Events now moved quickly, with spontaneous uprisings around Hungary and freedom fighters blowing treads off Soviet tanks with Molotov cocktails. (Molotov himself accompanied Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders to Warsaw, where Gomulka promised adherence to the Soviet foreign policy line, as long as he could experiment somewhat in internal policies, and this was agreed.) In Budapest, Nagy announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and its neutrality in the Cold War. The Soviet ambassador in Budapest, Yuri Andropov (subsequent chairman of the Soviet Communist Party), purported to discuss the withdrawal from Hungary of the five Soviet occupation divisions.
These proved not to be good-faith discussions, but while they continued, Eisenhower and Dulles exchanged rather smug comments about how the collapse of the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe was coming rather more quickly than had been expected, and implicitly, that all their bunk about “liberation and rollback” from Republican postwar lore was unfolding as they had promised and demanded on Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. Like most communists who have any notion of comparative democracy, particularly those in the Soviet bloc between the defection of Tito, who had a powerful and battle-hardened army and close connections to the neighboring West in 1949, and the rise of Gorbachev in 1983, Nagy was completely naive about Soviet responses to national independence movements. But in this case, the president of the United States and his secretary of state, for all their experience and worldliness, were not much wiser.
While all was hopefulness and self-congratulation—and U.S. intelligence reported Israeli mobilization and assumed Israel was about to attack Jordan, which had just formed an alliance with Egypt and Syria, which the British and French might use as some sort of pretext for seizing the canal—the British and French governments embarked on what must rank as one of their most insane military adventures in their very crowded national histories. Despite U-2 overflights and strenuous efforts to crack the codes in the heavy traffic between London, Paris, and Tel Aviv (three of America’s closest allies, and the U-2s had to fly from Germany because Eden would not allow overflights of Russia from the U.K., such was the state of what 10 years before had been the Grand Alliance), the CIA had been completely foxed by their allies, the chief Anglo-French triumph of the campaign.
On October 28, Israel attacked not Jordan but Egypt, in the Sinai. Radford thought it would take them three days to seize the Sinai, and that that would be the end of it. Dulles said that Egypt would close the canal and shut down the pipelines, and then the British and the French would intervene to protect their oil supplies.
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Eisenhower had warned Ben Gurion not to try anything, but his powers of moral dissuasion with the Israeli leader were no greater than with Eden and the French. The American leadership was stuck on the notion that their chief allies were convinced the U.S. would always “pull their chestnuts out of the fire.” It is generally assumed that the British didn’t believe their great ally and honorary citizen, General Eisenhower, would desert them; the French believed that NATO’s greatest champion would not desert his two main NATO partners, and Ben Gurion assumed that the United States would not undercut Israel at election time (they were nine days from the U.S. election). But all they really wanted was for Eisenhower to stay on the sidelines while they beat the stuffing out of Nasser.
Eisenhower determined that the U.S. must put principle above traditional attachments and that he must ignore any political considerations arising from the election, though he doubted the American people would throw him out over such an issue anyway. He issued a statement on October 29 upholding the section of the Tripartite Agreement of 1950 (Britain, France, and the United States) that they would side with the victim of aggression in the Middle East, leaving no doubt that this was Egypt. He ordered that the British be advised that although they had a legitimate grievance against Egypt, it did not justify the drastic step they had taken, and that the U.S. would present the UN with a cease-fire resolution in the morning. The British chargé, J.E. Coulson, was summoned (the ambassador had returned to London), and Eisenhower asked that the British government be informed at once of his views.
Only on October 30 did the U.S. administration understand the proportions of the Anglo-French-Israeli action. Ben Gurion sent a message in the morning saying that Israel’s existence was at stake and there was no thought of stopping, much less retreating. Eden and the (ostensibly Socialist, though in France political labels are deceiving) French premier, Guy Mollet,
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exchanged messages with Eisenhower, and explained that the Tripartite Declaration was invalid because of changed circumstances. Eisenhower suspected Churchill’s “mid-Victorian hand” in this (completely unjustly), and speculated that the French thought that this action might somehow assist them in Algeria, where there was a widespread and bloody Arab insurrection.
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At midday on the East Coast, the British and the French gave Egypt a very severe 12-hour ultimatum. Finally, it was clear: unless the Egyptians and the Israelis each withdrew 10 miles from the banks of the Suez Canal, Britain and France would occupy the canal and keep it open. Israel, of course, accepted at once, and intended to retain the Sinai, and to be allowed transit of the canal.
Eisenhower may be said, finally, to have captured the essence of it when he said on that afternoon, though Eden was now at least trying to explain his and his allies’ actions to the U.S. president after a two-week silence: “I’ve just never seen Great Powers make such a mess and botch of things. Of course, in a war, there’s just nobody I would rather have fighting alongside of me than the British. But—this thing! My God!“
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He considered it, from the start, “the biggest error of our time, outside of losing China” (which he largely, and unfairly, blamed on his revered old chief, Marshall).
The next morning, Eden won a confidence motion in the British House of Commons, 270–218, which would not normally be considered adequate to continue with such a risky operation by a recently reelected government. But Russia announced that it would withdraw its forces from Hungary and respect the sovereignty of the East European states as it had promised to do at Yalta, and apologized for its past behavior. Eisenhower, while his closest colleagues rejoiced, again showed his worldliness by finally expressing doubt about Soviet sincerity.
It was not too late for Eden and Mollet to pull back, and they could certainly extract some concessions from Nasser now, but Eden ordered the attack to begin; British planes bombed Egyptian cities and military targets. Nasser did manage to sink a number of ships in the Suez Canal, effectively blocking it. Eisenhower spoke to the nation and the world at 7 p.m. on Halloween. He said the U.S. would economically assist Eastern European countries if they asked for it, but assured the Russians that he would not try to recruit them as allies; said the U.S. sought peace with Arabs and Jews; and spoke warmly of Britain and France and Israel, but said the United States had not in the slightest been consulted about this action, and that while the powers that undertook it had the right not to consult America, America had, and would exercise, its right to dissent from their initiative. The United States sought peace and the rule of law. It was an effective and statesmanlike address that showed Eisenhower’s grasp of longer-term strategic goals to keep the Western Alliance together through the outbreak of insanity in London. (Paris and Tel Aviv weren’t risking anything; France and Israel were both more or less at war with the Arabs, and could make it up with the Americans anytime.)
The American leadership was correct to be annoyed with its allies, but if Eisenhower hadn’t pulled out on the Aswan Dam, Nasser would never have seized the canal as he did. If the U.S. had lifted a finger to help France avoid a terrible humiliation in Vietnam two years before, the French would have consulted. And if Dulles had been more congenial with the British (both Churchill and Eden found him grating, humorless, unimaginative, and full of sanctimony, and didn’t notice his good points, especially his fierce anti-communism), and had earned their confidence as Acheson and Marshall and most subsequent secretaries of state did, Britain would not have put such strain on the alliance with such a hare-brained plan. (Dulles underwent an emergency cancer operation on November 4, and Hoover was acting secretary for the balance of these crises.) At least Eisenhower made sure that Lodge, the ambassador to the United Nations, got the U.S. resolution in first, to avoid a much harsher condemnation of the three renegade warrior nations by a Russian motion. The French and the British, and then the Russians, vetoed resolutions, including American ones, at the UN that they found disagreeable.
After 10 days of some disorder in Budapest and elsewhere, and ostensible negotiations, the Hungarian negotiators were seized; 17 more Soviet divisions were inserted into Hungary, as 80 percent of the Hungarian army had deserted rather than suppress the population, and the Red Army occupied Budapest in the predawn hours of November 4. Eisenhower had been correct to smell a Soviet rat, and only now, with Soviet tanks a few hundred yards away, did Nagy ask for military assistance from the international community—no one in particular, claiming it had been promised by Radio Free Europe. (It had been, implicitly, but not in these circumstances, and a radio propaganda station couldn’t officially bind the nation to war, even with all Dulles’s belligerent fantasies about liberation and rollback. And Nagy was seeking help from an international group, not just the U.S.)
The fact is, the U.S. could have airlifted some assistance to the freedom fighters, but didn’t even do that, so risk-averse was Eisenhower (as he had been when he let the Soviets take Prague and recommended against taking Berlin, in 1945, because he feared accidental conflict with them). It would have been worth a try for Eisenhower to propose a reciprocal scale-back of the alliances—Poland and Hungary, and possibly Greece and Denmark, joining Finland, Austria, and Yugoslavia as neutral states with no foreign forces on them, with guaranteed Soviet access to its occupation zone in Germany, and perhaps some cap on West German force levels. If the divided Kremlin had refused, it might at least have squeezed more political juice out of the lemon and seemed less of a betrayal of the forces of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If Nagy had acted like Gomulka and not just announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, he might have accomplished something durable, but he had no idea of world affairs and no idea what forces he was dealing with, especially with a war underway in the Middle East.
The British and the French finally landed in Egypt on November 5, paratroopers preceding amphibious landings around the northern end of the Suez Canal. The Soviet premier, Nikolai Bulganin, wrote to Eisenhower, threatening force, by implication including atomic attack, on Britain and France, if their alleged aggression did not cease, and proposing to Eisenhower that the USSR and the U.S. take joint military action in Egypt, a mad idea that could not have been meant seriously. Bulganin naturally avoided all mention of his country’s brutal reoccupation of Budapest the day before, and Eisenhower responded almost at once, with a statement that any Soviet military intervention in the Middle East would be resisted with military counter-force from the United States, and made it implicitly clear through channels, to all parties, that any attack on Britain and/or France would be treated as a direct act of unlimited aggression against the United States itself and would be responded to with instant and maximum force. That stopped the Kremlin’s references to the possible imminence of World War III. Eisenhower wrote in his diary of moving to “help the refugees fleeing from the criminal action of the Soviets,” and claimed that landlocked Hungary was “as inaccessible to us as Tibet,”
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which, as a glance at the map shows, is self-justificative eyewash. And he scarcely lifted a finger to help the 200,000 refugees, despite Nixon’s going to the border and on his return pleading with Eisenhower and Rayburn to help them. The U.S. filled an upgraded quota of 21,000, and eventually nearly 60,000 more, and the refugees were generously received in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.
As America went to the polls, international grand strategy had been reduced to tragicomic farce on a scale rarely plumbed in modern history, though not chiefly by American actions.
10. REELECTION AND DE-ESCALATION
America voted on November 6, as the Syrians blew up oil pipelines from Iraq to the Mediterranean (it might have been too technologically challenging just to shut them and collect the through-flow for themselves). Eisenhower had scarcely campaigned and left that, as he left most distasteful tasks, to his vice president. International crises had made it a lively campaign. Stevenson had started out with an inane set of military proposals for abolition of the draft, a nuclear test ban, and an enhanced program of missile development. Eisenhower replied that the end of the draft would leave the United States in default of its military commitments, that a nuclear test ban would cause a great deal of missile development activity to be wasted, and that every rocket scientist in the country was already working overtime on developing the military potential of missiles of all sizes.
Stevenson had been under secretary of the navy in World War II, but had no executive authority or specialized knowledge of military matters and was demolished in one well-publicized press conference by the incumbent, who did not have to remind Americans that his combined credentials as a war planner and theater and alliance commander were probably greater than that of any person since Napoleon. Stevenson was reduced to informing the public, most directly on election eve, that Eisenhower’s health was so parlous that a vote for Ike was a vote for Nixon, an uncharacteristically tasteless and politically futile sally (and Eisenhower eventually outlived Stevenson, who was 10 years younger, by four years).