Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (42 page)

Eisenhower's most important appointee, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, seemed at first to be a sound, indeed almost inevitable choice for the position. Dulles was the grandson of John Foster, President Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State, and the nephew of Robert Lansing, who had held the post under Woodrow Wilson. Dulles had been personally concerned with international relations for almost fifty years and had attended the Paris peace conference after World War I. He had then become an influential attorney in New York and was part of the Establishment network of well-placed lawyers and bankers who formulated postwar American foreign policy. In selecting Dulles, Eisenhower told his chief aide, Sherman Adams, "Foster has been in training for this job all his life." He reminded Emmet Hughes, "There's only one man I know who has seen
more
of the world and talked with more people and
knows
more than he does, and that's me."
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From the beginning, however, Dulles became a lightning rod for criticisms of Republican foreign policies. This was in part because he seemed extraordinarily influential. Some contemporaries, indeed, were sure that Dulles was the power behind the throne and that Ike merely acquiesced in whatever Dulles devised. This was not the case: Eisenhower made all important policy decisions himself. Indeed, the President was at times bored and irritated by Dulles, who tended to be preachy in meetings. The Secretary of State, Ike said on one occasion, had "a lawyer's mind" and tended to act like "a sort of international prosecuting attorney."
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But critics of Dulles were correct in recognizing that Eisenhower relied heavily on his Secretary, who was a hard worker, knowledgeable, and wholly loyal in trying to carry out the President's goals. For these reasons, and because Eisenhower did not always monitor his subordinates closely, Dulles enjoyed considerable leeway and initiative. He held office, enjoying the President's confidence, until he grew ill with cancer and had to resign in April 1959. Only then did Eisenhower step forward more boldly on his own as the spokesman for American foreign policy interests.

Critics who took aim at Dulles fired off many grievances. They emphasized first of all that he was moralistic and self-righteous. This was often true. Dulles, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was influential in national church affairs. His strong Christian faith strengthened his distaste for Communism, which he deplored as atheistic as well as unprincipled. Moreover, Dulles seemed humorless, at least on the job. Self-assured and pompous, he had a habit of looking up toward the ceiling (some critics thought toward God), hands calmly folded on his desk, while talking (critics said pontificating) at considerable length. Other critics simply described his manner as "Dull, Duller, Dulles."
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What most irritated liberal opponents was Dulles's apparently inflexible and ideological anti-Communism. This helped him to acquiesce in McCarthy-inspired efforts to purge the State Department of alleged subversives and appeasers. I. F. Stone, the liberal journalist, called him "McCarthy's Secretary of State."
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While this charge was inaccurate, the critics were mostly correct in focusing on his anti-Communist zeal, for Dulles—more than most contemporary political leaders—believed that Communist ideology (rather than strategic interests) determined Soviet behavior and that the Soviet Union therefore had a grand design.
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Perceiving issues in ideological terms, Dulles could be pickily legalistic when dealing with other political leaders. Some of these leaders were infuriated by his manner. Churchill said that Dulles was "the only case of a bull I know who carried his own china shop with him." The journalist James Reston added that Dulles "doesn't stumble into booby traps; he digs them to size, studies them carefully, and then jumps."
²²

Analysis of Dulles's ideas and activities by historians has slightly softened this acid portrait. Dulles was in fact politically shrewd. Anxious to escape the vilification from the GOP Right that had savaged Acheson, he worked hard at protecting his standing with conservatives in Congress, a very important consideration. It is also clear that Dulles was no more inflexible than Acheson—or than the Truman administration generally, which had initiated no serious negotiating with the Soviet Union (or China) in many years. Dulles's style may have seemed more rigid, but the end result was much the same: more hardening of the Cold War.
²³

These reminders are useful. Still, few contemporaries saw a flexible, subtle side to Dulles. Publicly—and in negotiations—he
was
mostly stern and unbending, with a harsh edge that not even Acheson had matched. Indeed, Dulles seemed an eager spokesman for a new administration that regularly denounced the Democrats for being "soft" on Communism. Like anti-Communist conservatives on the Hill, he seemed prepared to push the Cold War, already frigid, into a deep freeze from which it might never emerge.

The Central Intelligence Agency headed by Foster Dulles's younger brother Allen was equally anti-Communist. The agency, created in 1947, had grown slowly prior to the Korean War. But it had received authorization to conduct covert operations as early as 1948, using it to intervene at that time in Italian politics, and it grew rapidly in the early 1950s. By 1952 its budget had risen to $82 million, its personnel to 2,812 (plus an additional 3,142 overseas "contract" personnel), and its number of foreign stations from seven to forty-seven. Under Eisenhower and Allen Dulles, a pipe-smoking bon vivant who was charming, popular with Congress, and well connected socially as well as politically, it grew into an important government agency.
²⁴

The CIA had its first significant impact early in the Eisenhower years. In the summer of 1953 it led a successful coup in Iran against Prime Minister Muhammad Mussadegh, who had earned the enmity of British leaders by nationalizing their oil interests in 1951. The coup replaced Mussadegh with the pro-Western Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi, who agreed to a new charter that gave British and American oil interests 40 percent each of Iranian oil revenues. The Shah received a package of American economic aid worth $85 million.
²⁵
In June 1954 the CIA intervened again, this time in Guatemala in an effort to help rebels overthrow Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the legally installed leader of the country. Arbenz Guzmán's mistake had been to promote land reform by expropriating (with compensation) significant acreage of the American-owned United Fruit Company. Unbeknownst to the American people, CIA pilots joined in bombing raids that may have helped the coup to succeed. Eisenhower, fearing the spread of Communism in Central America, was highly pleased with the result. "My God," he told his Cabinet, "just think what it would mean to us if Mexico went Communist."
²⁶

Because both of these coups were quickly and rather easily accomplished—and because some of the CIA's involvement remained secret—they did not attract great attention from the American press. This was unfortunate for several reasons. First, the coups exacerbated internal divisions in these countries, with disastrous long-range consequences for the people there. Second, the coups indicated the willingness of reporters at that time uncritically to accept obfuscatory CIA cover stories: it was not until the late 1950s, when a U-2 reconnaissance plane under control of the CIA was shot down over the Soviet Union, that significant numbers of reporters began to display a healthy distrust of self-serving government handouts.
²⁷
Third, it was obvious that the coups involved well-placed economic interests. A thorough public discussion of these interests would have been useful in exposing the material forces that helped to drive America's Cold War behavior. Fourth, the coups convinced the CIA and other government officials that covert actions were easily carried out. In the next few years it conducted other such actions in Japan, Indonesia, and the Belgian Congo. The bravado that such efforts engendered was to prove disastrous in later years.
²⁸

The coups were revealing in other ways as well. Americans who read about them seemed delighted with what they were allowed to know of CIA activity. The CIA leader in Iran, Kermit Roosevelt, TR's grandson, was acclaimed as a hero.
²⁹
Americans seemed unconcerned that the interventions violated sovereign rights. Foster Dulles was hardly challenged when he went on radio and TV following the coup in Guatemala to call it a "new and glorious chapter for all the people of the Americas."
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Above all, the coups indicated the power of Cold War thought and action within the Eisenhower administration. Top officials argued that Communist elements linked to Moscow were the key forces behind both Mussadegh and Arbenz Guzman. This was not so. Though Mussadegh belatedly turned to the Iranian Communist party for help in order to bolster himself, he was fundamentally a nationalist. Arbenz Guzman was a reformer, not a Communist. But the Dulles brothers easily convinced themselves—and many others—that Communism lay at the root of international unrest. The coups in Iran and Guatemala revealed that key figures in the Eisenhower administration, perceiving the world in black and white, had at best a dim awareness of the appeal of nationalism and anti-colonialism throughout the world. Then and later American officials would demonstrate this profound misunderstanding.

Nothing did more to sharpen the tough-minded image of the Eisenhower administration than Foster Dulles's pronouncement of a "massive retaliation" policy in January 1954. The "Free World," he said, had properly tried to contain Communism with measures such as the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, and the dispatch of troops to Korea. But these were inadequate, "emergency" reactions. Moreover, the "Free World" could not match "the mighty land power of the Communist world." Instead, it must take the initiative and rely on "massive retaliatory power." The nation should "depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our choosing." This would mean "more basic security at less cost." Dulles went on to say that warnings of such massive retaliation—nuclear weapons—had brought the Chinese to heel in Korea in 1953. The Secretary seemed to be proposing that the administration brandish nuclear weapons whenever confronted by an enemy.
³¹

Dulles was not simply indulging in his fondness for stern and grandiloquent phrases. On the contrary, the National Security Council, which became much more important in policy-making during the Eisenhower administration, had reconsidered defense doctrine in 1953 and had approved NSC-162/2 on October 30. This document emphasized the need for a nuclear-based strategy and for cost-cutting (mainly of ground-based forces) in defense spending. Eisenhower had read Dulles's speech in advance and had apparently penned in the key passage calling for a policy based on a "capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing."
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"Massive retaliation"—the "New Look," contemporaries called it—was carefully conceived administration policy.

The New Look in fact nicely complemented existing defense initiatives, which were beginning to rely heavily on the Strategic Air Command (SAC). By 1954 the SAC, still headed by the tough-talking, fiercely anti-Communist General Curtis LeMay—a kind of airborne George Patton—was replacing its propeller-driven B-36 bombers with jet-propelled B-47S. These could fly at speeds of up to 600 miles per hour and had an effective range (when refueled in the air) of nearly 6,000 miles. LeMay presided over a rapid expansion of his force between 1948 and 1955, by which time the United States had some 400 B-47S plus another 1,350 planes capable of dropping nuclear weapons on the Soviet heartland. The Soviets had perhaps one-tenth as many that could bomb the United States.
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Given this enormous edge, it seemed only logical for the Eisenhower administration to announce a policy that rested heavily on air power and atomic weapons.

Eisenhower backed massive retaliation for two other military reasons. First, it was obvious that the Soviets possessed a very large advantage in ground forces. As Dulles pointed out, there was no way that the United States could realistically hope to catch up in that domain. Second, Eisenhower knew that missiles carrying nuclear warheads were soon to become main-line military weapons. In pursuit of such weapons he quietly but aggressively supported research and development of the Atlas, Polaris, and Minuteman programs, all of which were well underway by the late 1950s, and of light warheads for such missiles. America's support of bombs and warheads was intense, resulting in growth in the number of nuclear weapons available to United States forces from around 1,500 in January 1953 to 6,000 or so six years later. This was an increase of 4,500, or 750 a year, or two or more per day. The effort, which was far greater than militarily necessary, gave the United States a wide edge in missile development by the late 1950s.
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In supporting massive retaliation Eisenhower and Dulles adopted historically familiar American approaches to defense: faith in high technology, and aversion to large standing armies in times of peace. These were politically attractive approaches. They also had several more precise goals in mind. The policy, they believed, widened American initiative by enabling quick retaliation—nuclear if necessary—on an aggressor's own territory. The United States, for instance, could blast the Soviet Union itself instead of using troops (which were expensive to maintain and might get killed) to deter Communist trouble-making wherever it might occur—Greece and Turkey? Berlin? Korea?—throughout the world. In this sense, they thought, the new policy was both cheaper and safer than NSC-68 (1950), which had in effect called for fighting aggression wherever it occurred. Second, massive retaliation was supposed to keep an enemy guessing. Eisenhower and Dulles hoped that adversaries, like the Chinese in Korea, would think twice before defying the United States.