While this ruse played out, the administration debated its next move. Although Eisenhower recognized that the islands were “not really important except psychologically,” they could not be given up under duress to the communist Chinese, especially in light of the recent American passivity in Indochina. Yet the islands also could not be defended tooth and nail. These were insignificant islets, little more than seaweed-choked clusters of rock that were not vital to America’s security, and for that matter not vital to Taiwan’s defense either. In short, they were nothing but symbols. Was America going to attack China with atomic bombs over a few small islands? The stakes were indeed that high. For as Eisenhower chillingly stated to the NSC, “If we are to attack Communist China, [the president] was firmly opposed to any holding back like we did in Korea.” This time the war would go nuclear.
Eisenhower certainly did not want the conflict to escalate. His mailbag was filled with letters asking, as he put it, “What do we care what happens to those yellow people out there?” It would be a “big job,” he said, to explain why Americans should die for these tiny islands. But the black eye America had received in Vietnam was still bruised and tender. Eisenhower simply could not tolerate any more Chinese provocations.67
To find a middle course Eisenhower and Dulles chose to offer the Nationalist government a defensive security treaty that would commit the United States to the defense of Taiwan and the neighboring Pescadores island group. Such an act would demonstrate resolve to domestic critics and reassure Chiang and other Asian allies that America meant to stand up for its friends. But the treaty would leave out any specific mention of Quemoy, Matsu, and other offshore islands. The purpose of this bit of guile was to gain credit for supporting Taiwan while avoiding the burden of an explicit commitment to defend the disputed islands. Eisenhower was a master at delay and evasion, and this action personified his style: Don’t make a firm decision until you absolutely must. At the start of December the United States and Taiwan initialed a security pact giving American guarantees to Taiwan but making no mention of Quemoy and Matsu.68
But the crisis did not end there. This defense treaty, even with its hedging about Quemoy and Matsu, outraged Mao. He saw it as proof that the United States aimed to create a U.S. military colony in Taiwan. On January 6, 1955, Mao’s forces opened up a new artillery barrage, this time on the Tachen island group, located 300 miles north of Taiwan, and seemed poised for further military operations along the offshore islands. As his advisers huddled together in anxious meetings in Washington on January 19 and 20, Eisenhower had to look the problem in the face: Had the time for a showdown with China arrived?
Secretary Dulles advised Eisenhower to pressure the Nationalist forces on Tachen island to abandon their position, which was militarily not significant in the defense of Taiwan, and at the same time to make a public statement that clarified the ambiguous language of the mutual defense treaty to make clear that the United States would defend Quemoy and Matsu against any communist attack. “We could not play a fuzzy game any longer,” Dulles concluded. “That game was played out.” The Chinese were probing, testing. It was time to take a stand and then “deliver on our commitments.” Not only that, Dulles said; now was the time for the president to ask Congress for authority to commit the armed forces to the defense of Taiwan and to secure a congressional resolution to that effect. In short, Ike should publicly prepare for war.69
In a memorable meeting of the National Security Council on January 20, Robert Cutler argued that Dulles’s proposal was likely to increase the risk of war. Eisenhower firmly disagreed. By making American policy crystal clear and laying down an absolute line, the United States “would actually decrease the risk of war with Communist China.” In a reversal of his usual policy of deception and ambiguity, Eisenhower now admitted that America’s deliberate obfuscation in Asia—what he called its “dangerous drift”—had backfired. Wilson and Humphrey dissented, just as they had done in the debate over bombing Dien Bien Phu. “It was foolish to fight a terrible war with Communist China simply in order to hold all these little islands,” Wilson insisted. Defend Taiwan, yes, but forget about these little islands that were within hailing distance of the mainland.
But unlike in the Indochina crisis, Eisenhower lost patience with a strategy of delay and deception. The offshore islands were not by themselves crucial to the defense of Taiwan, but “abandoning these islands” would crush the morale of the Nationalist troops, who might one day be called on to repel a Chinese invasion. Worse, coming so soon after the Western defeat in Vietnam, it would shatter the reputation of the United States in those East Asian nations that America had pledged to defend. And the domestic politics of any abandonment of territory to the communists would be very troublesome. In a revealing comment at the end of a long and contentious meeting, Ike said “there was hardly a word which the people of this country feared more than the term ‘Munich.’ ”70
Thus, on January 24, Eisenhower sent a message to Congress asking for authority to use armed forces to defend Taiwan—indeed to do more than that: to repel attacks on “closely related localities” that might be a preliminary to an attack on Taiwan. That could only mean Quemoy and Matsu. “Our purpose is peace,” Eisenhower declared, but then insisted that he be given authority to wage war if the line he now drew was crossed. Four days later the “Formosa Resolution” passed the two houses of Congress with near unanimity. Unlike during the Dien Bien Phu crisis, Eisenhower had laid down a bold red line and signaled to his adversary that he, and his nation, would not retreat.71
The passage of the resolution opened a new phase in America’s public posturing toward China. Over the course of the next six weeks, administration officials went to considerable lengths to signal to the Chinese their new resolve. On March 8, in a nationally televised speech, Secretary Dulles stressed that America would use “new and powerful weapons of precision” to defend its interests in Asia—a clear reference to atomic bombs. In his press conference on March 16, Eisenhower backed up Dulles, saying, “In any combat where these things [nuclear weapons] can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” In case the press missed the point, he repeated, “Yes, of course they would be used.” The next day, in a public speech in Chicago, Vice President Nixon reiterated the government’s position that “tactical nuclear weapons are now conventional and will be used against targets of any aggressive force.”72
Was Eisenhower really considering a nuclear war against China? The evidence seems clear that he was. In contrast to his reluctance to send troops to fight in Vietnam, he seemed prepared to hit China with a devastating nuclear air strike, not just because such a blow could be delivered quickly and without infantry divisions on the ground but also because the Taiwan crisis provided a clear-cut case of Chinese aggression against a U.S. ally. The Dien Bien Phu battle had been a muddle with no easy choices. The Quemoy crisis looked much simpler. A Chinese attack would be met by war.
The nuclear saber-rattling had the desired effect. On April 23 the Chinese foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, announced that China wanted no war with the United States and stressed China’s desire for friendship with the American people. The shelling of the islands fell off dramatically and the crisis was dispelled. Eisenhower’s threats seemed to have worked. But at what cost? America’s use of nuclear brinkmanship made Eisenhower look tough and determined, but it deeply alarmed the European allies, who now feared more than ever that the United States might trigger a global nuclear war. Ike’s menacing warnings may also have pushed China into a search for its own nuclear weapon as a counterweight to America’s. Just 10 years later, in 1964, China would test its first nuclear bomb.73
In evaluating Eisenhower’s handling of the twin Indochina and Taiwan crises of 1953–55, it is difficult to support the argument that he demonstrated commendable restraint. Certainly he decided against a unilateral American interventi
on in Vietnam in the tumultuous spring of 1954, but the problem of confronting communism in Asia was larger than that. His ambition to contain Chinese influence and suppress communist rebellions in Asia led him to make a series of dramatically hawkish public statements that pledged American prestige in Asia, and from which neither he nor his successors could easily walk away. By resorting to nuclear brinkmanship and constantly speaking about falling dominoes, Eisenhower narrowed his options for dealing with future crises. At some point America would have to make the terrible choice between living up to its promises or skulking away.
Yet one can rightly ask: What was the alternative to Eisenhower’s policy? War, certainly, was one. Another would have been a politically disastrous decision to turn away from Indochina altogether and leave it to its fate. In retrospect that might look appealing, but presidents do not govern in retrospect. They must make decisions in real time, and Eisenhower tried his best to pursue his broader goal of containment while avoiding war. He himself acknowledged the amount of improvisation that went into his policymaking. Far from claiming that he followed a grand strategy in Asia, he admitted that America “threaded its way, with watchfulness and determination through narrow and dangerous waters between appeasement and global war.” To a great degree he managed to accomplish that balancing act. His successors, alas, did not.74
CHAPTER 9
* * *
Taking On Jim Crow
“There must be no second class citizens in this country.”
I
HIS MOTHER WANTED AN OPEN-CASKET Funeral. she wanted the world to see what they had done to him.
In the early morning of August 28, 1955, in a small Mississippi Delta cotton-mill town along the Tallahatchie River called Money, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, was abducted from his great-uncle’s home, driven to a nearby barn, brutally beaten, and then shot to death. His naked body, wrapped in barbed wire and tied to a heavy cotton-gin fan, was dumped into the brown slow-moving river, where it lay on the muddy bottom until, three days later, two boys out fishing discovered the mutilated and swollen corpse.
Till was from Chicago, where he lived on the South Side with his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, who had been born in Mississippi but moved to Illinois as a baby with her parents in the early 1920s. Young Emmett had expressed an interest in visiting his extended relatives in the South, where he planned to stay with his mother’s uncle, Mose Wright, a sharecropper. Three days after arriving in Money, Till and his cousins went to buy candy at Bryant’s Grocery. Something about Till, an extroverted city kid from up north, gave offense to the 21-year-old white woman, Carolyn Bryant, who was working behind the counter. Perhaps he had been impolite, or had looked at her wrong. Mrs. Bryant later claimed that Till made suggestive remarks and had whistled at her. (Many years later she recanted.)1
The details did not matter much to Roy Bryant, who returned home on August 27 after working a long shift as a truck driver hauling shrimp from New Orleans to Texas. The idea that a black boy, from the North no less, had leered at his wife in his own grocery store was too much for Bryant to bear. Given the sexual innuendo of the tale Carolyn related to her husband, Roy felt fully empowered to administer the kind of punishment that whites had been doling out to black people in the South for many generations.
It did not take long for Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, to discover that the boy they believed had insulted Carolyn was staying at Mose Wright’s house. They drove there in Milam’s pickup truck at 2:00 a.m. on August 28, seized Till, and threw him into the truck. Over the course of the next few hours, Bryant and Milam took the boy to a number of locations, beating him savagely at every stop, until finally they shot him in the head and threw his weighted body into the river.
After Till’s disfigured body was recovered, it was shipped back to Chicago. At the Illinois Central train station, Mamie Till Bradley dropped to her knees in anguished prayer upon seeing the wrapped bundle containing her son’s remains. “Oh God, my boy, my only boy,” she wailed, filling the hall with her wrenching cries. She decided that his death would not go unnoticed. The body was placed in an open casket at the Roberts Temple of the Church of God in Christ at 4021 South State Street. For the next five days, as word spread and the murder became a national story, tens of thousands of people filed past the bier, gazing at the horrific sight. “Mississippi Lynches Boy,” screamed the front page of the Pittsburgh Courier. “Emmett Till Funeral Saddens City, Nation,” was the headline of the Chicago Defender above heartbreaking scenes of the funeral. Jet magazine published close-up photos of the boy’s bashed and swollen, contorted face.2
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) demanded that the Justice Department launch an investigation and put an end to “a state of jungle fury” in Mississippi. Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago sent a public telegram to President Eisenhower asking for swift justice for Till, as did Governor William Stratton of Illinois. In Mississippi, however, the reaction to Till’s murder was muted. Governor Hugh White named a special prosecutor, and the two suspected murderers were indicted and put on trial in Tallahatchie County just a few weeks later.
But the white authorities quickly closed ranks. The prosecution was lackluster. The two men admitted to seizing Till but claimed to have released him later. The defense asserted that the body retrieved from the river could not be identified and that Till might still be alive. Witnesses were intimidated. The sheriff of Tallahatchie County, Clarence Strider, announced his opinion that the “whole thing looks like a deal made up by the NAACP.” The trial lasted five days and attracted national press coverage, though black journalists reporting on the trial were segregated from whites in the courtroom. The jury was all white and all male, and on September 23 after an hour of deliberation it returned a verdict: Milam and Bryant were acquitted.3
Why did the Emmett Till case become a nationwide controversy? After all, his was not the only murder of a black person in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. In May, Rev. George W. Lee, a local member of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and an NAACP organizer, was shot to death in Belzoni while leading a voter registration drive. On August 13, a 63-year-old farmer and World War I veteran named Lamar Smith, who was also active in a voter registration campaign, was shot and killed on the steps of the Brookhaven Courthouse. There had been little national attention paid to these murders. By contrast, Till’s youth and the particularly vicious details of the murder transformed his case into a national tragedy. And his Chicago roots meant that the northern press and politicians took an immediate interest and helped the NAACP in its efforts to shine a powerful light on Mississippi. When Till’s killers walked out of the courtroom free men, the national news media was there to record the scene. And when in early 1956 Bryant and Milam defiantly and publicly admitted killing the boy, the murder case became a symbol of the shame of white supremacy and a rallying cry of the struggle for black freedom that in the 1950s was gaining power across the nation.4
For all its self-congratulation as a time of peace and prosperity, the Age of Eisenhower was also a time of racial turmoil and confrontation. Eisenhower found the civil rights crisis a deeply unsettling and troublesome issue, one he was ill-prepared to handle. Yet presidents always confront crises they do not foresee and often do not understand. It is then that history is best able to take the measure of the man. How would Eisenhower respond?
II
Eisenhower had little personal experience with or knowledge of black people. True, his valet, the man who dressed him every day for 27 years, Sgt. John Moaney, was black, but Eisenhower’s entire career was spent in the segregated U.S. military. His army patrons—Fox Conner, Douglas MacArthur, and George Marshall—had southern ties, as did most of the general officers he led in the great crusade in Europe, from George Patton (a graduate of Virginia Military Institute) to Leonard T. Gerow (a Virginian), J. Lawton Collins (born in New Orleans), Lucian Truscott (a Texan), and Courtney Hodges (from Georgia). Bedell Smith g
rew up in Indianapolis, where public schools were segregated until 1948, and Omar Bradley hailed from Randolph County, Missouri, where slavery had been practiced until the end of the Civil War.
Soon after he left the army, while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on universal military service, Eisenhower was invited to give his views on racial segregation in the military. His response was quite lengthy. The army, he opined, “is just one of the mirrors that holds up to our faces the United States of America. . . . There is race prejudice in this country, and when you put in the same organization and make live together under the most intimate circumstances men of different races, we sometimes have trouble.” He spoke about the segregation that was in place when he first joined the army four decades earlier, calling it “extreme” and unnecessary. But he suggested that “amalgamation” would cause problems. “You always have some men that do not like to mingle freely between the races, and therefore if you have a dance for your soldiers, you have a problem. But I believe those things can be handled.”
More difficult, he went on, was the issue of promotion. Black men without the opportunities for education that whites might have had would always be at a disadvantage in a desegregated army, Ike said. A better practice was to keep black units intact, thus allowing them to develop a cadre of black officers. Eventually, Eisenhower hoped, “the human race may finally grow up,” and such concerns would disappear. But for now, “if we attempt by passing a lot of laws to force someone to like someone else, we are just going to get into trouble.” These comments reveal a man who believed that racial segregation in both the army and the nation had an organic quality. It was unpleasant and probably wrong, but because of its history, it could not be eradicated quickly, nor should federal policy be seen as the principal agent of change. Let sleeping dogs lie.5
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