Latin America had a special place in the Eisenhower White House. Ike’s brother Milton was an expert on the region, and his trip soon after Ike’s election had greatly gratified American allies in the hemisphere. By 1958, there were hopeful signs in the region: Argentina had at last disposed of Perón and elected a leader, Arturo Frondizi, with whom the administration believed it could cooperate. Similarly, Colombia had cast off Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and elected Alberto Lleras Camargo, whom Nixon regarded as “an enlightened and dedicated statesman.” With so much changing in the region, Eisenhower believed a high-level visit was in order. The midterm elections were approaching, so he tapped Nixon for the duty. Nixon, though he felt he would be better used at home and feared that the two-and-a-half-week excursion would be ponderously boring, nevertheless reluctantly agreed.
Accompanied by his wife, Pat, Nixon left on April 27. At first, the trip was uneventful. The Nixon party stopped in Trinidad to refuel and was greeted warmly in Uruguay. The vice president dropped in unannounced at a university in Montevideo, where he charmed all but his most hardened critics. In Argentina, Nixon conferred with leaders, threw the switch at a new nuclear power plant, and suffered through a gaucho barbecue; he attended Frondizi’s inauguration but got there late—traffic delayed him, and the ceremony started four minutes early. He then visited Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru, where he faced an unruly, rock-throwing crowd at San Marcos University. As Nixon was returning to the hotel, a protester managed to squeeze close to the vice president and spit directly in his face. “I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to tear the face in front of me to pieces,” Nixon wrote later. He maintained his composure, however, and earned Ike’s praise for his “courage, patience and calmness.”
After uneventful stops in Ecuador and Colombia, the entourage arrived in Caracas, Venezuela, where the government assured Nixon it could control trouble despite reports of demonstrations being planned to greet the Americans. From the moment Nixon disembarked the airplane, it was obvious that the government overestimated its abilities. Dick and Pat Nixon stood politely for the playing of the Venezuelan national anthem while, from an observation deck above them, a crowd cursed and spit on them. Pat’s red suit was mottled with chewing tobacco stains. The Nixons, flanked by the Secret Service, pushed through the crowd and into two waiting cars, Dick in the first, Pat in the second. They left the airport and headed for the center of the city. Stores were shuttered and sidewalks empty, but traffic seemed heavy. Then, suddenly, the car pulled to a halt, blocked by a dump truck that created a blockade. A mob descended on Nixon’s car, ripping the flags from the front bumper and hurling rocks. The driver finally pushed through, only to hit a second blockade and then a third.
“Here they come,” a passenger in Nixon’s car said. And with that, a crowd of several hundred descended on the two vehicles. One rock shattered Nixon’s windshield, scattering glass. Demonstrators pummeled both vehicles with metal bars and sticks. Then the crowd around Nixon’s car began to rock it back and forth, attempting to flip it. “For an instant, the realization passed through my mind—we might be killed,” Nixon said. Members of the Secret Service reached for their guns, but just as a riot seemed inevitable, the press truck traveling in front of the Nixon cars plowed through the mob and cleared a path for Nixon’s driver to follow (in all his years of sparring with the press, that may have been the most appreciative Nixon ever was for a group of reporters). Pat and Dick escaped unharmed, though deeply shaken. Nixon’s experience in Caracas was one of the most frightful of his life, and he later dedicated a chapter to it in his memoir, Six Crises.
Two days later, the Nixons returned to Washington, where Ike and Mamie greeted them at the airport. Ike brought Nixon’s two daughters, Julie and Tricia, with him to welcome their parents. When the plane landed, he let the girls rush to meet it, rather than standing on protocol. Julie never forgot the courtesy. “He had the biggest smile, the brightest blue eyes,” she recalled of Eisenhower.
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Eisenhower’s attention in early 1958 was again drawn to the Middle East, where Nasser’s personal ambition and quest for leadership over the region prompted him to strike an alliance with Syria. Under it, Egypt and Syria announced their intentions to merge into a new entity, the United Arab Republic. The move did not necessarily threaten American interests. In fact, one consequence was the outlawing of the Communist Party in Syria, and the union was widely popular among ordinary Arabs thrilled by the prospect of a unifying, postcolonial identity. Many Arab leaders, by contrast, viewed Nasser’s designs with unease. Eisenhower monitored the development, sounding out friends in the region and seeking their guidance on a shift that he feared could “carry serious implications” for America’s Arab allies.
Among those troubled by Nasser’s efforts was Lebanon’s earnest but skittish president, Camille Chamoun, whose appreciation for the Western powers helped fortify his rule but also made him suspect in the eyes of Nasser and other Arab nationalists. Chamoun’s own authority was weak, as he ruled over a fractious nation, divided between its Maronite Christian community and its growing Islamic population. If Nasser was intent on expanding his base, Chamoun understood that it could come at the expense of his own.
Through late 1957, Eisenhower suspected Nasser of fomenting trouble in Lebanon. He worried that the Soviets would seek a foothold in the region and that Nasser would unify Arabs against the West and threaten its oil. On a more personal level, Eisenhower liked Chamoun and had appreciated the president’s kind words after Ike’s heart attack in 1955. Eisenhower even asked his doctor to give Chamoun a checkup in 1957 after Chamoun too was diagnosed with heart trouble.
With his country in a state of agitation, Chamoun in early 1958 debated whether to seek another term as president. To do so would have required an amendment to the Lebanese constitution, and the mere prospect of Chamoun maneuvering to retain power enraged his critics. Still, Chamoun held on, motivated in part by concern that leaving office without a natural successor would exacerbate his country’s divisions and expose it to Nasser’s designs. By June, Ike had grown deeply concerned. “Chamoun is most friendly but indecisive,” he confided to Paul Hoffman. “There are, of course, wheels within wheels, conflicting reports, cross currents of personal ambition and religious prejudice, and, above all, a great internal campaign of subversion and deceit, possibly communistic in origin. Unless the United Nations can be effective in the matter, it would appear that almost any course that the United States could pursue would impose a very heavy cost upon us. The two alternatives could become intervention and non-intervention.”
Those were the options that remained just weeks later, when, to the surprise of the American government, the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and its king murdered. Suddenly the entire Middle East was inflamed. The challenge, Ike wrote, “changed from quieting a troubled situation to facing up to a crisis of formidable proportions.” Chamoun could not bring stability to his own nation; Iraq had failed to protect its king. The Shah of Iran, there by Ike’s hand, worried about spreading instability. Saudi Arabia’s monarch feared it as well. Amid such manifest weakness, Eisenhower had to admit grudgingly: “No matter what you think of Nasser, at least he’s a leader.” Chamoun pleaded for American troops to maintain the order that he found impossible to impose himself, and on July 14, Ike approved a decision he would make only once during the entirety of his presidency: he ordered American troops to invade a foreign land.
The invasion of Lebanon was carried out under the principles of the Eisenhower Doctrine and in keeping with Ike’s views of war: it should be conducted with overwhelming force, with an articulated mission, and with a path for victory. He recognized that no one could foresee the complexities of combat, but Eisenhower would not authorize conflict without a detailed plan and the personnel to carry it out.
Dispatching American soldiers to occupy a Middle Eastern nation was, as Eisenhower had known for months, sure to embitter Arab nationalists. Just two years earlier, the United States had impressed Arabs by breaking with Britain and France during the 1956 invasion of Egypt; now America risked being cast as a colonial aggressor, rather than as a protector of nationalist aspiration. There were, however, as Eisenhower would aptly note, profound differences between the Suez crisis and the Lebanese invasion. Lebanon’s rightful leader invited in U.S. forces; Egypt’s president angrily denounced the force used against his nation. Access to oil, as always, hovered in the analysis of the Middle Eastern crisis, but what specifically motivated the U.S. president were American obligations under the Eisenhower Doctrine and the recognition that Communist subversion rarely came in the form of direct combat. “Today aggression is more subtle and more difficult to detect and combat,” he wrote in his diary. “Its forms include propaganda barrages, bribery, corruption, subversion, and export into the affected countries of arms, munitions, supplies and, sometimes, so-called ‘volunteer’ combatants. This type of aggression is carried on under the name of ‘civil war,’ a term that connotes domestic difficulty not directly affected by outside influences.”
At 3:00 p.m. on July 15, seventeen hundred Marines splashed ashore just south of Beirut, threading their way between swimmers playing in the surf. The U.S. ambassador met up with the troops on the road from the airport and escorted them the rest of the way into the capital.
In the ensuing weeks, the Soviets played up the crisis, decrying the imperialist images of American forces in the region but confining their objections to rhetoric. American troops, meanwhile, gingerly held positions in and around Beirut, building up to a force of more than fourteen thousand soldiers. Operation Blue Bat, as it was called, had the desired effect. Elections at the end of July produced a winner in General Fuad Chehab, a Christian moderate acceptable to both sides. Chehab’s victory settled Lebanon, and he amused Ike when he wrote to express his misgivings about giving up the Army for politics. “His statement,” Eisenhower wryly observed, “struck a responsive chord.” Chamoun stepped down that fall, and by the end of October, American forces had withdrawn from the country. Over the course of that brief occupation, only one American was killed in battle, shot by a sniper (three more died in a bus accident). The American occupying forces did not kill a single civilian. Nasser, meanwhile, was left to contemplate the fortitude of Soviet power, which, when challenged, retreated into talk.
In Lebanon, Eisenhower responded to a deteriorating situation in a country within easy reach of U.S. force, far from the heart of Communist power, and of clear strategic consequence. In that same year, however, a far more complicated struggle resumed in a familiar location. Once again, the venue was the bothersome pair of scruffy rocks within sight of the Chinese mainland: Quemoy and Matsu.
China’s advance on those same islands in 1954 and 1955 had produced the defense pact between the United States and Taiwan pledging America to defend Taiwan and its “related positions and territories” without specifically committing the United States to war over Quemoy and Matsu. “I won’t be pressed or pinned down,” Dulles said at the time, “on whether an attack on Matsu and Quemoy would be an attack on Formosa.” That studied approach—strategic clarity layered over tactical ambiguity—persuaded China to halt its aggression, but Mao went away mad and now girded for another attempt to wrench the islands from the grasp of Chiang Kai-shek, or at least to provoke an American response that would work to Mao’s advantage.
Chiang warned in July and August that a buildup was under way. Chinese leaders delivered bellicose statements, and two Nationalist planes were shot down in July while on routine patrol. As the hostilities mounted, Khrushchev paid a surprise visit to Beijing, alarming Chiang as well as CIA observers. Inside China, government-sponsored demonstrations featured angry crowds protesting Taiwan’s presence on the islands, and the Chinese government moved war planes to fields within striking distance of Taiwan. The threat to the islands escalated, and Eisenhower once more had to decide whether the United States was prepared to go to war over two useless island redoubts, and if so, would it wage nuclear war?
In one scenario, Eisenhower was prepared to go all the way. If China invaded the offshore islands and then turned to Taiwan itself, America’s obligations under its mutual-defense treaty would leave it no choice. “If the Chinese communists attack Taiwan,” Ike said, “we have got to do what is necessary.” That, he added, “would be all-out war.” The Joint Chiefs, meanwhile, were preparing to wage nuclear war at a lesser threshold. If the Chinese Communists succeeded in blockading the offshore islands, the chiefs believed that alone would warrant nuclear strikes against six to eight airbases in mainland China. Gerard Smith, an assistant secretary of state, was aghast to learn of the Joint Chiefs’ willingness to launch a nuclear war over such insignificant islands—indeed, merely over the blockade of those islands, not even their invasion—especially in light of Eisenhower’s long insistence that no nuclear conflict could remain local once it had commenced. Smith pleaded with Dulles to urge Eisenhower to explore a military alternative that would not catapult the United States into a general war with China or its closest ally, the Soviet Union.
Finally, on August 23, after weeks of escalating tension, the Chinese bombardment began. The first fusillades brought in the steel and explosive hail of as many as thirty-five thousand rounds (that was the Nationalist estimate; American sources put the number closer to twenty thousand rounds). More than five hundred Taiwanese soldiers were killed or wounded. After the first day, the shelling tapered off but still continued. Chiang Kai-shek pleaded with Eisenhower for help. Not only was artillery blanketing the island, Chiang wrote, but enemy torpedo boats had sunk or damaged two Taiwanese vessels, and Chinese planes had strafed ground positions. Three generals were dead. In his message, Chiang, who referred to the president as “Your Excellency,” asked Ike to declare emphatically that the United States would repel any attack on the islands with military force and urged Eisenhower to grant Taiwanese field commanders the latitude to respond to bombardment or invasion as they saw fit (the terms of the mutual-defense treaty prevented Taiwan from attacking mainland China without U.S. approval). Eisenhower was nonplussed, and Dulles, though bafflingly out of the office on vacation as the crisis unfolded, contacted Herter, the acting secretary of state, and reinforced his skepticism about giving Chiang a free hand to respond to the aggression.
Ike recognized the situation for what it was: Chiang had deliberately reinforced the offshore islands in order to make his soldiers hostages to just such a crisis, and Mao was bombing those positions to bait the United States into a response that would horrify the world. (The British, in particular, were fearful that the United States would launch a nuclear war over islands of such insignificance and warned the Americans that they would not be able to support such an action.)
Eisenhower was having none of it. He refused to grant Chiang the freedom he hoped to use against Communist China, and he would not declare an attack on the islands as equivalent to an attack on Taiwan itself. In short, he refused everything that Chiang sought. The Taiwanese generalissimo, dependent on the United States for his survival, fumed that Eisenhower’s directives were “inhuman” and “unfair,” that they required him to acquiesce in the shelling of his army and were destructive to the morale of his nation. He was, one American observer reported, “the most violent I have seen him.” Eisenhower was unmoved. Military officials in the Taiwan Strait also begged for a more forceful response, convinced that the shelling was prelude to invasion. Eisenhower refused them as well. General Nathan Twining and the Joint Chiefs lobbied for permission to attack China with “small” nuclear weapons if it proceeded to invade or escalated its bombardment. Eisenhower turned them down, too.
Instead, he pursued a diplomatic solution. Working through intermediaries in governments from Auckland to Warsaw, the administration broached a proposal sure to infuriate Chiang but intended to defuse the crisis: Taiwan would agree to demilitarize the islands if, in exchange, the Chinese would stop their shelling and renounce any possibility of invasion. Not only was such a proposal anathema to Chiang; it was fiercely resisted within the upper reaches of the U.S. military, where some officials preferred World War III to conciliation. “The argument that nothing is worth a world war,” Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, chief of naval operations, stated, “was the reason why the Communists had been winning all along.” Khrushchev underscored that point in a bombastic letter to Eisenhower on September 7, asserting that the Soviet Union was standing firmly with its Chinese ally. Twelve days later, he added: “Those who nurture plans for an atomic attack on [China] should not forget that not only the USA but the other side as well possesses atomic and hydrogen weapons … If such an attack is made on [China], the aggressor will immediately receive a proper repulse with these very means.” Eisenhower did not dignify that with a response.
Beneath the bluster, however, China and the United States were talking. Negotiations began in Warsaw on September 15, and after early posturing, China suspended its bombing on October 6. Taiwan reluctantly agreed—as if it had much choice—to scale back its military presence on the islands, though not to abandon them. China responded with a move that captured the lunatic order of the period. It resumed shelling on October 25, but only on odd-numbered days. Terror devolved into farce; the threat of devastation was transformed, Ike noted, into a “Gilbert and Sullivan war.” The prospect of world war receded.
Eisenhower prevailed, once again overcoming the misgivings of allies, generals, and diplomats. But China also gained; by use of force and violence, it backed down the might arrayed against it. Khrushchev took note.
Despite Eisenhower’s desire to avoid a world war, he was not quiescent in the face of Communism. As had been the case since his first year in office, his national security strategy included an energetic devotion to covert action. In theory, subterfuge offered what his nuclear strategy forswore: the opportunity to roll back Communism without directly confronting the Soviet Union.
Unlike Quemoy and Matsu, outposts of psychological value at best, Indonesia was a nation of strategic consequence. The world’s fourth-largest country, it controlled vast natural resources—rubber, oil, and tin were among its treasures—as well as sea-lanes between Asia and the South Pacific. A hostile Indonesia could bar ships from the Strait of Malacca, disrupt trade, hinder the defense of Singapore, and isolate Australia and New Zealand from Asia.
Indonesia had spent hundreds of years under Dutch rule until 1949, when Ahmed Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta completed a four-year campaign to win national independence. Trained as an architecture student, Sukarno was a nationalist type familiar to Washington: raised in his native culture, in his case that of Java; educated in Dutch colonial schools; and fervid in his rejection of the colonial regime. To the Eisenhower administration, Sukarno seemed a South Asian Nasser, especially when his aims were coupled with his charismatic appeal to his followers and Cold War neutralism. Like Nasser and Nehru, Sukarno refused both subservience to the United States and absorption by the Soviet Union.
Popular as the hero of his revolution, Sukarno as president held firm against the centrifugal forces of Indonesia, which featured a strong government in Java but a weak hold over the nation’s archipelago. He was not a Washington favorite, but U.S. planners regarded him with concern more than hostility. They recognized that while Sukarno was not under their control, neither was he a Communist. “Although U.S. efforts have been unsuccessful in pulling Indonesia from its neutral position, they have contributed in preventing it from passing into the communist orbit,” American security policy concluded in 1956.
Sukarno, however, remained stubbornly immune to Western overtures and persisted in flirting with Moscow and Beijing. His speeches included ritual denunciation of colonialism. He visited the capitals of America’s enemies and practiced a politics of “guided democracy” that appeared to American leaders to be “inspired by the material accomplishments if not the ideology of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Communist China.” Moreover, Dulles didn’t like him. He was, the secretary believed, “wholly undependable … dangerous and untrustworthy and by character susceptible to the Communist way of thinking.” Most worryingly, Sukarno welcomed leftist representation in his government, and the nation’s Communist Party, pursuing its goals through legal means, grew in strength to the point that by 1957 it had emerged as the nation’s largest single party. By that year, the analysts’ conflicted assessment of 1956 had given way to a far bleaker view of Sukarno’s “preoccupation with the restoration of ‘national unity,’ ” an obsession that Americans felt came at the “price of communist participation in his government,” and reflected his “infatuation with ‘guided democracy’ as a remedy for Indonesia’s political and economic instability.”
Eisenhower was not prepared to watch Indonesia slide into Moscow’s control. Confiding to Hoffman that summer, Ike wrote: “With Sukarno’s ambitions and his leftish leanings, with his readiness to take Communist support, and his seeming preference for the radicals rather than the more conservative sectors of Moslem people, the situation could well become serious in that area of the world.” The question was: How to resist? The United States could attempt to woo Sukarno, but American refusal to support his claims to West New Guinea, “an issue which is an obsession with Sukarno,” weakened Eisenhower’s influence. The United States could and did attempt to influence Indonesian elections, but when the CIA secretly poured $1 million into the coffers of the Islamic-oriented, anti-Communist Masjumi Party in 1955, the Communists still outpolled the U.S.-supported party. There was always the possibility of invasion, but the administration lacked any pretext for attacking a peaceful, neutral nation. Moreover, military action would harden Indonesian resentment of the United States. Ike personally rejected invasion as an option in September 1957.
Instead, the United States identified two sources of opposition to Sukarno: the nation’s military leadership and the nation’s incoherent but energetic rebel groups, scattered across Indonesia’s outer islands. The trouble was that those two groups were implacably at odds with each other. Nevertheless, Eisenhower authorized a complex covert action built on enticement of the military to check Sukarno while simultaneously supplying “all feasible covert means to strengthen anti-Communist forces in the outer islands.” It was integral to success that neither the military nor the rebels become aware of aid to the other.
Late in 1957, the CIA rolled out the plan. It tapped its accounts for $843,000, a down payment on the planned actions, and the first operatives arrived in Sumatra in early 1958, along with a shipment of weapons to arm eight thousand rebels. The U.S. Navy—an aircraft carrier, two destroyers, and a heavy cruiser—stood by offshore. By the end of February, Indonesia’s civil war was under way.
Despite American support, the rebels struggled. They captured some territory, but the Indonesian military pushed back. On March 12, a dawn raid on a rebel airfield drove the rebels from the area. After they scattered, Indonesian paratroop units discovered a line of abandoned trucks. Thinking that the crates inside contained canned milk, they cracked them open for a drink and found money and food, along with twenty cases of machine guns, bazookas, and rifles, among other weapons. Some of the arms bore stamps identifying them as having been made in Michigan.
Sukarno, still courting U.S. support, chose not to make a major issue of the arms discovery. The mere fact that the weapons were made in the United States, after all, did not necessarily mean that they were wielded by Americans. In conversations with U.S. officials in Jakarta, Sukarno continued to plead that he was not a Communist. He refused, however, to negotiate with the rebels and insisted that there would only be a settlement “as soon as the rebellion is quelled.”
In Washington, Eisenhower and his advisers were not yet ready to give up. The National Security Council meeting on March 20 opened with Allen Dulles briefing the members on the Indonesian civil war. Dulles said the rebellion was hampered by poor communications and inadequate aircraft. Although Eisenhower was skeptical of how aircraft could be effectively used in the Indonesian jungle, Dulles argued for supplying U.S. planes. Ike entertained the idea and, a few weeks later, even suggested that the rebels might also benefit from “a submarine or two.”
The rebels did not get all they wanted, but Ike agreed to let Americans join the fight. Recognizing the risk to the covert operations if Americans should be captured, he insisted that they not be drawn from the military, but if “private persons operating on their own” should join up with Indonesian rebels, who was the U.S. government to object? Eisenhower well knew that he was approving the use of CIA agents, and the CIA wasted no time dispatching two pilots nominally working for a Taiwanese company but in fact on the agency’s payroll.
From that point forward, all that had gone right in Iran and Guatemala went wrong in Indonesia. The rebels proved disorganized and unwilling to fight, even when CIA “advisers” started shooting. On April 30, the Indonesian forces captured documents that revealed foreign support in arming the rebels and even in piloting rebel aircraft. The documents showed the Sumatran rebels had received ten thousand small arms, along with bazookas, artillery, and at least five airplanes, ample evidence that “the rebels were … receiving actual assistance in the form of military equipment from foreign government sources.” Although the Indonesian government did not specifically accuse the U.S. government of complicity, the Indonesian foreign minister warned the American ambassador the planes were being piloted by Americans and Chinese. Eisenhower continued to feign ignorance, protesting that the U.S. government could not control the actions of soldiers of fortune. The noose was closing.
Goaded by their American advisers, the rebels staged a series of strikes in early May and appeared to be making headway. But the government struck back on May 15, wiping out much of the rebel air fleet. That same day, an American CIA pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, dropped a bomb on an Indonesian transport ship; sixteen soldiers and a member of the ship’s crew were killed. A few minutes later, he attempted to bomb a military camp onshore; he instead hit an adjacent market and ice factory.
Over the next few days, Pope played an active role in the back-and-forth fighting between the government and the rebels. Then, as he was flying his B-26 on a bombing run in the city of Ambon, a government pilot shot the right wing of Pope’s plane, which burst into flame. Pope bailed out, hitting the tail fin as he ejected and plummeting toward the jungle. Government forces hurried to the area and captured the operative suspended from his parachute. He was still alive.
The next afternoon in Washington, Allen Dulles learned that Pope had been missing for half a day. He listened quietly, puffing on his pipe, then called his brother. “I could not see in the long run any possibility of this being a winning course,” he recalled in a memorandum later, after he’d met with the secretary of state in person that afternoon. To the agents in the room, he was more direct: “We’re pulling the plug.”
Unlike in Iran or Guatemala, the CIA action in Indonesia failed to topple the regime that agitated Washington. In Indonesia, however, the administration’s all-but-open support for the rebel movement achieved some of what it sought indirectly. After resisting Washington’s entreaties to purge his government of Communists, Sukarno eventually did shake up his administration. Though it was too slow for Washington’s taste, Sukarno consolidated his own power and stayed clear of Moscow’s designs. Then, in 1965, Indonesia’s Communists staged an attempted putsch with coordinated attacks on the nation’s leading generals. Sukarno sided with the Communists and was deposed when the coup failed. He was replaced by President Suharto, who outlawed the Communist Party once and for all and placed Sukarno under house arrest, where he remained until his death in 1970.
The covert action in Indonesia was exceptionally sloppy, but it produced what Eisenhower wanted of it: an independent Indonesia, free from Soviet control. Even Pope was ultimately repatriated: sentenced to death, he remained in prison through the end of the Eisenhower administration but was released after Kennedy took office. Sukarno’s parting words: “Just go home, hide yourself, get lost, and we’ll forget the whole thing.”
Lebanon, Quemoy-Matsu, and Indonesia represented strikingly different threads of the Cold War: one provoked an overt, conventional military response; one brought American forces to high nuclear alert; one was waged in the shadowy realm of covert action. What they had in common was instability that gave room for Communist advance, met with forceful U.S. reply. And in each case, Eisenhower’s calibrated actions preserved American lives.
It was exhausting. Ike told Ellis Slater that 1958 was the “year all hell broke loose” and described it as the worst of his life. But Eisenhower, despite his battles with his health and the crush of overlapping crises, persisted. In 1958, American troops and agents occupied a Middle Eastern nation, patrolled a knife’s-edge conflict between Taiwan and Communist China, and actively worked to support a rebel movement in Indonesia—with the resulting loss of a single American life. Rarely in American history has so much ground been held at so little cost.