Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952 after a Republican campaign indicting the Truman administration and Democratic Party for failing to protect national security, containing Communism rather than liberating its victims, and engaging in reckless spending. The Truman administration’s internal security program, it was said, had not rooted out Communists at home. Abroad Truman had plunged the nation into war in Korea, blundered into a wider contest with China, and proved unable to win, or even end, the fighting. In one of the rare presidential races that focused on foreign affairs, Eisenhower capitalized on his World War II reputation as a bold leader who had surmounted enormous obstacles in pursuit of victory. He told the American electorate to trust him to go to Korea, bring the boys home, and prevent any new wars from erupting.
Upon entering the White House, Eisenhower dedicated himself to developing capabilities to wage a more potent Cold War. Thus his administration reexamined security policies in a long, complex exercise code-named Solarium and produced a “New Look” defense policy in 1953 that relied on nuclear arms as a more effective, and cheaper, deterrent than conventional forces. During his tenure, a reduced emphasis on ground troops nevertheless placed soldiers in forty-two countries while the U.S. nuclear arsenal swelled from 1, 200 to more than 22, 000 warheads.1 Growing military power encouraged his secretary of state belligerently to describe U.S. strategy as brinksmanship—that is, going to the threshold of war to force the enemy to capitulate—based on a willingness to meet provocation with massive atomic retaliation. Eisenhower’s administration expanded NATO, pursued a European Defense Community, and launched SEATO and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO).
In the election, Eisenhower triumphed not only over the Democrats but also over the isolationist wing of his own party. He relished the challenge. Dedicated to internationalism and alliance building, Eisenhower continued Truman’s struggle to get Europeans to arm themselves and to strengthen NATO. He worried about nuclear weapons and arms control, mindful of the increased likelihood of proliferation after Moscow exploded its first atomic device late in 1949, well ahead of U.S. expectations. He sought to use his popularity to reassure Americans that their engagement with the world was necessary and desirable.
To mount his initiatives, Eisenhower reshaped various government institutions. He refurbished the National Security Council (NSC), which, having been created in the 1947 National Security Act, had languished under Truman’s disinterested leadership. Eisenhower added members, convened the group regularly, multiplied the number and responsibilities of the staff, recast the post of presidential national security advisor, and heralded its ability to help him make decisions. His concern about security and efficiency led him to rely more on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to implement foreign policy than had his predecessor, carrying out covert and semicovert operations and using psychological warfare, subversion, bribery, and assassination. Eisenhower toughened Truman’s loyalty and security programs, emphasizing threats that could come from information leakers, sinister “pinkos,” and potential targets of blackmail, like homosexuals. At the State Department, foreign service officers who had warned of the growing power of Communism in Asia were fired, as though their alerts about a Communist future suggested advocacy of the same.2
Eisenhower and Dulles had publicly and with considerable vitriol deplored the direction of American foreign policy under Harry Truman. In additional to inadequate zealousness in pursuit of Cold War goals and an inconclusive hot war in Korea, the Truman administration, they complained, left them other unresolved crises. Problems festered in Germany and Eastern Europe over tightening Communist control—in Egypt, Iran, Morocco, and Tunisia owing to agitation against faltering colonial rule; in Cuba, Guatemala, and Indochina due to weak governments vulnerable to Communist infiltration; and in Africa because of inadequate guarantees of access to vital resources such as uranium in the Congo. Consequently, Eisenhower and Dulles faced upheaval in a decolonizing Congo; Moscow’s repression in Hungary and Germany; instability in Lebanon and Iraq; the Suez crisis; war in Indochina; and the advent of Fidel Castro’s control of Cuba. There would be another category of thorny dilemmas, including the launch of Moscow’s Sputnik spacecraft and its shooting down of a U-2 spy plane. In each of these arenas, Eisenhower and Dulles felt Communism hovering, quick to exploit any misstep.
Eisenhower and Dulles shared, but also cultivated, the 1950s national obsession with Communism. Vibrant anti-Communism won elections, ensured broad media exposure, and shielded politicians from critics. No one lost popularity for demonstrating anti-Communist fervor, but denunciation and disgrace hounded those insufficiently critical of leftist ideas and ideals. Presenting the Communist threat as monolithic, moreover, was simple and safe. Movies, television, literature, art, and the churches highlighted and exaggerated concerns about vulnerability to enemies at home manipulated by enemies abroad. Ordinary Americans waged patriotic crusades to uncover insidious subversives fouling the fabric of American life. Indeed, the highly popular 1956 science fiction thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers told Americans that neighbors, friends, and lovers could be Communists in disguise. A majority of angry and frightened Americans in 1954 told pollsters that Communists should be jailed (52 percent) and deprived of their citizenship (80 percent). The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), under J. Edgar Hoover, spent the decade chasing Reds and ignoring organized crime.3
And then there was Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), a self-proclaimed Communist hunter, whose vicious attacks Eisenhower refused to confront directly but whose baleful influence on the president’s behavior was undeniable. Eisenhower recoiled from a fight with McCarthy, despite hostility toward the senator, because of McCarthy’s renown among millions of Americans and his sway in Congress. McCarthy neither shrank from destroying lives, nor from contorting American foreign relations, imbuing Republican campaigning with an ugliness that his more sober colleagues did little to dissipate. Beginning in February 1950, having been sensitized to the utility of the Chinese revolution, he tirelessly charged that Communist sympathizers in the U.S. government had facilitated Mao Zedong’s victory.
The help McCarthy received from members of the China Lobby, and its congressional China bloc, reflected frustration with a Democratic Party that, they believed, had humiliated and abandoned Chiang in 1949. Ignorant of Chinese conditions, McCarthy nevertheless responded eagerly to suggestions that condemning the Communist triumph would invigorate his political career. In the process, he served the interests of China Lobbyists who sought, at all costs, to ensure future aid for and support of Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist cause. The China Lobby’s adherents comprised a loose coalition of businessmen, labor leaders, journalists, scholars, missionaries, and politicians. They supported Chiang because of investments—material and spiritual—as well as anti-Communist sentiment—real or politically driven. During the 1940s, they attempted to shape policy but generally fell short, not yet able to wield much political power.4 With the outbreak of the war in Korea and McCarthy’s opportunism, their influence grew. During the 1950s, they would become a daunting constraint in Sino-American relations. Even after McCarthy’s influence waned, Eisenhower and Dulles continued to temporize on China as they worried about the repercussions of change, inaction being far easier than reconsideration of mistaken policies.
That China could engender alarm among voters came as an abrupt departure from the past. A legacy of missionary work and World War II efforts to rescue Chinese victims from Japanese aggression cast the Chinese as impotent—sometimes contemptible, sometimes piteous, always weak and dependent. Americans since the middle of the nineteenth century pictured themselves as benefactors in China, caring for the sick, illiterate, and poverty-stricken masses whose government chronically proved too ineffective to provide for its own people. They might see Chinese rulers as venal and ruthless, but incompetence meant that China posed no challenge to the United States. Even the rapid Communist triumph in the Chinese civil war seemed to be as much a case of Chiang Kai-shek’s collapse as the emergence of a significant military force.
The Korean War, however, changed earlier assessments and made a China threat tangible. Americans assumed Chinese connivance in launching the war, sustaining North Korean forces fighting the war and resisting negotiation to prolong the war. They found, to their astonishment, that Chinese troops fought formidably.
Americans quickly fell back on stereotypes and prejudice. Chinese who had seemed hopelessly inept became frightening amalgams of yellow peril and red fascism.5 Chinese soldiers were not brave on the battlefield; they demonstrated “mass lunacy.”6 The United States had, of course, only just emerged from the brutal racism of the Pacific War, in which Japanese and Americans had come to see each other as subhuman and had inflicted appalling brutalities upon soldiers and civilians alike.7 The United States bore a history of discrimination at home against Asians that had produced an avid anti-immigration movement, exclusion laws, and repeated episodes of violence. In Korea, again, the cultural and racial clash paralleling the political agenda led to barbarity. “I couldn’t get over how cruel we were to the prisoners we captured,” Private Mario Scarselleta of the Thirty-Fifth Infantry told journalist Max Hastings.8 Charges of U.S. bacteriological warfare in Korea—use of plague, cholera, encephalitis, and meningitis—gained currency because of the known racism of Americans.9
Eisenhower displayed this same bigotry. A southerner born in the nineteenth century, Ike saw nonwhites as underlings, not equals. He was content to live in a segregated nation and had no compunctions in telling “nigger jokes” in the White House. He insisted that change in discriminatory policies at home and abroad could only come slowly through “moderation.”10 In 1948 he had testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the U.S. military should not be desegregated. During the 1957 Little Rock crisis over school integration, Eisenhower insisted, “you cannot change people’s hearts merely by laws.”11 As president he met with black leaders just once, in 1958, perceiving them as ungrateful for the concessions he thought he had made to them.12
Members of Eisenhower’s administration at all levels shared his bias. Assistant Secretary for East Asia Walter Robertson, with southern roots as deep as Ike’s, dismissed peaceful coexistence with the Chinese as a “siren song” and likened the People’s Republic of China to Nazi Germany.13 Dillon Anderson, who advised Eisenhower on national security, defended the idea of dropping nuclear weapons on the Chinese because “they can breed them faster in the zone of the interior than you can kill them in the combat zone.” John Foster Dulles believed and thoughtlessly told V. K. Wellington Koo, the Republic of China’s ambassador, that “the Oriental mind… was always more devious than the Occidental mind.”14 He and brother Allen, descended from South Carolina slaveholders, ignored discrimination. U.S. diplomats, who refused to join segregated social clubs, were disparaged by embassy coworkers for having “gone Asiatic.” The FBI’s head J. Edgar Hoover “viewed the mere advocacy of racial equality as a subversive act.”15 Other officials rejected Chinese calls for peace as “Asian trickery.”16
This broad-based racism had a chilling effect on U.S. foreign policy and America’s international image. It stirred anti-American sentiment abroad, providing fuel for Cold War attacks. Moscow struck out at the United States for touting freedom and equality but practicing discrimination and repression. China publicized acts of racism in the United States to nonwhite peoples of Africa and Asia. But administration leaders were not embarrassed enough to exert effective pressure for even-handed policies.17
Their reticence reinforced suspicions that Washington’s position on de-colonization owed a lot to racial intolerance. In the aftermath of World War II, agitation for self-rule swept the globe. Americans subscribed to the idealism of anti-imperialism and self-determination but doubted its wisdom in practice. Emergent nationalism appeared dangerously vulnerable to Communist exploitation. The stability and sobriety of colonial powers was by contrast reassuring and seemed to strengthen Washington—since these were also U.S. allies—in its struggle with Communists both in the rising third world and in Europe. Furthermore, it seemed critical to avoid upheaval that could threaten access to raw materials for U.S. business and potential military bases in the event of war.18 Racism magnified the political problem as Americans were easily persuaded that new nonwhite governments lacked the education or acumen to run their nations effectively. Accordingly, Eisenhower and Dulles sympathized with aspirants to independence but identified with the imperialists, disregarding the fact that across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, nationalism moved people far more often than did Communism.
China benefited from the U.S. predicament. Its racial makeup provided a link to third world societies, its revolutionary experience provided a model for liberation struggles, its mid-1950s foreign policy moderation broadened its appeal, and its economic progress served as an inspirational exemplar. The Chinese understood the humiliation of exploitation by the West, having endured a century of semicolonialism and near national extinction. Beijing could authoritatively deploy anti-imperialist rhetoric to condemn Washington.
Washington tried to portray Communism as a new, virulent colonialism but failed. Eisenhower complained to the British ambassador that in Asia “colonialism is not colonialism unless it is a matter of white domination over colored people.”19 Having approved, or acquiesced in, the efforts by imperial powers to resist loss of empire, moreover, Washington’s credibility on the subject vanished. U.S. officials found that “despite our massive economic aid and military assistance… our anti-colonial record [for instance, the United States had granted independence to the Philippines in 1947], our recognized good intentions, our free and diverse society, we seem to be becoming more identified with the negative aspects of the past and the status quo.”20
To undo the damage, Washington counted on psychological warfare, employing a broad range of tactics from public relations to subversion to influence opinions, ideas, emotions, and behavior as well as the policies of friend and foe.21 Dwight Eisenhower welcomed the challenge. Some of his zeal stemmed from successful propaganda work during World War II, the rest from his enthusiasm for adapting the marketing techniques of a thriving business enterprise.22
The overseas campaign focused on telling the world’s people that U.S. goals were their goals. The administration established the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1953, reassembling and reinvigorating Truman-era outreach. It replaced the Psychological Strategy Board with a more muscular Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) to organize clandestine warfare, plan covert political actions, and sharpen weapons of cultural, economic, and political pressure. Eisenhower appointed a special assistant for psychological warfare. To enhance its persuasiveness, the administration used catchy, upbeat packages, such as “Atoms for Peace,” a program to deliver civilian energy generation without proliferation. Like Open Skies, which promised greater transparency regarding nuclear installations, Atoms for Peace portrayed the United States as candid and eager to alleviate simmering nuclear nightmares that one staff member described as “bang-bang, no hope, no way out.”23 Voice of America (VOA), for its part, energetically publicized developments like the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision on desegregating U.S. schools to counter denunciations of racism and government inaction. It did so even though Eisenhower made clear he disliked the court ruling, which he believed ignored the feelings of white southerners.24
Simultaneously, at home the administration crafted initiatives to sell its message. Eisenhower created the first congressional liaison staff and met routinely with congressional leaders. Dulles testified often on Capitol Hill. Both the president and the secretary held frequent press conferences (Ike’s tally for 8 years was an exhausting 193) and cultivated individual reporters notwithstanding Eisenhower’s complaint to his diary that journalists were humorless, vain, arrogant, and destructive.25 Eisenhower held the first televised White House news conference. There were even efforts to cooperate with the still fledgling television industry in producing educational broadcasts inspired by the Defense Department.26
Shaping opinion took priority, but understanding popular thinking on foreign affairs from polls, news media, and Congress aided decision making. Government operations, such as the Public Studies Division at the State Department, continuously scrutinized radio, television, periodicals, and press commentary, distributing reports to various agencies on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Polling on foreign affairs questions, available to officials since the 1930s, and after 1945 secretly supported by the State Department through a contract with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), also reduced dependence on Congress and the press.27
Other less formal mechanisms alerted the White House to public opinion. The president benefited from evaluations of opinion analyst George Gallup, a protégé of Sigurd Larmon, the latter a close friend of Ike’s. Similarly, Hadley Cantril, who had helped Franklin Roosevelt wrestle with polling data, served as a consultant to the Eisenhower White House. Further, the Republican National Committee contracted with the world’s second largest advertising agency, Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, two of whose executives knew Eisenhower from his Columbia University days, to conduct spot-checks of public views and deliver them to the White House every Monday.28 Press secretary James Hagerty regularly sought out polling data and occasionally suggested questions for surveys.29 Overall, according to H. Schuyler Foster, longtime head of the Public Studies Division, feedback to his office emphasized the usefulness of the data “as a corrective of individualimpressions.”30
Polling citizens, of course, did not make them better informed about international relations, cognizant of the biases inherent in poll questions, or willing to admit ignorance. Nevertheless, in the most general sense, what polls, newspapers, and the Congress showed was that, like the president and his secretary of state, ordinary Americans—across regions, religions, gender, and income levels—and their representatives thought about Europe, not Asia, and wanted the government to dedicate its attention to European rather than Asian problems.31
During the decade, polling also suggested that the citizenry gradually became less frenzied anti-Communists, although opinion remained changeable. Their skepticism about peaceful coexistence with the Communist bloc, for instance, subsided so that by mid-1959, 66 percent of respondents thought it possible.32 Trade with the Soviet Union, which only 40 percent supported in 1953, received 55 percent approval by the end of the decade. People welcomed the 1955 Geneva summit conference, which helped push Ike’s popularity to 79 percent, and Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States. Regarding China, fierce hostility persisted longer and was easily intensified, but a key analyst of opinion on China has argued that “as policy slowly moderated in the 1950s, so also did opinion.”33 In essence, whatever Eisenhower and Dulles expected to see on China they could find.
CONCLUSION
Eisenhower and Dulles pursued a foreign policy seemingly of extremes. They pledged that they would strengthen the free world and stop Communist expansion. Theirs would be an era of liberation rather than passive containment. They would support states willing to declare fealty to the right side in the Cold War and undermine those that might possibly join Moscow. If that meant working with an apartheid South Africa and a fascist Spain while overthrowing wayward governments on the left, so be it. They would welcome nationalism rhetorically but would not back decolonization. They would operate an executive branch, and especially a State Department, purged of Communist infiltrators and sympathizers. Theirs would be an administration outfitted with new people and institutions prepared to wage a more efficient and effective Cold War.
But things were not always what they seemed. The reality of the Eisenhower years did not necessarily match administration intentions or the picture that historians have drawn. On a number of fronts, the two diverged significantly.
To begin, although Eisenhower campaigned against the Democratic Party’s passive strategy of containment, the Truman administration had, as Ike knew, pursued rollback. And even as Eisenhower insisted on the necessity and rightness of liberation, operationally he adopted containment, recognizing that he could not push the Soviets out of closely held and inaccessible places.34
Eisenhower also railed against Truman’s Europe-first policy. He called “the defense of freedom… indivisible” and insisted that “all continents and peoples [would be held] in equal regard.”35 In fact, as the profile of Ike in chapter one makes clear, he had a slim knowledge and cared minimally about countries outside Europe. He, too, placed the concerns of U.S. allies in Europe well ahead of problems in Asia.
Eisenhower and Dulles publicly condemned the Communist bloc as voracious and monolithic. Privately, however, they subscribed to the notion that states could be Communist and yet not part of an international conspiracy. The image of a unified red menace made Americans more cohesive and rallied foreign friends and allies. To Winston Churchill Eisenhower wrote that the perils of not fighting Communism everywhere and at all times were that “we would create the impression that we are slinking along in the shadows, hoping that the beast will finally be satiated and cease his predatory tactics before he finally devours us.”36 The United States must appear, as well as be, invincible.
Eisenhower’s praise of a decisive NSC was for show. The president deliberated on and decided policy in the Oval Office alone or with a close circle of advisers. He almost always came to discussions such as those convened in the NSC with his views set, simply allowing participants in these spirited debates to think they were shaping his choices. Most often he used the NSC as a vehicle to educate members of his administration regarding his views and priorities. That he spoke disparagingly of his administration’s China policies, therefore, did not mean he sought action and was thwarted. He assumed even before he aired his frustration that he was trapped by the Cold War, right-leaning politics, and the public.37
As many scholars have shown, Eisenhower believed passionately in psychological warfare and the use of the presidential podium to instruct citizens. It is also evident that he abdicated his responsibility to do so on critical issues including race, anti-Communist extremism, and China. The amusing side of his failure was his “jumbled syntax, his confessions that he ‘did not know’ about this or that issue, and his often inappropriate or impossibly confusing answers,” which baffled the press.38 But although Ike never could be characterized as an exciting speaker, he could have expressed his thoughts clearly had he wanted to, and he could have used his broad popularity to address controversial questions.
Actually, Eisenhower and Dulles had complicated views about public opinion. It worried them and they saw it as a constraint. As is true of most high-level officials, they denied being unduly influenced by the public. Dulles told the press in 1958 that “you cannot allow your foreign policy to be dictated by public opinion” because it might not be “sound.”39 Eisenhower confided in his diary his dismay with civilian leaders who viewed the attitudes of their citizens as immutable, similar to “a thunderstorm or a cold winter.” He believed as a military commander that public opinion could be altered through dynamic leadership and education. But his reality diverged significantly from his self-image. On race, on Joseph McCarthy, and on China, he refused to speak out, hoarding his influence for things that mattered more to him.40
It should not be surprising, given these contradictions, to find that the president’s articulated policy on China and his convictions about China differed. As he went forward to engage with the decisions, problems, and crises of his tenure, he knew what he should do about China but not how to do it. He recognized the need for leadership and his own abilities to spur action, but he rarely reached the point, and then not on the most critical questions, where China mattered enough to him to take risks.