With powerful critics paving the way, the junior senator from Massachusetts, already considered a leading contender for the presidency, decided to join the battle. Armed with purloined data given to him by his admiring Georgetown neighbor Joe Alsop, John F. Kennedy stood at his desk in the Senate on the evening of August 14, 1958, and delivered what was, up to that moment, the most important speech of his career. In a long and artfully crafted address, Kennedy attacked the cold war doctrines of the Eisenhower administration. Not only had Eisenhower allowed a missile gap to open up, Kennedy asserted; he had also underfunded the conventional military arsenal of American power. The Soviets would now use nuclear blackmail to spread their influence, and America would be powerless to stop them. “Their missile power will be the shield from behind which they will slowly, but surely, advance—through sputnik diplomacy, limited brushfire wars, indirect non-overt aggression, intimidation and subversion, internal revolution, increased prestige or influence, and the vicious blackmail of our allies. The periphery of the free world will slowly be nibbled away.”52
Eisenhower stood doubly accused: he had failed to build enough missiles, and he had cut conventional forces, thus hobbling America’s response to the limited emergencies that burned across the developing world. Worse, his policy had been driven by a shortsighted emphasis on fiscal balance and tight budgets. The Eisenhower budget-cutters had hollowed out America’s military power, ceding to the Soviet Union the leadership in the cold war. Kennedy looked to Scripture for the right phrase to hang on the Age of Eisenhower and found it: “the years the locusts have eaten,” a tag line he would deploy again and again in the 1960 campaign.
Alsop, who had urged Kennedy to make the speech, now went into print with unstinting praise for the young, “hard-hitting” senator. Kennedy’s Senate address, gushed Alsop on August 18, was “one of the most remarkable speeches on American defense and national strategy that this country has heard since the end of the last war.” Kennedy spoke candidly in “the authentic voice of America.” A star was born, and Alsop was not alone in noticing. James Reston, a wily observer of the political carnival in Washington, recognized that Kennedy’s speech had vaulted him into the pole position for the Democratic nomination in 1960. “Senator Kennedy is on the make,” Reston wrote; “he makes no pretense about it.” The Democratic Party had found its candidate and a winning issue: Ike’s insufficient zeal to confront the menace of Soviet power.53
Privately Eisenhower fumed about Alsop’s “senseless diatribe.” He viewed Alsop, a well known bon vivant and irreverent gossip, as a man of “low character” who brought disgrace on his newspaper. To old friend Bill Robinson, who used to be the publisher of the Herald Tribune, Ike seethed about Alsop’s “garbage.” The FBI considered tapping his phone. In his public remarks to the press, however, Eisenhower simply dismissed the idea of a gap of any kind and insisted that American military capabilities “are the most powerful they have ever been in our history.”54
Eisenhower possessed more knowledge about the case than he let on. Although Ike had grounded U-2 flights over the USSR, his military and intelligence services carefully reviewed the radar data they possessed on Soviet tests of ICBMs and found, to their surprise, that such tests had not been frequent enough to indicate robust missile development. It was a puzzle: If the Soviets were building a fleet of hundreds of ICBMs, why had they tested so few of them? In fact up to May 1958, the CIA could verify only eight Soviet ICBM launches in total, including the Sputnik III satellite on May 15. These rockets revealed Soviet technological advances, but were too few to indicate the existence of a major ICBM development program.
Somewhat reluctantly Allen Dulles had to report to the president and the NSC on August 27, that the intelligence services, while still certain of the Soviet desire for a large ICBM fleet, were pushing back by six months, to the end of 1959, their prediction for an operational Soviet nuclear-tipped ICBM. In their new National Intelligence Estimate, SNIE 11-5-58, they speculated that the USSR could have 100 of these by the end of 1960. It was still an alarming possibility, but not quite so alarming as the picture Dulles had painted for Congress in November 1957.55
This proved to be the first of many backward steps by the intelligence community. On October 9, 1958, Dulles initiated another review of the available radar data—still without any help from U-2 flights, and the lengthy report that emerged from an interagency review admitted, “We have no conclusive evidence that a Soviet ICBM production program of the type estimated in NIE 11-5-58 is currently being accomplished.” The report hastened to add that because of the restrictions on U-2 overflights, the available intelligence was incomplete, and so a final judgment remained elusive. But so far it was difficult to understand how the USSR could have a big missile program without conducting regular tests. By the start of November the intelligence community again walked back by another six months their estimate of when the Soviet ICBM would be operational. Not until Eisenhower allowed U-2 overflight of the USSR in July 1959 and again in early 1960 did a clearer picture emerge, and it confirmed that the Soviet ICBM program had been significantly slowed down in favor of the production of intermediate-range missiles. But none of this could be communicated to the public for fear of revealing the top-secret overflights. The myth of the missile gap endured, kept alive by those who wanted an easy way to attack Eisenhower for his alleged complacency.56
VIII
Ever since Sputnik went into orbit in October 1957, Eisenhower had endured insulting complaints about his “flaccid” leadership (to use Alsop’s term). Quite possibly this context explains his uncharacteristic decision in mid-July 1958 to send a division of American soldiers to Lebanon to offer political and diplomatic protection to an ally, the Lebanese president Camille Chamoun. The origins of this decision lay in the ever-wider reach of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Middle East. Since his triumph in 1956 over the Europeans, Nasser had meddled in the region, strengthening his ties to Syria and backing a coup in Iraq. Chamoun, a Maronite Christian in a multiethnic nation, feared that Nasser had his sights set on Lebanon as well. The link between Nasserism and communism lived mainly in the minds of American strategists, but even the chance of losing a pro-Western ally in the Middle East made Eisenhower and Foster Dulles deeply anxious. They viewed the Lebanon problem as a matter of prestige: if Lebanon were to collapse and be swept up in a Nasserite-communist web of influence, Nasser’s prestige would soar, America’s would sag, and the Eisenhower Doctrine would be seen as meaningless. “We must act, or get out of the Middle East,” Eisenhower told his advisers.57
Applying the logic of credibility and prestige, which his successors would do later in Vietnam, Ike saw Lebanon as another theater in which the United States was fighting the USSR. In a televised address to the nation, he invoked a doom-laden catalogue of cold war horrors, conjuring up the communist efforts to subvert Greece, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, China, Korea, and Indochina. Lebanon could be next, he warned. (He sounded much like Anthony Eden on the eve of the Suez invasion, a fact Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gently pointed out. “You’re doing a Suez on me,” he chuckled to Ike over the phone.) On July 15, 14,000 American soldiers (army and marines) splashed down on the beaches of Beirut in pleasant sunshine, where they were welcomed by sunbathing locals. The threat that these soldiers were supposed to guard against never materialized; no shots were fired or soldiers killed; within three months the troops were withdrawn.58
The Lebanon action, though, came at a cost. Eisenhower and Dulles forfeited whatever credit they had accumulated during the Suez Crisis and now appeared in Arab eyes to be acting like a colonial power. Instead of cultivating nationalist leaders in the region, they alienated them. Rather than enhance American prestige, the intervention gave the Russians the opportunity to denounce American imperialism. And it did little to bolster Ike’s reputation at home. Most Americans seemed puzzled by the action and anxious lest the United States get caught in a briar patch. The headline in the Los Angeles Times caught the national
sentiment: “What Are We Doing, Anyway?”59
If the Lebanon affair had something of the comic about it, the events in the Far East in the autumn of 1958 looked far more dangerous. What became the Second Taiwan Straits Crisis opened on August 23 with a massive artillery barrage from communist Chinese batteries onto Quemoy, the small island held by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists just a mile or so off the coast of mainland China, athwart the approaches to the city of Xiamen. Just why Mao chose this moment to restart the shelling of Quemoy remains a subject of dispute among historians. Most likely he had domestic political purposes in mind, as he had just initiated the Great Leap Forward, a tumultuous period of collectivization and social upheaval. Generating an air of crisis through conflict with the Americans might help to inflame the people’s revolutionary ardor. Mao also knew that U.S. prestige was at a low ebb in the non-Western world due to its alleged failures to keep pace with the Soviets in the missile race and because of its intervention in Lebanon.60
Whatever Mao’s motives, this second artillery bombardment of Quemoy came at an awful time for Eisenhower. Precisely because he had been the subject of so much criticism for his alleged indecisiveness and complacency in confronting the Soviets on the world stage, Eisenhower felt that he must demonstrate resolve and firmness—those baleful keywords of cold war strategy. Privately he admitted that the islands had no value in the defense of Taiwan itself, which was 100 miles away across the rough and stormy Taiwan Strait and defended by the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Nonetheless the ill-conceived Formosa Resolution of 1955 had pledged the United States to defend Taiwan and related Nationalist possessions and seemed to imply that Quemoy fell under this umbrella of protection.
Chiang meant to hold the United States to its word. By 1958 he had placed 130,000 Nationalist soldiers on Quemoy. When Mao commenced his artillery barrage, Chiang could say that if Quemoy was taken by the communists, Taiwan would have lost one-third of its army and would be vulnerable to a direct Chinese attack on Taiwan itself. Chiang argued that if the United States was serious about containing the menace of communist China, it must commit itself to protect Quemoy, even if that meant attacking mainland China itself. Once again Chiang put on a master class of how the tail wags the dog.
Eisenhower and Dulles faced a nasty dilemma. Either they could declare solidarity with Chiang and commit American forces to the defense of Quemoy, risking all-out war with China or they could declare Quemoy to be outside the sphere of American interest and leave it to its fate.
The first choice—defend Chiang and his islands at all costs—likely meant war, and even the use of nuclear weapons. That outcome did not seem hypothetical. In the spring of 1957 the United States had sent 40 Matador nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to Taiwan. As recently as June 1958 American military leaders had accepted a policy paper stating that the only way the United States, so far from its own bases of support, could fight against China, even in a limited war to protect Taiwan, would be by using nuclear weapons.
In the first week of the communist artillery attack, Foster Dulles and the Joint Chiefs of Staff met to consider their military plans. They all agreed if the communist Chinese attacked Quemoy in an amphibious landing, the United States would drop several “small atomic weapons,” which they defined as 7- to 10-kiloton bombs, on Chinese airfields and military staging grounds. (A 10-kiloton bomb would create about two-thirds the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.) The chief of staff of the U.S. Army, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, said such nuclear weapons were “the only way to do the job” in order to avoid a “protracted Korea-type conflict.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Nathan Twining, agreed, casually admitting he “could not understand the public horror at the idea of using nuclear weapons.” The military chiefs knew that some Asian countries, like Japan, would recoil at the use of atomic bombs on China, but they insisted that the loss of influence among such allies was a smaller price to pay than the huge loss of world prestige that would occur if America failed to live up to its word and crumpled under communist pressure. Dulles, evidently much enthused by the iron-fisted determination of the military chiefs, advised the president that the Chinese assault on Quemoy was part of a broader plan to liquidate Chiang’s Nationalists on Taiwan and that the United States must be prepared to use nuclear weapons in a war with China: “If we will not use them when the chips are down because of adverse world opinion, we must revise our defense set-up.”61
The second choice—leaving Quemoy to its fate—struck Dulles as far more dangerous than hitting China with atom bombs. He argued, “If we do give up the islands, Chiang is finished.” He would be militarily weakened and possibly overthrown by neutralist elements inside Taiwan. Very soon the Pacific would become a communist lake, and all the wobbly Asian nations, such as the Philippines and Japan, would make their peace with their new communist masters in Beijing. Those allies had become symbols of American resolve to wage the cold war. “The problem is primarily one of psychology,” Dulles explained to Prime Minister Macmillan, “and what would look like a retreat before the new, tough and arrogant probing of the Communists. If the United States seems afraid, and loses ‘face’ in any way, the consequences will be far reaching, extending from Vietnam in the south to Japan and Korea in the north.” The domino theory never had a clearer explanation.62
Eisenhower has often been criticized for indecision and a tendency to postpone and prevaricate. But never was there a more suitable moment for his particular kind of strategic patience than in the Second Taiwan Straits Crisis of September 1958. He refused to accept the problem as Dulles and his military advisers framed it. He rejected the stark choice between nuclear war and appeasement. There had to be a third choice, even if it meant making no choice at all. And so he waited.
Eisenhower did not want to overreact to Mao’s dangerous gamesmanship. He instructed his advisers that unless a much bigger and direct threat to Taiwan emerged, they “should probably hold back on nuclear measures.” The offshore islands were unnecessary to defend Taiwan, he reiterated, and he would be happy to cut a deal in which Chiang left them altogether, in exchange for some kind of acceptance by Mao of the status quo in Taiwan. Ike told his secretary of defense, Neil McElroy, that Dulles “tends to take a somewhat stiffer view” of things, but Eisenhower had no use for such inflexibility. “It is not adequate simply to say that we will stand on Quemoy and Matsu. We must move beyond that.” He would not allow the offshore islands to draw America into war.63
Instead he made a few carefully calculated moves. He reinforced Taiwan’s supply of fighter aircraft and provided them with new Sidewinder missiles. He transferred a regiment of Nike anti-aircraft missiles to Taiwan and gave the Nationalists powerful artillery pieces. He ordered the Seventh Fleet to provide convoy cover so that supply ships from Taiwan could reach Quemoy and resupply the besieged garrison there. This proved tricky and dangerous, as there were many soldiers and civilians to feed on Quemoy. But the navy accomplished the task. At the same time, Eisenhower insisted that Chiang do nothing to trigger a full-scale war, like bombing airfields on the mainland of China. In short, Ike figured he could wait out the communist provocation, resupply the soldiers on Quemoy, and avoid either war or retreat.64
It was a gamble, and it worked. On October 6, after six weeks of intensive shelling, Mao announced a one-week moratorium on the artillery attacks, a pause that stretched on for a few more weeks, until the crisis had passed. Quemoy remained under Taiwan’s control (as it does today). No “small” atomic bombs were dropped. America did not lose face in Asia. Chiang did not attack the mainland, though he continued to fume about insufficiently firm American support. Eisenhower’s strategy of patience paid off. He restrained his generals and his secretary of state, calmed his allies, and showed that the United States would not be bullied. It was a quiet and terribly important victory for the president.
But of course it was not the kind of victory that played well on the home stage. The press attacked Eisenhower and Dulles mercilessly, first f
or allowing the United States to be manipulated by Chiang into such a dangerous predicament, and then for being insufficiently bold in standing by the Nationalist leader in his hour of need. Walter Lippmann wrote a dozen columns during the six-week-long crisis in which he flayed the administration for strategic incoherence and incompetence. “There is no policy” on the offshore islands, he asserted, only a “wager” that the Chinese won’t do anything too rash. He described the administration as “paralyzed,” at a “dead end,” and “embarrassing.” Joseph Alsop, not to be outdone, actually rushed to Taiwan in the midst of the crisis and published no fewer than 17 smoldering essays of invective against the Eisenhower administration. He used the crisis to bash Ike for failing to keep a sufficiently robust naval and military presence in Asia and for hesitating in the face of communist aggression. Such was the verdict of the pundits.65
The domestic politics of the Second Taiwan Straits Crisis were indeed disastrous for the president. Democrats repackaged Eisenhower’s policy of restraint and patience as incoherence and indecision. “We have teetered consistently on the brink of foreign wars no American wants or could even explain,” commented Senator Kennedy, a future architect of America’s war in Vietnam. Presidential aspirants Averell Harriman and Hubert Humphrey, as well as leading Senate Democrats Mike Mansfield, William Fulbright, and Theodore Francis Green, excoriated Eisenhower’s brinkmanship. Little did they know that Eisenhower was the one firmly pulling on the reins of restraint, guiding the horses of war away from the abyss.66
The Age of Eisenhower Page 54