Authors: Jim Newton
Churchill’s departure was especially poignant because it emphasized the contrast between leaders of his stature and those surrounding Ike in 1955. Knowland, in particular, continued to irritate the president, even though the latest triggering event was relatively minor. The Senate Republican leader had annoyed Eisenhower in late 1954 with his vote not to condemn McCarthy (he voted, he said, as a member of the Senate, not as its Republican leader, a distinction that mattered to no one but Knowland). “In his case,” Ike wrote of Knowland in January when the senator angered him again, “there seems to be no final answer to the question, ‘How stupid can you get?’ ”
Ike could joke about the senator but not about China, which was again stirring. The latest eruption in that relationship occurred in the early hours of January 18, when the White House awoke to the news that China had launched a full-scale invasion of Yichang, a volcanic rock near the Tachens and under Nationalist control. Russian jets provided air support, and Chinese forces scaled cliffs as the Nationalist defenders broke ranks. Andy Goodpaster, a trusted adviser on national security matters, glumly observed that the Chinese were “growing up and getting tougher.” And more strategic, too. The remoteness of the island—and the nature of the conflict between Chinese Communists and Nationalists—were enough to give China confidence that it could engage in aggression without fear of American nuclear retaliation. The Communists believed those factors would protect them from what Ike described just weeks earlier to Republican leaders as “the ability to blow hell out of them [any American enemy] in a hurry if they start anything.”
The Chinese invasion was deliberately provocative, timed just as Eisenhower was attempting to build public and political support for a reduction in American armed forces—part of the New Look strategy that envisioned a long struggle against Communism, not a short and decisive war. That approach was integral to the administration’s strategic planning and an outgrowth of the Solarium Project—with its multifaceted approach to containing and rolling back international Communism through nuclear deterrence, sound budgets, and covert action. But Ike continued to encounter resistance to New Look, particularly from defense hawks, including some leading Republicans, who were suspicious that its emphasis on reduced conventional forces marked a retreat from confronting Communism. Some military leaders accepted the change in course reluctantly, mindful of its implications for their turfs and budgets. The Army’s chief of staff, Matthew Ridgway, who had earned Eisenhower’s admiration during the Korean War—and especially as a welcome relief from MacArthur’s megalomania—now emerged as an outspoken critic of the president’s strategy. Ridgway complained that he was being asked to make irresponsible cuts—“I felt I was being called upon to tear down, rather than build up,” the nation’s fighting capacity, Ridgway wrote later—and warned that the Chinese action in the Taiwan Strait was proof of his fear. Only American ground forces, he insisted, could defend the Nationalist Chinese islands. Eisenhower was incensed and considered sacking Ridgway, only to be talked out of that idea by Dulles, though Dulles too complained of subordinates who “carry their dissents beyond privileged boundaries.” Ike relented for the moment about firing Ridgway but stood fast on New Look and Taiwan. “I have no intention of putting American foot soldiers on Quemoy,” he told Admiral Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “A division of soldiers would not make any difference.”
But if threatening the use of nuclear weapons would not deter Chinese adventurism, and Eisenhower was unwilling to commit American troops, what response was left? Ike knew that America’s nuclear arsenal offered an option, not merely as deterrent, but as weapon of retaliation. Indeed, use might enhance deterrence, as it would prove the seriousness of the threat, precisely the argument advanced on behalf of a nuclear strike against North Korea in 1953. Eisenhower was unwilling to fight for remote volcanic rocks, but if China determined to take islands of greater consequence, including Quemoy and Matsu, Ike was ready to go to war. On March 6, Dulles reported from a trip to the region: “I said I did not think that as things now stood we could sit by and watch the Nationalist forces there be crushed by the Communists.” Ike accepted that and acknowledged, too, the grave implications of such a commitment. According to Dulles, “I said that this would require the use of atomic missiles. The President said he thoroughly agreed with this.” So, yet again, the administration faced the abyss, determined to deter by its willingness to engage. Eisenhower authorized American assistance in evacuating Yichang, then turned to the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Would China now force the next move?
War seemed so imminent that Admiral Robert Carney, whom Ike had appointed as chief of naval operations in 1953, blurted an off-the-record comment at a dinner with reporters, saying he believed that China would attack within weeks—specifically, he predicted China would invade Quemoy and Matsu by April 15. Such a bald prediction from a senior member of the military was reckless, and it compounded Eisenhower’s frustration. “By God, this has got to stop,” he exclaimed to Hagerty. Ike recognized that Carney expressed a widely held view within the administration, but it was one thing to discuss that fear among colleagues, another to say it to a room full of reporters. Moreover, Charlie Wilson, Eisenhower’s malaprop-prone secretary of defense, was publicly suggesting that the loss of Matsu or Quemoy would not significantly alter the international equation. Ike pulled Wilson aside after an NSC meeting to urge him to watch his tongue. Later, Eisenhower marveled in his diary at how Wilson “seems to have no comprehension at all of what embarrassment such remarks can cause.”
Amid such confusion, Eisenhower was immediately forced to answer for Carney’s prediction. A reporter opened Ike’s news conference on March 30 with a question about the admiral’s comments. Eisenhower roundly disavowed them. “I do not believe that the peace of the world, the tranquility of the world, is being served at this moment by talking too much in terms of speculation about such things,” he said. Then, trying to end the matter, he added: “I think that is all I have to say about it.” Reporters kept pressing him, asking whether Carney was irresponsible to discuss the enemy’s plans so openly. Ike almost delivered a more direct rebuke, then pulled back when asked if Carney would be reprimanded for his comments. “Not by me,” he replied brusquely. That ended the matter publicly, but by the rules in those days the White House cleared comments for publication. The president’s remarks in the section of the conference that were not approved for quotation were even sharper. “I want to make clear that he does have a right to his personal convictions,” Eisenhower said. “But he cannot utter them properly, in my opinion, if he is going to create difficulty for his administration … because then he doesn’t belong as a member of the team.” Carney knew he was in trouble. He halfheartedly expressed his regret to Eisenhower—Ann Whitman said the admiral had “apologized,” which she put in quotation marks—and then all concerned waited anxiously as Carney’s predicted date approached. The strain on Eisenhower was unmistakable. “Foster and I live 24 hours a day with that one,” he told the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn. “That is the most difficult problem I have had to face since I took office.”
April 15 came and went, and the islands remained in Nationalist hands. Strategic clarity, tactical ambiguity, military strength, and nuclear capacity succeeded where Truman’s uncertain commitment toward Korea had failed. Ike deterred aggression and avoided war. Once the crisis had passed, Ridgway retired in June, followed by Carney in August. Wilson remained. Dulles was ebullient. “Of all the things I have done, I think the most brilliant of all has been to save Quemoy and Matsu,” he confided to Emmet Hughes in 1956. Hughes was repelled: “I felt an almost physical reaction before the icy breath of his self-esteem.”
Even as events roiled Asia and kept rival ideologies in the region at sword’s point, the Cold War’s dynamic—in which capitalism and Communism dispatched soldiers to one region and diplomats to another, where threats of obliteration were accompanied by pledges of cooperation and common pursuit—simultaneously encouraged conflict and negotiation. In 1955, those forces produced a growing public and political clamor for a four-power conference that would include Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The initial impetus came from Britain, where Churchill’s former foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, now served as prime minister. Eager to demonstrate his new position and convinced that a summit could help reduce international tensions, Eden wrote to Eisenhower in early May proposing the meeting. “I do hope you will be willing to try this,” Eden continued, almost pleadingly. “The hopes of so many people, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, have been raised and a kind of mystique surrounds the idea. This may be foolish, but it is human.”
As Eden suspected, Eisenhower was skeptical, not to mention slightly nonplussed to discover that Eden had hatched the proposal without first discussing it with his American counterparts (Ike was miffed when reports of the British intention to propose a summit leaked in London and reached him through the press before Eden’s formal note). But Churchill urged Ike to go along, and Eisenhower responded with an open mind, suggesting that if such a summit were to take place, it should neither revolve around a detailed agenda nor be an entirely open and unstructured conversation. Rather, Eisenhower proposed that a summit should tackle three general subjects: nuclear arms reduction, limitation of forces and arms in Europe, and reunification of Germany. Although mindful of domestic opinion and concerned about angering “die-hard opponents of any contact with the Communists,” Eisenhower clearly signaled that he was open to a summit under the right conditions.
Over the next several days, Dulles, checking in frequently with Eisenhower, met with British and French officials in Paris and then Vienna to draft language inviting the Soviet Union. The allied governments circulated a draft on May 10 that read, “Believe that the time has now come for a new effort to resolve the great problems which confront us. We, therefore, invite the Soviet government to join with us in an effort to remove sources of conflict between us.”
Addressing reporters the following day, Eisenhower described the plans as exploratory but acknowledged that his initial resistance to a gathering had softened. His answer was not a model of clarity—it was one of those circumlocutions that earned him a reputation for rambling—but it did capture his hopes for the gathering. “This business of trying to reach a clarification of issues,” he said, “if such a thing is possible, is so important that you can’t stand on any other principle except, ‘Do your utmost,’ as you preserve your own position of strength, as long as you are not sacrificing it, as long as you are not expecting too much. Don’t be just stubborn in your refusal to expect anything, but go ahead and see what you can find out about it.” If it seemed Eisenhower was talking to himself, well, perhaps he was.
Two days later, in Vienna, foreign ministers of the four powers met over a Saturday evening dinner. Dulles pressed his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, a scheming old Stalinist and survivor of many intrigues, to lay down rules for a summit. Molotov was receptive, yielding on what Dulles thought would be an insistence that China attend as well. The Russian proposed Vienna as the site for the gathering, but Dulles resisted, worried that holding the affair there would seem to reward Austria for adopting a position of Cold War neutrality in exchange for casting off Soviet occupation. Such a signal might encourage Germany to try to do the same. Instead, Dulles suggested Switzerland; Molotov warned Dulles privately that anything but Vienna might encounter resistance from the Soviet leadership—the Soviets favored Vienna for all the same reasons that the U.S. resisted it—but added that if the conference were held in Switzerland, the Soviets would prefer Geneva, where they had a consulate, to Lausanne. And so the principals circled in on a place. As for a date, Eisenhower preferred to wait until Congress adjourned for the summer. Molotov seemed flexible.
With plans coalescing for the summit, Eisenhower enjoyed strong popular support for his participation. Through 1955, his job approval rating rarely dipped below 70 percent, extraordinary numbers for a president moving into the second half of his term. Nearly eight out of ten Americans trusted him to lead a successful conference with the Soviets. Support was similarly strong in Germany and Italy, though the United States was generally viewed far more skeptically by the French and the British—indeed, in Britain, more of those surveyed expressed warmth toward the Soviet Union than toward the United States. Reviewing the data, Nelson Rockefeller, acting as a special assistant to Ike, concluded that the conference “is regarded as beginning a long process of easing world tensions.”
Rockefeller in 1955 was a forty-seven-year-old comer, a pointy-elbowed, cocksure politician in training, heir to a family name synonymous with power and fortune. Rockefeller joined the administration early, initially at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, but moved to the position of special adviser for foreign affairs when C. D. Jackson returned to
Time
magazine. Dulles was suspicious from the start. Rockefeller’s position encroached on Dulles’s turf, and Rockefeller lacked Jackson’s subtlety for internal politics. Although Rockefeller could count on Sherman Adams for some protection—the two Dartmouth alumni were fond of each other—Dulles eyed Rockefeller’s moves warily, and Rockefeller responded by removing himself almost entirely from Dulles’s scrutiny, an awkward position given that Rockefeller’s mandate was foreign affairs. Dulles and his brother viewed Rockefeller as brash and shallow; when, for instance, Rockefeller offered up an idea for a political warfare school, the Dulles brothers chortled. Out of his earshot, they derided it as “amateurish” and “dangerous.”
Dulles was wary of the summit to begin with but had reluctantly come to advocate it. Rockefeller, by contrast, was a full-bore enthusiast. He gathered advisers and experts at the Quantico Marine Corps Base to draft what he hoped would be a dramatic peace proposal to unveil at the conference. They worked in secret, to Dulles’s consternation. “He’s got them down at Quantico,” Dulles groused to Adams one day. “And nobody knows what they’re doing.” By late May, Dulles and Rockefeller were feuding openly. Dulles told the president he had heard that Rockefeller was trying to chart policy for the summit; Rockefeller complained that he was so frustrated working with the State Department that he was considering a transfer to Defense. Ike saw the strengths in both men and refused to intervene.