The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  A little more than a month after meeting with Khrushchev and insisting on his desire for world peace, Eisenhower had no difficulty pivoting back to the dirty business of waging the cold war. He ardently believed communism to be a misguided ideology nourished by false hopes and empty promises. Above all, he considered it a mortal threat to the United States. So no matter how earnestly and frequently he spoke the language of peace in public, behind closed doors he remained a determined and ruthless cold warrior. He saw no contradiction between his aspirations as a statesman of peace and his persistent reliance on subversion and deceit in the secret wars of the 1950s.

  II

  In 1957 the CIA implemented the largest covert military operation it had ever attempted in its decade-long history. That year had been a tumultuous one in Indonesia, the oil-rich archipelago of 17,000 islands stretching along the strategic sea lanes between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It was then that President Sukarno, the country’s first post-independence leader, established a new ruling order that he termed “guided democracy” in order to distinguish it from the chaotic experiment in parliamentary democracy he had led since 1950. Sukarno’s model offered a kind of multiparty dictatorship, in cooperation with the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and the army, which declared martial law in March 1957. In the eyes of U.S. observers, these moves, which seemed to trample democracy, embrace military rule, and appease the communists, looked extremely dangerous. Not surprisingly CIA analysts rang the alarm bells.

  Sukarno had been on a CIA watch list ever since he hosted the 1955 Bandung Conference in April 1955. The conference had gathered representatives from 29 Asian and African nations in an effort to oppose the cold war division of the world into two blocs. The gathering gave voice to the powerful anticolonial sentiments of the Third World and pledged the delegates to an agenda of anticolonial solidarity. Naturally the conference served to heighten suspicions in Washington about Sukarno’s left-leaning ideology, and he was ever after a marked man.

  When in 1957 Sukarno seemed inclined to welcome communists into his government, Washington lost little time in acting against him. In August the CIA put together a study group to make recommendations, which were duly presented to the National Security Council in September. The CIA jumped to the worst-case scenario: a loss of Indonesia to communist forces would allow the Soviet bloc to “threaten directly Malaya, Singapore, British Borneo, the Philippines, New Guinea, and Australia. . . . The U.S. strategic posture in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific would be jeopardized.” And U.S. military supply operations in support of friendly governments in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaya would be hampered. “Furthermore,” the memo asserted, “the Communist bloc would benefit from the exploitation of Indonesia’s oil, rubber, and tin.” Guided by the powerful paradigm of the domino theory, CIA analysts concluded that communist influence in Indonesia constituted a direct threat to the United States.4

  Allen Dulles reached into his Guatemala playbook and proposed creating a force of disaffected army officers and rebellious right-wingers who would build a base of operations on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Deploying “all feasible covert means” to build up this rebel army, the United States would then use this force to exert pressure on Sukarno if he should move any further to the left. If the communists seized the central government, the forces in Sumatra would become “a rallying point” to launch a military counterattack. U.S. arms deliveries began in October 1957 and carried on for months, some coming by air drops, others by ship and submarine. These arms shipments had to remain secret, for the United States continued to pose publicly as a friend, albeit a concerned one, to Indonesia, urging Sukarno through diplomatic channels to crack down on the PKI. Privately, however, John Foster Dulles described Sukarno as “dangerous and untrustworthy” and “susceptible to the Communist way of thinking.” Coming from Dulles, that amounted to a death sentence.5

  On February 10, 1958, these CIA-supplied rebels in Sumatra issued an ultimatum to Sukarno to fire his cabinet, ban the communists from positions of influence, and hold national elections. Following a defiant reply from Sukarno, they declared the formation of a provisional government. Allen Dulles egged them on, hoping for “widespread guerilla warfare on Java,” the central island and home to the capital city, Jakarta. However, the uprising proved premature. The Indonesian Army and Air Force, largely loyal to Sukarno, launched successful raids against the rebel strongholds on Sumatra in February and March, causing Allen Dulles to wonder if perhaps the United States should shed its mask of neutrality and intervene directly. “If this dissident movement now went down the drain,” he told Eisenhower, “Indonesia would go over to the Communists.” The president was inclined to agree, replying, “We would have to go in if a Communist take-over really threatened.”6

  But did it? Having routed the rebels in Sumatra, Sukarno tried to assure the United States that, as he put it to the new U.S. ambassador, Howard P. Jones, “he was no Communist.” Sukarno said he wanted a neutral and independent Indonesia: “Nationalism is the fire that is sweeping Asia. . . . I am a nationalist but no Communist.” It was extremely difficult for the Americans to accept this self-portrait. In Allen Dulles’s mind, any leader who allowed communists into his cabinet or who failed to see communists as a mortal threat was at least a stooge and a knave, and more likely a secret Red. Along with many other Afro-Asian leaders, Sukarno insisted on a middle ground: that communism, if balanced by other factions in a plural system, could be contained and tolerated. Sukarno proposed simply to keep his friends close and his enemies closer.7

  As the Indonesian Air Force pummeled the rebel positions on Sumatra, the CIA refused to give up, rushing more guns, ammunition, and supplies to the rebels, even at the risk of discovery. The American press got wind of these operations in April and began to pepper Foster Dulles with questions about American support for the rebel force. Dulles denied any knowledge. On April 15 Eisenhower, growing wary, told Secretary Dulles that he “did not want any U.S. government personnel or persons . . . taking part in any operations partaking of a military character in Indonesia.” But, he went on, “private persons operating on their own,” or “soldiers of fortune,” could still be deployed. This was vintage circumlocution to insist that the CIA carefully cover its tracks and obscure its airborne assistance to the rebels. Predictably this is just where things went wrong.8

  The CIA, anxious to put some spine into the besieged rebels, cobbled together a few surplus B-26 bombers and P-51 fighter aircraft from Clark Air Base in the Philippines and put CIA-trained “civilian” pilots in them. In late April and early May these planes bombed oil installations, tankers, and Indonesian Navy gunboats, in operations designed to make it appear that the rebels were regrouping and had hidden reserves of air power. But on May 18 a B-26 was shot down, and its pilot, an American named Allen Lawrence Pope, was captured alive and in possession of incriminating papers. The involvement of the United States had been revealed, and Allen Dulles immediately canceled all further operations in support of the rebels. But it was too late. On May 27 Pope was placed in front of cameras at a news conference in Djakarta. Ambassador Jones “expressed regret that a private American citizen was involved as a paid soldier of fortune serving with the rebel forces.” Not for the last time Eisenhower and the CIA had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.9

  III

  The CIA did not limit itself to destabilizing unfriendly governments; sometimes it expended its resources to prop up friendly ones. On May 8, 1957, Eisenhower welcomed to Washington one of the most prominent recipients of American military and economic aid: the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. Eisenhower viewed Diem as so important to America’s grand strategy in Asia that he personally appeared at National Airport to greet the visiting leader, an honor Ike bestowed only once before, when King Saud of Saudi Arabia came to town just a few months earlier. And no wonder. While prominent Asian leaders like Indonesia’s Sukarno and India’s Nehru had proclaimed neutrality
in the cold war, Diem had fought relentlessly since 1954 against communists inside South Vietnam and transformed his nation into a pro-American bastion.10

  Diem did not see himself as an American puppet. Born into a prominent Catholic family of administrators and clerks, this devout, lifelong celibate was groomed for a career as a colonial bureaucrat. But his pride and nationalism led him to reject the path laid out for him. Refusing to work for either the French colonists or the Vietnamese administration that served the French, in 1933 he resigned his post as a regional functionary and spent the better part of two decades quietly laying the foundations of a nationalist, noncommunist opposition to French rule. In the early 1950s he spent more than three years in the United States, living chiefly at a Maryknoll seminary in New Jersey and cultivating ties to many American politicians, including Senators John Kennedy and Mike Mansfield (both Catholic), publisher Henry Luce, and Cardinal Spellman, the archbishop of New York. Though he had no official role, these contacts would prove invaluable to him later in gaining American support.

  In June 1954, as the French and Vietnamese communists hammered out the Geneva accords that partitioned Vietnam at the 17th parallel, Diem saw his chance. At the request of Emperor Bao Dai, Diem returned to Vietnam to form a government that would usher out the hated French and open the way to the creation of an independent and noncommunist South Vietnam. A short, stocky man with heavily oiled hair who always seemed to be drowning in the folds of his double-breasted sharkskin suits, Diem became the face of a new experiment in Asian self-rule.11

  Although Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country; although his extended family, the Ngo clan, had a notorious reputation for corruption, criminality, and connections to reactionary military circles; and although he had little popular appeal or legitimacy, he seemed to the Americans the perfect man to build a free and democratic South Vietnam. He was ferociously anticommunist. His Catholicism marked him as Western in American eyes. And he already had close friends in Washington. In fact his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had been working with the CIA since 1952 and would maintain that link for the rest of the decade. As Diem consolidated power, he relied upon American support to fend off a military coup attempt in 1954 as well as uprisings launched by sects and gangs in Saigon in 1955. The CIA sent an experienced hand to help him: Edward Lansdale, an air force officer and former operative in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) who had spent years in the Philippines assisting in the repression of a communist insurgency there. From the start of his regime Diem relied upon the CIA for intelligence, training, and counterinsurgency activity. In October 1955 he staged a bogus referendum that proposed to abolish the monarchy and approve a new constitution giving the president sweeping powers. On the eve of the referendum, Lansdale urged Diem to limit himself to only modest vote-rigging; Diem instead announced a vote total of 98 percent in favor of his new regime.12

  As Diem’s power grew, his relationship with the United States became more troubled. He was an authoritarian man with a messiah complex. He relied upon his brother, who ran the secret police, to wage a relentless war upon communist sympathizers and subversives. By itself that did not displease Washington, but the methods used—mass arrests, torture, wanton murder—did upset the narrative that Washington wished to write of Diem as a model Asian leader. Even the CIA station in Saigon urged Diem to adopt land reform and political liberalization so as to develop some degree of popular support and legitimacy. Diem refused, citing the constant threat of internal subversion as a reason to focus on building up the South Vietnamese Army and deploying harsh tactics against any dissidents.

  Diem understood that he could manipulate the Americans. In return for his anticommunism, he sought and received enormous amounts of aid, totaling $2 billion between 1954 and 1961. Not only did the United States supply the South Vietnamese Army and security police, but it gave vast sums in the form of development aid and loans, allowing South Vietnam to purchase huge quantities of American cars, trucks, household goods, and food. The United States built roads, bridges, schools, railways, canals, and airports; set up a national telecommunications network; supplied civil aviation aircraft; and implemented nationwide English-language education. South Vietnam rapidly became the showcase for the American way of modernization and militarization in the Third World. And all the while hopes for democratization withered.13

  American officials consoled themselves that, for all his shortcomings, Diem nevertheless shared America’s aims in Asia. A briefing book prepared for Eisenhower on the eve of Diem’s visit declared that Diem “feels that Vietnam in its present situation and given its own heritage is not yet ready for a democratic government. . . . His concept is one of benevolent authoritarianism.” Diem “believes that the Vietnamese people are not the best judges of what is good for them.” While these attitudes prompted some discomfort in Washington, Diem’s anticommunism inoculated him from serious American criticism.14

  When Diem met with Eisenhower at the White House on May 9, 1957, Ike praised him for “the excellent achievements he has brought about” and barely registered any protest when Diem insisted that he needed more military aid. Given the honor of addressing a joint session of Congress, Diem declared that his country had used its annual subvention of $250 million to wage war on communism. The budget-conscious representatives gave him a standing ovation. In New York City, Diem received a ticker-tape parade. Mayor Robert Wagner hailed the Vietnamese “miracle” and described Diem as “a man to whom freedom is the very breath of life itself.” The press hailed him as “Vietnam’s man of iron” and a “symbol of a free new Asia.”15

  Privately, though, American officials expressed grave concern about Diem’s autocratic tendencies. At the end of 1957 the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Elbridge Durbrow, sent to the State Department a very pessimistic report on Diem’s regime, painting the president as obsessed with internal enemies and uninterested in creating the foundations for long-term economic growth and political reform. Diem’s authoritarianism, his reliance on his powerful clan to run the secret police, and his lack of interest in the welfare of his people had alienated educated elites, businessmen, villagers, and peasants. He ruled harshly, squashed dissent, and erected a cult of personality. And though he willingly took American money, he refused to take American advice.16

  Durbrow’s assessment was, if anything, too gentle. In 1958 and 1959 Diem transformed South Vietnam into a regime of terror, corruption, and repression in his campaign to wipe out communist subversion. He was tactically successful in hunting down and cracking communist cells, but his methods were so brutal that they alienated his own people. More significant, his methods persuaded North Vietnam to escalate its support for the rebellion inside South Vietnam. In January 1959 the North Vietnamese decided to launch a major campaign of subversion in the South to overthrow Diem’s regime and attempt to reunite the country. A new Indochina War was about to begin.17

  As communist attacks increased in South Vietnam, Diem responded in kind. His government herded hundreds of thousands of peasants into concentrated villages (“agrovilles”) so they could be better policed and blocked from offering support to the rebellion. Diem also expanded even further his security apparatus, channeling American aid into the secret police and diverting the army into internal security duties. In May 1959 he forced through a new decree that gave the government extraordinary emergency powers to arrest, try, and execute suspected communist guerrillas. In an appalling act of barbarism, the government sent guillotines to all the provinces. Those people found guilty of subversion met their death strapped to a horizontal plank beneath a slashing blade. Predictably such policies stimulated massive hostility throughout the South. A CIA analysis in May 1959 candidly admitted that Diem’s regime was on the brink of disaster, yet in Washington Eisenhower called for no change in policy. Despite billions in U.S. aid and an unrelenting war on internal enemies, Diem had failed to defeat the communist insurgency or build any legitimacy for himself. By the start of 1960 Diem’s regime, once held u
p as a model of Asian freedom and democracy, had become a brutal police state standing watch over a restive and seething people.18

  None of these problems led to a reconsideration of America’s strategy in Vietnam. Eisenhower remained firm: the Diem regime must be given the tools to win its fight for freedom against communism. Since the start of his administration, Eisenhower had styled Vietnam as a domino that must not be allowed to fall. To wage and win the cold war in Asia required resolute support for leaders such as Diem of South Vietnam, Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan, and Syngman Rhee of South Korea. Of course an Orientalist and patronizing discourse underpinned these geopolitical arguments: since Asians were not yet ready for the complexities of self-government, the United States had an obligation to train and guide their Asian protégés. Sometimes their immaturity led to tension with the paternal Americans. Nonetheless communism could be beaten, Eisenhower and his advisers believed, by the steadfast application of generous economic and military aid as well as political leadership. To lure Asian minds away from utopian communism, Americans offered their own dreamscape of democracy, prosperity, and freedom, engineered by the proper application of American know-how.19

  These were noble aspirations, and Eisenhower believed in them firmly. Yet they were consistently betrayed in their implementation. Instead of building freedom and democracy, the Eisenhower administration militarized “free” Indochina. It propped up Diem’s dictatorial government and provided enormous sums of money that allowed Diem to strengthen his hold on power even as he was driving his people into the arms of the communist insurgency. By the start of 1960, while Ike looked forward to his meeting with Khrushchev in hopes of resolving many cold war tensions, his administration was fanning the flames of anger and resentment across Indochina. That fire would soon engulf not just Southeast Asia but America as well.