The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

Just as Nixon was sweating his way through friendly Asian capitals, Eisenhower and his advisers gathered on November 5 at the usual Thursday meeting of the National Security Council to give final approval to a top-secret paper titled “U.S. Policy toward Communist China.” Designated NSC 166/1, it drew an alarming picture. “The emergence of a strong, disciplined, and revolutionary communist regime on mainland China has radically altered the power structure in the Far East,” the paper asserted. No one could doubt the fact of China’s power. “In the course of half a decade the Chinese Communists have succeeded in defeating and replacing the National Government of China on the mainland, in consolidating, extending, and intensifying the control of the central administration, and in largely rehabilitating the Chinese economy, while at the same time undertaking a Communist political and social revolution of vast proportions.” The Chinese communists would not stop there. They wanted, the NSC asserted, to “recapture the historically Chinese territories which the U.S. and the West now hold or protect,” namely Taiwan and Hong Kong.