The Fifties

by David Halberstam

The Rev. Dulles was surprisingly liberal for his time, taking the side of the modernists in the then-burning question of whether to accommodate the manifestations of modern science as they encroached on the literal teachings of the Bible. On two occasions he was almost expelled from the ministry, first for questioning the virgin birth and later for permitting a divorced woman to marry in his church.

“He knew,” his sister later wrote of him, “that if he wasn’t right in his opinion on life, he was as right as most people he knew. He had few doubts. He was sure of himself in everything he did.”

He thought Republicans more trustworthy than Democrats—they, after all, made more money and therefore were more successful in the real world; the Democrats had to be watched closely for they tended, for reasons of demographics, to pander to lesser groups. In addition, they had been in power too long and had been insufficiently aggressive in combating Soviet adventurism.

what it would later call “the New Look,” a reformulation of American foreign policy and military posture. It reflected the President’s belief that the true strength of America came from a healthy economy and that a heavy defense budget would diminish that strength. Cutting defense spending inevitably meant a greater dependence on atomic weapons.

A few weeks later Eisenhower approved a new National Security Council (NSC) paper that, in effect, assumed nuclear weapons would be used in limited-war situations—as they had not been used in Korea. Humphrey seemed to speak for Eisenhower’s fiscal conservatism at an October 30, 1953, NSC meeting: “There would be no defense,” he said, but only “disaster in a military program that scorned the resources and the problems of our economy—erecting majestic defenses and battlements for the protection of a country that was bankrupt.”

Dulles’s speech about massive retaliation was not a great success abroad. Our allies were terrified by it. We seemed to them to threaten turning small wars into much larger ones.

Admiral Arthur Radford had replaced Omar Bradley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Bradley was, ostensibly, a mild-mannered man who seemed more a schoolteacher than a warrior (but who sacked more battalion commanders than any general in modern American history). One of the great generals of World War Two, he was closely associated in the public mind with Eisenhower, but he was also, as far as the Republican right was concerned, a man of Europe and containment. Worse for them, he had dissented from MacArthur more than anyone else. The final straw, though, turned out to be his refusal to support Eisenhower as he cut back traditional military forces and bet everything on a nuclear response.

If the critics of the Truman-Acheson years had seemed to envision a simpler world, in which nothing limited American power and the atomic weapon offered an easy answer to every military dilemma, they now had, in Admiral Radford, a Chairman of the JCS who shared their views.

More, in the view of American policymakers, the source of all evil was not even the Vietminh but an aggressive, militaristic, imperialist, Communist China. By 1954 it was increasingly obvious that French and American interests in Indochina, which had been seemingly compatible for the preceding four years, were now about to diverge; the Americans now had more interest in continuing the Indochina war than did the French, who increasingly wanted out.

The Americans were becoming extremely nervous that the French would pull out of Indochina. The National Security Council met on September 9, 1953, to deal with the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation to help fund the Navarre plan. Dulles began by giving a fairly pessimistic appraisal: All in all, he thought French chances were poor. But we might as well pay the money, he argued, because the Laniel government was as good as we were likely to get. George Humphrey, the secretary of the treasury, spoke like a small businessman: “Well look, we’ve got a proposition here in which we’ve put an awful lot of money in the past. Mr. Dulles says this is the last hope of salvaging the investment. Therefore I think we should go ahead and make the further funds available.” With that the Americans decided to pay for much of the Navarre plan. By all rights the Navarre plan should have excluded a battle for a small and not particularly valuable outpost along the Laotian border.

In a way the very concept was a study in Western arrogance, for the war had already been going on for seven years, and even casual study of the other side should have given the French commander a healthy respect for the Vietminh’s bravery, combat skills, and, above all, their ability to conserve resources. Navarre believed that General Giap, the Vietminh commander, could bring at most a reinforced division to bear upon this distant position. It proved to be a terrible miscalculation, one of the worst of many such in this war, for Giap eventually moved three divisions into play. It would be a trap all right, but for which side was the question.

The Vietminh soldiers were physically tough, able to travel as much as twenty miles a day. They had the most primitive footwear, often only rubber sandals cut from tires, but “our feet are made of iron,” the soldiers used to say. Like the Chinese who had fought the Americans in Korea, they traveled lightly, carrying only their weapons, some water, and some salt. Giap would eventually be viewed as one of the two or three greatest military strategists of the twentieth century, but General Salan regarded him, in effect, as a noncommissioned officer who had not even been to a military staff college. When Giap’s name was mentioned in French dispatches, the title “General” was put in quotation marks, as if to mock him.

But Giap’s ability was far greater than the French realized, though, thanks to a secret new, if rather primitive, weapon: the bicycle. The Viets had reinforced two thousand of them with extra supports so that peasants could load and push them through the primitive trails to Dien Bien Phu.

“Let’s have no illusions,” Navarre told his staff officers the second night. “I hope the Viets aren’t going to start again tonight. We shall have to find some other solution.” It was to prove a nightmare; there was little in the way of food, water, or medical support, and little cover. The Viets did, contrary to Colonel Piroth’s opinion, know how to use their artillery pieces, and in fact they had positioned them brilliantly.

Suddenly, this war with its thousand little skirmishes was focused on one dramatic and poignant battle. Dien Bien Phu became a household word, and the question of whether the embattled French garrison would survive was taken up as an international issue.

Here then was the first test of the New Look and of the new Eisenhower-Dulles doctrine, the keystone of which was that no additional Asian country should fall to the Communists. For the next two months John Foster Dulles was a man constantly in motion, cajoling, pushing, and stroking allies, telling them half truths about each other, almost like a socially ambitious dinner party hostess who tells one prized would-be guest that another (who has not yet accepted) is coming in order to get the first guest to come.

The Democrats in Congress, seeing the approach of a Republican dilemma and just having been attacked for being soft on Communism, sat back and watched with no small amount of glee as the administration juggled this. “The damn Republicans blamed us for losing China and now we can blame them for losing Southeast Asia,” Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., then a congressman, was heard to say after one congressional briefing.

In all of this John Foster Dulles was the featured performer. Ostensibly, he seemed to favor intervention, and he spoke passionately at the meetings convened on the subject; evidently, he even asked the French foreign minister if they wanted atomic weapons. But the French demurred, pointing out that atomic weapons would not be helpful, since they would destroy the French garrison as well as the Vietminh.

At one point in early April, he wrote Churchill a surprisingly passionate letter asking him to join in united action: “If I may refer again to history; we failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?” A few days later, at a press conference, he outlined for the first time what became known as the domino theory. In response to a question about Indochina he answered: “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. So you could have the beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound consequences.” The loss of Dien Bien Phu, he said, would have dire consequences for Australia, New Zealand, and even Japan. Gradually, Dulles was forcing others to make the case against intervention and thereby take the blame.

General Matt Ridgway was unyielding in his opposition to the idea of intervention. He was also unalterably opposed to the New Look and the implication that wars could be fought quickly, easily, and antiseptically. He had witnessed the worst fighting in both World War Two and Korea, and in Korea, particularly, he had seen what the Air Force had promised to do with strategic bombing and how limited, in fact, strategic bombing was as an instrument of policy. If we bombed, he argued, we would end up inevitably using ground troops. Ridgway saw air power as a sort of high-tech aspirin; it gave some immediate relief, but it did not cure the underlying problem.

He did not merely dissent on such general terms, though. Since his President was a soldier, he made the case against intervention in terms that a soldier would understand: He sent a team of planners to Vietnam to find out what victory would take in terms of manpower. The answer was devastating: minimally, five divisions and quite possibly ten (there had been six divisions in Korea), plus fifty-five engineering battalions. Altogether, that meant between 500,000 and 1 million men. Draft calls would be far greater than those for Korea. The existing infrastructure was horrendous, and the construction costs would be immense. Worse, political conditions on the ground would be much worse than in Korea. There the indigenous population had generally supported American intervention. That would not be true in Indochina. No one ordered the Ridgway report; he did it on his own because of a profound conviction that if you were going to send young men into battle, you had better know exactly what you were getting into. When he briefed Eisenhower on what the cost would be, a groan seemed to come from the President. Ike was, Ridgway noted laconically years later, a much better listener than Lyndon Johnson. The other restraining influence was the British resistance to the idea. No matter how much Dulles pushed, neither Churchill nor Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, would bend. The pressure, much of it from Radford,

On April 26, Radford dined with Churchill. If Radford did not get exactly what he wanted—a British commitment to send troops—he got something more important: a wise lecture on the limits of power from one of the great men of the era who was watching his own nation’s power contract in the twilight of his career. Churchill had begun by talking about the British decision to give up India in 1947. He had been in opposition then, he said, and he had hated the idea of giving up so important a country, one Britain had ruled for 250 years. He had regarded this as one of the most painful decisions of a long career, but he had come to accept it. Radford had to understand this when he viewed the British decision on Indochina. He was asking a nation that had given up the most valuable part of its own empire without firing a shot to fight to preserve French colonialism. That could not be done. The British people, he said, would not accept

Churchill accepted that there might be serious regional consequences, but he warned Radford, prophetically, that the most important thing was to defuse the tensions with the Soviets and not “to squander our limited resources around the fringes.”

Then Dulles finally went on national television and blamed the British; we would have gone in, he seemed to be saying, but for the Allies. That took care of the domestic politics. We had not lost the war, our allies had. The post fell on May 7.

It was over. There was great bitterness among America’s most important allies, most particularly the French, whose garrison had been forced to surrender. The British felt the Americans had not merely tried to initiate a policy beyond their reach but behaved arrogantly.

At a conference in Geneva, Vietnam was divided up, with the North becoming a Communist state under Ho Chi Minh and the South an anti-Communist society under Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic mandarin who had sat out the war in America and was now being installed by the Americans. Both sides, ironically, resented the Geneva settlement; the North, with good reason, felt it had been on the verge of a total victory but had been pressured by the Soviets to settle for half the pie.

feeling that somehow the French had sold out and given the Communists a victory at the conference table.

made and that Dulles should do it in the friendly forum of Life magazine, in an article by a particularly friendly writer, James Shepley. Published in January 1956, it was called: “How Dulles Averted War.” The theme of the article was that foreign policy under Eisenhower and Dulles had not been merely a bland continuation of past (cowardly) policies, as some critics had charged, but that Dulles, backed by the atomic weapon, had walked to the very brink of war, had stared down the country’s enemies, and thereby brought back an otherwise unattainable peace.

From the article came the famous term for Dulles’s foreign policy, brinkmanship. Hearing later of Dulles’s boasts about his trips to the brink and the calculated risk involved, Georges Bidault, the former French foreign minister, noted with no small degree of bitterness that “It involved a great deal of calculation but no risks.” How wrong Dulles was to claim that we had escaped the taint of colonialism, the next generation of American policymakers would find out.

We could not see the affairs of Vietnam as they really were, mired as we were in prejudices generated by our own domestic politics. Rhetoric, repeated by Foster Dulles, emphasized that Vietnam was part of the larger struggle with China. We did not pause to understand why a peasant army had defeated a powerful Western army. Anyone who tried to talk about why the other side had won was vulnerable to charges of being soft on Communism.

BY THE EARLY 1950S the Supreme Court was in chaos, racked, ironically, by long-simmering divisions among the four judges appointed by Roosevelt; if nothing else, the conflict reflected something of the political contradictions and deviousness of the man who had appointed them. The personal squabbles among the four intellectually towering figures—Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, Hugo Black, and William O. Douglas—sometimes seemed more serious than the political ones.

There were two clear political factions on the Court, the more liberal Black/Douglas wing and the conservative Jackson/Frankfurter one—Frankfurter, a great liberal as a young man, believed that the Court was a conservative institution and seemed to want to reaffirm precedent as if his vote belonged more to the Court’s past than to his own instincts. Frankfurter referred to Black and Douglas sarcastically in his letters as the “great libertarians,” and his close friend Judge Learned Hand (who longed to be on the Court himself) referred to them in letters to Frankfurter as “the Jesus Choir,” and “the Holy Ones.” Jackson was hardly less virulent: He said of Black that “I simply give up trying to understand our colleague and begin to think he is a case for a psychiatrist.” Of a Black opinion, Frankfurter once noted, “It makes me puke.”

They did not welcome Vinson as a kindred spirit; instead, they looked down on him as second-rate; his former political strengths became liabilities. “This man,” Philip Elman, an influential Frankfurter clerk, wrote his boss, “is a pygmy, morally and mentally. And so uncouth.” Not that Frankfurter, a great intellectual snob, needed a great deal of convincing. If anything, the Court under Vinson fragmented even further, and in the early McCarthy years, as the issues of civil liberties came before the Court, Vinson took a simplistic (some might say craven) view toward protecting them.

By this time a number of cases challenging the right of states to segregate their schools, including one filed in (of all unlikely but highly segregated places) Topeka, Kansas, had worked their way through the judicial process and had reached the Supreme Court. The Kansas case had been filed in 1951 by a black welder named Oliver Brown, who objected to the fact that his eight-year-old daughter, Linda, had to go twenty-one blocks by bus to a black school when there was a white school only seven blocks from her house. Brown, a mild, religious man, was hardly a local radical: He had tried hard to register his daughter at the all-white Sumner School but finally decided to sue the local school board. The case was filed under the title Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In the South, the concept of separate but equal had always been a sham: It might have been separate, but it never was equal.

The Southern states were spending twice as much to educate white children as they were black children and four times as much for school facilities; white teacher salaries were 30 percent higher; and there was virtually no transportation for black children to and from school. The disparity was even greater at the college level, where the Southern states spent $86 million on white colleges and $5 million on black colleges. A study by Ralph Bunche showed that the poll tax was highly effective in keeping blacks out of the political process; only 2.5 percent of the black population voted in the presidential election of 1940 in the deep South.

Thurgood Marshall, the shrewd, folksy black lawyer, had started working for the NAACP in 1936 for the grand sum of $2,400 a year, plus expenses, and he carried the burden of much of the litigation. Marshall argued most of the early civil rights cases in small Southern courtrooms and suffered the worst indignities of segregation himself, not to mention the threat of physical danger. No town in which he argued seemed to be large enough to have a hotel or restaurant for black people.

On occasion, he liked to reminisce about the small town in Mississippi where a local resident had told him, “Nigguh, I thought you oughta know the sun ain’t nevah set on a live nigguh in this town.” So, he noted, he had “wrapped my constitutional rights in cellophane, tucked ’em in my hip pocket,” and caught the next train out of there. Marshall and a handful of colleagues attacked the segregationists where they were most vulnerable—in the border and Southwestern states, where racism was less virulent.

By 1950, the Supreme Court began to tilt away from segregation and had outlawed it in graduate schools. Marshall and his handful of colleagues had carefully and indeed cautiously escalated what had begun as piecemeal raids on the periphery of segregation into a full-scale assault upon its very core. That meant taking on the critical precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson, the critical decision made some sixty years earlier.

“The Fourteenth Amendment,” Thurgood Marshall liked to say, “was no more or less than a codification of the Judeo-Christian ethic.” But slowly and steadily after that, the pendulum had swung back to reflect the prejudices of the white power establishment.

It was a remarkably insensitive decision, reversing the tide of legal equality begun after the Civil War. “Justice Brown, in short would make no provision for the fact or purpose or result of the Civil War,” wrote Richard Kluger, a historian of the segregation decisions. “He [Justice Brown] wrote as if the South had won.” The vote against Plessy was seven to one, the one dissenting cast by John Marshall Harlan, the leading intellect of the Court and himself a very conservative man. In a passionate dissent, he noted that if the state could do this to blacks on railroad cars, could it not do it elsewhere to other groups, “of native and naturalized citizens of the United States, or of Protestants and Roman Catholics?” He added: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power.... But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.”

In the vacuum of presidential and congressional inaction on the subject—the Democratic party, after all, was paralyzed by the power of its Southern wing in the Congress—the issue was finally passed on to the Supreme Court.

Vinson on such issues, Frankfurter, a conservative who nevertheless was convinced that segregation had to end, foresaw a decision that would end segregation, but only by a five-to-four vote. Such a narrow margin would make implementation difficult, if not impossible. As a delaying tactic, Frankfurter suggested rehearing the arguments. The new hearings were scheduled for December 1953, but in September Vinson suddenly died of a heart attack. “This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God,” said Frankfurter.

The one blot on his record was his leading role in interning Japanese-Americans in detention camps during World War Two.

We don’t want to have a second Pearl Harbor in California. We don’t propose to have the Japs back in California during this war if there is any lawful means of preventing it.” Later he expressed considerable regret for his actions, although he was somewhat defensive in his memoirs: In 1972, when he was interviewed on the subject, he broke down in tears as he spoke of little children being taken from their homes and schools, and the interview had to be stopped while he recovered his composure.

He was quite comfortable with his own squareness. He hated the pornography cases he had to review, and after reading some of the books and magazines involved, he often needed to get out and take some fresh air. When his law clerks twitted him about this, he would respond, “You boys don’t have any daughters yet.” He was a member of both the Moose and Masons. “Warren’s great strength,” said Justice Potter Stewart years later, “was his simple belief in the things we now laugh at—motherhood, marriage, family and the flag.”

Warren’s greatest skill, perhaps, was his ability to cut to the core of an issue. He immediately came to the conclusion that the Court had to confront Plessy directly. Previous cases, he later told the writer Richard Kluger, had all but stripped Plessy down and the concept of separate but equal had, in his words, “been so eroded that only the fact of segregation itself remained unconsidered.

Plessy, he believed, could only exist based on the idea of Negro inferiority. He was not eager to overturn so important a law from the past, but he did not want to continue punishing black children by sending them to inferior schools. That had to end. The law, he said in one meeting and in words noted by Frankfurter, “cannot in ‘this day and age’ set them apart.”

Tom Clark, with roots in Texas and Mississippi, was perceived as a segregationist, but he would, he signaled the new Chief, be willing to end segregation as long as the decision reflected the complexity of the problem ahead, region by region, and was not punitive to the South. Stanley Reed appeared to be the only true segregationist on the Court.

Later after the dinner was over, Ike took Warren by the arm and walked with him to the sitting room. “These are not bad people,” he said of the Southerners who were defending themselves in the segregation cases. “All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big black bucks.” It was the first sign that the President and the Chief Justice were going to part ways on the most important case before the Supreme Court.

Jackson still needed some convincing. He was scornful of the briefs by the NAACP—they were sociology, not law, he thought. But gradually he was won over in conferences.