The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  Eisenhower allocated fewer dollars to defense than Truman did at the height of the Korean War. But Ike presided over nearly eight years of peace, and his annual defense budgets were still more than three times what Truman’s administration had spent in 1950, before Korea. They were living in an age of peril, the president had said. “Security based on heavy armaments is a way of life that has been forced upon us and on our allies,” he explained to the American public on April 30. “We don’t like it; in fact we hate it. But so long as such an unmistakable, self-confirmed threat to our freedom exists, we will carry these burdens with dedication and determination.”30

  There was a Spartan tone to Ike’s approach to national defense—fitting for a lifelong soldier. He viewed democratic government as a collective enterprise in which great benefits came to a free people only through common effort and shared sacrifice. As long as the nation faced grave threats, taxes would stay high and citizens must remain on alert. “We expect to live as a free state,” he told the country in a public radio address, “which means we must develop a [defense] program that can . . . carry the security burden for a long, long time if that is necessary, and we will do it without complaining because we prize our freedoms that highly.” This was a maxim to live by in an age of peril.31

  V

  Having imposed a degree of restraint and order on the federal budget, Eisenhower now turned to the bleeding wound of the Korean War. To Eisenhower as well as many Americans, the war seemed a tragic waste. It was costly, it placed a terrible drag on the domestic economy, it sapped public morale, and it did not enhance America’s global position. Eisenhower had no specific plan to end the war, but he knew it must end, somehow.

  He had inherited a difficult tangle in Korea. By the start of 1953, the battle lines had stabilized along a front that was fairly close to the 38th parallel, the prewar border between North and South Korea. Since June 1951 the combatants had been in fitful discussions about signing an armistice, though these talks had been interrupted regularly by fierce outbursts of fighting, with the result that the war was an open sore, hurting both sides but achieving little strategic purpose. After painstaking negotiations over many months, the Truman administration had managed to settle with the Chinese and North Koreans almost all the outstanding issues—except for the question of repatriating thousands of Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war in American hands who expressed an earnest desire not to be sent home. The communist nations consistently refused to accept the American position that captured soldiers should be allowed to choose their subsequent fate, and demanded that they all be returned. The United States, by contrast, viewed forcible prisoner repatriation as morally wrong: it would not agree to surrender, against their will, North Korean and Chinese prisoners who were begging to be spared the return trip. A top-secret staff study declared that a forcible return of prisoners would “constitute appeasement of the most serious sort” and “the grossest betrayal of trust.”

  The domestic politics of any such deal were also toxic: President Roosevelt at the close of the Second World War had in fact agreed to the forcible repatriation of Soviet POWs, whose destiny thereafter was to languish in the Gulag. This was part of the hated legacy of the Yalta agreements. A Republican administration could never agree to follow such a precedent. Thus the negotiations stalled, while both sides lashed out at one another on the battlefield with periodic attacks designed chiefly to enhance their bargaining position at the peace table. It was grotesque: American soldiers were dying on behalf of a war that no one was trying to win. Eisenhower considered this situation “intolerable,” and he wanted to bring the whole unfortunate mess to an “honorable end.”32

  But how? For many years biographers have asserted that Eisenhower’s plan for achieving an armistice in Korea was breathtakingly simple: he threatened to expand the war into China and to use nuclear weapons in the process. Ike’s so-called “bluff” scared the Chinese and brought them to accept a reasonable deal at the peace table. This example of Eisenhower’s bold leadership was promoted initially by none other than John Foster Dulles, when in 1956 he told a Life magazine reporter, James Shepley, that Eisenhower had settled on his plan to use the nuclear threat to achieve a peace deal as early as the conversations aboard the Helena in December 1952. When the Chinese and North Koreans refused to accept reasonable terms for an armistice, Shepley reported, Dulles passed along Eisenhower’s ultimatum to the Chinese through the intermediary of India’s leader Jawaharlal Nehru, whose country was acting as a go-between. The results were immediate: “Within two weeks of his trip to New Delhi, Dulles received word from Korea that the Reds appeared to have begun to negotiate seriously.” The communists accepted what was a “propaganda defeat” for a simple reason: “because they had had an unmistakable warning that further delays would no longer be met with U.S. indecisiveness.” Many admiring historians and biographers, eager to highlight Eisenhower’s decisive leadership style, have adhered to this explanation.33

  However, the facts do not bear out the “atomic bluff” theory. When Eisenhower came into office, he, like Truman, had no secret plan or magic bullet with which to end the war. Threats of nuclear attack offered no quick fix; Truman had already tried that, to no avail. Eisenhower, assessing the long-running efforts of the Truman team to arrange an armistice, had come to the conclusion that negotiations would not work either; the communists could not be trusted to keep a deal. Therefore Eisenhower’s first inclination was not to seek a negotiated end to the war but to widen the war in search of a major victory on the battlefield. There was no bluff about his seriousness on that score.

  To that end, in early February he broached the idea with his advisers of using “tactical atomic weapons” on the Chinese in North Korea. Although the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his former classmate Omar Bradley, discouraged this, Eisenhower laid down a marker: “We could not go on the way we were indefinitely.” On March 21 he reiterated the possibility of building up United Nations conventional forces “in order to deliver a massive blow and reach the waist of Korea,” that is, push even farther north, to about the 39th parallel, and then impose a settlement upon a defeated enemy. He knew such a military objective would likely require an attack directly on the territory of China. Ten days later Eisenhower seemed to be settling on a plan that would significantly expand the war in Korea. The minutes of his statement at the NSC meeting record his chilling reasoning:

  If, he said, we decide to go up to the strength which will be necessary to achieve a sound tactical victory in Korea—for example, to get to the waist—the Russians will very quickly realize what we are doing. They would respond by increasing the Communist strength in Korea, and, as a result, we would be forced into a situation very close to general mobilization in order to get such a victory in Korea. . . . The President then raised the question of the use of atomic weapons in the Korean war. Admittedly, he said, there were not many good tactical targets, but he felt it would be worth the cost if, through use of atomic weapons, we could 1) achieve a substantial victory over Communist forces and 2) get to a line at the waist of Korea.

  Eisenhower knew that America’s allies would be very reluctant to follow such a course, but “somehow or other the tabu which surrounds the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed.” There was no bluff in these words; Eisenhower was deadly serious. If compelled to wage a prolonged war in Korea, he would do so with one end in sight: victory.34

  But Ike got lucky. He never had to make the terrible decision to launch nuclear weapons in Korea. It is a paradox that while American officials were contemplating a significant increase in the intensity of the war, the Chinese and Soviets were moving in the opposite direction. The Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai, in Moscow for Stalin’s funeral in mid-March, held discussions with the new Soviet leaders about the Korean War. The Soviets, still seeking to ease global tensions, decided that it was “urgently necessary” to end the war and instructed the Chinese to give in on the POW issue. As it happens,
the North Koreans too were ready to end the war. The intensive American bombing had devastated virtually the whole of the North, so much so that Pyongyang had been obliterated. Kim Il-sung, the North Korean dictator, seemed positively relieved at the Soviet decision. On March 31 the Soviet Council of Ministers made it official, stating that China, North Korea, and the USSR were all agreed on seeking an end to the war.35

  Yet these hopeful signs were as yet unseen in Washington and so did not immediately influence American planning. On April 2 the NSC Planning Board submitted to the president its staff report, titled “Possible Courses of Action in Korea.” The document’s authors assumed that the stalemate at the negotiating table would not be broken and that the war would continue. In such a case there seemed two broad policy choices: to continue the war while avoiding any attacks directly on China and thus ensuring the war did not widen or drag in the USSR, or to intensify the war by combining a large-scale offensive in Korea with air and naval attacks against targets in China, including the use of atomic weapons. Instead of offering a path to peace, the NSC envisioned more war on the horizon.36

  Fortunately Eisenhower did not have to choose between these two poisoned cups. Following their discussions with the Soviets, the Chinese began to make surprising new concessions at the armistice talks in Panmunjom. On April 11 Gen. Mark Clark, the commander of UN forces in Korea, informed Washington, “The sense here is that the Communists probably want an armistice,” which they demonstrated by agreeing to an exchange of sick and wounded prisoners in mid-April. Between April 19 and May 3, 700 United Nations POWs came back across the battle lines in exchange for 7,000 communist POWs.

  The communists seemed ready to compromise, a fact not lost on South Korean president Syngman Rhee. He was staunchly opposed to the division of Korea and alarmed at this sudden change of heart by the Chinese. He wrote an anguished letter to Eisenhower denouncing any kind of armistice that would leave Korea divided. Eisenhower coolly replied that “it would not be defensible to refuse to stop the fighting on an honorable basis.” And in early May hopes were raised again by a major communist concession at the negotiating table: they agreed to the creation of a commission of neutral nations to take custody of the soldiers who refused repatriation and to screen them independently. A long debate ensued about which countries would provide this service—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Sweden, and India were eventually enlisted—but by the beginning of May 1953 an armistice was in reach. And no nuclear threats had been made to the Chinese or Soviets.37

  Even as these encouraging steps were being made, American military planners, and the president himself, were preparing for the possibility that a peace deal might fall through. Over the previous three years the communist side had often used prolonged armistice negotiations as a screen for reinforcing their military positions. Eisenhower was determined not to be caught unprepared. During May and June, as peace talks were inching their way to a conclusion, he held numerous discussions with the Joint Chiefs of Staff about developing a contingency plan for widening the war and hitting the enemy savagely if the talks failed. In these conversations Eisenhower rather breezily discussed the use of atomic weapons against the enemy in the event that the war should continue. “He had reached the point,” he told General Bradley, “of being convinced that we have got to consider the atomic bomb as simply another weapon in our arsenal.”

  The Joint Chiefs, aware of the president’s predilections, incorporated the use of atomic weapons into their contingency planning. They concluded that the only way to impose a solution on the battlefield was to increase bombing of North Korea so as to “destroy effective Communist military power in Korea.” This would also require extensive bombing of targets in China. Yet it is important to note that these plans were to be used only in case the armistice talks collapsed and the war continued to 1954.38

  To make America’s position clear, Secretary Dulles, in India in late May, dropped hints to Nehru—hints he hoped would be passed along to the Chinese—that the Americans were quite prepared to continue the war and to significantly widen it if the talks failed. However, Dulles said nothing to Nehru about using nuclear weapons, only that “if the armistice negotiations collapsed, the United States would probably make a stronger rather than a lesser military exertion, and that this might well extend the area of conflict.” But the United States had been saying much the same thing publicly for many months, and this vague comment can hardly be considered a nuclear ultimatum. In any case, Nehru never reported this conversation to the Chinese. And by now threats were unnecessary: the communists had decided two months earlier to seek a deal to end the fighting and had already made substantial concessions to secure an armistice. Nuclear saber-rattling had been irrelevant to the whole affair.39

  If there were any American ultimatums delivered in this delicate stage of the armistice talks, they were directed not at the communist enemy but at America’s purported ally, Syngman Rhee. The South Korean leader did not want the war to end and the Americans to leave without having won a decisive victory and the unification—under his rule—of the Korean peninsula. He opposed the armistice tooth and nail. In an attempt to sabotage the carefully structured agreements on prisoner-of-war exchanges that the combatant states had worked out over many months, Rhee ordered his military to release 25,000 North Korean prisoners, all of whom had declared their opposition to being repatriated.

  Eisenhower was stunned by this deceitful act. In the privacy of a National Security Council meeting, he fumed that if Rhee continued in this way, “it was ‘goodbye’ to Korea”: American forces would simply withdraw, leaving South Korea to its fate. Eisenhower sent Rhee a scorching letter to this effect. But Secretary Dulles had a hunch—a correct one, as it turned out—that “the Communists really want an armistice so badly that they will be willing to overlook the release” of the prisoners. The real problem was Rhee: Would he accept an armistice and not start the war again on his own authority? On July 2 Eisenhower directed his military staff to make a show of planning for the exit of U.S. forces from Korea. Just days later Rhee agreed to accept the armistice in exchange for a mutual security pact with the United States and substantial financial aid to assist in reconstruction.40

  Having reeled in his reluctant and high-strung ally with a combination of threats and incentives, Eisenhower now had a settlement in reach. On July 27, 1953, the armistice was signed and a much-hated war came to an end. “Three years of heroism, frustration and bloodshed were over,” he reflected. Forty-five thousand Americans had been killed or went missing in Korea; over 200,000 North Koreans and as many as 400,000 Chinese died in the war. And yet Korea remained divided, its new frontier scarcely different from where it had been three years earlier.

  What had Eisenhower learned from the Korean experience? Above all, he concluded, no more Koreas. Yet he also came to believe—erroneously—that America’s warlike disposition and atomic threats had been essential in bringing the Chinese to the armistice table. These twin conclusions—avoid quagmires and carry a big nuclear stick—would shape Eisenhower’s strategic thinking for the duration of his administration.

  VI

  These strategic principles now found their way into official policy. During the summer and early fall of 1953, Eisenhower directed his national security team to prepare a top-secret document that articulated America’s grand strategy for the global cold war. Before drafting this new statement of policy Robert Cutler put together an elaborate staff study exercise, called Operation Solarium, named after the White House parlor in which Ike and Dulles had first hatched the project. Cutler assembled three teams of leading policy and military officials under elaborate security precautions at the National War College, on the grounds of Fort McNair in southwest Washington, D.C. For six grueling weeks each team evaluated one of three policy hypotheses: that America should continue with a more robust version of Truman’s policy of containment; that America should “draw a line” on the world map to demarcate its sphere of influence and go
to all-out general war if the Soviets crossed that line; or that America should not wait any longer but go on the offensive now and attempt to roll back the Soviet bloc.41

  The voluminous planning documents reveal how seriously each team took its mission. But the exercise remained at best an intellectual one, for the president had already settled in his mind the broad contours of America’s cold war strategy. This was made perfectly clear on July 16, when the three teams presented their conclusions to Eisenhower in an all-day meeting in the White House Conference Room. After listening to the reports, Eisenhower thanked the teams for their hard work but reflected that “the only thing worse than losing a global war was winning one.” The American people had no desire to wage a war of annihilation against the USSR and then find itself responsible for yet another long-term project of rehabilitation of a defeated enemy. The best policy for the nation must be one of strategic patience, resilience, and vigilance. Great Power war in the nuclear age was simply unthinkable. As one shrewd participant noted, Ike flatly contradicted the rhetorical fulminations of Dulles: “Roll-back sank, it was finished off as of that day.”42