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

by William I. Hitchcock

Indeed Kermit Roosevelt, the chief CIA operative in Tehran, titled his memoir Countercoup precisely to suggest that it was Mossadeq who was the usurper: the United States merely assisted the shah and the Iranian Army in restoring

Just one week after the ouster of Mossadeq, the leading covert operations planners within the CIA agreed that among their next projects “Guatemala will have number one priority.” This was no mere accident of timing. The success in Iran had opened up a new vista for the CIA, which after all was still a fairly small and unproven agency. It was now possible to imagine a panoply of covert

actions that could turn the tide of communist subversion around the world. Central America was the next front in this long twilight war, and Guatemala an especially vulnerable sector in what Ike thought of as the battlements of freedom.

In 1944, in the face of widespread unrest from teachers, students, and workers, the country’s dictator yielded power. Nationwide elections brought a moderately conservative government to power, which opened up a period of political reform in the country. Guatemalans were writing their own democratic story.

The United Fruit Company, owner of huge banana plantations in Guatemala and a company that relied on cheap, nonunionized agricultural labor, pulled strings in Washington to make sure the U.S. government was fully aware of the threats to their interests. By August 1950 CIA officials had locked in on Guatemala as a likely source of anti-American activity in the Western Hemisphere, though even they could not find evidence of direct Soviet interference there.

In June 1952 Arbenz signed Decree 900, which sought to expropriate mostly fallow and underused land from large estates, divide it into small parcels, and sell it to farmers. The former owners were to be compensated for their losses. Even the New York Times editorial page saw these reforms as “long overdue.” The paper argued that “in promoting social justice there should be a relatively fair distribution of the land”; it was wrong to tarnish the plan with the epithet “communistic.”

But the local origins of his policies were lost on the U.S. government. In the highly charged atmosphere of the early cold war, this kind of aggressive land reform aligned with the state-sponsored social reform projects being imposed by socialist and communist governments around the world.

The government was also proceeding rapidly with its seizure and redistribution of United Fruit land holdings. In February the government announced a plan to seize 250,000 acres of the fruit giant’s land along the Pacific and in August took aim at another 174,000 acres on the Atlantic coast. The State Department framed the problem this way: “The immediate Communist objective is

the elimination of American economic interests, represented in Guatemala by the United Fruit Company, the International Railways of Central America, and the Guatemalan Electric Company. The loss of these enterprises would be damaging to American interests and prestige throughout Central America.” While it seemed that “the Communists are not seeking open and direct control of the Guatemalan Government,” their tactics served a nefarious purpose: “to convert [Guatemala] into an indirectly controlled instrument of Communism.”

On September 11 Wisner sent a detailed plan of action to Allen Dulles for his approval. Describing Guatemala as “the leading base of operations for Moscow-influenced Communism in Central America,” Wisner stated that the CIA would now “reduce and possibly eliminate Communist power” there.

As it turned out, though, Guatemala was a tougher nut to crack than Iran. The CIA possessed none of the advantages that the coup plotters in Tehran enjoyed. The Guatemalan Army was loyal to Arbenz; the president was popular and democratically elected; the exiles were discredited and perceived as right-wing opportunists; neither the CIA nor the exiles had penetrated the Guatemalan press, political parties, church, or bureaucracy and could count on no rallying of these institutions to the cause of Arbenz’s overthrow.

There was also domestic pressure to act: in mid-October the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Alexander Wiley, declared, “Communism has established a strong beachhead in Guatemala,” thus putting the Eisenhower administration on notice that inaction in Central America would

not be acceptable.

Land reform had

been controversial and indeed had antagonized the presidents of neighboring Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, who worried about the radical plans Arbenz had championed spilling over into their countries.

But Arbenz himself may have caused the most grievous wound to his government. In April 1954 he secretly placed a $5 million order with the Czechoslovakian government for the purchase of thousands of tons of arms with which

to supply his small armed forces.

The army, which had begun to reconsider its loyalty to Arbenz, finally turned on the president and pressured him to resign. On June 27, unable to command the loyalty of his troops, he stepped down, eventually making his way to safety in Mexico. Within days a junta of army officers, in conjunction with American intelligence agents, worked out a deal to bring Castillo Armas into power. It was another home run for the CIA, as Dulles and Wisner saw it. “A great victory has been won,” Wisner cabled to PB-SUCCESS headquarters in Florida.

Arbenz was no Soviet puppet but a leftist, reform-minded politician who had the bad fortune to face off against powerful foreign interests at the height of the cold war. His country posed no threat to the United States, or other Central American nations. His ouster brought down international condemnation on the coup, which was widely assumed to have been supported from Washington, and fomented anti-Americanism throughout Latin

America.

Thereafter Guatemala endured three decades of repression, civil war, death squads, and terror. Not a legacy the Eisenhower team would wish to celebrate.

The NSC had declared in a top-secret policy paper in February 1954 that with the advent of a Soviet H-bomb the previous August, the danger of the Soviet arsenal had dramatically increased. This new weapon has “placed a premium on . . . improvement of our intelligence regarding Soviet capabilities and intentions.” It was the CIA’s job to give the president this information, and so far it had failed.

What he found was unsettling: the CIA employed too many mediocre personnel; it suffered from leaks; the agency’s relations with the armed services were terrible, and not much better with the State Department; the covert operations office had become too large and messy and needed a “complete reorganization.”33 In private Doolittle was even more critical. On October 19, 1954, he met with Eisenhower in the White House and made clear that he thought the CIA’s main problem was Allen Dulles himself.

On March 27 Eisenhower met with his Science Advisory Committee and told its members of his anxiety about the inadequacy of America’s weapons technology, especially the inability to detect and deter a surprise attack by the Soviets on the American homeland. What means could be devised to guard against a surprise attack and ensure America’s overall safety in the nuclear age?

In 1951 and 1952 numerous missions were sent across Soviet territory, but Soviet radar and fighter aircraft often spotted and intercepted these flights; a considerable number of them were shot down. Eisenhower continued the practice and personally approved of occasional overflights despite the loss of aircraft and their crews. He had to balance the risk of discovery of these overflights with the urgent need to know about Soviet military hardware.

Though aware of its extreme danger—penetrating Soviet airspace could trigger war—Eisenhower desperately wanted the information the U-2 spy plane could provide. He insisted the plane be funded off the books and that no active military personnel be used as pilots; the CIA would run the show. Within a month the highly secret design project, code-named Aquatone, was under way. By August 1955 the U-2 aircraft was ready for its first test flight. A new chapter in the secret war against the USSR was about to open.

The period from mid-1953 to mid-1955, then, was a crucial one in the evolution of the military-industrial complex and the warfare state. NSC 5412, the March 1954 charter for covert

operations, provided an ambitious global plan to counter communism at every turn, by any means. The Doolittle Report of October 1954 called for the CIA to become better organized and better managed precisely so it could also take on a bigger role in the cold war. The Killian Report of February 1955, infused with anxiety about the inability of the United States to predict or deter a surprise attack on the nation, called for a dramatic expansion of new weapons systems, new aircraft, new forms of radar and early detection, bigger and more secure air bases, more powerful bombs, and more aircraft to deliver them.

The arms race was not just about a state of readiness, Eisenhower understood, but also about a state of mind: the United States must never seem to be

playing catch-up to its allegedly inferior and less developed enemy.

championed America’s dynamic, free-market society, and who asserted that America could defy communism while sustaining its democratic values, did so much to obscure the inner workings of the nation’s security from public debate. In this sense the Age of Eisenhower would live on long after Ike had passed from the scene.

Instead the president preferred to combat communism in Asia using the same method that had worked effectively in Europe: containment. That meant generous economic and military aid to sympathetic governments in the region, along with close political, diplomatic, and personal ties—of the kind Nixon’s trip sought to foster.

Eisenhower confronted a terrible dilemma: he could send U.S. military forces to prop up the rotten and unpopular French Empire, or he could stand aside as the communists seized northern Vietnam and took aim at the rest of Indochina.

“Although the French have been successful in inflicting severe losses on the Viet Minh, and have considerably disrupted the Viet Minh economy, overall French operations cannot

be considered successful because of their failure to arrive at a political solution that obtains the support or patriotism of the Vietnamese people.”

In addition to increasing aid to the French, Eisenhower and Dulles decided to put the Chinese on notice that America’s determination to hold the line in Asia was undiminished. Dulles took to the airwaves on September 2 to deliver a threat (carefully vetted by Ike) that if China took advantage of the Korean armistice to shift soldiers and resources to the war in Vietnam, the United States would immediately intensify its own military commitments there. If America was drawn into war in Indochina through Chinese provocation, Dulles asserted, the resulting conflict “might not be confined to Indochina.” Hinting at a possible nuclear war against China had become the signature

Dulles style, no less hair-raising for all its familiarity.

“He simply could not imagine the United States putting ground forces anywhere in Southeast Asia. . . . There was just no sense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us. I cannot tell you, said the President with vehemence, how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!”

“Every move I authorize is calculated . . . to make certain that that does not happen.” This became the leitmotif of Ike’s Asian diplomacy: to maneuver in such a way that the war could be sustained without direct U.S. involvement. For emphasis he insisted, “I cannot conceive of a greater tragedy for America than to get heavily involved now in an all-out war in any part of those regions.”

By circling a date on the calendar for a Great Power summit to discuss the future of Indochina, France motivated the Viet Minh to improve their bargaining position by winning a big battle in the weeks before the conference. And a large target had conveniently presented itself: the heavily fortified and now surrounded French garrison at Dien Bien Phu.

“We should not get involved in fighting in Indochina unless there were the political preconditions necessary for a successful outcome,”

he told Foster Dulles. Those preconditions, such as immediate independence for the Indochinese states, full international approval for any military action, and a Vietnamese request for American intervention, were highly unlikely to be in place soon, as Ike knew.

In mid-January 1954 he had tasked a small group of his most trusted advisers, chaired by Undersecretary of State Bedell Smith, to think broadly about a Southeast Asia “area plan,” as he called it, “including the possible alternative lines of action to be taken in case of a reverse in Indochina.” In mid-February, while testifying to a closed executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Smith revealed that planning along those lines had moved ahead. Rejecting the domino theory, Smith said, “Even at the worst, part of Indochina might be lost without losing the rest of Southeast Asia. . . . One can think of the possibility of an area defense pact which might include Thailand as the bastion, Burma and possibly Cambodia and part of Indochina—and maybe some part of it could be lost without disastrous effect.” A man as savvy as Smith, Ike’s intimate confidante, would never have said such things

unless they squared with the president’s thinking. When Senator William Langer asked Smith whether the United States would “go ahead alone . . . if France quits on us,” Smith replied curtly, “I do not think so, sir. No.”

The president had made his decision: he would not send Americans to fight in Vietnam. He told his advisers confidentially that he rejected the simplistic idea that “because we might lose Indochina we would necessarily have to lose all the rest of Southeast Asia.” Privately he argued that the domino theory should not force America’s hand. It was possible, he believed, to create a strong Western position in Asia even without Indochina.

Eisenhower became expansive, and in some of his most famous words, asserted the viability of the domino theory. “First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs,” he began. “Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world. Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” He went on to prophesy a total disaster in Asia if Indochina fell. “The possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world,” he concluded darkly.

The consequences of such double-talk were serious.

Churchill hit the nail on the head: a small-scale military intervention would be both ineffective and likely to trigger a wider war with China and the USSR—in short, the worst possible outcome. The partition of Vietnam now appeared a safer and more plausible solution. That could be done at Geneva without paying the heavy price of war.

Although Eisenhower would eventually win the praise of posterity for staying out of the Indochinese war in 1954, at the time most observers believed that he and the United States had suffered a terrible defeat.

“We must hold the western side of the Pacific or it will become a Communist lake,” he concluded. Eisenhower agreed and summed up the new American position: “In simple terms, we are establishing international outposts where people can develop their strengths to defend themselves. We cannot publicly call our allies outposts, but we are trying to get that result.” The American era in South Vietnam had begun.