Authors: Jim Newton
American leaders feared for the wholesale collapse of the region and again contemplated nuclear war. Just before lunch on June 2, Eisenhower’s top military and diplomatic advisers came to him to discuss American action should China advance on Vietnam or the rest of Indochina. Even read a half century later, their contingency plan trembles: “Congress would be asked immediately to declare that a state of war existed with Communist China, and the U.S. should then launch large-scale air and naval attacks on ports, airfields, and other military targets in mainland China, using as militarily appropriate ‘new weapons.’ ”
The French and the North Vietnamese signed a partition pact later that summer, and the Republican right wing again rebelled, with Bill Knowland decrying it as “the greatest victory the Communists have won in 20 years.” Ike was incensed at the recurring broadsides from the Republican Senate leader. He grumbled to Hagerty, “The more I see of Knowland, the more I wonder whether he is a Republican leader or not.” Eisenhower and Hagerty assigned a more sympathetic senator to challenge any colleagues who criticized the settlement to ask whether they were prepared to send “American boys to fight in Indochina.” The silence spoke loudly. Despite the pleadings of his own party and the desperation of an ally, Eisenhower refused to budge. He would not wage war in Vietnam.
Those were trying and often exhausting months. Eisenhower tried to relax with his golf clubs and family. One rainy day he moped around the White House, then brightened when it cleared just in time for him to take his grandchildren on a trip down the Potomac.
Ike’s grandchildren were a source of joy and comfort. Failing to reach John and his wife, Barbara, one day to wish them a happy anniversary—they celebrated their seventh anniversary in June—Eisenhower instead dropped them a note of congratulations. “I couldn’t possibly be prouder of you both,” he wrote, “unless possibly if I had another grandchild!” He would get his wish: Ike’s three grandchildren—David, Barbara Anne, and Susan—would be joined by a fourth, Mary Jean, in 1955. He took delight in the young ones, at ease with them in a way that had sometimes been difficult for him when John was growing up. As Eisenhower came upon David and Anne one day in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom, he overheard a snippet of their conversation. “This,” David lectured his younger sister, “is President Lincoln’s bed.”
“That can’t be,” Anne replied. “That man isn’t President. Ike is President!”
Eisenhower cheerfully relayed that exchange to Edgar, with the comment that “by the time they are eight, they will probably be candidates for their Ph.D.’s.”
But family could also provide tragedy, none more shocking or heartbreaking than the news that Milton’s beloved wife, Helen, was diagnosed with cancer in early 1954. She initially responded to treatment but then suddenly died at home of a blood clot on June 10. She was forty-nine years old. Milton and their son, Milton Jr., were by her side. A shocked Ike and Mamie canceled their plans for the coming week—Eisenhower had been scheduled to address a gathering of governors—to rush to Milton’s home in University Park, where he served as the president of Pennsylvania State University. For months thereafter, Ike treated his little brother with delicacy, calling on him for advice and service but taking care not to overburden him.
Dwight Eisenhower was a profoundly conservative man, dedicated to the conviction that government served society best by safeguarding the individualism of the governed and allowing maximum liberty within those limits. His “middle way,” as he shaped and explained that idea, explicitly rejected the notion that government should control the lives of citizens or eliminate all fear or want. But he also stood firmly apart from those who would, as a matter of principle, reject the useful services of a government that could advance the economy or protect its people. As he wrote to a much more conservative friend in 1954:
When I refer to the Middle Way, I merely mean the middle way as it represents a practical working basis between extremists, both of whose doctrines I flatly reject. It seems to me that no great intelligence is required in order to discern the practical necessity of establishing some kind of security for individuals in a specialized and highly industrialized age. At one time such security was provided by the existence of free land and a great mass of untouched and valuable natural resources throughout our country. These are no longer to be had for the asking; we have had the experience of millions of people—devoted, fine Americans, who have walked the streets unable to find work or any kind of sustenance for themselves and their families.
On the other hand, for us to push further and further into the socialistic experiment is to deny the validity of all those convictions we have held as the cumulative power of free citizens, exercising their own initiative, inventiveness and desires to provide a better living for themselves and their children.
That quest for balance, a defining feature of Eisenhower’s life and presidency, found expression in the summer of 1954 with the completion of a long-sought deal to open the middle of the United States to oceangoing goods through the construction of a system of locks linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. The opportunity for that project, known as the St. Lawrence Seaway, had long fascinated engineers, but it was mired in complexity and cost, not to mention considerable opposition from rail companies that worried it would break their lock on trade through the region.
In this case, Eisenhower saw a constructive opportunity for government action. He urged Congress to create a public corporation that would issue bonds to build the seaway and then recoup the money through tolls from the ships that used it. Using the same logic that would later prevail in his support for a national highway system, he argued that the economic benefits were vast and that no blind fidelity to limited government should deter thoughtful progress. Congress passed the St. Lawrence Seaway Act, and construction began in the fall of 1954. When it opened, Eisenhower, joined by Canada’s prime minister and Queen Elizabeth, proclaimed it “a magnificent symbol … of the achievements possible to democratic nations peacefully working together for the common good.” It was also, he hardly needed to note, a triumph of the middle way—of government making possible private sector investment in order to advance a public good.
With McCarthy vanquished and the seaway approved by Congress, Eisenhower looked forward to a summer rest, only to have it delayed in July when the Chinese shot down British and American planes performing rescue missions in the South China Sea. Peace, it seemed, was always tested.
At last he escaped to Denver, where his staff worried about him. “Eisenhower had spells of depression that summer, and the reason was not easy to pin down,” Sherman Adams wrote. He and Ike’s secretary, Ann Whitman, feared that it was the result of too many problems that defied easy solution—long, deep questions that had perplexed and angered him all year. The stresses of the presidency were hard to bear and impossible for aides to ease.
9
Revolutions
D
eterrence was one prong of New Look, but Eisenhower and Dulles promised to do more than merely contain Communism; that was the essence of Truman’s foreign policy, which they rejected as too timid and defensive. Ike wanted to challenge Communism, to roll it back where he could and liberate its captive populations. Full-scale confrontation was out of the question—the expense far too great, the threat to humanity too horrifying—but so was passivity. The ease with which Mossadegh was bumped from office in Iran whetted Eisenhower’s appetite for covert action, and Project Solarium had specifically identified subversion as a useful tactical device. The CIA hardly needed encouragement when, in the early weeks of 1954, it became increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of the Guatemalan government and its president, the former Army captain Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Indeed, Project Solarium’s Task Force C had been shockingly unambiguous in its proposal for how to deal with this turn of events in the Western Hemisphere. Under recommendations for Latin America, the report suggested: “Coup d’etat in Guatemala.”
For Truman, Guatemala had been a source of anxiety and ambivalence. Under the histrionic rule of Jorge Ubico—who fancied himself Latin America’s Napoleon and liked to pose in the image of his idol—Guatemalans enjoyed no right of dissent, and the nation’s large Mayan population was relegated to impotent poverty. But Ubico opened the country to foreign investment, and American firms, most notably the United Fruit Company, established large and prosperous operations. Still, suppression has its limits, and university unrest in 1944 spread to the middle classes. Together, students, teachers, and the Guatemalan bourgeoisie overthrew Ubico. Arbenz was among the military officers who deposed Ubico’s junta; the officers then ceded power back to civilian authorities, and Juan José Arévalo was elected president in December 1944. Arévalo, a university professor educated in Argentina, launched the nation on an ambitious program of social and economic reform that placed him at odds with the interests of American corporations. In 1947, the Guatemalan National Assembly, with the encouragement of Arévalo, approved new labor rules permitting unionization of large industries, including United Fruit. The company appealed to the U.S. government for help and received it. “If the Guatemalans want to handle a Guatemalan company roughly that is none of our business,” an American official explained, “but if they handle an American company roughly it is our business.”
American support for United Fruit placed the U.S. government, first under Truman and then under Eisenhower, in lockstep with the repressive forces in the region. That connection was reinforced by John Foster Dulles, whose law firm represented United Fruit, and by other American representatives of the company, including the famous fixer Tommy Corcoran and General Robert Cutler, an old friend of Ike’s who headed the president’s NSC Planning Board. Even Ann Whitman’s husband served as a public relations executive at United Fruit.
The objections of the American firms in Guatemala crested after Arévalo’s historic transfer of power in 1951—he was the first civilian president of Guatemala to yield office voluntarily. Arbenz’s chief opponent in that campaign was Francisco Arana, a fellow military officer who had joined him in the 1944 coup but had since tacked to the right and was supported by Guatemala’s upper class. Arbenz was the strong favorite to win, but Arana tried to force an early election; his campaign ended in a shoot-out on a bridge outside of Guatemala City. Blame for Arana’s murder was never fixed, but the shadow of culpability would hover over Arbenz and taint the CIA’s later appraisal of his administration.
Arbenz’s early moves as president troubled American officials and United Fruit. On June 17, 1952, just six months after taking office, Arbenz signed Decree 900, a land reform act that appropriated uncultivated land from large landowners and distributed it in eight- to thirty-three-acre plots to farmers who could pay back the government over time. Landowners whose property was taken were to be compensated for their loss based on the property’s assessed value for tax purposes. Although all large landholdings were affected by Decree 900, United Fruit’s properties were especially burdened by it since the company was Guatemala’s largest landowner. Moreover, it had systematically avoided paying its share of Guatemalan taxes in part by securing absurdly low valuations for its land, which stung now that compensation was to be based on those same fraudulently low estimates. Over the next several months, the government moved to acquire large portions of United Fruit’s property and proposed to pay the company $1,185,000; the company, with the support of the Truman administration, countered with a bill for $15,854,849.
As tension mounted, American officials increasingly came to see the Arbenz reform efforts as the work of a reckless administration, infected by Communists. With reference to Eisenhower, two things must be noted: First, his administration did not set out to put the might of the U.S. military behind United Fruit; rather, the challenge to United Fruit seemed, to Eisenhower as it did to Truman, to be part of a larger rejection of American influence in Guatemala. Second, Eisenhower was not wrong to spy Communist influence in Guatemala, but he misapprehended both its extent and its relationship to Moscow.
The National Intelligence Estimates for 1952 and 1953 highlighted the presence of Guatemalan Communists. In 1953, with Eisenhower freshly in the White House, the estimate reflected a gathering pessimism: “As long as President Arbenz remains in power the Arbenz-Communist alliance will probably continue to dominate Guatemalan politics.” Arbenz did count among his supporters some Guatemalan Communists, especially in the nation’s labor movement, which strongly backed the Arévalo and Arbenz reforms to strengthen labor’s position in Guatemalan society (prior to Arévalo, it was a capital offense in Guatemala to join a union). Nevertheless, Guatemalan Communists never held high-ranking positions in the government, nor did they capture more than a handful of seats in the National Assembly. American intelligence officers searched enthusiastically for evidence of contact between Guatemalan Communists and Moscow—examining travel records and investigating allegations of a courier network—but never produced any evidence of such connections. Nor was Guatemalan Communism a dominant force in that country’s politics. When Bill Allen, a friend of Eisenhower’s, visited the country in 1954, he cabled back that there were indeed Communists in the country but, he noted, “not as many as [in] San Francisco.”
From Washington, however, the possibility of Communism in Guatemala seemed real. Eisenhower would not have it. The U.S. analysis was in many respects flawed—Arbenz’s reform plan more closely resembled the New Deal than Stalinist collectivization—but Communists operated in secret, so estimates of their strength were invariably regarded as conservative. There was, in fact, an international Communist movement directed by Moscow, and though Soviet leaders in practice were far more conservative in their foreign policy than Washington believed, their occasional aggressiveness made it easy to overestimate the danger they posed. As a result, the overarching threat of international Communism repeatedly caused American officials, including Eisenhower, to overlook or underestimate nationalist or regional impulses.