Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (63 page)

The early months of 1959 were difficult months for foreign policy-making in the Eisenhower administration, for Dulles was in the hospital with cancer (he died on May 24). Eisenhower, however, grabbed the reins and made it clear that the United States would stick by West Berlin. But he tried not to embarrass Khrushchev by publicly calling his bluff. Instead, he resolved to keep talking about Berlin and about a test ban. When critics demanded that he increase defense spending in order to prepare for a crisis in Berlin, he grew angry and blamed selfish interests for the hulabaloo. "I'm getting awfully sick of the lobbies by the munitions," he told Republican leaders. "You begin to see this thing isn't wholly the defense of the country, but only more money for some who are already fat cats."
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Eisenhower's patience paid off, at least temporarily. The deadline for a treaty between East Germany and the Soviet Union passed without treaty, incident, or American concession. Khrushchev would bring up the issue again and in 1961 would erect the Berlin Wall. But for the time being he dropped his demands. Negotiations even resulted in an agreement that Khrushchev and Eisenhower would exchange visits. Khrushchev came to the United States for a whirlwind tour in September 1959. Erratic as ever, he called for Soviet-American friendship yet boasted, "We will bury you." At the end of his visit he spent three days with Eisenhower at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. There he agreed to a summit meeting at Paris in May 1960 with Eisenhower and the leaders of France and Great Britain. The "spirit of Camp David" reminded people of the "spirit of Geneva" and promoted a good deal of journalistic talk about "peaceful coexistence."

This lasted until May 1, 1960, when a U-2 reconnaissance flight by pilot Francis Gary Powers, from Pakistan to Norway, was shot down by Soviet rocket fire near Sverdlovsk, 1,300 miles inside Russian borders. The CIA, which had charge of the flights, had equipped Powers with a needle dipped in curare, a deadly poison, so that he could kill himself before being captured. But Powers bailed out and survived. His plane was found, and he was captured and interrogated. This was sixteen days before the summit conference in Paris was scheduled to open.

The U-2 Incident, as it was called, need not have torpedoed the conference. Khrushchev, though angry and embarrassed by the U-2S, could have announced right away that Powers had been captured, at which point Eisenhower could have replied that excessive Soviet secretiveness made the flights necessary. He might then have called them off, at least for a while. Khrushchev, however, resolved to show the world (perhaps mainly the Chinese, with whom Soviet relations had become dangerous) that he was tough. He therefore announced only that an American plane had been shot down in Soviet territory, saying nothing about a U-2 or a pilot. He hoped that the United States would spin a tissue of lies, in which case the Soviet Union could humiliate Eisenhower and claim a big propaganda victory.

The ruse worked. American officials confirmed only that a weather reconnaissance plane was missing. Khrushchev then sprang his trap on May 7, proclaiming that Powers had been captured and had confessed and that Russian officials had the plane, complete with photographic equipment that proved Powers had been spying. Powers, Khrushchev gloated, was equipped with a pistol that was noiseless. "If that gun was meant for protection against wild animals . . . then why the silencer? To blow men's brains out! The men who supplied him with the silence gun pray in church and call us godless atheists!" Powers also had with him two gold watches and seven ladies' gold rings. "What possible use could he make of all this in the upper strata of the atmosphere? Perhaps he was to have flown still higher, to Mars, and meant to seduce the Martian ladies."
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Eisenhower might then have kept quiet. But he was embarrassed by rumors that the mission had taken place without his authorization, and he resolved to set those rumors straight. He announced at a press conference on May 11 that he knew everything of importance that happened in his administration. The flight had been necessary, he added, because "no one wants another Pearl Harbor." To prevent such an attack the United States had to protect itself and the "Free World" by spying. Espionage activities of that sort, he concluded, were a "distasteful but vital necessity."
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Eisenhower then set out for Paris with the intention of going through with the summit. Khrushchev, however, showed up in no mood to settle issues such as Berlin, probably because hard-liners at home fought the idea of compromise. On the first day of the conference he arose, red-faced and angry, to demand that Eisenhower condemn U-2 flights, renounce them in the future, and punish those responsible. He also withdrew his invitation for Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union. Eisenhower was angry but kept his temper. The flights, he said, would not be resumed. But he refused to accede to Khrushchev's other demands. When the Soviet leader stalked out of the room, it was clear that the summit was over before it started.

The legacy of the U-2 Affair was negative for all involved, save perhaps Khrushchev who scored the propaganda victory that he seemed to crave. American critics wondered why Eisenhower had authorized such a flight on the eve of the summit (it was supposed to have been the last until the summit was over) and were chagrined to see him caught in a lie, not only to Khrushchev but also to the American people. The debacle destroyed whatever hopes had existed (not strong) for a test ban agreement and for some understanding concerning Berlin.
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The U-2 Incident chased away the "spirit of Camp David" and set in motion a hardening of Soviet-American relations that intensified during the next two years.

Eisenhower's foreign policies after 1956 left especially tense and unresolved situations in two other areas of the world. One crisis, in Cuba, mounted quickly after Fidel Castro staged a successful revolution against a corrupt pro-American dictatorship and triumphantly took power in January 1959. Castro at first seemed heroic to many Americans. When he came to the United States in April, he was warmly received and spent three hours talking with Vice-President Nixon. But relations soon cooled. Castro executed opponents and confiscated foreign investments, including $1 billion held by Americans. Refugees fled to the United States and told stories of Castro's atrocities. Castro signed long-term trade arrangements with the Soviet Union, denounced "Yankee imperialists," and recognized the People's Republic of China. It seemed that he was taking Cuba into the Communist bloc of nations.
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The Eisenhower administration responded forcefully in 1960 by cutting American economic aid and ultimately by refusing to accept Cuban sugar, a mainstay of the island's economy. An embargo was placed on American exports to Cuba. The administration encouraged the formation of a Cuban government-in-exile and authorized the CIA to promote paramilitary training of exiles in Guatemala. They hoped to stage an invasion of the island. The Soviets responded to these events by pledging to defend Cuba against attack from the United States. In Eisenhower's last days in office the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba. At that time there were some 600 men being readied to attack from Guatemala.

The Eisenhower administration could hardly have preserved warm relations with Castro. The Cuban leader, like many people in Latin American nations, deeply resented the economic might of the United States, whose citizens owned some 40 percent of Cuban's sugar, 90 percent of its wealth from mines, and 80 percent of its utilities.
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The United States also controlled a bit of Cuban territory, a naval base at Guantanamo. Castro, anxious to curb American power in Cuba, indeed to promote a social revolution, could not help but provoke animosities. Still, the far-from-secret readiness of the Eisenhower administration to consider invasion—Castro was well aware of what was going on in Guatemala—added heat to the fuel of emnity. When Eisenhower left the White House, it remained only for someone to kindle the fires of war.

The legacy of Eisenhower foreign policy in Vietnam after 1956 was also grim and lasting. Having encouraged southern leader Ngo Dinh Diem to ignore the Geneva accords' call for national elections in 1956, the Eisenhower administration proceeded to step up support for his increasingly corrupt and dictatorial regime. The aid totaled some $1 billion between 1955 and 1961, making South Vietnam the fifth largest recipient in the world of American assistance during that time. By the late 1950s the United States mission in Saigon, the capital of the South, employed 1,500 people; it was the biggest American mission in the world. The economic aid helped to control inflation and to rebuild the southern economy in places like Saigon. But it did little to help villages, where more than 90 percent of the people of South Vietnam lived. Most of the aid, indeed, was military, designed to guard against invasion from Ho Chi Minh and his Communist regime in North Vietnam.
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Diem, having struggled earnestly against criminal elements and against various corrupt religious sects, had enjoyed some heartening successes by 1957. But he also proved to be increasingly stubborn and narrow-minded.
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Brooking no interference with his exaggerated sense of destiny, he refused to widen his circle of supporters much beyond his own extended family. With his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu as his top adviser, he tightened his autocratic rule. Local elections, a tradition in the country, were abolished. Diem filled village and provincial offices with friends, many of whom arrested local notables on trumped-up charges and forced them to pay bribes in order to get released. Diem and Nhu shut down unfriendly newspapers and incarcerated many thousands of opponents. Southern opponents, feeling harassed, responded by resuming armed resistance in 1957 and by beginning a campaign of terror against Diem's supporters in the villages in 1958.

Ho Chi Minh also ruled autocratically in the North. Estimates place the number of dissidents executed there at between 3,000 and 15,000 from 1954 to 1960. Indeed, Ho was so busy centralizing his authority that he waited until January 1959 to give formal approval to Vietminh resistance in the South. Thereafter, his aid increased rapidly. The North expanded infiltration routes through Laos and Cambodia and sent increased numbers of trained agents into the South. In 1960 it was estimated that these agents, together with southern rebels, assassinated some 2,500 Diem loyalists. In December 1960 the North took a major role in the official founding of the National Liberation Front (NLF), the political arm of the struggle in the South against Diem, and revolutionary activity further intensified. Diem, christening the NLF the Vietcong (Viet-Communist), could not stem their advances in the countryside. By 1961 full-scale military operations were in progress, and the Diem regime grew steadily more precarious.
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It is obvious in retrospect that the Eisenhower administration erred seriously in throwing so much support to Diem. Ho, after all, was a popular liberator who had had every reason to expect that he would win national elections in 1956 and become the legitimate ruler of a united nation. By the late 1950s some administration officials recognized Ho's growing appeal and urged Diem to reform. The dictator refused, whereupon the Americans—having no viable political alternatives in the South—relented. More aid poured in, as did American military advisers, of whom there were roughly 1,000 by January 1961.
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While the Eisenhower administration's record in Vietnam was wrong-headed, it can be placed in context in two ways. First, Saigon was a long way from Washington. Vietnam, American aid notwithstanding, did not seem as strategically important as Berlin, Cuba, the Middle East, or even Laos (which many State Department officials in the late 1950s considered more in danger of collapse). Warnings about trouble in Vietnam were received but, for the most part, ignored amid the noise of diplomatic traffic. The administration simply did not pay great attention to Southeast Asia.

Second, and more important, Ho Chi Minh was a Communist. In the polarized Cold War atmosphere of the mid- and late 1950s, this alone was sufficient to make him an enemy in American eyes. South Vietnam, administration officials thought, had to have backing to protect it against the autocratic Communist rule of Ho. If Vietnam fell, moreover, it would be the domino that threatened the collapse of other non-Communist governments in Southeast Asia. Other American leaders who bothered to notice Southeast Asia agreed with this analysis. Senator John F. Kennedy, speaking passionately to the American Friends of Vietnam in 1956, delivered characteristic anti-Communist rhetoric on the subject. "Vietnam," he said, "represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone of the arch, the finger in the dike." Should the "red tide of Communism" pour into South Vietnam, much of Asia would be threatened. South Vietnam, he closed, "is our offspring, we cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs."
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A
ROUND 4:00 P.M. ON THE AFTERNOON
of February 1, 1960, four freshmen from all-black North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered the local Woolworth department store to stage a protest. The store was open to all—the more business the better. But its lunch counter, like those elsewhere in the South, was open to whites only. The four young men, Ezell Blair, Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil, resolved to conduct a sit-in at the counter until management agreed to desegregate it. Their bold and courageous action sparked the direct action phase of the civil rights movement in the United States.