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

by William I. Hitchcock

After a decade of intense anti-Soviet propaganda, Americans had come to believe that the USSR was a brutish, backward, and totalitarian society in which individual creativity had been extinguished. Yet Sputnik demonstrated that a communist nation with a command economy could outperform the free world in scientific achievement.

Walter Lippmann, often a sharp critic of Eisenhower, agreed: Sputnik represented a failure of American science, ideas, and daring. American leaders had become complacent and anti-intellectual, nurturing a “popular disrespect for, and even a suspicion of, brains and originality of thought.” Low-brow culture had dampened the intellectual firepower of the country. Prosperity had become “a narcotic,” while President Eisenhower, dozing in “a kind of partial retirement,” let the nation drift. Reflecting these morose sentiments, the stock market took its sharpest plunge in two years.

Although Johnson theatrically stressed his desire to keep politics out of the hearings and promised not to “wander up any blind alleys of partisanship,” his committee brought out into the open a number of critical facts that made Ike look bad and lent support to the perennial theme of a dangerously disengaged chief executive.19

And so the hearings went, painting the picture of a defense establishment that was badly organized, led by a weak secretary of defense, slowed by endless committees, tangled in red tape, underfunded, and beset by interservice rivalry.

Dulles knew exactly what he was doing: a dire report about a Soviet lead in the missile race would prompt congressional outcry and lead to increased dollars for the CIA’s espionage capabilities. Dulles therefore gave Johnson and his fellow committee member Stuart Symington a magnificent opportunity to use the still-raw intelligence the CIA had gathered to damage the Eisenhower administration. By the end of the hearings, a bleak picture had emerged: the scientists, the military experts, the engineers, and especially the top intelligence analysts now asserted that America faced mortal

danger and that if the nation did not respond immediately, the Soviet Union would turn its mastery of science into domination of the world.

Eisenhower pushed forward this huge expansion of the U.S. nuclear deterrent because he had come to accept a basic paradox of the cold war: that the only way to avoid using weapons of mass destruction was to build more of them.

During his relatively short speech, Eisenhower delivered what had been lacking so far since the October 4 Sputnik launch: a clear sense of direction for the country in

the new missile age. He finally admitted that Americans had been spooked by Sputnik and demanded a response. He proposed a series of “imperative” actions to fix the problems that the Sputnik crisis had revealed. He wanted a reorganized Defense Department to halt the crippling interservice rivalries that had slowed missile progress. He wanted an immediate infusion of cash to improve radar capability, bomber dispersal, missile production, nuclear submarines, and mobile conventional forces. He wanted to help America’s allies by lowering barriers to trade and by sharing nuclear secrets so they could better defend themselves. And he wanted major federal investment in scientific education. Such actions would ensure that America’s military and scientific power, already strong, would never lapse. Such a program would require “sacrifice”—a word he used throughout the speech. The people must know that to counter the Soviet Union’s “total cold war” against America, they would have to toil and strive with common purpose. “The world is waiting to see,” he declared, “how wisely and decisively a free representative government will now act.”

He asked Americans to accept the basic unpleasant fact about the cold war: To deter war, America must prepare for it. And that meant investing in science, technology, and education as well as arms manufacturing. For Eisenhower, the purpose of such a titanic effort was not war but peace—an armed and anxious peace, but peace nonetheless. Here lay the basic national security principles of the Age of Eisenhower.

These three major legislative moves—the NDEA, NASA, and Defense Reorganization Act—marked an extraordinary period of activity for the president and Congress, and they all responded directly to the challenge of Sputnik. Combined with his beefed-up defense budget, these actions revealed a shift away from the small-government Republicanism that Eisenhower cherished. The missile race, and for that matter the cold war, required robust military-industrial-scientific collaboration on a nationwide scale, the sort of thing that only the federal government could direct.

In mid-April Eisenhower orally approved what became known as the Corona Project, which planned to use Thor rockets to put camera-equipped satellites into

orbit above the USSR, Eastern Europe, and China. It was a long hard road to success: the first 12 Corona satellites malfunctioned. But on August 19, 1960, a Corona satellite that had passed over the communist bloc successfully dropped its payload of film to Earth by parachute, where a waiting air force C-119 snatched it out of the sky using a long grappling hook extending from its fuselage.

Six days later Allen Dulles and Eisenhower stared at photographs of the Soviet Union taken from space. “This one satellite mission,” said the secret CIA history of the program, “yielded photo coverage of a greater area than the total produced by all of the U-2 missions over the Soviet Union.” For the next decade the United States used the top-se...

These rockets revealed Soviet technological advances, but were too few to indicate the existence of a major ICBM development program.

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The Lebanon action, though, came at a cost. Eisenhower and Dulles forfeited whatever credit they had accumulated during the Suez Crisis and now appeared in Arab eyes to be acting like a colonial power. Instead of cultivating nationalist leaders in the region, they alienated them. Rather than enhance American prestige, the intervention gave the Russians the opportunity to denounce American imperialism.

It was a gamble, and it worked. On October 6, after six weeks of intensive shelling, Mao announced a one-week moratorium on the artillery attacks, a pause that stretched on for a few more weeks, until the crisis had passed. Quemoy remained under Taiwan’s control (as it does today). No “small” atomic bombs were dropped. America did not lose face in Asia. Chiang did not attack the mainland, though he continued to fume about insufficiently firm American support. Eisenhower’s strategy of patience paid off. He restrained his generals and his secretary of state, calmed his allies, and showed that the United States would not be bullied. It was a quiet and terribly important victory for the president. But of course it was not the kind of victory that played well on the home stage. The press attacked Eisenhower and Dulles mercilessly, first for allowing the United States to be manipulated by Chiang into such a dangerous predicament, and then for being insufficiently bold in standing by the Nationalist leader in his hour of need.

Walter Lippmann wrote a dozen columns during the six-week-long crisis in which he flayed the administration for strategic incoherence and incompetence. “There is no policy” on the offshore islands, he asserted, only a “wager” that the Chinese won’t do anything too rash. He described the administration as “paralyzed,” at a “dead end,” and “embarrassing.” Joseph Alsop, not to be outdone, actually rushed to Taiwan in the midst of the crisis and published no fewer than 17 smoldering essays of invective against the Eisenhower administration. He used the crisis to bash Ike for failing to keep a sufficiently robust naval and military presence in Asia and for hesitating in the face of communist aggression. Such was the verdict of the pundits.

More broadly, Eisenhower in 1958 lost control of the political narrative of his own presidency. Peace, prosperity, security, and small government—these had been the watchwords of “Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism.” By late 1958 these looked like hollow phrases.

The horizon was clouded by threats of war; the economy sputtered; claims of a missile gap suggested a weak national defense; and both taxes and spending remained high.

In the final two years of his presidency Eisenhower would have to find an effective way to rebut this criticism. The stakes were enormous: his place in history was at risk.

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Thus his dilemma: he wanted to ease the cold war with America and lower its cost, yet he also wanted to benefit from the prestige of leading an assault on the capitalist-imperialist West. Khrushchev was caught in a contradiction of his own making.

Spluttering and angry one moment, congenial the next, Khrushchev told Humphrey, “I like President Eisenhower. We want no evil to the U.S. or to free Berlin. You must assure the president of this.” Only a “madman or a fool,” Khrushchev insisted, would think of war between the superpowers.12 These observations clearly influenced Eisenhower, since they squared with his

own belief that the USSR did not want to fight over Berlin.

Ike called the Berlin problem a “can of worms,” but his usual inclination toward patience and moderation paid dividends here.

He rejected the kind of provocative actions that the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed to favor, such as driving a

heavily armed convoy down the Autobahn and daring the Russians to stop it. Ike would have none of that. He resented Soviet tactics, but he...

Ike told Macmillan that “he would not go to a meeting under circumstances which made it appear that he had his hat in his hand.” If the foreign ministers met first and made serious progress on the issues of Berlin, German unification, disarmament, and so on, then a summit could be arranged. But until the Soviets showed good faith and a willingness to compromise, he would hear no talk of a summit.

According to James Reston, the trip “enhanced Mr. Nixon’s chances of nomination” for president by the Republican Party in 1960. In Russia, Nixon had found a more complex and dynamic society than he had expected. He had effectively spoken out about American freedom of religion and the press, and done so in a manner that was firm but respectful. Reston concluded that Nixon had “handled a delicate political assignment . . . with considerable skill.” Even Walter Lippmann praised him for demonstrating that personal diplomacy could be far more effective in lowering world tensions than meetings of professional diplomats.

Reston wrote that Eisenhower seemed reborn, “a man of action again, moving and planning and speaking out with a new serenity. . . . He has moved out of the shadows and into the center of the stage.” With the restraining figures of Sherman Adams and John Foster Dulles gone, Eisenhower seemed more flexible, dynamic, determined to secure his legacy. “He sees the light at the end of the tunnel,” Reston observed, “and some of the old sparkle has returned.”

Khrushchev, he reminded Ike, was a true believer in communism and in the inevitable collapse of capitalism. If organized correctly, the trip might “shake his convictions” that America was a feeble, rotten society. The trip should demonstrate the “long-term prospects for growth” of the vast American economy. If Khrushchev was forced to confront the reality of American power and industry, he might prove more amenable at the conference table.

One crucial preliminary task awaited before Ike met with the Soviet leader. He had to reassure his NATO allies that the United States did not intend to negotiate any

grand bargain in the cold war or sell out West Germany by agreeing to Khrushchev’s demands. To make his point, in late summer Eisenhower conducted a hasty tour of three key capital cities: Bonn, London, and Paris. On August 26 he set off for West Germany and was met by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and by an enormous crowd lining the streets of the capital city—a heartwarming welcome for the man who, only 14 years earlier, had arrived in Germany as a conqueror. Now Eisenhower came as a symbol of America’s commitment to defend Germany from Soviet pressure. A day of discussion with Adenauer left the Germans reassured: the allies would stay in Berlin and never cede their rights there under duress.

Eisenhower, not wishing to start the visit on the wrong foot, dismissed all the senior staff and advisers from the Oval Office, keeping only two translators. In a 10-minute tête-à-tête Ike delivered his planned personal appeal to the Soviet leader, saying that Khrushchev “had an opportunity to become the greatest political figure in history” by taking up the cause of peace and changing the direction of Soviet policy. But the gesture fell flat.

But the public looked on Eisenhower’s personal diplomacy enthusiastically. Just six years earlier America had been at war in Korea against the forces of “international Communism.” In his first term Ike stressed that the nation was “in peril” as a result of the communist threat. The frenzy of the McCarthy era remained white hot through 1954, and in 1956 the invasion of Hungary made the Soviets look like ruthless beasts. The early phase of the space race alarmed Americans and drew their eyes upward to search the nighttime skies for Soviet rockets. Yet now, at the close of 1959, Eisenhower, at his paternal and unruffled best, assured his people that the cold war could be managed, eased, and perhaps even defrosted through the power of his ice-melting charm. All that remained was to put Ike’s warm words of peace into action.

Unfortunately Eisenhower’s CIA did far more

harm than good to American interests. Rather than enhancing national security, Eisenhower’s secret wars created great human suffering, propped up awful dictatorships, left the U.S. government vulnerable to exposure and public humiliation, and alienated millions of people who otherwise had reason to like and admire the United States. Over the course of the 1950s the CIA engaged in sabotage, arms smuggling, destabilizing of governments, widespread radio and print propaganda, and the arming of insurgencies. It supplied arms, intelligence, and training to certain friendly regimes that were engaged in repression, summary arrests, torture, and murder. And it plotted the ouster and in a few cases the assassination of foreign leaders, violating American law and tarnishing America’s reputation.

When Asians and Africans shook off colonial despotism, they often embraced revolutionary nationalism, radical socialism, and communism, not because they wished to become the lackeys of the Soviet Union but because they desired economic justice, distribution of wealth, agrarian reform, and the breakup of foreign economic control of their natural resources. Such demands sounded threatening to American ears. And when threatened, American officials in the Age of Eisenhower tended to retreat to the well-defended ramparts of anticommunism.

So no matter how earnestly and frequently he spoke the language of peace in public, behind closed doors he remained a determined and ruthless cold warrior. He saw no contradiction between his aspirations as a statesman of peace and his persistent reliance on subversion and deceit in the secret wars of the 1950s.

Although Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country; although his extended family, the Ngo clan, had a notorious reputation for corruption, criminality, and connections to reactionary military circles; and although he had little popular appeal or legitimacy, he seemed to the Americans the perfect man to build a free and democratic South Vietnam. He was ferociously anticommunist. His Catholicism marked him as Western in American eyes.

As Diem’s power grew, his relationship with the United States became more troubled. He was an authoritarian man with a messiah complex. He relied upon his brother, who ran the secret police, to wage a relentless war upon communist sympathizers and subversives. By itself that did not displease Washington, but the

methods used—mass arrests, torture, wanton murder—did upset the narrative that Washington wished to write of Diem as a model Asian leader. Even the CIA station in Saigon urged Diem to adopt land reform and political liberalization so as to develop some degree of popular support and legitimacy. Diem refused, citing the constant threat of internal subversion as a reason to focus on building up the South Vietnamese Army and deploying harsh tactics against any dissidents.

American officials consoled themselves that, for all his shortcomings, Diem nevertheless shared America’s aims in Asia. A briefing book prepared for Eisenhower on the eve of Diem’s visit declared that Diem “feels that Vietnam in its present situation and given its own heritage is not yet ready for a democratic government. . . . His concept is one of benevolent authoritarianism.” Diem “believes that the Vietnamese people are not the best judges of what is good for them.” While these attitudes prompted some discomfort in Washington, Diem’s anticommunism inoculated him from serious American criticism.

In 1958 and 1959 Diem transformed South Vietnam into a regime of terror, corruption, and repression in his campaign to wipe out communist subversion. He was tactically successful in hunting down and cracking communist cells, but his methods were so brutal that they alienated his own people. More significant, his methods persuaded North Vietnam to escalate its support for the rebellion inside South Vietnam.

In January 1959 the

North Vietnamese decided to launch a major campaign of subversion in the South to overthrow Diem’s regime and attempt to reunite the country....

In May 1959 he forced through a new decree that gave the government extraordinary emergency powers to arrest, try, and execute suspected communist guerrillas. In an appalling act of barbarism, the government sent guillotines to all the provinces. Those people found guilty of subversion met their death strapped to a horizontal plank beneath a slashing blade. Predictably such policies stimulated massive hostility throughout the South. A CIA analysis in May 1959 candidly admitted that Diem’s regime was on the brink of disaster, yet in Washington Eisenhower called for no change in policy.

Despite billions in U.S. aid and an unrelenting war on internal enemies, Diem had failed to defeat the communist

insurgency or build any legitimacy for himself. By the start of 1960 Diem’s regime, once held up as a model of Asian freedom and democracy, had become a brutal police state st...

Korea. Of course an Orientalist and patronizing discourse underpinned these geopolitical arguments: since Asians were not yet ready for the complexities of self-government, the United States had an obligation to train and guide their Asian protégés. Sometimes their immaturity led to tension with the paternal Americans. Nonetheless communism could be beaten, Eisenhower and his advisers believed, by the steadfast application of generous economic and military aid as well as political leadership. To lure Asian minds away from utopian communism, Americans offered their own dreamscape of democracy, prosperity, and freedom, engineered by the proper application of