7.25. In comparative terms, that is 90¢ less than in Ike’s day.

^h In 1954, the Eisenhower administration introduced a reinsurance plan to backstop private insurance companies against “abnormal loss” if they expanded their coverage to individuals not adequately covered by health insurance. The reinsurance plan, in Ike’s view, was a “middle way” between government and private insurance. Despite vigorous administration backing, the plan was opposed by the American Medical Association as the opening wedge to “socialized medicine.” On July 13, 1954, it lost in the House of Representatives, 134–238, with 75 Republicans voting no. “The people that voted against this bill just don’t understand what are the facts of American life,” Eisenhower told his press conference the following day. Public Papers, 1954 633.

ⁱ At his press conference on March 30, 1955, Eisenhower was asked whether Admiral Carney would be reprimanded for his remarks. “Not by me,” the president replied—a classic Eisenhower response. Carney’s reprimand came from Defense Secretary Wilson, who immediately issued an order directing all military personnel to henceforth submit for clearance all speeches, press releases, and “other information” intended for publication. When Carney’s term as CNO expired that summer, he was replaced by Admiral Arleigh “Thirty-one Knot” Burke. (During World War II, Burke mistakenly led his destroyer squadron into a Japanese minefield. Admiral Halsey radioed to ask Burke what he was doing in a Japanese minefield. “Thirty-one knots,” Burke replied. Eisenhower advanced Burke over the heads of ninety admirals more senior.) Press conference, March 30, 1955, Public Papers, 1955 374.

^j In a lengthy letter to General Gruenther, Eisenhower attempted to explain his thought process on the Formosa question.

We must make a distinction (this is a difficult one) between an attack that has only as its objective the capture of an offshore island and one that is primarily a preliminary movement to an all-out attack on Formosa.… More and more I find myself, in this type of situation—and perhaps it is because of my advancing years—tending to strip each problem down to its simplest possible form. Having gotten the issue well defined in my mind, I try in the next step to determine what answer would best serve the long term advantage and welfare of the United States and the free world. I then consider the immediate problem and what solution we can get that will best conform to the long term interests of the country and at the same time can command a sufficient approval in this country so as to secure the necessary Congressional action.

When I get a problem solved on this rough basis, I merely stick to the essential answer and let associates [Dulles? Nixon?] have a field day on words and terminology.…

Whatever is now to happen, I know that nothing could be worse than global war.

DDE to Gruenther, February 1, 1955, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 16, The Presidency 1539, cited subsequently as 16 The Presidency. (Eisenhower’s emphasis.)

TWENTY-THREE

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