The Fifties

by David Halberstam

THE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD WAS turning out to be a more difficult and complicated place than Eisenhower’s policymakers had ever imagined. In the 1952 campaign, the Republicans had criticized the Democrats for losing so much of the world to the Communists. But now that the Republicans were in office, they found they had inherited a world filled with trouble spots that might easily go Communist on their watch. In Indochina, the French were fighting a colonial war against an indigenous Communist-nationalist force, and despite optimism from French military headquarters, the war was obviously not going well. The French public was tiring of it, and French politicians were beginning to ask America for increasing amounts of aid. As the colonial order collapsed in other parts of the world, a process much accelerated by World War Two, which had significantly weakened the traditional colonial powers, Marxism found fertile new ground. The Republicans found themselves facing a real dilemma; they did not want to “lose” any countries to Communism, but there were obvious limits to American military and political power abroad. In addition, as the Korean War proved, there were certain domestic restraints on American military involvement in the third world. The Eisenhower administration quickly