Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (100 page)

Read Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership Online

Authors: Conrad Black

As always in international crises, the nation rallied to the president. There had never been any doubt about the election, and Eisenhower and Nixon won by 35.6 million and 57.4 percent of the vote, with 457 electoral votes and 43 states, to Stevenson and Kefauver’s 25.7 million, 42 percent, and 73 electoral votes from five states. The Republicans even took most of the South (despite the ruling of the Supreme Court declaring racial segregation of schools unconstitutional, which Eisenhower made it clear he would carry out, albeit without enthusiasm). As an endorsement of the incumbent, it was, next to Roosevelt’s in 1936, the greatest since Monroe ran unopposed in 1820, as Eisenhower polled slightly ahead of Jackson in 1832, Grant in 1872, and TR in 1904. But the Rayburn-Johnson control of the Democratic Congress was undisturbed, and Eisenhower was the first president to win an election and face a hostile Congress in both houses since General Zachary Taylor in 1848. The country detected the president’s (justified) disdain for his party’s congressional leadership—Knowland and the other reactionaries.
On Election Day, Eisenhower ordered the first stage of mobilization—recall of all military personnel from leave—and was delighted to get a call from Eden saying a cease-fire was acceptable to Britain, as he claimed that the British and the French already controlled the canal. Eisenhower expressed great pleasure and said that the UN peacekeepers would be led by Canadians, as he didn’t want any of the permanent Security Council members involved, because that would put Russian soldiers on the Suez Canal. (It was a White House plan that Lodge gave to Canadian external affairs minister Lester Pearson in the corridors of the UN, as Canada was a reliable ally that would be more acceptable to the neutral nations. Pearson happily ran with it, won the Nobel Peace Prize and the leadership of his party in 1958, and was elected prime minister of Canada in 1963.) Eden asked how the election looked, and the president responded that he had been focused on the Middle East and Hungary and that “I don’t give a damn how the election goes. I guess it will be all right.”
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The Suez crisis ended on the shabby note of Eisenhower destabilizing the British currency and enforcing an oil embargo on Britain and France until their forces were out of Egypt, and telling his ambassador in London, Winthrop Aldrich (John D. Rockefeller’s son-in-law and a financial backer of Eisenhower), to scheme with Harold Macmillan and Rab Butler, the two candidates to succeed Eden, who was deemed to be finished, and enabling Macmillan to tell Eden that the British pound would collapse if American demands for withdrawal were not met. This was something of an exaggeration but providential for Macmillan’s ambition to ditch Eden and take his place, which he did. Almost all Ike’s great British wartime comrades, from Mr. Churchill down through the upper military ranks at the time of D-Day (Britain’s last amphibious operation, which had enjoyed masterly planning and execution), wrote to Eisenhower asking for a gentler treatment of Britain, and Eisenhower responded to all in sorrowful but amiable inflexibility. (Thus, Macmillan largely owed his ultimate success to Eisenhower, and Pearson his to Lodge, and Eisenhower, despite his demi-urgic back-digging efforts to disguise it, largely owed his original nomination to Nixon; the beneficiaries of this vital career assistance, as happens in politics, were uniform in their ingratitude.)
Eisenhower was stirred by the Middle East crisis to advocate what became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, which enabled the president to extend military and economic assistance on his own authority to countries menaced by communist subversion. The Congress only approved the military part of it, and the only significant difference with Truman’s Doctrine was that Eisenhower’s extended throughout the Third World, though it was aimed primarily at the Arab world as a rival to Nasser’s rising influence. He invited a procession of Third World leaders to Washington, starting with Nehru and peaking at King Saud, whom he had been promoting as a rival in the Arab world to Nasser. Saud proved a shy man of medieval views, unsuitable to rival Nasser at stirring the Arab masses, but important as a source of oil for Europe. (Eisenhower was not brilliant at judging political horseflesh; his preferred candidates to succeed himself were Treasury Secretary Anderson and his capable but completely non-political brother Milton Eisenhower, president of Johns Hopkins University.) He again had recourse to coercion when he supported a congressional measure to stop private assistance to Israel if it did not withdraw from Gaza. These positions were broadly correct, and when Israel did occupy Gaza, from 1967 to 1993, it was terribly tumultuous and burdensome. The Israelis announced their withdrawal on March 1, 1957.
The crises had almost completely passed by the beginning of 1957. America’s allies had been trounced by American intervention, and the hob-nailed Soviet jackboot had crushed freedom’s windpipe in Hungary, but the Western Alliance had been preserved. As usual, Eisenhower had been perceptive and sound in his strategic judgment and analyses of the events as they unfolded, but contrary to his performance as a military commander, he had been ponderous and unimaginative in decision-making. He could have caused much greater inconvenience to the Russians over the Hungarian uprising, should not have driven Nasser into the arms of the Kremlin with the Aswan Dam decision, and could easily have preserved more dignity for his allies, mad though their Suez caper was. His attack on the British currency and his oil embargo after the cease-fire to hasten the Anglo-French departure were gratuitous and unfriendly acts, and neither the bonhomous “I Like Ike” gaiety of his reception of Eden’s surrender, nor the diaphanous whitewash he and his principal biographer, Stephen Ambrose, slap onto these events, disguise these facts.
This would be the last time an enfeebled France would have to endure such demeaning treatment. Charles de Gaulle’s long-awaited (particularly by him) hour was about to strike, and Eisenhower would live to see the Franco-American relationship shift unpleasantly. Ike was a safe pair of hands, and he consolidated and gained Republican acceptance of the achievements of Roosevelt and Truman. If given long enough, he could come up with interesting ideas, like Open Skies and the interstate highway system, but he was getting a bit smug and slightly old in his attitudes. No president except possibly Monroe had had a better second than a first term. Eisenhower had rendered immense service to America and the world, but was entering an Indian summer that would be relatively undisturbed and rather unexciting. But he retained to the end the essential strategic sense to preserve America’s commanding preeminence in the world, and to avoid impetuosities that would bedevil some of his successors. Most of the world resumed its long march back to normalcy The Eisenhower years were the best the United States and most of the West had known, at least since the twenties and possibly ever. These six presidential terms of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower had produced steadily rising prosperity, and under American leadership, the slow advance of democracy in the world. The United States had led the West to victory in the World War II, while Russia took most of the casualties; imposed a containment policy on Soviet Communism; and, with Open Skies, begun the de-escalation of the Cold War. No other country could have done any of it.
FOUR
 
THE SUPREME NATION, 1957–2013
 
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 
Peace and Prosperity, 1957–1965
 
1. A PROFUSION OF TROUBLE SPOTS
 
On September 25, 1957, Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division, the fabled “Screaming Eagles,” to Little Rock, Arkansas, to integrate Central High School, emphasizing that he was enforcing the law, not militarily assaulting the social institutions of the South. Eisenhower saw less clearly than had Roosevelt and Truman the moral palsy of segregation and its harmful effects, though Nixon warned of the damage segregation was doing to America’s standing in the world and ability to compete with international communism, especially in African countries. Powerful senator Richard Russell of Georgia accused Eisenhower of using “Hitler-like storm trooper tactics,”
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illustrating how deep the problems supposedly settled by the Civil War remained. All that had really been settled was that no state could secede. (The
Brown v. Board of Education
case that caused the Supreme Court of the United States to outlaw segregation had been argued by John W. Davis, Democratic presidential candidate of 1924, for the segregationists, and by future and first African American Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall for the complainants.)
On October 4, 1957, Eisenhower was completely blindsided by the successful Soviet launch into orbit of the world’s first man-made satellite, the
Sputnik.
Eisenhower was again completely out of touch with the depth of concern that immediately arose in the United States that it was being scientifically and ultimately militarily outdistanced by the Soviet Union. The whole American education system, industrial base, and military strategy were instantly placed under intense scrutiny, with Eisenhower implausibly assuring everyone that all was under control. On November 25, after intense discussions with backbiting military chiefs and budget hawks and defense hawks wanting to bust the budget to counter the perceived Soviet missile charge, Eisenhower had a stroke in his office. (He quickly recovered.)
And in December, the long-awaited and much prepublicized launch of an American satellite led to a liftoff of the Vanguard rocket just two seconds before it fell back onto its launcher and blew up with a tremendous report, before the news cameras of the world. There was suddenly a revenance almost of the acute paranoia of the McCarthy era, with Khrushchev bouncing around the world claiming that the entire American defense commitment to manned bombers was obsolete and that communism would sweep the world on the wings of triumphant Marxist physical and social science. There was rising criticism of Dulles’s intractable foreign policy, and in retrospect, he was largely blamed for the Western fiascoes in Hungary and Suez. Eisenhower was aware that he, the president, was the author of those policies, even if Dulles, who was relatively inaccessible to the generous feelings of others because of his incessant, boring obsession with communism, was a convenient lightning rod. Eisenhower was too astute a politician not to notice that the administration needed some new policies, an infusion of energy, and a bit of panache. But he ignored a series of suggestions by Richard Nixon, including stimulative tax cuts.
Though Eisenhower came back quickly from his stroke, he was clearly not an energetic leader. He responded to Bulganin’s request for a summit meeting in the United States, which Dulles typically considered a plot to plant spies in the country, with a suggestion of a prior foreign ministers’ meeting. There was much talk of arms control and test bans, and Eisenhower tried to get a consensus in his administration to declare a moratorium on nuclear testing, but was disturbed by the utter inflexibility of the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Admiral Lewis Strauss (who had just managed to have the security clearance of one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, lifted), and the new defense secretary, Neil McElroy. Even Dulles argued strenuously that something had to be done or the Soviets would win a clear propaganda victory, as the CIA had advised that a unilateral test suspension by Russia was believed to be imminent.
On March 27, 1958, Khrushchev pushed out Bulganin and consolidated the offices of premier and Communist Party chairman, as his predecessors, Lenin and Stalin, had done. On March 31, 1958, with the U.S. administration still dithering, Khrushchev announced a unilateral test ban. The Russians had just concluded a series of tests and would need some time to set up for new ones, and Khrushchev reserved the right to resume tests if the Americans and the British continued to test. It was a brilliant coup that, along with the
Sputnik-
Vanguard episode, gave Russia a stinging double defeat of the United States that continued to rattle the serenity of Eisenhower’s era of peace and prosperity and made the Russians seem dynamic and the emergent world force, just five months after the brutal subjugation of a briefly free Budapest. (Imre Nagy had been betrayed, seized, and hanged by the Soviet secret police, to complete the wickedness of the affair.)
Dulles persuaded Eisenhower to propose technical talks toward a lasting test-ban treaty with the Soviets, and Khrushchev accepted. It was a positive turn and Dulles, who was instrumental in achieving it, was generally derided for delaying it. Dulles even successfully argued for restraint in defense spending, a policy that Eisenhower approved, especially after the CIA acknowledged that it had unwittingly multiplied by three the number of intercontinental bombers the Soviet Union possessed and had brought forward by some years the date of commissioning of their intercontinental ballistic missile capability.

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