Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tom Wicker
Read between
June 6 - June 9, 2019
That future president Lyndon Johnson, who with other congressional leaders would not approve U.S. intervention in Indochina in 1954, was to insist a decade later that Eisenhower’s aid commitment was justification for sending 500,000 American troops to fight “aggression” against South Vietnam.
Though France finally refused to ratify the European Defense Community, he pushed through arrangements for what he most wanted, German rearmament and membership in NATO. On Capitol Hill, despite his warring Republican majorities and his low priority for domestic affairs, he achieved needed tax revision, an extension of the Social Security system, and funds for U.S. participation in the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Less happily, the nation’s economy went into a brief recession. A series of nuclear tests conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission on Bikini atoll in the Pacific aroused great public fear
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More ominous for the long run was what the public did not yet know—that the Eisenhower administration also had precipitated two “secret wars,” one winding down in Pyrrhic victory in Iran in 1953, the other intended to topple an elected, legitimate government in Guatemala.
Neither secret war, in the unblinking hindsight of history, was necessary to “stop Communism”; and both heralded a dark American record that would unfold in subsequent decades—subverting governments, supporting despots, and exerting clandestine force, all in secret, all in the name of freedom and democracy.
In Indochina, Iran, and Guatemala, however, it was Dwight Eisenhower who started the nation down that slippery slope.
January 5, 1961: We continue to have concern as to whether the Clandestine Services of CIA are sufficiently well organized and managed to carry out covert action programs. Further, we have been unable to conclude that, on balance, all of the covert action programs undertaken by CIA up to this time have been worth the risk or the great expenditure of manpower, money and other resources involved. In addition, we believe that CIA’s concentration on political, psychological and related covert action activities tended to detract substantially from the execution of its primary intelligence-gathering
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So secret was U.S. activity in Iran and Guatemala that it was years before details came to light—and some still are shielded by official government secrecy.
For years, that nation’s ample supply of oil had been pumped, refined, and marketed by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which transferred out of Iran about $2.4 billion of $3 billion in gross revenues between 1913 and 1951, while paying Iran only about 10 percent of company profits. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Iranian parliament and Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh—a weepy but tough old man who did most of his business from a sickbed—nationalized Anglo-Iranian in 1951.
He also joined in British planning “to bring about a change” in the Mossadegh government, approving Operation Ajax—a covert scheme jointly brainstormed by the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service.
Mossadegh’s supporters poured into the streets accompanied by Communist sympathizers seizing the opportunity. The CIA-SIS team (the CIA operative-in-charge was Kermit Roosevelt, the son of President Theodore Roosevelt) turned loose the estimated six thousand counter-rioters it had recruited and was holding ready. Chaos briefly ruled Tehran, so Mossadegh tried to call out the police to restore order. Again as prearranged, the Iranian military seized power instead, suppressed all demonstrations, and arrested Mossadegh. Ajax had worked as planned, and the Shah could come home to Iran and
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There was even less excuse—save Eisenhower’s strong anti-Communism—for the United States to overthrow Guatemala’s elected government in 1954.
In 1953 the Eisenhower administration brought into office the Dulles brothers, Foster and Allen, who had been among United Fruit’s lawyers. “Beetle” Smith, the undersecretary of state and Eisenhower’s wartime chief of staff, was later to become a director of the company, as was John J. McCloy, president of the World Bank.
some credence was lent to a phony Central American Red alarm when Arbenz, his efforts to buy U.S. arms rebuffed, ordered two thousand tons of munitions from Czechoslovakia. The Czechs, as it turned out, conned Arbenz, most of the weapons turning out to be virtually unusable in Guatemala.
in May 1954, Secretary Dulles conceded to Latin American ambassadors that he had no “evidence” linking Guatemala to Moscow, but insisted that “such a tie must exist” and therefore the Soviet Union “could not be allowed to establish a puppet state in this hemisphere.”8
Not least among those deceived was the New York Times, whose headline, “Revolt Launched in Guatemala,” lent substance to CIA disinformation.9
The truth was that Castillo’s invading “army,” which was not remotely a product of the oppressed Guatemalan people, invaded no farther than the initial six miles; his “air force” dropped only leaflets, a hand grenade and a stick of dynamite, and lost two of its planes to ground fire. Another crash-landed in Mexico, where the CIA covered up for its American pilot.
On July 3, Castillo landed in Guatemala City in a U.S. aircraft, accompanied by U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy sporting a pistol in a holster.
Arbenz’s land reform was cancelled, unions were outlawed, hundreds of political and labor leaders were exiled, unknown numbers of campesinos were murdered, thousands were arrested, political parties were suspended, and three-quarters of the people were disenfranchised because they were illiterate. For years to come, Guatemala was racked by guerrilla warfare, coups and countercoups, murder and repression. Castillo Armas himself was assassinated in 1957, despite the “freedom” and the “liberation” from Communism that he and the CIA, with the approval of Dwight Eisenhower, had brought to
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As a consequence of his advisers’ myopia, Eisenhower almost alone developed his “Atoms for Peace” proposal.
In forthcoming four-power talks, he continued, he would propose that the atomic powers (then the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom) contribute fissionable materials—five units from the United States to every one from the Soviets—to a new International Atomic Energy Agency under the UN. The new agency, drawing on scientific knowledge from all nations, would study means of putting atomic power to peaceful uses—especially providing electricity to areas in desperate need of it. In that way, Eisenhower said, “the miraculous inventiveness of man” need not be “dedicated to his
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When the Soviets still did not accept it, Eisenhower’s attitude toward them and the Cold War hardened perceptibly.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that “separate but equal” public schools, then being operated in seventeen southern and border states and in certain school districts of Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming, were not only actually but “inherently unequal,” and thus unconstitutional.
Eisenhower told speechwriter Arthur Larson years later, “I personally believe the decision [in Brown] was wrong,” and that the Supreme Court should have required only “equal opportunity” rather than integration—the argument of the more enlightened southern opposition.6
I have heard people say, “After all, we are dealing with a bunch of rats. What we ought to do is go out and shoot them.” Well, I agree they are a bunch of rats. But just remember this: when you go out to shoot rats, you have to shoot straight because when you shoot wildly, it not only means that the rats may get away more easily—but you make it easier on the rats. Also, you might hit someone else who is trying to shoot rats, too.
With good reason, William Ewald thought this passage disclosed the speaker’s “black id.”
Only in his first two years, therefore, had his divided party—Old Guard vs. Modern Republicans—elected a congressional majority.
He wisely realized that if he were to become the actual president following Eisenhower’s death, or the Republican candidate if Eisenhower could not run in 1956—either of which at first seemed possible—he could be damaged politically by accusations of having attempted a power grab. So he managed rather adeptly to appear to be “filling in” for poor, sick Ike, rather than “taking over” the presidency. Presiding over cabinet meetings, for instance, Nixon carefully sat in the vice president’s accustomed chair—not in the president’s.
Allen Dulles later told me that he had forced Kennedy’s hand by asking him, “Are you going to be less anti-Communist than Eisenhower?”
“I think the people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”7
Eisenhower did not so much wish victory for Nixon as he wished defeat for Kennedy.”12
Eisenhower momentarily considered resignation, but he quickly recovered, briefed congressional leaders, met the press as usual, remarked that the closed Soviet system made spying “a distasteful but vital necessity,” and suggested rather incredibly that the outlook for the summit had not changed—“not decisively.”8 But of course it had.
To Eisenhower, the imposing de Gaulle—not always an intimate or even an admirer of the World War II general or the later president—privately declared moving allegiance: “Whatever happens, I want you to know that I am with you to the end.”
The nuclear arms race and the Cold War, the vast expenditures to sustain both, with tensions only occasionally lessened and never removed, would continue for nearly thirty years, through seven more administrations, into the 1980s.
The Eisenhower administration itself, for practical purposes, had come to an end on a sad, even something of an Aristotelian, note. The 1960 campaign, Nixon’s defeat, economic and diplomatic conflict with Castro’s Cuba, more budget battles—all had yet to unfold. But shortly after Khrushchev shattered the Paris summit, the president said candidly and correctly to one of his scientific advisers that because of “the stupid U-2 mess … he saw nothing worthwhile left for him to do … until the end of his presidency.”10
The collapse of the Paris summit in May 1959 did not, of course, literally mark the end of the Eisenhower administration, which still had seven months to go.
Between May 1959 and January 1961 is 19 months, not 7.
The most celebrated, at the time, was a triumphal world tour the president undertook as his second term neared its end. His reception everywhere was tumultuous; the man of peace was welcomed with cheers and crowds all across Europe and Asia.
The trip left little doubt that Eisenhower himself had become the most popular, well-loved, and respected of the world’s leaders—the disastrous consequences of the failed Paris summit not being as well understood in the immediate aftermath of Khrushchev’s tantrums as they are nearly a half-century later.
Less noticed at the time but of growing significance in the years since was Eisenhower’s farewell address. Some inaugural speeches have become famous—Roosevelt’s in 1933, for example, John Kennedy’s in 1960. Eisenhower’s two inaugurals are seldom remembered, and for good reason, but he shares with George Washington the distinction of having his last presidential words, rather than his first, enshrined in memory and lore.
In 1958, White House speechwriter Malcolm Moos gave the president a book of presidential speeches that included Washington’s farewell, in which the first president warned the nation to avoid “entangling alliances.” The warning caught Eisenhower’s eye, though it was far too early for him to begin thinking about a farewell. His last years in office, however, encompassed a long, almost endless battle against Democrats, some in his own administration, and the press, all of whom wanted to increase defense spending and build more weapons in the mistaken belief that the Soviet Union had forged ahead
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his own firm and experienced conviction that for deterrence “enough is enough,”
Then, in late 1960, Moos and another writer, Ralph Williams, presented him with a memo detailing that the top hundred defense contractors employed 1,400 retired military officers, including 261 generals and admirals. “For the first time in its history,” the two writers concluded, “the United States has a permanent war-based industry.”
Eisenhower and his brother, Milton, edited it, including (at the suggestion of the White House science adviser, James Killian) shortening Moos’s warning against a “military-industrial-scientific complex” to the phrase that would become famous: a “military-industrial complex.”
Three days before John Kennedy was to be sworn in, Eisenhower spoke to the nation on the night of January 17, 1961. Americans, he warned, “face a hostile ideology, global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.” The danger threatened to be of “infinite duration” and, as a result, “we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.”
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Kennedy’s ringing inaugural address soon swamped Eisenhower’s farewell—which had not been in any case a major theme of his time in office.
in the sixties and as Vietnam became a national horror, the import of Eisenhower’s last words had lasted, grown, and echoed, not only in the United States but throughout the world. The old soldier turned father figure had done his duty again, at last warning the family that he had guarded so well, for so many years, that there was a danger within as well as a threat without.
because of President Eisenhower, Americans cannot say they weren’t warned—
Eisenhower did warn us about the military-industrial complex....
In a speech in Boston in 1962, the former president himself staked out a strong claim for its accomplishments: In those eight years we lost no inch of ground to tyranny. We witnessed no abdication of international respect.… [N]o walls were built.1 No threatening foreign bases were established. One war was ended and incipient wars were blocked. Yes, but … Eisenhower’s personal inability to refuse that last, fatal U-2 mission was disastrous to the disarmament he by then wanted above all; nor has the world since achieved a comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty.
He planted the seeds—at least tilled the ground—that later sprouted into the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War. He presided over and encouraged infamy in Iran and outrage in Guatemala.
They can cite the Eisenhower interstate highway system, NASA, the Saint Lawrence Seaway, statehood for Hawaii (he opposed it for Alaska), and the first civil rights bill (albeit a weak one) in modern times, though he did little to achieve it. On the other hand … Eisenhower’s refusal to support the Supreme Court’s historic Brown decision outlawing school segregation was perhaps his worst failure, one not altogether redeemed by his belated but firm enforcement of the ruling at Little Rock in 1957.
