Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (62 page)

A previously commissioned report by a panel of the Science Advisory Council, delivered in early November to the National Security Council, seemed to bear out these criticisms. It represented the thinking of a number of veteran (and partisan) anti-Communist Establishmentarians, including Robert Lovett, John McCloy, and Paul Nitze (who in 1950 had fashioned NSC-68 calling for major hikes in American defense spending). The Gaither Report, as the document was called, was supposedly classified, but its contents quickly leaked. It recommended enormous increases in military spending, amounting to $44 billion—to be achieved by deficit spending—during the next five years.
³³
It also demanded rapid development of fallout shelters. Press accounts seized on the Gaither Report as confirmation of America's vulnerability and Eisenhower's culpability.

The Gaither Report was but one of a series of broadsides from "experts" on defense needs who were sure that the United States was falling behind the Soviets. Starting in early 1958 the Rockefeller Brothers Fund released a series of critiques along the same line.
³⁴
Some of these came from the fertile mind of Henry Kissinger, a thirty-four-year-old student of international relations. His own book
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy
, published in 1957, had already insisted that the United States needed a much more flexible and costly military posture. It became a big seller.

Documents such as the Gaither and Rockefeller reports greatly distorted the contemporary balance of terror. In fact, there was no such thing at that time—or later—as a "missile gap," a phrase that Democrats and others flung at the GOP during the 1958 and 1960 election campaigns. The
Sputnik
launches indeed demonstrated that the Soviets had an edge in capacity for thrust—the ability to boost satellites into orbit. But in fact the Soviets lagged badly in the production of usable warheads and did not deploy an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) during the Eisenhower years. In 1957 the United States had a huge advantage over the Soviet Union in the areas of military missile development and in nuclear weaponry, and it widened it during Eisenhower's second term. In the event of a Russian attack—which under the circumstances would have been suicidal for the Kremlin—the United States could devastate the military and industrial power of the Soviet Union.
³⁵

Eisenhower, moreover, had good reason to be confident of American nuclear superiority. Since 1956 he had benefited from extraordinary intelligence being gathered by U-2 planes, which were sleek and supersonic reconnaissance aircraft designed to fly at altitudes up to 80,000 feet (fifteen miles) and equipped with amazingly powerful cameras. Photographs could capture newspaper headlines ten miles below. Evidence from U-2 flights established without doubt in 1956–57 that the Soviets lagged far behind in development of ICBMs. The photos made it possible to lay out in sequence what the Soviets were doing and thereby gave the United States plenty of warning about Moscow's preparations, if any, for attack.

The President, self-assured about his military expertise, carefully examined the U-2 evidence, for he took great pride in his attention to American security, which he considered to be far more important than exploration of space. It was much better, he said, to have "one good Redstone nuclear-armed missile than a rocket that could hit the moon. We have no enemies on the moon." Refusing to be panicked by
Sputnik
, he insisted on adhering to the doctrine of "sufficiency": in dealing with nuclear powers the United States needed mainly to maintain sufficient military strength to survive foreign assault, with nuclear weapons in hand for a devastating counter-attack, but it need not arm ad infinitum. How many times, he asked impatiently in 1958, "could [you] kill the same man?"
³⁶
Rejecting the fiscal extravagance of the Gaither Report, Eisenhower continued to insist on containing costs. He told his Cabinet (which needed endless reassurance) in November, "Look, I'd like to know what's on the other side of the moon, but I won't pay to find out this year."
³⁷

Under popular pressure Eisenhower did bend a little. In 1958 he supported establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), a civilian bureaucracy that was created to coordinate missile development and space exploration in the future.
³⁸
He also recommended federal aid to promote American know how in science and foreign languages. The result, approved by Congress in September 1958, was the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). This was a historic break with twentieth-century practice, which had assigned educational spending primarily to states and localities. As its title indicated, however, the NDEA was sold as a defense measure, not as endorsement of a broader principle of federal aid to schools or universities. Individuals who received money under the act had to sign a clause affirming loyalty to the United States and to swear that they had never engaged in subversive activities.
³⁹

But Eisenhower otherwise hewed to his course. Indeed, he had a fundamental problem: if he spelled out in detail the nature of America's superiority in missiles and nuclear weaponry, thereby trying to relieve political pressure at home, he would have to reveal that the United States possessed super reconnaissance planes. Such a disclosure, he thought, would expose too much about American intelligence. (It was learned later that Ike need not have worried much about this; the Soviets knew of the flights in 1956 but lacked the capacity until later to shoot them down.) Full disclosure, Eisenhower further realized, would also amount to confession of high-level spying. Worse, it would publicly embarrass Khrushchev, driving him to escalate USSR defense spending. So the President did not tell all. Privately, he reassured people in the know. Publicly, he relied on trying to convince a highly nervous population (in the face of ardent partisan attacks) that he, a military expert, knew what he was doing.

As commander-in-chief Eisenhower deserves mostly good marks for his handling of concerns over
Sputnik
(and of defense policies in general during his second term). By concentrating on missile development Eisenhower presided over great gains in America's air-based and nuclear capacity relative to that of the Soviet Union. By doing so quietly, he may have allayed Soviet fears, thereby preventing the Soviets from hastening missile development of their own.
⁴⁰
By refusing to panic in the face of
Sputnik
and domestic criticism he maintained a lid on defense spending.
⁴¹

At the time, however,
Sputnik
probably damaged Eisenhower's political standing. Belated American missile successes—the United States finally launched its first satellite on January 31, 1958, from Cape Canaveral—did not do much to reassure American doubters. The satellite, carried by a Jupiter C rocket, weighed only thirty-one pounds. In October 1959 the Soviet Union landed a probe on the moon and sent back pictures of the dark side of the lunar surface. (In April 1961 it put the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit.) The United States clearly lagged in this kind of effort when he left office in January 1961. It was not until February 20, 1962 that Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth.

The
Sputnik
"crisis" above all revealed the enduring power of Cold War fears in the late 1950s. Although Eisenhower did his best to reassure people about American preparedness, he only half-succeeded. And this mattered politically. Americans, holding grand expectations about their "can-do" capacity, liked to think that they were the first and the best at scientific and technological innovation. If they fell behind, someone must have blundered. Reflecting these attitudes, contemporaries as varied in their politics as Chester Bowles, Dean Rusk, AFL leader George Meany, and Kissinger publicly deplored what they said was a lack of "national purpose." (What that was, they were hard-pressed to say, but obviously it was up to the President to provide it.) George Kennan complained in 1959 that the United States needed a greater "sense of national purpose" if it hoped to best the Soviet Union in the competition for world leadership. General Maxwell Taylor, army chief of staff in 1958–59, demanded a more flexible military posture in a book,
The Uncertain Trumpet
, that he published in 1960. Eisenhower's own Commission on National Goals warned him in 1960 that "the nation is in grave danger" and "threatened by the rulers of one third of mankind." Disgusted, the President did not release the report,
Goals for Americans
, until after the 1960 election. But claims that the nation suffered from a "missile gap" nonetheless resounded throughout the campaign.
⁴²
When the new generation took power in 1961, it zestfully accelerated the arms race.

A
LTHOUGH EISENHOWER TRIED
to moderate anxieties concerning
Sputnik
and defense spending, he otherwise pursued policies that sustained and in some ways exacerbated the Cold War during his second term. In his Middle Eastern policies, his use of the CIA, and above all his conduct of relations with Cuba and Vietnam, he managed (with provocative help from Khrushchev) to leave an unusually tense world situation to his successors.

His engagement with problems in the Middle East increased in early 1958 following a bloody coup that overthrew the royal family in Iraq. Nearby nations, including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon, grew worried that Nasser-style nationalism might engulf the region. Eisenhower attended willingly to their concerns, both because he worried about Soviet moves in the area and because he was determined to protect Western oil interests. He also welcomed the chance to take forceful action.

All these concerns led to his decision, for the only time during his eight-year presidency, to send American troops into what might become combat abroad. On July 15, 1958, marines splashed onto the beaches of Lebanon. Two days later, in what was obviously a coordinated effort, British paratroopers landed in Jordan. Fortunately for all concerned, fighting proved unnecessary, and by late October the marines were removed. The incursion accomplished nothing, for Lebanon had faced no real threat. In his eagerness to display the resolve of the United States, Eisenhower had resorted to a form of gunboat diplomacy that bestowed no honor on the nation or on his presidency.
⁴³

Similar criticism can be made of his continuing reliance on the CIA. During his second term he gave it still more latitude than he had earlier, when it had abetted coups in Iran and Guatemala. In 1958 the CIA attempted unsuccessfully to overthrow the government of Indonesia, and in 1959 it helped to install a pro-Western government in Laos. Eisenhower knew of and approved of such efforts. What he apparently did not know, but what his largely uncritical support of the agency encouraged, was that CIA operatives were also hatching schemes to assassinate the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and the new head of Cuba in 1959, Fidel Castro.
⁴⁴
The CIA was becoming a rogue elephant.

In dealing with Khrushchev after 1957 Eisenhower tried sporadically to promote more amicable relations. This was hardly because he trusted the Soviets or because he thought that conciliation might lead to detente. Rather, he became ever more certain, thanks in part to the U-2 flights, that American military superiority made negotiations an increasingly safe and desirable option. In 1958 Dulles, widely considered the ultimate hard-liner, added his weight to such an approach by calling for reductions in defense spending. "In the field of military capacity," Dulles advised, "enough is enough."
⁴⁵

Eisenhower and Dulles pressed especially for a Soviet-American ban on nuclear tests in the atmosphere. Their support of such an effort rested in part on the advice of scientists, who by 1958 had grown more confident about their ability to distinguish a far-off nuclear test from a seismic event. It might not be necessary any more, they thought, to demand frequent on-site inspections of Russian installations—a demand that in the past had frightened the highly secretive Soviet leadership and helped to stall efforts for control of testing. Administration leaders were also growing worried about evidence linking atmospheric testing to long-range radioactive fallout. Taking no chances, the United States ran yet another full series of tests in October 1958 and then—secure in the knowledge of American superiority—ceased atmospheric testing on October 31. A few days later the Soviets (who had conducted their own spate of tests in October) stopped, too. Although both sides kept on building bombs, chances for some kind of nuclear agreement seemed more promising than at any time in the history of the Cold War.
⁴⁶

As it happened, both sides stopped atmospheric tests for the next three years.
⁴⁷
But Eisenhower failed in his quest for an agreement and presided over a Soviet-American relationship that deteriorated badly by the summer of 1960. This was mainly the doing of Khrushchev, who proved to be an erratic, confrontational, and sometimes grandstanding adversary. In November 1958 the Soviet leader sharply escalated tensions over Berlin, which remained isolated within the satellite state of Communist East Germany. Unless American troops left West Berlin by May 27, 1959, Khrushchev warned, the Soviet Union would sign a treaty with East Germany, thereby giving the East Germans a green light to deny American troops ground access to Berlin. The United States, which did not recognize East Germany, might have no recourse save to shoot its way into the city.