On August 5, 1953, Maj. Ambrose Nugent, former POW from Camp 12, arrived at Freedom Village in Munsan and began weeping uncontrollably. Released as part of Operation Big Switch (the final exchange of prisoners that took place between August 5 and December 23, 1953), Nugent felt elated and relieved, but also confused. “Having been a prisoner of war in the hands of the Asiatic Communists,” he later recalled, “and having gone through these periods that we did over there—the death, the starvation, the deprivation, the threat of never being able to return home—reaching Freedom Village was like coming out of a black night. Over the course of the next month, I felt like I was dreaming.”1
Awakening from that dream turned out to be far ruder than he, or any other prisoner of war, might have expected. Almost immediately after repatriation, the prisoners realized that they would not be going home as heroes, but as suspected collaborators. Even before their homecoming, journalists and military officers began painting a disturbing picture of undisciplined soldiers in Korea who were lacking in camaraderie and patriotism. As many as one-third of the prisoners were suspected of having collaborated in one form or another. Twenty-three American airmen, including a senior marine pilot, Col. Frank H. Schwable, had publicly confessed to germ warfare and other war crimes. Twenty-one American POWs had decided to remain with the enemy. Many prisoners had made public statements against the UN effort in Korea, with particular criticisms of America’s conduct in the war. Fourteen former POWs, including Major Nugent, Lt. Col. Harry Fleming, and Lt. Jeff Erwin, all survivors of the 1950 winter death march, were court-martialed for their alleged collaboration with the enemy. Major William Mayer, an army psychiatrist and outspoken critic of the POW behavior, summed up what many Americans thought about the prisoners’ “misconduct”: “Too many of our soldiers in prison fell far short of the historical American standings of honor, character, loyalty, courage, and personal integrity.” He concluded, “The fact that so many yielded to the degree that they did presents a problem of fantastic proportions and should cause searching self-examination by all Americans, both in and out of uniform.”2
The lack of a clear victory in Korea made questions about the character flaws of the American soldier all the more urgent. What could explain the nation’s less-than-total victory in its first confrontation with communism? Some devious force had to be at work, whether this was “Red” infiltration at home or a deep spiritual flaw within American society itself. Whatever the cause, Korean War POWs became associated with all that was wrong with American society: materialistic, pampered, and overindulgent ways had produced men wholly unprepared to face America’s ideologically dedicated adversaries. By the end of 1953, Americans were inundated with daily anecdotal evidence of treason. Headlines like “The GIs Who Fell for the Reds,” “The Colonel’s Korean Turncoats,” “Why Did the Captives Cave In?” or simply “The Rats” fed a growing sense of crisis that American society was somehow failing.3
These concerns were also taken seriously by the Department of Defense and the armed forces. In the aftermath of the POW “debacle,” the secretary of defense’s Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War was established in June 1955 to provide “recommendations on various aspects of the POW problem, which entailed provisions for a new Code of Conduct” as well as a “program of training and education to make the Code effective.”4 “We must view the communist treatment of prisoners of war as only another weapon in the world-wide war for the minds of men,” declared Gen. John E. Hull, the new commander of the Far East Command, to the committee. The foundation of a soldier’s strength, he announced, “lies not in armament and training alone” but is “derived in large part from his early environment which shapes his beliefs, builds his loyalty and molds his stature.”5 As symbols of an effete and indulgent society, Korean War POWs became linked to deep anxieties about the American character. New measures to strengthen American society were therefore deemed necessary.6 The Korean War experience sharpened Americans’ anxieties about their nation’s “apathy” in the face of the communist threat by painting the American struggle against these alien forces as a contest between two ways of life: freedom and individualism versus slavery and conformity.
Popular concerns over the apparent loss of manly vigor in the wake of the Korean War also found expression in popular cold war cinema. American films made during this period repeatedly returned to fear of an overwhelming “feminine” force that threatens American manhood/nationhood. My Son John (1952), for example, explores the unhealthy relationship between mother and son that eventually turned John into a communist.7 Popular science fiction films of the 1950s reinforced these anxieties. As the film scholar Michael Rogin observed, “Biology is out of control in these films … and reproduction dispenses with the father.”8 In The Thing from Another World (1951) the aliens are able to quickly multiply, through detachable body parts. Likewise, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) the ovarian pods take over the body of their victims as they sleep. Them! (1954) literally makes the connection between communists and the matrilineal society of giant ants whose multiplying colonies threaten to overrun the free world.
Behind these anxieties lay the emergence of a strong and hostile China. Like the giant insects/aliens that made their appearance onto the Hollywood screen, the Chinese also became associated with these ant-like creatures in the popular mind, made all the more striking by their nocturnal fighting habits and their propensity to dig underground passages and build “nests.” “They [the communists] continue unceasingly to burrow and tunnel to advance their positions against the citadels of freedom,” Dulles once famously declared.9 Moreover, because the end of the fighting in Korea had not settled the contest between freedom and slavery, it was feared that the Chinese would take the struggle to other parts of Asia.10 It was this fear of the Chinese communist threat that had led the Truman administration to support the French in their effort to reestablish their former colonial power in Indochina after World War II. “The loss of Vietnam,” Eisenhower was convinced, “would have meant the surrender to Communist enslavement of millions.”11 Secretary of State Dulles advocated a harsh approach to China, “a policy of containment through isolation” because it held out the promise of ultimately dividing Moscow from Beijing.12 Chinese forced dependence on the Soviet Union, he believed, would inevitably lead to conflict between them. The Chinese would realize the drawbacks of their dependence, while the Soviets in turn would tire of supporting the Chinese. “My own feeling,” explained Dulles, “is that the best way to get a separation between the Soviet Union and Communist China is to keep pressure on Communist China and make its way difficult so long as it is in partnership with Soviet Russia.” Yugoslavia’s Tito did not break with Stalin because the West was nice to him. “On the contrary, we were very rough on Tito.”13
The policy also had the concomitant benefit of soothing the domestic forces of the right wing in Congress, which blamed the Truman administration for China’s “fall” in 1949. The Eisenhower administration was very aware of the power of the Taiwan-China lobby and the need to cultivate a fervently anticommunist Chinese image to defend itself against potential attacks.14 Such a policy also allowed the administration to pursue a partial improvement in Washington’s relationship with Moscow.
Isolating China would also help to limit the status it gained from holding back the world’s greatest superpower in Korea. In his speech before the Oversea Press Club on March 29, 1954, Dulles outlined the administration’s position toward Communist China as well as the threat it posed to Indochina. The United States was opposed to recognizing China, he declared, and the reasons were simple: “Will it help our country,” Dulles asked, “if by recognition we give increased prestige and influence to a regime that actively attacks our vital interests? Will it serve the interests of world order to bring into the United Nations a regime which is a convicted aggressor, which has not purged itself from that aggression, and which continues to promote the use of force in violation of the principles of the United Nations?”15 Dulles also believed that by holding back on recognition with Beijing, the United States would enhance the prestige of the anticommunist leaders in Asia. For those “defenders of freedom” it was necessary to show a positive spirit that America and her anticommunist allies would stand strong against the forces of defeatism and tyranny. The new importance of Indochina after Korea thus became part of a developing concern about anti-Western and communist activity in the Third World.
As the architect of Eisenhower’s foreign policy, Dulles was also aware that many of the “new nations” that had emerged since World War II “harbored mistrust and fear of the West.”16 Touting American values of freedom while supporting old colonial powers, like the French in Indochina, clearly presented a problem for the Eisenhower administration. And this is exactly what made the Chinese communists so dangerous. They were seen to be taking advantage of the fervor of anticolonialism and independence movements in Asia to enslave them under communism. Any accommodation with China, Dulles believed, would certainly “sow discouragement” among the anticommunist leaders in Asia, since communism would be seen as “the wave of the future”17 The United States needed to confront the Chinese communists head-on in their battle for the Third World by showing that the “boundless power of human freedom” was stronger than the enslaving myths of communism.18 “We should be dynamic, we should use ideas as weapons, and these ideas should conform to moral principles,” Dulles declared. “That we do this is right, for it is the inevitable expression of a faith … But it is also expedient in defending ourselves against an aggressive, imperialistic despotism.”19 Smaller countries in Asia needed to be encouraged to take sides. They also had to be presented with a stark moral choice that any accommodation with the Chinese communists would mean turning their back on the self-evident truths of freedom and goodness. This is why the United States would remain implacably opposed to Communist China. “It … is one thing to recognize evil as a fact,” Dulles announced on March 29, 1954. “It is another thing to take evil to one’s breast and call it good. That we shall not do.”20
Dulles’s fear of the dynamism of the Chinese communists as the potential “wave of the future” was also a reflection of his anxieties about America’s moral decline in the wake of the Korean War. The Chinese represented an “acute and imminent threat” precisely because they were “dizzy with success” and “have an exaggerated sense of their own power.”21 American reaction to this threat had been lukewarm, and he criticized the Truman administration for its “passive” policies. Although he was quick to commend Truman for his forthright decision to respond to the North Korean attack, he believed that the administration’s response had merely been reactive. To counter this passive response, a new “policy of boldness” was required. “It is ironic and wrong that we who believe in the boundless power of human freedom should so long have accepted a static political role,” he observed. “It is also ironic and wrong that we who so proudly profess regard for the spiritual should rely so utterly on material defenses while the avowed materialists have been waging and winning a war with social ideas, stirring humanity everywhere.”22
The attempt to rally the nation by invoking themes of boldness and strength also deeply resonated with the American national character. The historian Rupert Wilkinson identified the national preoccupation with national vigor with what he called “the fear of winding down,” which “rests on the traditional belief that Americans are people of energy and reach who nevertheless fear the loss of their vigor and competence.”23 Dulles claimed that to defend freedom in Asia, Americans needed to act boldly and thereby “seize the initiative.”24 “We were from the beginning a vigorous, confident people, born with a sense of destiny and of mission,” he reminded the nation. “That is why we have grown from a small and feeble nation to our present stature in the world.”25 The anxiety that China might provide an alternative model emulated by other Asian nations thus propelled both Eisenhower and Dulles to proclaim that the United States must act boldly and repulse the Chinese hordes from sweeping over Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. “The violent battles now being waged in Viet-Nam and the aggressions against Laos and Cambodia are not creating any spirit of defeatism,” Dulles told the nation on April 19, 1954. “On the contrary, they are rousing the free nations to measures which we hope will be sufficiently timely and vigorous to preserve these vital areas from Communist domination.”26
The call to action was also in response to a vulnerable Japan. Dulles was concerned over what a communist victory in Vietnam might mean for Japan’s future growth. The “workshop of Asia” would be deprived of access to the vital raw materials—tin, tungsten, and rubber—from Southeast Asia that it needed. A communist victory could also undermine Japan’s confidence in America’s protection. “The situation of the Japanese is hard enough with China being a commie,” Dulles declared. If Indochina fell, “the Japs would be thinking how to get on the other side.” As he reassessed the repercussions of a communist victory, Dulles concluded that “the Indochina situation” was even “more important than Korea, because the consequences of loss there could not be localized, but would spread throughout Asia and Europe.”27 China’s success in Korea had created a new “breeding ground” for communists. Although that “plague on freedom” had been temporarily stopped at the 38th parallel, this did not mean that the communists would not try and find other outlets to reproduce themselves. Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the JCS, spoke of Korea simply being “one tentacle” of Chinese communism “that has been denied the prize for which it was reaching.” Indochina and then the rest of Southeast Asia were seen as the most viable other prizes. This region “was a very real part of the over-all conflict between the free world and Communism.”28
Beyond the familiar imagery of communism as a “plague” on human freedom, the fear of a French loss in Indochina had awakened in the Eisenhower administration old fears associated with Japanese conquest, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and the Yellow Peril. Vietnam was one of the launching pads for the Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia in World War II, and a communist victory in Vietnam could also provide a similar launching pad for other communist conquests. “Communist conquests, if Indochina falls,” wrote the U.S. News & World Report, “may well follow the pattern set by the Japanese, as officials here see it. In 1940, Japanese ‘protective forces’ took over Indo-China after the fall of France. That gave Japan a base from which to seize other countries of Southeast Asia.”29
Linked to concerns regarding American vigor, or lack thereof, was the administration’s “New Look” policy, which focused on, among a variety of issues, the role of nuclear weapons both to deter and to defeat communist aggression. Dulles laid out the details of the New Look policy in the April 1954 issue of Foreign Affairs, where he explained that the capacity for instant retaliation was the most effective deterrent against a surprise attack. Asserting that the Chinese and the Soviets would always resort to battle conditions involving manpower, which favored them, Dulles observed that “the free world must devise a better strategy for its defense based on its own special assets.” These assets included “air and naval power and atomic weapons which are now available in a wide range, suitable not only for strategic bombing but also extensive tactical use.”30 This did not mean, Dulles emphasized, turning every local war into a world war. It did mean, however, “that the free world must maintain the collective means and be willing to use them the way which most effectively makes aggression too risky and expensive to be tempting.” In this way, “the prospective attacker is not likely to invade if he believes the probable hurt will outbalance the probable gain.” Korea had been the first test of the policy of massive retaliation since, according to Dulles and Eisenhower, it was the threat of massive nuclear retaliation that had finally pushed the communists to settle the conflict. “The essential thing is that a potential aggressor should know in advance that he can and will be made to suffer for his aggression more than he can possibly gain.”
Yet, for all his rhetorical power, which the journalist Richard Rovere once characterized as “one of the boldest campaigns of political persuasion ever undertaken by an American statesman,” Dulles’s repeated calls to “preserve” Indochina from the communists were ambivalently received by the American people.31 To the administration, attempting to determine the best response to what looked to be, in mid-1954, the inevitable defeat of France in Indochina, a central question was whether Americans would support another war in Asia.
On March 13, 1954, the Vietnam People’s Army (VPA) besieged and assaulted Dien Bien Phu, a major French strongpoint located in northern Vietnam and manned by ten thousand men. As the siege developed, it became clear that the French had underestimated the Communist Vietnamese strength. The possibility of a French defeat loomed, and such an outcome would be a decisive military and psychological victory for the communists. In late March, General Paul Ely, the French Armed Forces chief of staff, arrived in Washington. His mission was to secure American military aid in the form of bombers and a commitment of American air support in the event of a Chinese air attack.32 Dulles and Admiral Radford were noncommittal about Ely’s query regarding Chinese intervention, although the request for bombers was approved. According to Ely, however, he received a promise from Radford that he would push for an approval of airstrikes to relieve the siege. The plan, code-named VULTURE, called for massive strikes against the Communist Vietnamese positions from bombers based on U.S. carriers and in the Philippines.
Radford’s plan generated little support among the Joint Chiefs. General Matthew B. Ridgway, then the army chief of staff, was the most vocal in his opposition. Ridgway thought that Radford saw Indochina as a place to “test the New Look” strategy of placing primary reliance on airpower and the threat of massive retaliation to deter communist aggression. To Ridgway, the war in Indochina was an uncomfortable reminder of Korea. He later recalled, “In Korea, we had learned that air and naval power alone cannot win a war and that inadequate ground forces cannot win one either. It was incredible to me that we had forgotten that bitter lesson so soon that we were on the verge of making the same tragic error.”33 Ridgway felt sure that “if we committed air and naval power … we would have to follow … immediately with ground forces in support.” He responded with an “emphatic and immediate ‘No’” when asked for his view on the desirability of U.S. military intervention.34 There was also the question of possible Chinese intervention in Indochina and the widening of the war, which might lead to World War III. UN forces had narrowly escaped this fate in Korea, and Ridgway saw no reason to test that possibility again in Indochina. For him, “no more Koreas” also meant “no more unilateral intervention close to the Chinese border.”35
To Ridgway and other members of what later became known as the “Never Again Club,” the lessons of Korea proved to be a strong incentive against involvement in Vietnam. Vice Admiral A. C. Davis in the office of secretary of defense, for example, warned that “involvement of US forces in the Indochina War should be avoided at all practical costs,” because, as he warned, “one cannot go over the Niagara Falls in a barrel only slightly.”36 It was a sentiment echoed throughout the country. One reader wrote to the editor of the New York Times,
We, the American people, have only recently finished (I hope) with the Korean War. This so-called police action cost us over 100,000 casualties and an increased cost of living with higher prices, that we can ill-afford. After reading Secretary Dulles’ March 29 statement on Indochina, I wonder if we are going to be again dragged into another “Korea” in Indochina, with more casualties and sacrifices.37
Similar concerns were expressed by members of Congress. Many of them opposed the limited air and naval intervention proposed by Dulles and Radford on the ground that such a venture would be a repeat of Korea. Senate Majority Leader William Knowland expressed the unanimous concerns of his fellow congressmen when he said that there should be no congressional action until the administration has secured the commitment of political and material support from America’s allies. “We want no more Koreas with the United States furnishing 90% of the manpower,” he stated. However, if “satisfactory commitments” could be obtained, “the consensus was that a Congressional resolution could be passed, giving the president power to commit armed forces to Indochina.”38 In effect, Congress insisted that the United States could intervene only as part of a coalition. Dulles later dubbed this plan “United Action.” The idea was to create a coalition composed of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines for the joint defense of Indochina and the rest of Southeast Asia against the communist threat. This would also allow the United States to take control of the Indochina situation from the French while at the same time “remove the taint of waging the war for French colonialism.”39 Cooperation from the British and French was vital to the plan’s success.
Dulles flew to Europe in April in a frantic round of “shuttle diplomacy” before the Geneva Conference, set up to resolve the Indochina crisis, opened on the twenty-sixth. He had hoped to persuade the British to answer his call for “United Action” to save Indochina, while holding out the prospect of U.S. intervention to France if it remained committed to the fight in Indochina and resisted a negotiated settlement in Geneva. French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault refused, saying that such a commitment would jeopardize the success of the Geneva negotiations. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden also made it clear that no decision regarding Dulles’s proposal of “United Action” would be made before the Geneva meeting. The looming memory of Korea informed his view: “I did not believe that anything less than intervention on a Korean scale, if that, would have any effect in Indo-China,” he later wrote. “If there were such intervention, I could not tell where its consequences would stop.” Echoing Omar Bradley’s famous dictum made at the MacArthur hearings in 1951, Eden concluded, “We might well find ourselves involved in the wrong war against the wrong man in the wrong place.” Eden was also wary of the administration’s motives: “Once President Eisenhower had been assured that the United Kingdom would participate in this declaration, he would be prepared to seek Congressional approval for intervention.” Prime Minister Churchill shared Eden’s concerns. He later confided to Eden, “What we were being asked to do was to assist [Dulles] in misleading Congress into approving a military operation.” If the United Kingdom acceded to this latest American proposal, “we should be supporting direct United States intervention in the Indo-China war, and, probably, later American action against the Chinese mainland.” The best Eden could do was to promise Dulles to revisit the issue in the event that the talks at the upcoming conference failed. More cautious than either Dulles or Radford, Eisenhower was forced to concur: “Without allies … the leader is just an adventurer like Genghis Khan.”40
The prospect of sitting down with the Chinese in an international forum meant to confer both legitimacy and prestige on the PRC was extremely distasteful to the Eisenhower administration. Earlier in 1954 in Berlin, when Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov proposed a conference in Geneva with representatives from the United States, France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China to both conclude the Korean War with a peace treaty and end the Indochina War, the Americans at first refused.41 Dulles, in particular, wanted nothing to do with a conference that provided China equal status. But the deteriorating events in Indochina had forced his hand. Dulles had to go to Geneva if he hoped for cooperation from the French and the British, but not without taking some heat from the Republican right wing and the China lobby, which characterized the conference as nothing more than a “second Yalta” and an “appeasement to communism.”
In the weeks leading up to the Geneva Conference, Dulles had thus been forced to walk a fine line between not doing anything that might enhance China’s prestige and building an international consensus about Indochina and Korea. By the time the conference began on April 26, it was also clear that the United States, France, and Britain were on the defensive. “One only has to look across the room to poor Bidault, pale, apprehensive, doomed, to see how far we have fallen back since last year,” observed Evelyn Shuckburgh, Eden’s private secretary. “The serried ranks of yellow faces and blue suits, the confident hand-shakes between Molotov and Premier Zhou Enlai after the latter’s speech, the ashen anger of Dulles” demonstrated that it was the Chinese who were now on top. Dulles’s proposal “to reactivate the UN Neutral Nations Commission for Korea and try to unite the country, by the withdrawal of Chinese troops from North Korea,” was met with predictable resistance from the communists. Even the British were perturbed by Dulles’s “moralistic denunciations” of the Chinese, which failed to further the discussions. According to Shuckburgh, Eden was “concerned” by the fact that “with regard to the Korea issue, no reasonable proposition has yet been put forward from the Western side—nor can be, because the Americans felt obliged to give further run to the ridiculous South Korean proposal of elections in North Korea only.” Very quickly, it had become apparent that no solution to Korean unification would be forthcoming.42
Nevertheless, the Korean War overshadowed the events. As during the armistice negotiations at P’anmunjŏm, symbolism became extremely important. U. Alexis Johnson, who served as the coordinator of the U.S. delegation, recalled that he was under considerable pressure “to satisfy Dulles’ stringent and convoluted seating requirements” aimed to deny China its due status as an equal participant of the conference. “This was China’s first major international conference, but we did not want to give its government any added status.” Dulles refused, for example, “to sit at a table with Zhou Enlai, thus requiring an auditorium-type seating arrangement”43 The secretary of state also purportedly refused to shake hands with Zhou. Zhou never forgot the rebuke, and the incident was often recounted to visitors with “an air of injured innocence.”44 Despite American attempts to marginalize the Chinese, however, the Communist Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu on May 7 significantly enhanced China’s hand. The French defeat and the rising crisis in Algeria made the French even more desperate to extract themselves from Indochina. The victory also made the British more skeptical of military intervention.45 Eden stalwartly refused to answer Dulles’s call for United Action. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Bingnan recalled that “when the news of Dienbienphu [sic] came we spread it to each other. We were very much encouraged and felt more confident in solving the Indo-China issue.”46 With the aim of breaking the American policy of isolation toward China by adopting a moderate line, Chinese leaders hoped to win over British and French support on Indochina by driving a wedge between them and the United States.47
To a large extent, the Chinese were successful. Nevertheless, Zhou and other Chinese leaders were still concerned that the Americans might intervene unilaterally. According to Khrushchev, who had by then become the de facto leader of the Soviet Union, “Zhou Enlai told him before the Geneva Conference that ‘China could not meet Ho Chi Minh’s demands to send Chinese troops to Vietnam.’ “ Zhou had also told Ho that” we’ve already lost too many men in Korea—that war cost us dearly. We’re in no condition to get involved in another war at this time.”48 After fighting in Korea, the Chinese wanted to focus on domestic affairs and rehabilitate their economy. Although the French defeat had raised the possibility that the Communist Vietnamese might be able to end the war more or less on their own terms, the Chinese nevertheless pressed their Vietnamese allies into accepting a divided Vietnam to settle the conflict. The Vietnamese were also pressured into agreeing to proposed elections that would eventually unify all of Vietnam. Rather than driving for maximum advantage for their Vietnamese comrades, the Chinese pushed them hard for a compromise solution. Eventually, and not without some resentment, Ho accepted the 17th parallel as a temporary dividing line. Nationwide elections were scheduled to follow in 1956.
The Geneva Conference had thus ended the First Indochina War, although the Korean War remained without resolution. And it was the Korean War experience that had played a decisive role in President Eisenhower’s decision not to intervene in Indochina in 1954. That decision also began to raise doubts about his New Look strategy and its reliance on “massive retaliation.” It had become clear to Dulles and Eisenhower that the threat of massive retaliation would not have saved the situation in Indochina. America and her allies would not risk nuclear war over interests that were, despite all the heated rhetoric, still considered peripheral. Thus, Eisenhower’s reaction to the Indochina situation was actually very much in line with Truman’s reaction to Korea. Richard Rovere wrote in 1956, “About all that seems to be left of the New Look now is a budget that strengthens the Air Force at the expense of ground forces. But if the worst happens in Indochina, where atomic bombs would be useless as crossbows, the ground forces will have to be restored to their former strength—and then some.”49 Rovere would be proved right.
“How can a liberal society provide for its military security when this requires the maintenance of professional military forces and institutions fundamentally at odds with liberalism?”50 This paradox, first posed by Samuel Huntington in his classic work The Soldier and the State, became particularly acute after the Korean War when U.S. foreign policy shifted its emphasis from political and economic “containment” of communism to military security from it.51 For Huntington, there were three possible answers to this dilemma: The first was to return to the pre-1940 pattern of civil-military relations, that is, “cutting military forces to the bone, isolating military institutions from society, and reducing military influence to negligible proportions.” In this way, American society would remain true to its liberal tradition based on the idea that military and democratic values were antithetical and that a large standing army posed a threat to liberty. However, the pursuit of liberty would be realized at the expense of the nation’s military security.
The second solution was “to accept increased military authority and influence but to insist that military leaders abandon their professional outlook and that military institutions be reformed along liberal lines.” The drawback of this solution was that while it would provide for the continuation of liberalism in American society, it might have to accomplish these goals at the expense of military effectiveness. Finally, the third solution was for society to adopt “a more sympathetic understanding and appreciation of the military viewpoint and military needs.” This would require, however, “a drastic change in the basic American liberal ethic.”52 Although none of these solutions was followed exclusively, it was the third solution—the militarization of American society—that was ultimately adopted in the aftermath of the Korean War. Why?
At first, Eisenhower had tried to adhere to the traditional American stance that military and democratic values were antithetical. He recognized early on in his presidency the threat that a large standing army and huge defense expenditures posed to American society. As a staunch Republican, he accepted his party’s time-honored view that balanced budgets and low taxes were essential factors in maintaining a healthy economy. Vowing to put the nation on the course to achieve both security and solvency, Eisenhower aimed to eliminate the national deficit, racked up during the Truman administration, by targeting defense for major cuts. For him, “the foundation of military strength, was economic strength.”53 Eisenhower’s New Look policy would thus rely almost exclusively on nuclear weapons at the expense of a large permanent standing army. The principle of “massive retaliation” would make war obsolete since, as the American military strategist Bernard Brodie put it, “war and obliteration are now completely synonymous.”54
But beyond the concern for balanced budgets, Eisenhower was also fearful that huge defense expenditures would lead to America’s slide toward becoming a “garrison state.” Would America have to become a garrison state in order to fight one? The New Look was Eisenhower’s answer to this paradox and to the heightened tensions between the military imperatives of security and the maintenance of a liberal society.
Yet Korea had shown that atomic weapons did not make war obsolete. As Ridgway, Taylor, and other military leaders would later argue, a “properly balanced” force was necessary to prepare for a wide range of contingencies, and only such a force could claim real credibility as a deterrent.55 Moreover, committing the nation to a strategy that reduced war to the threat of annihilating entire civilian populations also meant that force was no longer an instrument of policy, since such a strategy undercut the very purpose of war itself. Such sentiments, widespread among army leaders during the mid-1950s who deplored the way that nuclear weapons had “corrupted American thinking about war,” had given rise to a fierce backlash against the New Look among army leaders. As a result of the New Look, wrote one Army officer,
we have accepted civil destruction as an object of war and a means of war where formerly it was an incident of war. The question raised is not of humanity but of reality—whether we have forgotten that war is still a political instrument which must have political objectives and methods … This error leads to the brutalization of war without purpose, to a preoccupation with mass destruction, to the neglect of political realities.56
Ultimately, Eisenhower’s New Look failed. By relying on nuclear weapons, Eisenhower had attempted to balance military imperatives and democratic values, but the solution proved unworkable. His strategy of massive retaliation had offered only two choices: the initiation of general nuclear war—Armageddon—or compromise and retreat.57
Thus when John F. Kennedy came into office in 1961, the stage was set for a new defense policy. Although Kennedy was not adverse to the use of nuclear weapons, the main tenet of his defense strategy, Flexible Response, was the resurgent role that the army would play “to put out a brushfire war before it becomes a conflagration.” Kennedy believed that the security of the free world required that the United States “have military units capable of checking Soviet aggression at any scale of violence.”58
Flexible Response also aimed to reinvigorate U.S. global power through the expansion of the range of options available to policy makers, by demonstrating a U.S. willingness to fight non-nuclear wars. During President Kennedy’s first year in office, military outlays rose 15 percent. Between 1961 and 1962, the army’s budget increased, and 207,000 soldiers were added to its rolls. The number of active-duty divisions increased from eleven to sixteen. Kennedy also dispatched additional ground troops to West Germany “to bolster U.S. commitment to NATO.” In 1961, he dispatched four hundred American Green Berets to South Vietnam; by 1963, there were sixteen thousand American military personnel in that country, a huge increase from Eisenhower’s nine hundred advisors.59 Whereas Eisenhower had tried, and failed, to resolve the fundamental tensions in civil-military relations through reliance on nuclear weapons, Kennedy had opted to resolve these same tensions by adopting Huntington’s third solution: making American society more militarized.
Military influence during this period had indeed extended throughout the government, and from there to virtually every area of American life. Few developments more dramatically symbolized the new status of the military than the links forged between the business community and the armed forces. While military spending helped to revive the flagging aviation industry in New England, it also contributed enormously to the economic boom of the American West. Civic and local leaders in places like California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah organized sustained efforts to capture a large share of the defense budget, which in turn shaped, often dramatically, the growth patterns in those regions. The Denver Outpost, for example, began tracking the economic benefits of government procurements, which included more than $1.5 billion for metal mining in western states.60 Utah’s defense industry complex, in particular, grew very rapidly. By 1963, the state was receiving $408 million in defense contracts, an absolute gain of 1700 percent since the outbreak of the Korean War, and the largest gain recorded by any state for the same period.61 These expenditures helped to reopen hundreds of mines, add new jobs, and increase the state’s income, all of which in turn laid the foundation for new industries.62 A similar dynamic affected California, which dominated the fast-growing military aviation, missile, and electronics industries that accounted for the bulk of military procurements. Nearly 25 percent of all persons employed in manufacturing, equivalent to one out of every fifteen of those employed in the state, worked in the defense industry.63
Although traditional isolationists like Republican Senators Robert Taft and William Jenner would continue to hammer away on the point that the national purpose was “to maintain the liberty of our people” rather than “reform the entire world or spread sweetness and light and economic prosperity to peoples who have lived and worked out their own salvation for centuries,” the Korean War had made these isolationist views largely irrelevant.64 The Great Debate of 1951, between the Old Right “isolationists” like Senator Taft and the cold war liberal interventionists like Dean Acheson, had by 1961 been firmly settled in favor of the new ideology of national security, which had made it impossible for the United States to retreat from globalism or to reduce its defense spending to the comparatively modest levels of the pre–Korean War period.65 The influential columnist James Reston of the New York Times, in describing the Korean War as a major turning point in American history, wrote that the United States was going to have to live with permanently higher defense budgets, less spending on nondefense programs, and a large peacetime army.” “Whether we like it or not,” observed Reston of America’s new global identity, “we have inherited the role played by the British” of maintaining world peace, and “this role must be organized, not on a temporary, but on a permanent basis.”66
Eisenhower was keenly aware of the problems that Korea raised. He had won the 1952 presidential election by promising to end the fighting there, but he knew the conflict was not over. The unfinished war would continue to shape events, channeling American policy and state-making into a direction that he feared was wrong for the country. In his farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961, one of the most important presidential speeches ever given in American history, Eisenhower conceived his good-bye to America as a warning. “A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment,” he told the nation. “Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.” But the new role of the military in American society raised troubling questions. One was the rising defense budget. “We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations,” he noted, and the conjunction of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.” Eisenhower continued, “We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.” Then he warned,
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense without peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.67
Eisenhower’s warning went largely unheeded. The militarization of American society and the ever-growing military-industrial complex had become the Korean War’s enduring legacy.