Eisenhower now directed his national security team to draft the strategic concept paper that would define the basic principles of American policy for a long cold war with the Soviet Union. What emerged in October 1953 was the document “Basic National Security Policy,” referred to by its numerical designation, NSC 162/2. In a briskly written 27 pages, the NSC staff described a strategy for “meeting the Soviet threat” while avoiding any “serious weakening of the U.S. economy or undermining our fundamental values and institutions.” It was one of the most important statements of American security policy ever written, for within it lay the plans for the creation of the military-industrial complex.43
NSC 162/2 lucidly defined the main global threat faced by the country: “Soviet hostility” toward the United States combined with a rapidly growing Soviet military and a communist Chinese regime that had established itself in Asia. The communist bloc was large, populous, and ideologically menacing. Even if the likelihood of a Soviet attack on the United States remained small, NSC 162/2 asserted that the Soviets could sustain a long ideological struggle, hoping to spread their doctrine in the Third World among newly independent nations and stirring up instability and revolution around the world.
To defend against such a devious global enemy, the United States would above all have to develop and expand its arsenal of nuclear weapons, for here was the key deterrent to keep the Soviets in check. As long as the United States maintained “a strong military posture, with emphasis on the capability of inflicting massive retaliatory damage by offensive striking power,” the Soviets would not risk general war. Eisenhower accepted that nuclear weapons were now a part of the landscape of world affairs, and he would use them if necessary. “In the event of hostilities,” NSC 162/2 stated, “the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for use as other munitions.”
But nuclear weapons were only one part of the grand strategy. Eisenhower’s planners called for full mobilization of American society to ward off the communist threat. NSC 162/2 demanded not merely more and bigger nuclear weapons, along with the aircraft to deliver those bombs; it also called for a robust intelligence network to analyze Soviet behavior, coupled with elaborate security measures to combat domestic spying. It outlined a nationwide manpower program, emphasizing scientific and technical training to serve military needs. It insisted upon military readiness through stockpiling and securing of vital raw materials and key industrial plants. The concept paper envisioned huge continental defense systems, with early-warning radar and a large air force that could meet Soviet intruders. It called for the overhaul of military service requirements for American citizens, with longer tours of duty for draftees, inclusion of women into the armed services, and the enlistment of civilians for maintenance work. And the strategy insisted on a better public effort to explain to the American people why such a militaristic mobilization of their society was needed.
Eisenhower’s policy, then, cannot be called restrained or passive. To be sure, it envisioned patience rather than provocation and war. But to wage a prolonged geopolitical and ideological struggle with the communist bloc required a transformation in American capabilities and mentalities. In these first months of his presidency, Eisenhower laid down a blueprint for the warfare state—an official plan to mobilize the nation and put it on a permanent war footing. The military-industrial complex had begun to take shape.
VII
As commander in chief, Eisenhower could impose his new strategy on his subordinates. But selling it to America’s allies proved more difficult. In early December 1953 he traveled to Bermuda for a conference with his wartime comrade Winston Churchill, once again serving as the British prime minister. (The two men were joined by their French counterpart, Prime Minister Joseph Laniel, who developed a high fever as soon as he arrived and was thus sidelined for the duration of the conference.) Churchill had just turned 79. The previous June he had suffered a stroke that left him weakened and diminished. His hearing too was failing, and his family and inner circle of advisers thought it was time for him to cede power to his longtime protégé and foreign minister, Anthony Eden. Churchill refused. With a supreme effort he worked to recover his mobility after the stroke, and by December he had gained enough strength to travel to Bermuda for a week of discussions with the American president. The leaders used the Mid Ocean Club as their gathering place, a large white-stucco Colonial-style hotel that looked out across gently rolling golf links to pink beaches and a shimmering blue sea.
Churchill had gone to Bermuda with one goal in mind: to arrange a four-power summit of America, Britain, France, and the USSR to discuss all the major issues in the cold war, especially the possible unification of Germany. The death of Stalin seemed to him to open the prospect of ending the cold war, if only the world leaders could grasp the moment. Churchill yearned to play the role of honest broker, bringing together the hawkish Americans and the suspicious Soviets and sealing a grand bargain that might significantly improve world relations. Such a deal might place the capstone on his storied career, whose days were clearly numbered.44
Yet in Bermuda, Churchill found an Eisenhower who was in no mood for compromise. The smiling Ike of the war years, the genial consensus-builder, was gone. In his place was a man of firm opinions and deep anti-Soviet sentiment. In reply to Churchill’s appeal at the conference’s opening session for a real effort to strike a deal with the new leaders of the Soviet Union, Eisenhower delivered a vulgar tirade in front of all the diplomats and officials of the three national delegations. Churchill’s private secretary, John Colville, recorded the scene: “[Eisenhower] said that as regards the prime minister’s belief that there was a New Look in Soviet policy, Russia was a woman of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath. America intended to drive her off her present ‘beat’ into the back streets.” Colville noted “pained looks all round.”45
In a gesture of conciliation designed to accommodate European anxieties, Eisenhower said he would offer a constructive proposal to the Soviets. For some months he had been mulling over the idea of asking the UN to create an international agency to share research on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. If the Soviet Union and the United States created a “pool” of atomic material, dedicated to civilian energy use, the two nations could find common ground in deploying their nuclear knowledge for the betterment of the world. Eisenhower’s own advisers were cool on the idea, but they understood its propaganda value. If the Soviets rejected the overture, they would bear the responsibility for turning away a constructive proposal.46
At Bermuda, Eisenhower discussed this scheme with the British. “The world was in a rather hysterical condition about the atomic bomb,” he said, and he wanted to use an invitation he had received to speak at the UN General Assembly to point to the “constructive capabilities of atomic energy.” America “wished to appear before the world as we really were—struggling for peace, not showing belligerence or truculence.” Surely, he mused, a proposal to gather the world’s scientists into a great collaborative effort to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes “would bring a large number of people to our side.”47
However, Eisenhower was quick to point out to his British allies, this scheme for sharing atomic energy was not to be confused with a disarmament proposal. No indeed: the United States planned to rely heavily on nuclear weapons to deter communist misbehavior. In an exchange that left his British partners deeply glum, the president declared that “atomic weapons were now coming to be regarded as a proper part of conventional armament.” If, for example, the North Koreans and Chinese broke the armistice so recently achieved in Korea, they would be struck with atomic weapons. This had been expounded in NSC 162/2 and was now American policy.
Eisenhower’s cool assertion triggered a mournful outpouring from Churchill: any use of atomic weapons by America would lead to Soviet retaliation in Europe and to the “destruction of all we hold dear, ourselves, our families and
our treasures; and even if some of us temporarily survive in some deep cellar under mounds of flaming and contaminated rubble, there will be nothing to do but take a pill to end it all.” Colville noted in his diary that Eisenhower’s announcement of his intention to use nuclear weapons in the case of war, even a peripheral war like Korea, was news “which far outstrips in importance anything else at the conference.”48
Eisenhower expressed some annoynace at the British in his diary that night: “We have come to the conclusion that the atom bomb has to be treated just as another weapon in the arsenal”; the British, by contrast, still see atomic weapons as marking “a completely new era in war” and “cling to the hope (to us fatuous) that if we avoid the first use of the atom bomb in any war, that the Soviets might likewise abstain.” Secretary Dulles, in his own account of these exchanges, noted that American “thinking on the subject was several years ahead” of Britain’s and that the British leaders worried that “there was a danger of our taking action which would be morally repellant to the rest of the world.” It was a striking moment: America’s closest ally viewed the evolution of America’s nuclear strategy with growing alarm.49
With the anxieties of the British fresh in his mind, Eisenhower went forward with his proposal for U.S.-Soviet collaboration in the field of nuclear energy research. He and his White House staff flew from Bermuda directly to New York, where at the United Nations on December 8 Eisenhower delivered his surprising offer. The speech carried both a warning and a promise. In the first passages of his address, Eisenhower walked through a catalogue of horrifying statistics about the consequences of nuclear war. But he soon pivoted toward hope instead of fear. In a stirring passage he said that the atom bomb should be taken “out of the hands of soldiers” and given to those “who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.” He wanted “to hasten the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear from the minds of people.” It was time to declare that the Great Powers were “interested in human aspirations first, rather than in building up the armaments of war.” In creating the International Atomic Energy Agency, and turning over to it some quantity of uranium and fissionable material to be used to supply electricity to the developing world, the Great Powers would show their desire to use science to improve the world rather than to destroy it.50
While the press responded with hearty praise for Eisenhower’s “dramatic,” “eloquent,” and “moving” address, the Soviets quite predictably called his bluff, responding that instead of discussing nuclear sharing, the Great Powers should agree to ban all atomic weapons. Since the United States had no interest in halting atomic weapons production, the Soviet counteroffer was swatted away, and the arms race continued unabated. Indeed it might be asked: Was Eisenhower really committed to moderating the cold war or to altering his recently designed cold war strategy? The evidence suggests he was not.51
“Atoms for Peace” was sold to the public as an earnest declaration of Eisenhower’s desire to turn atomic weapons into plowshares—a desire to end the arms race and instead invest in science and technology for the betterment of mankind. But it was not a disarmament proposal at all; Eisenhower had decided that the United States would commit itself to a major expansion of its nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union, he believed, remained bent on world domination. Only deterrence and a credible threat to use nuclear weapons would halt Soviet expansionism. Eisenhower’s UN speech certainly held out the hope that atomic energy might aid the developing world in the long run, but he nowhere suggested that he was ready to stop the rapid expansion of America’s nuclear arsenal.52
Nothing could make this clearer than the delivery, shortly after the UN speech, of a strikingly bellicose declaration by Dulles to an audience gathered at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in January 1954. Speaking from a text edited by the president himself, Dulles looked back over the first year of the Eisenhower administration. He spoke of how Truman’s national security policies had been improvisational, expensive, reactive to Soviet threats, and unsystematic. The United States, Dulles announced, had inaugurated a new strategy to deter the USSR from any aggressive action. From now on America would “depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate instantly by means and at places of our choosing.” Eisenhower and Dulles, just one month after the “Atoms for Peace” speech, declared that America was ready and willing to use nuclear weapons to protect its interests anywhere in the world against Soviet provocation.53
Eisenhower’s cold war strategy soon earned the nickname the “New Look”—a riff on the term used to describe the newest women’s fashions then being featured in society magazines. Driven by a desire to cut the costs of defense, the New Look relied heavily upon a powerful nuclear deterrent instead of a large ground army. To be successful, the New Look had to create the impression that America was willing to unleash nuclear war to protect itself and its allies. And Dulles seemed to relish the opportunity to declare this willingness. “The free world,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in April 1954, “must make imaginative use” of its powerful weapons, whether air power, naval power, or atomic weapons. “A potential aggressor should know in advance that he can and will be made to suffer for his aggression more than he can possibly gain by it.” Whether on a wintry Korean hillside, in a tropical Vietnamese jungle, on an arid Middle Eastern desert, or even in a charming German village, American interests all around the world would be backed by nuclear weapons. The goodwill generated by the “Atoms for Peace” speech evaporated like a warm breath on a cold evening.54
As if timed to reinforce this message, on March 1, 1954, less than a year after Eisenhower’s soaring “Chance for Peace” message and three months after the “Atoms for Peace” proposal at the UN, the United States set off the largest nuclear explosion in history up to that time. Code-named “Castle Bravo” and detonated on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the H-bomb test was measured at 15 megatons, 1,000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. The first year of Eisenhower’s presidency had ended just the way it began: under the shadow of an ever-widening mushroom cloud.
CHAPTER 6
* * *
Confronting McCarthy
“I don’t believe we can live in fear of each other forever.”
I
“I’D LIKE TO MAKE SOME changes right away,” said Mamie Eisenhower, blowing smoke from a freshly lit cigarette as she sat upright in bed. She had just passed her first night in the White House, and she didn’t like it. She had been quartered alone in a small dressing room used by Bess Truman and given a narrow single bed. The room had one small dark closet. It would not do. She summoned the White House domestic staff and announced that the Eisenhowers would move into the large sitting room next door and use it as a bedroom. She ordered a king-size bed with a headboard upholstered in pink. Unlike the Trumans and Roosevelts, the Eisenhowers would share a bed. That way, “I can reach over and pat Ike on his old bald head any time I want to!”1
After seven years of the unvarnished, unpretentious Bess Truman, the White House now had an imperious, demanding, outgoing, dynamic, and crackling first lady. Mamie Eisenhower, with her curly bangs, her pink ribbons and ruffles, her devotion to high fashion and her lively personality, became central to the Eisenhower style that defined Washington in the 1950s. Ever since John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, all first ladies have been measured against the incomparably glamorous and graceful Jacqueline Kennedy. Yet it was Mamie Eisenhower who inaugurated a new image for the presidential spouse. She was highly visible, trend-setting, and fashion-conscious. Her personality was lively, witty, genial, brisk, at times common and jokey, with a certain folksy affectation. According to the long-serving chief usher of the White House, who worked with her every day, she was “feminine to the point of frivolity,” an “affectionate and sentimental” person who “adored the pomp and circumstance and grandeur that went along with the nation’s top job.” Yet she ran the house with intense devotion to detail and a hawk-like watchfulness f
or overspending, waste, or inefficiency. Every morning she combed the newspapers, looking for bargains. She approved every menu served at the White House, met daily with the White House chef, and insisted that food never be wasted. She had grown up in a well-off Denver family, but her life had been shaped by the same scrimping and saving that every officer’s wife endured in the interwar army. For all her love of luxury, she took pride in sticking to a tight budget.2
Mamie’s style matched Ike’s. Together they were exemplars of a new American sense of self that marked the decades of the 1950s: outgoing and convivial, they combined an air of success and achievement with a good degree of contented ordinariness. In later years, especially during the Kennedy era, the Eisenhower style would come to be seen as middle-brow, plain, even vulgar and undignified for the White House. Yet America in the 1950s compared Mamie with the homespun, self-effacing Bess Truman and the earnest, admirable and slightly tragic Eleanor Roosevelt. In truth there had been no genuine glamour in the White House since Woodrow Wilson had married the lovely and aristocratic Edith Galt in 1915. Ike and Mamie brought an altogether new and refreshing change.
The American public seemed to relate to the confident, pragmatic, and accessible Eisenhower style. An admiring account in U.S. News and World Report welcomed the new attitude. “Harry Truman surrounded himself with cronies,” the magazine lamented. “Eisenhower picks men for what they can do. Franklin D. Roosevelt dealt in political theories. Eisenhower distrusts theories. Herbert Hoover held himself aloof from people. Eisenhower is warmly human. Calvin Coolidge was a silent New Englander. Eisenhower talks easily and frankly.” Eisenhower’s traits seemed to align with a new ideal of American masculinity that was visible across the decade of the 1950s. The practical, extroverted, can-do man of business was in; the reflective intellectual, the man of irony, the calculating politician were out. Richard Nixon had called Adlai Stevenson an “egghead” on the campaign trail, and the epithet stuck: in the Eisenhower White House, businessmen were preferred over professors. As for Mamie, U.S. News declared her to be “an adaptable, easy hostess, used to moving about and meeting people. She makes a home for her husband, handles social affairs with aplomb, likes people and gets along with them.” No greater compliment could be paid, apparently, than acknowledgment of these domestic virtues.3
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