Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (43 page)

To Eisenhower the new doctrine promised above all to promote his vision of the good society at home. Reliance on massive retaliation would enable reductions in the size of the army, which would have been very expensive to maintain at Korean War levels, and therefore to cut costs. "More bang for the buck," contemporaries said. The President was especially anxious to balance the budget because he feared inflation, which he was sure would badly damage the economy and widen divisions in American society. These, in turn, would weaken the standing of capitalism in the global battle against Communism.

In his skepticism about the long-run capacity of the American economy to tolerate high levels of military expenditure, Eisenhower differed substantially from bullish contemporaries—and from his successors in the White House. Holding grand expectations about the potential for American influence in the world, they felt confident that government could also promote rapid economic growth at home. They were much readier to spend generously for both defense and domestic programs. Eisenhower, too, was a Cold Warrior who wanted to lead the "Free World" against Communism. But he placed a considerably higher premium on the need for fiscal restraint, the key (he thought) to social stability. His tenacity in support of prudent financing, whether for defense or social programs, stamped a definite character on his presidency.

Eisenhower was also afraid that high levels of defense spending would give too much power to military leaders and defense contractors. The result could be a "garrison state" that distorted priorities. "Every gun that is made," he said in 1953, "every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."
³⁵
This did not mean that he believed in large-scale government social programs to relieve suffering; far from it, for those, too, would unbalance the budget. But he did worry that heavy spending for arms would feed what he later called the "military-industrial complex."
³⁶

The quest to contain costs under the New Look enjoyed modest success over the next few years. Thanks mainly to partial demobilization following the Korean War, federal spending for defense decreased from $50.4 billion in fiscal 1953 to $40.3 billion in 1956 before creeping up to $46.6 billion in 1959. After 1954 it also decreased slowly as a percentage of the federal budget and as a percentage of GNP (from 14 percent of GNP at the peak of the Korean War to around 9 percent by 1961).
³⁷
All the armed services took cuts in personnel, especially the army, in which Eisenhower had spent most of his adult career. It lost 671,000 men and women between 1953 and 1959—a slashing that brought the number to 862,000 and that outraged many of Eisenhower's old friends and colleagues. Two of these angry generals, Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor, were army chiefs of staff in the 1950s; both wrote books in retirement that protested the reductions.
³⁸
The cuts prompted charges that the United States would lose the flexibility to cope with local crises—"limited wars"—throughout the world. Ike, however, was determined to control costs and to curb the influence of the military-industrial complex. Sure that air and naval power offered sufficient security (especially when missiles became operational), he successfully stood his ground. Only a general with his commanding popularity and expertise could have managed this policy without severe political damage amid the Cold War fears of the 1950s.

Opponents of massive retaliation leveled other complaints at the new policy. Some insisted correctly that it amounted to a strategy of nuclear "blackmail." Ike indeed resorted to blackmail against the People's Republic of China in standoffs over the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1955.
³⁹
Other critics complained that massive retaliation was saber-rattling of the most dangerous sort, that it frightened allies, and that it would accelerate the arms race. More "bang for the buck" would be matched by a Soviet response of more "rubble for the ruble." Finally, they said, the policy was simply not credible. Potential aggressors, far from being deterred, would act with impunity, confident that the United States would not dare to use nuclear weapons in the vast majority of regional conflicts. The Soviets, one critic complained, would be able to "nibble the free world to death piece by piece."
⁴⁰

Eisenhower did not bend under these criticisms; he never repudiated massive retaliation or the New Look, and he avidly supported development of missiles and nuclear power. But both he and Dulles grew sensitive to the need for careful application of the policy. Eisenhower in fact came to regret the rhetoric. He told a press conference in February 1954, "I don't think that big and bombastic talk is the thing that makes other people fear." Later in 1954 he reminded Dulles that "when we talk about . . . massive retaliation, we mean retaliation against an act that means irrevocable war."
⁴¹
Dulles, writing about massive retaliation in
Foreign Affairs
in April 1954, emphasized that it was "not the kind of power which could most usefully be evoked under all circumstances." He went on to say that he appreciated the need for other weapons.
⁴²

Still, the rhetoric was incendiary, and the critics were correct in lamenting it. The policy did frighten America's allies, and it did not help whatever chances may have existed following the death of Stalin for renewed dialogue with the Soviet Union, which thereupon rushed to catch up with the United States. Massive retaliation may in fact have played into the hands of Soviet hard-liners looking for reasons to accelerate their own weapons development. Finally, the rhetoric helped to further an already heated climate of domestic opinion. Massive retaliation did nothing to facilitate efforts at easing the Cold War in an age of thermonuclear capability.

It is nonetheless striking that most American political figures in the mid-1950s—Democrats as well as Republicans—adopted the same assumptions that moved Eisenhower and Dulles. Like Eisenhower, they talked as if they were certain of Soviet aggressiveness—even if privately they were not so sure about that. Though some of them, such as Adlai Stevenson, later sought to stop thermonuclear tests, most leaders tended to demand more, not less, defense spending—as well as a good deal more military flexibility. Amid the powerful anti-Communist consensus that dominated American life in the mid-1950s, voices for acting "tough with the Russians" all but silenced counsels of restraint.

N
OTHING MORE CLEARLY
revealed the nature of Eisenhower's conduct of world affairs than a series of crises that threatened to run out of control between 1954 and 1956. These concerned, in order, Indochina, Quemoy and Matsu, Suez, and Hungary. In several of these cases the administration seemed to toy with the idea of American military intervention. But ultimately cautious management by Eisenhower and his advisers—and good luck—enabled the United States to control its involvement. Ike's prudence under the test of these crises forms the nub of his enhanced reputation in later years.

In 1945 many native nationalists in Indochina had regarded the United States with admiration. President Roosevelt had periodically criticized colonialism and seemed prepared to put pressure on France, which had governed the area since the late nineteenth century, to surrender or soften its claims for repossession once the Japanese (who overran the region during the war) had been evicted. Although Roosevelt backed off from his anti-colonial rhetoric in early 1945, Ho Chi Minh, the leading nationalist from Vietnam (part of Indochina), still looked to the United States for support and inspiration. When Ho's forces (working with an American intelligence unit) managed to take control of Hanoi in September 1945, he proclaimed Vietnamese independence in a message inspired by the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal." Later that day United States Army officers stood with Vietnamese patriots, listening proudly to the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as American warplanes flew overhead.
⁴³

Ho was soon to be rudely disappointed. The French, assisted by the British, reclaimed southern Vietnam and in November 1946 shelled the northern port city of Haiphong, killing 6,000 civilians. Open warfare then broke out between the French and the Vietminh, as Ho's forces were called. Fighting was to savage Vietnam (and often neighboring Laos and Cambodia, the other parts of Indochina) for decades thereafter.

American officials during the late 1940s did not pay the warfare much attention. Some recognized that Ho was a popular nationalist leader and that the French were corrupt and often brutal. But France was needed as an ally in the developing European struggle against Communism. Moreover, although Ho was first and foremost a nationalist, he was also a Moscow-trained Communist. Then and later this basic fact was the single most important determinant of American policy toward the region. Presidents from Truman through Nixon—from the 1940s into the 1970s—insisted that Vietnam must not be allowed to fall to the Communists. As Secretary of State Marshall put the matter in February 1947, "We are not interested in seeing colonial administrations supplanted by [a] philosophy and political organization . . . controlled by the Kremlin."
⁴⁴

Communist domination of Vietnam, American officials believed, would be bad for several reasons. Militarily and economically the area was thought to provide a "natural invasion route into the rice bowl of Southeast Asia."
⁴⁵
But real estate or resources were not America's major concerns. Rather, the key to American thinking was what Eisenhower, using an already worn metaphor, called in 1954 the "falling domino principle" and what other leaders labeled "credibility." If a local communist like Ho Chi Minh could topple the domino of Vietnam, nearby dominos—Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, maybe even Australia, New Zealand, India, and Japan—might fall next. Such a domino effect would not only deprive the "Free World" of resources and bases; it would also demonstrate that America was a paper tiger—loud but not "credible" when a crisis arose.

For these reasons the Truman administration sided with the French, who in February 1950 established Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as semi-autonomous "free states" within a French Union. Bao Dai, the former emperor of Annam (a part of Vietnam within Indochina), was recognized by the United States and its Western allies as the puppet head of Vietnam. The USSR, China, and other Communist states recognized Ho. The United States stepped up military aid to the French in the area, especially after the outbreak of the Korean War, which seemed to prove the aggressive intent of Communism—Chinese as well as Vietnamese—throughout Asia.
⁴⁶
The aid amounted to 40 percent of French military costs by January 1953 and totaled $2.6 billion between 1950 and 1954.
⁴⁷

The Eisenhower administration continued this policy, increasing the aid to 75 percent of the cost of the war by early 1954, and for the same basic reasons. It was anxious to get France to join the European Defense Community (EDC), a military arm of NATO, and therefore tried not to antagonize the French government. In this way, as in many others, American policy in Southeast Asia was inextricably bound to policies in Europe and to overall Cold War strategy. Far-off Vietnam, considered relatively unimportant in itself, was both a domino and a pawn on the world chessboard.
⁴⁸

The French, however, were losing badly to rebel forces led by the resourceful Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietminh commander-in-chief. Then and later the lightly armed, lightly clad Vietminh soldiers, enjoying nationalistic support from villagers, fought bravely, resourcefully, and relentlessly—incurring huge casualties—to reclaim their country. By contrast, the French army was poorly led. Its commanders were contemptuous of Giap and his guerrilla forces and vastly overrated the potential of their firepower. Ike dismissed the French generals as a "poor lot." General Lawton Collins, a top American adviser, said that the United States must "put the squeeze on the French to get them off their fannies." Nothing of that sort happened, and the French, hanging on to major cities such as Hanoi and Saigon, foolishly decided in early 1954 to fight a decisive battle at Dienbienphu, a hard-to-defend redoubt deep in rebel-held territory near the border with Laos.
⁴⁹

By then various of Ike's advisers were growing anxious to engage the United States in rescue of the French. One was Vice-President Nixon, who floated the idea of sending in American ground forces. Another was chief of staff Radford, who urged massive strikes, possibly with tactical nuclear weapons, from American bombers and carriers.
⁵⁰
General Nathan Twining, air force chief of staff, favored dropping "small tactical A-bombs." The result, he said, would have been to "clean those Commies out of there and the band could play the Marseillaise and the French would come marching out of Dienbienphu in fine shape."
⁵¹

At times Eisenhower seemed tempted to involve American military forces in Vietnam. The region, he said in January 1954, was a "leaky dike." But it is "sometimes better to put a finger in than to let the whole structure wash away." On April 7, with the French in desperate straits at Dienbienphu, he gave his version of the domino theory: "You have a row of dominos set up. You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is a certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound consequences."
⁵²
His remarks hinted at a decisive American commitment.