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March 2 - March 31, 2019
“Suppose the French were to give up and turn the whole country over to the Communists, would the United States then interfere?” Eisenhower confirmed his position, saying, “No, we would not intervene.”
“No one could be more bitterly opposed to ever getting the U.S. involved in a hot war in that region than I am,” Eisenhower declared in front of a room full of reporters. “Every move I authorize is calculated . . . to make certain that that does not happen.”
“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.”
The United States had to accept placing Indochina on the agenda at Geneva as the price of keeping the war going.
Eisenhower asserted that any U.S. role would require the approval of the United Nations as well as an invitation from the government of Vietnam itself. It would also require the approval of Congress. “It was simply academic to imagine otherwise,” he said.
British leaders
had come to see American policy as reckless, driven by an obsessive anticommunism that might soon plunge the world into atomic war.
If the United States moved in to rescue the French, Ike stated, “we would in the eyes of many Asiatic peoples merely replace French colonialism with American colonialism.”
“We would soon lose all our significant support in the free world. We should be everywhere accused of imperialistic ambitions.”
The president looked on as Dien Bien Phu and northern Vietnam fell to communist battalions. After much bluster about the domino theory, Eisenhower was compelled to reveal that he did not believe all of Indochina was worth fighting for.
China and, behind the scenes, the USSR, wanted the Indochina conflict to come to an end—perhaps
wanted to forestall an American military intervention.
So the communist side floated the idea of a temporary partition of Vietnam in order to separate the warring parties and implement a political process for a postcolonial Vietnam.59
Eisenhower revealed that his patience was running out. If the communists tried to snatch all of Indochina now, he said, the U.S. response would be massive: “There should be no half-way measures or frittering around. The Navy and the Air Force should go in with full power, using new weapons, and strike at air bases and ports in mainland China.”
Rather than wage an unending jungle conflict, the United States could simply launch a nuclear strike on China.60
Once he had settled a crucial sticking point—the neutralization of Cambodia and Laos and the removal of all Viet Minh troops from those two states—Mendès-France moved rapidly to accept the partition of Vietnam.
With the French out of the way, the United States could “establish a military line, and we must hold that line.”
“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.61
In August 1954 Eisenhower signed off on a new statement of American policy in Asia. NSC 5429
United States would rededicate itself to shoring up military and economic ties to Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, as well as Australia and New Zealand. Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam too would come under the American umbrella. A new regional security treaty, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, would pull Asian states into a military alliance backed by American power.
Wellesley-educated wife, Soong Mei-ling.
On September 3, 1954, Mao gave the order to unleash a major artillery barrage on the island of Quemoy and its 50,000 Nationalist troops.
“If we are to attack Communist China, [the president] was firmly opposed to any holding back like we did in Korea.” This time the war would go nuclear.
At the start of December the United States and Taiwan initialed a security pact giving American guarantees to Taiwan but making no mention of Quemoy and Matsu.
on January 24, Eisenhower sent a message to Congress asking for authority to use armed forces to defend Taiwan—indeed to do more than that: to repel attacks on “closely related localities” that might be a preliminary to an attack on Taiwan. That could only mean Quemoy and Matsu.
Four days later the “Formosa Resolution” passed the two houses of Congress with near unanimity. Unlike during the Dien Bien Phu crisis, Eisenhower had laid down a bold red line and signaled to his adversary that he, and his nation, would not retreat.
In his press conference on March 16, Eisenhower backed up Dulles, saying, “In any combat where these things [nuclear weapons] can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.”
Vice President Nixon reiterated the government’s position that “tactical nuclear weapons are now conventional and will be used against targets of any aggressive force.”72
Was Eisenhower really considering a nuclear war against China? The evidence seems clear that he was.
On April 23 the Chinese foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, announced that China wanted no war with the United States and stressed China’s desire for friendship with the American people.
Just 10 years later, in 1964, China would test its first nuclear bomb.
Eisenhower tried his best to pursue his broader goal of containment while avoiding war. He himself acknowledged the amount of improvisation that went into his policymaking. Far from claiming that he followed a grand strategy in Asia, he admitted that America “threaded its way, with watchfulness and determination through narrow and dangerous waters between appeasement and global war.” To a great degree he managed to accomplish that balancing act. His successors, alas, did not.
In the early morning of August 28, 1955, in a small Mississippi Delta cotton-mill town along the Tallahatchie River called Money, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, was abducted from his great-uncle’s home, driven to a nearby barn, brutally beaten, and then shot to death. His naked body, wrapped in barbed wire and tied to a heavy cotton-gin fan, was dumped into the brown slow-moving river, where it lay on the muddy bottom until, three days later, two boys out fishing discovered the mutilated and swollen corpse.
the boy they believed had insulted Carolyn was staying at Mose Wright’s house. They drove there in Milam’s pickup truck at 2:00 a.m. on August 28, seized Till, and threw him into the truck. Over the course of the next few hours, Bryant and Milam took the boy to a number of locations, beating him savagely at every stop, until finally they shot him in the head and threw his weighted body into the river.
After Till’s disfigured body was recovered, it was shipped back to Chicago. At the Illinois Central train station, Mamie Till Bradley dropped to her knees in anguished prayer upon seeing the wrapped bundle containing her son’s remains. “Oh God, my boy, my only boy,” she wailed, filling the hall with her wrenching cries. She decided that his death would not go unnoticed. The body was placed in an open casket at the Roberts Temple of the Church of God in Christ at 4021 South State Street. For the next five days,
tens of thousands of people filed past the bier, gazing at ...
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Jet magazine published close-up photos of the boy’s bashed and swollen, contorted face.2
The jury was all white and all male, and on September 23 after an hour of deliberation it returned a verdict: Milam and Bryant were acquitted.
When Till’s killers walked out of the courtroom free men, the national news media was there to record the scene. And when in early 1956 Bryant and Milam defiantly and publicly admitted killing the boy, the murder case became a symbol of the shame of white supremacy and a rallying cry of the struggle for black freedom
Eventually, Eisenhower hoped, “the human race may finally grow up,” and such concerns would disappear. But for now, “if we attempt by passing a lot of laws to force someone to like someone else, we are just going to get into trouble.”
Eisenhower said his goal was to act “in a spirit of good will” toward states where segregation still persisted.
insisted that what was needed “to deal with the problem of race relations, to provide equal opportunities and to end racism, is leadership.” Leading by example and exhortation rather than using federal law: that was Eisenhower’s preferred method.
On civil rights, it seemed, he planned to speak loudly and carry a small stick.7
He then announced a concrete action: “I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces.”8
In mid-March 1953 Eisenhower was asked at a press conference by an African American journalist, Alice A. Dunnigan, if he was aware that the army continued to operate white-only schools, which seemed incompatible with his declared policy of eliminating segregation in areas of federal responsibility. The question caught Ike off guard. “I haven’t heard it; I will look it up,” he replied. But he went on to say, “Wherever federal funds are expended for anything, I do not see how any American can justify—legally, or logically, or morally—a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds among our
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there were indeed segregated schools being operated on military installations in Virginia, Oklahoma, and Texas. These schools, however, were funded by the states and supervised by local school boards.
Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. In that case the Court ruled that the state of Louisiana could legally separate whites from blacks on public railway cars, provided that the cars themselves were of equal quality.
In Plessy, the Court implied, people could be equal before the law but unequal among each other.
Plessy decision was of monumental significance, for it provided legal validity to racial segregation in “separate but equal” public schools.18
September 30, 1953, the president announced his nomination. Congress was in recess at that moment, but Ike, aware that the desegregation cases were already under way, did not wait for Congress to come back into session. He made a recess appointment, and Warren took the oath of office a week later, without congressional approval.
