Just one week before Eisenhower’s inauguration, Beijing shot down an American plane dropping leaflets over Manchuria and took eleven American servicemen captive. Three others died in the wreckage. Demands swept the United States for a naval blockade of China. Among others, Senator William Knowland, future Senate majority leader, wanted immediate action. The call to arms grew louder when, during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1954–1955, Chinese courts sentenced the eleven soldiers and two CIA agents to prison terms of 4 years to life for espionage. Again members of Congress and Ike’s own military advocated a prompt response. At both junctures, however, the president rebuffed talk of a blockade.1 Reflecting the broader trajectory of his China policy, the president ignored provocation from Beijing and domestic pressure, determined to avoid a clash with the Chinese.
Beijing had not been nearly as judicious. Although Chinese leaders delighted in the direct diplomatic contacts with the United States in 1954, they quickly realized that progress on recovering Taiwan would not result from a few cordial conversations in Geneva or elsewhere. They knew that they lacked the capabilities to attack Taiwan but worried that the international community might conclude that Beijing had accepted national disunity. Not only had talks failed, but the United States continued to arm Taiwan, and a mutual security treaty between Washington and Taipei seemed imminent. Accordingly, Mao decided to use force rather than words to demonstrate that the status quo was not viable and that closer U.S.-Taiwan relations and any broader U.S. effort at encirclement of China entailed high costs and risks.2
Beginning just two days after the Geneva conference ended, Chinese leaders launched a campaign calling for the liberation of Taiwan. On September 3, as delegates convened in Manila to inaugurate SEATO, Beijing followed threats with bombardment of Jinmen island, which was located in the Taiwan Strait but just two miles from the major Chinese port city of Xiamen. The chain of offshore islands, of which Jinmen was a part, had been occupied by Nationalist troops fleeing the mainland in 1949. People’s Liberation Army efforts to capture them had failed, and the KMT had gradually fortified and garrisoned them. Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)Central Committee feared that American imperialists, defeated in Korea and unable to sustain the French war in Indochina, would now use Taiwan and the islands as staging areas to overthrow the PRC.3
With assistance from the Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives and Records Administration.
According to new Chinese sources, Mao did not seek to start a war with the United States and apparently did not believe the shelling would spark a crisis. From the Chinese perspective, the bombardment, although more sensational, was just another confrontation in a long civil war. Later testimony of Chinese military commanders and the contemporary assessments of the CIA contend that China never mobilized to seize Jinmen, nor did it have the ability to attack Taiwan.4 Instead, Mao intended to reinforce his claim to Taiwan, appeal to world opinion, and coerce Washington into abandoning Chiang. He wanted to forestall the signing of a defense treaty, but, at the very least, deter any coverage of the offshore islands.5
Mao, however, drastically miscalculated Eisenhower’s perceptions and reactions. Rather than consider the Chinese Communists measured and modest in their actions, Ike concluded that they were “completely reckless, arrogant… and completely indifferent to human losses.”6 The July 1954downing of a British passenger plane by a PRC fighter aircraft causing the death of ten, among them three Americans, testified to Chinese Communist irresponsibility.7 Moreover, there had been a pitched battle between Communist and Nationalist forces over the Dongshan islands in July 1953, and Beijing had asserted air control over the Dachen islands during the spring of 1954.8 Eisenhower and Dulles were probably also jolted by the failure of their efforts to deter Chinese aggression through naval deployments and public warnings. Beijing might not be able actually to seize Taiwan, but U.S. officials found its publicly announced determination to try unnerving and treated this as a major crisis.
Eisenhower and Dulles, of course, could not have known what Communist Chinese leaders hoped to accomplish. Even with better sources or greater contact through diplomatic relations, Americans would have had trouble penetrating Chinese deliberations. As it was, the United States collected data through espionage, from allies and refugees, as well as out of open publications, but this yielded little in the 1950s and often proved unreliable. John Melby, a foreign service officer with China experience, evaluated the effort as of 1952 as “so bad that it approaches malfeasance,” and Ray Cline, a CIA Taipei station chief, stressed in his memoir that it was “important…to emphasize how little we knew about mainland China.”9 What the Chinese planned to do and what was happening inside China remained elusive. The Soviet model and the Sino-Soviet alignment suggested broad parameters but not the critical details. American understanding of, and expectations for, Chinese activities sometimes hewed close to reality, with intelligence estimates tending to be judicious and cautious. At other times, the intelligence community dramatically misread developments on the Chinese mainland, as with their relatively upbeat assessments of the economic impact of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Former intelligence analyst and China specialist Robert Suettinger summed up the China problem by noting that studies of Chinese affairs had to “delve into a realm of speculation, a dense process of trying to separate out the probable from the possible from the impossible… providing answers… with an appropriate degree of uncertainty.”10
Eisenhower preferred to fight the Cold War as a cold war. He delighted in propaganda campaigns designed to subvert leftist governments and free captive people. He had supported similar activities in World War II, and they meshed well with his belief in government instigating, but not carrying out, change. Eisenhower’s enthusiasm ensured a worldwide growth in paramilitary activities, espionage, and psychological warfare.11 Although willing to use force, Eisenhower and Dulles preferred to undermine, not overthrow, governments.
Emphasizing psychological warfare made it possible to reserve the use of military, paramilitary, and covert action for small-scale and deniable ventures. Thus the administration moved from Iran in 1953, to Guatemala in 1954, to Lebanon in 1958, to Indonesia in 1957–1958, to Cuba in 1960 and never directly confronted an adversary possessing sufficient military might to retaliate effectively. For larger, stronger, or more sensitive opponents, its activities focused on psychological means, leaving coup plotting behind; such was the case with China.
Making information available to and implementing propaganda campaigns for the president, however, was not easy. On the eve of the Eisenhower administration’s inauguration, Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board deemed operations against the Soviet Union and China largely ineffective. In both cases, leafleting had occurred, but radio broadcasting—which would be so critical in Guatemala and Eastern Europe—fell short: the Soviets jamming it and the Chinese lacking radios on which to listen.12
Furthermore, however poorly the U.S. government did in getting its message out, it had even less success in stealing secrets: American spies in China remained scarce, the Chinese published few reliable economic statistics and less political data, and refugees and collaborators sold information that too often proved fraudulent.13 Signals intelligence that could monitor China’s relatively rudimentary telecommunications would eventually allow the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, and the CIA to gather useful information, but in the early 1950s, it remained “so bad that a senior CIA official referred to this period as ‘the dark ages for communications intelligence.’”14 Working with regime opponents similarly yielded questionable results.
Intelligence cooperation with the Chinese Nationalists floundered quickly because of Republic of China (ROC) ineffectiveness and unreliability. The Taiwan intelligence community wildly exaggerated the size of potential insurgent forces on the mainland and repeatedly proposed unrealistic operations to spark a revolution.15 CIA veteran James Lilley recalled that “we came to see our Taiwan partners… as refugees, dependent on the U.S. for work and pay. This was not a productive situation for collaboration.”16
Other sources proved similarly unpredictable. Third Force contacts on the mainland—groups from the Chinese political fringe—proved less useful than Taiwan; much of what the former “gathered” turned out to be rewritten newspaper copy. In colonial Hong Kong, British authorities facilitated American access to refugees, travelers, and businessmen, passed along information from their own civilian and military intelligence services, and tolerated one of the largest CIA stations in the world (allegedly close to 600 persons), but the yield remained irregular.17
Accordingly, when the shelling of Jinmen began, Eisenhower and Dulles lacked information and could not be certain of Chinese intentions. China’s use of force shocked the president and secretary of state, especially since two Americans died in the initial barrage. As a result, and directly contrary to Mao’s hopes, the military action forced Dulles to move forward with the mutual defense treaty he had been resisting. Earlier, Beijing’s bellicosity coupled with Robertson’s persistence and negotiation of the SEATO pact excluding Taiwan had weakened objections. Valued advisors to the secretary Robert Bowie of Policy Planning and Livingston Merchant from European Affairs withdrew their opposition, cautioning only that any security guarantee must not be extended to the offshore islands.18 Others urged that Congress commit publicly to administration policy through treaty ratification.19 Dulles’s surrender, however, came only after Beijing’s artillery barrage forced the issue.
Although Washington did not know why China acted when it did, the United States bore some responsibility for the attack on the offshore islands. The United States had encouraged Chiang to garrison the vulnerable bits of land off China’s coast. In November 1953, Eisenhower accepted a plan of action regarding Taiwan from the National Security Council (NSC 146/2), which had explicitly called for assistance in the defense of the islands and support for raids on commerce and territory.20 Subsequent Nationalist operations, using the islands to disrupt Communist China’s trade routes and spy on communications and military dispositions, rendered them logical targets.21
Nevertheless, Chinese Communist shelling was seen as aggression. Reversing decisions made on several occasions after 1950, three of the four Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) advocated an immediate declaration that the United States would defend the islands using nuclear weapons if necessary. In NSC 162/2, approved by the president in October 1953, the United States declared that Taiwan was of sufficient importance to necessitate U.S. military participation in its defense. To ensure victory, nuclear bombs would “be as available for use as other munitions.”22 To JCS Chairman Radford, Air Force Chief of Staff General Nathan F. Twining, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Robert B. Carney, the Jinmen bombardment constituted the first step in an invasion of Taiwan and, therefore, activated NSC 162/2.23 Although they conceded that the islands were not crucial for the defense of Taiwan, all three emphasized the psychological state of Taiwan’s government and people. Predictably, Walter Robertson’s shop at the State Department agreed with the JCS conclusions, wanting “such severe punishment on the enemy’s naval and air strength… as to significantly impair his chances of success.”24
For others, conversely, it was the insignificance of the islands that argued against vigorous U.S. action. General Matthew B. Ridgway, chief of staff of the army, emphasized the islands’ vulnerability, insisting that it would be folly to try to hold them in the face of an all-out Chinese assault. Dismayed by his fellow chiefs, he urged the others to think strategically, not politically.25 The secretary of defense similarly dismissed the islands’ value.26 Acting Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith urged Dulles to oppose intervention despite the deaths of two American military advisors. Those in the department who, like Smith, opposed military action noted that foreign opinion, highlighted in a special intelligence summary on September 4, feared U.S. recklessness.27 Even Rankin, writing from Taipei, discounted the incident as a political gesture. The intelligence community, moreover, concluded that not responding to the shelling would not invite an attack upon Taiwan. Barring an explicit U.S. abandonment of Taiwan, no expansion of military action should be expected.28
For Eisenhower and Dulles, three key contingencies shaped the decision regarding the U.S. response in the Strait: that the islands were too difficult to secure given their proximity to China’s coast; that they were not essential to Taiwan’s survival; and that China was not then prepared to attack Taiwan. Dulles abandoned his initial preference for defending Jinmen, noting that Chinese Communist goals were limited and that congressional and public opinion did not support an aggressive policy risking global conflagration.29
Eisenhower rejected radical action to hold the islands, pointing out that “we’re talking about going to the threshold of World War III.” A war with China could not be limited, and if such a war developed, the actual adversary would quickly become Moscow, although the president believed that the Soviets did not want war.30 “It was better,” Eisenhower thought, “to accept some loss of face in the world than to go to general war in the defense of these small islands.”31 Besides, the American people, he noted, could not understand why this mattered to the United States. “Quemoy is not our ship” he observed and added that the letters coming to the White House strongly questioned “what do we care what happens to those yellow people out there?” The president, accordingly, told the NSC that he “was personally against making too many promises to hold areas around the world and then having to stay there to defend them” since “if the Communists, by making faces and raising hell, can tie down U.S. forces, they will use that device everywhere.”32
Dulles thereupon sought a diplomatic solution. He turned to the UN and sought to involve the international community.33 But recognizing the potential for Nationalist Chinese interference and domestic political repercussions, Dulles camouflaged the U.S. initiative. He persuaded New Zealand to propose a cease-fire resolution to the UN Security Council and then pretended to Chiang that he had been caught by surprise. He urged, nonetheless, that the Generalissimo concur, demonstrating Taiwan’s reasonableness while Beijing and Moscow inflexibly blocked the resolution.34 In fact, both Chiang and Mao condemned Dulles’s internationalization of their domestic dispute.35
Opposition also flourished elsewhere. Secretary of Defense Wilson and Mutual Security Director Harold Stassen cautioned that once the offshore island question had been brought to the UN, there would be no way to prevent discussion of Taiwan’s status and its UN membership. Vice President Richard Nixon warned darkly of damage to the UN. Many Americans believed that UN restrictions in Korea had cost American lives and would protest UN interference on Taiwan.36
Dulles, nonetheless, persuaded the president to support Operation Oracle, as the New Zealand initiative was called. The secretary himself believed, and was not troubled by the thought, that “a probable ultimate outcome of UN intervention… would be the independence of Formosa and the Pescadores.”37 Thus, through the actions of the Chinese themselves, Two Chinas, the policy he preferred, would be achieved.
At the same time, however, Dulles capitulated on the long-sought mutual defense treaty to minimize KMT intransigence.38 A transparent bribe to secure Chiang Kai-shek’s cooperation, the defense treaty also turned out to be a mechanism for U.S. control. Under the provisions and secret codicils, the United States required notification from Taipei prior to any large-scale use of Nationalist troops against China, reserving the power to veto such operations. In effect, this blocked mainland recovery. Moreover, Washington refused explicitly to include the offshore islands in the treaty, although ultimately the Eisenhower administration accepted compromise language from Taiwan’s Foreign Minister George Yeh regarding “such other territories as may be determined by mutual agreement.”39 The treaty protected Taiwan but lessened the threat to Beijing and thereby reduced the likelihood of war.
For these very reasons, the treaty disappointed Taipei. The ROC ambassador, V. K. Wellington Koo, fruitlessly argued that Washington should not have the power to control Nationalist troop deployments. Further, Yeh insisted that Washington had no right to constrain Nationalist planning for the islands since it rejected any responsibility for them.
The JCS objected to the treaty for different reasons. Although erstwhile proponents of a security pact, by the autumn of 1954 the JCS had concluded that the existing Seventh Fleet executive order regarding the Strait gave them and the Nationalists more maneuvering room than a fixed commitment treaty would provide. They also opposed the treaty’s suspension of paragraph 10 of NSC 146/2, which had encouraged Nationalist raids on Communist commerce and territory. As recently as August, a tougher position had been tentatively adopted by the National Security Council (NSC 5429/2), calling for reduction “of the power of Communist China in Asia even at the risk of… war” and, to this end, maintenance of “political and economic pressures… [including] support for Chinese Nationalist harassing actions.”40 Furthermore, Vice Chiefs Admiral Donald B. Duncan and General Thomas D. White argued that a treaty unnecessarily removed ambiguity regarding U.S. plans for military action, freeing the Chinese Communists from pressure that otherwise moderated their behavior.41
Eisenhower, however, trusting his own military judgment, ignored the Pentagon. When he opted for the combined program of a UN initiative and a defense treaty, no one even bothered to notify the JCS. Changes in the treaty proffered by the chiefs arrived too late to influence the treaty’s contents.42
The advent of the security treaty had a clear impact on the Strait confrontation. Beijing had never intended to attack Taiwan in 1954 or 1955, recognizing that China lacked the amphibious capability. It did count on gaining experience and exploring the limits of U.S. engagement by trying to seize a few of the thirty islands being occupied by the Nationalists. In this endeavor Mao stressed that PLA forces should at no point engage the Americans directly. But according to scholars Gordon Chang and He Di, when the Mutual Defense Treaty did not explicitly embrace any of the offshore islands, Mao concluded that Washington would not stop China.43 Disregarding the precarious conditions generated by months of confrontation, on January 18, 1955, some 10, 000 PLA troops stormed the island of Yijiangshan, overwhelming its meager defenses. The previous week, the Chinese air force had begun firing on the nearby Dachen islands as a preliminary step to taking the liberation campaign there as well. Moreover, construction accelerated on airfields along the Chinese coast within range of Taiwan.
Until the Yijiangshan operation, Dulles had argued that Beijing could be restrained through a policy of obfuscation. Although forced to agree to the defense treaty that would make Washington’s commitment to Taiwan clearer, he objected to any unequivocal statement of intentions toward the offshore islands. The administration deliberately clouded the question in public while secretly ordering the military not to defend the islands.44 With the seizure of Yijiangshan, the secretary concluded that uncertainty could be an invitation as well as a deterrent. Moreover, he feared, the appearance of faintheartedness against Chinese Communist aggression hurt American credibility and prestige throughout Asia.
The best way to avoid further setbacks would be a congressional grant of authority to Eisenhower that would demonstrate U.S. resolve, buttress presidential power, and commit Congress to administration policy. The president believed he had sufficient authority to evacuate the offshore islands but questioned whether he would exceed his constitutional right if it proved necessary to conduct military operations against the Chinese. He would, he noted, do this were China to assemble a massive attack force even if he risked impeachment, but this was not desirable or necessary. Vice President Richard Nixon believed that Republicans required mollifying.45 On January 24, therefore, the president requested authorization to use American forces however he deemed necessary to protect Taiwan, the Pescadores, and related territories. Just four days later, even though disgruntled Democrats opposed a “predated” license for war, Congress overwhelmingly surrendered oversight, giving Eisenhower the Formosa Resolution.46
The president, nevertheless hoped to avoid using force, and again disregarding the opposition of the JCS, and with the Chinese Communists poised to attack, Eisenhower concluded that Chiang Kai-shek should evacuate the Dachen islands—as these were 200 miles north of Taiwan and difficult to defend. In exchange, the United States would assist his redeployment and, activating the Formosa Resolution, would pledge to help protect the offshore islands of Jinmen and Mazu.
At the same time, the president sought to limit U.S. exposure. He told the National Security Council that he had to defend Jinmen and Mazu to resolve the immediate impasse, but he would abandon them as soon as peace could be restored to the area.47 Eisenhower concluded that the military costs of using the islands as “stepping stones” to China outstripped any benefit.48 Ike, therefore, deceived Chiang, neither telling him of future intentions to jettison the annoying islands nor following through on earlier promises that he would announce the decision to defend Jinmen and Mazu.49 When Chiang threatened to publicize the commitment himself, he was warned that the United States might repudiate his statement and renege on the guarantee.50
On January 28th, as Congress gave Eisenhower the freedom to carry on military operations in the Strait, New Zealand implemented Dulles’s plan to defuse the crisis without war. Supported by London and prompted by Washington, the New Zealand UN delegation offered a cease-fire resolution, and the Security Council invited Beijing to join deliberations. Simultaneously, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold sought release of Americans in China and a compromise formula regarding the offshore islands.51 But efforts to use the United Nations foundered on the reality that Beijing, having been excluded from the organization, saw no reason to accept its jurisdiction. As Zhou told the Swedish ambassador in February 1955,
if the question is to force the People’s Republic of China to accept a cease-fire… neither the UN nor any foreign country has the right to interfere in China’s internal affairs.… The United States has occupied Taiwan by force and invaded the Taiwan Strait, and threatens China’s security. That is where the real danger of war lies.52
Although American intelligence now concluded that Beijing did not intend concerted military activity, the crisis atmosphere in Washington only intensified.53 The root of the problem appears to have been mutual misunderstanding. Having safely carried off operations against Yijiangshan and the Dachens, Mao concluded that Washington wanted so desperately to avoid a war that it would not retaliate against continued low-level provocation. Mao hoped to make the United States look weak and indecisive, aggravate tensions between Washington and its allies, and intensify anxiety in Taiwan. Instead he convinced American policymakers that he was preparing for an actual assault upon Taiwan.54 Dulles, for instance, told British Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden that he had thought Taiwan to be safe but now considered a Communist attack likely. And drawing the parallel to Hitler and Czechoslovakia, he asserted that aggression had to be stopped before it was “too late.”55
The alarm that gripped the administration in the spring of 1955 was out of proportion to the reality of the menace posed. Eisenhower wrote in his diary that his cabinet considered war to be likely and imminent. Admiral Robert B. Carney told reporters that the White House anticipated a confrontation and that the military not only wanted the United States to fight but believed it would have to utilize atomic bombs extensively.
Courtesy of the Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Talk of nuclear attacks served Eisenhower in several ways, only one of which had to do with the crisis at hand. Nuclear threats would intimidate and deter Beijing but also undercut any notion anywhere that the United States was weak and indecisive. Eisenhower also sought to demystify the bomb. Having concluded that military budgets could be kept under control only by investing in a nuclear arsenal and reducing dependence on conventional arms and armies, the president believed it vital that there be no psychological prohibitions against using them.56 In Asia, where Eisenhower strongly objected to fighting small, indecisive wars against people his racial biases suggested were impossible to understand or to oppose successfully, he wanted nuclear bombs to be seen as simply one among many available weapons.57
The president understood that nuclear bombs aroused a primal fear of Armageddon. Movies exploited public dread by portraying atomic mutants in Them! (1954), in which atomic ants terrorized California, Godzilla (1956), and The Fly (1958). More horrifying were post–World War III films such as The Day the World Ended (1956), in which a scientist decided which man would mate with the only surviving female, his daughter, and On the Beach, a popular 1957 novel and award-winning 1959 film. Starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins, it examined the despair felt as fallout and radiation sickness spread and mankind faced extinction.58
Military planners responded to Eisenhower with options for nuclear strikes inside China. The most ambitious came from Joint Chiefs Radford and Twining, who were encouraged by Strategic Air Command head Curtis LeMay. They called for bombing major population centers, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and Chongqing.59
London took American threats seriously. The British considered Americans irrational on the subject of China. According to Selwyn Lloyd, minister of state in the Foreign Office, “There is now in the United States an emotional feeling about Communist China… which borders on hysteria.” Dulles, in turn, told members of Congress disparagingly that the British were “almost pathological” in their fear of the hydrogen bomb.60
In fact, neither Eisenhower nor Dulles actually anticipated using nuclear weapons.61 Whatever progress Beijing might be making in building infrastructure on the coast, and there was some, the Chinese Communists were still a long way from the necessary facilities for a serious military operation, a fact that intelligence and diplomatic reporting clearly communicated.62 Dulles reassured the NSC that, although “Communist probing will go on” until the leadership had “demonstrated to their satisfaction that we cannot be dislodged,” fighting could be avoided.63 He similarly emphasized to the president that administration members were sometimes too tough and “unrealistic”; that “you and I have never attempted to say that the Chinese Reds should concede [so much].”64
Dulles, moreover, did not think of nuclear bombs as legitimate weapons, and although he sometimes spoke of their use as a serious option, he actually tried throughout his tenure to make nuclear fighting less likely.65 The picture sometimes drawn of Dulles maneuvering to spark a nuclear exchange is far from reality.66 He had, after all, condemned Harry Truman for dropping atomic bombs on Japan, arguing that Christian nations did not do such things.67 When he talked of carrying out pinpoint attacks inside China without massive casualties, moreover, it was clear he did not fully understand what technical capabilities U.S. forces possessed. Gerard C. Smith, special assistant for atomic energy affairs, disabused Dulles of the notion that fallout could be minimized or that the U.S. Air Force would willingly employ small-yield weapons when their doctrine called for large-scale strategic bombardment.68 Robert Bowie provided information showing the millions of casualties that would result from blast, heat, and radiation.69 Both men had close relations with the secretary and significant influence on his views.70
Eisenhower doubted that the Chinese Communists wanted to risk war. Washington need only prevent escalation or accident. He repeatedly rejected Radford’s plans for preemptive strikes on air bases or for bombing of radar facilities. As Eisenhower recorded in his diary, “I believe hostilities are not so imminent as is indicated by the forebodings of a number of my associates.… I have become accustomed to the fact that most of the calamities that we anticipate really never occur.”71
So talk of exploiting nuclear arms reflected contingency planning and popular education, not serious proposals for use. Eisenhower had been the author of the massive retaliation view that the administration should “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate instantly by means and at places of our choosing,” but he also asserted to the press in March 1955 that such a response “on the fringe or periphery of our interests… [is something] I wouldn’t hold with for a moment.”72 In 1945 he had recommended against use of the atomic bomb against Japan. As commander in chief he would make the final decision on dropping nuclear bombs regardless of whatever others had planned. Why then allow for such aggressive planning? As historian Matthew Jones has asserted of Eisenhower,
he believed the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons was best maintained by making the consequences of any breakdown of the peace so catastrophic as to restrain adversaries from committing aggression in the first place. This deterrent effect would also restrain over-zealous subordinates who were too eager to push toward confrontation.73
If Eisenhower and Dulles did not envision war, they nevertheless created an atmosphere in which advisors, lower-level officials, journalists, members of Congress, the public, and allies feared that the administration not only expected war but also welcomed it. Time magazine compared the offshore islands situation with Munich and shuddered at the choice between humiliation and a desperate fight for so little gain. The New Republic charged that Dulles had created a “situation where America’s honor and prestige are staked on defending two miserable islands… without allies, without the moral support of the United Nations, and with the disapproval of most of the Western World.” As the Reporter’s military analyst observed, “going to war mainly to cheer up the Nationalist army would seem a bit silly.” If, as political scientist Harold Hinton noted in the Commonweal, the Chinese Nationalists insisted upon inviting self-destruction, then the Los Angeles Mirror and Daily News concluded, “it’s none of our business!”74
The business community also opposed defending the offshore islands. Eisenhower, who admired the willingness of industrial and financial magnates to give selflessly of their time for the national interest, listened carefully to their suggestions and criticisms. Ernest T. Weir, chairman of the board of the National Steel Corporation, for instance, had joined Ike’s inner circle of business confidants. In 1955 Weir warned that confidence in Eisenhower’s judgment had been jeopardized abroad by irresponsible men like Senators Knowland and Styles Bridges (R-VT). The United States, Weir believed, risked a greater loss of face in Asia by defending the offshore islands than it would by letting them go.75
Members of Congress harbored fears about what seemed a precarious situation in Asia. Senators Wayne Morse (I-WI) and Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) loudly opposed using force to save the offshore islands.76 Even longtime supporters of the Nationalists like Representative Walter Judd (R-MN) and Senator H. Alexander Smith (R-NJ) distanced themselves from belligerents like Knowland and Bridges who wanted a tougher line with the Communists.77 Democratic Party Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX) angrily denounced the warmongering of the Republican right. As historian Robert Accinelli observed, “the war scare severely strained bipartisan cooperation… and greatly reduced the likelihood of unified public and congressional support.”78
Equally, the recognition on the part of the president and secretary of state that they lacked solid backing from foreign governments acted as a restraint. As early as October 1954, Dulles declared to the NSC that a decision to contest forcefully the offshore islands would have “a bad effect on Europe” and that the United States would “be in this fight in Asia completely alone.”79 By March, when the administration was well into its public campaign regarding the potential use of nuclear weapons, an interdepartmental intelligence estimate predicted that non-Communist governments would be shocked by the dropping of atomic bombs on China. Japan, for one, would probably question its close alignment with Washington.80 Department counselor MacArthur, moreover, warned that bombing China at locations distant from the Strait would be interpreted as an attempt to overthrow the Beijing regime, would very likely bring Moscow into the conflict, and would “cause our allies to back away, not only in the Far East but probably in Europe, in Africa and allover the globe.” A more effective move, argued Bowie, would be evacuation of the offshore islands with a guarantee for Taiwan’s future protection from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain.81
Scaling back the Nationalist presence on Jinmen and Mazu appealed greatly to the president. In opting for the Formosa Resolution, Eisenhower had hoped to make the offshore islands seem less vital to Chiang. It did not. Now Eisenhower told Dulles that “any approach to Chiang along this line would have to be so skillfully conducted as to make him ostensibly the originator of the idea.”82 As the crisis progressed, Eisenhower confided to Winston Churchill his wish that Chiang could be convinced to evacuate voluntarily.83 To this end, he urged publisher Roy Howard, en route to Taipei in February, to make Chiang see that his focus on Jinmen and Mazu could produce a disaster comparable to the French experience at Dienbienphu.
In April, there having been no progress, the president decided to send a formal mission to Taipei.84 Eisenhower wanted his representatives to persuade Chiang either to turn the islands into outposts, with a much reduced complement of defense forces stationed there, or to evacuate and accept a U.S.-policed “maritime zone” that would take the place of the islands as a first line of warning and defense for Taiwan. Recognizing that there would be considerable resistance, Eisenhower entrusted the mission to two men who Chiang could not help but see as sympathizers: Walter Robertson and Arthur Radford.85
In proposing establishment of a defense zone off China’s coast and sending Robertson and Radford to deliver the message, Eisenhower took the United States into dangerous waters. Although the president sought to avoid war, he employed measures that at other times he had called irresponsible.86 Eisenhower’s preferred strategy was to make Jinmen and Mazu into outposts so that when, or if, they fell to a Communist invasion, the embarrassment to Chiang and the sacrifice of manpower would not be extreme or necessitate retaliation. But neither Dulles nor Radford considered the president’s formula realistic and insisted on a more radical solution.
The idea of a naval blockade of the China coast had arisen on several occasions during Eisenhower’s presidency. The president-general had always objected that a blockade was an act of war and refused to consider it seriously. On April 17, however, the president appeared to capitulate, continuing to contest Radford’s assertion that significantly reduced garrisons could not survive but agreeing to allow Chiang Kai-shek to decide which alternative to take. He authorized his emissaries to propose the equivalent of a blockade—he called it an interdiction—to prevent the Chinese Communists from readying an invasion force on the coast. In exchange Chiang would have to abandon the islands. Should Beijing agree to renounce liberation of Taiwan, Eisenhower ordered that the interdiction be stopped immediately. In any case, Eisenhower wanted Chiang told that Washington would not fight solely to preserve the offshore islands. Undertaking such a mission would spark so much popular disenchantment in the United States that the administration would be forced to abandon the Nationalists entirely.87
Eisenhower’s choice of spokesmen would appear to have been misguided. Instead of giving Chiang two options, evacuation or retaining small contingents on the islands, they presented only the more extreme alternative that Radford had championed all along. Chiang rejected the plan. His suspicion that the Americans would renege on naval protection at the critical moment seemed confirmed. He also believed that allowing Beijing to capture these islands would permanently block his return to the mainland.88
CONCLUSION
This raises a series of important questions. What did Eisenhower intend? Did Eisenhower ignore a career’s worth of caution and a lifetime of military thinking and expose the United States to a possible war at the whim of Chiang Kai-shek, a man he disparaged and distrusted? Did Eisenhower assign a sensitive initiative that he knew could produce war to two men whose views had always been contrary to his own on broad U.S.-China issues as well as the narrower immediate offshore island situation? Did Eisenhower violate his conviction that “no Western power can go to Asia militarily, except as one of a concert of powers”?89 Did Eisenhower ignore the thrust of his own New Look policy, which was designed to keep the United States out of small-scale, local wars and instead risk placing the U.S. Navy in harm’s way on a continuing basis? Successions of scholars have condemned the president for the choices he made.90
Eisenhower, in fact, did not discard his principles over China. The president had different, less obvious, goals. Eisenhower was under no illusion regarding the Radford-Robertson view of appropriate actions in the Taiwan Strait. They had told him explicitly that they doubted the viability of an outpost strategy and wanted the United States more deeply committed to Taiwan’s survival. Ike later complained to Dulles, “it is clear that as long as Radford and Robertson themselves could not grasp the concept, we simply were not going to get anywhere.”91 But even if Eisenhower could not have predicted that these envoys would ignore a presidential order and not propose outposts, he had to recognize that their briefing would lean toward their preferred solution.
This being so, Eisenhower, a sophisticated strategist, could not have believed that the extreme solution would be the actual solution. Instead the president’s actions can be understood by looking at precedent: he was implementing a version of his Dien Bien Phu approach. In 1954, unwilling to use nuclear weapons to save the French fighting at the fragile Dien Bien Phu foothold in Vietnam, he nevertheless said he would do so if Congress and the British agreed.92 He could be all but certain that securing this support would be impossible. Similarly, Chiang was not going to relinquish the offshore islands. Offering to blockade China in exchange for evacuation was a pledge Eisenhower would not have to honor. The president did not see himself as putting America’s safety in Chiang’s hands. As he told Dulles,
Chiang’s answer to the specific proposal made is not only what I predicted but what I think I would have made had I been in his place. As long as our representatives did not feel they could suggest any attractive position between evacuation on the one hand and a “fight to the death” on the other, there was no possibility of a meeting of minds. For one thing there was left no way by which Chiang could possibly save face.93
The impact of an interdiction had Chiang accepted that option, of course, depended heavily on the Chinese Communists. Beijing could have been angered or alarmed or, taking advantage of an unexpected opportunity, elected to strike hard at Taiwan. From the Chinese perspective, however, the idea of a blockade was neither as new nor as surprising as scholars have subsequently argued. China’s southeast coast had been suffering the economic effects of a Nationalist Chinese blockade for some time. In July 1954, Zhou described existing U.S. activities in the area as a blockade.94 Historians Gordon Chang and He Di have argued that the Chinese leadership would have faced domestic demands for action. But no one can say convincingly what the Chinese Communists would or could have done, how much pressure they might have felt, and how vulnerable they considered themselves.95 What is known from repeated instances of judicious and cautious behavior was their aversion to war with the United States.
