The USA in Eisenhower's Time – 1953-1961
by Mike Donovan
“I Like Ike” - General Eisenhower, hero of World War II - The President from Kansas. – The Spirit of Geneva - He kept us out of war, and (unlike with Wilson) it wasn’t a slogan on a placard. – VP Richard Nixon – Whipped Stevenson of Illinois in 52 and 56 – He smoked four packs of Camel straights a day - Electoral College tally for 1952- Ike 442, Adlai 89 - 1956 the EC result was 457-73
“I feel pretty good when I’m attacked by both sides. It makes me more certain I’m on the right track.”
Ike
Popular Vote 1952--------------------Eisenhower R)
33,936,000
Stephenson D)
27,314,000
Popular vote 1956---------------------Eisenhower R)
35,590,000
Stevenson D)
26,022,000
Mr Golf, Ike had his faults, and most historians list him as a below-average president. I do not agree. Eisenhower was the military man who ended the Korean War and then kept us out of war in the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956.
Eisenhower was more of the grandfatherly figure in the White House than the fatherly. Comedian Lenny Bruce in 1961 did a bit about how young and hip JFK was, and said, “I could never picture Eisenhower kissing his wife, not on the mouth anyway” as the audience howled with delight.
Ike once called FDR an ‘egomaniac’ for his belief in the infallibility of his every opinion. It was recorded on audiotape and when he heard it played back, Ike decided to stop the practice of taping his White House conversations. If only Nixon had learned.
The left called him 'stupid' throughout his presidency because of his bad syntax that sometimes slipped out when he spoke extemporaneously at press conferences.
Eisenhower’s cabinet;
Secretary of State-------------------John Foster Dulles—
1953-1959
Christian Herter---
1959-1961
Secretary of Defense------------------Charles E. Wilson
1953-1957
Neil H. McElroy-----
1957-1959
Thomas S. Gates, Jr.-
1959-1961
Treasury------------------------------George M. Humphrey—
1953-1957
Robert B. Anderson—
1957-1961
Attorney General---------------------------H. Brownell Jr.----
1953-1957
William P. Rogers—
1957-1961
Secretary of Labor---------------------- Martin P. Durkin-
1953
Claude Lashua---
1953-1961
CABNOTES
Dulles was never dull. JFD was the rabid anti-communist who kept the left agitated day and night. The liberals hated Dulles as a militarist anti-Christ. Dulles hated the Communists quite a bit, but not nearly as much as the Communists hated him. Dulles made Don Rumsfeld look like Ramsey Clark.
Martin P. Durkin at Labor was a controversial choice within the Ike advisory group. “Durk” was an avowed Fair Deal Democrat and a labor union leader. Eisenhower thought that he could keep the labor squabbles out the White House by setting up a sort of lightning rod one of their own to handle troubles at the Department of Labor.
With Durkin in charge it was hoped that labor leaders would instinctually go to him with their complaints rather than to the public and the President. Things didn’t work out that way and after only eight months, Durkin was replaced by Claude L. Lashua.
Charlie Wilson the former president of General Motors was America's first 'Secretary of Defense.' Prior to Ike, the post was called more honestly, the 'Secretary of War.'
BIO
Dwight Eisenhower’s parents were Kansans who tried life in Texas for only two years before moving back to Kansas. In that interval Dwight David was born in 1890, a Ben Harrison baby. So while like Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, Dwight was born in Texas, he was not really a Texan, any more than I am because I lived in Austin and worked at an Arby's Roast Beef in 1976.
Ike had six brothers. His father made a modest income at an Abilene creamery. The home was strictly religious with Bible reading a regular thing. Dwight’s parents belonged to the River Brethren, a Protestant group.
When he attended Abilene High, Ike energetically applied himself to history studies. The school yearbook predicted Eisenhower would someday end up as a history professor at Yale.
Eisenhower attended West Point from 1911 to 1915. He had originally wanted a Navy career at Annapolis but when he was accepted at West Point he saw the hole in the line of scrimmage and hit it.
Eisenhower didn't like studying, except for history, and was only an average Pointer. What he really loved was sports. He had his mind on the playing field when he was in class. Eisenhower played some baseball and hockey but mostly he played and excelled at football. In his freshman year Eisenhower got the attention of the varsity coaches with his all out hard-hitting style.
Though not large at 175 pounds, Eisenhower was very strong and was completely aggressive on the field. I know, because he says so in his book At Ease. Having read three large Eisenhower books previously, I can tell you that the one quality that comes through overwhelmingly is how much Ike is not a braggart. He is the complete opposite of a braggart. So when he goes out on a short but firm bragging limb on this one subject of football, and tells us that he was a demonic hard-hitter on the field, I for one totally believe him.
Having made the Army Football varsity team late in his freshman season Ike had dreams of a glorious football career at the Point. Preparing for his second year he had packed on some more muscle and was starting out well. Then one day Ike was making a block when some chump on the Tufts team took Ike down by his ankle. The chain reaction up the leg caused a knee injury. It swelled a bit and Dwight was in the hospital a few days. When the swelling subsided he left the hospital. Then Ike went back to athletics. This was a mistake. The knee had not healed. During a horse riding exercise he jumped off the horse, landed on his bad knee and you could hear him yell all the way back to Abilene. That game against Tufts was the last of Ike’s football career.
The Tufts chump that took Ike out of football and into politics was a kid named Blaine Richardson. His son Bill went on to become governor of Arizona and a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet. (We might note that several men have claimed to be the one that took Ike out, so we have to trust Bill Richardson's word on honor on that one ... hmmm.)
Eisenhower was promoted to first lieutenant in 1916. But in July of that year he earned life’s best promotion when he married Mamie Geneva Doud.
During The First World War Eisenhower commanded a tank training school at Gettysburg called Camp Colt.
Then for many years he was senior aide to the venerable Doug MacArthur. Ike was at MacArthur’s side as they tore the Bonus Marcher’s tents apart in D.C. in the summer of ’32. Ike insisted on using a machete.
His rise through the ranks of the U.S. Army was not a result of hand-to-hand combat heroics, but rather the result of his honesty, intelligence, diligence, and the ability to see a complex problem and then, without panic, devise the most logical solutions. Ike was a desk clerk that was so good at it and so well liked, and was so fair and honest with everyone, that within two years of our entry into the Second World War he was the Commander in Chief of our forces in Europe. It was remarkable rise to the top for a soldier who had never fired a shot in combat.
Eisenhower's book Crusade in Europe, tells the story of how he led the Allied Armies to victory on the Continent in 1944-45. It is one of the finest books ever written on this planet as far as I'm concerned. DDE was the star of his day, the ultimate celebrity. Yet as powerful as he was, he never lost his the-guy-next-door aura.
Members of both political parties approached Eisenhower in 1948, hoping they could entice him to run for President on their ticket. Mr. Eisenhower turned them all down and never told a soul which party he preferred.
I like Ike. He had a lot of class and never took a cheap shot at anybody. If he criticized anyone it was done without public humiliation. If there was a rare criticism in public, he did it without mentioning the culprit by name if at all possible. What a far cry from today’s politicians. Ike is from another era that had a lot of class. Mine has advanced more in many great social issues, but in personal demeanor and decorum, the days of Eisenhower were a cut above.
Ike took command of NATO after the Second World War.
IMPORTANT EVENTS;
ELECTION OF 1952
DEATH OF STALIN 3.3.53
H-BOMB 53
KOREAN WAR ARMISTICE
SUEZ CANAL CRISIS
FALL OF MCCARTHYISM
RECESSIONS OF 1953 AND 1957
BROWN VS BOARD 1954
GUATEMALA AND THE CIA 1954
GENEVA ACCORDS 1954
GENEVA SUMMIT 1955
I AM BORN 1955
ELECTION OF 1956
JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY
RUSSIAN LAUNCH FIRST EARTH SATELLITES 57
OFFSHORE OIL LEASES RETURNED TO STATES
NIXON ABUSED IN CARACAS 1958
INTEGRATION CRISIS
INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM BEGUN
DIEN BIEN PHU
CAMP DAVID SUMMIT 1959
SEATO: NATO FOR ASIA
FRANCIS GARY POWERS DOWN
WALT DISNEY SNUBS KRUSHCHEV
ELECTION OF 1952
52 was the first TV campaign. When the TV handlers showed Ike the finished product that was to be his first campaign commercial he said with a resigned sigh, “To think that an old soldier has come to this.”
1952 was shades of Billy Harrison and Zack Taylor. Once again an apolitical Army general seeks the White House based on personal heroism combined with the lack of a political past and vague stances on all issues.
The Democrats whine to this day that Ike (like Grant in 1868) wasn’t really a Republican. He could have run on either ticket. In some different circumstance he would have won and run as a Democrat, they imply. It wasn’t really a victory on your side, you just happened to get lucky and bag a popular chameleon.
The charge is not true. Eisenhower did not care for the New Deal of FDR and had been secretly a Republican fellow-traveler for some time. However he had managed to keep his political leanings a national secret.
In December of 1950, Ike was head of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By the middle of 1951 many Republican leaders were once again begging Eisenhower to run for President in 1952.
Dwight D. drafted a letter for publication making it quite clear that he was not going to run for president or any other public office. “I will not allow my name to be placed in nomination for Mayor of Scranton, let alone President,” he wrote. But before he got it published he had some people to talk to first.
Ike was very much interested in lending his support to a Republican of his choice. The Kansan began meeting (very secretively we might add) with several Republicans who were considered front-runners. He wanted to find out who he should endorse. Eisenhower was disturbed by his interviews. He found that almost to a man, the Republican candidates for president were either isolationists, or a little too close to it. Eisenhower was the commander of NATO and in that role he had an intensely interventionist and internationalist perspective on U.S. foreign policy. Ike believed that the time of isolationism was over, that the Cold War was serious business, and that if the United States wanted to avoid World War III, it had to maintain a policy of peace through allied strength.
D.D. came to the realization that he was the only popular Republican candidate that believed in his own ideas about US foreign policy. So Ike changed his mind and decided to run. He had no choice but to become the next President of the United States. If you want to get something done in the Cold War, you have to do it yourself. Eisenhower simply could not bear the idea of what a President Taft (the current front-running Republican Senator) would do in the foreign policy field.
One night Mamie came into the living room and asked her husband if he had made up his mind. Ike went into his jacket and pulled out the aforementioned letter declaring that he was not a candidate. He gave her a serious look, then tossed the letter into the crackling fireplace. Mamie says Ike just stared at the letter as it slowly disintegrated. He didn't say a word.
On the Dem side, Truman was on the ballot in the 1948 Democratic primary in New Hampshire. Harry didn’t win. Apparently the polls were showing that half the country refused to say Truman's name unless they were within striking distance of a bucket were accurate. A few days later at the good ol’ Jackson-Jefferson Day Dinner Harry stopped in the middle of the speech and announced that he was not going to run for a third term. People in the audience were gasping “No!” and “You gots ta be kiddin’.” It was a bombshell.
Truman was the guy who learns he is going to get fired then walks into the bosses office and shouts “I quit!” At the end of 1951 his approval rating was 23%! The Democratic party was relieved to be allowed to look elsewhere.
Truman’s record in his second term was a liability, not an asset. Pundits in 2008 commented often that W. Bush is the most unpopular President ever, but that is not accurate. Truman at the end of his second term was the most unpopular president ever.
The leading figure in the newly opened Democratic field was Tennessee senator Estes ‘Droop-a-long’ Kefauver who had made a national name for himself with his committee investigating organized crime. Al Barkley the VP was also in the hunt as was Senator Dick Russell of Georgia.
But these guys had liabilities. Barclay was too old. The fact that he had a young bride didn't make up for much. The labor movement came out openly and declared Kefauver too old.
Insiders did not consider Estes Kefauver a first rate candidate. He was a sluggish public speaker and did not make friends easily. But Estes was passionate and sincere, and behind the poor elocution was some good writing, his words compelling and stimulating if you listened hard enough. Kefauver became the front-runner for President the moment Harry dropped out.
President Truman’s first choice to succeed him was not Kefauver but Freddie Vinson of the Supreme Court. Truman was a friend of Vin. But in the spring if 1952 Truman didn’t have the clout to play ‘king me’. 1952 was not 1836 or 1908 when a President Jackson or a TR could virtually name their successor. Truman’s coattails could be measured with a microscope. After Harry S realized that he was the only one supporting Vinson, he turned next to pushing the candidacy of New York governor Averill Harriman.
The Democrats eventually turned to Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, the grandson of a Vice President under Grover Cleveland of the same name. The man known as ‘The Egghead’ was a charismatic person but another dull orator. I have listened to hours of his speeches and I keep the recordings near my bed in case I have trouble nodding off to sleep. Contemporaries describe Adlai’s excellent speaking skills and charm. I say no way. He was an insufferable windbag bore with a monotonous speech pattern that made him sound 40 years older than he was.
Stevenson annoyed Truman by showing no particular eagerness to be nominated. But it was more complicated than that. Truman invited Stevenson to meet with him and told Adlai that he was the favorite choice of the President. But that was exactly why Stevenson played hard to get. He wanted to run as his own man, not as Harry Truman’s man. Adlai was a proud able and independent politician and without political cleverness he still would not have wanted to run as Truman’s choice. Adlai was not a dummy. Stevenson knew that Truman was growing more unpopular almost by the day and the endorsement of the incumbent was not the key to victory.
If Truman had stayed out of the New Hampshire primary, Stevenson might have been an open candidate long before the convention opened. As it worked out, Stevenson stayed out of all of them and then gave a speech to the convention on opening night as nothing more than the acting governor of Illinois. The convention drafted him while he feigned surprise.
After Stevenson won the nomination Truman showed up at the Convention and made a showy speech about “taking my coat off and doing everything I can to help him win.” Stevenson and his supporters were up the back of the hall thinking, ‘the best thing he can do is stay out of it.” A Truman condemnation would be worth more votes than his support.
Adlai was charming, brilliant and, unlike Truman, a uniter who worked well with opposition people. But Stevenson was never direct and cogent, he was always the talker beating around the bush while everyone checked their watches. He was the very opposite of the man he would be running against in ’52. The Democrats could hardly have nominated a more unappealing candidate in my opinion. A.S. was a well liked and effective politician, but a drone that appealed only to the already converted.
Stevenson however was nobody's lefty. Adlai was a devout anti-Communist and Cold Warrior. The fact that JFK later named him to head the US delegation to the UN in 1961 at a very hot time in the Cold War is proof of that. Stevenson was probably a more activist anti-Communist than any Republican in the hunt for the top spot.
At their convention, the Republicans in the third round chose Dwight David Eisenhower. Dick Nixon, the anti-Communist from Cal was chosen to run for Veep.
The Republican front-runner at the opening of the convention was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. He was easily the favorite amongst Republican insiders. Taft was something of a God within the Party but to the average swing voter he carried some serious foreign policy baggage. Taft was an isolationist.
Of all the serious candidates in both parties Taft was indeed the only unabashed isolationist. He alone among the candidates rejected the idea of “collective security”. The term meant alliances with Europe again, this time to stop a Communist threat. Hadn’t that led to two world wars that we were needlessly dragged into, not to mention the UN war in Korea that was going badly? Who needed more of that? Taft advocated an American Gibraltar, a fortress America, protected by the threat of massive retaliation from air power alone. Taft wanted U.S. troops brought back home from all over the world. As for the Soviet Union and Red China, they should be informed that if they try anything anywhere that threatened our national security interests, the USA was prepared to launch massive air attacks on Russian cities. We would drop first and ask questions later. This would work even better than collective security which was much more complex and devious. Bob believed that alliance systems with Europe and elsewhere were trip-wires. The more alliances we had the more of a chance that one of them could drag us into another war.
It was a profoundly interesting idea and for all we know it might have worked. But for practical purposes it was a moot argument because the Congress and the American people did not support the idea very much. Taft also advocated a “Liberation policy” which defied logic. While pushing for isolationism like a 1920 Lodge, Taft declared that if he were president we would take the offensive with the Communists and infiltrate their states the same way they always try to infiltrate ours. With enough good honest propaganda, we would bring the Communists states down from within. In essence he was proposing to destroy the Communist bloc through leaflets and radio broadcasts. The plan was a joke, but Taft was serious. Even Dwight Eisenhower was alarmed. Taft wanted to appear to be tough on Communism while retreating from actively confronting it.
One of the reasons the draft Ike movement became so appealing to the Republicans was this threat of a Taft victory. Party leaders knew that Taft could win the party nomination on his Ostrich/Eagle plan, but also that such a man would be a sure loser in November. Taft was the plain girl who could make it to the finals of the beauty pageant by playing the piano and making a good speech, but would get clobbered in the finals for obvious reasons.
Heading into the convention Taft had the most pledged delegates, but at the same time all the polls indicated that Ike could beat any Dem and that any Dem could beat Taft. The man from Ohio had to be stopped and the man from Kansas had to be started in order to stop him.
Taft had a slight lead after the first round but a challenge to the rules committee on delegates awarded some disputed bodies to Ike and he emerged from the second round with a slight edge and clear momentum. Taft then graciously withdrew his name and asked that the nomination for Ike be declared unanimous. Taft might have been an isolationist, but he was not an obstructionist.
After the convention Eisenhower, announced dramatically that he was going to look at the situation on the ground in Korea personally during election campaign time. He used his best MacArthur language and proclaimed, “I shall go to Korea.” Ike kept his pledge. He took a tour of the secured areas in Korea, met a lot of adoring GI's and flew back to the states.
Richard Nixon was picked for number 2 largely because of the fame he had gained in the Alger Hiss case. The choice of Nixon as the VP became a controversy when charges surfaced against him that he had maintained a campaign fund of $18,000 which he dipped into for personal use in violation of all ethical standards. Nixon told Ike the charges were false but that he would resign anyway for the good of the campaign. Ike told him that was not necessary.
Nixon decided to go public with his answer to the charges. He addressed the nation in the famous “Checkers’ speech. Richard accounted for every penny of that “slush fund” and defended himself well. The camera panned over to his wife Pat while he explained that she never owned a mink coat, but did have a respectable “Republican cloth coat. And I always say she’d look good in anything.” Then he mentioned that there was one gift that the family had received that he had better own up to because if he didn’t there would be charges against him on that too. Recently he had mentioned in public somewhere that his daughter Tricia had always wanted a dog. Soon the Nixon’s received a big box in the mail. Inside was a happy little cocker spaniel puppy. It had black and white spots all over it so Tricia named it ‘Checkers.’ Then Nixon looked into the camera and said that regardless of what anyone said, they were going to keep him.
The speech worked and the slush charge melted away. Ike noted the favorable reaction to the speech and then came out in public defense of his VP. Nixon’s memoirs indicate that he resented the fact that Ike didn’t come out publicly in his defense until the general made sure that the speech had been well received. Ike sat on the fence when Nixon could have used the help.
While campaigning in Wisconsin, Eisenhower made a lifelong enemy out of former president Harry Truman, which was pretty easy to do since Truman was a bitter man who held grudges against Republicans to a sick fault.
Wisconsin was the home state of bad-guy Joseph McCarthy who was running for re-election. Tail gunner Joe had recently been verbally attacking Secretary of State Marshall, the man Truman most admired in the world. A planned Eisenhower speech had included a passage of clear and deliberate praise for George Marshall, but Eisenhower deleted the passage out of deference to the wishes of the McCarthy campaign for re-election. The Ike speech was delivered without any compliments for Marshall. Truman was so angry with Ike over this that from that time on every time Eisenhower’s name was mentioned in Truman’s presence, Harry would stop and say something rude I'd rather not repeat.
Truman believed that if Eisenhower had defied McCarthy and praised Marshall, it might have made the difference in the Wisconsin senatorial election and the nation might have rid itself of the McCarthyism by peaceful means before it grew into the Godzilla it later became.
1952 Ike Throws Stevenson Out Of the Ring
The Democrats were never gracious about losing in 52 or 56. They claimed that Ike wasn’t really a Republican, that he could have gone either way and that in fact he had almost run for them in 1948. The Dems still bring that one up now and then as a jab. They claim the Republican interlude between the New Deal and the New Frontier wasn’t really a Republican presidency anyway. Ike was just Ike.
“He was just popular, that's all,” whined Humphrey and others for the next three decades in interviews.
Oh! Just popular. Last time I checked that's how you win the popular vote. They said that about Reagan too. “It wasn't his policies they liked, he was just popular. They just liked him.” It's all just bitter sore-loser unfair carping excuse towel rhetoric. By that logic Milton Berle could have run as a Republican in the 1950's and won twice.
GOLF
Critics ripped Ike for 8 years because he golfed too much. I once asked my dad what he thought of Eisenhower and he said, “He was always golfing.”
Somehow this golfing business always angers people. I hate golf, but I could care less if a President in charge of the nukes wants to golf a lot.
When Bill Clinton went golfing, and he did it often enough, there was never any backlash against him. Apparently for some strange reason it’s only wrong for Republican President’s to go on vacation and golf. In the movie Fahrenheit 911, 912 lb. film maker Michael Moore shows President Bush golfing after the World Trade Center bombing while the flash in the pan pop group from 1980 the Go Go’s are overdubbed singing their lame hit “Vacation” – Get it? He’s going on a vacation and they are singing a chorus with the word “Vacation” in it.
In 1991 Bush senior took a lot of heat for spending time golfing when there was a crisis in the Persian Gulf and then for golfing when there was the August crisis in the Soviet Union. How dare he do that!
Ike golfed frequently with Prescott Bush, the freshman Connecticut Senator and grandfather of GHWB. There's some nine-irony there.
Golf is a quiet safe haven for our beleaguered president, whatever the Party. What is a President supposed to do for recreation, shoot dice in a slum alleyway? When President-elect Obama vacationed in Hawaii for two weeks before taking the oath of office in 2009 while the economy collapsed and the nation panicked, he was not criticized for two reasons; he didn't golf and he was a Democrat.
WINDING DOWN THE KOREAN WAR
In the negotiations in Korea, Eisenhower’s emissaries dropped tactless hints to the Communists that Ike wouldn’t be so averse to introducing tactical nuclear weapons as compared with his predecessor. These threats worked.
America had an overwhelming nuclear superiority when Ike took over the White House. The USA had 1,420 nukes in 1953. The Soviet Union had 120. Great Britian touched one off that same year, increasing the mushroom club to three. But the UK was already nuclear protected with US nukes on English soil.
By the time Eisenhower left office in January of 1961, the US had close to 20,000 nukes. However, the Soviet Union had 2,000. This was more than the US had possessed in 1953 and more than enough to constitute a clear deterrent to reckless military adventurism by the United States in areas controlled or well influenced by the USSR.
By the time Kennedy took office, the Soviet Union thus had a major strategic nuclear offensive capability, including deployed delivery systems. When Ike took office that was not the case, and he used that nuclear threat to help end the Korean War.
DULLES LINKS KOREA AND NAM
Just before the final negotiations to end the Korean War John Foster Dulles tried to make it a precondition that China agree to desist from any aggressions in Southeast Asia as a the price for a settlement in Korea. Ike's other advisors convinced him that China would never agree to this so it was not put in play. It's possible that if Ike had taken the advice of crazy right-wing nut Dulles, the story of the Vietnam War would have been different. The Korean War would have perhaps been extended and the Vietnam War perhaps would have been avoided!
DULLES DOCTRINE OF MASSIVE RETALIATION
The new Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was a hawk to beat all hawks. He took the theories of NSC 68 and 79 and escalated nuclear deterrence to nuclear brinkmanship.
Dulles took the concept of flexible response and turned it into inflexible response. Ike wasn't President two months before Dulles made a prominent speech in which he outlined the new administrations' policy of “massive retaliation.”
What it amounted to was simple. If anyone crossed the United States anywhere, anytime for any reasons, the United States would blow them to bits. We would drop so many nukes on you it will make WWII look like a couple of firecrackers.
The Policy Planning Staff of the Truman Administration felt that all the work they had done to build up a bipartisan consensus for a flexible response including all levels of conventional and nuclear options had been tossed out the window as soon as the new guys took over
Granted, it was Ike and Dulles prerogative to to conduct foreign policy as they saw fit, but this was hair trigger reactionary. Was it all a bluff? Would the United States really rain nukes on anyone who started up with us like the Koreans did in 1950? Or was it an excuse to justify Ike's massive defense cuts, that made a wide range of flexible response impossible?
TO WIN A NUCLEAR WAR
Ike wanted to keep up an image as Mr. Peace so he was reluctant to even listen to anyone who wanted to discuss plans to win a nuclear war. Ike would throw up his hands almost literally block his ears with his hands like a child with a “I don't want to hear of this! A nuclear war is unthinkable!”
“But Ike, what if we are attacked by Russian nukes and then we have to ...
“I said I don't want to even think about it!”
That's really not far from what went on for the first five years under Ike. The Sputnik Soviet missile of 57 finally did get his attention.
In the era of Bushes and Clintons it's the Republicans who are the big military spenders, and the Democrats who are always cutting from defense. But from Truman to LBJ it was somewhat reversed. It was Ike that kept cutting the defense budget while the egghead hawks were flabbergasted with him for doing it. Then when JFK got in he jacked up defense spending by 300%, and he was the Democrat.
For the first seven years of DD's presidency the nuke nerds were concerned primarily about US vulnerability to a first strike by the Soviet Air Force. But then the Russians made some ICBM's operational near the middle of 1959 and by the end of 1960 had a couple of hundred ready to hit New York or LA as the push of a button or turn of a key. The USA had the Atlas deployed to match it.
The threat of nuclear holocaust was real enough in the pre ICMB years too. The simple delivery system of the bomber plane had a remarkable ability to get through. It's easy to think, 'hey we send up a hundred fighter jets and blow those bombers out of the sky before the reach New York.” But it wasn't that way. One or two jet bombers at the very least is certainly going to get through out of a squadron of 24.
The nuclear war thinkers were primarily concerned that the United States did not have a second strike capability. Both sides had a first strike capability. Everyone does. Togo has a first strike capability against France. A 70 year old nun has first strike capabilities against the heavyweight boxing champ if he's sitting in PF Chang's having a shrimp roll and reading the paper. It's second strike capability that decides most battles. It was the studied opinion of several think tanks that the United States could get knocked out with one Billy Martin sucker-punch from Russia. We would then have to make a humiliating peace settlement with Russia because we had no second strike deterrent. The Gaither report gathered that 90% of US nuclear forces could be destroyed in a first strike before we got one B-52 off the ground in retaliation.
Changes were urged, including panic level improvement of our early warning radar systems all over the globe, rapid development of our ICBM program both land and sub, and a stand-by alert system for our B-52 crews.
The B-52's were great planes (though quite ugly in my opinion) but what good were they if the crews were scattered all over the place at any given moment and only one or two were on immediate stand-by. A new system had to be and was developed whereby half of the total B-52 force was always on 15-minute stand-by for war.
BROWN VS BOARD MAY 1954
In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were illegal. May 17, 1954 was the date for this explosive Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka decision. Brown vs. Board said that ‘separate but equal’ was an oxymoron, thus overturning the old Plessy vs. Ferguson decision of the second Grover Cleveland administration.
Brown vs. Board was a landmark decision and was honored in the breach rather than in the enforcement. As is so often in important Supreme Court rulings, the enforcement would begin only in gradual increments after the ruling. New law usually runs ahead of its application. It was certainly true of the Sherman and Clayton anti-trust acts, and it would be true again in the school segregation issue. The Boston busing crisis of 1974 would attest to that.
In 1957 the Brown vs. Board ruling faced its first crisis when 9 black teenagers enrolled at Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas. Racist redneck Governor Faubus called out the National Guard, not to protect the students, but to prevent the students from entering the building.
A few days later President Eisenhower called out the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army to escort the students safely to class. Then Governor Faubus closed down all the high schools in Little Rock for two years (some kids have all the luck).
Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which had more bark than bite. CRA 57 was weakly or not at all enforced. But it was a great moral victory for the just cause, creating momentum for the years ahead. It was similar to Brown vs. Board in the sense that the law is written years ahead of any infrastructure to enforce it with, but the legal precedents are established and everyone knows who’s got the momentum.
In 1998 Central High School in Little Rock was declared a national monument and is currently administered by the National Parks Service. Governor Faubus spittoons and dart boards are sold in the gift shop.
THE COLD WAR
The map below gives a good account of the state of the Cold War on or about 1954 – black and white text is mine – This is from a mid 1950's high school history book.
Brown ‘Other countries receiving aid from the US’
Pink – ‘Soviet Satellites and occupied areas’
GUATEMALA 1954
The CIA in 1954 sponsored and supported an army coup in Guatemala to overthrow an allegedly pro-Communist government there. In general the verdict of the historians is not good for the USA in this episode. The two charges against America are that,
One, that the Guatemalan government that we overthrew was not Communist at all.
Two, that the real motive for the invasion was to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company, which owned a sizable portion of Guatemalan lands and whose corporate leadership included many men with high connections in the US Government.
One motive for the invasion is rarely mentioned by the leftorians. President Arbenz in 1954 was seeking and receiving military assistance from the Soviet Union in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. Weapons were shipped to Guatemala from the Soviet bloc Skoda armaments factory.
The Guatemalan government had decided to seize a quarter of a million acres of United Fruit land in Guatemala on the grounds that it was not being cultivated. There would be compensation for the ‘expropriation,’ but when it saw the compensatory figures, United Fruit went bananas. UFC instead worked behind the scenes in Washington to promote US sponsored military intervention.
In addition to land redistribution, Arbenz also legalized trade unions. The head of the largest new trade union happened to be an avowed Communist.
The presentist historians point out that 2% of the Guatemalans owned most of the land and so the US should have supported this progressive Communist supported land legislation. But is that really progressive as measured by American Progressive standards? No. In fact, except for a few months early in the Civil War, the United States has always been fundamentally opposed to forced seizure of land and redistribution of it to the poor.
So what we have here is the United Sates overreacting to a sincerely perceived Communist threat, but partly in the name of a big business lobby in Washington.
Eisenhower had no interest in the prosperity of United Fruit even if his man Dulles did. Ike was reacting to what he saw as a Communist leftist penetration of Central America.
American actions here are hard to defend because of everything we know today after 40 years of research by leftist scholars. But from the vantage point of the 1954 Oval office, it wasn’t insanity or right-wing lunacy at all.
If the United States was guilty of destroying a budding democracy in Guatemala, and if the CIA provoked needless killing in a bad cause, that is a disgrace to the USA. But Truman would have done the same thing, and there are documents to prove that, so it was a bipartisan misconception of the realities of the time by politicians and citizens alike. It wasn’t just one nutty idea from the Dulles Brains Trust. If Dulles was guilty then so were our grandparents.
Once again we have to remember that Communist rhetoric always ran 25 times ahead of its capabilities. We bought their threats and reacted. McCarthyism defined. But how could we know that their bark was always worse than their bite, which it always had been since 1917? If your neighbor threatens to hurt you, do you laugh that off because he has no criminal record?
They were threatening to take over the world and bury us. Were we always in the wrong if we often overreacted to these threats? The threats were not based on reality, but they were real threats. Threat is a noun and a verb. As a noun the Russians may have been bluffing and posturing, but as a verb, the threats were a powder keg and the US reacted accordingly.
We know now how the cold war turned out, but in 54 the battle was still joined. Stalin was still cooling off in his casket, the Korean War was just simmering down, the Communists were infiltrating Southeast Asia and possibly the State Department, and the Russians were developing nuclear weapons at an alarming rate. Guatemala happened not because we like to choose wrong, it happened because it didn’t feel very wrong at all in the political climate of the time.
The leaders of 1954 were old enough to remember the Spanish Civil War when the Soviet supplied democratic left murdered priests and nuns as often as the right was murdering Communist intellectuals. The US overreacted because the president perceived the shipment of arms to Guatemala as Soviet aggression, not Guatemalan.
Dwight wasn’t a Marxist scholar. He was a soldier. He acted not to promote American hegemony, but to protect America. I can agree with the standard liberal opinion that the US was in the wrong, but not with the equally standard assertion of our low, base, and devious motivations.
Ike didn’t overreact in Guatemala because of the United Fruit Company. He overreacted in Guatemala because of prolific hostile rhetoric of the united fruits that were running the communist nations of the USSR and China at the time.
DULLES BROTHERS
The left today has it's whipping boys and girls. They hate the Bushes, Karl Rove, the right-wing talk-show hosts, and a few choice conservative Congresspersons.
Where did all this violent hate begin? When did they first decide that it was ok to hate someone as long as they are labelled right-wing reactionaries?.
I would have to say that it all started with John Foster Dulles, Ike's anti-Communist Secretary of State. This anti-Communist the first anti-Christ for the modern American left. Older adults still bristle at the sound of his name. And that's to me in 2008!
I can tell you what others thought of him, but I never met the guy and I've only studied about four minutes of him on film. The jury's out for me. I know that he has come down to American history as one of the bad guys. And considering I like some of the recent 'bad guys,' I can't pile on the tackled Dulles. Not yet, anyway.
Dulles was the lightning rod for people who otherwise might have been inclined to yell at Ike. Whether this was a deliberate good-cop bad-cop set up, as Halberstam implies, is another question. Dulles certainly took most of the heat for the Administration's very aggressive moves in the Cold War.
In any case, Dulles was to the right of right-wing, at least when it came to standing up to the Soviets in foreign policy. He was less concerned with Communist infiltration of America than he was with advocating a get tough policy with the Soviet Union at face value in foreign affairs. Dulles felt that FDR and Ike had been pushed around quite a bit by the Soviets, and he was going to work with Ike to put a stop to all that.
JFD was a smart kid. His grandfather on his mother's side was President Ben Harrison's Secretary of State (almost bizarre considering that the man Ike defeated, Adlai Stevenson, was the grandson of the Secretary of State under Grover Cleveland, who in 1889 succeeded Harrison.)
John F. Dulles grew up in very northern New York State and graduated high school at 15. He went to Princeton at 16 and finished second in his class in 1908 (Smedley Charles Einstein finished first.) He was invited to join several prestigious social clubs, turned everyone down because he thought that being popular would cut too much into his study time.
During the campaign of 1952 Dulles had criticized President Truman for his policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union. Dulles said that this Truman policy was weak and defensive. Dulles proposed that the United States and its NATO allies take the offense in the Cold War.
Dulles came up short whenever he was asked what specific actions the United States should take in order to convert from containment to offense. Most of it was threatening moralizing rhetoric. The United States could do nothing offensively in Eastern Europe, even if it wanted to. Indochina might offer a chance to get tough but even that was more a matter of containment than offense.
THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY
As a hippie in early 70's I knew the referent. If you want to ridicule someone for being a right-wing idiot, just call them a John Bircher.
The John Birch Society was so right-wing that it thought Ronald Reagan was too liberal! True story.
The JBS was formed in 1954 and is still operating today, although I'm not sure how much it has moderated its traditional lunatic stands. Not even a self-respecting conservative wants the support of the John Birch Society. In fact in many a political campaign, the Democrat accuses the Republican of being a member of the John Birch Society. The Republican denies it. They say you are supposed to accept support from any and all quarters but even Republicans draw the line at the John Birch Society.
It was named after a Baptist minister who was in China at the end of World War II. Two weeks after “the Japs” signed the surrender on the Missouri in September 1945, the Communists murdered John Birch in cold blood and he became an anti-Communist martyr nailed to the conservative cross.
The main founder was a guy named Bob Welch. He wrote a book in 1958 called, The President which called the President “a willing tool of Communism.” The very idea that any organization could call Ike a Communist with a straight face gives you some idea about how extreme the John Birch Society was. The sad part is that the extremist JBS helped give all anti-communism a bad name. And, contrary to the famous quote by Goldwater, extremism in the name of anything is a vice.
As recently as 2008 when Mitt Romney was running for the Republican nomination for President, his opponents dug up evidence that he had once accepted donations from the John Birch Society. Thats how poisonous the name is in American politics. Yet the organization rolls on as if it is a positive force in politics. There is no left-wing extremist organization to match the JBS because it would never have been tolerated in the USA. Only a McCarthyist era could have spawned it, and only the flag-waving pinheads of the 1960's could have kept it alive.
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MCCARTHY - 1954
In 1954 the power of right wing senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin reached its height. He accused so many people of being communists that today his name is a bleak stain on American history. The McCarthy hearings were a witch-hunt. Anyone who ever had lunch with a known communist 30 years ago was threatened with imprisonment, job loss and total social ostracizing.
McCarthy had hammered at Truman and he wasted no time in accusing his own Republican Party Eisenhower Administration of being infested with Communists. With the Korean War still fresh, and many cases of real Communist infiltration and spy ops verifiable, it was hard to stop the McCarthy extremism from flourishing.
McCarthy was finally discredited and his star came crashing to a halt, but for a while he was very powerful. President Eisenhower felt that to become involved would be to give McCarthy the free publicity he was seeking. Many of McCarthy’s foes honestly believed that McCarthy was motivated by a desire to have his dinner speaking engagement fees lifted to the roof. For these reasons Eisenhower had little to say during the McCarthy hysteria.
McCarthy was a bad person. The real tragedy of his witch-hunt is that it made reasonable concerns about communism, communists, and communist international spying unhip and laughable for decades to come. From now on anyone who opposed communism and communists was a “McCarthyist”. The epithet “communist” had been replaced by the epithet “McCarthyist.” - The techniques of McCarthy had now come full circle and were to be used against the right.
The United States Senate managed to kill the pestilence of McCarthyism in 54. After holding hearings investigating his charges of Communism in the US Army, complete with countercharges by the Army against McCarthy, the Senate concluded that McCarthy was guilty of conduct unbecoming a Senator. They voted yes on a censure resolution to this effect by a score of 67 to 22. McCarthy was suddenly on the decline and falling fast. A feud with revered television and radio journalist Edward R. Morrow in which McCarthy said that Morrow should be fired also hastened the Senators demise.
Those who argued during the Bill Clinton impeachment crisis that censure never accomplished anything could have cited the censure resolution against McCarthy. It brought the bum down. (Clinton by the way, had the partisan conceit to write in his 80,000 page memoir that “Joseph McCarthy came along too soon. He would have been right at home in the Republican Congress that came along in 1995.” Surely this is the most foolishly unfair statement ever typed up in the history of American political debate, and the most selfishly motivated one. Poor Bill was the victim of his enemies, who were even more immoral and vicious than Joe McCarthy. Dream on, pal. Nice try.)
GENEVA SUMMIT 1955
To many Americans over the length of the Cold War decades, the state of US-Soviet relations always depended on whether or not there were face-to-face meetings between the respective leaders. Of course this is silly because nations often meet often, and then go to war, while other nations never have meetings and never go to war. Meetings don’t make for peaceful relations, but try telling that to the know-it-alls. Face-to-face meetings somehow are supposed to solve everything and any president who doesn’t arrange them is therefore against peace. Every democrat who ran against reagan in 1984 and against Bush in 1988 declared that if he became President he would begin to have face to face meetings with Soviet leaders. This was going to make the difference in establishing permanent world peace.
This was a big issue for Ike in his time. No US-USSR summit meeting had taken place since Potsdam in 1945, and we all know how much we gained form that one.
The next so-called “summit” after damn Potsdam came in 1955 at Geneva in Switzerland. Ike went in person. Bulganin was there as the representative of the Soviet Union (Bulganin was very powerful at the time, some say the number one man in the USSR after Stalin died.)
There were no significant deals made at the 55 Geneva summit, but a lot of proclamations were released for public consumption boasting of a new spirit in US-Soviet relations. It was called the ‘Spirit of Geneva’ but no one ever explained exactly what that was. In the end it turned out to be not much of anything at all; just a lot of hot air.
THE MIDDLE EAST
THE BAGHDAD PACT
The Cold War involved the oil-rich Middle East just as surely as it involved Europe.
It was hard for the US to form alliances with the states in the Arab world for many reasons. The most obvious of course the historic enmity of religion. After that came the fear and hatred of colonialism. Did accepting American help and protection against the Soviets equal ‘Uncle Tom’ coddling of the colonial masters? To some fundamentalists in these countries it obviously did. But the Arab states feared Communism too. Christians and Moslems may be fighting over which God to love and worship, but the Soviet Union was against God, whatever his or her form and rule book. Without Soviet state-sponsored atheism, it is hard to imagine that the USA could have ever acquired the friendships in the Middle East that it sort of did. They didn’t care for the Christian-Judeo religion but hey, at least we had one. Soviet atheism gave Sam the keys to the Middle East.
The Arab states hated Israel, France and Britain more than they hated the USA. But the United States was strongly allied with these countries so they hated us by proxy. This was a problem when we approached Arab states to form alliances against the Communist bloc. They welcomed our help in defending their states against Communism but they resented our connections to their most bitter enemies.
In February of 1954 Iraq and Turkey signed a two-way defense pact to protect each other from outside aggression (meaning Russian). It was called the Baghdad Pact. The UK signed on in April giving it real force. Pakistan and Iran gave their Mohammed Hancock to the pact in the following year.
The pact may have caused internal instability in the Arab states that signed on. It gave the appearance of government disloyalty to Arab fundamentalism in exchange for external security. The Arab states may have been playing along with fake enthusiasm only in order to acquire western military hardware, which they did.
The US never signed the Baghdad pact but everyone knew that Sam was the big brother backing it all up. The Baghdad Pact is generally associated with the USA.
In 1958 a coup in Iraq overthrew the government favorable to the west and installed on favorable to the Soviets. Baghdad packed its bags and bagged the pact. So much for that idea. Well, at least we no longer had to fear a Russian invasion of Iraq. These two were now allies and would remain so until George W. Bush invaded Iraq in April of 2003.
SUEZ CANAL CRISIS OF 1956
When Abdel Nasser became the leader of Egypt in 1952 it marked the first time in a long while that Egyptians ruled in Egypt. How long?
Take a guess.
Wrong. The Persians conquered Egypt in 525 B.C. So 524 B.C. was the last time Egypt belonged to the Egyptians. So it is understandable that in 1956 a.d. they were in a bad mood about their sovereignty when Israel, Britain and France attacked her over the Suez canal.
The Arabs call it the Sinai War. In the west it is known as the Suez Canal Crisis. It is almost ignored in the newer US history textbooks as an irrelevant event compared to the rise of television, rock and roll and the hula-hoop.
Israel, France, and Britain went to war with Egypt over the Suez Canal in the fall of 1956, and the United States shocked its allies and the world by refusing to intervene militarily on the side of the Western democracies.
The trouble erupted on October 29, 1956. On that day Israel invaded Egypt. What were the motives for such a dramatic step?
Egypt had recently seized (‘nationalized’ is the accepted euphemism for such aggression) the Suez Canal in response to the United States refusal (Dulles in particular) to subsidize the construction of a giant project to control the Nile. This was the Aswan Dam project. The Soviet Union was dangling an offer to help build the mega-dam for Egypt, but with the usual attached political conditions. Egypt would have to consider itself in the Soviet sphere of influence, and would have to take on Soviet advisors across the length of its military and intelligence services.
As one of the Arab states that denied the right of Israel to exist, Egypt naturally also forbade Israel the right to use the precious Suez Canal.
Israel in Green – Note Gulf of Aqaba
Egypt also denied Israel the use of the Gulf of Aqaba, thus pinning Israel’s sea borne commerce in a second way.
These facts alone gave Israel a motive to attack Egypt, which is not to say a right to. Egypt was sworn to destroy Israel, and a state of enmity existed quite openly. Israel had no diplomatic relations with any Arab country. Israel hoped to win the war of course, but if the war was a draw, Israel had a large bonus prize in mind. In any armistice or peace treaty ending the war, Egypt would de facto be acknowledging the existence of Israel as a nation. Tie goes to Israel.
The attack was also timed to coincide with the US Presidential election. It was incorrectly assumed that Ike would have no choice but to stand by his close friend in the Middle East or else risk the loss of his right-wing political voting base on election day. After all, the US was not happy about the Egyptian nationalization of the canal, and had good reason to see it retaken by a more friendly power.
France and Britain backed Israel, and the two Euros began mobilizing for direct military aid. Egypt severed diplomatic relations with France and the UK on November 1.
But the Israel that was depending on support from the USA was in for a big let down. Eisenhower was in no mood to commit the United States to a fight in the Middle East. His country was still recovering from the tens of thousands of casualties in the Korean War. Ike not only refused to help, he led the diplomatic effort to condemn the invasion as an act of aggression on the part of his allies. On November 2, 1956 the United Nations, led by the United States, condemned the invasion of Egypt. The decision to not only withhold support for the invasion but to condemn it produced widespread scathing criticism of Eisenhower and America in the three invader countries.
On November 5, British and French paratroopers captured Port Said. The next day the Soviet Union threatened to intervene with nuclear weapons if the Israelis and their West European friends did not withdraw to the borders ante-bellum, before the war.
On November 10 Russia threatened direct intervention, including the deployment of Soviet troops to the battle sites. The United States and the USSR kept in contact to try to avoid a nuclear WWIII.
There was much pressure on Eisenhower, both foreign and domestic to send in American military force, but Ike refused. The three amigos that were fighting Egypt were shocked and angry and Ike took a lot of abuse for many moons for what he did not do.
The invading armies withdrew and Egypt kept the Suez Canal. Egypt also didn’t have to recognize Israel and it did not have to let Israel use the canal.
Israel had lost 171 killed in action. US inaction at Suez could have been a motive for the mysterious attack by the Israeli Air Force on the USS Liberty in 1967.
Suez pacifism was the bold personal foreign policy decision of Eisenhower and it damaged American relations with the old Western European allies. The history books have nevertheless been kind to his performance here, even if not to his performance overall. Few historians are moaning that we should have intervened in the Suez back in 56. But at the time it was a courageous decision to do nothing when military intervention (even if short of declared war) was right there for the asking if Dewey had wanted it. Imagine how the entire history of the Middle East would have been different if the USA had intervened on behalf of Israel Britian and France in 1956.
NASSER WINS
Even though his army was slapped around like a young hippie drunk in the hands of three night club bouncers, Abdel Nasser emerged as the winner in the Suez war of 1956. He won because the world did not approve of what the aggressors were doing. Some one jumped in and pulled the bouncers off and threw in the paddy wagon and asked him if there was any way they could make it up to him.
To the rest of the Third World Nasser suddenly became a superhero. He had stood up to the old school bullies, nationalized the Suez Canal and had won. It mattered little to the rest of the poor nations of Africa and Asia that he only won because the great bullies called off the medium bullies, what mattered was that he had stood up to the west and won. France and Egypt would never be superpowers again and the United States didn't gain much either. The Egyptians were not grateful and the French, British and Israelis were resentful. Eisenhower simply did what he thought was the right thing.
FEDERAL HIGHWAY ACT 1956
Today we take our interstate highway system for granted. We now have access to every state on the continent via a high-speed limited access highway. Limited access means no red lights or pedestrian crossings and therefore the use of relentless high speeds to reach our destinations.
When Eisenhower took office there were only the old fashioned state highways with all of the impediments to high-speed long distance road travel. Ike promoted and signed into law the Federal Highway Act of 1956 creating a great interstate limited access highway system. I use this system almost every time I drive. It is a central fact of American life and changes the demographics of business.
But the I-roads were not built just to improve our lifestyles. There were also strong considerations of national defense capabilities involved. The new highway system could send three army tanks side by side at high speed to any location in case of a continental attack by the Soviet Union. The old system could not.
The Interstate highway system was initially never going to make it through Congress. But as soon as they changed the name to the “Defense Highway System” why that money appeared out of nowhere.
ELECTION OF 1956
The Republicans pow-wowed at San Francisco in 56. Ike was popular and the obvious choice for re-nomination, but what about Nixon? There was considerable talk about dropping Dick from the ticket and replacing him with the governor of Massachusetts, Christian Herter. Ike hesitated before deciding that Nixon was still the one. Ike’s hesitation hurt Nixon's feelings, but kept his own counsel until he wrote about it long after Ike’s death.
The only real issue of the 1956 election campaign was Ike’s ticker. He had suffered a serious heart attack and many had doubts about his physical fitness for a second term.
The Democrats had a wider field of candidates to challenge the incumbent loser Stevenson for the top spot on the ticket. The strongest contender was Senator Estes Kefauver.
These two guys battled it out in the spring primaries, and their debate on May 21, 1956 was the first televised political debate in American history. It was also the first time a moderator got mad at the audience for being “too demonstrative.” If they don't want the audience to cheer and boo, why have them there in the first place?
Kefauver actually led after a couple of rounds, but it was also clear he could not win. A few favorite son candidates too their hats out of the ring. and those states for the most part went over to Stevenson, securing the egghead the nomination.
Adlai then acted madlai and threw the nomination for Vice-Presidential nomination up to the convention. he would endorse no one.
It was a mad scramble. The Democrats would have 24 hours to consider candidates and pick one. The two leading contenders emerged as Lashua and John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy lost to Lashua but in losing made a big national name for himself, paving the way for his nomination in 1960. Not that the son of Joe Kennedy and senator from Massachusetts was politically obscure. But after the battle for the VP in 1956, even uneducated people who didn't register to vote knew his name.
During the campaign, Stevenson said that Eisenhower was a “great great grandfather but not a great great president.” He had to apologize for the remark. Ike got the last laugh by defeating Stevenson in a great great landslide.
If there was ever a more boring public speaker than Adlai Stevenson, I have yet to hear him or her. Didn’t the Democrats realize that this guy had no charisma?
Older people still speak of Adlai as the holy man of the people who lost to Mr Popular. Stevenson always talked about “the common man” as a mantra of his political identity. As if Adlai was Mr. get your hands dirty friend of the common man. A different view is provided by Madeleine Albright in her memoir. Madeleine rubbed elbows with some very rich and connected people in her younger years, one of whom was her mother-in-law's sister, Alicia Guggenheim, the wife of the famous Harry Guggenheim.
Evidently Adlai Stevenson was winning the nomination in Mrs G's bedroom, and the affair was so blatant that the newspapers leaked it. Albright writes,
“Even in the early 1960's Stevenson used to come
out to Long Island quite openly when Harry was
was away. I was somewhat disillusioned
listening to the great Adlai engage in petty gossip
about his yachting sojourns on the Riviera.”
SPUTNIK 1 –10.4.57
October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first successful orbital satellite. It was called Sputnik 1 and it was bad news for the USA. Our mortal Communist enemy had proven itself far ahead of us in the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead over long distances through outer space. Sputnik not only proved itself superior in quality to our as yet unlaunched rockets, it was also much larger. The national security implications were clear and frightening. They weren’t rejoicing in Times Square when the news flashed.
The story officially went out as one about an exiting new development in space exploration, and in a basic way Sputnik should have been seen as a victory for mankind. But the USA was depressed over Sputnik because of what it really meant. It meant that in one day they jumped ahead of us in military power. If they put a nuke on a new Sputnik it could be say goodbye to Sputnik. The success of Sputnik may have backfired a little on the USSR. It scared even the left into supporting increased US military spending. Even a beatnik feared Sputnik.
SPUTNIK 2 –LAIKA; LONELY ARE THE BRAVE 1957
In early November 1957 the Russians followed up with a second Sputnik. This time the rocket was even bigger and performed even better, circling the globe for an entire week at 18,000 miles an hour at 900 miles above sea level. Americans at night in some locations could actually stand in their back yard and watch the trail of this man-made star.
What made Sputnik 2 even more special was its cargo. Inside the tiny air-pressured cabin was a passenger, a living creature, and the first soul ever to travel in outer space. It wasn’t a human being. It was a stray dog taken from the streets of Moscow, a cute half-husky named Laika (the name means ‘barker’ in Russian).
As Sputnik 2 soared above the planet, the Russian scientists in a press conference conceded that there was no way the dog could be successfully returned to earth. Laika the brave was on a suicide mission in the name of science. Dog lovers were angry.
The western press named the flight ‘Muttnik’.
Laika’s mission helped elect John Kennedy to the White House in 1960. The Democrats could now charge, and did for the rest of his term, that Eisenhower had allowed the United States fall behind the Soviet Union in military strength. The Sputniks proved these criticisms. Kennedy would repeatedly charge during his two-year campaign for the presidency that there was a dangerous ‘missile-gap’ between the two nations and that we were on the short end of it. The charge was never true but was always believable thanks mostly to the Sputniks.
The Russians never armed an effective nuclear missile before we did.
Laika was a true space hero. Two other dogs were trained for the mission, but Laika was chosen because this special dog remained the most calm during testing for stressful situations. Laika was the dog who left the squirrels alone.
Poor Laika probably died about five hours into the flight from heatstroke, although some Soviet scientists still insist that the dog lived in the cabin for several days before succumbing to conditions in the tiny cabin. Laika’s fate is still a mystery. What was Laika thinking as she looked out the window at the earth?
ALGERIA
From the time it broke out in 1954 until the day he left office, Ike had to deal with the political problem of the French War with Algeria. The was really the War for Algerian Independence.
The world was full of revolution and independence and Algeria, a French colony for along time, was ready to go for it. France was willing to let go in Vietnam and let go of some of its tropical African colonies. But Algeria was where France drew the line. Partly because it was close to France, but also because more than a million French citizens (called colons) lived there. Many were third generation born there. They had a lot of clout in the Paris government. France was not going to let go of Algeria without a fight. There was a movement in France in favor of Algerian rebels, a leftist critic mob much like America's left during Vietnam. The Algerians had allies in France but not enough to call off the war.
This was a brutal war. Torture was used on both sides. More than a million Algerians died in the war!
Algeria presented the USA with a dilemma. We had a stake in both camps of a war of rebellion going on there. Algeria was a French colony in revolution against mother Paris. The United States traditionally liked to support independence movements, such as Hungary in the 19th century and the nations of Eastern Europe at the end of World War I. We were the model revolutionary nation for all the hopeful rebels of the world. But being an inspiration to the underdog based on our example of 1776 caused problems in the 1950's. How could the United States play big dog in global politics and friend of the underdog states at the same time?
We were trying to win the cold war against superpower Russia and were part of a strong system of alliances with states that just happened to be the oppressors of these aspirants for independence. We wanted to stay loyal to our NATO allies like France, Britain, Portugal and Belgium, and we wanted to be a friend to their colonies seeking independence at the same time. It was an impossible contradiction for our foreign policy and for our patented moral posturing.
This oxymoron of supporting both the colonial powers and their rebellious colonies was problematic for more than one or two presidents over the next decades. It certainly was the heart of the problem in Vietnam in these Ike years.
As for Algeria, there were few in Congress who dared come out in clear support of Algerian independence. A few gave contradictory lip service to Algerian dreams of statehood, but always with a keen eye on not offending our NATO table-leg France. One who stood up was Senator John F. Kennedy. In July of 1957 he created a stir in Washington when he made a speech in the Senate calling on France to call off the poodles and let Algeria belong to the Algerians. Many Democrats condemned the speech. But in Africa, Kennedy became an overnight hero for this profile in courage. The speech came in handy later on when he became president and had to try to work with Africans to solve international issues. His name was already gold over there before Election Day 1960.
Even in France, many admired Kennedy for being the first prominent politician to say it first. French politicians were far more vulnerable to political backlash of course if they had said it, but many believed it was time for France to get with the new era and let these people go.
If the rhetorical ball would start rolling overseas via the charismatic and popular JFK, the day might come when French progressives might be able to speak out without getting run out of office on rail.
PROFILES IN PLAGIARISM 1957-58
In 1957 Senator John F. Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Profiles in Courage. The theme of the book was crossover courage by nine United States Senators who voted against their party in a time of crisis, or in some way made a decision that would carry a heavy personal political price, but they made it anyway because they thought it was the right thing to do.
In 1958 on the Mike Wallace Show on CBS TV, journalist Drew Pearson said that Kennedy did not write the book. Pearson claimed that the book had been ghostwritten by Theodore Sorenson.
Kennedy had plans to run for President in 1960. He knew that a plagiarism charge could destroy him. His father Joe really hit the roof and demanded that his son sue the network for millions. Ted Sorenson went to CBS with a little box full or handwritten notes and pages that Kennedy had clearly written himself. The network was forced to make an abject retraction on the next Mike Wallace Show and the road to the White House stayed open.
Kennedy never denied that Sorenson had done a great deal of the research, but how much of the final draft was John’s and how much was Ted’s still remains an unsolved mystery. If JFK really took a Pulitzer Prize for what was Sorenson’s work then he did not live up to his title.
CARACAS 58
Eisenhower asked Nixon to travel to Argentina in the spring of 1958 to represent the USA at the inauguration of the new democratically elected president.
While he was down there, it was decided it would be a good idea for goodwill ambassador Nixon to stop off at a couple of other South American capitols, like Lima, Peru, and Caracas, Venezuela for example.
In Lima crowds chanted abusive things and made the trip miserable. Things got worse in Venezuela. When Nixon went to Caracas unruly mobs repeatedly attacked his motorcade, throwing rocks and shaking his vehicle after they had stopped it with a proletarian roadblock. They spit on the car and held up placards calling Nixon and the USA a lot of bad names. The Vice President’s person at times was seriously threatened. One guy jumped full body on the windshield but the glass held. It makes me mad every time I read about it. I realize that its only Nixon we’re talking about, but after all he was still our Nixon.
Eisenhower dispatched airborne infantry to the Caribbean to be ready to intervene in Caracas to protect the VP. But the timing was bad. The reports of these troop movements only served to re-ignite a crisis that was at that point simmering down. Nixon reassured his Venezuelan hosts that Ike meant nothing hostile by the gesture and that the troops were there to help the Venezuelan government, not attack it.
When Nixon’s plane landed back in Washington on May 15, 1958, Eisenhower, the entire cabinet, the Congressional leaders, and fifteen thousand Americans were there in person to welcome him home as a hero who had taken it on the chin for his country in a hostile land.
The incidents at Lima and Caracas made both the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations alert to the dangers of ignoring the sensitivities of our neighbors to the South. Latin American diplomatic affairs took on a new and more serious tone for the foreseeable future.
1958 ELECTIONS
The Republican Party got toasted in the mid-term election of 1958. They lost 12 seats in the Senate to the Democrats, and 48 in the House of Representatives. No administration had ever taken such a whipping in the Congressional election. It bode well for the Dems chances in 1960. The economy was flat, Sputnik hurt, and Ike was being perceived as a cold old man who went golfing all the time. The Reps paid at the polls.
DEATH OF DULLES
On May 24, 1959, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles died of cancer. He had been ill for some months. United States foreign policy suffered while he suffered and he probably should have resigned eight months before he finally did on April 15, 1959.
Christian Herter took his place.
BUDGET ECONOMICS
Although Eisenhower was a friend of big business and was certainly no FDR type New Dealer, he also surprised a lot of people by his moderate support for many Federal programs providing social aid to the elderly and poor. Many Democrats had campaigned against him with the threat that he would undercut all the federal social assistance that FDR and Truman had provided. He did not.
CUVA 1959-60
Before Castro (BC) the Cuban bad guy was named Fulgencio Batista. In the 1950’s he ruled Cuba with an iron hand. Cuba’s largest industries were under the shady influence if not complete control of a lot of giant evil USA corporations. The island was a paradise for rich American tourists. Our Mafia ran Cuban gambling casinos. But the Cuban people were poor. The average Jose did not enjoy a life of luxury in Cuba.
Then came genuine revolution from below. The anti-rich-people rebels, led by Fidel Castro battled Batista until Fidel in the end entered Havana in complete triumph on New Years Day, 1959.
At first America embraced Castro as a hero. Our press and politicians generally praised him, and Time Magazine named him “Man of the Year.”
But the Castro regime began leaning more and more towards a Bolshevik style leftism where the main event was the constant uncompensated seizure of all capitalist private property for the benefit of the state. This caused a dramatic about-face in American opinion. That’s where our support for the underdog ends. Land confiscation is the water’s edge between capitalism and communism. Castro had crossed the line. The freedom to own is even more sacred than freedom of speech.
In our society the poor have always resented the rich, but if you’re rich, but you can still keep your stuff. Law enforcement protects private property in the USA. It doesn’t protect the worker mob that wants to seize it. Eisenhower withdrew all American financial aid to Cuba. The Cubans then turned to the Soviet Union for aid and the quid pro quo was Cuban political reorientation to the extreme brand of Soviet Socialism. Castro took the deal.
KRUSHCHEV VISITS AMERICA 1959
Nicky Krushchev the Gensec of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union arrived in the United States in 1959 to meet with Eisenhower. His arrival was an exiting national event as he was the first Russian leader to ever visit the United States. The nation rolled out the ‘Red’ carpet for Mr. Krushchev.
No US President had ever visited Russia. VP Nixon had gone to Moscow but Ike had not.
The two nuclear trigger fingers met and shot the breeze at Camp David in Maryland. Little came of the summit in concrete political deals, but the so called “Spirit of Geneva” from the 1955 summit was evidently revived and things were on the upswing in US-Soviet relations. This Cold War thaw would freeze up again soon with the U-2 incident.
Krushchev left Idlewilde Internationa Airport with a high profile invitation extended to Ike to visit the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1960. The invitation was for the fall, but Ike didn't want to neglect his grandchildren, so he postponed the date to May of 1960. In the meantime, the U-2 incident took place, which changed everything. The invitation was rescinded. More on the U-2 later. If Ike had been willing to forget about the stupid grandchildren, the whole Russian-American thing might have turned out better. In any case, Ike's visit to Russia would have been an interesting chapter in history.
BOB HOPE TRIES TO DESTROY THE WORLD
On September 19, 1959 Krushchev and his wife Yelena were dining with dignitaries at a gala in their honor in Los Angeles. Bob Hope, Lawrence Harvey, and Frank Sinatra were there too on the dais. Hope was next to Yelena.
Bob 'for Texaco' Hope, the comedy movie star was making small talk all night with the gensec's wife. At one point Bob casually mentioned that, “You really should go and see Disneyland. It's fantastic.” Mrs. Krushchev quickly scribbled a note to her seated husband telling him how much she would like to see Disneyland. The note made it to Krushchev who passed a note to his hosts that he definitely wanted to go to Disneyland.
Over the next hour several phone calls were made and the answer came back “no.” Apparently Walt Disney was a staunch anti-Communist. Disney reportedly telephoned back and said that Krushchev could “go jump in Lake Baikal.” Mickey Mouse and Goofy both sent cables to the effect that the Soviet General Secretary was persona non grata in Fantasyland.
All this went down before Krushchev rose to give his speech as the man of the hour. Mr. Krushchev began his speech with a tirade against America for denying him the right to visit Disneyland.
“Is this what you call freedom? Denying a
Soviet visitor the right to visit your famous
amusement park? What are you hiding there,
some new ICBM's that I am not supposed
to know about?”
Krushchev fortunately settled down for the rest of the speech and managed to finish it up with a moderate impression of good-will intentions. But the tirade about Disneyland made for fun stuff in the American press.
I've read three of four different versions of the Krushchev Disneyland episode, and I must confess that I'm going with the version that is the most fun, rather than the one that was probably true. Walt Disney was a nice man and the park was open to the public. There's no real evidence that Walter refused to let Krushchev ride down Magic Mountain, but the story persists, and I heard it many times while I was growing up. It says much about the spirit of the era that the story was invented and successfully spread. It actually made me think much less of Walt Disney when as a young lefty in the 1970's, as I kept hearing the story and presumed it was true.
It was probably closer to the truth that both the US Secret Service and the Russian KGB security team were in agreement that they could not protect Krushchev on a hot September Saturday as he roamed around Disneyland buying cotton candy and trying to knock down the milk bottles and win a stuffed capitalist. A February Monday morning might have been different.
So some of the story is play, but Krushchev did blame the Americans for being kept out of Disneyland, a decision that was bi-partisan; and he really did make an angry speech about being denied admission to Disneyland. And, yes, stupid Bob Hope really did set off the whole thing with a casual remark to Mrs. K. Imagine if the Disneyland thing made him so mad that he cancelled his trip and went back in a huff to Moscow? We could have had WWIII when the U-2 went down then next spring, and we'd have Bob Hope to thank. He could go entertain the troops in a war he started.
The other version of Krushchev Disneyland in print is that the Los Angeles Police Department nixed the trip because they could not protect Krushchev. That's a shaky one because Disneyland is in Anaheim.
The other “what if” of history is, what if the security teams had been more brave and said, 'He's goin' to Disneyland!'
What a trip that would have been for Krushchev's mind's eye. I can't help but believe that the effect would have been beneficial for international relations and the reduction of US-USSR tensions.
Disneyland may be overpriced and tacky, it might represent corny and unhip cultural values, but who can really deny that it is not conceived in a spirit of good will. There's nothing that caters to hate in Disneyland, nothing that even caters to conceit (In my opinion the two causes of war.) I think it would have been a magical day in his heart forever. The Soviets had nothing to come close to this in Russia. Their idea of Disneyland was that there's enough dirty pails for everybody today at the water machines.
Most Americans go to Disneyland at least once in their lives. It's really like a permanent World's Fair, creating a better, but fake, world. Imagine the stories and footage of Krushchev in Disneyland. He was an extremely bi-polar. Get him in an ecstatic mood for a few hours and count the smiles and laughs as he meets all the unemployed actors in Snow White and Snagglepuss costumes. Sure, maybe someone might have shot him, but not likely. No one shot at Gorbachov when he got out of the limo on Connecticut Ave. to greet the American people. I for one will always regret the unpaid visit to Disneyland by Nikita Krushchev on September 19, 1961.
THE U-2 INCIDENT 1960
For years the USA was conducting overflights of Soviet territory with high altitude reconnaissance aircraft, especially the unique looking U-2 spy plane. The Soviets did not want to protest openly because that would advertise to the world the helplessness of their position. The U-2 could fly at up to 70,000 feet where the air was thin and the sky dark at noon. The US claimed that at that height there was no national territory, the same as a satellite rocket. But the Russians claimed was that their nation’s airspace was being violated by these photo planes and quietly threatened the US with shooting one down the first chance they got. Military analysts did not think that Soviet anti-aircraft missiles could ever reach the mighty U-2. But eventually a Soviet Sam did catch up to a U-2 and it was a sensation.
It happened over the Ural Mountains, near Sverdlovsk. A U-2 plane, piloted by a private citizen being employed by the CIA was struck by a SAM and came crashing down. The Washington brains trust presumed the pilot to be dead from the crash and told the press a silly lie about the plane being a weather reconnaissance plane that had strayed off course.
A few days later Krushchev stood before the Russian Supreme Soviet and proclaimed that they had the plane and the pilot. Worst of all, the pilot was talking. His name was Francis Gary Powers, his wife drank a lot, and the feeling in America was that he should have committed suicide, but that was not part of his instructions and he eventually stood trial and was convicted by a Soviet court of espionage.
PARIS SUMMIT – YOU TOO
Relations between the US and USSR were on the mend from the fall of 1959 to the spring of 1960. But they took a tumble at the Paris Summit in May of 1960. Eisenhower would not have agreed to the Paris meeting if not for progress made when Krushchov visited Camp David in 1959. Nicky agreed at Camp David to call off the dogs in Berlin. Now Ike could agree to a summit without losing face. He didn't want to feel he was being forced to the Summit under knifepoint in Berlin.
The Paris Summit was especially progressive because it was not limited to the United States and the Soviet Union. It included Great Britain and France as well.
Eisenhower arrived at Paris on May 15. No sooner did he give a tiny tip to the bellhop than he got word from both de Gaulle and Macmillan that Krushchov had sent them a telegram condemning the U-2 overflights and the various aggressions of the United States. All three western leaders thought it a bit odd that Krushchev didn't write directly to the President, since it was his country that committed the crime.
Krushchev opened the preliminary meetings with a series of violent speeches against the United States for the U-2 overflights. The Soviet tubby Gensec admitted that Eisenhower probably didn't know of or approve of such flights, but that someone in the United States should be punished. Krushchev wanted some hawk US Generals fired.
But Ike upset Kruschev's plans by admitting that he alone authorized the U-2 overflights. Eisenhower also refused to apologize, saying that Soviet military and political aggression made these types of countermeasures necessary, which was true. Ike cited the attack on Pearl Harbor as justification for American spy wars. Pear Harbor was mentioned a lot at the short Paris Summit.
Krushchev demanded an apology from the United States. He did not actually think that the United States would call his bluff. He thought that Ike would sacrifice some higher up military man as a diplomatic gesture to maintain “The Spirit of Geneva” at Paris.
The Paris Summit ended without a formal plenary session. The bickering at the preliminary hearings were as far as they got.
Krushchev angrily told Eisenhower that he was no longer welcome to visit the USSR as previously planned. Ike never did get there. In fact, a top notch cottage on Lake Baikal had already been completed for his upcoming visit. It still stands and is called by the locals, the “Eisenhower Cottage.”
President Eisenhower thought that Krushchov wanted to cancel his visit anyway, and used the U-2 shootdown as an excuse. The visit of Vice-President Nixon the year before had caused unexpected complications for the Communist leadership. Even though Krushchev managed to verbally bully Nixon a little bit, many of the VP's statements made it through to the Soviet people. Nixon had boasted about the quality of life in the United States and Krushchov had cut him off and dismissed it as nonsense. But enough Russians paid attention to Nixon talking about well paid US workers. Could it be, as Ike maintains, that Krushchev expected Ike to break through to the Russian people much better than Nixon did, and that the Gensec didn't want to deal with the consequences?
Some experts have suggested that the United States deliberately set up the U-2 shoot-down in order to sabotage the upcoming Paris Summit because they didn't want any nuclear arms reduction. I think that is ridiculous, but the charge was made in all seriousness by professional journalists.
POWERS IS A FINK
The fate of the captured pilot still had to be decided. Powers was to be tried under Soviet law for espionage. The key to Soviet law was not guilty or not guilty, but rather sorry or not sorry. Powers expressed his sorrow while he as at the Soviet dock and was given a 10-year sentence. He could have been given the death penalty and this could have led to a war between the United States and the USSR.
America put Francis Gary Powers on its list of skunks. He was supposed to have killed himself to keep from talking, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to admit he was guilty and ask forgiveness in a Soviet court with international reporters present from about 90 countries.
Powers absolutely was not instructed to kill himself if captured, even if he did have a tiny needle with a poison tip. That would be to protect oneself with death when clearly threatened with torture. It was not to keep from “talking”. What did he know which would be so valuable to the Russians? They already had the plane and the camera inside it.
In fact, the pilot’s apology was more valuable than any batch of high tech nuclear secrets he might have possessed. So the suicide charge is bogus but I don’t know about the second one. He explains his side of things well in his book, but I think there were moments when he was more protective of his skin than his country. I make no claim that I would do any better if tested. But just imagine if he had said, “I realize that my flight was illegal under international law, but the Soviet Government conducts illegal operations within the United States that are far more serious and threatening than my reconnaissance mission.”
The trial would have ended right there on the spot and Powers would have been a great American national hero as the Russians dragged him off to jail for life.
But on the other hand, if he had done that, the incident might have never blown over. Maybe history needed a little wimpiness out of Powers at that moment to calm things down and give peace a chance. Tough guys start all wars. If Powers didn’t measure up, and it saved the peace, then God bless Gary Powers.
COAL MINER THREATENS TO STRIKE.. WITH NUKES
Nicky he coal miner from the Donets in charge of the USSR went ahead with the agreed summit in Geneva in May of 1960. Would Premier Krushchev use the occasion to berate the USA for the U-2 incident, or would he leave it off the table for the sake of a successful summit on many important issues?
Krushchov used the summit to berate the United States and threaten war if the US dared to try and take back Cuba. His violent tirades against America negated two years of his own excellent propaganda about “peaceful-coexistence.” A substantial part of the American press and public had bought that line, that the USSR wanted peace. But overnight, the American mainstream went back to Cold War defensiveness. This guy Krushchov would start a war at the drop of a hat if given half a chance. He was the Russian Goldwater. Krushchev stormed out of the Vienna Summit in an attempt to insult and humiliate Eisenhower, Dulles and the USA.
Obviously there is some power gain from being seen as erratic when at the control of the nukes. President Reagan wasn’t all that horrified when he scared the Russians now and then with his loose talk about nuclear war. That might be one reason for Nick’s threatening language. The other reason was to impress a third audience, a third world audience. In defying the USA so brazenly in even the military field, Krushchov was signaling the new nations of the independence revolution that the Soviet Bloc was no slouch. You could back a winner, not a scared second-rater when you took Soviet aid and along the way gave socialism a chance. The new nations of Africa and Asia were the makeweight prize in the struggle for international supremacy between the NATO bloc and the Communist Bloc. The US could laugh off his threats while the third audience is impressed.
RB-47 SHOOTDOWN
On July 1 1960 Soviet Air Force fighters shot down a RB-57 USAF reconnaissance place with eight crew-members on board off the northern coast of Russia. Six of the men died in the cold Artic waters while two were rescued and imprisoned inside the USSR. The two prisoners were named John McKone and Freeman McGillicutty and they became overnight celebrities just like Gary Francis Powers. The US claimed that the plane was 30 miles from the Soviet border and the Politburo claimed of course that the plane was in Soviet airspace.
These incidents showed how close the two countries were to a shooting war and how real was the later threat under Kennedy over Cuba.
INDEPENDENCE EXPLOSION
28 countries became independent in the Ike years. This trend continued under Kennedy. It was a heady time for the end of colonialism and the rise of the “Third World.”
Cambodia, Laos and the two Vietnams became independent in 1954, although these four were all subject to dangerous foreign influences bordering on outside control. The rest of the new nations were fully independent in fact as well as in name.
Sudan, Morocco and Tunisia played the 1776 flute in 1956. Ghana and Malays took their baby steps in 1957. Guinea broke out of the egg in 1958. The world stopped to catch its breath in 1959 as no new nations entered the UN then.
In 1960 it was a starburst of independence as The Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Senegal, Malagasy, Togo, Cyprus, the Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Niger, Dahomey, the Congo Republic (yes, not the same the the Republic of the Congo), the Central African Republic, Chad, Gabon, and Mauritania all became countries after years of European dominance.
Europe had taken about 20 years in the late 1900's to conquer most of Africa. Africa in the 20 years after WWII shook off the shackles.
In fairness to 'bad guy' Europe, the Africans won their independence largely because of the liberal progressive trends in western thinking. It wasn't all a matter of fighting and winning their freedom in the face of tough odds and strong resistance. They were granted their independence as much as they won it.
CONGO CRISIS
The Congo was the scene of an international crisis in 1960 that spilled over into the Kennedy Administration.
CONGO; Kinshasa used to be ‘Leopoldville’
The Congo nation (map above is of present Democratic of the Congo state, not to be confused with the smaller Republic of the Congo to the northwest) had been ruled by Belgium for 80 years or so, but the revolution of newly independent nations that was sweeping the globe in 1960 came to the Congo. Belgium granted full independence to the Congo in July of 1960.
But independence did not bring prosperity nor peace. Instead chaos broke out all over the place. There was a mutiny in the Belgian security forces in defiance of the end of colonialism. The Soviet Union began full-scale political infiltration shenanigans. Rioting and some shooting took place between factions. Belgium sent in airborne troops to restore order. Kinshasa was suddenly a very dangerous place. The large and important southern Congo province of Katanga declared its secession from this madness in faraway Kinshasa and other provinces said, ‘hey that’s a good idea’ and did the same. The thought of Katanga and other provinces splitting of to become new nations was not only abhorrent to Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, but the United Nations was very unhappy too. The UN had enough problems admitting new nations freed from the yoke of colonialism. They didn’t want the added burden of every new country splitting up into several new countries, Yugoslavism in reverse, each seeking admittance under its own flag.
PM Lumumba went directly to the UN and asked for assistance, both political and military to restore peace in his land. Belgian backlash, secession, and Cold War guerilla clashes had to be confronted.
The United States stood with the UN. Some American officials thought that independence for Katanga was not a threat to international security and thought that America should stay neutral, or perhaps even support Katanga. But Ike (and Kennedy later) did not feel this way and did not want new countries becoming a dozen new countries. Katanga was trying to seize the moment, the only moment probably, when it could slip between the cracks just as Belgium is getting out of there and use the moment to create a new nation. It wasn’t such a bad thought, was it? But the UN would have none of it.
From July 1960 to the spring of 1962 the UN fought a real war to suppress revolution in the Congo. It was a rare example of a UN army in action in an offensive operation. If only Woodrow Wilson could have seen it.
Some would call the Congo intervention of 1960-1 one of the finest hours of UN effectiveness. Others would say that it was a repressive reactionary move against legitimate peaceful people who disliked the old Congo state and wanted only to set up shop on their own. The Katangans wondered what they did do to deserve being actually invaded by a UN army when the UN had already looked the other way on so many worse offenses around the world in its 15 years?
The crisis was in an undecided stage when Kennedy took over. Lumumba was kidnapped and murdered by Belgian troops on January 17, 1961. Kennedy took office a couple of days later.
THE ECONOMY
There was a reason that the popular sitcom of the 1970’s celebrating the 1950’s was called Happy Days. The inflation rate in Eisenhower’s time averaged an astonishing one percent annually! The unemployment rate hovered at around three percent. Ike maintained a balanced budget most years. It didn’t hurt that the Korean War ended just as he took office and the Vietnam quagmire began only after he left it.
THE ALLEGED SINO-SOVIET SPLIT BEGINS 1959-1960
I say that it was all a great and tragically successful disinformation campaign. The Soviet Union and Communist China supposedly became near-enemies at the end of the 1950's. This myth lasted for the next 30 years. These two Communist giants were supposed to be always n the brink of war. China did not trust the Russians when they seemed like they were about to make a deal with the Americans and the Soviets hated the Chinese too.
Study the origins of any 20 wars and tell me that Russia and China in 1959 or 1969 or 1979 had any real reason to go to war, using those 20 as a guideline for military confrontation.
I have really studied up on this subject and I would bet my life on it. It was all a hoax. I lay my head on the railroad track as the train approaches that says that the USSR and Red China are enemies and are on the verge of war. I am in no danger. All of American foreign policy was ruined by this false belief. All American history books are ruined by this false belief.
And what was the issue over which these two goliaths were gong to hate each other and go to war. I will tell you.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was supposed to lead to the world-wide socialist revolution overthrowing all the bourgeois capitalist nations and installing a world government that cared more about the lower classes who were tired of being oppressed. In the Russia of 1917 there was far more support for organized revolution in the cities than there was in the farmlands. To the frustration of the Russian revolutionaries, the farm folk were apathetic about Marx and Plekhanov and Feuerbach and a hundred other intellectual leaders of the coming wave of socialism. So rather than admit that the rural people didn't give a damn and that the Bolsheviks were usurpers who didn't have the support of the masses, the Communists re-invented themselves as leaders of the industrial proletariat. The rural areas would follow their leadership. So the farm people cared after all! They just were looking for leadership and the urban rebels would provide it. They were putting words and thoughts into the rural minds that weren't there, to explain the depth and width of the movement expediently.
Through violence and intimidation and hard work, the Lenenists pulled off. All of the mass of Russian farmers became revolutionaries too, even though they weren't and had never been consulted. When, in the late 1920's and early 1930's they finally tried to explain that they were not socialist, but really just farmers, Stalin murdered 40 million of them. So much for their love of socialist leadership.
OK, fine. Even though we had to murder 40 million of them, the farmers are the socialist followers and proletariat the leaders.
Now along comes the Communist victory of 1949. Mao takes over. The Chinese fighting farmers won the revolution was on the run in the Long March while the reactionary Chiang Kai Shek had controlled the cities. The Soviet Union had supported the Chinese victory struggle materially. After China won its revolution, the USSR in an astonishing gesture of international good will, almost unprecedented in world history really, gave back to China the portions of Chinese Manchuria it has seized at the end of World War II. A deed like this the United States and Great Britian had never done for anyone, ever. That alone would make the two nations blood brothers for a hundred years.
Both countries poured out a forest of socialist literature every day. Every hair-splitting issue was argued between socialist intellectuals. It was all insider stuff, rather boring to put it mildly. If you ever find a book on socialist debates in any era, burn it while you still have the chance to save yourself from what I went through too many times trying to find something worthwhile in there, and always failing.
The fact that these arguments are boring is significant. When two nation get ready to go to war it is never over a boring all-over-the-road intellectual argument.
Here's the big argument; It seems that China did not agree with the idea of Soviet leadership in the international struggle.
China felt that the Russian version of how world history was about to unfold was narrow and in error. China, which happened to be more rural, decided that the rural socialists would lead the revolution that was soon to take over the world. They asserted that Lenin had been wrong to presume that only the industrial proletariat the city socialists could make the great revolution a success. Chinese intellectual leaders said that rural revolutionaries, in other words China, could, would and should lead the big one.
Folks, that's it! That's the whole thing! That's the reason China and Russia were on the verge of nuclear war between 1959 and 1989! If you believe that I've got a Hensley Meulens rookie card with a coffee stain on it for sale for $850 any time you want to come by and pay for it. Again, take the Pepsi challenge and read up on the origins of any 20 wars at any time in history and then tell me that the argument over whether Chinese rural or Russian industrial socialist revolutionaries should be in the vanguard of victory is a casus beli. The whole thing was a staged disinformation play and we bought the Meulens card and added a $350 tip!
The benefits that would come from the west buying the play were major and continuous. Convincing the west that the two Communist leaders were close to war was worth a hundred army divisions and a fleet of 70 first-rate Communist aircraft carriers. The west took its foot off the tough-guy gas pedal accordingly. If Russia and China hadn't pulled off this disinformation play we would have won the Cold War a lot sooner than 1989. That set back our vigilance. When the Communists got tough, the west got tougher. So even a Communist victory was a net loss for Communism because the west responded with fanatical military build-ups to make sure it didn't happen again. Then they got smart and found the only way to win when you're losing, and that was by way of deception.
VIETNAM
No subject is more important to Americans who came of age in the 1960's and 1970's. Vietnam changed our lives and took what was a normal “generation gap” in any era and blew it up into a tragic chasm that led to the “cultural war” that messed up my value system big time just as I was growing from boy to man. I came close to being drafted and sent to Indochina to die in the jungle against an unseen enemy, ambushed without a chance to shoot back at anything but shadows. How did it start? Why were we there? What were the issues? What are the details? Who were these squids on the enemy side? Who were the toads on our side? Who was Diem? Who was Ho, and why do I still hate the bones in his grave? Was it LBJ or Kennedy that got us into Vietnam? Or was it Eisenhower?
INDOCHINA
“India would be outflanked.”
Ike on the danger of losing Indochina to Communism
It was President Truman that first committed the US to supporting the French in Indochina. Ike in 53 had little choice but to continue a commitment already pledged.
Eisenhower was not fond of French colonialism but saw Communism as the greater of the two evils.
The Korean War was not over when Eisenhower took office and Stalin was still alive. How can you blame Ike for seeing the Communist rebellion against the French in Vietnam through Cold War glasses?
Truman and Eisenhower were more or less on the same page when it came to helping the French suppress the Communist Revolution in Vietnam. It wasn't so much that they loved the French, nor that they approved of French colonialism.
But both presidents had the larger picture to consider and it was decisive in our decision to give the French in Indochina our material and political support.
The primary concern was the need of French support in Europe against the Soviet threat. Vietnam was a sideshow compared to the potential of a Soviet invasion of West Germany. The Red Army might well take over all of Europe if we didn't stand up to them and we desperately needed the French to do their part. France, not the United States, was on the front line of freedom. Korea and Vietnam weren't on the border of Maine or Florida, one nation removed from the homeland, but to France, the Red Army was about as close. If the Soviet Army attacked in Europe and conquered West Germany in a week, France would be next.
The United States feared that a France that did not feel fully backed by the United States might make a separate deal with Russia, allowing itself to become almost 'Finlandized.' This would mean that France would be allowed to prosper in peace as long as its foreign policy was acceptable to Soviet interests. It was not an unrealistic fear in Washington. Churchill feared this even more than Ike or Truman did, for obvious geographical reasons.
So if the United States took the part of the Vietnamese nationalists against the French in southeast Asia, the French could retaliate diplomatically by severing the alliance in Europe and negotiating a new world order with Stalin.
It was a no win situation for America and Ike continued the Truman policy of reluctantly supporting France in Vietnam. Ike had plenty of support at home at the time. The Vietnamese rebellion was openly Communist, so it wasn't really all that painful to support the French imperialists under the circumstances.
The USA was much less likely to support the French in places where the rebellions were not Communist oriented. Algeria is a perfect example. Neither Ike nor successor Kennedy supported France in Algeria against the rebels who wanted to be independent. Senator Kennedy in Ike's time openly sided with the Algerian revolutionaries, to the chagrin of de Gaulle.
But Vietnam was different. The French were Christian, the Vietnamese Communists under Ho Chi Minh were atheists. France was a NATO ally and an old friend from two recent world wars.
Eisenhower and Churchill were on the same anti-Communist page regarding Nam (which means 'south.')
Historian Howard Zinn quotes a letter to Churchill in which Dwight says that if Indochina falls to the Communists “the ultimate effect on our and your global strategic position with the consequent shift in the power ratios throughout Asia and the Pacific could be disastrous.”
From this Zinn concludes,
Eisenhower was not talking to the public, but to an
ally.
He was explaining American support for the French
not in any moral terms, like defeating “aggression,”
but in terms of “global strategic position” and
“power ratios.”
… Shortly after this letter Dulles proposed
massive American military action to support the
French.
It was very clear to all sides, in those years when
the United States began its intervention in Indochina,
that there was only one party engaging in “external
aggression” and “external attack” in Vietnam: the
French. And the United States was helping the
French, massively, to reestablish control over
a former colony.
This simple fact of history … casts huge doubt,
to put it moderately, on the administration’s claims
today that its major reason for being in Vietnam
is to “repel the aggression.”
This letter to Churchill was also printed in Ike’s memoirs.
Okay, first of all why can’t two leaders discus geo-political power struggles with strong moral conviction for the cause resting behind the discussion as an unspoken given? Just because Ike didn't spell out his moral reasons does not mean they weren't there. It went without saying. Is Howard Zinn questioning the moral sincerity of the two men who conducted the fight against the Nazis in World War II? Cannot these men mentally multitask moral convictions plus the global chess game for control against the Communist side? Why does one have to exclude the other? Eisenhower assumed his reader Winston was smart enough to know that of course there were moral convictions behind these moves to maintain power. He hadn’t counted on Howard Zinn. The letter is not a clear negative on Ike’s morals or lack of them. Otherwise why in the hell would Eisenhower include it in his book?
Secondly, it most certainly was not clear to “all sides” in those years that only France was the aggressor. The left doesn’t get to speak for the right. Plenty of decent and important Americans supported our efforts to stop the North Vietnamese Communist aggression in trying to take over all of Indochina.
In 1955 almost one million Vietnamese fled the North to the shelter of the South. They felt the sense of aggression breathing down their homes. They certainly count as someone. Zinn apparently believes there was nothing ‘aggressive’ about the International Communist movement in the era of Stalin and Mao!
Much is often made of the Sino-Soviet split and the alleged disunity of the Communist block and therefore the naiveté of those who believed in the monolithic international Communist menace. But this alleged split, even if we concede the reality of it, did not begin until 1959-1960. The years Zinn is discussing are those when no one on either side of the Iron Curtain would disagree that the international Communist movement was real, united and determined to rule the world.
Zinn only points out one truth and then claims that it speaks for all the other complicated factors in the situation. True, in the early 50’s we were in effect supporting the French in their effort to re-establish their colonial control over Indochina.
But if that was our cynical reason for being there, why did we jump in after the French left? Was it because America had colonial aspirations in the jungles of Indochina? Was it for the oil of Vietnam? There wasn't any. Was it for their great banking institutions?
No we supported and then replaced the French in Vietnam out of moral convictions.
The idea that we were there to only fill out some insensitive calculations by world leaders about geo-strategic positioning without moral considerations is sad and wrong. Do you think all of our post-war Presidents would send our boys to die for less than a moral cause? The US left thought so then, thinks so today, and will think so tomorrow.
Neither FDR, nor Truman, nor Eisenhower was pleased to be assisting the French in reestablishing their control over Indochina. But with China going over to Communism and then supporting the North Vietnamese Communists, Truman and Ike had little choice but to invoke the old adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Even if he is a colonialist.
In August of 1945 Indochina was in a vacuum because the US and the UK defeated the Japanese Army who were physically still occupying the Vietnam countryside. The USUK team did all the dirty work. The Vietnamese had not done much. The Vietnamese Communist were as quick to blow up a truck full of our French WWII Allies as a truck full of our enemies, the Japanese. They hadn't earned a big piece of the post war pie in the wake of the US victory over the Japanese who occupied Vietnam. We owed more to the French for the divisions they recruited in the last two years of the war who fought hard.
Shouldn’t the USA and France both have some say in the post war settlement of the Indochina independence questions? A half a million Americans died to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese. France had suffered a lot more than had the Vietnamese in the conflict. I don’t recall any great Vietnamese resistance battles against the Japanese between 1940 and 1945 but I do recall some brave fighters resisting the Nazis in France.
If 10,000 Vietnamese rebels had assisted the US in our fight against the Japanese in Indochina and tied up great numbers of Japanese forces in the insurrection, and inflicted heavy casualties thus saving American lives, then we would have a moral obligation to support them in a demand for immediate independence after the war.
There were a few brave Vietnamese resistors. But they had not won their independence they way we did in 1776, nor the way Mexico had in 1821, and the fairest thing in some minds was to first return to the status quo antebellum and then go from there.
Let’s not judge early Nam decisions by the presentism of today. Our early 50’s assistance to France came a decade before the sweeping independence movements of Africa and Asia. The world was still closer to the thinking of the post World War I mandate system than to the independence fever of 1960-1963. Zinn had 60 newly independent nations in the bank when he’s judging the US at his typewriter in 1967. Ike made his 1953 decisions from the prism of 1953.
The new nations of the Middle East in the 1920’s and 30’s, such as Iraq and Lebanon, were granted independence for services rendered during the First World War, not because a left-wing writer said they should get it on general principles.
Ike's desire to help the French was limited. Money oui, troops, no. Eisenhower decided to help the French hold on to their capital with capitol. Hanoi stayed in French hands in the early 1950's thanks to American money. Truman had already started the moneybag rolling, and Ike kept up the greenback attack. Three billion US dollars worth of help went to France in Indochina.
Troops, on the other hand, were a definite no. Korea had already cost tens of thousands of American lives and there was little or no Congressional or public support for sending troops to Indochina. France did not want US troops in there either. The French wanted US money, air support and diplomatic backing. But they did not want American ground troops. They correctly believed that American ground troops would mean that France no longer controlled the destiny of Indochina, which was the whole reason for being there.
The French decided in late 1953 that the only hope for victory in Vietnam was to stop the flow of troops and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and to force the Viet Minh forces into a full-scale fight. Both objectives were to be reached by establishing a remote post in the heart of enemy territory in the path of the Ho trail.
Dien Bien Phu was the chosen spot. It was a crossroads for Indochina, just six miles from Laos on the western edge of North Vietnam. The French troops were supposed to arrogantly garrison DBP in order to defy the Communists to attack. Dien Bien Phu was a magnet, a marker, a bulls-eye saying we dare you to knock this block off, a Cripp sitting down in the middle of a Blood tent, and breaking out a sandwich with his feet up on the enemy bosses desk.
15,000 French troops were sent in to the outpost. The first were parachuted in and then helped build an airstrip. The rest landed by plane. About 2,000 of these Phu fighters were native Vietnamese.
The plan backfired. Communist fighters from far and wide marched on Dien Bien Phu. Ho and company had nothing but time to organize an advantage before striking. Some took months to get there. No problem. Just get there. Strike only to win, strike only when victory was assured, or don’t strike at all. That was the plan and it was a good one. The trek to Phu became a Red journey to Mecca with the reward of a grand decisive fight at the end. By April 1, 1954 a highly camouflaged force of almost 40,000 Communist troops surrounded the camp, just waiting for the signal to start the attack.
The French at Phu presumed that the North Vietnamese enemy could never muster the artillery to drive them out. But Pierre forgot about Chairman Mao and Pal Joey. Stalin and Mao were more than willing to provide Ho with the big guns he needed to drive the French out of Dien Bien Phu. It took four full months for the Communists to transport and set up this siege artillery pieces on the hills overlooking Dien Bien Phu, but once they did the battle was over before it started. It was an Indochina version of the rebel haul of cannon from Ticonderoga to Boston in 1775. The left biased histories conspicuously fail to mention that the artillery at Dien Bien Phu were supplied by the Chinese and the Soviets. They are referred to merely at “Viet Minh Artillery.” Can't anyone try to be fair and balanced, or at least own up to their bias?
The French position was militarily untenable. A green private could see the score. The French had morale, good equipment, American money, and 49,000 bottles of excellent wine. The Viet Minh had modern Russian and Chinese artillery, motivation, and the high ground. The French soldiers were bivouacked in a bulls-eye.
The attack began and in a couple of hours 500 French soldiers were killed and key positions overrun in hand-to hand fighting.
The next day the French Army launched a successful counter-attack and re-took a lost position. It felt like victory. But the French commander knew the truth, and it was even more ugly than the death toll on both sides. The French had expended all of its offensive capability in the one counterattack. This French victory on day 2 was a false spring, a common tactical mistake in warfare, the intrepid successful counterattack decimating your own defense.
The airstrip was soon knocked out and the garrison isolated.
The French tried parachute drops. But the defensive perimeter grew smaller and smaller until relief chutists were landing as often in Communist hands as in French. The wounded could no longer be evacuated and were housed in crude underground shelters. Plasma was desperately needed and long gone.
The French begged the USA to save the day and intervene in force. At Dien Bien Phu, the dream of America coming to the rescue was the only hope that kept morale alive and precluded surrender.
There was a lot of pressure on Eisenhower to pull the French chestnuts out of the fire, and Dwight in fact sincerely wanted to. But the President felt that he simply could not do it, both from a political and military standpoint.
Many US military advisors wanted us to intervene almost as badly as the French did. Some even advocated the introduction of US nuclear ordnance to save DBP. But the blast from a nuke would probably kill the French defenders along with the attacking troops, so the idea was discarded. Ike had taken the idea quite seriously for a brief moment.
Dulles told the French foreign minister Bidault that if the US could get the British on board, there was a good chance for some real help. Ike and Dulles consulted the British in the hope that a multi-national Korean War type of intervention could be organized in a hurry. If the British had said yes, it is almost certain that the United States would have intervened in force in North Vietnam in 1954. But the UK gave the US an adamant no.
The Ike Administration then offered France another way out. If France agreed to give the four states of Indo the right to voluntarily
leave the French union after it was saved, then the United States would make every effort to save Dien Bien Phu. This offer was rejected, of course. What was the point in saving an empire by combat only to allow it to walk away in peace?
France asked the United States to make a pledge to use American air power if China intervened with troops. Ike said “sorry, but no.”
American intervention did not come. On May 7, 1954 the French were forced to surrender the entire Army at Dien Bien Phu.
The prisoners were forced to march to a VC prison camp in a Bataan like atmosphere of cruelty. More than half of them died before a prisoner exchange could be arranged. Within six months, the Viet Minh had entered Hanoi as the new rulers and there they remain today.
The defeat could not have come at a more opportune moment for the Communists. While they were shelling the defenders at Dien Bien Phu, representatives of 19 countries were meting at Geneva, Switzerland to try and negotiate a revisionist settlement of Indochina in order to end all the civil wars and disputes. The Geneva meetings began on May 8. The Communist Vietnamese representatives were all smiles as they arrived. A French representative later said that he came to the poker table at Geneva holding the two of clubs and the three of diamonds.
GENEVA ACCORDS
The Geneva Accords of July 1954 divided Vietnam into the two states that went on to fight a 10,000 day war that ended in May of 1975 when T-54 tanks smashed through the gates of Saigon's Presidential Palace and the American Embassy.
John Foster Dulles went to Geneva but he was very unhappy to be there. Just negotiating with Communists wasn't right as far as he was concerned. But Ike told him to go, so “The Dullard” (as Joe Alsop called him) went. The United States was determined to participate, but not to sign anything. There was too much at stake to stay out of it, but too much also at stake to make any definite long term pledges. It was typicl America like the League of Nations and Salt II and the World Court. Not signing on, but sitting outside in a room next door at all the meetings.
Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were not eager to compromise and allow Vietnam to be divided into two states, even temporarily. They felt that had won the battle and in effect won the war. The French still controlled the city of Hanoi, but little else, and it would only be a matter of time before Frenchie would get Dien Bien Phud out of there too. Ho wanted a national election and a unified Communist Vietnam right now.
The west, especially the United States, wanted to prevent this of course. But surprisingly, the Chinese and Soviets pressed the Viet Minh to accept a divided Vietnam; for now.
Why on earth would the Chinese and Soviets press Ho to accept a divided Vietnam at the hour of near total victory?
The USSR wanted to woo France away from the NATO bloc and any other European defense groupings it might be leaning towards joining. The Russians felt that if they could save face for France in Vietnam by exerting some pressure on their Communist little brothers they would score more political points in Europe against the United States than they would lose in the less important region of Indochina. It was a mirror image of why the United States was supporting Colonial France in Indochina the first place.
The Chinese felt that they could maintain more influence on one-half a Vietnam on their border, than with a full sized independent Vietnam drunk with victory. China wanted friendly satellites on its southern border, not upstart rivals to their south. China also wanted to mitigate its Korean War image and this time ostentatiously play peacemaker for international brownie points.
China also feared that if some sort of compromise were not reached, then the United States might intervene in force and make itself a permanent continental land power in South Asia. So China cooperated in allowing South Vietnam to get away free for now.
There were less cynical reasons why the Viet Minh accepted a divided Vietnam at Geneva. The Communists had not completely won their civil war in the North. They had driven out the French, but they had their own internal enemies to take care of first. It might be wise for the Viet Minh to take a couple of years to consolidate control over North Vietnam before resuming the quest for final Communist victory against the South. If they knew it was going to take 21 more years to get there, the Viet Minh might have taken a different stand at Geneva in 1954.
The Geneva agreements were finalized in July of 1954. They created two new nations out of the old colonial French Indochina provinces. The old French Indochina suddenly re-emerged as four nations, Laos, Cambodia, South Vietnam and North Vietnam.
The separation of Vietnam into two states was supposed to be temporary pending a settled unification later.
Laos would be both neutral and independent, meaning it did not have true independence, since as a neutral it could not choose allies. But in exchange for nationhood, why not? And most western experts knew that since the Communists had all the momentum there, neutralization was the best the democratic west could do at the moment.
Vietnam would be divided at the 17th parallel, pending elections in two years. The Communists (the Viet Minh) under their charismatic leader Ho Chi Minh would control the Northern part.
The Southern half would be nominally independent but France would still reign through its puppet democrat emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai.
The United States and South Vietnam did not sign the Geneva Agreements, but voluntarily pledged to abide by their terms. The US and South Vietnam did not trust the Communists to keep their side of the agreements so they did not sign anything with them. It is important to always bear this in mind because for the next 19 years we never hear the end of how our side “Violated the Geneva Accords.”
The defeat at DBP did not have to mean French withdrawal from Southeast Asia. They had more forces where that came from. But it put the French politicians on the defensive. From now on French Vietnam was a sinking ship.
One of the key stipulations of the Geneva accords was that none of the four new states of could legally form military alliances with nations outside of Indochina. This was a big advantage for the Communists because China was already a long standing military ally and bordered North Vietnam and Laos. It was impossible to enforce this rule in practice regarding China and these two friendly nations below it.
Many US Congressmen called Geneva a complete defeat for the Eisenhower Administration. What Truman had won in Korea, Ike had now given away in North Vietnam. The Communist were being allowed to set up shop there with US approval. What was the point of fighting in Korea if this was our new attitude in Vietnam?
But Ike and Dulles were realistic enough to know that North Vietnam was impossible to save, or attack. It was too close to China and we didn't need another Yalu River bloodbath or world war. It was best to give up one nation and try to hold on to the other three than to make a hopeless attempt to win all four. But that didn't sit well with many critics at home in Washington.
After Phu, France continued to ask for American aid, and Eisenhower and the Dulles gang were willing to continue to help. But we attached certain conditions to U.S. money and diplomatic support. When France refused our terms, we refused the money. It was only then that France decided to completely withdraw from Vietnam. They more or less said, “Ok Sam, you want Vietnam on your terms? You got it! Lot's o luck!” The last Frenchman was gone by the end of 1956, not counting reporters and a couple of heroin dealers.
SEATO
American distrust of the Geneva Accords resulted in the calling of a meeting of friendly states to form a NATO for the Far East. It was called SEATO. This stood for the South East Asia Treaty Organization. It was our legal basis for the Vietnam War.
The pact was signed on September 8, 1954. The member nations were the USA, UK, the Philippines, France, Australia, New Zealand, Tonga, Pakistan and Thailand. The countries that SEATO was formed to defend were not even signatories of the pact because of the Geneva protocol mentioned earlier.
SEATO was a mutual defense pact, like NATO, except that its terms were so vaguely worded that any member state could choose to send or not send military assistance to a threatened or attacked member and justify it's course of action or inaction either way. SEATO was a contract for the signed up nations to get together in the event of aggression or subversion and talk it over and see what we can all do about this. It was the same as many other weak treaties of the past and present.
If the United States intervened in the Vietnam War under SEATO obligations, it wasn’t because it had to under SEATO obligations. The treaty terms did not require any American president to go to war if another country invaded South Vietnam. But it said that any signatory nation could it if really wanted to.
The practical and threatening meaning of the treaty was understood by the entire world. The letter of the law was flexible but the spirit fell on the side of American military assistance if any outside force (read ‘Communist force’) attacked a member state. SEATO was stronger than its vague wording would indicate. The US would not have instigated its formation if it did not have action in mind. The US had just fought the Communist challenge in Korea, and was losing in Laos. Eisenhower and his military think tank were oiling up the guns and checking the sights when they created SEATO.
I was the only kid in my third grade class that knew what SEATO was and was very proud of myself for that and obviously still am. It didn't occur to me at the time that SEATO might get me killed before my 20th birthday.
VIETNAM DEMOCRACY
Did the USA prevent the free elections in 1956 Vietnam that had been promised by the Geneva Agreement of 1954? It is standard historical info today that the US did so because we knew the Communists would win. Therefore, America not only backed the dishonest side, we were hypocrites of democracy.
To repeat a point that can hardly be repeated enough because the accusation is repeated ad nauseam, the US never signed the Geneva agreements. Why? Because the USA did not trust the word of any Communist nation to hold an honest election. We had no obligation to honor or abide by a national Vietnamese election at this time. We smelled a rat and the wind was coming from Ho’s direction.
Would the US have rejected elections just because it enjoyed being part of a rightist transparent trampling of justice? I doubt it. Ike had reasons. For one thing there were nine million more people in the Communist North Vietnam than in the South. Eisenhower felt strongly that since a dictator controlled most of the North Vietnam population, our candidate could never get a fair chance. There would not be a single person under Mr. Chi Minh that would dare to vote no on Ho.
So our candidate Diem (more on him soon) would have to win 270% of the population in the South if he had any chance to win. Ike felt that such dictatorial control of a country made elections fraudulent, even if there was to be an attempted supervision by the International Commission through field reps from Poland, Canada, and India.
So the North wanted elections and the South didn’t. The truth was that the North wanted an unfair election and the South rejected it with American support.
At the end of the Geneva signings flood of emigrants poured out of the north to the south. 900,000 fled the north to go live in the south. Many of these refugees would finally be chased down and caught in 1975 when Saigon fell, at which time they either fled in leaky rowboats, put in reeducation camps or were killed.
In the other direction, 90,000 Communist guerillas went from South to North for further training in Lenin and Hoism. They would return later and play a key role in the war against South Vietnam. So the refugee vote was ten to one in favor of life south of the 17th parallel.
Most of the 900,000 who voted with their sandals were Catholics. But many were not.
The North Vietnamese Communist actually welcomed this mass exodus from the North. Now they could consolidate their gains and not have to fight these people. Consolidate meant murder.
I want to stop and ask the reader to listen and read carefully what I am about to say. The first to die were the intellectuals. If you are reading this, you are probably one. Who else reads history books? A few million dummies will watch the History Channel, but only an intellectual will take the time and effort to buckle down voluntarily with anyone's history book. If you are here with me reading this you would be the first to die in a Communist rebellion and take-over. It doesn't matter of you are a right-winger or a left-winger.
It is the same story in all accounts of Communist take-overs. It was the same in the Bolshevik Revolution. The Lenins and the Trostskys made sure that people of leadership qualities died first. Even if you were a supporter of Communism you were likely to be killed. This is the most profound reason I can offer you for despising the Communists of the 20th Century the way I do. Traitors didn't die first. The smart people died first.
Stalin murdered millions of Russians for having talent or brains or a conscience, even if they themselves thought they were on Stalin's team! Sadaam Hussein did the same thing in his Iraq, modeled on Stalin's Russia. Read any inside account of the takeover of China under Mao and it is the same story.
There were a million fools who hung from trees because they supported Communism but had a mind of their own, and disagreed with some tenet of a Communist in power. Intellectuals died first. Leaders died first. Anyone who thought independently, even if they supported Communism, died first. By the time these fools realized their error they were watching their corpse from above.
It was reverse Darwinism. Communist takeovers meant survival of the unfittest. I have seen so many interviews of old people with tears in their eyes speaking or Nam or China and saying, “The Communists came in and took over the village. They had a list prepared of all the intellectuals, all the village leaders, anyone with a free thinking spirit, and none of them were ever seen again.”
The Communists artificially created a new human being by weeding out all the talent and fertilizing the soil with them. They created a stupid and passive world of frightened people with no sense of defiant independence, people who were scared to say or do anything in the face of their Communist bosses.
This reverse Darwinianism is especially abhorrent to me because I have been a very rebellious and independent person all my life and an intellectual, albeit a formally untrained one. I'm a wild mustang who never made it to the rodeo show. I would be the first to die in a Communist revolution and so would you if you are still here reading this with me, even and especially if you think you disagree. Independent thought is the first warning sign that you have to go.
It reminds me of the sit-com star who has complete creative control of the show in his contract. He gets a dinner invitation from the executive producer. At dinner, the producer comes out with it; “Why did you fire Brian Kiley from your writing staff? Everyone knows he helped create magic in every script. And he was the only one who could spot a bad joke and speak up and say it should be taken out. Kiley was the only one on the staff who wasn't a yes man. Why fire the best man on the staff?” The sit-com star just stares coldly at the executive producer until he sits back and says “Ooooooh. I get it.” The sit-com star goes back to his steak without another word about it.
Hitler pretended to hate the Jews for their inferiority, but he hated them more because they were the educated class and he wasn't. They were a threat to Nazi leadership and control. Therefore, they had to die. Jewish writers died long before the concentration camps were filled up with Jewish shopkeepers and Gypsies. The Nazi's practiced reverse Darwinianism too, but unlike the Communists they made a pretense of doing the opposite.
As soon as the Geneva Accords were unilaterally ratified on the Communist side, the mass murders began in the North. The shining lights in cities and especially down to the village level were rounded up and taken care of. The most talented Communist in any village was in as much danger as the most talented anti-Communist. People with brains got their brains beat in. People with guts got their guts ripped out. Estimates of the number of North Vietnamese people killed by their own brothers in the 1950's range from 100,000 to 500,000. It was a genocide of the best and the brightest, in order that a few ruthless scums who had back-stabbed their way to the top of Communist leadership could rule without fear.
To me, this is the essence of our cause in Vietnam. These were the people that Kennedy and Johnson went to war against. And to think that the Communist North is always credited by liberal western authors as being the one side that truly favored a “United Vietnam.” They, not the south were supposedly the true “Vietnamese Nationalists.” The Viet Minh murdered five Michigan State football stadiums worth of little people of their own race and half-nation, but they are called the true Vietnamese nationalists.
Leftorians blame a deplorable propaganda campaign by the CIA for this exodus to the South. You see, the CIA under the sordid spy 'Edzo' Lansdale (was he really seen at Dealy Plaza on 11.22?) printed a pamphlet purported to be from the Communist printing press announcing terrible things the Viet Minh were about to implement in North Vietnam. It also distributed out a flyer with some astrological predictions designed to scare the locals into believing that bad things were going to happen soon in the North. Supposedly these pamphlets caused almost a million peasants to pick up and leave their life-long homes and move to the south with no job or place to live awaiting them there. Yeah, right.
Most of the 900,000 who fled the North were Catholic. Do these writers think that Catholics anywhere in the world in 1956 needed a CIA astrology pamphlet to convince them that it was time to leave when a Communist regime took over? If Communists had taken over the United States in 1956 I’m sure that about 130 million Catholics and Protestants and Jews would have fled to Mexico and Canada with only what they could pack into the Oldsmobile. No pamphlet would have been necessary here and none was needed there. They knew the score without our prodding.
The point is often made that the United States never cared a hoot about Vietnamese Independence. It is said that we only supported the anti-Communist forces in there for our own selfish ideological (at best) or cold geopolitical (at worst) reasons.
All right, lets for the fun of it concede the point. We never cared a damn about Vietnamese independence. But what about China, without whose help Ho could never have overthrown the French, nor the Americans later? Did China care so deeply about Vietnamese “Independence?”
No. China was allegedly a great historical enemy of Vietnam. We never hear the end of that argument. So if China was indeed the historical enemy of Vietnam, yet channeled billions of dollars worth of military supplies to Ho's home boys, it must have been for a very low and selfish reasons. Yet China never gets called out on that one.
China only wanted a Communist power friendly to China in the place called Vietnam. It wanted an allied Communist state there. China wanted true Vietnamese independence as much as a fish wants to land on top of a Sudan sand dune. To be sure, China favored truly free elections on Jupiter, but nowhere on this planet.
The liberal pundits still write that the North was more moral because it stood for true Vietnamese independence. Please. Only a Communist Vietnam friendly to China, and one that was an active part of the international Communist movement’s attempt to dominate the world was ever going to allowed to come into being. Independence meant independence acceptable to China, which means not independent. No election would stand that did not favor a Communist candidate.
If by some miracle Diem had been allowed to campaign openly in the North and had won a fair and square one-third of the Northern vote and his total made him the winner in a close one, do you think that Ho, China and the North Vietnamese Communists would have allowed the election to stand, with Ho backing down and letting Diem set up shop in Hanoi? Well, do you?
China was behind the rise of the North Vietnamese Communists, China financed it, and China could and would remove from power any regime or individual not to its liking on its post 1949 southern border. Ho stood for an independent Vietnam because he was acceptable to China and only because that he and his Communist comrades were acceptable to China. The Soviet Union in turn backed China in the food chain of support.
So Bao Dai and US blocked the “free elections” that were scheduled for 1956. But who backed the North in 1956? China and the Soviet Union. When did these two countries ever have “free election” in their own country? Try never. Certainly not at the time we are examining. So the true crusaders for free elections throughout Vietnam in 1956 we are supposed to believe, were the three groups that were the most inherently anti-democratic on the face of the earth, the USSR, China and the Ho Chi Minh warriors.
We are supposed to believe that America and the anti-Communist South Vietnamese feared true democracy, but on the other hand those Communists under the total guidance and domination of China and the Soviet Union, were its real defenders of democracy. Give me a break.
The international Communist movement in the 1950’s was a brutal atheistic force that was the opposite of everything this country stood for. The Communists were the bad guys at Dien Bien Phu, they were the bad guys when Saigon was being evacuated in 1975, and they were the bad guys when the skulls piled up in Cambodia after we split. That's why the world rejoiced when it fell in 1989-91.
A good example of liberal Blame America and South Vietnam First bias is the history of the war by professor George Herring of the University of Kentucky. Ho is very admired in this book while Diem is a total man of evil. Herring is forever omitting that Ho and the Viet Minh are “Communist.” He hates to use the word except when mocking an American “anti-Communist.”
I don't understand the leftorians fear of using the very word the Communists used to describe themselves. The magic word “communism” is always euphemized into “socialism.” I saw a very recent documentary on US immigration in which the writers mentioned that Castro brought “socialism” to Cuba. Why cut the guy slack he wouldn't have the yellow cowardice to cut for himself. Castro's Cuba was proud to be “Communist.”
Here’s Herring's take on the state of Ho and North Vietnam in the immediate time after the Geneva accords,
The North Vietnamese regime was not
without internal opposition, and it faced
an enormous challenge of post-war
reconstruction. … Ho Chi Minh was the
best known nationalist leader in all of
Vietnam. … Ho and his colleagues
remained deeply committed to the
reunification of Vietnam, and they left
between 10,000 and 15,000 operatives
in the south to promote that goal by
legal and extralegal means.
Unbelievable.
‘The North Vietnamese regime was not without internal opposition.’ He doesn’t mention how that opposition was eliminated. As for its facing ‘an enormous challenge of post-war reconstruction,’ well so did Diem but the government to the south is never given this kind of sympathetic phrasing.
'Ho Chi Minh was the best known Communist nationalist in all of Vietnam.' George, Ho and his colleagues were deeply committed to the triumph of Communism and would never accept a united Vietnam under a non-Communist government, so nationalist is a qualified term at best. Stop with the biased euphemism, Herring. The Communists left behind 10-15,000 guerilla fighters, not your soft-sell term ‘operatives.’
Herring almost reluctantly admits that these stay-at- home Ho sympathizers would be doing some illegal things. But he never mentions that leaving these warriors behind was a violation of the Geneva agreements which North Vietnam had signed. On the other hand, the USA gets stern condemnation from Herring for violating the Geneva accord by supporting Diem. And we had not signed.
Herring again,
Violating the spirit and sometimes the letter of
Geneva accords, the Eisenhower administration
in 1954 and after firmly committed itself to the
fragile government of Ngo Dinh Diem.
Herring also says that the United States pushed the French out of Vietnam in order to create a state more to our liking with which to fight the Commies. Blame America First.
In 1985 Nixon wrote that there were more than 12,000 books about the Vietnam War, 12,001 counting his. There may be one or two that make a feeble attempt to look at both sides of the argument. The other 11,998 are hopeless. They are either conservative books citing only conservative sources in support of their view (these can be counted on two hands), or liberal historians citing only other liberal historians supporting their point of view (if you include periodical literature, these can only be counted on two new computers.)
Historians are not infallible and they come from liberally biased academia.
The percentage of historians that are wrong on any given issue is the exact same percentage as the percentage of cab drivers and floor sweepers arguing the same subject. The cabbies have less facts, and are less articulate, and own less pipe tobacco, but the same percentage of them are wrong and right.
Many of the arguments of the libtorians condemning the South Vietnamese regimes have validity. Diem was a scum and we'll get to that later. The problem is the disgusting double standards applied at all times. Condemn the lack of democracy in the south, ignore or misrepresent the lack of democracy in the North. Condemn the totalitarian regime in the South, provide apologist admiring and sympathetic views of the Ho Chi Minh regime in the North. Condemn American support for the South, ignore or provide apologist excuses for Chinese and Soviet support for the North. Better yet, claim that China and Vietnam were enemies and that China and Russia were not a major force behind the NVC war effort.
A FRIEND OF VIETNAM JUNE 1956
A very conservative anti-Communist Senator made a speech in June 1956 before a Washington organization called “The Friends of Vietnam.”
In the speech he said that indochina was a place where America has to take a stand against the Communists, just like it did in Korea.
The Senator said that Chinese aggression was behind the move to take overall of Vietnam by the Viet Minh.
He specifically said that the United States and South Vietnam must reject any attempt to hold a national election at this time and demanded a repudiation of that demand of the Geneva Accords. The senator said that those elections would be rigged and the Communist would win. He called for an absolute repudiation of the Geneva accords. The man who made that speech was Senator John F. Kennedy.
WHO WAS DIEM?
The new President of the new nation in the South was Diem. He had a serious problem on his hands for openers with local rebellions that were not Communist. Maybe rebellion isn’t the right word.
The Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao were two virtually autonomous religious and political groups that occupied large areas of the Mekong Delta. Between them they represented more than two million Vietnamese people. France did not want to fight them so they were allowed to exist within the French Empire on a peaceful-coexistence basis.
Diem (pronounced ‘Tzee-em’) and he was destined to die in a coup in 1963. Diem had been virulently both anti-Communist and anti-French. His defiance of the French had led to his flight to the United States where he enrolled in a Catholic seminary in New Jersey. Now that's desperate!
It was Diem by the way that coined the Phrase ‘Viet Cong’ a derogatory nickname for the Vietnamese Communists, or ‘VC’ for short. The VC adopted the phrase and wore it proudly. It is used primarily to delineate the revolutionary Communists in the South from the regular Army in the North, who are usually referred to as NVA. I prefer the use of ‘VC’ as an abbreviation for all the forces of Vietnamese Communism, both North and South.
This was the first of two critical “decent intervals.”
Besides, the new nation called Laos was now bordered by two expansionist Communist states and its conquest was only a matter of how and when, but not of if. We’ll worry about South Vietnam later, after we’ve taken Laos. It was a great strategy.
President Diem of South Vietnam was a conservative anti-Communist but a tyrant in his own right. He was no friend of pure democracy, even though he endorsed a South Vietnamese Constitution that in print seemed more democracy friendly than it was in practice. The French did not want Diem in power and the USA did. A heated argument over Diem took place in Paris between American and French leaders. France threatened to pull out of South Vietnam completely if America insisted on supporting Diem. The stubborn Yanks said do what you have to do and the French pulled out in a short series of troop withdrawals.
Diem was such a tyrant that by the late 1950’s a revolution against him began to foment throughout South Vietnam. The Communists, who had been minding their own business in the South, and not even contemplating aggressions towards the South in the North, suddenly saw their opportunity. The villages were so up in arms against the South Vietnamese government, that they turned eagerly to Communism, whereas they would never have done so before. America was a naïve fool to think that Diem’s anti-Communism would stop Communism. What really happened was that Diem’s anti-Communism created the rise of South Vietnamese support for Communism.
They stress that Diem’s secret police were very bad and they say nothing about the ruthlessness of Communist police forces in the North. They magnify the crimes of Diem and minimize those of Ho. Some of the bias is simply a matter of space allotment. There are 43 paragraphs on Diem’s crimes then two quick hit and run sentences on the crimes of the Communists. Then we go back to the crimes of Diem as if the unfair dichotomy of space given to each sides wrongful deeds isn’t a dastardly deed in itself. They take the maximum statistics they can find on Diem’s crimes and report it as fact. Then they reluctantly cite some figures on murders in the North and mention that they are probably exaggerated. What is even better, they see no excuse for Diem’s behavior but offer sympathetic reasons for the wrongs in and from the North. Here is an example from Herring who in his book America’s Longest War has bashed Diem for page after page after page when he paused ever so briefly on pg 67 to reluctantly concede that the North perhaps were not angels,
Like Diem, Ho Chi Minh and his lieutenants faced
massive problems of postwar reconstruction and
nation-building. Reports of a “bloodbath” in which
as many as 500,000 people were executed following
implementation of a land-reform program have been
greatly exaggerated. Hanoi’s heavy-handed measures
did provoke widespread opposition, however.
Between 3,000 and 15,000 dissidents may in fact
have been executed, and resistance in Ho Chi Minh’s
own Nghe An province had to be suppressed by
units of the regular army.
Slick. We hear that a half a million were killed in the agrarian program? Well, that’s just an exaggeration. Three to fifteen thousand dissidents executed? No; they may have been executed. Then Herring delivers the most evasive soft-sell wording humanly possible for the act of Army troops massacring civilians in Nghe An province. They weren’t killed, they were ‘suppressed.’
If the same deeds were committed by Diem we can only imaging the wording.
How can you put bloodbath in quotation marks. As if the Soviet Union, Red China, Pol Pot and the North Vietnamese Communists have not all been patently guilty of this word in the twentieth century. Agrarian reforms in Communist countries traditionally involve the needless murder of thousands of innocent people. Even if we allow that the reports of 500,000 killed was an exaggeration, what is the acceptable threshold for the word bloodbath? One thousandth of 500,000 is still a bloodbath.
Diem held democratic elections in South Vietnam that made a mockery of democracy. He wasn't content to fraudulently win 78% of the vote. He had to rig the elections so that he won 98%. The US was backing a bad guy in South Vietnam.
The Diem regime was a family mafia. His brother and his sister in law were more hated by the people than he ever was. Madam Nhu was a witch from hell who helped get her brother in law murdered in 1963 by her insane ruthless murderous suppressing of anyone who breathed the wrong way when they spoke of the regime.
Diems's brother Tony Ngo made Al Capone look like John the Baptist. More people in Vietnam wanted him dead than there were people in Vietnam.
HANOI STARTS THE SECOND NAM WAR 1959
There had been something of a lull after the geneva Accords were signed by some but not all of the parties on the struggle in 1954.
The North decided to concentrate on consolidating the Communist victory there and wait for the south to collapse under its own worthless government structure.
In the League for the Independence of Vietnam, which translates into the “Viet Minh” was Communist, but for now welcomed a few non-Communist anti-Deim groups in order to win against the south.
Ho and Giap really did think that Diem could not possibly last. They expected to waltz into south Vietnam when a spontaneous revolution from below, whether Communist or not, showed him the door or the grave. The VM expected a complete and easy victory to obtain a “unified” Vietnam.
Diem was ruthless and not very democratic and he killed and imprisoned many Vietnamese people. Not denied. But in his mind that was the only way to hold on, and maybe only a tyrant could have held on as long as he did.
The American Ambassador Ellwood Durbrow was trying to pressure Diem to be more honestly democratic, while the CIA was more willing to look the other way as the only to hang on against the Communists.
Diem only had two real items on his agenda. he wanted physical improvements to please the people and make his own country more efficient and economically prosperous like roads, schools, hospitals, irrigation systems. The other was to defeat the Communists who were always knocking at the door while he tried to sleep at night. If he had enough French wine, Diem would openly admit that for now he didn't give a Ho about democracy. He wanted his regime to survive.
In theory we could sympathize with his position, but his brother and the other members of his mobbed up family were so despicable that even that equation goes out the window. The whole country hated his mob family much more than they did him. His brother had more to do with his murder in 1963 than he did.
When Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 he was succeeded by a dull but strong Commie named Le Duan. In 1959 Le Duan went on an undercover scouting mission to South Vietnam to see how things were going or not going. He came back with a pessimistic report. Apparently in spite of all his clear cut anti-democratic corruption, or perhaps because of it, (they should know) the Diem regime was apparently going to hang on.
It was time to resume the war. The decent interval had not paid easy dividends in the south even though it did indeed give the VM time to consolidate its Communist state in the North.
George Herring give a complete opposite reason for why North Vietnam decided to resume the war. He says that the North Vietnamese realized that Diem was losing control and that revolution was rising up from below. They felt that now all of a sudden the time was ripe to resume the war because victory seemed more within sight. It is a perfect example of the hopelessly inexact science of history and how no matter what I or any historian writes, another historian will come along and insist that the exact opposite is true. It always come back to Voltaire, “History is a series of fables agreed upon.” He might have added disagreed upon.
William Colby of the CIA is the one who carefully explained that the resumption of the war was the result of North Vietnam realizing that Diem was growing stronger. Herring says the opposite.
Colby is CIA which makes him suspect, but he was on the ground at the time and he has access to a lot of information. Herring represents the academic orthodoxy of general consensus, which is no less suspect than the CIA. One works for the Central Intelligence Agency, the other for the Liberal Intelligence Agency. So pick your version, the CIA or the LIA. I'm going with Colby on this one.
In any case at least we can safely say that North Vietnam did decide to resume the Vietnam War in 1959. Neither author says that the Diem regime or the CIA started it up.
MAAGOTS
American aid was starting to come into the south in larger increments. In addition to money and supplies, the Americans were starting to sent in Americans. They arrived under the heading of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, or as one leftorian mockingly called them, “The MAAAGOTS.” They came in peace to help kill Communists.
The first two Americans to die in the Vietnam War were hit on the night of July 8, 1959 in the town on Bien Hoa, on the northern outskirts of Saigon.
They died on movie night. These MAAG men were watching a very bad black and white film with John Wayne called Big Jim McLain. Wayne plays a tough joyless American anti-Communist. Just before the two doomed men in Vietnam found out that the real killer in the movie is a Communist spy, a VC squad fired automatic weapons into their darkened tent killing both men.
The first body bags from Nam were soon on their way back to Andrews Air Force base. If anyone in D.C. had any inkling of how many more were to follow, the US role in Vietnam might have been nipped in the bud right then and there, no matter what Big Jim McLain had to say about it.
Bien Hoa would be the scene of a strategic ambush (if there is such an oxymoron) in the early 1960's.
PARA-COUP 1960
On November 10, 1960 just before midnight, Bill Colby the CIA Station Chief on Saigon was sipping sherry on his balcony across the street from the Presidential Palace with his wife, admiring the windless night, when a slew of tracer bullets went up in his direction. The two of them hit the deck and the bullets tore up their bedroom. The American Ambassador Durbow came running upstairs to see what was going on. Colby yelled at him to “duck down you nit wit!” when a second spray of bullets came up at them and Colby had to yank Durbrow to the ground just in time. One of Durbrows assistants who had just arrived on the scene was wounded in the shoulder. The little Yankee contingent set up some bookcases and hid in a corner of the room.
The attack was not specifically directed at the Americans, but was actually a South Vietnamese Army revolt directed at Diem. Parachutists were landing all around the President's Palace and were isolating him for a siege.
These clowns were not even intent on overthrowing Diem. They only wanted to make him listen to their demands for reforms. The chute coup wanted opposition groups to be included in Diems' government, an introduction of some real democracy (usually the opposite goal of a military coup,) and end to some of the tyrannical practices of the Ngo brothers and the secret police, and more effective reforms within the Army to fight the Communists.
The parachute coup was doomed to failure because it was not a united front within the Army. There were far more loyal army units than rebellious ones and soon they were called out to put this thing down. The parachute rebels who had surrounded the Palace were soon surrounded by loyal Army units who forced them to surrender.
The rebel leaders were either packed off to the French built prisons that used to use against Vietnamese rebels. A few escaped to Cambodia. Others were forced on to a plane to exile in Cambodia.
The coup had no chance because it had no mass backing. It was a plan without a parachute. The Ngo brothers didn't change their policies one bit. In fact they used the coup to imprison some of their political opponents who had not participated in it, by saying they had.
The chute shoot said much to Colby and Durbrow about how “popular” the Diem regime was throughout the land.
ATLAS AND RB7
1959-60 was the turning point in nuclear missiles. For a decade both the USSR and the USA had conventional bombers with nuclear warheads who could take a 10 hour trip to the other country and destroy all of its large cities.
In 1959 Russia deployed the first of the RB-7 Intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuke on top. Sputnik 1957 was an RB-7, but by 1959 one or two of them had a nuke on top. With the push of a button the Russians could attack the United States. The two-ocean security system was dead after almost 200 years of protection.
In the same year the United States deployed its first handful of operation Atlas ICBM's. These too were nukes that could hit Russia from bases in the United States. No pilots, no call-back capability. Ike got out just in time.
Throughout 1960 the two counties began deploying these ICBM's in serious numbers. Ike got out at the right time. He left office just as the world was changing for the terrifying worse. In the time it took the Japanese to blow up the USS Arizona in 1941, the Russians could blow up the state of Arizona in 1961.
The RB-7 and the Atlas became military obsolete over the years because they were designed to carry an enormous heavy warhead. When nuke bombs got smaller, slimmer and more technically advanced rockets were built to carry them. But the Atlas and RB-7 found a second wind in being able to launch heavy large peaceful satellites into earth orbit. Most of the race to the moon in the 1960's was carried on by the old military nuke goliaths of the late 1950's.
CONCLUSION
Harry Truman said of Eisenhower, “Ike didn’t know anything, and all the time he was in office he didn’t learn a thing.”
Go to hell, Harry. The commander in Chief of our army in Europe in World War Two and the leader of NATO didn’t know anything?
This statement says more about a caustic, bitter, divisive, unfair partisan by the name of Truman than it does about the wise, reasonable, intrepid and fair gentleman uniter named Eisenhower. When Ike wrote his memoirs, his editor didn’t have to apologize on the jacket for the shameless bragging in the text, as was the case with Truman.
AFTER OFFICE;
Eisenhower retired to his farm near Gettysburg, Pa. He wrote his excellent two volume White House memoirs, and played golf without being criticized, and criticized Kennedy.
Ike died of heart failure on March 28, 1969 at a hospital in Washington. His last words were “I want to go; God take me.”
He is buried in Abilene, Kansas in full uniform.
SOURCES
The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford – c) 1961
Bailey makes no attempt to hide a partisan and offensive dislike of Eisenhower as a President, “who evidently only cares about golfing and quail shooting.” I forgive him because he is a great writer and because virtually all historians voted for the bore of the century in 52 and 56, so it's just another leaf in the late autumn wind, not an item to vociferously rebut.
Tom tells a story about “an extortionist who threw acid into the eyes of a journalist exposing racketeering.” I want to make it clear right now that I like anyone who engages in racketeering and I have no intention of exposing any of them.
America's Longest War, The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975, by George C. Herring – c) 1986 – This is an excellent book even though I disagree with so very much of it. He's biased. I'm biased. Sparks fly in the margins with the help of my fine point top of the line pens.
America in Vietnam, by Guenter Lewy – c) 1978 – How is it possible that a man who teaches history as U-Mass Amherst could write a history of the Vietnam War in which he actually sticks up for his country. Amherst is the most leftist area east of Berkeley California. Its more leftist than Harvard Square and Greenwich Village. I was shocked when I bought this book at the Reno Nevada Historical Society gift shop and began reading. Guenter is my hero!
Don't ask me why a book on the Vietnam War was for sale at the Reno Historical Society gift show, but it was, and it made my road gig go by faster to have this good guy to read after all the 'Blame American First' Nam histories I'd read previously.
Lewy proves beyond all doubt that the Geneva Accords were rejected outright by both the United States and South Vietnam, and even if they had been signed at all they did not pledge anyone to anything but absolute vagaries. In either case the charges for the next 20 years that we were violating the Geneva Accords was a pile of relentless offensive untruth.
At Ease, Stories I tell Friends, by Dwight D. Eisenhower – The title is misleading. This is an autobiography, the perfect compliment to the large memoirs of the White House listed above.
A Diplomatic History of the American People, by Tom Bailey, c) 1958 – Priceless perspective from a top notch historian knee-deep in the events of the 50’s.
The Fifties, by David Halberstam – c) 1993 – I read this book for two nights at my mother in law's house. She is a die-hard left Democrat. That's why this book found its way into her library. The famous Halberstam doesn't think he is left biased, but I do. Not to say he's some big-mouthed extremist lightweight, like the cast of Air America radio. Hal is an erudite liberal and a stimulating scholar. I liked his writing here much better than with his famous best-seller The Best and the Brightest.
A History of the American People, by Graebner, White and Fite, c) 1970
History of a Free People, by Bragdon, c) 1954
Ike’s Spies, by Stephen Ambrose, c) 1981 – Ambrose does not deny the essential error of our Guatemala intervention, but does quote several important persons as believing that the invasion would have happened with or without the selfish United Fruit connections in Washington.
Krushchev Remembers, by Nikita S. Kurshchev, edited by the always insufferable Harrison Salisbury -c) 1971 – The book is hard to put down if you love history and can make it through Salisbury's long introduction.
Based on a box of tapes found long after Krushchev passed on to the nothingness of atheism. Krushchev may have fallen from favor in the USSR but that didn't kill him like a Stalin would have. He retired to a good old life and made a lot of tape recordings on his own initiative about his his spectacular life in politics and crime. For a while, some historians questioned whether the voice on the recordings
was really that of Krushchev, but a scientific study verified it as Nicky's voice and his alone.
Lost Victory, by William Colby, with James McCargar – c) 1989 – A CIA chief in Vietnam tells the history of the war beginning with his arrival in Saigon in 1959. I like the book but not the writing. I blame the ghost writer. Colby is a man of action, even if we don't like his angle, and he can't possibly have written a draft with that many tediously long and confusing sentences. Only a Johnny Writer can do that. It should have been titled, Lost Reader.
Mandate for Change, by Dwight D. Eisenhower, c) 1963 – Volume one of the immense and immensely readable Eisenhower memoirs. So many books criticize Ike, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you haven’t let him argue the other side. Let the guy be a lawyer for himself and hear his arguments before you join the ‘Ike was a mediocrity’ historical crowd. You may find yourself nodding your head yes and saying, “good point” or “very interesting” quite often. Don’t look for much praise of Ike in other political books. He was no darling of the academic establishment. They didn’t like his politics and they didn’t like his style. Ike was what made the election of Kennedy the most wonderful exiting thing that ever happened.
Ike set up Camelot more than Joe Kennedy did.
The National Experience – Part II A History of the United States since 1865, by John M. Blum (Yale), Edmund S. Morgan (Yale), Willie Lee Rose (JHU), Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (CUNY), Kenneth M. Stampp (UCB), and C. Vann Woodward (Yale) – c) 1981 Harcourt Brace Javonovich NY
With this line-up I was expecting a delightful read, but they slow it down at every possible opportunity with boring segments about trends in things like science, art, literature, and economics. It seldom delivers the basic goods on events.
No More Vietnams, c) 1985 by Richard Nixon – This book is a thriller. The antidote to Maclear’s book and about 70 similar ones.
Nixon stresses that Ho Chi was a tool of International Communism, not a lover of Vietnamese independence. Most of the other Nam books ignore many facts that Nixon tells us, for example, that Ho Chi Minh was one of the founders of the French Communist Party in the 1920’s.
Operation Overflight/ The U-2 spy plane account by the pilot, Gary Francis Powers. Couldn't put it down. The stuff about his alcoholic unsupportive wife wasn't useful information though.
The Ordeal of Power, by Emmet John Hughes, c)1962 – When this book was published, Ike felt he had been stabbed in the back. Hughes had been one of Eisenhower’s speechwriters. They had worked closely together on many in an atmosphere of presumed trust. Ike was the kind of a guy who wouldn’t go public against his worst enemy. He might break him in two on a football field but Ike would never go public on anyone unless in self-defense. His memoirs in war and in peace spare the name every time he tells a story about some incompetent person he had to straighten out.
Near the end of his term Hughes made it clear that he disagreed with many of Ike’s policies and he resigned as speechwriter. Then in 1962 he wrote this unflattering account of the Eisenhower presidency. It made Ike look bad and it argued the author’s pet positions. Hughes essentially said that Ike was over his head at the top spot. Ike was steamed at Hughes for this poison pen book. I don’t blame him. I think being a speechwriter for anyone implies a trust that should not be broken even in the event of a personal falling out later on. It’s just not right.
Out of Many, A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale); Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke); and Susan Armitage (Washington State), c)1994 –
This modern general history has only one paragraph on the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, an event with crucial implications for our relations with all 1954 Middle Eastern nations both then and now. But Elvis Presley alone get three paragraphs, 50’s rock and roll in general gets seven, the plight of the 1950’s teen-ager gets 3, the television shows of the fifties get 8, the new suburban lifestyle gets 4, and the plague of loneliness from the rise of mass culture gets 3. Is there something wrong with this picture? Social history at home has become predominant in US general history and as a result the rest of the world is more knowledgeable about us than we are of them. The US history book today is so busy tooting its own cultural horn under the guise of academic study that more important issues of the world and our role in it often get superficial treatment at best. Just because the authors lived this or that part of US culture in their youth they think it’s worth writing extensively about on the pretext of educating the reader.
The Oxford History of the American People, By Samuel Eliot Morrison – c) 1965 – SEM wrote the definitive history of Columbus, the Maritime History of Massachusetts and the official U.S. Navy history of World War II, and is a Harvard history man.
He is very biased and cross as a general American historian.
Sambo obviously didn't vote for Ike. He says that Sambo was his nickname in the U.S. Navy.
Pictoral History of the American Presidents, by Whitney – No copyright date in the book, but definitely early 1970's – The text is far stronger than the title would indicate.
Presidential Elections, by Eugene Roseboom.
The Prize, by Daniel Yergen
Yergen as written the definite general history of the oil industry and deserved all of the many awards he got for this amazingly readable book.
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty – c) 1977 Harper & Row
Columbia Gouvernor Morris emeritus professor Garrity surprised me when he wrote this sentence about the 1950's on page 463,
“Despite all the billions poured into armaments and foreign aid, the safety, even the survival of the country seemed far from assured.”
Really?
Six Crisis, by Richard Nixon
A Soldier’s Story, by Omar Bradley includes many of Omar’s dealings with Ike. Bradley was the other big war hero of the European theatre.
The Ten Thousand Day War, by Michael Maclear, c)1981 – I don’t know which is better, the book or the movie. Both works are great. Maclear probably doesn’t even believe his book is hopelessly slanted to the left, and that’s what I like about it. He’s not a conniving sneak like many Nam historians, just a sad fool caught in the web of every Vietnam War orthodoxy.
The United States: The History of A Republic, by Richard Hofstadter of Columbia, Will Miller co-author of The Age of Enterprise, and Daniel Aaron of Smith - c) 1957 Prentice-Hall
I'm pretty sure that Hoffie and Aaron did not vote for Ike in 1952 or 1956. I can't say about Miller. I'm basing this on the tone of their pro-Dem text in general, plus the fact that Aaron wrote books about leftist writers and Hofstadter was an unabashed member of the ACP in the 1930's, that is, the American Communist Party.
Vietnam at War, The History, 1946-1975, by Phillip B. Davidson – c) 1988 – Tremendous level of detail on the events in Southeast Asia in the Eisenhower era. Most histories of Vietnam don't start getting warmed up until Kennedy's time. This one is red hot before Ike is even sworn in. This kind of battle detail of the Nam 1950's is hard to find elsewhere.
Waging Peace, By Dwight D. Eisenhower, c) 1963 Volume two of his memoirs. Super book.
Warriors at Suez, by Donald Neff c) 1981 – Neff says that the Suez Crisis meant the end for Britain and France as superpowers. The subtitle is Eisenhower takes America into the Middle East, which is almost odd since it was his refusal to intervene there, that marks the climax of the entire 1956 affair.
The U-2 Incident, - Video- A very good account with historical integrity was this made for TV Movie, with Lee Majors as Powers. Frances Gary later became a traffic helicopter reporter in Los Angeles and perished in a chopper crash in 1977.
Useful Idiots, by Mona Charen, c)2004 has a few pages to say on the subject of McCarthyism. I agree with the tirades of Mona Charen. This book is too perfect.
World Book Encyclopedia, c) 1954
OTHER MEDIA
The Ten Thousand Day War (reel one) Mandarin– PBS Documentary, based on the book. Both are excellent works with standard liberal bias. Extremely rich in talking head participants of the events who have since passed on.
Wikipedia – I have been warned that editors hate to see this as a source. I try not to use it as the primary or exclusive source on any subject, but I go there.
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