In the final years of Eisenhower’s administration, a series of new international crises confronted an exhausted, lame-duck president. His hope for an arms control agreement with Nikita Khrushchev remained unfulfilled, and the myths of a bomber and missile gap gained strength. Confrontation over Germany escalated, Japanese public support for the U.S. alliance eroded, and the Congo, Algeria, and Laos were plunged into violence. Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba, accepted Soviet assistance, and became the target of assassination and invasion plots.
Soviet-American détente, which seemed to acquire a boost from Khrushchev’s 1959 U.S. visit, flagged with continual threats by both sides regarding Germany and then evaporated with the downing of an American U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. Moreover, it became apparent that Moscow was swinging further left under pressure from China. Beijing had become increasingly active internationally, touting itself as champion of anti-colonial peoples. Khrushchev ran to keep up.
Eisenhower would have to face many of these problems without John Foster Dulles, who had succumbed to the ravages of colon cancer. When Dulles left the State Department in April 1959 after months of painful and arduous struggle, Eisenhower lost his strongest foreign policy partner. He might not always agree with Dulles, and he found him irritating, but Dulles had been crucial in shaping Washington’s overseas actions and reputation.
Christian Herter, the new secretary, would prove to be a stronger international presence and better department head than many anticipated. He would meet regularly with the president and talk to him constantly, but he never built the close working relationship with Ike that Dulles had nurtured. Herter lacked the cues that long association gave Dulles and did not always understand what the president wanted or had said. Eisenhower took to having a third party present at their meetings to clear up misunderstandings and explained ideas in far greater detail to the new secretary than he had found necessary with Dulles.1
Like Dulles, Herter came to the State Department as a confirmed Europeanist, ignorant of, and uninterested in, China. He had been born in Paris, clerked at the embassy in Berlin, and worked with Joseph Grew in the U.S. delegation at Versailles and with Herbert Hoover on European food aid. Serving briefly in Warren G. Harding’s Commerce Department, he resigned, condemning Harding’s Washington as “a dirty kitchen where cockroaches abound.”2 But Herter believed in public service and became governor of Massachusetts and a five-term congressman. In contrast to the dour Dulles, Herter was genial and optimistic, delighting in people. He established a wide network of friends in Congress, including the Democratic Party leadership of Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Lyndon Johnson (D-TX), Senate majority leader; and Sam Rayburn (D-TX), speaker of the House. As the New York Times noted admiringly, Herter had no enemies. Tall, brushy browed, and patrician in demeanor, Herter had been touted as a potential presidential candidate had Eisenhower retired in 1956 and as a replacement for Nixon on an Eisenhower ticket, despite his liberal internationalist principles.
Nevertheless, Dulles gave him little to do, and their relationship remained difficult. The secretary did not enlist his under secretary’s support in problem solving, and often Herter learned of important decisions after they had been made. The Times described his unpleasant sojourn as being “Number Two man in a one-man Department.”3 Herter told Eisenhower aide Emmet Hughes, “it is hard to know what use I am around here.… I have been given no authority, and no area of work is specifically my task.”4 But although Dulles rarely consulted him, Herter served as acting secretary on some thirty-eight occasions, when Dulles traveled or proved too ill to serve.
When Dulles resigned in 1959, some worried about Herter’s severe arthritis and the allegedly negative image of an American official on crutches, recommending choice of a heartier successor, such as Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs C. Douglas Dillon, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge, Ford Foundation Chairman John J. McCloy, or even former Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey. Eisenhower, however, wanted continuity and perhaps relished having a secretary of state he could control. And this he got in large part, Herter conducting himself quite differently from Dulles, depending more on the State Department, alienating colleagues far less often, and originating fewer initiatives personally.5 In general, the soft-spoken and tolerant new secretary posed a striking contrast to his predecessor. Herter’s special assistant William W. Scranton worried that the American people “do not have a clear impression of you,” and unkind observers suggested that Herter “seemed to blend invisibly with the antiseptic corridors of the State Department.”6
Herter learned about Asia on the job. He had had even less contact with China policies than Dulles had prior to inheriting his leadership. He visited Taipei in 1957 as part of a monthlong eight-nation Asian trip—his first. Herter began serious engagement with China policy when he supervised State Department handling of the 1958 Strait crisis. He complained that Chiang Kai-shek had not done enough independently to deal with the situation, calling too early and too loudly for U.S. assistance. He believed that Chiang sought to plunge the United States into war and told the press that the offshore islands were “not strategically defensible.”7 He came to see Chiang’s determination to hold on to the islands as “almost pathological.”8 Accordingly, he did not, as Dulles had done, pressure Taipei to evacuate, because he believed that the “risks of failing to persuade Chiang were so great, the chances of success so slight, as to make the risk not worth taking.”9
Herter had far less patience for Chiang than Dulles possessed and sought, in small ways, to make U.S. policy more flexible, although he never wavered in his determination to sustain a Free China for its propaganda value. He quickly lifted the ban on Canadian trucks hauling Chinese goods over American roadways. He agreed to have journalists’ passports validated for travel to China, eliminating a time limit on such trips that Beijing found insulting. He influenced the attorney general to lift restrictions upon Chinese reporters who applied to come to the United States.10 And when the president stopped in Taiwan on his Far East trip and heard, once again, Chiang’s plea for support to attack the mainland, Herter was no more sympathetic than Eisenhower. So China policy became a little less rigid, but “the Eisenhower administration… [at its close] possessed neither the imagination, nor the intellectual coherence, nor the political will to effect a genuine change of course—in… the Far East.”11 Herter opposed recognition of the PRC and its admission into the UN. Close to the end of his tenure, he would tell SEATO states that those countries that had established diplomatic relations with China had gotten nothing in response.12
Courtesy of Renate Behrendt.
The 1958 Taiwan crisis had drained American officials and made those who stridently advocated the Nationalist cause less outspoken. Director of the Office of Chinese Affairs Marshall Green recalled that Dulles appeared increasingly “moderate and reasonable” on Chinese issues.13 Kenneth Young, diplomat and author, suggested that Dulles would have been ready to meet with Zhou Enlai, as Beijing had long wanted, but that the Chinese did not grasp the opportunity.14 Early in 1959, Gordon Gray, special assistant to the president, called upon the State Department to prepare a new country paper on China, as NSC 5429/5 of 1954 was now out of date. He sought to explore the possibilities of furthering the Sino-Soviet rift and the likelihood of upheaval in China. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson similarly thought that new opportunities to drive Moscow and Beijing apart might arise and that Washington should be in position to exploit them.15 In fact, Herter’s decision to act on journalist visas followed a Dulles turnabout shortly before his resignation.16
Administrations almost always face a measure of disarray and decline in cordiality in their last years. That became obvious in Eisenhower’s second term. The president would miss Foster Dulles after he resigned, but long before that the president’s patience with the secretary had diminished substantially, complaining that he “was apt to forget that he had [already explained something] and, within a day or so, [would] tell it over again.”17 As for Allen Dulles, the president became sufficiently disenchanted by his increasingly rigid anti-Communism and delight in covert operations that “he did not want to meet with Allen unless at least one other person was also present.”18 Two of Eisenhower’s inner circle, General Lucius Clay and Treasury Secretary Humphrey, left Washington for other assignments. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson departed, having not had much success in controlling the Pentagon’s appetites. He was replaced by businessman Neil McElroy, who similarly deferred to others on strategic vision, and later by Thomas Gates. McElroy, though new to government and to Chinese affairs, came quickly to resent Chiang Kai-shek’s stubborn endangerment of the United States in the 1958 Strait crisis.
Changes also occurred at the State Department. Herter critics, such as New York Times columnist and reporter Arthur Krock, insisted that the department stopped functioning effectively in Dulles’s wake, lacking leadership and an agenda. Historian Frederick Marks has blamed Herter for botching Cuba policy and facilitating Khrushchev’s U.S. visit even though Moscow had not met administration preconditions.19 But Herter has also received praise from many historians, especially for consulting more broadly than Dulles ever thought to do.
Herter did not bring in his own team or purge Dulles’s intimates, but there were some personnel shifts toward the end of the administration. Ambassador Karl Rankin left Taipei to be replaced by experienced China diplomat Everett F. Drumright, who continued the hard line “in defense of the ROC position” at the U.S. embassy in Taipei. As Drumright later noted, his was “an unusually strong line,” and others thought “I was inflexible; perhaps I was.”20 Walter Robertson departed in June 1959 taking with him what the Washington Post called his zealotry and fanaticism. His successor, J. Graham Parsons, however, held similar, if less stridently expressed, views. A fascinating exchange in 1959 with Edwin Reischauer, one of Harvard’s leading Asia specialists, demonstrated Parson’s unwillingness to rethink attitudes toward China. Reischauer explained at great length the reasons why nonrecognition was a poor policy and refuted claims that isolating China protected overseas Chinese, China’s neighbors, and the UN. But Parsons “emphatically disagree[d],” insisting that Reischauer did not appreciate the evils of Chinese Communism, and although Parsons subsequently assured his interlocutor that he was not calling him naive, biased, or pro-Communist, Reischauer warned it was dangerous to dismiss all critics so cavalierly.21
Dulles’s closest associates established good but not intimate relations with Herter. Men such as Livingston Merchant and Robert Bowie continued in the department but did not connect with Herter as they had with Dulles.22 Douglas MacArthur II was in Japan as ambassador from early 1957. C. Douglas Dillon and the new secretary became friends, and Herter relied upon him for guidance on economic affairs. Dillon, however, did not deal with Asian issues and so did not insist that Herter be cognizant of them. In choosing informal advisers, Herter looked to John McCloy much as Eisenhower did. McCloy spoke with the new secretary about the European issues he knew best but also consulted on problems with the two Chinese regimes, neither of which he liked or trusted.23
Time had similarly eliminated some of the loudest critical voices on China policy. In Congress the bruising midterm electoral defeat of 1958replaced several Republican China Lobby activists, most prominently William Knowland (R-CA), “the Senator from Formosa.” His successor, Clair Engle (D-CA), early in 1959 began his tenure by calling for a reassessment of China policies, including talks above the ambassadorial level. He did not go so far as to call for recognition but insisted, as Eisenhower often did, that “there are many concessions with reference to trade in the Far East that might be advantageous to us.”24 Senators Albert Gore (D-TN), Thomas Dodd (D-CT), and Joseph S. Clark (D-PA) supported his remarks. In fact, a poll of freshmen members of the House indicated increased openness toward possible future relations with China, with sixteen favorable, twenty opposed, and many of the remaining forty-five willing to be persuaded.25 Before the end of the year, Oregon Democrat Representative Charles O. Porter sued Herter on the grounds that it was unconstitutional to bar a serving member of Congress from traveling to China to gather information that would inform his voting decisions.26 Members who had frequently signed Committee of One Million petitions moreover began to change their perspective. Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) asserted already in1957 that he favored allowing reporters to travel to China, making trade restrictions less onerous and including Beijing in disarmament negotiations. Similarly, Senator John Sparkman (D-AL) had come to support sending newsmen to China, and Representative Porter in 1959 called upon the president to invite Zhou Enlai to the United States, to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing and help create a Republic of Taiwan.27 J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the State Department to find ways to advance talks in Warsaw by agreeing to a new, more accommodating agenda and perhaps by employing external mediators.28
A milestone of sorts came with the presentation of the Conlon report to Congress on November 1, 1959. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had contracted for the study in November 1958 as one of fourteen similar projects, and Conlon Associates turned to a team from the University of California to draft it. Robert Scalapino, who wrote the northeast Asia portion of the study, sparked considerable comment by advocating that the United States formalize a Two Chinas policy by recognizing the Republic of China on Taiwan as the Republic of Taiwan and then facilitate admission of the ROT and the PRC to the United Nations General Assembly. Beijing would be given the disputed Security Council seat, and both Japan and India would be added to that forum at the same time. The United States would pledge to maintain its protection of Taiwan and would increase economic aid to the island, but it would also expect Nationalist withdrawal from the essentially indefensible offshore islands.29
State Department officials greeted the report with disdain, privately denouncing Scalapino as unprincipled and his recommendations as unsound. Certain that Scalapino had made up his mind before he ever undertook his exploratory travel in Asia, Marshall Green and Assistant Secretary Parsons complained that the report took no note of the protection America’s China policy afforded China’s neighbors, allowing them to prosper and grow stronger. Those Asians who had apparently told Scalapino they advocated Beijing’s admission into the UN had misled him. They simply wanted to score points with Beijing but knew the United States would not countenance it.30 Walter Robertson, before leaving his post, personally tried to convince Scalapino not to recommend changes in U.S. policy, insisting that his Asian contacts wanted Washington to stand firm. Scalapino later recalled, “No one in the Eisenhower administration contacted me after publication.”31
Reaction in Taiwan combined anger with efforts to minimize the report’s significance. Official newspapers reassured the public that democratic systems could not prevent irresponsible proposals but that Conlon Associates did not speak for the government. A less restrained comment by the independent English-language China Post questioned the wisdom of the Senators on the committee for contracting with Conlon’s “idiots or lunatics,” who were essentially just a “group of profit-seeking pseudo-experts.” Officials of the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of National Defense, as well as members of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Legislative Yuan, were reported to have been deeply troubled, although Taiwan’s ambassador George Yeh dismissed it as the predictable handiwork of Senator Fulbright.32 Scalapino was denied a visa to visit Taiwan for a decade thereafter.
By contrast, enthusiastic Foreign Office analysts in London welcomed Scalapino’s effort, in which the author came to terms with reality as Britain saw it. Noteworthy was the recognition that the Communist regime remained popular among the people because it delivered “psychological satisfactions and emotional releases.” The report, which British commentators snidely noted was “better written than most American documents,” admitted that the American trade embargo could not long survive. They agreed, of course, with Scalapino’s rejection of containment through isolation, taking particular note of the argument that Americans might be dangerously assuming a greater degree of accessibility and rationality from the Soviets than the Chinese, trusting the Russians too much and the Chinese too little.33
Public opinion, most often negative, also proved changeable and inconsistent. To the degree that people knew about Beijing’s imprisonment of Bishop James Walsh for spying, or repression in Tibet, or China’s border clash with India, they lashed out at the Chinese. Their concerns were reflected in novels like the Manchurian Candidate, whose portrayal of a Communist brainwashed soldier daring to try to assassinate a presidential candidate proved so popular that its film version starred leading actors of the day Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury. William Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American stayed on the best-seller list for 78 weeks, rose to number six, and sold some four million copies. Set in a fictional Southeast Asian state called Sarkhan, where the government deftly played the United States and Soviet Union against each other, the story demonstrated that American foreign service officers were unprepared for the struggle and letting America down. Although the critics panned the book and Senator J. William Fulbright dismissed it as “sterile, devoid of insight, reckless and irresponsible,” Eisenhower read it. The volume went onto become a similarly popular movie starring Marlon Brando and persuaded large numbers of Americans that the U.S. effort overseas against Communism was bankrupt.34
One such book or movie could reach many more people than the work of scholars or the so-called informed public, whose views moderated, exerting some but not enormous influence on the broader populace. At the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, for instance, hostility toward Beijing had mellowed enough to accept that Communist China would not be a rapidly passing phenomenon. A 1956 study by Henry Roberts on Russia and the United States urged that Washington begin to entertain the possibility of having two Chinas seated in the United Nations.35 David Rockefeller had from early on declared it “political foolishness” not to accept the existence of the PRC. Similarly, at a foreign policy conference held at the bucolic liberal arts campus of Colgate University, academic and business opinion accepted the inevitability of Beijing obtaining a UN seat and recognition from Washington. Thomas Finletter, Truman’s secretary of the air force, disparaged provocative Republican policies that had the effect only of driving China closer to the Soviet Union.36 Just two years later Finletter would publish a book on American foreign policy in which he argued that, given world opinion, the United States would not long be able to continue barring China from the UN. Instead, the prominent member of the Democratic Advisory Committee asserted that there should be two Chinese seats in the General Assembly and that India ought to be allowed to occupy the Chinese seat in the Security Council.37
The frequency with which people began to speak out in favor of reassessing China policy disturbed the pro-Chiang community. Stanley Hornbeck, former director of the Office for Far Eastern Affairs, complained to a leading China Lobby propagandist Alfred Kohlberg that “the Cloisters of Academe” along with “the managed associations, societies and councils that concern themselves with foreign affairs” were filled with “dupes and tools” seemingly “hell-bent” to further the cause of Red China.38 Kohlberg made a similar assessment of the book Communist China and Asia, which journalist and researcher A. Doak Barnett had published under Council on Foreign Relations auspices in 1960 and which cautiously advocated a Two Chinas policy. Kohlberg did not charge Barnett with being a Communist but thought him a patsy and noted that fortunately the volume would not get much attention because it was, Kohlberg insisted, too long and dull.39
The most vicious attack of the period, however, was on a volume entitled The China Lobby in American Politics by Ross Y. Koen. An exposé of pro-Chiang efforts to sustain U.S. support of Taiwan and isolation of the Chinese Communists, the book came to the attention of the Lobby when preview copies were put into circulation. China Lobby activists immediately contracted for a counterbalancing study in The Red China Lobby, which ultimately came out in 1963. In the interim, they dissuaded Macmillan from publishing the Koen book reportedly because of his charges that the Nationalist Chinese authorities had been smuggling narcotics into the United States. Harry Anslinger, U.S. commissioner of narcotics, took strong exception to the accusation, as did governing authorities in Taipei. Nevertheless, when Harper & Row finally did publish the book in 1974, virtually nothing in the text had been altered—only the times had changed.40
The press remained divided. As the State Department’s public opinion study staff revealed to the secretary, opposition to recognition and UN admission still galvanized the right-of-center news organizations, such as the Hearst and Scripps-Howard newspapers; Knowland’s mouthpiece, the Oakland Tribune; and William Loeb’s Manchester Union Leader. Predictably, the newspapers and journals advocating change included left-wing publications such as the Nation and the New Republic. More striking were the views of several prominent papers in the center that had begun to advocate more flexibility toward Beijing, including the Atlanta Constitution, the Christian Science Monitor, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The Washington Post condemned the administration’s approach as a “negative, dead-end policy.” Meanwhile, the New York Post, the Providence Journal, and the Louisville Courier-Journal explicitly recommended a Two Chinas policy.41 In the midst of the 1958 Strait crisis, the editors of the Kansas City Star questioned whether the president’s “refusal to recognize Red China or agree to her admission to the United Nations [remained] in our national interest,” or whether conditions had changed enough to “point in a different direction.” Eisenhower told Dulles that the paper more closely reflected Midwest sentiment than did any other paper west of the Mississippi.42 Walter Lippmann, journalist and columnist for the Herald Tribune, confided to a British diplomat, however, that even the election of a Democrat would not yield a better China policy. The United Nations, he believed, should just admit China over American objections.43
For Eisenhower, the worries of the public, the press, and members of Congress reinforced sensitivity to the state of Sino-Soviet relations. Washington, notwithstanding its own troubles cooperating with Taipei, had underestimated Sino-Soviet friction for years. This was true even though the Eisenhower administration had since its early days in office been discussing ways to divide China and the Soviet Union. These discussions persisted even after the CIA created a unit devoted to analyzing the relationship in1956.44 The Soviets increased confusion when, despite disputes with Beijing over the 1958 Strait crisis, Khrushchev aggressively admonished Ambassador Averell Harriman that “we have given the Chinese rockets which are… within range of Formosa and can destroy it at will. Your Seventh Fleet will be of no avail.… If the Chinese decide to take Formosa, we will support them even if it means war.”45
However, like Eisenhower, Khrushchev saw the main theater of concern as Germany. In Berlin a surge of intellectuals and technicians fleeing from east to west posed a severe problem for the survival of the German Democratic Republic. In the autumn of 1958, Moscow decided that the hemorrhaging had to stop, and in November Khrushchev delivered an ultimatum demanding within six months a peace treaty that would transform Berlin into something other than a NATO salient within the Communist bloc. Accordingly, however much Khrushchev might threaten Harriman, the Soviet leader’s patience for Beijing aspirations and operations in the Taiwan Strait vanished.46
The State Department China desk argued in 1960, “Khrushchev probably sees a perennial threat of war in Peiping’s insistence that military force be used, if need be, to ‘liberate’ Taiwan.” They could point to evidence in Khrushchev’s 1959 warning to Mao against “testing the stability of the capitalist system by force” as would be necessary to push the United States out of Taiwan. There also appeared to have been a Soviet suggestion of joint action to resolve the Taiwan dilemma, according to Llewellyn Thompson, the American ambassador in Moscow, who reported being told that the need to act was urgent and that there was little time left for a simple solution.47 State Department officials Edwin Martin and J. Graham Parsons believed that their strategy “of partial responsibility, whereby we have put Khrushchev on notice that there cannot be a détente in Europe while his partner pursues a policy of aggression in the Far East” was working.48
In fact, during this period Khrushchev widened his dispute with Mao by seeking better Soviet-American relations. Mao neither understood nor sympathized with this policy. He believed that the Western alliance was on the verge of collapse because of capitalist repression and should not be bolstered by Moscow. He also worried about U.S. meddling in China. In November1959, Mao had his secretary Lin Ke translate three of Dulles’s public statements on peaceful evolution—the elimination of socialism through an evolutionary process that could be encouraged from the outside—which he then annotated and circulated among his top leaders for discussion and as a warning to guard against malign U.S. influence.49 Thus word that Khrushchev would engage in a summit with Eisenhower on American soil in the autumn of 1959 came as galling reminder of Mao’s lack of influence in Moscow.50
Khrushchev approached his visit, the first of a Soviet leader to the United States, cautiously, focusing on Germany and disarmament. At Camp David he and Eisenhower continued to disagree, coming together only in favor of a further summit in exchange for which Khrushchev withdrew his Berlin ultimatum. As the two men sparred, China became entangled in the German dispute, with Eisenhower asserting that “if the two German states remained, they would be an indefinite hot bed of conflict,” to which Khrushchev replied that Americans seemed content to accept the existence of two Chinas. Historian Wang Dong has suggested that an implicit bargain was struck between them “that if Khrushchev could sell ‘two Chinas’ to the Chinese, then Eisenhower might very well consider ‘two Germanys.’”51 Khrushchev, on the other hand, argued to Eisenhower and Herter that Taiwan was a Chinese province and that Mao was right to threaten force against it. Chiang Kai-shek was nothing more than a mutinous general or perhaps a Chinese Alexander Kerensky, seeking to preserve a weak and feckless regime. Furthermore, China should be in the UN.
The Soviet leader flew within days of his return from the United States to China, with disastrous results. In the United States he had been celebrated. “Cinema and television cameras turned the trip into a graphic spectacle for thousands of Soviet elites, and many more in the general public.” But Khrushchev found the Chinese cold, irate, and truculent. Offended by Khrushchev’s elevation of Soviet-American détente above the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Chinese were incensed when he urged Mao to accept Tibetan independence and the Taiwan status quo, essentially supporting a Two Chinas policy.52 As the Soviets later described the scene, Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Chen Yi shouted at one another, refusing to shake hands and the Soviet leader declaring, “Don’t you try to spit on us.… You haven’t got enough spit.”53 Although Washington did not know the details of the exchanges, it quickly became clear that tensions had been pronounced.
The repercussions of Sino-Soviet mutual suspicion crystallized during1959 and 1960. While Beijing waited to receive the prototype tactical nuclear weapon and equipment for a plutonium reactor from Moscow promised in their 1957 nuclear sharing agreement, Khrushchev decided that adhering to the commitment would be too dangerous, that Beijing had proven itself unreliable and reckless.54 Thus in June 1959, he persuaded the Party Presidium to renege and notified Beijing that no bomb, no mathematical models, no components would be forthcoming.55
Washington, of course, knew nothing of Khrushchev’s decision and continued to calculate Soviet assistance into its predictions about a Chinese bomb. Only in December 1960 did analysts speculate that the USSR might be slowing delivery of aid in the hope that this would postpone a “Chinese nuclear weapons capability as long as possible.”56 Inadequate intelligence gathering, long the bane of American analysts—despite imagery from U-2flights, the Corona spy satellite, and the Navy P-2V Neptune aircraft—left China “a real mystery.” Although the intelligence agencies had discovered nuclear facilities at Lanzhou in northwest China, ten uranium mines, and a cadre of Western-educated nuclear scientists, their knowledge remained uncomfortably “fragmentary.” John McCone, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, barely exaggerated when he told the press that “we have no evidence on China’s weapons development program.”57
Eisenhower was similarly ill-informed about China’s economic progress. Analysts told the president that Beijing’s new economic strategies had produced remarkable growth even as the Soviets dismissed Chinese policies as irrational and misguided. Khrushchev told Senator Hubert Humphrey that the Chinese were pinning their hopes on policies tried and rejected by Moscow.58 Later he asserted that China’s economic adventure would lead to collapse and so “we did all we could to influence the Chinese and stop them before it was too late, but Mao thought he was God.”59 The private dismay of Soviet leaders eventually grew into public condemnation. U.S. intelligence nevertheless continued to believe, and was drastically wrong in telling Eisenhower, that “China’s economy will continue to grow rapidly” over the period from 1960 to 1965 as it had done between 1958 and 1960.60
In reality, China’s economy had been severely damaged by the Great Leap Forward and Moscow had already begun to reduce aid to China. The Chinese noted delays in deliveries of equipment and resistance to sharing technical data. Nie Rongzhen, who headed China’s nuclear program, reported to the Politburo in January that “Soviet technical aid has become untrustworthy,” the Soviets seeking to prevent China from benefiting from Soviet scientific achievements. Mikhail Klochko, a Soviet scientist detailed to China, later recalled that Moscow did, in fact, shortchange the Chinese by sending inferior personnel, particularly when it came to military industries.61
Yet it took China’s response to the U-2 incident to convince Khrushchev to disregard domestic critics and openly take action against the Chinese. Khrushchev overcame what political scientist Steven I. Levine has called the problem of the “‘meta-alliance,’ deriving from the fictive identity of interests that socialist states supposedly shared. This contributed to the creation of a structure of unfulfillable expectations.” Levine argues further: “Disagreements, rather than being handled at the working levels, escalated rapidly into questions of good faith, fundamental belief, and personal power.”62 Although on the surface Beijing appeared to support Moscow’s outrage at the American aerial spying and congratulated Khrushchev for disrupting the May summit meeting with Eisenhower, its subtext soon emerged clearly. The Soviet leadership had been naive to trust the Americans. American spying could have been predicted and the need to shoot down the plane simply proved the superior wisdom of Chinese policies.63
An angry Khrushchev decided to teach Mao a lesson by withdrawing some 1, 400 Soviet technicians from China. Between July 18 and August 24, they packed up their blueprints and abandoned half-completed projects all over China. According to Klochko,
The abruptness of the withdrawal meant that construction stopped at the sites of scores of new plants and factories while work at many existing ones was thrown into confusion. Spare parts were no longer available.… Planning on new undertakings was abandoned because the Russians simultaneously canceled contracts for the delivery of plans and equipment.64
Americans watched these developments from afar with only partial awareness of the interplay and wondered about their significance. They knew that Moscow had recalled technicians from China, impeding Chinese modernization. They recognized that conflict stemmed from several basic questions of theory and practice relating to different stages of development in the two countries. Moscow favored peace for economic growth, whereas Beijing sought to eliminate rapacious imperialism through liberation struggles. China sought new methods of agricultural organization to speed production, whereas the Soviet Union promoted its development model to preserve leadership in the bloc. Furthermore, ordinary clashes over borders, allies, and economic assistance complicated efforts to resolve ideological and developmental disagreements according to Ambassador Thompson, whose report was read personally by Eisenhower.65
No one could predict confidently what the course of the Communist alliance would be and whether the United States stood at the threshold of a new international order. When the Soviet advisers departed, American officials found it difficult to decide whether Moscow had removed them or China had expelled them.66 Although some analysts insisted that a serious Sino-Soviet rift had developed, others still assumed in 1960 that underlying doctrinal compatibility would ameliorate friction and sustain a continuing military alignment.
In either case, the Chinese challenge to American interests appeared increasingly menacing. If China had chosen actually to defy the Soviet Union, then its strength, or at least its arrogance, made it unstable and dangerous. If, on the contrary, it remained tied to Moscow, then it added a serious auxiliary hazard to the formidable Soviet threat.
The United States received little useful assistance from its allies in reaching a conclusion. British analysts, despite their supposedly closer ties to Beijing, appeared equally uncertain, doubting both the possibility of Sino-Soviet reconciliation and the potential for a complete rupture.67 The U.S. embassy in Tokyo dismissed a Japanese Foreign Ministry study of “Sino-Soviet Relations” as a less sophisticated version of American analyses, but with an additional naïveté regarding Chinese motives.68 Not surprisingly, Taipei spurned all evidence of a genuine Sino-Soviet dispute as a power struggle.69
American analysts needed to tell the president precisely how serious the Sino-Soviet rift had become for many reasons, not the least of which was the likelihood and nature of war. Repeatedly during the period, Eisenhower and his advisers reviewed the possibility of limited war and wondered whether fighting with the Soviet Union would require a conflict with China as well. During the March 1959 discussion of NSC 5904, “U.S. Policy in the Event of War,” at the 398th National Security Council meeting, Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter, for instance, argued that at the start of combat with the Soviets, the United States ought not simply assume involvement of the entire bloc and, therefore, automatically attack Communist China and Eastern Europe. Eisenhower worried that “Communist China [could not be allowed] to stay on the sidelines and develop, after perhaps forty years, into another Soviet Union.”70 But although he insisted on action, and thereby appeared among the alarmists, he said that action need not be military.
At the same time, Eisenhower administration officials could take comfort from the fact that China comprised a challenge to its erstwhile friends as well as its enemies. Chester Bowles, a John F. Kennedy foreign policy adviser, observed that “the Soviet Union is going to find it difficult to control China” and argued that evidence of Moscow’s distress should not be disregarded.71 Eisenhower and Dulles emphasized a provocative Soviet hand in the 1958 crisis, but in the weeks following the confrontation, both men publicly conceded that Moscow seemed to be facing an ally no longer following orders.72 At a state dinner with First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, in the midst of the 1958–1959 Berlin crisis, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy took pleasure in needling a Soviet official regarding relations with China. Wasn’t it true, McElroy insisted, that China’s increasing power and decreasing dependency would present serious problems to Moscow?73
By the spring of 1960, the rift had become more public. The Chinese Communist theoretical journal Red Flag published several articles critical of Soviet foreign policy. Particularly devastating was the essay entitled “Long Live Leninism!,” which pointed relentlessly to the divergence in party views. The Chinese took issue with Soviet positions regarding the inevitability of war, the viability of détente, and the scientific superiority of the Communist bloc.74 In self-defense, the Soviet Communist Party used the pages of Pravda and Sovetskaya Rossiya to reaffirm the predominance of Moscow’s experience as the only legitimate path to socialism, attacking the Chinese commune movement and Beijing’s misunderstanding of peaceful coexistence and arms control.
And yet American reluctance to accept the idea that a split between Moscow and Beijing could be genuine persisted. Entrenched prejudices, institutional biases, self-interest, and fear of being fooled by a communist Conspiracy underlay their resistance. Chiang Kai-shek sought to play on, and aggravate, these fears, telling Eisenhower that a genuine rift was impossible.75 Vice President Nixon, whose career had been built upon fervent anti-Communism, unsurprisingly doubted the authenticity of the split—he had not yet undertaken his 1960s world travels nor experienced his conversion on China. The newly appointed Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates not only denied that any real ideological differences existed but worried that accepting such a diagnosis would jeopardize security and budgets.76
Analysts in the nation’s intelligence community, including the CIA, the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau, the army, navy, air force, and JCS, rejected evidence that they were witnessing the irreparable breakdown of the Communist alliance. Rather they anticipated that “discord will ebb and flow” but that it would not drive the two “so far apart that they cease to look to each other for support in their common drive against the West.”77 Writing in NIE 13-60 that December, analysts declared, “we believe that the differences between Peiping and Moscow are so basic and so much a product of the different situations and problems in the two countries that any genuine resolution of the ‘fundamental’ differences is unlikely.” Nevertheless, they needed each other too much to permit a reprise of the Soviet-Yugoslav rupture of 1948.78
Eisenhower, the most important judge of the relationship, recognized the existence of a doctrinal dispute and other frictions but believed that Moscow and Beijing would not permit disagreement to produce collapse of the bloc.79 He worried that relations were strong enough for the Soviets to be willing to build nuclear plants in China to hide facilities from Western inspections.80 His assumptions, even when contradictory, remained relatively fixed.
The fact that so many of the nation’s officials, expert observers of the Communist bloc, and incisive analysts of China made such a profound miscalculation followed from several realities. First, Americans simply did not have enough information to make solid judgments. Second, few harried policymakers studied the situation carefully enough. Third, Washington exaggerated the importance of ideology as a Sino-Soviet bond, ignoring factors such as nationalism that produced friction. Fourth, while taking ideology seriously, U.S. analysts missed deep-seated differences between Beijing and Moscow. Fifth, officials listened to, processed, and accepted information regarding Sino-Soviet relations on the basis of established knowledge and experience, not hearing, or denying, data that did not fit. Preconceived notions about the strength of bloc ties made fresh insight virtually impossible.81 Sixth, regulations governing the U.S. intelligence community barred analysts from examining the impact of U.S. policies on the decisions and behavior of the Chinese, creating a significant gap in understanding.82 And finally, seventh, the Sino-Soviet alliance had become too useful in forming and executing policies, winning appropriations from Congress, maintaining the U.S. alliance system, and managing relations with Moscow and Beijing. They were reluctant to let it go.
American policymakers came to believe that Sino-Soviet ties curbed Chinese activism and that without Soviet supervision the Chinese would be more unpredictable and dangerous. Beijing’s disapproval of warming Soviet-American relations, notable in the Sino-Soviet debate, contributed to this perception. In the 1940s, when analysts had spoken about splitting China and the Soviet Union, their assumption had been that as a result the United States would win the Chinese to its side against the Russians. By the middle of the 1950s, that calculus had broken down. Chester Bowles reflected the views of many informed citizens when he asserted that “China is more likely to threaten our interests in the next twenty years than the Soviet Union.”83 Dulles remarked to the press, “the Chinese Communists seem to be much more violent and fanatical, more addicted to the use of force than the Russians are or have become.”84 Walter Robertson argued that the threat of the Soviet Union, “though great and dangerous, is not as active as the Chinese Communist menace to Asia.”85 Former ambassador to Taipei Karl Rankin emphasized that a China that accepted Moscow’s dictation meant a China that would abide by peaceful coexistence.86 And this tendency to see Russians as more predictable and less volatile than the Chinese contributed to a belief that when the Soviets acted combatively, they were being pushed to do so by Beijing.87
Edwin W. Martin, director of the China desk, explained much later that he and others “exaggerated” the Chinese menace “to offset the idea that because there’s a Sino-Soviet split, [one need] not… worry about the Chinese anymore.”88 In reality, China was widely perceived as strong and confident. Eisenhower and Dulles had early on rejected the possibility that the Communist government could be overthrown and that conviction remained in place at the end. Eisenhower would be willing to go to the rescue if the Chinese people called for assistance, but that seemed unlikely, he reasoned, and “a decision to intervene in the absence of an appeal for help would be quite another thing.”89
CONCLUSION
The final years of the administration saddened Eisenhower. He believed he had served the country well but lamented the things he had not been able to accomplish. After the U-2 disaster, the president bemoaned his lost opportunity to check the Cold War. He had struggled to “restrain and restrict the military programs… [of] the services which were highly competitive with each other” and yearned “to demilitarize the nature of international relationships.”90 As he told his science advisor, “he saw nothing worthwhile left for him to do… until the end of his presidency.”91
The election campaign added to his dismay. He glumly dismissed Nixon as a worthy successor. On the other hand, he “could not believe that the same country that had twice elected him could turn the government over to a man like Kennedy.”92
China policy did not lead campaign priorities, but neither was it absent from the contest. The most notable moment came with sparring over the offshore islands. Kennedy mocked Nixon as a “trigger-happy Republican” for his willingness to use U.S. troops to save the islands. “Quemoy and Matsu,” he warned, “are not essential to the defense of Formosa.” Nixon counter attacked by vigorously denouncing Kennedy for suggesting that “he is willing to hand over a part of the Free World.… I assure you,” he intoned, “that I will not hand over one square foot.”93
Kennedy thereupon used Eisenhower-style moderation against Nixon’s vehemence. The president, Kennedy reminded the country, had sent delegations to Taipei to convince Chiang Kai-shek to evacuate the islands, preparing to put them in Communist hands. This was a dispute between Nixon and Ike, Kennedy declared, not Nixon and himself. Indeed, Christian Herter and JFK’s foreign policy liaison Chester Bowles in secret meetings discussed the danger of continuing public debate. The Chinese might be misled into thinking Americans were divided and weak, and the China Lobby in the United States might be unnecessarily aroused.94
Eisenhower listened to the campaign arguments about his policies with indignation and anguish. Nixon made Eisenhower’s legacy appear more rigid and belligerent than the departing president wanted. It was true that Eisenhower exited the presidency in 1961 much the same as he had entered it. He still cared more about Europe than Asia. He still had a public China policy that was tough and seemed supportive of Chiang Kai-shek. Indeed, his 1960visit to Taiwan sent a message of solidarity with the Generalissimo, and his warm welcome in Taipei belied the various points of friction that challenged the relationship. Eisenhower assured the crowds that not “the slightest lessening of our determination” to support them had occurred.95
Ike, however, regretted that during his time in office he had not been able to break free of political and popular restraints to alter the U.S. relationship with Beijing. He was more attuned to the elements of popular culture, such as the Manchurian Candidate, that warned him not to be flexible than to the moderating views among businessmen, scholars, international affairs organizations, and even public opinion. He had not noticed that the nation he had led for 8 years had become more open to a new direction on China.