Eisenhower had been authorized at the Yalta Conference to enter into direct contact with the Soviet high command, which in practice meant Stalin, in order to avoid accidental conflict as the two gigantic Allied army groups approached each other in Germany and Central Europe. And Stalin was so impressed with the conception and execution of the cross-channel invasion of France that he invited Eisenhower to Moscow in May 1945, and they got on quite well. While Eisenhower considered communism to be unutterable nonsense, he believed that it would be possible to deal with the Russians. And he was disgusted with the fear-mongering of McCarthyism that effectively presented communism as a virus or poison that could be secretly inserted in the drinking supply or the breakfast cereal of the children of America. He was in fact very critical, privately, of all his old chiefs except Roosevelt—Marshall for forcing coalition government and a false cease-fire on Chiang, Truman for being too squeamish about threatening draconian reprisals on China, and MacArthur for being too publicly and verbally trigger-happy about atomic weapons and for his rank insubordinacy.
Ike, as he was known to friends and to the American public, combined fiscal restraint with military purposefulness by proposing and enacting two policies that were popularly known as “more bang for the buck” and “brinkmanship.” He wished to build on America’s lead in nuclear weapons and their delivery capacity, and to roll back the vast personnel costs of large standing forces, especially the army. Though he had reached the highest possible rank in the U.S. Army, Eisenhower considered the navy and the air force better investments because they projected American power; he thought the retention of large standing armies was not altogether necessary and that it would be much cheaper, and more effective, and more conducive to economic growth and broadening prosperity, to restrain defense costs and focus them on massive retaliatory power of the most devastating kind, which would also stimulate advanced scientific research and sophisticated manufacturing.
Eisenhower also enhanced the role of the CIA and had no hesitation in using it to turf out unfriendly governments in several countries, starting with Iran. The eccentric leader of that country, Mohammed Mossadegh, who frequently appeared at public occasions in his pajamas, and burst into tears in the middle of speeches from his balcony, and accepted the support of local communists, had nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The British responded by shutting down the largest oil refinery in the world, at Abadan, declared any acquisitions of Iranian oil to be the purchase of stolen property, and promised to sue any such buyers in British or foreign courts. Mossadegh was astoundingly inept to be impeded in this way, and had only to take a leaf from the book of Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico in the late thirties and pay a somewhat reasonable compensation, even in notes, and line up sales in advance to countries who wouldn’t care what Western courts thought of anything. Instead, he endured a crippling loss of revenue and beseeched Eisenhower to help him against the British. Now that Churchill was back in office in London, the chances of Eisenhower siding with Mossadegh in such a dispute were less than zero, especially with the young pro-Western Shah in opposition and conspicuously available to take back absolute power.
As Eisenhower considered nuclear war out of the question, conventional war horribly expensive in lives and money and possibly unwinnable against the Russians and Chinese, and stalemate unacceptable, he warmed up to the CIA, headed by Dulles’s brother Allen, as a low-budget, high-effectiveness alternative. Eisenhower authorized a coup against Mossadegh, which consisted of the CIA operative for Iran, Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit, dispensing over a million dollars among military and tribal leaders to organize protests and stage a coup when the time came. Mossadegh passed a good deal of progressive legislation, for land reform and broadened education, but also rigged a 99.99 percent win in a referendum on whether to grant him absolute power for a year. The Shah showed no great staying power, forcing Mossadegh’s resignation and then rejecting it, resisting cooperation in a coup and then giving way, and at the height of tension, removing to Rome for the summer of 1953. The British didn’t have the resources to arrange a coup for themselves, and Churchill bombarded Eisenhower with messages to get rid of Mossadegh, lest the Russians succeed in Iran (as he had bombarded Truman in 1945 to scrap the German demarcation zones and the spheres of influence in Eastern Europe he had approved over American objections).
Iran was a Ruritanian farce in an important country, a rich oil state on the borders of the Soviet Union. Kermit Roosevelt prepared the ground well, under the nose of the naïve Iranian leader, who was thrown out by his own military on August 19, 1953. It was the smart move, but has been much criticized, and is yet. It was a crisp professional operation, and the Shah proved an effective and modernizing ruler. Of course there is room for legitimate debate about whether the United States would and should have done better by working with Mossadegh and not promoting and sustaining regime change. But once having done so, it had to back its protégé. The problem was not dispensing with Mossadegh, it was giving insufficient support to the Shah 25 years and five presidents of the United States later. Eisenhower and Dulles assured, through Kermit Roosevelt, that the British monopoly on Iranian oil would be knocked down to 40 percent, a share equal to that of the United States. (The Anglo-Persian, later Anglo-Iranian, Oil Company, and then British Petroleum (BP), would carry some long-term baggage as President Barack Obama, elected in 2008, would publicly disapprove Eisenhower’s overthrow of Mossadegh and BP’s role, and BP would not escape controversy, as Obama would become extremely censorious about the company’s conduct in the 2009–2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.)
On December 8, 1953, Eisenhower, after conferring with Churchill and the French premier, Joseph Laniel, in Bermuda, addressed the United Nations General Assembly, and proposed a division of available nuclear fissionable material between the U.S.A., the USSR, and the U.K., which would be handed over to the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose establishment he urged under UN auspices, for sharing for peaceful purposes with all the countries of the world. It was a rather visionary idea, and was exceedingly well received when he presented it. Even the Russians applauded, but they then shilly-shallied, and the International Atomic Energy Agency was only set up in 1957. This was the “Atoms for Peace” plan, but the Russians, again with the heavy-handed clumsiness that had distinguished all their activities since they became one of the world’s two superpowers, ultimately refused, as they had refused participation in the Marshall Plan.
Eisenhower deftly managed to reduce U.S. defense expenditures by relying more on atomic development, and got peace in Korea by threatening nuclear war, yet he took over and championed the cause of international civilian use of atomic energy, and de-escalation of the Cold War. It was a clever policy, spanning brinkmanship and peaceful sharing of atomic power for peaceful purposes, as Eisenhower was himself simultaneously a golfing, barbecuing grandfather, and the five-star general who crossed the Rhine, enveloped the Ruhr, liberated many of the death camps, and, as much as Stalin, drove Hitler to suicide.
Eisenhower also dispatched Nixon (whose trip with other congressmen to Europe in 1947 had greatly strengthened support for the Marshall Plan) on a 70-day, 20-country tour of the Far East and South Asia, starting October 5. Nixon was always massively briefed, and was so on this occasion, and had, as passing decades would show, great aptitude for foreign relations. Eisenhower entrusted Nixon with the mission of telling South Korean president Syngman Rhee that he absolutely must not provoke a renewal of the conflict with the North. Nixon also closely studied the successful British techniques in dealing with the Chinese Communist–inspired civil war in Malaya. Nixon stayed with the British commander and governor, Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, and they developed a warm mutual appreciation that would resonate importantly more than 15 years later. Nixon went on to Vietnam and was as unimpressed with the French plan to deal with their insurrection as he had been struck by the intelligent planning and execution of the British.
He delivered Eisenhower’s message to Rhee, and in a wide-ranging interview with Japan’s great survivor, Emperor Hirohito, urged Japan to begin rearming at once (only nine years after he had earned two battle starts fighting Hirohito’s armies at Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and Green Island). In a seven-hour meeting with Chiang Kai-shek, Nixon disabused him of any idea of going back to the mainland. In Burma, he originated his technique, which would become familiar on every continent except Antarctica, of going into the midst of crowds of demonstrators and disarming them with knowledgeable conversation. He was very impressed with Philippine president Ramon Magsaysay, and considered Indonesian president Sukarno a corrupt and degenerate cynic and buffoon. Both were accurate insights. He intensely disliked Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, as pompous and ineffectual hypocrites claiming transcendent cultural and humanitarian virtue for their ramshackle, poverty-stricken country. He finished his tour with excellent visits with the Pakistani leader, Field Marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan, and with the recently reinstalled Shah of Iran, thereafter a life-long friend.
Nixon and his wife demonstrated a strong grasp of all they saw and made excellent impressions personally on all their hosts (and on the traveling American press contingent), other than Nehru, who, after Nixon promised aid to Pakistan, called him “an unprincipled cad.” Many of these encounters would have important consequences. Nixon addressed the nation at Eisenhower’s request on December 23, 1953, and spoke of the danger of communist infiltration and insurrection in Malaya, Indochina, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Burma, as well as the divisions of China and Korea, presaging Eisenhower’s soon-to-be-coined domino theory—that if one of these countries went down, it would take others. Nixon strenuously recommended to Eisenhower and Dulles a South East Asia Treaty Organization, modeled on NATO, and work began on this at once.
Nixon and Dulles were essentially in favor of using Chiang’s forces in Korea, drawing the Red Chinese army into the peninsula as MacArthur had proposed, cutting them off, and crushing them from all sides and the air, while conventionally bombing China’s fragile industrial capacity, and administering a stinging military defeat on China. They also wanted comprehensive aid to anti-communist forces in the area, to be conducted and directed as the British were in Malaya: not colonial holding operations like the French were attempting in Indochina, which were hopeless, but as Western support for indigenous, democratic, and anti-communist forces, as was being successfully carried out in Europe. Eisenhower agreed that more attention had to be paid to Asia (he had, after all, spent four years with MacArthur in the Philippines, albeit, as he later rather snidely said, “studying theatrics” from his chief). But Eisenhower did not want to use American ground forces in Asia again, and while he invented the domino theory, he was a cautious judge of how much effort was warranted in the case of each unit in the sequence. Indochina was clearly coming next, and fast.
Eisenhower was effectively fine-tuning the containment strategy, with the astute eye of a proven military analyst and commander, and very successful soldier-diplomat at the highest levels in war and peace but also as a very successful politician. He was admirably qualified to consolidate the gains of Roosevelt and Truman, having served both those presidents with great distinction.
3. INDOCHINA
By early 1954, the condition of the French in Indochina was becoming very disquieting. France could generally hold its own against the Viet Minh (Vietnamese Communists led by Ho Chi Minh) but such a war was very costly for the French, who were constantly seeking U.S. assistance, and threatening an indefinite delay in the approval of the European Defense Community if they did not receive it. The Defense Community was the integration of NATO military forces (including a rearmed West Germany) that Eisenhower had been pushing since he was the first NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR). This issue and Indochina became ensnared in France’s ancient preoccupation with Germany, which France was having some difficulty considering as a friend. In his first months as president, Eisenhower had told the French that American assistance in Indochina was conditional on France finding a “forceful and inspired” military leader in Vietnam, and on France promising independence and getting out from under the opprobrium of seeming to fight a colonial war. France had had a first-class commander, General (posthumously Marshal) Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, who had commanded the French First Army of 10 divisions in Eisenhower’s sweep through France and into Germany almost a decade before. De Lattre had won several victories against the Viet Minh, and had military matters fairly stabilized when he had to retire because of cancer (shortly after his only son had died in action under his command), and he succumbed quickly to the illness, dying in January 1952. (Eisenhower, de Gaulle, though he was not present, and Montgomery were among the honorary pallbearers at the mighty state funeral from the Invalides to the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame.)
On the second point, the French knew that their real enemies were the inde-pendentists within Indochina, though they were being supported by the Russians and the Chinese. Unlike the British, who knew such a war to be unwinnable, the French were determined to hang on to what they could, even if they dragged down European defense and the security of France itself in doing so. Eisenhower was not prepared to commit America to defend French colonialism, and with the administration’s “New Look” of fewer men and greater firepower and air and sea forces, there was not the manpower to fight in Asia while maintaining an integrated conventional and nuclear deterrent in Europe, which remained the principal theater, as had been agreed since the beginning of the Anglo-American staff talks in 1939.